I find this excerpt from Robin Morgan’s poem The Network of the Imaginary Mother on my mind recently: it is associated at this time with the current Season of Winter Solstice (in my region of Earth in the Southern Hemisphere). I remember when this excerpt (and whole poem) first impressed me: when I was birthing new being in myself, through difficult circumstances, as is usually the case with birthing new being … as something else is falling apart or away. One doesn’t know what is through the gateway, but there comes to be an acceptance of, and trust in, one’s participation in the “giant heart whose roar I have called Mother in my dreams”.

I am learning.

The cord is wrapped around my throat.

I am learning.

The passageway is cramped and blind.

I am learning

though Kali dances through it, past

where Demeter still seeks Persephone,

where Isis searches for the fragments of Osiris,

where I wade upstream through a living current

which seizes me and drowns me into life,

pumping, pumping, as from a giant heart

whose roar I have called Mother in my dreams.

…

Robin Morgan, The Network of the Imaginary Mother, in Lady of the Beasts, p.85.