One year ago around this time, I landed in Hawaii with a tsunami warning. Island wide alarms would go off, stating that we must evacuate to higher ground.

I was received by a friend, let’s name him Richard. He is a grandfather, the kind that was rough on the edges, seen too much, and utterly relaxed about anything under the sun. He said, let’s go enjoy the beach, amidst the alarm bells. His son, grandchildren, and extended family went up towards the mountain; along with most people on the island, making an effort to be far from the ocean. While we were going the complete opposite direction — hopping on a motorbike, going to the beach. I somehow trusted that we will follow towards higher ground, later on.

The tsunami was said to hit at 7pm. It was about 4pm, and we were there, sun-bathing. Richard was the only person I knew on this small island, that was starting to become absolutely deserted because everyone was going up the mountain, except us. I was somewhere between anxious, confused, disoriented. By 6pm or so, he took me to another beach, he said he wanted to see if the tsunami was coming, I thought we were going towards our death. There was no where for me to run to. In these moments of crisis, or perceived crisis, you truly orient to people. Yes, you orient to the landscape, but intuitively, you hold on to each other, even if you think the other person is crazy. I would have rather been with a local than meander my way all alone, there was no where for me to go. We were isolated.

Eventually, finally, with relief and a sigh — we went home, parked, and climbed up the near-by mountain. We hiked up high, climbed a big tree, sat on a sturdy branch, whipped out binoculars and took a good gaze at the ocean, awaiting that big wave. There was a small long wave, and surprisingly, even one person surfing it, but nothing alarming. We waited, we watched, we talked. By then it was passed 7pm, passed the tsunami marker, and we meandered down. He could tell I was distressed. How could I not be?! So, I took a warm bath, and lingered there. From the bath, I could hear the wave pull back along the rocks chuka-chuka-chuka-chuka. It was a long pull, the kind of pull before a big wave. I would just listen, with a big anxious humming inside my body. I was by myself, taking a warm bath in a yurt, on a small isolated island in Hawaii. I thought, maybe this is the way I die? Not a bad way to go, honestly.

Anyways, the tsunami did not come, yet.

She is coming, tsunami, be ready

Later into the trip I was on a deep medicinal journey with the sacred plant Huachuma. In the ceremony, I found myself singing a song, something along the lines of — she is coming, tsunami, be ready. I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t know what I was preparing for. I only knew that the words came through with a strange certainty, as if my body already knew something my mind could not yet comprehend.

And she has come.

In the year since, the earth has continued to move — tsunamis, earthquakes, eruptions, fires, and as I write this, my own Motherland, the Philippines, being flooded by monsoon after monsoon. Later on did I realise that the tsunami, the she I was referring to, was my matrescence; the great undoing, the arrival of a force that would pull at the foundations of everything I thought I knew about myself, about care, about work, about love, about what a life is for.

Never would I have thought I would become a Mother so soon. Never would I have imagined that the calling would be so sharp, so crystal clear — not a gentle invitation, it was more akin to a divine cosmic order. It felt like, there was no negotiating with it, no way around it; only through.

It’s medicine is destruction

A tsunami relentlessly, unapologetically, pulls the water from a deep undercurrent, revealing the base of the shore, leading into the seabed. It pulls, slowly, dramatically, letting all know of its arrival. It pulls, it pulls, until it builds enough momentum to rise towards the sky and crash onto the land, as quick as a blink of an eye.

The water takes over all in its way, its medicine is destruction. Every little corner, anyone trying to escape, every rooted tree, some massive and aged, some budding bushes, homes, buildings and roadways that took years to build — all of it, in a glance, gone.

Everything you have worked so hard for, lost. Everything that has made you who you are, what you identify with, out. Relationships that you thought were deeply rooted, restructured. Direction of your life and where you intended to go, redirected.

All is part of this rite of passage that is, matresence.

Even when the resistance is thick; trust, surrender, let go — because there is no other way. The only way is through, as they say.

