Coronavirus is not the only cell to wear a crown. Oocytes, or female eggs are crowned by a mantle called Corona Radiata. It is an egg’s outermost layer of cells. This corona speaks the language of a chaperone and elder. While wearing her crown, this chaperone sees you through the most meaningful early times of your life. This corona is there when your feminine half, the egg meant to become you, comes of age and grows into a fertile cell. When you’re ready to leave home, and are released from the ovary you’ve grown up in, Corona’s there, as an elder, still surrounding you, on your tenuous initiation journey down your future mother’s fallopian tube. Corona either becomes a death doula, and sees the egg, if not fertilized, to her end, or stays on, surrounding you, when your masculine half approaches as sperm. This crownly chaperone vets your masculinity, you could say, much like an elder on behalf of her fledgling bride- and groom-to-be, and decides which sperm will enter you and which will not. The myth of a sperm penetrating is just that. Your feminine side decides. Corona stays with you, the now courting couple, as you perform your alluring dance of conception, and chaperones your new matrilocal cell, then cells, until you, a now burgeoning baby find your new home in your mother’s endometrium a week later.
Last week, two friends and I went down to the water near my house to experiment with the resonance of Corona Radiata. I shared what I knew about her, and we imagined we could don our bodies with the mantle of her luminous hue. We included her discernment about who and what comes in or out, we included her wisdom, and her natural health. After a few minutes we imagined surrounding the beach with the same hue. Then the spirit of the land, the ancestors of the land, the living inhabitants of the place, followed by the the greater population, the country, continent, then world.
We can’t know if our immunities are stronger, let alone those of the others we’ve imagined. But during that time we felt loving, whole, generous, prayerful, and unafraid. Even more, we felt housed in an integrous body containing a healthy, negotiated marriage between our masculine and feminine energies. Curious what that means for the global climate, inside and out, and the rhythm of how life makes, sustains, and takes.
Image Credit: Jaap Van der Wal