Hola gorgeous goddesses,

It’s a Friday night. The couch is soft around me. My love’s feet rest against mine. I’m playing along with Gwen’s Best of 2009. Today – it’s My Best Trip of 2009.

Usually I’m a travelling goddess. Each year, there are trips that shine out as being little gems and turning points in my journey.

2006: The Trip of Soul. We fly into the depth of the Australian desert, to Uluru, the most sacred place I have ever known. I feel like I have come home to my soul out there, walking in the red desert sands at night with my love, resting my head against the great mama rock, spending a week meditating and healing in a gathering of souls.

2007: The Trip of Lessons. With my mama, and two sisters, we spend a month adventuring in India. Where everything in my life was turned upside down, and everything became a coyote and a teacher. Everything falls apart, and is broken… and it makes us whole again.

2008: The Trip of Love. We drove halfway across the country, back to our homelands, back to the beach we first fell in love. Dancing in the water, my love of seven years asks me to marry him. We both cry, and I say yes, and sea eagles fly above us.

And so, each year’s trip becomes its theme.

And my best trip this year?

In June, I fly back to my homelands for a week, on my own. I do not know then that this will be my last solitary journey as a maiden.

I photograph the full moon belly of my brother’s wife, my niece spending her last weeks in her skin-cocoon. I dance in the ocean like a mermaid again. I climb trees with my sisters. I build a crystal labyrinth with my family. My sister finds the right place on the farm – a swirl of long grass resting beside a river. My brother finds fallen tree logs and bushrocks, and we begin dragging them into place. My teenage-boy cousins jump into the task with relish, insisting on using motorbikes to move logs into place. We laugh a lot. And when it is ready, my niece and nephew choose crystals to place around it, blessing each one with love and tenderness. My little blue-eyed ocean-boy nephew places an amethyst cluster reverently into the centre. We dream about what it will be like for all of us to live on the farm again, creating our retreat centre.

At sunset, I walk the canefields with my mama and our dog. We watch the sky light up, and I tell her softly that we are ready to bring a new soul into the world. And she smiles, and her eyes glow with tears, and she holds my hand. My mama will always be my mama. My wild, intuiting centaur dad chooses that moment to come out driving to find us. We drive back with him, dust and wind flying around us, and I laugh. My dad will always be my dad. I eat lunch with my little sister, and tell her I feel nauseous for some strange reason. She narrows her eyes and says: Are you pregnant? I laugh. No, not yet. But I am, with a tiny spark of possibility.

I return back home, back to my love. And that tiny spark of possibility turns into a tiny spark of reality. We become pregnant with a new little soul.

And so unfolds our big trip of the year… The Trip of Transformation.

This year will always be marked down as that year I made the journey from flat-bellied maiden into a mama-in-initiation.

I’ve learned how to throw up, how to be still. I’ve learned how to cocoon, how to let go of the things I can’t do anymore. I’ve learned how to worry, and how to work my way back to not-worrying anymore. I’ve learned how to lean into the soft comfort and riverstone calm of my love, how to choose who to surround myself with and how to say what I need.

I’ve learned how to be vulnerable. I’ve learned how to hope and how to accept. And most of all, I’ve learned how to be changed, and how to love.

I’m six months pregnant now. It’s a trip I don’t think I can come back from, one I don’t think I could ever want to.

And it’s still some months until this new little soul enters the world fully… but to us, she already has. She’s already our teacher, our medicine, our gift… and the greatest blessing of our love by far.

She’s the journey we needed to take, the road we wanted to walk, the trip that has changed us the most.

And for that – I am over the moon, ocean-soaked grateful.

love, love, love

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