EcoBirth’s Deep Womb Ecology

EcoBirth’s Deep Womb Ecology

Realizing our maternal lines back to the beginning of the cosmos is our reclaimed story of 
creation and redemption. We women come from a long history of oppression 
and we feel the deep trauma of Mother Earth in our cells. 
Like in birth labor, we can yield to our body’s innate knowing, to open, 
to birth our beauty and compassion and as bearers of the future generations in our wombs, 
claim our sacred and joyous authority to care for, protect and bless all life. 
As a collective matrix, we form a world reflecting our ancestral kinship 
of healing, nurturance and well-being, loving MotherBaby MotherEarth.

October 27, 2019 presentation slides and script for A Case for Climate and Sex 
at Humanist Hall, Oakland, CA

EcoBirth’s Deep Womb Ecology

Realizing our maternal lines back to the beginning of the cosmos is our reclaimed story of creation and redemption. We women come from a long history of oppression and we feel the dark trauma of Mother Earth in our cells. 
Like in birth labor, we can yield to our body’s innate knowing, to open, to birth our beauty and compassion and as bearers of the future generations 
in our wombs, claim our sacred and joyous authority to care for, 
protect and bless all life. As a collective matrix, we can form a world 
reflecting our ancestral kinship of healing, nurturance and well-being.

 

Take a stand with a loving gaze on reality

We women are the first environments of our children. We embody our lineage of environments - which is physical reality. How do we stand for what is right for ourselves, which is therefore right for our children? By looking straight into the eyes of reality, with courage and love. Then taking a stand, acting with integrity and clarity.

EcoBirth-Women for Earth and Birth is exploring how to do that with two projects- My Personal Environmental Story and Guarding the Rights of Future Generations.  Please look further under our tabs on this website and join us on Facebook. Also visit our My Personal Environmental Story website and "like" us on our Facebook page. And visit the Women's Congress of Future Generations website and read the Declaration of the Rights of Future Generations and give your opinion on what it says.

You can offer your own Personal Environmental Story and become involved in the new civil rights movement for Future Generations. You can become a Guardian of Future Generations and a Beloved Ancestor. Take a stand with a loving gaze on reality with us.

My Environmental Lineage and Legacy Story

When I was raising my children, I thought all I needed to do was to raise good children and everything would be OK. 

When they were grown, I realized that the outside world in which they were conceived and now live and in which their children will be raised, had drastically changed to include hazards about which I knew little, much too little.

I started searching for answers, which brought me to a lot of research and eye-opening information. I soon realized that I had to look at my lineage and our home for four generations, San Francisco, to grasp what could continue to affect my children and grandchildren. 

 
My environmental lineage and legacy story contains my increasing consciousness  of  what we are doing to ourselves, our fellow creatures and our world and integrates all the strands of my personal story in an intimate portrait that connects me to my primary environment, our devoted Mother Earth.

 I learned that my family's heritage is intrinsically connected to the creation of those toxins that could have affected them and could still be affecting me, 

 

my children and now my grandchildren. 

I am a grandmother of twin girls. Our relationship is immutable and life-changing for me. I knew that their lifeforce was growing in the dark, protective womb of their mother- which contained all that they needed. But I also knew from pulling together this story of my environmental lineage and legacy, that they could be influenced by outside forces, not by the conscious will of their mother, nor by any truly rational choices of our culture, but just as immutably, by me and my ancestor’s personal actions, choices and ignorance. I realize that how I live on this earth is what my granddaughters will inherit. Their changeable physiology creates a responsibility on me, because I would never want an action that I do to harm my grandchildren. I understand that my relationship with my all-encompassing Mother Earth somehow is immutable too, just like my relationship with my granddaughters. And I feel that my Mother Earth who holds and nurtures me and feeds me is beneficent. She would not want to harm either, yet she accepts what is happening to her, with involuntary surrender. 

I live within and enable the perpetuation of a system that harms our world and our babies. This became an existential dilemma for me. How do I live in the real world, hold to the faith and conviction I have in the beneficence of our existence and not drop into despair and hopelessness?

