Inception

At first, we passed each other under the starry sky, in the depth of winter darkness. I had just left the small sauna which nestled into the trees at the edge of the neighborhood where I rented a room. I walked my dog Gaia across the frozen pond and headed back to my house, dimly aware that beneath the thick layer of ice a whole world of life waited: toads hibernated, dragonfly nymphs skulked, fish languished. All in a cold stupor. All anticipating a new season.

A form emerged from the grey, moving closer. It was a man I’d never met before, tall, bundled up against the frigid air.

“Hi,” he said. “Were you in the sauna?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s great,” I replied.

“How did you get in there?”

“I have a key.”

“You have a key?”

“Yep. Enjoy!” I said and walked away.

On a different cold night, a week later, I stepped into the sauna again to find four naked people already basking. The heat hit me and my skin tingled as it thawed from the outside cold. I took a spot on the upper bench. I vaguely knew three of the sauna-goers from around the neighborhood, but one man was a stranger. He had shoulder-length, dirty blond hair, tanned skin, and a muscled upper body. The other parts, well, I did my best not to stare.

“This sauna is amazing, Rob,” said the older woman. “Thanks for building it.”

I turned to him. Rob. The connections crystalized. He was the man I had met on the dark path the week before.

“You’re the guy who just moved in with my friend Tim,” I said. “He told me he got a new roommate.”

“And you’re the girl who broke into my sauna,” he said. “How did you do that, by the way? I’ve only given out a couple of keys, and people are only allowed to use it once they’ve been given specific operating instructions.”

I was suddenly quite conscious of the fact that I was completely naked, in a very small space, and the gorgeous man was grinning at me. His sky-blue eyes glistened in the candlelight. I wanted to step inside them and curl up there.

“Oh, I have my ways,” I said and grinned back.

He laughed, then stepped over and poured a cup of water onto the hot rocks. The water sizzled and sparked and steam slid into the air. It swirled and hung above us, stinging my lungs and making me take quick breaths. 

An hour passed in quiet conversation. Eventually, the heat made my head spin and I needed relief. I wiped my face with my towel, wrapping it around me before climbing off the bench.

“We should get together sometime,” Rob said. “Go for a hike or something.”

I paused and looked at him. Something had sparked besides water on hot rocks. “Yes, we should,” I said.

He smiled as I moved past him into the foyer. I took a long drink of cool water, dressed, and slid on my wet boots. Then I pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped out into the snowy night.

Creation

The Dreaming of Australian Aboriginal people is past, present, future; it is everywhen. It is the origin of knowledge, of creation, of life. It encompasses the identity of the people and the land itself. The Dreaming is complex and subtle law which resides here and everywhere and nowhere. It embraces spirit and totem, human and animal. It is both myth and real.

Those who are not of Aboriginal descent sometimes call the Dreaming a religion, a mythology, a story. But to Aboriginal people, it is life. Some of us can scarcely comprehend it. And yet we try. There is a Rainbow Serpent, sometimes represented as the Mother of Life, a being described in a variety of forms, in many traditions. Life begins when she awakens from her slumber to find the earth a dark and dead place. She travels everywhere on the earth, leaving the winding mark of her movement. She tickles the bellies of frogs. They laugh and water spills from their mouths to form rivers and oceans and ponds. Grasses and trees grow in the water and other animals awaken. They follow the Rainbow Serpent and she gives them homes.

The Rainbow Serpent makes laws by which all must abide. Those who are quarrelsome and disobey are turned into rocks, and thus she forms mountains and hills and islands. Those who follow the law are made human. They are given a totem, a clan, and a land on which to live for all time. And here they reside as a part of the cycle of life, caring for the land and honoring the Rainbow Serpent Mother who created it all.

Conception

It begins when an ovary releases a mature human egg. This single cell slides along the fallopian tube a short distance to a particularly suitable area called the ampullar-isthmic junction. There, it waits: for time to pass, for a hormonal signal from the pituitary gland, or for sperm to arrive.