And, yes, it will be lonely for a while. You’ll only want to be with people who get it, the Mothers, and the very rare exception of a maiden who radiates a maternal spirit, even though she has not been through birthing a child (yet or ever) in this life. I’d like to believe this knowing lives within every woman, and somehow, it truly does. Yet so much of it is still sleeping. We have been taught to move away from the Mother, away from dependence, away from the parts of ourselves that require slowness, tending and a mundanity that is also expansive. Perhaps some women have even learned to repel these parts of themselves, because we have been sold a neo-colonial idea of freedom that asks us to remain autonomous, productive and perpetually becoming — where freedom becomes less about having the conditions to live fully, and more about having the privilege to remain uninterrupted: perpetual success, self-development, and growth. And, matrescence makes that illusion much harder to maintain.

A tsunami rearranges the coastline

Now what? When you are left with all of this destruction, what do you do?

You start to clean. Slowly, one corner at a time. You start to organise, slowly your mind clears, if only for a little bit, then you keep going,. All there is to do is to clear the way for what is to come.

The tsunami doesn’t only destroy. It rearranges the coastline.

A tsunami does not ask what you what you want to keep.

It does not distinguish between the things you carefully built and the things you were already ready to lose. It simply moves through. And afterwards, the coastline is different. Not better, not worse, it evolved as nature intended it to, maybe not as you intended it to, but a force larger than your own ideals.

There are things beneath the water that have been revealed.

Things carried away. New edges of your skin, perhaps a deep scar, marks that stretched your womb, a thickness in your pulsing chest — one that does the work of turning blood into milk, new shapes in the landscape of your body that you have yet to meet. New boundaries, ones that have a sharpness to it that cuts through like a sword, ones that hold a protective fierceness that truly, only a Mother can recognise, for it protects not only herself, but her children; and that is a power that is un-fathomable.

It comes with it, a new found anxiety, a humming underneath the skin that says, I need to always be ready. It wakes you up at night to check on your baby, it keeps you alert and sharp, instincts beyond logic, by far. This is what matrescence does, it changes the coastline, pretty damn drastically.

When I look around at the wreckage, I can also see what the tsunami took.

One of the biggest things it took is this false perception of being able to plan life. This linearity of capitalist progress seriously feels like a joke. This is not to say we shouldn’t have goals, or visions for the future. Absolutely, they are core to who we are. We are born to envision the way we desire to live. But there is a difference between having a vision and trying to control the path towards it. The linear type of planning, the rigidity of high expectations, the anxiety when things don’t go your way — all of that floundering is doing too much and nothing at the same time.

Some of our deepest callings don’t arrive through more effort, more planning, more searching, more development, more becoming. They arrive through emptying. Emptying out the expectations of who you thought you would become. Emptying the timelines you inherited. Emptying the obligations that have disguised themselves as desire. Emptying the noise of what you should want, what you should be achieving, where you should be by now.

Not so that you become empty, even that is an agenda. Empty so that, there is enough space to hear. Our life’s work isn’t something we need to invent. It is something we become quiet enough to recognise.

And matrescence has made me much more interested in listening for that calling than in forcing my life to follow a predetermined path. There is still vision, desire, and ambition. However, it feels like climbing towards something, and more like listening for what is already trying to emerge through me. A calling that is not tainted by obligation. A life that is not organised around someone else’s measure of success. Something that only you can hear, when you finally make enough space to listen.

What we do not see, what is underneath the seabed

In it’s taking, the tsunami also reveals what lays under the seabed.

It showed me and amplified in my reality the generational trauma, burden of projections, and deep fears that lay within the bones of those who came before me.

Those fears are glossed with the systems that our parents were forced to succumb to: the martyrdom of motherhood, the dogmatic patriarchy, the inherited ideas of what a good woman should endure, provide, sacrifice and stay silent for. They loomed all around me.

That takes a lot of cleaning. Not the kind of cleaning where you simply sweep something away and carry on. The kind of cleaning that asks you to go underneath it. To ask: whose fear is this? Whose voice am I hearing? Is this actually mine? What was handed down to me as love that was really survival? What have I mistaken for duty because it was simply what the women before me had to do?