The word EcoBirth  came to me in the midst of this search, it has come to integrate many strands in my life- my feminine qualities, living a faith-based life, connecting to my lineage and legacy, unique to place and time in San Francisco, and my primary, immutable, relationship with  Mother Earth. I want to take responsibility for the shape that our world is in now, by seeing the hope and love that is needed to enable the next generations to heal it. I do not have the answers for them, but I can try to hold the space to allow them to find those answers, by seeing the truth of what is happening now, processing it in my heart and naming it in public. I see birth as the metaphor for transformation and creation that if honored, will create a paradigm shift in our culture’s consciousness.

And that consciousness would realize that we are all related, that our planet home is an extraordinarily perfect balance of natural cycles and that caring for our one natural life will enable us all to be well. That we are caught in a web of a story that separates us, gives us a false sense that we are independent, alone and in charge of our own destiny, with no need for anyone else. Disconnected, unrelated, isolated. Not true.

Our true story is about the extraordinary connection in ourselves that goes all the way back to the first stirring of life gathered on this earth. We were born from our mothers, they were born from their mothers, and we were formed from bits of their bodies all the way back to the first amoeba- there is still a small bit of that life spark in us. We could not be here without all this lineage and heritage; we are dependent on their living and giving. It is a wonderful story of relationship based on love and compassion, unbreakable, freely given. We have just lost our connection to our Mother Earth and to ourselves and our fellow kin, but becoming aware that we are all in the same interdependent living system is hopeful, faithful and so biologically real. We have since the beginning of time, given our feminine, maternal gifts to our children, with no thought for payment.

That instinct for offering ourselves will be found again-to reclaim our rightful place in the order of life. We are not lost or truly harmful to our following generations, we are their life-givers. And I chose to work with a fierce passion to make right this world for my grandchildren, and your grandchildren. I trust in my connection to my mother and grandmother, and I see my relationship to all kin in our world, on our earth, in our cosmos, with a gaze of love and compassion. I look to receive that gaze in return, with an open, wounded heart, vulnerable and strong.

I just heard of research that said that a mother’s laughter makes her breastmilk healthier for her child- - there is really nothing more miraculous than that! We can change the world with love and laughter and it will respond with health, happiness and true acceptance of our rightful place in it.

Radio Interview with Molly on EcoBirth

An interview on Progressive Radio Network on Green Front, January 2012- learn a little history of EcoBirth and get to know me better- why I feel responsible for the bad shape the world is in.  I talk about the pre-pollution of our bodies and how we are passing that onto our children and grandchildren. Why is Scandinavia a better place for the health of mothers and babies? Why might my sister have been born with a birth defect? How do we understand and name what is happening to our world that is being inherited by our children and grandchildren?

We can be hopeful when we realize that we are connected, related- all birthed from our mothers, inheriting a speck of life from the very first spark of life on this earth. We know who our relations are and where we belong- that is immutable. We have agency to create a world that is compassionate and loving- just look at the freely given gift of life from our mothers and the rich harvest offered by our Mother Earth. We can protect our children and heal our earth home and by realizing our unique, authentic gifts, consciously use them to make a better world.

It was fun to have my first radio interview, tell me what you think!

My passionate journey to EcoBirth

When I was raising my children, I thought all I needed to do was to raise good children and everything would be OK. 

When they were grown, I realized that the outside world in which they were conceived and now live and in which their children will be raised, had drastically changed to include hazards about which I knew little, much too little.

I started searching for answers, which brought me to a lot of research and eye-opening information. I soon realized that I had to look at my lineage and our home San Francisco to grasp what could continue to affect my children and grandchildren. 

 

This story is my increasing consciousness  of  what we are doing to ourselves, our fellow creatures and our world. And the realization that my family's heritage is intrinsically connected to the creation of those toxins that could have affected them and could still be affecting me, my children






  and now my grandchildren.  




I see now that my journey to EcoBirth integrates all the strands of my personal story in an intimate portrait that connects me to my lineage and to my legacy and immutably to my primary environment, our devoted Mother Earth. 




 I am not a doctor or scientist, but I am claiming my authority as a life-giver to speak up about what has been happening to our world and to take responsibility for my role in it. 

