Happy Birthday Baby: in a sweat ceremony when I was newly pregnant with Callum, I sat out of one of the hotter rounds.

It was fall. He was the size of a lentil. I didn't know he was a he. I was scared because I had lost three pregnancies before, but I could feel his presence so intensely that it felt safe and secure to ease into the knowing that [YES, everything will be fine]

Brandon helped me out of the Iodge, laid me on a stack of blankets, and placed another stack of blankets on top of me. I laid in that spacey in between place and felt the spirit of a polar bear come lay beside me. I saw the bear, beautiful and luminous, and felt it's deep chest rise and fall with each breath it took.

For a while we laid there, us two, just being with each other. Then I asked if he wanted to share something. That vision I will keep private but he said, without my insistence or asking, that if the baby should be a girl I would name her Aurora. She will be the dawning of a new life for me and he showed a vision on the horizon that is hers.

Aurora it was.

But shortly after that I felt that he was a he and that he needed a name of his own. So I asked Spirit to send one to me in a dream. A few weeks later it arrived.

The dream felt deep and ancestral; it was dark and smelled of earth. And in that darkness a name was called: "Callie"

I knew in that moment it was my sweetname for my son. I knew his name was to be Callum.

A few months ago, I had another dream where a voice in the dark reached out to me to say: "the girl was always meant to survive, the boy was not. The time could have been then or it could have been now. You chose." What to do with this? Rational mind says many things, loudly and repeatedly and emphasizing that this shit is crazy. Spirit mind says to listen to my heart.

My heart says to trust the journey, trust the process, and trust that I was part of a situation that had already been written. Heart says to stop seeking answers to things I can't possibly understand-- they are beyond human comprehension.

So I sit with what remains on my little man's 2nd Birthday: a couple pictures, a jar of bones and blessings, and the story of how he came into being.