Medicine in this planet time

On the evening of June 14, 2018, I unexpectedly discovered that I was pregnant. Not intending to have biological children, this came as a surprise, to say the least. I went through a period of disbelief - maybe we should get another pregnancy test the next day? The period of disbelief didn’t last long. The sobering reality of needing to figure out what to do about it soon set in.

 My partner Joseph and I had talked about having children in the past, but had mostly decided against it for a variety of reasons. Although I love children and would really enjoy being a mother, high up on the list of reasons for not having children was that I wanted to give the majority of my time to the healing of the wider world rather than spending so much time on the raising of one human being. There were also concerns about the human supremacy of the assumption that every human embryo was so sacred that it deserved to be birthed into the world and all the consequent resources it would consume were justified, no matter to cost to anyone else.

While I know that it may be possible for humans to live in a regenerative relationship with the planet rather than a depleting relationship – that is what I have given my whole life’s work to – and thus it may be possible to have a baby and it not just be a net negative for the planet (factoids come to mind like that the biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to not have children), I haven’t been able to shake the concern about the preciousness of time and what am I giving my time to in this planetary moment when the future of all life on Earth will be impacted in major degree by the choices humans make in the next two to five years.

 And then there is the nagging concern about human overpopulation on the planet. Human-caused ecological devastation is not just a matter of affluence/greed/level of consumption, or the ability of technology to amplify our human impact, it is also a numbers matter of there being so many humans on the planet. I’ve been curious about what is a sustainable human population for planet earth. Of course it depends on the relationship of those humans with the wider community – is it regenerative or consumptive, but research I have found indicates the sustainable human population is under one billion while the current population is over seven and a half billion and rising daily. I had concluded that the most compassionate and humane way to get back towards a sustainable human population on Earth was through voluntary choice, and as such, I needed to live my values by not having any of my own biological children. After all, there are lots of ways that I can be a mother to the world without having my own biological children. The service work that I do in the world, all of my work with Living rEvolution, feels like a mothering of the collective.

 If I lived in a culture that was already regenerative and a connected community, child rearing wouldn’t be such a huge burden on me. But I live in a highly disconnected individualistic capitalist culture, a hundred miles away from my blood kin; my partner owns a small business and works over 40 hours a week in that business; and I knew that the primary responsibility for child caring would have fallen on me. Unless we paid thousands of dollars for someone else to take care of the kid in a childcare center, and even if that was an option available to me, it wasn’t an option I wanted to take. 

And then there were the more personal concerns, such as that history has shown that radicals who really rock the boat typically don’t make it to a ripe old age. Forgive the cliché, but only a few days before his assassination, Martin Luther King said, “I may not make it there with you, but I have seen the mountaintop.” A few days later, he was dead. I didn’t want my child growing up without a mother, and while I firmly believe that any cause is better served living than in dying, I willingly offer my individual personal life in anyway that can serve the continued flourishing and health of the wider community of life on earth.

 So my partner and I, maybe more because of the strength of my beliefs than his, had decided against having our own biological children. For 14 years our birth control choices worked fine... until they didn’t. So we were presented with this weighty decision. It was one thing when this was a more passive decision that we wouldn’t have kids. It felt like another decision entirely once we would have to actively kill this embryo if we were to continue with this choice. 

 There is a part of me that wants to believe that the rEvolution I am a part of makes it possible for some people to joyously have biological children. If we all stopped procreating, our species would of course go extinct. So it is not a matter of everyone not having children. And just as there are regenerative ways to feed, clothe and house oneself, might not the same thing be true (something I have no experience with because it simply had not been on my radar before) for having a child? But the fact still remains that for my compassionate path to population reduction to unfold, some people must make that choice. And if I want people to take that seriously, didn’t I need to set an example? Perhaps yes. But just writing that feels harsh, cold, and definitely not a joyful rEvolution.

 While I want any rEvolution I am part of to be filled with joy, life is both joy and pain, and there will be some hard choices that will need to be made by all of us. What is each of us personally willing to do on behalf of the larger community of life on Earth that is in such great danger right now due to the actions of our species?

So I felt pretty clear rationally that becoming a biological mother as not something I wanted to do at this time, but still, it felt like such a huge decision and I hadn’t committed one way or the other. My partner and I were committed to exploring all the options and we went through an intense period of discernment.

 Two days after discovering I was pregnant, I was doing some groundskeeping at Starseed Healing Sanctuary - the land and community where I grew up and where I still contribute. The life growing within me and what to do about it kept cycling through my mind. What to do, what to do, what to do? I was weedwacking in the Medicine Wheel - a ceremonial stone circle in the back fields with a 100 foot diameter that has  a fire pit in the center and pathways coming from each of the four directions - and my mom had asked me in advance to be careful not to cut down a St. John’s Wort plant that was growing on the south side of the fire pit. St. John’s Wort is a medicinal herb whose flowers are commonly made into a tincture to treat depression (I recently made my own first St. John’s Wort tincture with its beautiful yellow flowers preserved in vodka, the liquid quickly turned a bright purple with the St. John’s Wort essence).

