The Primal Animal A Mother Becomes

How Poetry Named What We Often Leave Unspoken After Birth & The Village Of Mammas

Sometimes the things we’re dreaming of, are actually dreaming us.
Sometimes we’re just the ones who say yes.

I awoke from a dream of my new favorite poet sitting in my living room—surrounded by a circle of mothers.

The women were crying—soaking in the truth of her words. In that quiet, deeply rooted way when something truly lands. When a part of you that hasn’t yet spoken is suddenly spoken for.

The dream felt real. Familiar. Like a memory I hadn’t lived yet.

I had been reading Matter Mother, every morning in my tea meditation. It had been gifted to me right before I gave birth by a dear friend, and in the hustle of moving into our new home right before giving birth, I’d forgotten and misplaced it on a bookshelf right between Ram Dass and Joseph Campbell. Hidden in plain sight.

I rediscovered it in a bookstore. It felt so familiar.
Casually, curiously—I flipped to the first poem.
”Birth Story”.

If you had not been an animal before, in labor you became
animal––hoofed and horned, howling into the fist of day or night

or many days and many nights. You became all hands and knees,
hips and deafening heart. You became strong and sometimes scared,
but mostly a raucous wonderment of determination, of power,
of everything that is holy in this world. You became breath,

spiraling in and out, you traveled way beyond those agonizing hours
into Deep Time, into the place where your Grandmother’s birthed and continue
to birth, where they blessed your bones and helped your body to open.

You became the prayers and songs of every mountain and river,
each valley and gust of wind, all the stars shooting across
the night sky since the beginning of time. You became.

And now you have landed back in a body that is unfamiliar to you,
uncomfortable within the constraints of civilization. People ooh and aah
at your baby but you still have horns. They do not acknowledge the horns.
You will never again be that same woman who walked in a straight line,

you have been initiated into the land of fire and rough magic,
of fur and darkness. You looked into death’s lustful eyes
and held your life in full view, even as your life turned to ash,
you kept holding, even as you did not know how to go on

you went on. Very few people will ask about your story, yet
you will become your story. You will live into a body that is
informed by the rhythms of water and lightning, you will
no longer walk from here to there, you will prowl -

your tail will swing back and forth, your ears
will be forever tuned to what is happening
over the hill, to the thundering in the distance.

-April Tierney

And I wept.
The most gorgeous ugly snotty tears.
I sighed deeply.

Matter Mother

I’d been struggling to put words to the experience of birth.
Every time I’d tried, I felt my attempts fell flat.

All I could say was…
Holy shit. Birth.
I can’t believe all humans came into the world this way.

But April had done it.
She had spoken to the primal wild animal in me that felt unnamed.
The parts that will forever be there, but seem invisible to the naked eye.
The glimmer of life force and intensity in my eyes, no matter how tired I am.
The one in me who also feels misplaced in a world that isn’t designed with mothers in mind.

I wept for the parts of myself screaming to be seen.
Then I had the dream.

So I reached out to April, and took a risk—I invited her to gather at my home.
She must be busy… I assumed.
Will she even consider it…I wondered.

But then, she said yes.

She stepped into the very living room I had dreamt of, carrying a small stack of her books and the kind of presence that feels like an offering.

The other Mammas arrived, we took spacious time to settle and get the babies what they needed.

And we circled around the room with babies on chests, and I felt my tears already close to the surface.

April read. And the room got still.

And then something broke open.

We let the words move through us — the way true things do when we’re not trying to hold them back. Tears dripped from my cheeks onto my daughters sleeping head at my chest.

That day, we all belonged.

We got to be amongst mothers who could truly see us.
Mothers who are walking this path in deep alignment, each in her own way.
Close to the earth.
Deeply connected.
We created a field of something important.
Something tribal. Something real.

That circle—those women, that moment—felt like the dream my ancestors must’ve dreamed for me.
A village of mothers.
A place where I was understood and met.
This is what all mothers need.

And this is what I shared with the circle.

Then April said something that landed right in my chest.

When she wrote Matter Mother—scribbling lines during her baby’s naps—she was dreaming of this exact kind of circle. Of mothers in conversation around what felt too big to put into words on their own.

You dreamed this, and I dreamed this, and the world dreamed this too.
And we met it in the middle.

She told me about a quote David Whyte once said— that what we want and what the world wants for us won’t fully happen on their own. That it’s in the meeting between the two where life actually unfolds.

And as she said it, I felt the truth of it in my body.

Because the dream wasn’t just mine.
And it wasn’t just hers.
It was both.
It was all of ours.
And we met it in the middle.