The third story · the one we'll tell together

So here is my invitation. Come and walk the nine gates of the womb with me, in circle, by candlelight, the way our grandmothers' grandmothers gathered around the fire.

We'll begin at the outer gates, where the body meets the world. We'll laugh with Baubo, whose bawdy joke made grieving Demeter smile and turned the earth green again. We'll remember that pleasure is holy, and let the river of memory move.

Then we'll cross the crossroads with Hekate and her lamp, and step into the inner temple where the Grail waits. We'll ask our wombs how they are, maybe for the very first time, and listen.

And at the last, we'll go down into the dark with the Black Madonna, the Mother who composts every ending into new life, and lie down under Nut's starry body, held by a womb so much bigger than our own.

At every gate, we'll pause and ask the body for its yes. We'll hear a teaching, meet an archetype and a plant ally, place something on our altars, hold an image, and make a sound together. Between each threshold we'll stretch, write and share what's stirring.

We will go slowly, and only as far as your body says yes.

Not long after I turned fifty, my mother died.

And then came a year I can only describe as the long night. Grief moved into my body like weather. It sat in my chest and my belly, it woke me before dawn, and it would not be hurried or tidied away.

I didn't know it then, but that year was a threshold. Somewhere in the dark, grief turned me toward my womb. Toward the place in me that had been quiet for so long, the place that had held every joy and every loss and never once been asked how it was.

I come from a lineage of Portuguese healers. In that long night, I began to remember what the women before me might have known: that the womb is not only for making babies. It is a temple, a compass, a grave and a cradle. It is where we meet the Great Mother.

That year was the beginning of my midlife awakening, and of everything I offer now.

Long ago, the old tales say, the Grail was lost. And when it was lost, the land turned to wasteland. The rivers dried. The fields went grey. Knights rode out across the world searching for the cup that would make the land green again.

But the womb keepers knew a secret. The Grail was never out there. It was here, inside the body, in the bowl of the pelvis, in the holy of holies we were taught to forget.

We forgot it when we were told to be polite about our pleasure. We forgot it when we were told to grieve quietly, to keep our losses to ourselves, to carry the children who didn't stay in silence. We forgot it a little more each time we left our bodies to get through the day.

You were never separate from the Mother. You only forgot. And forgetting can be undone.