Generations have been adversely affected by our human interference with nature and natural processes and cycles.

 
I want a world in which babies are born toxin-free, births are experienced in a safe and normal way, and that our children’s connection to our planet will nourish and sustain them throughout their lives.

I claim the hope and certainty that we can make our world a better place by enabling a pure and caring home for all creatures, particularly when they are born from their first environment, their mother’s womb to their primary environment -our Mother Earth.

The Story of EcoBirth- a Mother's Legacy in San Francisco

In 1887 a baby was born in San Francisco, she was named Katherine Connor Oliver, she was given her mother’s name. 

In Northern California, starting with the Gold Rush, mercury was used extensively in hydraulic gold mining in order to help “capture” gold.  Mercury was also used in silver mining. 

My Grammy, the baby, was gestated in her mother’s womb when local water and local food could have been contaminated with the mines flushing of mercury into the rivers that feed the SF Bay. This heavy metal has been correlated with birth defects and lower IQ. It is called a neurotoxin and can permanently affect our health.  

  

 My Mommy was created then too, in my Grammy’s body as an egg. She could have been affected by that same mercury. The placenta is not a barrier of safety; it distributes to the baby what is in the mother’s body. 

One Natural Life-what is a whole community?

Questions bubble constantly in my mind about what it might be to understand that our lives, selves and world are intimately related as a whole ecosystem. I am still considering what Peter Forbes says in "WHAT IS A WHOLE COMMUNITY? A LETTER TO THOSE WHO CARE FOR AND RESTORE THE LAND" 2006. He says, " The true benefit and skill of land conservationists is our ability to put on the table a feast of values that reminds every American of what is healthy, what is fair opportunity, what is beautiful and meaningful, and what it means to be in relationship." O, provocative stretch and growth for a segment of our society that has been tremendously successful over the last 30 years, but is being called to "express our own spirit and a moral voice that knows, and cares, and responds." Who of us ought to be looking at " our greater selves to realize that this moment of becoming asks something entirely different of us".

I want EcoBirth to provoke these kinds of questions and initiate compelling dialog about our moral responsibility to our descendants- that living whole is knowing our own sense of place, on our Mother Land, in kinship to all our fellow creatures, and recognizing our own embodied ecosystem. I understand that natural cycles are intrinsic to the being and living of our whole world- and if we look at how we consider those cycles, we might have a clearer idea of how we are in our lives. Then we might care and respond. Then we can touch our greater selves. Then we can affect our world and our legacy.

Peter Forbes can help us see our relationship with our land, not only by enabling access to a continuing portion of it, but also by creating a moral vision that says " I am for relationship between people and the land and for equity and fairness toward all lives, starting with our own human lives. The root meaning of healing is to make whole. I want to do my part to make whole the land and the people."

He also says " When we see our lives as full and respected, we realize the imperative to offer the same to all other creatures".

And what happens in EcoBirth's consciousness, when we realize that we are the "land", the place, the first environment for our children? What responsibilities do we have to embody our "whole" system with care for the generations of humans who will be our legacy? It helps me look at what I let into my body, voluntarily or involuntarily. It becomes very clear that how I allow the pollution of the earth ecosystem, will affect  me and my children and grandchildren. It makes me aware that the primary natural cycle of my embodied system is how I bring my children into the world.

It makes me want a whole, healthy body, with a spirit that can thrive in a community that is envisioned by Peter Forbes " A whole community is a mosaic of people living their lives in constant awareness and relationship with a healthy place...is safer and healthier for all forms of life." 

He says "Posing philosophical questions is a necessary step in changing our consciousness...now it is time to be prophets and poets again."

Here are some questions to start with: What are the natural cycles of life? What do I dream about and long for? What is my vision for the future of my children?

We are the prophets and poets needed today.

There is no beginning and no end- it is all one- and we are it

I just participated in an animated discussion led by Michael Meade, author and mythologist, with drumming and storytelling, silence and audience interaction. He told a Native American Myth about a woman in a cave, weaving with porcupine quills and her black dog who unravels the years and years of work she had done to create the fabric of the world. She had worked her teeth to a nub, chewing the toxic quills and now had to start over again. But she started immediately again, imagining a more beautiful woven world.

