You can find a discussion about the power of the emotions you might feel if breastfeeding isn't working out the way you'd imagined here. There are many women who find, despite heroic efforts, that they can't breastfeed. This is no-one's fault - but there are serious health system blind spots concerning the support of breastfeeding and lactation which Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation aims to address. I acknowledge that this article may be painful to read if you are one of those women who has been unable to breastfeed, and you might even decide to skip it.

Many stories from traditional cultures celebrate breastfeeding

There's another way we can make sense of the great longing to breastfeed which wells up through many of us as women. This is by considering ancient stories about the creation of the world. These myths guided the many different human cultures prior to the rise of our Western industrial culture on how to find meaning, how to live together, how to be sustained by the Earth, how to care for the Earth.

I was still a very young doctor when I had the opportunity, here in my home country of Australia, to learn some of these stories from First Nations People, who comprise the oldest continuous cultures on the planet. Ancient stories in the traditional cultures of all continents feature female divinities or ancestors, who not only birth in the miracle of creation, but who feed and sustain new life from their bodies.

The new sciences of the last decades celebrate life's inherent and unfathomable generativity

We humans have always needed to remind ourselves that although life brings destruction and death, life also brings abundance and renewal. I find it helpful to remind myself of the staggering revelations of quantum physics. In my life-time, scientists have learnt that electrons, protons, and other elemental particles are endlessly flaring forth out of dark energy - out of nothingness, out of the quantum vacuum - then just as miraculously, disappearing back into this nurturing abyss.

The Sun consumes four million tons of itself every second to nurture life on Earth, roaring forth with heat and light. When we, as adult female humans, breastfeed, we are gathering up our little ones to our breast in one tiny but powerful embodiment of life's stunning generosity.

We live upon a small blue planet now threatened by Homo sapiens dominance and greed. I was born in 1960, which some say marks the first years of the Anthropocene, the sixth mass extinction, created by human beings. My lifetime spans a catastrophic decline in our Earth's biodiversity. Somewhere around the world, every ten minutes, a species extincts. A third of all global mammal extinctions have occured in my own country of Australia, post-colonisation. Extreme weather - droughts and floods, fires and terrifying storms - ravage the land. You know how the rest of this goes: riverine ecosystems crash as our rivers pollute and dry up, marine life extincts as oceans choke with plastic, glaciers melt, the seas rise up ...

Every time you breastfeed you're reminding those around you of life's fundamental abundance

Yet a mysterious life force still renews the seasons, over and over, and will continue to do so even if humans lay waste the soils and the skies and the seas and disappear. Life is, despite everything, staggeringly generous.

All I have to do to remind myself of life's generosity is to allow my attention to fall into this singular precious moment as it presents itself right here and now. Another moment, and another moment, and yet another entirely new and unrepeatable moment. In this way, life offers itself - herself - to me with stunning bountifulness, until I die.

This is what we are reminding ourselves and others around us every time we casually lift up our shirt or pull down our breastfeeding singlet and offer milk to our child.

Come, sweetheart, your mother's breast is generous.

We are, in that moment, the great sustaining Mother, she who renews and nourishes life from her abundant body.

This is an image of the Venus of Willendorf, a 11 centimeter high limestone carving or figurine dated at 29,500 years old. She was unearthed in Lower Austria in 1908.