A few hundred sperm show up. They are but a small fraction of the group which once included more than 200 million. Each sperm has propelled itself on a lengthy journey through the cervix, uterus, and fallopian tube to reach this junction, and many millions did not survive. Now, the remaining sperm commence trying to penetrate the egg, which has a protective membrane around it. Each sperm butts its head up against the egg and releases enzymes which weaken the membrane. When one sperm finally enters the egg, the enzymes then alter the egg membrane to prevent other sperm from breaking through.

The nucleus of each sperm cell and egg cell contains a different set of twenty-three chromosomes—the information carriers in the cells—which is half of what is needed in the human genome. Once the sperm is inside the egg, the membranes surrounding each cell’s nucleus disintegrate and their cores pull together into a kind of embrace. Nothing separates them in this union, and their genetic material, their chromosomes, mingle and fuse.

Two have become one: a zygote, a new cell with an original set of forty-six chromosomes. This one cell is the foundation of a new organism. The zygote immediately forms its own membrane defining itself, and begins to grow. Each cell divides again and again, based on the instructions set forth by the chromosomes. The blueprint for a possible future being is there, but this information, this plan for development is not enough. This mass of growing cells needs something more. It needs a mother who wants it. 

Nascence

Across the history of human time, women have used abortion to maintain their personal choice of if and when to become a mother. Midwives, herbalists, and elder women knew the practices and procedures to safely end pregnancy and were called upon to support women in their decisions.

It was not until the mid-1800s that governments began outlawing women’s right to have abortions in the United States. White, male doctors formed the American Medical Association in 1847 and decided that with their knowledge and power they should be the arbiters of the abortion practice. Women, particularly Black women, who worked as midwives threatened the white male power structure and were attacked and discredited accordingly. Black healers and midwives, in particular, were portrayed as unprofessional at best, barbaric at worst. By the 1880s, all states had restrictions on abortion and the practice became stigmatized.

In the early 1900s, women’s voices were becoming louder as they fought for suffrage and other societal freedoms. Many women believed in “voluntary motherhood.” This idea proposed that it was solely a woman’s right to control her pregnancies and use birth control, which included a wife’s right to refuse to have sex with her husband. In addition to worrying that they would lose control of their wives, white men feared the growing numbers of Black, immigrant, and non-Protestant families in the U.S. and redoubled their efforts to restrict women’s access to birth control. If white women were forced to have more children, it would counteract the increase in population from other groups.

Regardless of legality, women have abortions. In 1930, abortion complications were the cause of one-fifth of maternal deaths. Women who cannot find safe medical care often turn to dangerous home remedies. They insert knitting needles or coat hangers into their vaginas and uteruses. They drink chemical mixtures. They inflict trauma on their bodies by hitting themselves or falling. Many, if not most of these actions result in serious medical emergencies. In 2017, approximately 22,000 women and girls died from unsafe abortions. And while historically, and in modern times, white, wealthy women could sometimes quietly find willing doctors or travel to another state to find a safe abortion, this option did not, and generally does not, exist for Black, indigenous, or poor women.

After decades of fighting to ease and repeal abortion laws, women saw success when, in 1970, New York was the first U.S. state to legalize abortion. In 1973, the Supreme Court, at the time populated solely by white males, considered the Roe v. Wade case. It decided that the constitution protects a person’s right to privacy and thus to terminate their pregnancy. The abortion bans across the country were deemed unconstitutional and were rolled back.

Despite the fact that today, approximately one in four women will have an abortion at some point during her childbearing years, the war on choice has only heightened. In 1976, the Hyde Amendment banned federal dollars, such as those used for Medicaid, from being used for abortions. Through the early 2000s, many states forced women into waiting periods, to have ultrasounds, and to receive “counselling” before allowing the procedure. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leading to a wave of laws across dozens of states preventing and criminalizing abortion, restricting women’s basic human right to bodily autonomy.

Men think they can control women’s bodies. But whether and when to become pregnant and if to abort that pregnancy always was and always will be a decision that should be made by the woman. She may be pressured to ignore her body or her wishes. She might be forced to terminate or to carry. She may be threatened or harmed by those who disagree. But only she knows the right path for herself, for her spirit.

