As I reflected on the words "childlessness transformed" I realized that I never actually made a conscious decision not to have children; rather, I became conscious of a deep understanding within me that I would not physically bear children during my lifetime. This has not been a particularly easy awareness for me to acknowledge.

For as long as I can remember I've spent time with youngsters. I just felt right being with children. I seemed destined to parent my own children; "to parent the earth" was not yet within my frame of reference.

My desire to parent children was manifested in a variety of ways beyond spending time with children. Many of these ways created significant imbalances in relationships I had with both males and females. Initially, at an unconscious level, I established my role in most relationships as the "Good Mother Earth" figure: caring, accommo-dating, keeping the peace, supporting dependencies. I managed to incorporate these attributes of the "postitive parent" into my relationships. This served both to attract people to me who needed parenting and also resulted in my parenting friends in ways which prevented our friendships from maturing.

At this time my parenting skills lacked the power and strength of the darker side: yin with no yang just doesn't do it. " To parent the earth" requires a potent force of energy which can receive absolutely anything, a force equal to the wisdom of Hestia and Hecate combined. Only then can the light and dark forces, the painful challenges and joys of the Earth be fully and appropriately parented. I was still a substantial distance from this stance. I needed first to address certain factors from my past and present which would enable me more fully understand my function in contributing to the wave of "childlessness being transformed" at this time.

For all of us on a sociological level, childlessness has been associated with barrenness, a lack of fruition, feelings of incompleteness. A woman without children was perceived as not fulfilling her commission of womanhood; there was a sense of separation from a primary purpose for existence. Feelings of separation are painful. And one of the most poignant parts of my journey was coming face to face with certain areas of pain.

This past year I moved out of my home in the city to live in an intentional community in the country with fifty other people. My supposed purpose for being there was to write my doctoral thesis, a task I required in order to legitimize taking time off and giving myself space for creative pursuits. Little did I realize what form my creativity would take. During most of this time I was in the throes of a medical catharsis. It was a difficult year, and I learned later that a few of my primary care givers didn't think I'd live through the process. I needed to experience certain levels of physical, mental and emotional pain to be in touch with the reality of pain. For most of my life I had managed to gloss over the pain that was there. The gloss was like a strong layer of shellac that was, thank heavens, beginning to crack under the pressure of my desire for a new level of honesty.

I had never addressed the darker side of my world; I felt I couldn't handle it. Life gave me a chance to reverse this feeling of incompetency. I was so sick for a number of months that I literally couldn't move off my bed. Meals were brought to me; I slept extensively and felt "cocooned". Being physically incapacitated in this way, my mind had time to look at things I had never looked honestly at before. Questions as to what I bring into my small context and what I bring into a much larger context arose. For most of my life, I had thought that if I wasn't actively giving and doing and putting out that I really was of no value; the "Good Mother Earth" syndrome. I had to be doing things that other people saw as being legitimate. Then life gave me the opportunity to realize that while lying sick in bed, I could be doing something that was of value for my small community and the community at large. I was giving birth to something.

It was very much a time of peace. It was also a time of much darkness. I spent five weeks in the hospital as a part of it. My time in the hospital was like my last trimester of pregnancy. When I was admitted, I was very conscious of going there not as a patient, but because I needed to take care of certain things. With the assistance of some perceptive friends I began to address matters long aged in the subterranean depths of my consciousness. Receptivity, acceptance and the ability to be nonjudge-mental were factors which played a key role for me as I began to value the messages of my own strength. I realized I was quite capable of receiving the dragons of my shadow side, dragons which became increasingly playful as I stopped fearing them.
There were specific physical healings occurring at this time, which could only clear, I discovered, to the extent that I was willing to acknowledge and release those matters of the heart which had been held in check for decades. As a diabetic, my blood sugar level was in a state of imbalance, and my immune system had been diagnosed as being in crisis. The symbolism of my state of dis-ease rang true for me. I was not in the state of balance which is natural to life, and my master system of healing and protection wasn't functioning. Until my internal balance was brought into alignment, I would be in a state of crisis. It was an opportunity for me to honestly receive my pain with my joy and allow a transformation from the limited awareness more akin to childhood to a more transcendent perspective. It was only after this movement had occurred that I would be in a position to play my part in parenting the earth.

