Being born again

🪲🐦‍⬛🦋🐍✨

Dear one,

I am (still) in a re-birthing season. As you may well know, birth is a vigorous endeavor. So are rebirths, which are simultaneously death and birth. I’m grateful to have good company for this one, both human (my loving-and-wise Re-birthing Team) and other-than-human (cicada, monarch, vulture, and snake—all of whom are known for embodying rebirth).

I am blessed to be living on land, in community. Both a human community and the beyond-human community we tend and are part of—farm, forest, fields, wetland, and pond. One of my favorite spots is this glorious meadow:

view from my “front porch” at sunrise, aka “the far field,” aka my current best friend

Life is an adventure that brings much pain and many gifts. This week I’d like to share one of the gifts with you—a new moon gift—that emerged last winter in Santa Cruz California and here in this central North Carolina meadow ~

Each December, I embark on an inward journey called The 12 Nights of Winter with my mentor, Ro Marlen. The 12 Nights is an ancient wisdom practice. From the depths of winter solstice through the first week of January, these twelve nights are a time to get quiet and listen for what wants to unfold in the year to come. Each specific night corresponds to a lunar month, opening a unique opportunity to tune in on a soul level to what wants to grow in your life in the coming year. Before bed each night, I listen to the meditation Ro offers for that specific night, then sketch the image that arises. On the new moon of each month, I retrieve my drawing and contemplate the image that arose last winter. Monday night was a new moon, so I fetched my 12 Nights drawing:

My drawing for the new moon in Virgo, September 2024

Tuesday morning I stepped out my door and noticed something strange poking out of the low rock wall that contains a window garden.

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🎶 I believe poetry is a song that is meant to be heard as well as read. A poem is a journey for the senses as well as the mind. I invite you to sit back and experience me reading this one to you. You can listen here:

Ecdysis

Is it some kind of white 
inner tube for a bike?
Long, thin, striated,
round but empty
peeking out from the stones
of my flowerless flower garden?

Leaning down, I find 
it is a tail,
the shed shell
of an elegant being
easily four feet long,
encircling the window garden,
curled against the rocks.

Was it this morning, 
while I was inside
that she slid out of her skin
and into her new life?

Leaving behind this perfect shape,
this delicate strength,
like a frozen river of tiny, supple bones;
remains that look like death 
but are proof of living, 
this part left behind--
like a comfort and a warning
that everything is changing
and we are on holy ground.

-Kai Madrone

September 3, 2024

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freshly shed and completely, perfectly intact

likely the skin of this beautiful being, who visited me on summer solstice

can you see the eye holes?!

There is so much more going on here than what colonialist-capitalist-supremacist-patriarchy would have us believe.

More life. More relationality. More meaning. More connection. More responsibility. More intimacy. More medicine. More joy.

I’m intrigued to discover what snake wisdom holds for me this month. And hopefully to share more stories and poems from the rebirthing journey with you. Meanwhile, blessings on your path as we gradually glide out of summer, into fall and whatever newness lies ahead.

Let’s stay open to the magic of life,
Kai