LOVE & WARMTH AID BIRTH ALONG. FEAR HINDERS BIRTH.
If the acorn requires soil, rain, oxygen and sunlight, what can we extrapolate from the process of birth to understand its needs? The matrix it presupposes to exist for its best unfolding?
In essence birth requires love, safety and warmth.
This means birth requires respect, admiration, to be regarded as precious and even more than that: sacred. To be revered. Which means for women to be respected and revered. Individually and structurally.
So while we pay great attention to how the birth plays out in the woman’s body, the seed of that unfolding begins in society’s regard for women. This greatly informs what the women internalises and dictates what places of birthing and what care is available to her. As midwives caring for the woman before us, we should keep a weather eye out for the narratives around birth and the politics of birth places, maternity funding etc that ripple around us. When and where we are able, we should be prepared to plunge in. For the culture to evolve onwards we need to be part of the rerendering and conversation. Evolution spirals – the tree growing taller even as it cycles through the continuous seasons. Rather than a pendulum that ticks back and forth and never resolves and moves forward, work with the tree-in-seasons understanding – that we are spiralling forward, taking and integrating the good and discarding the bad. Moving forward consciously, paying attention, taking action, rather than reacting like the pendulum. We are capable of more complexity than merely reacting against – we can integrate and reject and move forward. We can emulate the maturing of the spiralling tree.
