After the simplicity of my friend's encouragement -why not, he said- I tried again to go deeper in my writing of my present bodily experience. Sharing the little piece (that's taken all morning to write, sigh):
No meditating on stopping it. I'm not appreciating deeply enough. For having it. This bleeding, useless, without sense or logic on the part of Nature. At fifty-five years of age it is only a bodily remembrance of the fertility that is past and now becomes a path of greater communion with my womanness, a spiritual deepening into an intimate, private being alive. On the morning of the fourteenth day, still the flush of blood, is it that I deny its importance, denigrate it, lament how weak I feel, how awkward it is in the work world, how strange at my age to flow so redly and opulently? Not that I seek to valorize it. Just to become comfortable with it. After forty-two years of continuous monthly menses, except during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and during the last year when it's been sporadic, I wonder if I have fully accepted my female body? Can I arrive at gentle acceptance near the end of many cycles? Acceptance without celebration or lament. Is-ness. This visceral reality, scarlet wash of haemoglobin on the white moon cloth. Ache in my belly, hidden tides. Loving my womb, inner bulb of fire. Its tender blood vessels.
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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I remember Mary telling me that menstrual blood was used in mortar in some ancient societies because of the binding agents it contained. I don't know what her source material was (I'll ask her when she's awake), and so far I haven't found any on the Web. But what I did find, that I thought was interesting, was a thread on Tribe about the uses of menstrual blood as fertilizer, at
ReplyDeletehttp://greenthumbs.tribe.net/thread/58a9da21-8393-4f89-9278-61cbafb5eaa2
I thought Rae's March 20 comment was particularly interesting. She wrote, "Menstral blood is rich in nutrition, and contains much more life giving substance than the blood you give at your local red cross," followed by this abstract:
"12 March 2006
At the American College of Cardiology annual meeting, Abstracts 921-105 and 921-107 by researchers at the Keio University School of Medicine in Japan examined the use of endometrial cells to mimic heart muscle. The two studies derived endometrial cells from either umbilical cord blood or from menstrual blood. In both cases, some of the endometrial cells were able to contract simultaneously (roughly half the cells from menstrual blood and nearly all the cells from cord blood). Both sets of cells also exhibited cardiac gene expression and response to the chemicals which trigger cardiac contractions. The cord blood study went further, demonstrating that half the stem cells transformed into cardiomyocytes (primitive cardiac cells) in vitro."