I was watching one of those scenes in a drama last night where the girl is going through labour, it feels like she’s giving birth to a watermelon, she’s in such pain and angry with the guy, everyone says she can do it…she does…and there is a great deal of relief and joy.

When I wake in these mid February mornings (I realised today) it always feels somewhat like that and has for years. I’ve talked many times before about the “quickening” in the pulse of electricity that I discern in my nervous system in mid to late January, as Nature wakes up and starts to stir, like a very fine electrical current running through everything. This can trigger my finely tuned sensors after the slumber of the preceding months but its always February that floors me the most; even when, as is happening this year, I insist that it doesn’t. It affects my body profoundly, even when it’s inconvenient because I have places to go. Yesterday felt as though the ground beneath my feet was running a high-voltage energy through my entire body and today I was taking the hit.

Even the shock factor of opening my eyes and being suddenly awake, today, seemed to push too much charge though the over-fine cables of my nerves; as though the pain of landing in the body was enough to burn out the entire fuse board. I knew the pain well…but I couldn’t be having any of it. I had somewhere to be and it felt important to me so I had to push through. I drew on emergency reserves and head off to the shower…

Why haven’t I pushed through like this before? Why don’t I normally risk it? Because it doesn’t, generally, feel like the last push…its as though I always have to hold something in reserve for other times ahead, incase this finishes me. Yet I know from previous Februaries that it usually is the past push…for now. March is generally better. March typically feels like I’m cradling the babe of my improved health in my arms, in golden sunlight and all congratulations. March is where the life of my year begins.

It struck me, in the shower, that this is where we are all at right now. We are sweaty, we are angry, we don’t even know how we will get this thing through; logically, it doesn’t make sense…too big, yes a watermelon to be passed. Like me, we are angry at the sun for making it happen…why was this started, how can we ever get it out without wholesale destruction? This thing is way too massive…a whole new kind of world is the size of many watermelons…so how oh how can we ever do that.

Yet, somehow, like every mother in every labour, we will do it. Of course, there’s the chance of stillbirth, of self-destruction in the process, but the odds are in our favour. The one thing we can be sure of is that it will feel like we can’t until the very last moment…yet our anger and frustration can so quickly turn to radiance and joy and unspeakable awe if we make that final push.

How can we ever know it’s the final push? We never can…and there will, still, always be more final pushes (this is life!) but we can assume it’s the final push for now if this amount of momentum has built. I spoke about the importance of momentum just yesterday, in my other blog; that crucial ingredient, the run-up to the most important of paradigm shifts. The thing that carries us through is faith. We have no precedent; not even when a mother has given birth to half a dozen children does she have precedent, since each one is entirely different. But we have a feeling and we all (when we tune into deepest intuition) know just when to push to make the difference.

In my life, that time is here. Perhaps I was right, in those other years, not to go so hard on myself at this tricky time of the year. Perhaps those were just the contractions that prepared me for recognising this highly-keyed sensitivity that tells me things are about to change. Perhaps many of us have become so-tuned in recent years. Women, especially, have refound the earth-instinct that connects them to the rhythms of a birthing planet in a sentient universe, whether or not they have ever had an actual baby in this lifetime. As the cliché goes, we just know when it’s time.

So I feel its time right now; time for me, time for all of us and though it may be hot hot and sweaty on the birthing table, though (in fact) we would rather get down to the ground to indecorously crouch and wail and gnash our teeth, we somehow know its all beautiful and it will be fine. We just have to trust and push through.

A version of that is what I’ve done today and somehow I am upright for my “thing” that I so wanted to do. Other years would have found me prostrate on the sofa for a day, feeling so much pain and overwhelming sensation as I did when I woke up but, instead, I’ve stood under flowing water, bashed out this post and am off to make myself a juice and get out the door. So, things are not the same this time around the cycle. Things may look the same but, where Mother Earth is concerned, they are often powerfully different in ways that only the most tuned-in will discern. Enough of us are doing that, right now, to give us the signal.