The Power of Community

When I think of community, I immediately think of women’s circles, the Red Tent, places where people who identify with Feminine Divinity or Sacred Divinity gather. These gatherings are where we do magic, where we tall stories, where we love on another. They are places that are safe, warm and sacred filled with mystery and healing. Healing through words and song and laying on of hands. Healing through memory holding, witnessing and honoring. Healing through ritual and ceremony and carrying folks through thresholds. Healing through wisdom and ancient practices. This is the kind of community I crave and I feel lucky enough to have found.

My Rosh Chodesh Circle is a group of women who have been together for almost a decade. When we began to firm up the structure of our circle, we intentionally closed it so that it could be a container - a place where both sacred and mundane time was kept. Through this sacred container, we could be open and vulnerable and our true selves. This means we don’t always agree, we don’t share all of the same opinions, and some folks are closer than others. It also means that we have the capacity to truly show up for and hold one another. I always tell folks that these are the women who will bury me - they are my forever community and I am so blessed to have them.

Yesterday I gathered with my Rosh Chodesh group to help prepare one of the women for the birth of her next child (poo poo poo - b’sha’ah tovah). Rosh Chodesh is the way that Jewish folks mark time - we operate on a lunar calendar and our days, months, and holidays begin by the moon. In times past, when the new moon was visible it was the responsibility of one tribe to light a huge bonfire on the highest point of the land. When the next tribe saw the fire, they would light their bonfire until the entire community could tell it was the new moon, next cycle of time.

In modern times we use calendars and traditionally Jewish women gather for ritual, mystery, and magic under the New Moon. My Rosh Chodesh group has been together for almost 8 years - we have witnessed the death of parents, good friends, and partners. We have carried one another through the thresholds of engagement, marriage, and childbirth. We have guided one another into waters to heal after miscarriage, sickness, surgery, and injury and this weekend we gathered to clean a kitchen, stock a freezer, and bless a new mother.

While we were bestowing blessings upon this woman whose first pregnancy and birth were traumatic, many tears flowed including my own. My own womb ached with the longing of a bigger family, the loss of my previously unborn children, my own joy for her womb. We surrounded her in Spirit and blessings and light and I felt deeply in my soul how sacred, how special, how unique, and how important it is to be surrounded by a community who love you, witness you, guide you, honor you, see you through all versions of you. We should all be this lucky.

My prayer for Whole Body Pregnancy in 2024 is to weave this kind of community - and you are a part of it. I hope to do this through virtual offerings of witnessing and ritual, through in-person offerings and teaching, and through training. I want to do this to foster community in us, to give us a glimpse of being cared for, and to help us spread concentric circles of support and love, weaving a tapestry that is sacred, holy, and reverent for all that we are.