The Womb of the World
Channeling the Cenote & the Fierce Feminine
I didn’t publish a Free Bird Hotel essay for the month of November. I wrote a lot of half-baked paragraphs, coming up with a concept and then subconsciously trying to relate it back to the US presidential election. This wasn’t my intention but it didn’t seem ethical to return “business as usual,” AKA writing about my personal life. But I got stuck—I didn’t have the words to describe how I felt and I had no salve to offer anyone else.
In November, I was also traveling and thinking about how land carries energy. I visited the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, the stretch of land that separates the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. I’ve always felt a potent feminine energy on this side of Mexico, probably because so much is happening underneath the surface. The Yucatán has more cenotes and underground caves than any other place in the world. There are over 6,000 of these natural sinkholes in the region. A cenote forms slowly, sometimes over the course of thousands of years as acidic rainwater eats away at limestone bedrock. The layers of the Earth’s crust erode over the course of many human life spans, and then all of the sudden, the land seems to collapse, revealing a pool of ground water.
My favorite cenotes are the underground cavernous ones. These pools are only accessible by climbing through a small hole and lowering yourself down through the ground on a ladder or rope. The water is cold and crystal clear. Sometimes a glimmer of sunlight will peek through the opening, illuminating the cave’s honey-colored skin and glittering stalactite. It feels like swimming in the womb of the Earth.
There are many moments in life when we need to be still, when we need to absorb, simmer, and integrate. The feminine energy pulls us underground and inward so we can listen for deeper spiritual truths. She invites us into the dark, cave-like space of the womb. She stirs the life force within us and speaks through dreams and intuition. It’s hard to trust what we cannot see, especially in a society that overvalues her masculine counterpart—action, growth, and conquering. But now more than ever, I am tired of internalizing patriarchy. What if the revolution begins by finding the space to trust ourselves and our internal process? What if the first step of resistance was feeling more comfortable swimming in this numinous territory where there are no clear answers?
My other favorite cenote is called “Ka Kuxtal,” which is in the middle of a Costco parking lot in Merida, Mexico. Apparently, in 2015, the Costco building was under construction when the nearby bedrock collapsed, revealing a pool of water connected to an underground river system. Its name in Mayan translates to “back to life.” The story feels like an old fable, a warning sign of the fragility on which we have built our civilization. The cenote is now adorned like a coy pond with a peripheral landscape of small trees and plants. It sits in the middle of the asphalt parking lot, an apocalyptic reminder of our vulnerability, how the Earth could swallow us up at any moment
Costco is not the evil villain of this fable but a playful side character. The tempter who asks: What do you do in the face of dystopic uncertainty? Would you like 14-gallons of mayonnaise? Do you want to buy up all the toilet paper? Sometimes it feels easier to spin into action because then at least we are doing something. We are all vulnerable to this self-protective energy that gives us a false sense of control, an illusion of power and safety. Fear can drive us further away from each other into scarcity and hoarding. But frenzied action usually just touches the most superficial level of survival. When I sense myself contracting into anxiety, it’s better for me to pause, tune inwards, and ask: How can I soften? How can I zoom out of this moment and expand my sense of what is possible?
The threats of climate change will reveal who we are. Over time, it will erode the dynamics of power, money, and ego and reveal our need for each other, for the community, for the Earth. The systems and the people we worry about are also fragile creatures, coughing on the smoke of their own poison, strangled by the tentacles of their egos. They too are headed towards collapse.
The cenote is playing the long-game. It is the slow revealing of what exists underneath us and who we always were. When we tend to our own inner worlds, we will intuitively sense the sacred action steps that will guide us to where we need to go. When we embody our wild feminine life force, we naturally become nurturing forces for the world.
The long game is made up of a series of tiny, sacred action steps, even and especially when everything feels futile. For me, this means volunteering in a garden, learning how to grow food, composting, writing poetry, whispering prayers of gratitude to the Earth. Rainwater doesn’t seem strong enough to destroy the bedrock but over time, it does. The work we are here to do is not something that will happen in one season. The medicine against the man is a slow-burning salve, a gentle erosion. We will not solve the problems in our lifetime, but we can let the caulk of social conditioning dissolve from our skin. We can return to our tenderness.
P.S. As we finish this Gregorian calendar cycle, I want to send a special thank you to my paid subscribers. The Free Bird Hotel is a labor of love and takes me many hours to create every month. I am so grateful for your patronage and it has kept me going whenever I want to give up. As a thank you, my next piece will be a Free Bird Hotel special on Sensual Stoicism for paid subscribers only. Sign up if you want to read it! :)