Welcome to Hear Me Roar: Post-Abortion Press. Series: On the founding.
Right now, that is all that is driving me. The need to create. And it is not unrelated to my abortion experience. In fact, it was born there. It’s an unwieldy energy, that I’m unsure exactly how to direct. Known to short-out, stutter and spark if I don’t do something with it early in the day. A current that can run through my legs and out of my toes; or that can get trapped inside and create a measurable heaviness that I can’t explain. And it does all types of other things, too.
The obvious thing to explore is the idea that I am converting reproductive energy into art. But I don’t know you well enough yet to dig in there. Instead, there is something in the etymology of the word “create” that is of importance to me. Creation, the morphology of the word create, is decidedly a Christian, birth experience word. It is masculine, the action of the creator. But really, when looked at closely, intimately, and outside of our current societal context, creation is a feminine action. Creation is life and death. And it always has to be both.
Creating, as a word, is neutral. I can be creating something at any given moment and before I know what it is, it is merely a productive and perhaps well-considered word. I’m remembering where I first started developing all of my thoughts about the urge to create, and the importance of creating as an expression of something feminine (not necessarily female, but a rooted, feminine energy), and I believe it was in a blog that I was reading – maybe written by someone facing infertility. The idea also blends together with my being a yoga teacher, who substituted her nine-month teacher training classes for children she couldn’t have. My associations and memories around this word and its form are dream-like. I can’t and won’t be able to explain them, and you might as well get used to contradiction. In the world of reproduction; in the world of abortion.
I also think of an artist who I met when I lived in California, who ran Saturday classes for freedom of expression. We connected briefly about having had abortion experiences. On the one hand, we both acknowledged the idea that we need to “do” – do something – after having done that, gone through that, to make it worth it, to make it make sense. This is production oriented; it is masculinist, patriarchal and capitalist; and it is oppressive. It covers up pain in accomplishment and doesn’t allow us to be part of the web of life – women who create and who destroy. However, we also acknowledged, silently, that we were still creating. That this energy had never stopped. That in fact we had not interrupted it, but redirected it, and the current, the stream was always there for us to tap into again. That this is why we met there on a Saturday.
The universe is quite forgiving. Although we cannot go back, it allows us to re-join.
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