Some of this cleaning happens in the most ordinary places. In the late hours of the night, swimming through oceans of grief with your full pregnant belly, unable to explain to anyone why something hurts so deeply. It lives in the ache in your lower back, carrying the weight of a new generation ahead of you and the death of the one before. In the tightness at the back of your chest, where your willpower sits and is suddenly questioned. In the soreness of your feet from continuing to walk forwards amidst it all.

You begin to realise that you are not only giving birth to a child. You are meeting the conditions that shaped the women who came before you. And you are deciding, sometimes painfully, what gets to continue through you — and what ends here.

That is a different kind of inheritance. Not the inheritance of names, property or family mythology. The inheritance of what we choose to heal, what we choose to refuse, and what we choose to make possible for the life that comes after us.

In its taking, it took with it all that does not truly prioritise care.

Care is deeply political. Perhaps the most political thing, if you truly think about it. The politics of care is to question a world that asks us to keep producing regardless of what our bodies, our communities, our children, our elders, or the earth require of us.

In my maidenhood, full of bursting energy and time, I allowed opportunity to override care. I would find a way to make things work — often out of obligation, but also because within those opportunities were glimpses of true desire and calling. I stretched my capacity, flexibility and adaptability towards what a neocolonial world had taught me to prioritise: perceived security, productivity as worth, building a life through what we call “work.”I travelled. I stretched myself thinner. I worked through exhaustion. I negotiated with my body. And I called all of this commitment, ambition, follow-through, willpower. And there is truth in that. However, matrescence has made the bargains around care impossible to ignore.

There are things I can no longer negotiate with my body about. Things that have become more important than the opportunity, the deadline, the plan. Not because I have become less ambitious, but because I can finally see the cost of an ambition that asks the work of raising the next generation, and creating the conditions for another kind of world, to come second. What is the point of building a life, a career, a legacy, a future — if we are not tending to the beings who will inherit it?

There are now things I simply cannot unsee: the cost of separating a mother from her baby so that she can remain productive. The ease with which we have normalised mothers leaving their children from sunrise to sunset, without a second thought. The cost of treating rest as something to be earned. The cost of building a life around opportunities rather than around what life actually requires to flourish.

I am not interested in how to work around life. I am interested in creating the conditions for it to flourish. And by life, I mean something much bigger than survival. I mean a child who is deeply tended to, securely held, free to become fully themselves. I mean the next generation having the conditions to imagine and build the kind of humanity our hearts already know is possible.

Children have to be centralised again. Not as an afterthought to adult productivity, not derailed to the side while we get on with the “important” work, but as the very reason we ask what kind of world we are building in the first place.

Care asks different questions:

Not, What can I achieve? Rather, What needs tending?

Not, How productive can I be today? Rather, What is in service to the whole?

Not, What opportunity might I miss? Rather, What happens if I leave this unattended?

And perhaps this is one of the great political disruptions of becoming a mother: you begin to understand that care is not what happens after the important work is done. Care is the work.

Amniotic fluid holds the source

The tsunami also gives.

It gives with primordial fluid, the amniotic fluid that we all come from. The first water. The water that holds us before we have language, before we have identity, before we know where our bodies end and another begins. This fluid teaches you something about the source. That it contains everything. The full spectrum of life.

Birth and death. Pleasure and pain. Tenderness and rage. Devotion and exhaustion. Destruction and creation. This is what matrescence gives you too: an intimacy with the whole of life.

Just as how the body gestates into the fullness of the moon, not gazing at the moon, but as the lunation of the moon itself that pulls water and dances with the cosmos. Just as how from it’s fullness it is absolutely emptied, drained, re-arranged, re-birthed with both loss and life.

As a Mother, you begin to radically see how much of what we have been taught to value depends upon separation, notions of: independence, productivity, individual aspiration, success.

When you dream, do you dream only for your own aspirations, or do you dream for humanity? Do you dream for the land, or only for your next travel destination? Do you dream in relationship to the generations that will come after you, or only according to the life you want to live now?

We have been sold this fantasy that we can build a life entirely on our own terms, without being interrupted by the needs of another body, another generation, the earth itself.

But what if the interruption is actually the invitation?

What if being needed, being dependent, being in relationship is not a failure of freedom, but the very fabric of being alive?

