A Year of Stories (Collection Three)

Birth Pains

When it starts it's boring, a slow building up of pressure, like the prelude to bad heart burn. Indigestion painful is what it is, lots of discomfort, but nothing to write home about.

The secret is to relax, to stay calm, to avoid rushing the process or rushing to conclusions. You have time, sometimes lots of time, too much time and if you don't learn to be calm now, to slow your breathing, to steady your pulse and strengthen your will – then all of it, the pain, the terror, the love bubbling up inside you like some living thing – will cause you to make mistakes, the kind of mistakes that may do irreparable harm to the real living thing growing within.

Try to keep to your routine.

If you're like the rest of us, there are a billion little things for you to do, so do them.

Some worry that they will be so distracted with their daily banalities that they'll miss the next stage. Believe me when I tell you, that this is next to impossible. When you need to start paying attention again, you'll know, trust me.

You'll know because something will break inside of you, burst like an over ripe melon, but unlike fruit growing warm and sticky in the mid-day sun, this will feel like a river, a raging tsunami of life spreading out from inside you – washing over everything – filling your core with a purpose, a strength you never knew possible. This will come, fortunately enough, just before the pain returns in earnest.

It is about this time when you should find some space for yourself, create some space where you and all those there to support you can be comfortable.

And please, make sure that someone is there to support you.

So many of us are loners, thinking that because we've been gifted with the power to create, that we need nothing else.

As much as you may want to believe that this is true, it is not, especially now.

Friends help, and soon, you're going to need all the help you can get.

The pain will be coming more regularly now, like the beating of a celestial heart, rolling out of you – growing in intensity and power – a forge stoked to the edge of breaking.

You will feel like you're breaking.

You will not break.

Instead you will breath, breath and remember your calm, remember your power!

Remember that you are the one who creates.

That your will is the will of worlds, your voice shatters mountains, you have the power to shape chaos, to rip energy from the fabric of the cosmos and mold it into something glorious, something beautiful.

No, you will not break.

But now, you must push.

You must push past the pain.

You must push past the fear.

You must push past distraction, past the chaos, past the forces cosmic and banal that seek to stop this act of pure love.

You must push until it's finally over.

Until the Universe you have birthed is stitched into the fabric of reality.

Until one of those billion, billion lives you have allowed into being, takes its first shaky breath.