Pregnant with a New World

And once labor begins, what's inside us has got to come out.

It’s only recently in modern Western civilization that women starting telling our stories out loud. We began to share our secrets beyond just tribes of sisters and friends, finally putting our thoughts and feelings onto public platforms. Yet even when we assert the value of our perspective within a larger public realm, we’re still tempted at times to adopt the language of the patriarchy in order to prove the value of our sharing.

If we have a political point to make, we feel required to justify it in economic terms. If we have a healing insight, we feel required to justify it in scientific terms. If we have a spiritual belief, we feel required to add, “Not that I’m a New Age woo woo or anything…”

Thankfully, those days are coming to an end. I remember years ago when someone came up to me after one of my lectures and demanded, “By what authority do you say these thing!?” To which I responded, “I have a brain…and I was born?”

We don’t have to justify our existence, and we don’t have to justify our worldview. To me, that also means we don’t have to justify the language through which we express it.

While I don’t want to get into a gender discussion of who and who cannot get pregnant, one can at least admit that historically men have not gotten pregnant. The imagery of conception, gestation, pregnancy, labor and birth is so enormous, so redolent with deeper meaning and dynamics, that it’s worth liberating from the closet of “women’s talk.”

Photo: Jose Luis Pelaez Inc.

Human beings do not just conceive children; we also conceive new civilizations. We do not just get pregnant with babies; we get pregnant with new possibilities in our lives and in our world. We do not just gestate new life in the form of a child; we gestate new ideas. We do not just labor to bring forth a newborn; we labor to bring forth huge historical movements. And we do not just give birth to children; we give birth to new versions of ourselves.

So it is that today, we are pregnant with a new world. It could even be said we’re already in labor, and it is a difficult one. But as with the birth of children, the birth of movements, and eras, and even civilizations, is part of the natural pattern of history. It is simply how life works. And once labor begins, what’s inside us has got to come out.

In order for the species to survive, enough people must be available to create children. And today, more than at any other time in history, in order for the species to survive we must also create more wisdom.

First we conceive an idea, then it gestates within us; we are pregnant with the possibilities that lie before us, and then labor begins. Many of us feel we are pregnant with something new in our lives, as though something is struggling to be born though we’re not quite sure what it is. It’s not entirely comfortable when we’re going through this - in fact, at times it’s terrifying - but nature is simply taking its course.

Now it is happening to all of us collectively. Or entire civilization is pregnant with something new.