We come through one another. We are held by one another. We are fed, carried, tended to. We belong to something much larger than ourselves. And perhaps becoming a Mother simply makes this impossible to ignore.

The tenderness and fragility of a baby makes this illusion impossible to maintain. Life has never been independent, we have been sold this absurd notion for too long. We come through one another. That we are fed, held, carried, tended to. Even as we are birth, we are caught by the hands of each other. There is no life without relationship.

This is the deeper wisdom of the maternal: not an idealised version of womanhood, but an understanding that life is relational and that is the utmost important thing that needs to be protected, the highest currency, our most valuable form of wealth, the most important asset — our relationships.

May we please move on from the notions of ‘What can I achieve?’ and return to the world-making questions, ‘What conditions am I creating for life to flourish?’

What am I passing on? What am I making possible for the body that has arrived through me? What kind of world might become possible if we organised our lives around the flourishing of life, rather than asking life to organise itself around our productivity?

The tsunami took much from me. There is a deep loss that I feel in my bones. These questions I ask come from a place of grief — from seeing what happens when the conditions of a Mother’s life are not tended to, when postpartum is pushed to the side, when you are no longer invited into the spaces you once frequented because your life has become inconvenient to the rhythm of the world around you. And maybe this, too, is a revealing gift of whom holds the sensitivity to weave this tapestry of radical care with you — because if we want to imagine differently, we have to do differently. And often, for a while, you will have to do it alone, for a little while.

The tsunami gives plenty, infinitely, incredibly beyond measure.

It stripped away so much of what I thought I needed to hold onto, and returned me to something more ancient and truly timeless: the ultimate fragility of being someones entire world. In that world, I need care, I need love, I need to be fed, I am dependent, and none of that makes me less than. This is the great lie we have been sold: that dependence diminishes us. Ultimately, it makes me profoundly more whole. To be in relationship with you is to become more of me.

Yes, the tsunami of matresence is here to destroy. Yes, it is here to rearrange. Yes, it is here to overthrow all that we know. And yes, here to offer us this gift of a new world.

In that world, vulnerability is not something to overcome. Dependence is not a failure. Care is not secondary. Slowly, we find our feet. We find the eyes of another. We allow ourselves to be held, to be loved, and to love more deeply than we knew possible.

For the Mamas out there: What did becoming a mother make impossible for you to unsee?

There is space for little else, really.

Yes, there is grief in the loss of how my life was, as every Mother goes through. Yet, I want to offer a prayer for the nectar that asks all of me, all of the body. It will cost you your old life, all that you knew, all that you have done must die for this nectar to come.

Breastfeeding has become the axis around which my days revolve. Time is no longer measured in hours, events, people, or things accomplished; rather it is the constant hum of a baby searching for his Mama. Day dissolves into night and back into day again. While my thickened body continues its unseen work of making milk from blood, minerals, water, sleep, and whatever nourishment I gather through the care, hands, and support of my beloved, and wider commune.

It is perhaps one of the most underestimated roles a mother undertakes. We speak of birth as the great initiation into motherhood, but breastfeeding is its own pilgrimage.

It is one of the deepest and most loving bonds between two and yet can also be relentless, repetitive, intimate, exhausting, and painful. It asks for my body over and over again, not just my attention or my love, but my literal flesh, blood, and milk. My bones, my nutrients, my energy, my hormones, my nervous system; all are recruited in the service of growing another human — every hour at times or every few hours, day and night.

The body becomes a sanctuary for another little human, gazing up at you with a look that says ‘you are my world’.

It has amplified for me the absolute necessity of caring for mothers and the lack of our place within a capitalist society. A breastfeeding mother is rarely “just feeding a baby.” She is regulating a developing nervous system, offering warmth, safety, nourishment, familiarity, and refuge. Her body becomes food, medicine, comfort, and sanctuary all at once. The Mother is the landscape from which a new human begins to understand the world.

Yet, this labour is one that is immensely invisible, uncompensated for, and yet — is it the labour that makes every other form of labour possible.

Matriarchy puts children at the center, which also places care for the Mother alongside children. When a mother is held, she can hold her baby. When she is nourished, she can nourish another. Care is never isolated; it ripples through generations.

