She Who Becomes the Portal

"A Midwife must have the Eyes of a Hawk, the Hands of a Lady, and the Heart of a Lion."

Here's a riddle for you:

What is the only experience all living humans share?

A clue: Think back to the beginning of your life, to the steady whirring rhythm beyond the veils of language, past your earliest memories. Stretch your mind to remember the beginning of all human life. Think about your belly-button. That was once a pulsing lifeline between you and the hero of this story. (But who is she?)

There is a profound and unknowable mystery enclosed within this question. Each of us start, against all odds, from a spark. From a microscopic alchemical union. We all grow for nearly 10 moon-cycles within the warm, dark, aquatic shelter of our pulsing, breathing, willing... MOTHER.

The experience we all unequivocally share is to be grown and birthed from her womb.

The woman who has most inspired and shaped my life goes by many names. She musters every wholehearted and thunderous ounce of herself time and time again to bring forth life. She is ephemerally and unceasingly in divine communion with the living brilliance that we call birth. These two entities combine to synthsize an exquisite, animate and transcendent third being. She's an archetypal woman whom I proclaim as:

'Our Mother Goddess.' She belongs to us all.

Indeed, mothers in the throes of giving birth are a mighty force to reckon with. Childbirth is a liminal and otherworldly experience in which one being becomes two. The transition is messy, bloody, and extremely intense. It's raw and inherently uncertain.

Every time a woman gives birth she stares her greatest fear directly in the face. This changes her forever.

She is forged in the fires of what it means to be a mother. There is a word for this: Matrescence. It means the irrevocable metamorphosis of a woman into a mother. It requires an enormous leap of faith. The outcome is not assured, only utter transfiguration is.

I only wish there was a word of comparable integrity and veneration for the way birth has transformed me as a birth-keeper. As a midwife I am continually revolutionized by witnessing women confront the terrifying power and rare grace of childbirth with utmost courage and surrender. This is the one modern phenomena that is so ancient and so enduring, that it's beyond anyones ability to control, much less plan. The experience of birth leaves it's mark on anyone fortuitous enough to glimpse it.

Every birth is an initiation for both the mother and her keepers.

I was hooked from the very first time I ever saw a woman embodying The Mother Goddess. She pulled me into the sheer gravity of her presence and she's never let me go. It doesn't matter what Im doing in the moment she calls me, I drop everything and I run to her. It doesn't matter if it's 2am, or if I had other plans. I drop everything and I run to her. I could be making love, or taking a shower. I may be exhausted, or still recovering from the lost sleep of our last interlude together. But I drop everything and I run to her. Nothing has challenged me more. And nothing has ever been so rewarding. She is the love of my life.

"Think not that you can direct the course of love. For love, if she finds you worthy, directs your course"

~A quote from Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

On the occasions that I get complimented on my work as a midwife, I always enjoy the opportunity to redirect that praise rightfully back to those most deserving: Our Mothers. They're unequivocally the ones doing the hardest and truest work of life. As a midwife I get the honor of (sometimes) being present.

The work of the midwife is both a calling and a blessing. It allows me (more than most) to witness something miraculous, something sacred, something immensely powerful. Birth has shown me a glimpse of the diversity of the human experience, as well as the thread of unity (the umbilical cord, if you will) that we all have in common.

In my work I've witnessed hundreds of births in settings and manners as diverse as the women undertaking them. I've been blessed to attend births that last 2 hours and births that take 2 days. I've seen many mothers giving birth for the first time, and even a mother having her 13th baby. I’ve been present to a 14 year-old mothers' birth, as well as a 43 year olds'. Births in the caul (where the baby is born with the bag of waters in-tact), births assisted by vacuum extraction or forceps, and births where the mother catches her baby with her own two hands. I’ve seen mothers give birth on hands and knees, in full squat, standing up in the shower, and on tippy toes (with exasperated family members supporting her balance!) Birth over the toilet, and on the floor of countless bathrooms. Birth by cesarean, birth in the water, and birth outside under the starry sky. One thing I’ve never seen is a birth that was easy. Nor a single one that was ordinary.