Because it is her body, her life, her connection to the great unknown outside of herself that is at stake, it is a choice. Her choice. Period.

Genesis

Walking the field with Gaia, tears filled my eyes again. The loud honking of a flock of Canada geese punctured the air. I looked up to see a V-shaped mass of the large birds, streaking together across the sky. As they passed over, my own bellows of sorrow came coughing up from someplace deep within. I bent over, feeling like I might vomit, then crouched down. I wanted to lie in the snow. I wanted the cold to freeze the pain out of me. The decision I faced, my love for Rob, and this mistake twisted up my insides.

Gaia bounded toward me, thinking I wanted to play. I pushed her puppy face away from mine and stood up. Too fast. The blood rushed from my head. The world swooped. Gaia stormed on, stuffing her nose into stalks of dead grasses and goldenrod that framed the path. Only Gaia and I walked the field that evening, but in the wintry air, I sensed something else. I held my breath. A presence, floating, invisible, ethereal.

I grew up in a Presbyterian family. We attended church every Sunday, volunteered at every bake sale, prayed before every dinner. But by the time I was thirteen and memorizing the books in the Bible for my confirmation, I knew this brand of spirituality wasn’t for me. No matter how kind, welcoming, and well-intentioned the community was, a singular God, white, bearded, and all-knowing didn’t resonate. More importantly, the religion demanded a belief in the actions of a person who supposedly lived 2,000 years ago or suffer an eternity in hell. That wasn’t a deal I was willing to make.

Over time, I found my own spiritual spaces. Places where the trees rooted in the earth and bent in the wind. Where the hymns came from the birds high above or from the depths of my own soul. Where the ground sustained my bare feet and aching body, even as sand ran through my fingers like time. I floated in icy ponds, where formidable mountains measured me. I took deep breaths in my cathedral, not inside any walls, but outside where everything else respired. I came to believe in the power of nature, in the cradle in which Mother Earth rocks us, in the source that connects all beings to each other and to the soil, the trees, the animals, the sky. The forest was where I attended my own services.

When I told my friend Ahrayna about the hovering spirit, I knew she’d think I was crazy. “I don’t really believe in this kind of stuff.” I hedged. But actually, I did. “It’s not logical, but I think it’s a spirit. It’s not in me. It’s not attached to this world. But it’s here. Rob and I called it here.”

“It could be a new being’s spirit,” she said, “but it’s your choice. If you’re not ready to welcome it in, that’s okay. You can say no.”

My parents would never accept my choice to have an abortion. They did not understand my moving away from the Church, my desire to exchange their religion for a reverence for wild places. And yet, I had been living my own grown-up life for years now and they didn’t need to know.

“I asked it to leave,” I said, blowing my runny nose into a cloth.

“The spirit may have some things yet to accomplish in the darkness,” Ahrayna said.

“And I have stuff to do, too. I don’t want to be a mother.”

I didn’t notice the ethereal presence when I busied myself at work, or cooked dinner, or maneuvered through traffic, but I sensed it when I lay in bed, willing myself to sleep and escape into my dreams, or when I wrote in my journal, capturing the thoughts fluttering by. And it was always there when I walked the fields, doubled over with emotion, watching my dog run free.

Provenance

Step One- Mifepristone

In the 1980s, French scientists synthesized Mifepristone, an anti-progesterone drug. It was approved for use in medical abortions in France in 1988. One year later, it was banned for use in the U.S. by the Food and Drug Administration. For twelve years, American activists and health professionals advocated and fought for access to the drug. It was approved for use in the U.S. in September 2000.

The hormone progesterone allows the uterus to prepare for implantation of an embryo, but Mifepristone blocks that hormone. Mifepristone causes cervical softening and the breakdown of the uterine lining. Thus, the uterus is unable to host a pregnancy.

Step Two- Misoprostol

Misoprostol is used safely each year in medical abortions for millions of women in the early weeks of pregnancy. Once the uterus is no longer suitable to support pregnancy, the drug Misoprostol finalizes the process. It causes the uterus to contract and the cervix to dilate. The ensuing cramps and bleeding effectively empty the uterus of all tissue. 

