Baby "Bump"
If your meaning has always been tied to an initiation into motherhood - what can come of challenging it? Coming to terms with where we are now.
If I haven't fallen asleep within a few minutes of my head meeting the pillow at night, I pretend I am pregnant. That there is a heart beat tapping against my own. That there is something growing inside that demands nothing of me but my vessel - so I need to rest. Usually by this point I'm asleep. But as my awareness of the systems we operate in has grown, so has the demand for this practice to deepen. Sometimes it's a hand on my lower belly, others its placing a pillow, the weight of a toddler, on my chest. I have to admit occasionally I end up patting the pillow, as if soothing a baby, as my parents did to me. A constant rhythm to fall into, 'I'm still here. You're safe.'
Since I was young I have resolutely found greater meaning in someday bringing a child into the world. As I've grown, so has the affinity to be pregnant and carry a being, as if to fulfil my biological prophecy. Though the 'raising the kid into an adult' part has become more and more distant, seemingly alongside coming to terms with my place in deep time and role in contributing to a civilisation which is self-inflicting collapse and worse, harming our mother.
Often challenging these ideas with thoughts of 'hasn't it always been this way? Hasn't there been centuries of humans facing the end of the world. Felt like they were living in the hardest of times?' Has every moment in time felt simultaneously life-giving and like you've chosen the short-end of the stick?
“who said we can’t fall? Who says we haven’t fallen? If this is an abyss, this is a fall. So the question to ask is: Why are we so afraid of a fall if we have done nothing in the ages but fall? Why does the feeling of falling make us uncomfortable? We have done nothing in recent times but fall. Falling, falling, falling. So why are we worried about falling now?”
I'm sitting at dinner after a dysphoric day at a Systems Thinking conference in Stockholm. Where global-thinkers silhouettes grace the stage, as an AI Siri voice announces their credentials, the stage illuminating and suddenly a sphere of blown out red mass appears on the screen. We've crossed 6 of the 9 Planetary Boundaries. If we don't drastically pivot, we've got it seriously coming. In all the science, statistics and convoluted language I'm grasping at what this means. Or more so, what does blowing out our planets resources actually look like? Feel like, smell like in its totality? Can I ask these oxford associates what vibe the end of the world is?
“Let’s harness all our critical and creative capacity to build colourful parachutes. Let’s think of space not as a confined place, but as the cosmos where we can fall in colourful parachutes”
I ask a woman at dinner, she's talking about what can only be compared to as how to prepare her young children for enduring the apocalypse, 'it's already happening' she says earnestly - slowly but surely. We laugh. In flood, fire, famine, plagues of disease, war, growing investment in harvesting the earths vital organs for capital gain, it’s happening. Though it’s going to quicken, to a speed not conducive to human existence.
The un-welcomed thought graces me for the first time, how can I possibly bring a life into the premonition of our future? How could I subject a someone, my own someone to that? The thought is crushing and relieving simultaneously.
Weeks later, I ask a mother of three, knowing what she knows now whether she would have children, do it again at my age. Having say a couple kids around 2030, who in 2050 would be twenty years old. I send the question via blue bubble and turn my phone off for the evening. In the dark, my hand lands on my mouth and I smother a cry for our future.
I don't think in asking these questions peoples answers are to give you your own, though I invite the formation of theirs to shape mine, from those around me I admire and am challenged by.
I wake to her answer.
'Yes I would, 100%. Would you plant a meadow? Restore a forest? Regenerate the land? It's all the same. If we are nature the same rules apply.'
She continues …'it s like experiencing your own humanity to the edges and depths of spiritual expression.'
I ask a woman who has actively chosen not to have children why. She shares she felt as though she had gained a responsibility to use her energy and platform to educate wider, to wake up those asleep. That she finds meaning in this choice. That there isn't a right choice only that 'if you fall into what is expected, that is the worst outcome-' use your position to make a conscious, intentional decision around it.
How do we honour our biological, spiritual yearning while facing the reality of the responsibility to equip a human to save the world as we know it? Actually no, correction - let the civilisation as we know it shed and fall away - to instead rebuild in a new sustainable, loving direction.
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I write this on an Air India flight from Paris to Delhi, home to Melbourne where my two week old nephew sleeps and wakes every few hours to be fed by my elder sister. And in this feeling of returning home. Returning home, to a new being - to hold and love and care for, the only possible reality I can and want to envision is a hopeful one.
Currently
Reading: Sensing Earth: Cultural Quests Across a Heated Globe
A book about the meta-crisis in a language I understand. An Artists approach to the behavioural/cultural shifts needed to move toward a flourishing ecology. Highly recommend.
Listening: Letting Go, Angie McMahon & A Slight Change of Plans, Dr. Maya Shankar
Anything Angie McMahon will get us through the Apocalypse. My favourite slight change of plans episodes are The Science of our Inner Voice & A neuroscientists curious approach to dying.
Deep dive
Living Fully in an Age of Decline - Essential Wisdom for Hardtimes by thegreatstory
Risking Life Versus Giving Life on Simone de Beauvoir by Sameema Zahra
Ideas to Postpone the End of the World - Colourful Parachutes (Quoted Italics) sourced from
Lots of love to Small Giants for being a playground to understand this moment.
This was written during and following Impact Safari Scandinavia at Impact Week Stockholm.