Videotaped Reading: Mother of Milk, 2003

Mother of Milk, 2003 from Brenda Clews on Vimeo. (It takes 10-15sec to begin.)

I recorded this reading of "Mother of Milk" in my studio in Vancouver for ARM's 'Mothering, Religion and Spirituality' Conference.

Breastfeeding my two children until they weaned themselves, a total of five years, I went from filling my time with constant doing, a consumption of time, activities, ideas, to being able to be with the vast silence of the interior stillness. In this learning of a deeper rhythm which seemingly encompassed the discordant ambiguities, difficulties, discontinuities, traumas, and irreconcilable aspects, as well as the joys and unities, of my life my spiritual understandings and practices underwent a profound metamorphosis. While I would emphasize that there are many spiritual paths, and that all are equally valid, the particular path I found myself on arose directly out of my experiences as a mother-of-milk as I subsequently explored the concept of the ‘Divine Mother’ in ancient mythologies and modern religions, through meditation in a yoga tradition, and privately before my small alter at home, so that, while still emphatically a ‘woman in process,’ my experience of a feminist, goddess-oriented, empowering way of being could be be described as an ‘embodied spirituality.’

Videotaped in Vancouver, 2003
Copyright 2003 by Brenda Clews All Rights Reserved

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This is the DVD cover.






This was a personal essay, or perhaps prosepoem of a certain point of motherhood, and I recorded it in my studio in Vancouver (where I lived at the time) for a conference on "Motherhood and Spirituality" in 2003 in Toronto. The viewing was well received. Afterwards the CD went underground, and was in at least one art show, in 2004, at the Ayer Lofts Art Gallery in Massachusetts where it was one of the features of a video evening. Oh, and the prestigious Mothers Movement Online published it as an essay around that time too, and it's still online.

With my new iMac (ok it's almost a year old, but still feels "new":-) I found I was able to save this video as a .DIVX file, shortening it from the Quicktime 1.4GB .MOV file to 172MB .DIVX while not losing clarity in the smaller screen (as happened with the .MP4 file), and, even though it's 21 minutes long, was able to upload it, not to YouTube (which has a 10 minute maximum) but to Vimeo (which has no limit on the length of a video, only a size limit of 500MGs a week).

Because of Google Sites html limitations I can only embed a teeny tiny flash player that plays the reading at my new Art & Writings Website, it's real cute!

ARM Conference: Maternal Health and Well-Being

This weekend is ARM's Maternal Health and Well-Being conference, which is being held in a hotel in downtown Toronto. I went last night for the launch of Andrea O'Reilly's massive 846 page tome, Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, and the equally wide-ranging book Rishma Dunlop has edited, White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood. Most impressive. I love this group of women.

I'm presenting Saturday, a chapter I wrote for my thesis on the maternal body that I didn't complete. The chapter was the 'grounding in the body' and is about the process of conception. It took months to write, if I recall, between medical accuracy and writing it as a love poem of what happens deep within our bodies when we create new life. After finishing it, I intended to continue on with the 9 months of pregnancy, but it seemed such a daunting project I didn't get started. And a more difficult task - for me to humanize pregnancy by bringing the poetry back into the medical view would mean writing it from my vantage and my pregnancies were, of course, different to the experiences of any other woman's and I foresaw problems with issues of essentialism were I to embark on writing it.