I bleed...(recycling my menses)

So today I started doing something that sounded crazy to me a year ago; I started recycling my menstrual blood today! A year ago, my friend Jules introduced me to the concept; she said, "sometimes I put my menstrual blood on my mom's vegetable garden..." Now I've been taught, like the majority of American women, that menstrual blood is dirty, is gross, is nasty...but this past year, in midwifery school, and more importantly, around radical women, has taught me that menstrual blood isn't nasty and dirty, but rather, full of rich nutrients like iron; which veggies need to grow. Since our soil that we garden in is often very depleted of nutrients, radical women have begun to recycle their menses.

Actually, this concept is ancient; as with many "new" ideas coming about right now, this one has its' roots in tribal traditions from around the world from way, way back. I can't say with accuracy where giving your menstrual blood back to Momma Earth began, or exactly what rituals women did around it; but according to The Red Tent, the Jewish traditional rituals included menstruating directly into the dirt, as a symbolic offering to the earth.

Anyway, the other day, while pounding yucca fibers out of the plant with two punk mommas; one giggled and said "I'm embarrassed to say this............."
"Say it..." I said.
"Yeah say it..." the other girl said.
"Ok, so this is weird, but when I bleed, I bleed on my garden..."
"That's not weird..." I found myself saying and I realized how much I'd changed since a year ago, when I had found myself thinking that Jules was a little weird. But then I thought, "I should do that next time I bleed..."

So I am. I already bleed into a little rubber cup that sits up next to my cervix in my vagina called The Keeper, so it isn't hard to catch my blood to take outside to my garden. When I dump my Keeper out, I dump it into a yogurt cup by the toilet and then when I get a substantial amount in the yogurt cup, I add some water and take it outside and dump it into the dirt next to a plant who looks like it could use some iron. So far, I've dumped all of today's blood next to a little oak tree I planted last fall who has been struggling all winter and looks like it needs a little something extra to perk it up. And you know something? I feel awesome about it; I always felt weird before dumping all of that rich, dark blood into the toilet or down the sink and then washing it away into the municipal sewer system; now my blood is going directly into the earth to feed my tree! And knowing that a lot of what I'm putting into the ground is still alive; (we looked at menstrual blood under the microscope a few weeks ago in micro-lab and where amazed at the number of red blood cells still moving around and doing stuff,) well, that just makes it seem even better! I'm giving a living part of myself to the ground, to the tree, to the earth; like a sacrifice, like a holy offering.

I eat you, you eat me, as Derrick Jensen would say...

Love ya,
Carrot