Imbolc Prayer for What’s Growing in Our Bellies
This time of year brings the Celtic cross-quarter holiday known as Imbolc, marking the midpoint between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. Can you feel the in-between of it? The word “Imbolc” means “in the belly,” and refers to an awakening that is beginning, but which is not yet born. It’s a time of quickening, inside of the continued tug of winter’s pull to rest, and a remembrance that the sun is coming for us again. It’s the truth that life continues to seek its birth from within the darkness of our dreams.
I’ve spent my nights this winter slowly reading Tricia Hersey’s beautiful book “Rest is Resistance,” a manifesto that advocates radical, unapologetic rest as an Afrofturist tool for transforming the world. She insists it is good for all people, even as she underlines the importance of it for melanated people, most especially. And it feels powerfully aligned to be entering 2024 - an election year of unimaginable importance for the future of life as we know it - with this work on my mind and heart. When I feel myself getting whipped into a froth at the news, expecting all the bad things I fear may result from another year of Trump’s campaign tactics, tightening my muscles in preparation for HARD TIMES, it is a revolutionary move to pick up Hersey’s book and read, “To resist means to soften into the powerful proposal of thriving right now.” Not some other time, way off in the future, y’all, but right now.
In the belly. Where our deepest longings reside. What we are gestating and feeding with our bodily generosity. What we will have to labor to give birth to.
I’m not a mother myself, but I’ve had the transformative experience of attending over 75 births as a doula, helping women alternate between waves of taking rest, and waves of plumbing the depths of their power and tenderness to bring something beautiful and new into this world. And that is an exquisite metaphor for how I want to see us move through 2024. With that kind of focus, priority, rigor, and yes, even rest.
Pluto has just entered the sign of Aquarius - a placement that hasn’t occurred for around 248 years, or since the times of the French, American, and Industrial Revolutions. We are being swept into a time of great change, whether we wish it or not. I refuse to turn over a year of my precious life to the shit-show of another Trump power grab, while our best/last 5-year window for transforming the way the whole world works is closing. And that’s what we know we must do if we are to protect our planet from catastrophic climate change.
“I must remain hyper-focused on the impossible and gain power and energy from it. My rest is possible in a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist system, because of my attraction to life and Spirit. We need this ethos if we are to shake loose from the stronghold grind culture has over us. We will need to dream without borders and to believe that everything is possible. We can’t continue to stay stuck in the literal, afraid to let our minds and hearts wander to the liminal space waiting for us when we dream and rest.” — Tricia Hersey
We must create the conditions so that another Trump presidency becomes unthinkable. So that the world becomes inhospitable to it because we have so tantalizingly nurtured our visions for a better world that people everywhere are falling in love with it, twitterpated, and cooing it into existence, like a new mother fussing over her beloved newborn.
We will not find much safety in the thrashing about of an unhinged climate and rising facism. But what we can rely on is what’s growing in our bellies. Our longing to co-create an abiding sense of solidarity, and connection, and power with all people who need the world to be better, right now. And, in so doing, we can forge a meaningful year for ourselves, no matter what comes to pass.
I’ll be leading an Election Year Support Group throughout 2024. You can register here.