My time in the hospital, although not easy, was a time of victory. The birth that happened there was birth into a level of strength that I hadn't known for a long, long time. Once again, I tasted the power inside me to be a creator, to initiate things. Fairly quickly, I was in charge of managing my state of physical disease. My doctor would say, "Marcia, you know much more about this than I do, you tell me what you should do." He'd come in and we'd chat for 15 to 20 minutes a day. Initially, he was my mentor and made recommendations. Later he would say, "Okay shaman, where are you with this?" It was a birthing of aspects of me that are strong and true. The strength was experienced increasingly as I recognized and welcomed the apparent states of imbalance on all levels of being. This began the restoration of my natural state of balance.

When I returned home from the hospital, and I think this is such a beautiful analogy for the process of giving birth to a child, I was delicate. Just as a mother and her child are delicate in one aspect of their new relationship, I, too, was delicate. I also felt fit, grounded and powerful, in sensing that I was now capable of meeting whatever was present in my continuing process of transition. I had a new creation within myself which was now beginning to move outwards.

I could now see with renewed vision certain factors pertaining to my own birth which no doubt contributed to my realizing I would not bear children in this lifetime. The time of my conception was not easy for me. I felt myself waiting eagerly on the sidelines ready to enter the world. My mother was receptive to my coming, yet my father was hesitant. Recalling this I felt the urge to stridently move in and tell my father to get on with it, or tell my mother to somehow manipulate him into realizing what a great little being was present to come into the world through them. I knew I needed to be on Earth, and that these were the ones to facilitate my entry.

Forty years after conception occurred, it was necessary for me to see this circumstance and offer a current of forgiveness into it. The fact is, I am here. When I went through a group rebirthing session two years ago, I was the first to complete the birth experience. I moved very quickly, and I came out laughing, filled with joy. I was out and in the light. I remember going for a walk in the Austrian mountains....I don't know if my feet touched the ground. I was moving in leaps and bounds. There were tall trees on the mountainside surrounding me giving the impression that everything just kept on going up higher and higher, forever. After this initial sense of joy, I wept with a sense of thankfulness that my mother had allowed me to come, even though she was desperately ill at the time of my birth, having just undergone surgery for a bowel obstruction, and was badly ripped during the birth. My intuitive sense is that I was afraid that I wouldn't come if my mother died, and I knew I needed to come. I was six and a half weeks premature. So in my coming, I experienced both the light and the dark. In reality, my mother and I experienced both. She experienced pain, which many women do. I experienced a deep sense of joy and thankfulness. I had come.

My mother's birth experience is valuable to recount to give a fuller picture. Her mother was a young vivacious well-loved woman in the community in which she lived. My mother was her first child. Everyone was preparing to celebrate the coming birth, but her mother experienced grave complications. The doctor evidently said, "Set the child aside, we'll save the mother." My mother's grandmother took my mother home, leaving at the hospital her own daughter who died very shortly thereafter. Mom was also premature, and extremely tiny. Her grandmother intuitively made an incubator for her by surrounding her small swaddled body with warm bricks beneath a woodburning stove. This was seventy-four years ago, before incubators had been invented. This sage of a woman, my great grandmother, provided the means for my mother both to live and to go on to bear three children herself. I was the middle of these three, and could have been involved in re-enacting in my own birth the same scenario as occurred at my mother's birth. It seemed the likelihood of this was even greater in our situation, given my mother's state of ill health following her surgery, as well as the impact of my birth on her. And, we broke the pattern before it had a chance to occur. Life prevailed.

Recently, after spending time with my parents, I returned home and had a most excruciating headache for thirty-six hours. I have never experienced anything like this before, and as I sat quietly with it the thoughts which surfaced were those of birth, not mine, but my mother's. I wondered to what extent I had accessed the pain she had experienced at birth. Was this my enactment of her physical pain as well as the pain she may still carry for somehow being responsible for the death of her mother? Again a current of forgiveness and love for these two women moved through me. We three have chords of connection which I deeply respect, and memories of pain which I am now in position to transmute. I trust a current of healing can move forth into the whole area of birth as I continue to receive and welcome these messages which come to me. We each have our own to receive, whether we are female or male, have given birth or not.

