Something Else Moves Us
A 2 week return ticket turned into 5 months…. A flight, a swirling bus (with wheels about to fall off) and a small boat in the night took me there. To the lake. To where they waited. The midwives the whispers in the wind had long told me about.
I was born at the bottom of the world. Under a large mountain on a small island. Some mornings the big blue ocean all around sits still and silky. The air is windless and the clouds low, kissing the tops of the peninsulas that float above the horizon. When the clouds come this low you can not tell what is ocean and what is sky, as if there is no separation at all. This morning from my bedroom window, the world look like this … and it makes me think of it, The Lake and them, The Midwives.
Some experiences in life feel far too limitless for words. As if the second you mention them, the immeasurable becomes somewhat finite. My time learning and living with a family of Mayan Midwives feels like this; like a dream that rests in the silence of my heart and on the tip of my tongue.
And yet, silence is one of the things they perhaps taught me best. Not only because of language barriers, but because often there is just nothing to be said or no words to accurately describe what it is we do as midwives and what exactly everyone of us here are a part of …
But for all of us there are knowings that rest in silence and if we have not found them it is because they are deep inside us, still, unmoving, like lakes. Mine was of my path to work with birth and death and though I often did not know the road or the next turn on it, something always pushed me on… Talk to me of this something and my words will surely fall silent again.
But that something foretold told me about them. Old wise grandmothers with long hair that knew I was coming despite me not ‘knowing’ where they were. Until a flight to the other side of the world and a small boat ride and that something else took me to them.
In times of intensity - something else moves us on. We each, in our own ways, know of this, or can recall a time we have felt it. During the time in my life I needed to most, I did. This was expressed through the first words Nana Rosalía told me when I moved up the mountains to live with her family. “You have come at a time you feel you are going to die”, she said. And though I am not ready to share how or why this was, I am ready to say that these words were fiercely true.
“We can only offer where we have walked ourselves”. To tend to the alter of birth, I had to be tended to by the midwives and birth myself. To be a healer, I had to open fully to healing myself. It was something I had known forever. You know, you read about it in books, the whole ‘healers journey’ thing and yet I was still young and wasn’t fully ready to accept it, until I was - and I did. And the whole sky opened up….
May something else move you on always x x
