Sparkle and Zest

My belly is not for the faint of heart

If you don’t like roundness, don’t come here

If you don’t like softness, lay your head elsewhere

If you don’t appreciate the squish of love, move on

If stretch marks intimidate you or turn you off: bye!

If the belly of a woman seems gross or unsightly, I formally disinvite you from this party

If my womb and guts and full belly breathing are just too damn much, please unfollow pronto

And what about those ovaries housed in there? We don’t give them nearly enough recognition!

With their delicate fronds, hovering sea anemones, guiding eggs to fallopian tubes for a gentle water slide ride to the womb—

Hundreds of thousands of miracle eggs in these ovaries, seeds of life, in constant gestation, buzzing quietly with limitless potential!

Let’s say the word: ovum. It doesn’t get said enough!

What a beautiful word

Oh-Vum

Feel it rest in your mouth, this round word

resting in my round belly

tiny jellyfish opal of almost human life

My belly carries thousands of them day after day,

night after night

moment after moment

from the time I was in my mother’s womb

from the time I was in my grandmother’s belly as a tiny egg in my mother’s ovary when she was a babe in her mother’s womb

and before that, when I was a possibility within an egg that would become a woman who would hold the egg that would become me

back and back

infinity upon infinity

until the beginning of time

until the first eggshell of the universe cracked and the Big Bang busted forth this wild continuum we call Life

I was there!

We all were there!

As the energy that began it all

crystalized forward

spinning wildly

Until it landed softly

into an Ovum

in the belly of your mother

into the soft belly of Me.

Of course this belly is round and large and full of breath and guts and womb and ova and the potential for galaxies

She is woman

She is life

She is belly

She is soft and delicious and unstoppable

She will not be tamed or starved or flattened or sucked in or crunched into oblivion

She will be worshipped

til the last dripping drop of all that she is

sinks into the earth of the Great Mother and her seeds are absorbed again into infinity

into the fertile ground of all that is

and her full-bodied self will be planted & dissolved into the mystery, christening & fertilizing All That Will Become

Beautiful image by @roseunfolding