a fragmented introduction

a feel of the woman behind the keyboard

I was born in the month of May under a waning crescent moon. I recognize my reflection in the Tauren cliché, whether I’ve assimilated the qualities of my sun sign from the outerworld or was always destined to resonate within it, who is to say. I live for earthly pleasures like a delectable brunch spread enjoyed in breezy open air, a long soft kiss after a big cry, and the warm squishy weight of a baby dozing against my chest. My Piscean moon keeps me swimming in the deep blue ocean of emotion, in all of its varying conditions. I can bodysurf the biggest cyclones and come out the other side with peace in my heart and a better woman for it. My unconventional societal ideas and my love of both languid and fervid discussions, I credit to my Aquarian ascendent.

If you have no flippin’ clue what I’m talking about, that’s okay too. Happy to have you.

I rejoice in being a woman, a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a mother. Celebrating femininity and women’s rites of passage is at the crux of who I am personally and professionally.

My life leading up to this point has been a reclamation story of embodying my womanness fully and unashamedly. Though first, it required thoughtful inquiry of what a woman even was, if she wasn’t all the surface level tropes that I was suffocating in. In my youth, I identified as a tom-boy and rather repelled any notion that I needed protection or help. I didn’t want to be a girl and I didn’t want to be little or anything else that stripped me of my competency.

Back then I had heaviness and intensity rooted in me. Anger and disappointment too. Growing up has been a process of lightening up. My unbecoming journey is still as present for me as the one of becoming. Some layers require power tools and grit, others easefully sloughed off as I outgrew the need for them. Each layer shed is weight off my chest and one step closer to the lively and easeful nature at my core.

My youthful bold opinions and innocently strong biases weren’t celebrated in every circle, as you can imagine. Somewhere along the line I took to heart the lesson many tried to get through my thick head: it was less painful to hold my tongue. I prioritized listening well and holding space (skills that I’m grateful for) as I renegotiated how I occupied the arena of relating.

Reviving my expression is a sticky, nonlinear and totally worthwhile journey, one that I’m still very much in the thick of. This publication is a direct act of support in the matter.

I’ve come at this mountain from many trail heads. At the summit is a sense of safety in my body where the playfulness and softness can once again breathe. With each step forward I taste the peak and I hold onto the promise of the vista in my mind's eye. The trail opens up at times, just enough to give a glimpse of what lies atop, just enough to let me know it's worth the trek.

I’ve learned that creation is the birthright of women, the entirety of our being is wired for it. Denying our innate creativity is a denial of the responsibility we carry as humankind. Storytelling is our gift. We do it through raw materials and dexterous hands, vocal vibrations, imaginative ideas and symbolism, and of course through receiving another and gestating life. Creative impulses visit to be made manifest— it is through you, but not about you. I find solace in this imagery, as it somehow simultaneously takes off the pressure yet upholds the responsibility to the idea.

I delight in reclaiming wild woman.

Embodied, sensual, unapologetic, instinctual, authentic, passionate, autonomous, messy – a force of nature. I yearn for the freedom and aliveness available when the wild woman is remembered and honored. Stripping away layers of social programming and any self consciousness, what is there at the center? I believe for each woman, it’s some version of her.

Movement practices have been a reliable anchor in my life. I dedicated my youth to martial arts. Using my body as a creative instrument felt productive and powerful. The passion transferred to yoga in my later teen years, which indirectly led me to an education in bodywork, and has now matured into a full fledged intrigue of somatic studies. I’m convinced embodiment is our natural orientation, though our modern lives are seemingly in direct opposition. Movement is medicine; movement paired with presence is magic. The past few years have been the most stagnant of my life, at least devoid of consistent and semi-structured activity. A big priority for me right now is to recommit to a movement practice and invite in more motion to the mundane daily flow.

If movement is my music, consider beauty my language. My heart feels deliciously open in a curated space. The tone of a lit candle in a darkening room is buttersoft. My brain works more efficiently with eyes rested on a dazzling landscape. Tea tastes better in a handcrafted mug. My mind works in aesthetics, I can conjure up any sprawling design in my mind’s eye. As I see it, beauty and love are one in the same thing. Beauty summons the beholder directly, unequivocally into presence with the thing.

I moved to Europe (semi) by accident. On a whim I flew to Poland for a fling and I am now happily married and best of all, as my husband likes to remind me, cultured. Our stars colliding was a plot twist that neither of us saw coming, and I am so proud of how we have navigated some logistically choppy waters, committing to a life together as an international couple right before the whole world lost its damn mind. The biggest ? for us has been where in the world to call home. With borders open, that quest feels more plausible than when we started. We’re not special, I see it as a very of-the-times problem as many of my peers are seeking the same thing. With two babies now, the search feels more urgent.

It also should come as no surprise that the concern of community (or lack of) rents prime real estate in my mind. I gauge the quality of my life by the quality of my relations. The circumstances of relating seem to be getting trickier and more challenging considering things such as polarization, the attention economy, social distancing, social anxiety, and harmful distractions under the guise of entertainment. Like so many in my generation, I’m seeking more. More connection, more honesty, more vulnerability, more collaboration, more shared meals, more shared tears, more loving touch, more joy in relating.

Last year we moved our family from western Poland to the Spanish island, Mallorca, as a trial run. The journey, while intense, was a long awaited homecoming and felt like an answered prayer. The people we met were like old friends, the landscapes resonant of a Mediterranean dream, the lifestyle reminiscent of some of my favorite things I said goodbye to in California many years ago. After spending the summer away, we are in the process of packing everything and heading back with excitement in our heart and with long-term in mind.

