Ring of Fire

Want to come with me?

Yeah! She said this with an agreeable ease that I met with joyful skepticism.

Great!…Really!?

And with confirmation that I carefully discerned was in fact genuine and not grudging, off we went to hike up Tumalo Mountain.

Ugh my lungs hurt!

I need to rest.

Are we even halfway there yet?!

I didn’t need to look at my watch to know we were not yet one mile into the 2-mile trek uphill to the summit of Tumalo Mountain.

Fun fact: Tumalo Mountain is not a mountain.

It is a shield volcano in Bend, Oregon that is part of the Cascade Range that extends from southern British Columbia down through Washington, Oregon and Northern California. The Cascades are part of a string of volcanoes, mountains—and more to the point sites of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions—that surround the Pacific Ocean. Ocean trenches not visible on land maps connect volcanic and seismic activity all the way to Antarctica and the South Shetland Islands, creating what is known as the Ring of Fire.

The Ring of Fire has existed for more than 35 million years.

I have done this 4.1 mile hike to the Tumalo Mountain summit and back down many times. Alone.

Alone I can hike it at a pretty decent clip knowing my ass will be on fire the next day. I know what awaits at the top. I know to look back to see the beauty of Mt. Bachelor at my back as I climb. I recognize the changes along the way as I ascend and the lush enormity of the forest floor slowly thins and the gnarled whitebark pines emerge as a haunting yet encouraging reminder that the tree line awaits and the only way is through.

We can rest whenever you need, I say in my easy breezy mama voice.

Put your hands above your head so your lungs can open a bit. All you need to do right now is take the next step and the next one. Remember that. All you ever need to do is focus on where you are in this moment and just take the next step.

Yeah that was on the nose.

She rolled her eyes in sheer annoyance, Whatever. You can say that because you are used to this.

She was right. In ways she doesn’t know yet.

Yeah, I am used to this.

I started this Substack just over a year ago, migrating over my Mailchimp newsletter that I started on my 44th birthday—a full moon—February 27th, 2021. I write with the full moon and sometimes the new moon, and at some point maybe with some other rhythm. The night before my 44th birthday I went snow-shoeing at Mt. Bachelor, amidst a merciful ending of a massive snowstorm.

I started writing a newsletter because it’s a natural extension of communication when you launch a coaching practice but the truth was that I didn’t want to write that kind of newsletter. I wanted to write. Again. And for the first time.

I wanted to write because it is there and at some point it simply felt like it couldn’t stay in me anymore and it was time for it to come out and live into the world, however that looks like. Whether 5 people or 5,000 people read things I write is none of my business. My business is to create what is there, at the ring of fire. The only way is through.

Uh, I need to go get the attending physician, I’m not really getting a clear view. That sweet ER resident was referring to my cervix that he was sheepishly trying to locate and assess through a transvaginal ultrasound in the final minutes of July 30, 2011 at Kaiser Oakland. Little does whoever he is know that he is forever a punchline in my kid’s birth story. He along with the attending physician, who minutes later looked up at me in utter shock as he stammered, OK uhm the reason we can’t see your cervix is that you don’t have one. The baby’s head is there. You are fully dilated. You are having this baby now.

The Oakland A’s beat the Minnesota Twins 8-3 several hours earlier that night which I will always remember because I was there. And because less than 7 hours after leaving that game, eating at the now closed Great American BBQ while having weird lower back pains, and then driving everyone home, and then going to Kaiser Oakland at the suggestion of my midwife, I gave birth guided by my planned homebirth midwives in a very unplanned hospital birth.

Due dates are bullshit but I was going to have this baby around mid-September. That July 30th afternoon before the game I was so tired. A different tired. I took a nap and woke up wanting to stay in bed. But I also wanted to go to the game and see my friends and it was the end of July which is nowhere near mid-September, so I went.

Memories are not files that get stored away and pulled out for reference or proof or denial. They bend and travel with time and are birthed into what we are ready to know.

