The Heart of Midwifery

There are too many. The number feels insurmountable. It is crumbling down all around me. The hope for our future, so deeply entwined and entangled in the way we are born, the way we are birthing. There are too many to count, too many broken stories to listen to, too many whose hurt needs to be shared, witnessed and healed, somehow as I am writing this, I am challenging it, the natural-world which holds me, is challenging it. There is hope in the capacity of humans, as an entity of nature, to hear the pain, to take in and transform the hurt, to heal the numb and to bring about a change. A change as gentle as a breeze that inspires the leaves to flutter a certain way and as strong as the branches that then start to grow in the same direction.

The torch illuminating the path of our future is held by each human, igniting at birth to light up the spirit of motherhood and beam hope at all those present. However, the ability for this glowing light to be truly felt is diminishing, it is over-shadowed by the darkness of trauma experienced by increasing numbers of birthing women, but also by all those present, not excluding; family, birth attendants, midwives and doctors who have invested a heart-felt connection to this moment, this birth. I am not speaking of a feeling of surface joy, that the labour is over, or the feeling of holding a newborn, although these too can be spectacular. I mean really feel with the deepest most vulnerable and powerful part of us, their existence, the; physical, metaphysical, microcosmic moment of their entrance. Feel the overwhelming tide of their permanence, their absolute spotlighted and unfettered presence in the world. Feel the depth of their belonging radiating, feel the  ripple like the landing of an inseparable droplet of our-self into the pool of our hearts, the shores of which are our inner terrain. The waves of that moment reaching every boundary and interface between our heart and our personal story as an evolving, historical landscape. There are places of deep fear, and places of deeper love, however, our terrain always has mountains of protective womanhood, where generations of women have ventured before us. The ‘I will go anywhere and do anything’ feeling of power. Not ‘I can’, but ‘I will’. ‘I am’.

I have attended in some capacity over a thousand births, and I am witness to the diminishing and the quietening of women acknowledging their essence of strength. The lack of the ‘I am’. ‘I am mother’, ‘I am birther’, ‘I am power’, ‘I am nature’, echoes lonely in my heart like a whisper in the dark. It is my greatest longing for the feminine in our culture to reclaim that voice. To hear its resounding return to our hearts when shouted over the valley of our silenced culture. For the voice to be heard, met and echoed loudly by women all over the world. 

It is nothing less than a sacred privilege to share this passage with new life. To hold, at that moment the newest person in our beautiful world, to hold their space to exist. To hold their mother and family in this monumental eclipse in time. I used to say ‘I cannot believe I get paid to do this work’. This work that came to me from afar, from way back in time, it was as though this precious bundle of passion and skills flew though time and space with purpose and direction, and landed deep in my heart. However, the defeat I feel now is heavy. It is a burden at times to be given this as my passionate duty. So heavy that I quietly took my radiant beam of light and hope out of this world, and I suppose it was a darker place because if it. I was still, and am still, a skilled and compassionate midwife, my loving presence cannot be denied, but my heart was too heavy to carry on. 

Women are missing their calling; they’re missing the opportunity to feel and embody their power. The power that is needed to stand up against the force of a weight that is far greater than any individual alone. To dissolve the destructive course our women-body’s, as a reflection of the suffering earth, are surviving rather than thriving through.

Countless babies who grow from a seed in the womb of the universe, developing every part of their being and existence through feeling (their other senses hampered by the womb in its fluid-filled darkness, magnifying their ability to feel and sense) are being born into a space in time where no one truly, wholeheartedly felt the gravity and utter beauty of that moment. There is an infinite pit of midwife grief in my heart. Infinite sounds big, it is, it is the size of our collective feminine energy burning at the heart of creation. It  mother earth silently breaking watching her beloved infant humans suffer. It is infinite for the very purpose that I have endless compassion and energy to mend this heart ache, and will therefore, always, with all my being, be the gentle breeze that sways the leaves to change the course.

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