The lesson being that there is no beginning and no end, just rebirth, constantly. So there is a real reason to continue to see the world as it is, in all its "chaosmology", and work to better it, because there is no such thing as "the end of the world". We are in difficult period now: our culture is not even kind, much less compassionate. I see this in the way we treat our Mother Earth and our mothers and babies, particularly at the moment of our most powerful act, birthing. It is hard to see and face and name. It is dark and grievous. But, we must start immediately again, imagining a more beautiful world, as the woman did in the cave.

We cannot separate what happens to the earth, from what happens to us and to our children and grandchildren, unending, holding all of us as one and we are it. This is important work, but Michael Meade reminds us to laugh, enjoy, joke. Stories and myths are fun and profound. They can help us to continue to hope for good change, to work for good change. We can live in the chaos, knowing that life will be rewoven, differently from what we have worked on for years, wearing our bodies out, but using our creative imaginations to continue with beauty and love.

I am looking forward to reading Michael Meade's book, Fate and Destiny- The Two Agreements of the Soul. I particularly appreciate his dedication, handwritten to me- much peace and many blessings...And may we all have the same.

Environmental Health Expert Offers Advice on How to Reduce Exposure to Toxins - UCSF Today

Environmental Health Expert Offers Advice on How to Reduce Exposure to Toxins - UCSF Today

UCSF study identifies chemicals in pregnant women - UCSF News Office

Such an important study that shows environmental toxins in our vulnerable babies, while they are forming. This is not right or just. We want to make the lifestyle choices to mitigate these hazards,but we also need to start protecting our ecosystem from the release of the synthetic chemicals we are creating for profit. Global and societal change needs to be supported on a systemic level, so the involuntary affects from just breathing our air or drinking our water or eating our food, can be safe and healthy, not poisonous.
There is a good video and short article on steps you can take to avoid environmental toxins in your everyday life. Thank you Tracey for doing the work and making us more aware of how we can live in our real world with consciousness and diligence.

Dr Sandra Steingraber speaks quietly with iron resolve

Dr. Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D, ecologist and mother, speaks quietly with a big stick. Her lovely voice and gentle presence belies her iron resolve to make a better world for her children. She is intimately familiar with disease and grief, and greed and manipulation and bodily invasions. She is courageous enough to live a life that contains truth-living and truth-telling to power.

EcoBirth produced a lecture by Dr. Steingraber in San Francisco, Oct 28, 2010. When I picked up Sandra from SFO, she asked me about my lineage here in San Francisco and she got to hear lots about my family having been in San Francisco since the 1820’s. She was flying in from the Women’s Conference in LA County and we got to do a little bashing of So Cal and Hollywood and celebrities and politicians- all in great array at the conference. We had a wonderful visit in her friend Judy’s old Edwardian in the Mission District. And I got a sense of some of the contours of her life. She discussed how she determines which speaking engagements she accepts and how those decisions may impact the very real economics of her life. She tries to look at the sponsors of the conferences who so frequently invite her to speak. And in no uncertain terms she said she would go nowhere near an event that was sponsored by a baby formula company.

This struck me as a brave act of integrity and a model for how we all might try to figure out how to accommodate ourselves to live in this imperfect world. Somehow we want to balance taking a stand for something we perceive as truth, but without being rigid, doctrinaire and irrational. I envy her the privilege of having a platform to speak truth to power which may have some good influence in the world.

I tie this impulse into EcoBirth, which recognizes the connections we have with our surroundings, our world through so many generations. Yes, it does matter where we were born and raised. And it does matter how our Mother Earth is treated, because we personally embody that current lack of care in our wombs and pass it onto two generations after ourselves. It does matter that the human qualities of greed and indifference affect how we birth our babies, what milk we can feed them from our own breasts and what food is nourishing from the bounty, given to us as a gift, from Mother Earth. So when do we realize that we will take a visible stand? We listen closely to those courageous people who show us how to do it with grace and openness, like Sandra.