After having touched my inner knowing that I was a female in the category of one not to birth a child, I gave myself permission to be on my own in my home for the major part of a summer. I refer to this time as my "warrior's retreat." My warrior needed to strengthen internally, apart from the great "out there and beyond," where I function fairly adeptly. This was a time with me in a quiet still way... with few distractions demanding my purposeful involvement. At the end of the summer a very dear artist friend showed me one of his relief sculptures, a beautiful wooden hanging of a mother giving birth. She is standing, and beneath the outcoming child's head is a pair of hands receiving the little one. I was particularly struck by the receptivity of the hands, their strength and gentleness carved into the rich grain of the wood. I purchased this piece and my friend came with me to hang it in my living room. We hung it in a place which is quite predominant; it's right there when you walk in. I realized after living with it for several weeks, given its placement in my home, which is a sacred place for me, that it was a rather striking symbolic statement about birth being so much a part of my life in everything I do.

I'm on the board of directors of the Pre and Perinatal Psychology Association of North America. One of the things I feel is at the crux of our organization is our attitude about life, about the wholeness and fullness of life. We have some very solid statements in writing, and we've also spoken with others about who we are and what we do. I can talk propheti-cally forever, but if I'm not living in that way with my friends and colleagues, my words mean absolutely nothing. Life's abundance, it's thriving nature, it's strength and creativity is known through my living of it. There's no other way that one can know anything. Knowing is in doing, in continually initiating and changing.

Exactly the same holds true for the work I do at the University of Toronto. I teach people in a post-graduate program in Assessment and Counseling. My students' work entails counseling people by providing them with an opportunity to change their perspective. This can enhance family well being. My involvement in this area of my life has to do with the interactions I have with my students, with my sensitivity and competency in recognizing their life force and power. How well am I setting the atmosphere through which they can initiate, give birth to new thoughts, words and actions, serve as points of inspiration to others? That is a humbling question, one I need to ask myself frequently.

As an active participant in transforming childlessness through a process of on-going birth, I need to be aware of the delicacy, the innocence and power of this process. Most adults are highly jaded. We have moved far away from our source, from the power that we actually bring and for which we are responsible on the Earth. We have a tendency to fear our own power, and thereby live in a state of immaturity, both emotionally and mentally. When a child is born, he is not immature. He is a fully mature one day old, one week old, or eighteen month old person. Immaturity is apparent when fear controls behaviour, and an individual reverts to a behavioral repertoire which is known, and is not appropriate to the circumstance at hand. In the context of birthing, the mature child entering the world is meeting the unknown continually: he's never been down the birth canal before, never felt the pressure of contractions, never experienced the intensity of light or known the spaciousness he is meeting. It is all new and he has the option of being fully mature in his movements by using his capacities as fully as he can at that time. It is not a thinking process for him, it is one of growing consciousness through which he extends his mental and emotional capacities. He is a creator on a life journey. Immature behaviour for a two month old would be simulating in-womb type behaviour in his actions. He would have reverted to known behaviours which were appropriate when he was in the womb environment, but which are no longer appropriate now that he is no longer in that space. Children actually enter the world with a tremendous innate desire to continually mature emotionally and mentally. They tend to adeptly use and not fear their power of creation.