Please believe me when I say that absolutely no one 'delivers' a baby but the mother. Ever.

Because birth takes women to the farthest edges they didn't even know they had, and beyond them, there is no looking back. She is essentially different than she was before. Labor brings about a crossroads in every womans life: Triumph or die. This is not a metaphor. Nearly every mother I've worked with describes having felt that she would die at some point in her birth process.

There is no way out but through.

Surrender is called for. It can be no other way. You cannot ever be fully prepared. Yet you have everything you need. Every ending is a new beginning. When women approach the entity that is birth they step into the portal.

Women become the portal. The Mother Goddess.

"If I'm that tough I've never had to prove it!"

-A new father after witnessing the home- birth of his first baby

The role of the mother as carrier of new life is so much grander than any one of us. She's omni-generational. She's been here since before the beginning was the beginning. Two parts magic: one part science... she has always been and always will be the ultimate Creatrix. It's true, she has a billion different faces and backgrounds. She speaks a thousand languages. She is both wealthy and humble, modern and indigenous, honored and desecrated in her homelands throughout history. Any culture that suffers amnesia of her power and importance suffers many interwoven ailments as well. Being with mothers has taught me that the key to every problem we face lies within putting women (and children) back at the center of our hearts, priorities, and communities.

When mothers are taken care of first and foremost, they will ensure that everyone else is cared for with fierce and impressive fervor.

After witnessing countless women give birth, I'm now forever filled with an immutable certainty that if women can do THAT, I can do anything I set my mind to... and so can you.

This sense of awe and reverence give me fuel to face my own fears and obstacles every single day of my life. The astonishing feat that over 300,000 women perform every day, on every continent, in every city on planet earth gives me an unwaivering certainty that as a species we are capable of immense acts of love, courage, and sacrifice for the greater good. We will be incited to radical and abiding evolution in the face of existential crisis, individually and collectively. There IS hope for a better future.

Just as mothers continually jump back into the fires of transformation and offer themselves up to its flames and wiles, so can I. So can each of us.

The veil between life and death is thin during birth. The world we've come into is undergoing a birth of it's own. The future isn't promised to any one of us.

The lesson Our Mother Goddess (She who carries life but is not immune to death) has taught me is this: When I acknowledge my capacity to nurture life, as well as the inevitability of my own death in the same moment, it frees something wild and epic within me. This freedom guides me to wake up every morning with gratitude and purpose. When I feel pushed to my edge I remember that each trial is an initiation into a higher form. We will be wise to remember that sometimes extreme pain gives way to new life. That indeed, all new life is preceeded by raucous tribulation.

All humans are forged of this mercy and grit. My relationship with The Mother Goddess has taught me what I'm really made of. What I think we're all really made of at our core: To be midwives and allies in the struggle for a more just and sacred world. Because all mothers have withstood the cauldron of dissolution and emerged distilled, they are our most essential assets in the momentous work we face as an irrevocably interconnected and afflicted world.

So in the name of Our Divine Mother to whom my life is dedicated I call upon each of us: Through our committed and collaborative efforts, may a kind and holy era blossom on earth in which mothers and children are supported and raised up everyday. May we learn to hold their wellbeing at the center of our world culture both in intention and in action. It's time for something new to be born.

"Hold your head up high you are controller of the tides woman..."

~Amber Lily & Lily Fangz

"There's a fire burning in the middle of this turning, wild and yearning for everything. For everything. Remains inside, these changing skies, through waves in time. Remembering a beginning"

~Bonnie Paine & Elephant Revival

"These times are poignant, the winds have shifted, its all we can do to stay uplifted...realigned and on point, power to the peaceful, prayers to the waters, women at the center..."

~Rising Appalachia