Yet, in much of today’s world, the care surrounding a new family has become fragmented, outsourced, or simply forgotten. People celebrate the pregnancy, admire the baby, and shower a growing family with well wishes. But when the quiet weeks of postpartum arrive: when meals are needed, laundry piles up, the mother hasn’t slept, and the village is most required—silence.

People are “too busy” or “overwhelmed,” our collective attention has been colonised—drawn towards productivity, consumption, and performance rather than caring for a new family that requires the unglamorous labour of helping a mother rest.

Caring for a postpartum mother doesn't lend itself to the aesthetics of modern wellness. It isn't profitable, or easily commodified like a yoga class, a retreat, or the next self-improvement offering—yet it may be among the most transformative acts of care we can give.

This isn’t about blaming individuals. Most people genuinely care. Rather, it reveals a culture that has lost its memory of how to care for mothers. We celebrate birth as an event, but not postpartum as a sacred transition that deserves sustained community. Care has become something we outsource, schedule, or assume someone else will provide; especially if one is surrounded by bodies of priviledge that can afford such care, and are cultured to normalised paid care.

I often think about the archetypal relationship between the maiden, the mother, and the crone. In matriarchal society, these weren’t isolated identities but interconnected roles. The maiden, with her relative abundance of time, energy, mobility, and freedom, played an essential role in tending to mothers so that mothers could tend to new life. One day, she too would be held in the same way. Somewhere along the way, many of us have forgotten this reciprocal rhythm. And in forgetting how to care for mothers, we have forgotten how communities themselves are sustained.

I’ve noticed how pronounced the gap is between Maiden and Mother since pregnancy, and it comes with a lot of grief and rearranging of my relationships with women. In my own reflection, I wish I could have been more present and active for the Mothers around me, rather than being caught up in the anxieties of what a capitalist-neocolonial society deems as work.

My priority isn’t simply to feed my son. It is to offer him the conditions from which secure attachment can emerge. In the long run, I imagine that he may feel a deep sense of safety from within, not based on external validation. A sense of security will root when he is older through these precious moments where he is nourished in every way possible — responded to when he cries, early cues of hunger are noticed, and as much time to regulate through my body, day and night. A constant presence from both parents, especially Mama, that is new even to me.

Breastfeeding has also deepened my understanding of the body as an ecosystem rather than a machine. Like healthy soil, rivers, or forests, the body can only continue giving when it is itself replenished. Milk is transformed from water, minerals, food, rest, and care. Nature teaches us that no landscape can sustain endless extraction without consequence, yet mothers are so often expected to do exactly that.

If we truly revered breast milk as sacred, we would also revere the body that makes it. We would nourish the source as devotedly as we celebrate the nourishment it provides, recognising that caring for mothers is not an act of generosity—it is an ecological necessity.

I hope that, through thousands of ordinary moments of this holy medicinal milk that is embedded in his tissues, bones, and organs — that he may comes to know safety not as something he must search for in the world, but as something that lives within him.

There are moments when breastfeeding feels miraculous. I watch my body respond to his needs beyond any immediate understanding. Milk changes composition, adjusts to illness, satisfies hunger, soothes distress, and lulls him back into sleep. It is an ancient intelligence that asks very little of my thinking and everything of my surrender, especially when I am tired and at low capacity, to tune into the medicine of holy milk also offers me regulation, bond, and loving joy.

And there are moments when it feels impossibly demanding. The ache in my shoulders and sharp pain in my upper back. The thirst that arrives out of nowhere at 2:45am. Compounded lack of sleep. The endless cycle of feeding just as I begin to imagine doing something else for myself. The invisible labour that fills every hour but leaves little tangible evidence by the end of the day—except a baby who is growing, softening, settling into the world.

Perhaps that is the paradox of holy work. It is often repetitive, often unseen, rarely applauded — yet it shapes the foundations of life.

My work is not measured by productivity, output, or accomplishment. It is measured in the holy milk that strengthens the spine of a new life still emerging, in moments of co-regulation in the warmth of skin against skin, and in the hope that this small human that will carry an embodied sense of belonging; long after he no longer seeks for his Mama.

This, too, is the work of being Earth.