We all need to parent the Earth, always remaining in touch with the larger perspective from the position of a creator, we, too, adeptly using and not fearing our personal power. There's wonder and magic in these powers of creativity. The "child, parent and adult" of who I am all have contributions to make. My child is alive and well, and I trust life enough to know that it will be well for my entire lifetime. Universally, we still celebrate childhood around the world quite extravagantly, beautifully and sensitively in many respects. When we look at the starving millions, we look to the children first. There's something in us that says that childhood is right and good and true. In the process of maturing it is interesting to note that most people, if they are able to mature beyond childhood, remain at a teenage level of maturity. And when they enter the frontiers of the adolescent adventure, they usually are not met by resounding applause. Adolescent power in motion has a history of adeptly finding and perceptively pushing other people's buttons. They say to us, "Hey, I've found something new, something that's different and exciting inside me. I want to initiate. I want to taste my power and use it fully." And their often unspoken words bring fear and trembling to the recipient parents/adults in their world. Teenagers push the boundaries of what is known and we criticize them for rocking our boat. A rift is experienced, and these young adults remain unhappy adolescents.

When they get to their 20's and 30's, they have their own children. So we have little beings coming in because they know they have something to contribute, and they're being received by parents who have allowed themselves to be truncated by us. Their children may well come face to face with the statement exemplified by their parents which says, "Don't explore, don't initiate, don't create; clone what's already been." If the parent isn't whole, and therefore is not a true parent, the child can never become a true adult. We've got the goods to be fully our child which we do fairly well, to be fully our adolescent, which we do particularly unwell, and subsequently to be fully our parent, and fully our adult. All these aspects are well in place from Source.

Potentially it is only whole parents that can give birth to and nurture whole children. There is a connection here for me between "healer, heal thyself" and "parent, parent thyself." By trusting the wholeness we are, we can own our power and use it with pragmatic wisdom. Right NOW.

We come as creators. We come as beings who are increasingly capable of tapping into the depth of wisdom of our intuitive and conscious realms, of the light source within us and the power that is there. I realized during the time that I was sick that I had virtually handed my power over to others. There are always people ready to take our power if we want to relinquish it. By giving my power away I truncated my process of maturing. I wasn't wholly who I am, and in consequence I depleted both myself and the other person to whom I'd given parental power.

My sense is that before the time of Lemuria and Atlantis, people were whole. They came into their physical bodies healthy. They were healthy, well and whole. Since that time, man has not been whole. It's like the wound in the grail story. There is a deep wound in people now, due to everything we bring from the past. Everyone born into the Earth at this time, regardless of how fit they are, can play an active role in healing the wound that still remains. The source of the only wound that needs healing is a sense of our being separate from the greater whole, a sense that our power isn't adequate for what we need to do. The wound is still present. It cannot be denied. The importance lies in how we address those aspects of our life which are still associated with feelings of separateness.

This is where the lack of choice in how I use my creative powers enters for me, perhaps for all mankind. Each of us has something we can take specific responsibility for in terms of healing. Each one has a channel (and more than one) into the whole. One of my healing venues comes by virtue of my having diabetes. In the endocrine system, the pancreas symbolically is the gland which brings the spirit of blessing when the individual is functioning in alignment with life, and of cursing when one is out of alignment. Not only do I have the opportunity to bring a current of blessing into my world because of how I deal with this particular malfunction, but I can also take responsibility for regaining my own balance. Balance is integral to wholeness. When I'm fully balanced in my physical, mental and emotional realms, I'm in touch with Source, and I manifest wholeness. That has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I have to take insulin for the rest of my life, or the fact that a person may have only one leg and not two. Wholeness doesn't have to do with what we tend to think of as wholeness: physical wholeness. Wholeness has to do with my awareness that I am a vital part of the source that is integral to the greater whole. As I live out this awareness abundantly, wholeness is present because I am contributing consistently to the larger whole, and consequently to a larger world.

We are in the process of maturity from the time of conception, and it is our birthright to live this maturity from the time of conception until the time we die. As we do this there is a strength of spiritual maturity present which provides an open door for us to fully explore the inroads and outreaches of our child, our adolescent and our adult. The ever maturing adult brings to the world playfulness and childlike delight as well as parental wisdom and discipline. He is one that lives with the wisdom of perspective and spaciousness. That is something to celebrate. We've spent so much time in the pit of survival tactics. As long as we're there, we won't know the wholeness and vibrancy of our own creative potential. We're here as creators. We're the ones who transform our world. We're the ones who parent the Earth, this precious sphere on which we live. Why else would we come?

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