The Fruits of Menstruality

Menstruality works us in such unexpected ways!

When I undertook the Women’s Quest Apprenticeship with Red School in 2016, I knew how much it would feed the work that Kate and I offer and share here at Woman Kind, there was an inevitability about that. But the personal work? How deeply we are taken into ourselves? I couldn’t have predicted how the fruits of those explorations would unfold.

Transition has been the name of the game, particularly at a time when navigating perimenopause is also in the mix!

We were asked to set intentions at the beginning of the Apprenticeship and one of mine to was to find my voice.

It took me by surprise that part of the voice-finding quest would take an unexpected turn into poetic form. Suddenly my cycle connection was emerging in verse. The emergence was wrapped in vulnerability; my inner landscape was being played out in a mode that I held in esteem and by the likes of Maya Angelou and Sylvia Plath: how were the words suddenly tumbling out of me?

Perhaps it’s the confidence gained from a profound and dedicated cycle awareness practice, that triggered an unleashing of creative flow. In fact, that is truly at the heart of it. Who’d a thought, gaining a deepened form of confidence can be a fabulous side effect of cycle awareness!

Our creative juices may easily flow during the phase of inner summer, during ovulation, the archetypal creative time. But, the more inward-looking creativity of the poetry, for me, has manifested during my premenstruum (inner autumn) and menstruation (inner winter). Each woman’s relationship with her creative cycle is such an individual process. Isn’t that bloody brilliant!

Recent musings came to me on day 23 of my cycle. Having  not ovulated, with none of the familiar build to a bleed coming,  I was feeling as though my inner compass had lost her way.  Sitting in a perimenopausal wilderness, I went for a walk in my local orchard and met someone rather beautiful:

Orchard Encounter

Flatlining
No guidance

Then jabs of
The familiar
Sadness
Grief
Loss

Then nothingness.
Again.

Heavy air is
Compressing
All that is me.

Seeking a cool breeze
To soothe.

I close my eyes.

My consciousness
Moves inwards.
My womb,
She smiles.
“All is as it’s meant to be.”

“I’m still,
Not flatlining.
We’ve worked
Really fucking
Hard together.
We’ve birthed,
We’ve lost.
We’ve healed.
We’ve shared such
Wisdom.”

Her smile remains
Soft and true.

“I’m resting.
Sit with trust
Dear one.
Remember
There was a time when
You despised me.
The pain I held.
But you showed me love,
And together we healed”

She puts a loving arm around me.

“Now we just lean in to each other,
As we find our step on this new
But ancient
Path”

The sense of nothingness
Abides.
But within myself
I know
I am not alone.

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