This season continues to be held by our Collective Midwifing circle. Every shared prayer, nourishing meal, kind message, contribution, and act of generosity has created the conditions for us to soften into this threshold of early parenthood.

Because of your support, we have been able to lean back from the usual demands of productivity, allowing us to be more fully present with our son and with this profound transition into a new family constellation.

We are currently at 84% of our Collective Midwifing Fund, and every offering, no matter its size, is deeply noticed and honoured. To us, this is what it means to un-nuclearise the family: to remember that raising a child and tending to a mother has never been the work of two people alone, but of a community willing to participate in the ecology of care.

As always, we are in deep gratitude. Our fund will remain open until the end of the Fire Horse year (February 2027), and if this reflection has resonated with you, we warmly welcome your support in whatever form feels aligned. Thank you for walking beside us in this tender season.

Collective Midwifing

Secrets, when held close to the heart, takes time to ripen, soften, reveal more to you. While, the floundering that comes with sharing opens up doors of meaningful conversations, relational fields widening, and a feedback loop that feels like a shower of blessings. So, I dance between the two.

Today, the solstice, feels like the right time to crack open a window for some wind to come through.

Oh, the birthing body.

There was one point in my pregnancy where in I pondered that, having a daughter would be heavy on my heart, as she will carry the deep grief of being a woman in the world today. The grief of generations who have known violence, silencing, impossible expectations, and the exhausting labor of care that so often goes unseen. In the same breath, it is such a magical way to feel this earth as a woman, and I love it with every cell of my breathing body. The tenderness comes because we love so deeply. The ache comes because we are so capable of connection. The vulnerability comes because our hearts remain open to life.

Alas, the cosmic joke is on us. We have been preparing for a girl, yet Luaña surprises us as a boy. Unexpectedly, I feel so honoured to have two men by my side, my beloved and my son. I feel joyous knowing that, we will raise this young one with matriarchy at heart, with compassion at hand, and a living prayer on our feet for this fella to walk his own path with integrity, depth, joy, and most of all; to be anchored in love.

Motherhood in all its majesty, comes with one consistent thing: pain. And, I say this not with pity, nor with pride. It simply, is. There is plenty of pleasure, of course. But, my God, the pain of birth was insurmountable, unfathomable — I was ready to die, and die I did. Yet, we came through the other side, in fragmented pieces, with wider hips and an outstretched sacrum, with a healing vulva, and a seven layer wound; continuing the path with the teacher of pain.

Birth breaks you, to open you, wide enough to fetch this baby from the land of spirits. And, it is dark there.

In this era of content, scrolling, and over-information — my pregnancy was full of gentle blissful birthing preparation. I did all the things, I stretched my pelvic floor, I went swimming regularly, we practiced perineum massages, I intentionally called in a gentle, peaceful, and safe passage. Yet, birth seemed like none of those things.

During labour, I even asked our midwife Ibu Robin — what happened to the orgasmic gentle birth that people talk about? She laughed and said, “It’s all marketing, those are women whom have had a few births before them. For your first birth, it hurts like hell.”

The void of becoming is something so sacred at oftentimes, boring. Boredom re-sensitises our bodies. This postpartum has been that, deepening into the void, realising how full my mind is with so many voices, trying to dust that all of to return to the power of silence.

How harrowing and beautiful to enter the undercurrents of this loving labour of tending to life in quietude. While the world waits for their applause, we are here, singing you to sleep, whispering lullabies, and feeding holy milk to this new cosmo, Luaña Ka’ala.

“Do not expect applause. Be prepared for silence. That is how real work happens.” - Toni Morrision

While, I also do not want to romanticise the postpartum journey, its is not aesthetically sound Instagram would like it to be. Postpartum is a full tub of nappies to wash, its a loud feral cry at 3:47am with wind in baby’s belly, it’s postpartum anxiety that often makes no rational sense, it’s snappy negotiations with your partner where you both work towards softening together, the grief of loss of your old life, the financial anxieties, the bleeding, wound healing, time warping kind of daze.

We are here, deep in it, surrendering to it.

The highlight of my day is the few minutes I get to take a warm shower under the sunlight, and the water and sun creates little rainbows around my broken body, giving it a moment of warmth and love to slowly heal; before I feed my baby again.