 Being the first mowing of the season, a variety of plants had grown up in the fire pit along with the St. John’s Wort. I noticed another medicinal plant - Yarrow, growing around the fire pit, and on my first pass with weedwacking, I thought “this is a lot of medicine,” and so I left both the St. John’s Wort and the Yarrow growing there in the fire pit. I later came back and thought, “these plants really need to be removed from this fire pit. It isn’t safe to have plants growing in here when there is a fire, because then the fire can spread through the plants roots and outside of the pit.” So, I weedwacked the Yarrow down.

 I was suddenly struck – here I was, Aravinda, giver and taker of life, deciding which medicinal plants would receive mercy or not, deciding whether the human embryo growing in my womb would be aborted or brought to term… and then it instantaneously came into my awareness how this is true on a collective scale between the human species and the rest of the community of life on Earth. Every coming generation – both human and any of the other 6 billion species that we co-inhabit this Earth with – will be impacted by and many depend on the actions of humans in the next 2-5 years. Collectively as a species will we continue on our current path of destruction, amplifying catastrophic climate change and accelerating the sixth mass extinction? Or will we radically, dramatically, and urgently transform our impact, showing whatever mercy is possible for the wider fertile womb of creation?

 We humans who inhabit this living Earth are not the ultimate givers of life. Creation has that claim. Life itself has that claim. But what will be our collective human legacy? Will we continue on the path of deepening, widespread collapse of the current biotic community? Or will we change our ways, rejoining the cycle of life in ways that contribute to it rather than detract from it?

I could feel in my body how right it felt to give myself in service to the community of Life in this planet time of biotic crisis, and I knew in my gut what my decision was about the life growing in my womb. I chose to give of my time and life energy in service to the wider community. 

Precisely a year later, I found myself once again at Starseed Healing Sanctuary doing some groundskeeping. I was again weedwacking, this time cutting down an invasive plant called Bishop’s Weed or Goutweed that we wanted to stop from spreading in the garden. Bishop’s Weed is a particularly wet and juicy plant and as I weedwacked, the plant’s juices and flesh bits sprayed all over me. As my face, glasses, arms, shirt, legs, and boots were all plastered with this plant, the following question came so clearly into my mind: What boundaries and commitments do you want to make with your time and life energy in this planet time when every generation that is to follow depends on the choices made by our species in the next few years? Famous revolutionary Grace Lee Boggs is often quoted for asking “What time is it on the world clock?” My related question stated more simply is: “What boundaries and commitments do you want to make with your time and life energy in this planet time?”

This question is not meant to be some kind of perverse shaming if you make the decision to give your time to child rearing. We need wise, consciously raised children. Becoming a parent is a sacred responsibility. If your gut intuition is that by having a child, you can help contribute to the healing of the world by raising a new generation differently, in a loving and securely attached way, bringing healing into the world with a new generation and creating regenerative culture in this way, I applaud you and support you in your decision. If there are other ways you can contribute more fruitfully, and are of childbearing years, I ask you to consider that choice of becoming a parent very carefully. 

The world needs us. The world needs our gifts and our talents, for us to be medicine. A question that brings a smile to my face is “What if the world needs all 7.5 billion humans alive now to contribute to the healing of the world?” Yes, we need to reduce our numbers and dramatically reduce human population growth, and for those who are already living -  and maybe, just maybe - would you entertain the possibility for me with a moment that - all of us alive today are needed for the Living rEvolution? Whether 7.5 billion of us humans are needed or not, we are here, so we don’t have to get caught up in suppositions if they don’t feel liberating. We can just ask, how do we want to contribute to healing? Living rEvolution is an exploration of how we can be medicine in this world.

I had committed to my decision pretty quickly in my head (rational thinking brain) and with the aid of Yarrow and St. John’s Wort in my gut (intuitive) brain, but it has taken my heart (feeling) brain a year to come to peace with this decision. For the first few months whenever anyone would talk about having a baby, tears would come to my eyes as I thought about what I had given up - the chance to bring that particular being into the world and to experience love as a biological mother in that way. My body was in shock to have gone from being pregnant one moment, to not being pregnant the next, and at my own decision. It took me many months to be able to speak of it to many people. Just this past month I told the last family member whom it was particularly important to me that they heard it from my own mouth, my grandmother. 

Nearly a year after making the most difficult decision of my life, I am still slowly healing from this choice. As I write these words on June 26, 2019, it is the one year anniversary of when I went to the hospital and had an abortion. My partner Joseph and I went to the ocean today as a way to honor the difficult choice we had made on this day a year ago and I stood at the edge of the water collecting tiny beach treasures - shells and colored stones the size of blueberries - just the size that embryo was when I acted to end the possibility of its life. The ocean has a way of holding grief and the unnameable, and also mystery and possibility. I was speaking with my friend Sol last week who said that Yarrow in the blood acts as a medicinal amplifier - that is, that it magnifies the potency and effectiveness of other medicines. This was the gift of Yarrow for me, it makes my commitment to serve the community of life at this planet time that much stronger. May we all be medicine in this planet time.