Chapter 35: Alive

This is the very last chapter of my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last. Thank you for reading… it’s been such a treat to share with you.

When I returned home from Mexico, I deleted the dating apps and ended the casual connections I’d been maintaining. They were just no longer appealing.

I could see clearly that the men I’d been relating to had been reflections of my own unintegrated masculine, parts of me that were still looking outward for response, direction, validation. Once I turned toward my animus and began to integrate him, those connections lost their charge. The small flurry of excitement that came from being wanted, flirted with, chosen, no longer held much interest. It no longer met my deeper desires.

Within two months of consciously honoring my animus, I sat down to write this book.

As with all acts of creation, something had shifted internally. Yin had been nourished, and Yang could now innervate it, allowing something new to take shape. What had been gestating was ready to be born.

At first, it was just going to be a book about fertility. And at its most basic level, it is. It’s about life force. About aliveness. About what happens when Yin and Yang meet in true relationship, when the elements are allowed to move freely through the body, unblocked and honored.

For a long time, I believed that magic lived somewhere outside of me. In polarity. In sex. In relationship. In another person’s ability to see me, hold me, meet me. And while I’ve had moments of that kind of magic, experiences that cracked me open and revealed what was possible, I came to understand that those experiences were not created by another.

They arose from me. They arose from seeing myself, holding myself, meeting myself.

Feeling the truth of that shifted the way I moved through intimacy.
The way I understood love.
The way I gave.

It was familiar to me, in love, to give. To sense another's wounds and pour myself out into them.

But I no longer want love that depends on my disappearance. I don’t want to be needed in a way that requires me to stay hidden from my own vulnerability. I don’t want to give from a place that leaves me unseen, outside of my own desire.

The fullness of me includes wanting. It includes need. It includes tenderness. It includes the longing to be met as a woman alive in her own body.

I used to imagine my path as linear. That there was a destination, an arrival point where I could finally say, I made it. Here I am. It all worked out.

I tried to write this chapter in that way — searching for an ending, a conclusion that would tie everything together, where the meaning in it all would finally be revealed.

But now I see that there will be no ending. My path has always been a spiral. I have been circling the same truths, the same lessons, and like all living things, deepening by returning. Unraveling and reweaving. Coming home again and again, each time with more awareness about who I am and how I want to live. Each time, more fully me.

Just as an acorn contains the oak tree, we carry our wholeness from the very beginning. At the moment of our birth, we already contain the entirety of our possibility. Constantly unfolding.

Like the Spira mirabilis, the sacred spiral, we are living miracles. Always in motion. And we are always, at each moment, already a masterpiece.

There has never been a destination.

Only this moment, again and again,
and the magic of being fully alive.

Thank you for reading.
Thank you for walking this path with me, for letting these words meet you wherever you are.

What’s unfolding now lives in the space between Mother and Crone.
I’m calling her The Empress. Stay tuned for more on

The Empress Phase: Finding The Sacred Yes of Your Midlife Initiation

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