Commencement

“So,” said the doctor I’d never met before, “you’ve decided to have an abortion and you’re ready to do this?”

I sat on the padded patient table and nodded. The paper under me crunched as I moved slightly. Rob sat in the white plastic chair to the side of the room.

“It’s fairly simple. You’ll take this pill, mifepristone, now. Then tomorrow, you’ll insert these tablets, misoprostol, into your vagina.”

“Okay.” I knew these details already. I’d been briefed at the first appointment. But I guessed she needed to tell me again.

“You’ll cramp and bleed like a heavy period. After a few weeks, your body will return to its usual cycle. Do you have any questions?”

Her calmness soothed me like a cat’s purr. She must have done this a lot, told women how to end their pregnancies, how to alter the course of their lives. But she was not robotic about it; sincerity radiated from her.

“No. I’m ready.”

The doctor handed me a little plastic cup that held one white pill—something so small to make such a huge impact—then another cup that held water.

“Here goes.” I took a deep breath, dropped the pill into my throat, followed it with the water, and swallowed. Nothing happened. Not that I expected it to. But it seemed like there should be something to note the fact that I just consumed a highly regulated and controversial pharmaceutical. Some sort of reaction. Something.

Instead, Rob and I walked out of the office, filled the prescription for extra-strength ibuprofen, and drove home.

The next day, I sat on Rob’s bed prepared for step two. I rattled the little bottle with the four pills in it, then poured them into my hand. One by one I inserted the pills, then lay back on the bed looking up at the pink, blue, and green Christmas lights strung around the ceiling. Maybe now something would happen; the regret, the pain, the deep sorrow would bubble up at any minute. It didn’t. Not even any tears. I supposed I’d spent them all in the past two weeks.

Yet, this was an important moment. What did I want as a woman? What did I see in Rob, my gorgeous guy, a man at a major transition in his life as he navigated coparenting his daughter with a vitriolic ex? My life’s path had always been unclear, but home usually did not hold the answers. I felt stifled staying in one place too long and had found direction in the past by exploring nature, on trails of the Appalachian Mountains, southeast Utah, and Peru. Maybe these things—travel, trails, mountains—could offer me direction again. Whatever I did next, I knew it would be movement that would let me find my way.

Rob returned from walking Gaia and lay down next to me. We stayed up late and watched Fawlty Towers and Monty Python. He read to me. We ate chocolate in bed, but it was his sweetness that consoled. The bleeding came, a flood of it, but it didn’t bring much suffering. It was like any other month when my uterine lining washed away all that came before and prepared my body for the next go around.

Orogeny

200 million years ago, Earth’s supercontinent land mass known as Pangea began to crack apart. Over millions of years, two new continents formed. We call the northern hemisphere mass Laurasia and the southern hemisphere mass, which contained today’s Australia, Gondwana.

As the continental plates of Gondwana smashed together, land scraped against land, pressure built, the sea floor spread, and volcanoes erupted. Intensely hot magma extruded from the ground in all directions, burning sideways into other rock and shooting upward to the sky. It pushed higher and higher, forming massive mountain ranges. The intrusion of this magma formed the land we call Australia, Antarctica, and South America, and was one of the most extensive volcanic intrusions in Earth’s history. When the molten lava cooled, it became the dolerite columns which define the Tasmanian landscape. Angular pillars protruding from islands, high cliffside tablelands overlooking the sea, and grey-blue mountain towers shadowing the valleys below.

Even as mountains build upward, other forces destroy them. For the past two million years, Tasmania underwent several periods of glaciation. 12,000 years ago, an ice age again settled over the southern hemisphere. As the climate cooled, snow layers piled up and compressed. Under pressure, the snow recrystallized into larger forms, compacting the air pockets trapped within. Gravity and friction pushed the enormous glaciers against the land, swallowing every bit of rock and debris in its path. The mass moved across the Tasmanian landscape, until a warming Earth slowed it. The glaciers retreated, exposing gaping holes in the land, volcanic rock outcrops, and long sandy shorelines. Over time, everything on Tasmania changed, and all that was left was a shadow of the past, moving centimeter by centimeter toward the landscape we know today.

