Expansion of the Universe

The boundaries of the human body change constantly throughout life and often do so quite rapidly. Bodily metamorphoses go hand in hand with the process of acquiring new competencies and obligations. Rituals and rites of passage help a person to accept this complex of changes. Unsurprisingly, an important part of the rituals is garment, that is, literally what frames body boundaries.

The wedding dress, christening shirts, and baby slings became for me symbols of the period of the most radical aberration of my body and out-of-body boundaries. Three times I raised children in my belly that became huge, like the ones Palaeolithic figures of foremothers had. Three times I became a single whole with each of them also after birth — I kept them in my hands or wrapped them to myself with long skeins of fabric, turning myself into a two-piece happy human mountain.

In the beginning the baby does not separate itself from its mother, it does not distinguish its body from the mother’s, this is a later skill. But soon after that its very rapid movement of separation from its mother begins, similar to the accelerating aspiration with which galaxies in an expanding universe are moving away from each other. The extreme transformation of a singularity into a huge multiplicity, into an endless world that will expand and exist for billions of years — is there any more accurate metaphor for motherhood? Was it not from a tiny figure of the Willendorf mother goddess that our world has arisen?