Lastly, beloveds, we share with you our birth story.

I was so hesitant to share, as this story devastatingly breaks my heart, again, and again. Yet, Ché encouraged us to be generously vulnerable with our community. After working through my own tensions, we shared our story, and it was so beautifully received; friends shared affirmations, resources, blessings, prayers — and what a way to be received during an intense moment at the gates of birth and death. Again, returning to that dance of the sacredness of secrets and the vulnerability of sharing.

Birth by Many Hands: Our Birth Story

If this felt moving to you, we would so appreciate if you can consider donating to our Collective Midwifing fund. It helps us to parent a new born full time until the end of the year. As two brown black folk from the global majority, simply trying to get by, your donation truly means the world to us.

Collective Midwifing

With all my love,
Chloe

I’m honoured to share a gift with you — a short ritual film on the invisible labour of mothering, politics of care, and spiritual midwifery: Matrix of Many / Matriks Ng Marami.

In the film, I speak with Filipina mothers about spiritual midwifery, invisible labour, and the quiet but profound ways motherhood can re-radicalise a life. Becoming responsible for another life can alter what you tolerate, what you protect, and what future you are willing to help shape. It can sharpen one’s refusal of unjust systems. It can make care itself a form of resistance. It can call us to choose with greater clarity, rather than continue inherited patterns unquestioned.

The film features humanitarian and Filipina midwife Ibu Robin Lim of Bumi Sehat, whose work after the tragic Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines brought birthing centres into communities recovering from devastation. Her radical advocacy for gentle birth reminds us that how we enter the world shapes how we belong to it.

Matrix of Many was first shown at Pagbubuo: Ritual Theatre Convergence in Tanay this April, in the company of Filipino local and diaspora artists gathering through ritual, performance, and remembrance.

Commissioned by Greenhouse Theatre, an ecosystem of nomadic and diasporic artists engaging the arts to cultivate regenerative consciousness.

The film also includes a Placenta Angel Ritual, shared through the care of Ibu Robin Lim, an offering I warmly invite you to join with us, collectively.

During this pregnancy journey, making this became a way of listening more closely to what is carried in our bloodlines, in our bodies, and in the choices we make when life begins to change us.

I welcome your reflections and curiosities by commenting, replying to this email, or sending me a direct message via Instagram. This short film is a seed for a larger transnational work to come. For now, it is rooted in Filipino memory, motherhood, and the ways care can become a form of collective repair.

Deep gratitude to Greenhouse Theatre, Daloy Dance Company, and Canada Council for the Arts, alongside all who made this possible. It was a gift to be in the muck of creation during the tender early weeks of my third trimester.

To birth a child is to birth a new cosmology, world, and future into being.

Motherhood as collective labour. An invitation to remember birth as communal, embodied, and deeply human—rather than fearful, medicalised, and isolated. To enter the Sinapupunan (womb) is to confront the politics of birthing; how birth has become dominated by the medical system, how fear has been instilled, and how this has created layers of generational trauma around birth. In many ways, women have been robbed of their true instinctual intelligence: the natural power to birth.

We are being called to return, remember, and repair our relationship with the collective Sinapupunan (womb). It involves not only the Mother, but the whole village.

Password to watch the film: bodyasearth

Watch Matrix of Many

If you so feel called to offer an exchange for the film, our Collective Midwifing fund is still open, so we may pass through the tender thresholds of post-partum with ease, support, and grace. It will be immensely appreciated and your exchange will go far.

We are also officially in birth territory at nine months pregnant. We can give birth anytime now. Send prayers and love our way for a gentle and peaceful birth passage.

While, I have shared how beautiful pregnancy is, I felt it is important to also bring voice to the The Mess Behind Pregnancy.

“Pregnancy is so often framed as beautiful, glowing, radiant. And it is. I too have been shamelessly sharing the beauty of this bountiful body; a body that has expanded its womb, shifted its organs, gained 20kg, and thickened itself enough to carry and create another human life, all while continuing to work, swim, sing, love, and move through the world. I am in immense awe of this exquisitely demanding initiation.