Cradle

I woke to raging blizzard outside Kia Ora Hut. I had no desire to go out into it and I had barely slept, thanks to the dozens of mice who ruled the hut the night before. They dug into packs, scurried around my head, and tore into the quiet with their nonstop chewing. Another hiker got the coal stove burning, which warmed the hut to a tolerable level, but I stayed in my sleeping bag, relishing a day off from hiking. 

I was halfway through the fifty-mile Overland Track in Cradle Mountain-Lake St. Clair National Park, Tasmania, Australia. I went to Tassie after the abortion because I needed time, escape, space. And space I got. Tasmania is nearly exactly as far from upstate New York on the physical globe as I could get, and once I was there, I felt the distance. I had parted with Gaia, my job, and my apartment to travel for six weeks alone. Most painful, however, was that I had left behind my heart. With Rob.

The hiking was like any other hiking, gasping for breath uphill, rollicking fun downhill, but the landscape was all new. The trail wove between mountains of 5,000 feet, past highland lakes surrounded by peatlands, and across boardwalks over alpine bogs. I did not climb Cradle Mountain, but instead its neighbor, 5,115-foot Barn Bluff, a dolerite column protruding straight up from the forest. The plants, trees, and bird songs mystified me, and yet, even a world away from the one I knew, the land held me, tucked me tight in its embrace, and offered solace.

By afternoon in the hut, the snow outside had eased and the next wave of hikers started to arrive, piling into the warmth, chattering and comparing trail notes, finding fellowship. Three blokes from Perth. A couple of French-speakers. Several single male hikers. And then, a family of four and their porter. 

I sat on my bunk pretending to write in my journal, but mostly, I watched the family. Their fitness was evident. When they arrived, each parent had been carrying a kid—one about two years old, the other about four—in a backpack carrier, while the porter managed most of their gear. Bringing such small children into remote Tasmanian wilderness seemed bold, even dangerous. I couldn’t keep my eyes off them as the mom set up sleeping bags on one side of the hut, the porter fired up the stove, the dad changed a diaper, and the four-year-old prattled incessantly, talking about the snow with all the confidence of a meteorologist.

A wave of loneliness filled me. I’d never had this kind of experience, or any kind of camping or hiking experience, with my own parents. Would I be a different person if I had? These parents were doing an astounding thing, exploring with their kids, showing them the natural world, teaching them to be in the outdoors, all while, presumably doing what they loved, backpacking. I wanted it. Suddenly and unmistakably, a family that hiked trails and slept in tents and discovered nature together seemed magical. For the first time, I got it. For the first time, motherhood made sense.

Dawning

In the Aboriginal world of The Dreaming, every spirit exists eternally, before, during, and after life. Dreaming stories of conception have nothing to do with a man and woman copulating; instead, it is spirit-children who cause impregnation. They are autonomous, playful spirits living freely in the environment. Some say spirit children are the size of walnuts, some look like human children, and some resemble tiny red frogs, but all are searching for parents to be born to.

Sometimes when Dreaming ancestors shook water off themselves, spirit children would fall from their bodies to the ground. They are a physical aspect of this ancestor, and in a new life will represent and share the ancestor’s totem. In other stories, the Rainbow Serpent placed them in ponds, a clan’s well, or small pools of water, where they play, sometimes being born as an animal for a short time. But mostly they wait, watching for a suitable mother to come along. A father may discover the spirit child in his dreams. Or he may find one while out hunting and then give it to the mother.

When the spirit child and parents find each other, the being enters the mother in her food, through her vagina or a crack in her skin. Often it is sung into her shortly before birth. At birth it enters into this conscious life, the spirit filling a human form, until eventually, someday, it again finds its way back to The Dreaming, the world where it exists forever.