I live for change and fluidity and spontaneity even, all from the anchoring point of an established and well loved-in home. I want both.

I could write 5,000 words on the nuances of home, and likely I will. But for today's purpose, it is enough to share that home as a concept and as a tangible thing, is an unrelenting force in my life. As a mother now, creating a homespace for my children feels all the more important. I know that our homes become the backdrop to life. I want it to be the epitome of safety and creative freedom. A soft, warm place that you land back in over and over again.

Two children are made of my heart, Niko & Ayla (“I-la”). Twice I’ve gone through the birth portal, and twice I’ve risen from the ashes anew. The pregnancy and birth of my son broke me, in all the ways I needed most. He smashed my outdated beliefs & pulverized the paradigms in which I was trapped. I was left shattered with a precious baby boy to tend to and the tedious task of creating something new of myself. What a shocking gift it was! My daughter’s conception journey, pregnancy, and subsequently her birth, stitched my edges back together again. The whole process fortified the woman I had been working so hard to become and gave her newfound direction and purpose.

I am grateful that I had been exposed to birth well before my birthing time. I have been enthralled by the mystic rite since adolescence. In my teens, I read both local and classic home birth books. I joined story circles where women told of their experiences. I attended lectures of traveling nurse midwives, several of which worked in remote areas of Latin America or West Africa. There was an undeniable pull to the work, but the mere thought of allopathic medical studies would stop the calling in its tracks.

Through birthing my own babies, dropping into my body, and extensively self-studying the topic over the past few years, I began to reorient myself around this vortex of life. Birth wasn’t at all the thing we had been taught it was. The layers of miseducation and social conditioning run so deep. Pregnancy and birth are not inherently risky medical events, which I had always intuited. But dare I be so crass as to say the reason they so often become one, is because of the intrusive and ceaseless meddling by the hands of (hopefully well-meaning) medical providers. And yes, this absolutely includes licensed home birth midwives. The notion of birth keeping and wholistic pre & perinatal care as authentic and meaningful birthwork is a whole-body-fuck-yes. The calling revealed itself again, at least in its current iteration.

Almost one year ago I put this wisdom to practice, birthing my baby girl at home with only my husband as witness. Life changing, paradigm breaking experience. A story for another day.

Last spring I completed an accelerated mentorship program with two leading women in the radical birth field, Emilee Saldaya & Yolande Norris-Clarke. This container reinforced the intuitions I had around the shamanic nature of birth and revealed the wildfire of injustice that is rampant in women’s health care. My biggest take away however, was an echo of the reflection I had after the birth of my daughter:

Women’s bodies birth babies. Babies know how to be born. Helping hands are very rarely needed. The most powerful way to show up for a birthing mother is to keep the space, tend to the energy in the room, and serve as a reflection of the mother’s brilliant power and wild capability to birth her baby. Familiarizing oneself with the many facets of birth through experience, allows for better attunement to the nuances of the birth process and learn how to best offer support while causing the least amount of disruption possible.

Navigating conception and pregnancy (and certainly postpartum) is glaringly less supported in our culture than the extremely intimate birth process itself. When I chose a wild (unmonitored) pregnancy with my daughter, I realized how although I was not at all interested in someone measuring my fundal height or weighing me or taking my blood, I was deeply missing being held and witnessed by someone that intimately knew the portal I was walking through and was genuinely interested/invested in hearing my insights and feelings about the process. I wanted someone to tend to my heart and offer a listening ear and expand my mind via thoughtful dialogue, throughout the unfolding of the experience.

I became clear on the importance of continuity of care, a principle that far extends past the concept spoken of in the medical model. A vision of how I want to serve women in my community is calling me forward. As she holds her world, I hold the mother. Be it in fertility challenges, navigating conscious conception, riding the tides of pregnancy, exploring true physiological birth, drafting a mother-centered birth plan, integrating the birth story, healing from a birth experience, reweaving identity in postpartum, validating the massive shift in welcoming a(nother) child into the dynamic, or creating a feasible self care practice for sustainable wellness. I want to walk side by side with women in these most tender and expansive moments of their life.

Building a business while raising babies is not for the faint of heart. I am in ardent support of this new wave ideology I’ve heard whispers of dubbed matriarchal entrepreneurship. Weaving business through the experience of motherhood rather than in opposition to it. Showing up as an integrated mother-lover-businesswoman, the whole spectrum of skillsets on hand. This is a model where nurturing life is not a professional faux pas, family comes first, and yet family respects entrepreneurship, so therefore both family and business (and most especially the mother-lover-business woman) thrives better than when disjointed. The application is nuanced, it will certainly require trial and error before integrating into the prevailing paradigm, but I can’t help but think it’s the way forward for me and for women.

Okey so there we have it, a brief introduction of who is writing to you. I’m a dynamic woman with unending curiosity. Here I am braiding together my vibe, my experience, and a need to create and relate. With the formalities aside, I look forward to this container as one of pure possibility and sit in sweet anticipation to see what is coming through.

Now, I would love to know a bit about you, my dear reader. Who do I have here, where in the world do you call home, and what are the aspects of life that light you up? Download the Substack app or login on your browser to find yourself in the comment section where we can chat.

Till the next,

Karlie xo