This Woman's Body

My monthly flow began yesterday and last night I slept with that awareness women seem to have, fully asleep but with a bit of consciousness focused around my root chakra. (It's the same awareness that mothers of infants have. A mother can be in her 7th month straight of severe sleep deprivation, can literally fall asleep while washing dishes, but put her in bed, allow her to fall asleep and one tiny little sigh from her sleeping infant will have her wide awake and ready to act. I wonder if any men besides firefighters and those in a war zone ever experience this? Hammy, for all his wonderfulness, would sleep through a meteor hitting the house, let alone one of the kids needing anything.) I awoke with a gratefulness that I am a woman. For me, being a woman helps me be aware that I am made in God's image. I was given this miraculous body that can create life! I can grow a new human and then birth it and nourish it for the first full year of it's life. This woman's body was the vehicle to bring 3 souls into this world that I love more than I ever imagined could be possible. Loving my children helps me understand how God must love us.

In one of the books I read recently, "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time" by Marcus Borg, I learned that the word compassion in both Hebrew and Aramaic (Aramaic is the language spoken by Jesus) has a plural and a singular form. In the plural form, it means basically what we understand it to mean, but in the singular form it means to love someone as if they are from your womb. Often, in the Bible, compassion was translated to be 'mercy' or 'merciful' especially when talking about God. When I think of God having compassion for us as if we are from God's womb that opens a whole new understanding for me. God loves me as I love my boys. I don't sit in judgement of them although I am often angered or hurt or frustrated and usually very saddened by mistakes they make, particularly mistakes which hurt them or set them back in some way. When they take positive risks, when they show kindness to others, when they're playing, being silly, loud and boisterous, I feel overwhelming joy in their existence.

5 days out of each month I am given an opportunity to have a heightened sense of awareness of my womb. Yeah, most of the time my attitude is stoic, at best, at the pain, mess and inconvenience of it. But occasionally I have the ability to transcend the immediate physicalness of it to allow my womb to teach me a lesson.