And yet beneath the beauty is a body undergoing rupture, reorganisation, and relentless change. It feels more possible now to experience a healthy, vibrant, and supported pregnancy than it may have for many of our mothers, whose bodies were shaped beneath the isolating pressures of modernity, capitalism, and disconnection from communal care; as are we continuously; perhaps with a different spectrum of possibility in this now.

I want to speak to the undercurrents of pregnancy; the struggles, griefs, sensitivities, and invisible rearrangements that so few people speak honestly about. Many enter pregnancy having inherited almost no honest stories about what this experience actually asks of the body. So much remains hidden beneath shame, performance, or the pressure to appear endlessly grateful and glowing.”

Read The Mess Beneath Pregnancy

A little moment with our becoming and constellation to come.

We desire to approach this pregnancy, postpartum, and parenting process with slowness, a circle of kinship, and practices that honour the ways of collective midwifing.

This is a call to activate relational tending that helps a new family constellation root into this threshold with tender holding and radical care.

We’re asking for help so we can align this birth with the values many of us share: collective care, earth aligned rhythms, and remembering that life thrives in relationship, not isolation.

If you feel called to offer to this constellation: financially, energetically, ritually, physically, or simply by holding us in your heart, we receive it with gratitude. No contribution is too small.

Collective Midwifing

With love,
Chloe

These shared letters hold a space of intimacy and invitation for the past 6 years; some of them used for sharing labour I offer, some for heartfelt stories, many for gathering community.

Mailchimp has been my trusted companion since the conception of body as earth, but it was time to migrate, and so I find myself with this new digital home for deep dives into the field notes of body as earth.

The term ‘field notes’ is inspired by the gesture of people moving through land and recording observations, the art of noticing, so to say. The unfolding of this new home, new territory, new lines, and new language will be one we unfold together.

I hope to express more around the journey towards decolonising my life and my relations, unlearning the conditions that keep us docile, and diving fully into my initiation of matrescence as I very soon come into Motherhood.

We have been invoking the culture of Collective Midwifing, which moves mostly in undercurrents - gestures of second hand post-partum bags from other families, a song offered by a doula, loving messages and notes of encouragement, simply checking in, and of course, practical donations help us immensely.

We have reached 55% of our fundraising goal which gives us a lot of relief and space as we prepare for a most tender threshold, bringing new cosmology into the earth. In our new family constellation, our dreams have whispered a name for this new life; Luaña. We welcome your support, tangibly, or even if it’s a candle lit prayer, no gesture too small or unnoticed.

It takes a child to raise a village, not only a village to raise a child.

Learn more: Collective Midwifing

Another contemplation I have been holding is how care looks, feels, and acts digitally. I’ve written an article on Care in the Digital Age. Here is a small excerpt:

“One of the biggest distortions of digital communication is that context disappears. There is no visibility of capacity — emotional bandwidth, caregiving responsibilities, personal struggles, and the occasional panic of practicalities. Digital spaces accelerate relational interpretations on a flat layer of text messages, which can be incredibly misleading when the embodied realities behind communication remain invisible, creating fragile ground for understanding.”

Curious about your own experiences of care within the digital age? Feel free to feedback, share your stories, or how this piece landed with you.

Read: Care in the Digital Age

Lastly, sharing with you the three layers to the field here below. Soon, I will be in the tender thresholds of post-partum with new new life traversing from the cosmos onto my breasts. And, so these offerings will unfold slowly, as nature does when it is allowed to follow it’s true rhythms.

Open access (free)
Notes of personal as political meanderings will take gentle, informal, and polyrhythmic residence here. You’re welcomed to freely be in conversation, co-contemplation, and to be within the field notes of body as earth.

Reciprocal support (two-way benefit)
A sharing of somatic practices to confront the poly-crisis of these times, a more practical and applied approach, expressed through audio guidance.

Ground holders (generous offering as reparations)
Community co-creation of body as earth within yourself and each other. You get to shape body as earth with more 1:1 conversations and active tending to. Through your generous offering, part of these proceeds will go into land-based mutual aid projects between Southeast Asia and South Africa.

That’s all for now.

With much love,
Chloe

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