Source

In my last days in Tassie, I camped for a few nights on Maria Island off the east coast. I passed the time meandering along the painted cliffs and studying shells on the white beaches. The park ranger said the effort to hike up Bishop and Clerk peak would be difficult, but well worth it. So, one morning I struck out on the six-mile hike. After a generally pleasant and mild climb, near the top, the trail turned into a stair-stepper machine. One solid rock step after the next. I pushed through the strain in my thighs, my heart beating madly in my chest, and inched myself to the peak. Once I wiped the sweat from my eyes, I met vast turquoise ocean in all directions. Light and color saturated everything. The mainland created a boundary to the west, and to the north a shadowy outline of rock and sand formed Freycinet peninsula. To the east, ocean. Forever, ocean.

Bishop and Clerk was one of Tasmania’s signature rocky outcrops, a conglomeration of black dolerite columns, giant tables split into squares, with sheer drop-offs in most directions. Moving around the summit required leaping from one table to the next. The columns seemed solid underfoot, but nothing held me back from stepping off the edge and falling into the eucalyptus oblivion below. Though exhilarating, the whole scene kept adrenaline pumping through me.

Sitting at the edge, the wind swept over me and I closed my eyes, feeling only the insistent pressure on my skin and the stability beneath me. I felt both consumed and protected, hungry and satiated. There on that outcrop I was all I was, nothing more, nothing less than everything.

The cooling air eventually won out and I pulled myself away from the peak, wondering if I’d ever gaze on this ocean again. I descended the stairs, then the scree slope, passed through the eucalypts and followed the dirt track downhill. Below me, the shoreline, a long, jagged cliffside with lengthening shadows overlooked the ocean. The view across the bay moved me and emotion suddenly inundated my senses.

I stopped walking, my breath caught and tears spilled out of nowhere. I slumped onto the rocky trail. I cried like I hadn’t cried in four months, since I was home, since the weeks before the abortion. Everything came pouring out. I pulled my knees to my chest and rocked myself back and forth.

Then I felt it. The presence that had hovered around me those few weeks back in January. It was the same one. My mind fogged, my eyes blurred. I still didn’t understand. And yet sitting on the ground, my tears falling onto the dusty trail, the presence filled my being with the enormity I had felt atop Bishop and Clerk. It was as if that forever ocean was inside me. As if it was me.

I thought the spirit had gone when I’d asked it to, when I’d had the abortion. Sometimes I thought I had just imagined it. Maybe I had. But in case it was real, I spoke to it.

“Come back, okay?” I said through my tears. “I’ll be ready another time. I promise I want you. But I’m not ready yet. Come back then, okay?”

I sat for a while, letting the tears dissipate, listening to unknown bird calls. Eventually I felt the ground beneath me, the cliffs below shifted into focus, and I was alone. I pulled myself up by a eucalyptus trunk and brushed off the seat of my black hiking shorts. Clouds drifted in front of the sun and the afternoon light darkened.

I’d write about this day in my journal when I got back to camp, but I wasn’t sure what I’d include. It all seemed so incredible: I climbed a 200-million-year-old rock tower, I discovered the endlessness of the ocean, I was visited by something resembling the essence of my child. Maybe I’d write about the sun-filled warmth of the woods or the grey trunks and high canopy of the eucalyptus forests; those were tangible things I could comprehend and describe. Maybe I’d write about the kangaroos and pademelons lounging around the tent sites, holding their joeys tight in their pouches, protecting them from harm. Or maybe I’d write the thing that had taken me a painful decision, a deep loss, a trip halfway around the world, and six weeks alone to figure out – I want to be a mother.    

About the Author

Amanda K. Jaros is a freelance writer and editor. Her memoir about hiking the Appalachian Trail is forthcoming with Running Wild Press in 2024. Her nonfiction has appeared in journals including Flyway Journal, Terrain.org, Newfound, Appalachia, and Stone Canoe, among others. She served in a variety of editorial positions, including editor-in-chief, at Literary Mama for ten years and is now president of the Literary Mama Nonprofit Board. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Chatham University. She lives in Ithaca, NY with her husband and son. Amandakjaros.com

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