Before anyone came to check on me as I sat there in the hospital getting monitored—just to be sure I wasn’t in premature labor because if I was having premature contractions then they could give me medication to stop them and at the very worst I would be put on bed rest, and as I kept rolling my hips and moving my body because my body knew to move with the pain and keep breathing with each wave, and as I heard the blip of the monitor and kept glancing over seeing the spike showing contractions but knowing no one had come by to check on me because there was no urgency, and oh how that changed moments later when they realized I was in fact having a baby right then and I stripped my gown off and agreed to wear a fetal heart monitor around my belly but told the people who now were feeling very urgent to kindly leave me the fuck alone, and I felt the wave of transition open up time and at some point my midwives arrived to my elated relief and the sterile room started to fade as I became my body—I turned to my co-parent and told him, No matter what happens, we have all the tools we need to do this.

I purposely didn’t tell her how close or far we were from the summit until the very end. Each time she slowed or stopped or shot me a darting glare I just talked about where we were.

Look at where you are. Look back at Mt. Bachelor, look at where your eye level is now. Look, the mosquitos are (almost) gone up here. Look up ahead, you can see the tree line.

She was born occiput posterior, more commonly referred to as “sunny-side-up” but less commonly the way most beings enter the world, with only about 5-8% of births emerging this way.

She was born looking up into this world.

Despite her eagerness to arrive earthside at 4lbs, 8oz, her posterior position coming through my pelvis was less eager and I pushed for 3 hours to birth her, amidst various positions guided by the improvisational choreography of my midwives and my co-parent mercifully pushing my hips together to open my pelvis.

“Pushing” is a bit of a misnomer as these final moments (or hours) are an intimate dance of a multiple bodied being emerging into two.

Every human on this earth has emerged from a body whose knowing is being continuously annihilated in a generational trauma temper-tantrum by those who sold collective ancestral wisdom for the bill of goods of domination, weaponizing their self-inflicted wounded rage as they claim victim to their own perpetration.

The doctors and nurses stayed out of my way as much as possible at my request/demand as my midwives guided me, and my co-parent, through the infinite defiant wisdom of the unbroken chain of birthing bodies.

After 3 hours of descending so glacially slow, the energy in the room shifted as the monitor showed the inevitable dip in her heart rate with each contraction. My midwife Beah came to my side with a calmness more powerful than anything I have ever experienced, gently laid her hands on me and with her face next to mine she said quietly, Jenn, we are going to birth this baby now. Their head is right there. Do you want to see?

I can’t open my eyes! I cried.

OK, give me your hand. I will show you.

With her hand gently guiding my fingertips, I felt my child’s head.

I felt the ring of fire.

OK.

Seconds later at 3:35am I opened to a knowing that enveloped me in the void of what has been lost, but is never gone.

We did it.

We descended and emerged from the place we started and as she swore she had zero desire to ever do this hike again, she shot me a beaming smile, I do feel very accomplished though.

My baby turned 12 years old yesterday, just before this full moon.

We have lived lifetimes in 12 years. Lifetimes that keep reminding me that readiness is a bless-your-heart illusion. Lifetimes that have slowed down immensely. Lifetimes that laugh at how silly it is that we must be reminded that it is never too late. Lifetimes that quake and erupt when the ring of fire births us again and again.

This is the age where she is transforming in plain sight. Not just she, we. Individuating from and with each other is a profound intimate dance of interdependence. We get tangled up. We step on each other’s toes. A lot.

She teaches me that readiness is not a requirement to live out loud.

I thought I was going to end this by telling you what Unravel is going to look like moving forward. I was going to spell out what is evolving and what this new iteration of writing here will look like.

But I am not sure. I have been writing a shit ton about this with clear-as-day ideas and seeds planted and outlines written and…and…

And the real truth is I am tired at this moment. There is a voice silent-yelling at me to erase that sentence right this second (like when you are on the phone and trying to get your kids to stop doing whatever this-will-end-badly shenanigans they are doing). And just like my kids do, I am ignoring it.

It’s there but not there yet. It’s coming.

Want to come with me?

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