Dr. Steingraber, besides being a mother and an ecologist, is an author, and cancer survivor, and an internationally recognized authority working to break the silence about cancer and its environmental links. Continuing her investigation begun in her first book, Living Downstream, Steingraber’s book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, explores the intimate ecology of motherhood, which is both a memoir of her own pregnancy and an investigation of fetal toxicology. Having Faith reveals the extent to which environmental hazards now threaten each stage of infant development. In the eyes of an ecologist, the mother’s body is the first environment for life.

Sandra has been able to communicate through her beautiful prose and her poetry the naming and recognition of what is happening to our world now, so we can understand it. The wonder, joy and beauty of our world shines in her language and is embodied in her life. That evening we had the honor of listening to a woman who walks the walk and is a guide to us on how we can do it too.

I said to Sandra, “Thank you for your filling the space for all of us as spokesperson naming the perils that are hard to hear about our world. Thank you for being visible to the entire world, especially those in power, acting with integrity and courage. Thank you for being a good mother to your children and to our children and to all our creature kin’s children.”

Please visit my posting of the lecture at http://ecobirth.blogspot.com and hear Sandra’s provocative answers to the below questions:

1-In Having Faith, you took an intimate, scientific look at pregnancy, fetal development, childbirth, and breastfeeding. Yet the book is also a spiritual journey, so beautifully displayed in the chapter on Faith’s birth itself. What have you learned of the sacred in our lives—in the connections between mother and child and environment—from that experience?

2-What part does grief and suffering play in this conscious understanding of the world and its imperiled trajectory about which you seem to want to enlighten us?

Interview with Dr. Sandra Steingraber about her book and film

 

Stand and Deliver: Thoughts on "Le Premier Cri"

Stand and Deliver: Thoughts on "Le Premier Cri"

EcoBirth Updates and Plans via #constantcontact

EcoBirth Updates and Plans via #constantcontact

Continuity of lineage-who are we related to?

My twin granddaughters are born and thriving, feeding, growing, pooping, crying, so real! I had been thinking about the unbroken lineage we all embody. I am fascinated with the history TV shows saying that the Native Americans in America are descended from 20 people. And I remember on a trip I took to Quezac in the center of the mountains in France, when I asked the Gite/hotel owner, "How long had her family been here?" She said "Always", it seemed inconceivable. But I do realize a very long continuous chain of connection and relationship to my ancestors, not just to my great-grandmothers who came to America with their warring army husbands on this western frontier, but way, way back to the beginnings. We came from Africa, we are all related, this is inconceivable, but profound to me. My relations are everyone. My husband and I were just trying to figure out what percentage these girls are of Chinese, Russian, Irish, French, German, Scots, Spanish- O it is a mish-mash! And these delineations of ethnicity and nationality are just arbitrary, not the absolute truth.

They have been given names that have Celtic foundations, seems very appropriate to me. I took out some books I had collected on Celtic art, history and spirituality. The Celts seemed to have been a curious mix of crazy, killing warriors and a strong connection to the earth and the daily miracles in the simple relationship with life around them. Their names are associated with wisdom and fire. I will tell you the names when I get permission from their parents, because I am not in charge of these precious beings, and permissions can not be given out by me for them. I have to understand that I am a step removed from them, which I am finding is quite hard to grasp emotionally. But they are in a chain of relationships that is truly immutable and I am in that chain with them, all the way back to thousands of years ago.


Now, my granddaughters will express so many aspects of their lineage and their environment. I wonder what affect their birth and first days will have? That is a poignant question for a person who is so tied into EcoBirth. I will hold this question, because I do not have the answer and right now it is too close to me emotionally to get a perspective.


I just want to make an effort to welcome these darlings to a beautiful world and I want to offer help to my son and daughter-in-law with the immediate everyday duties that come with their increased responsibilities. I want to hold the space for them of beauty and love that is hard to see in this new chaos of new life- x2!


This wonderful quote came to me today in my companionable email box and it spoke to me. Thank you Mr RLS!

WORD FOR THE DAY
Saturday, Sep. 11

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

Robert Louis Stevenson