Sunday, November 26, 2006

raise it up


This poem is clearly the culmination of the emotional work I've been doing and the writing that has been going on here in this blog. I performed it last week at Gaia Resurrect's all women's poetry, art and music performance in Asheville. As usual, my sense is that my work is more effective off the page than on it and is truly brought to life by my performance of it, but since I'm working with this written medium I am going to go ahead and make this poem as an offering to my people, my community, and to some people in particular like Rain's parents and Citrus's parents and to myself, today being the eight year anniversary of the loss of Ursula. Blessed be.
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I am a prophet of saying unpopular things.
I talk about bodies and birth
Without doctors and drugs,
I shout about freedom for each to do with her body as she choose,
I scream it is our right to refuse what others think we must do
Even if that thing seems like it is good for you.
And I whisper about death holding a righteous place in our lives.

I believe that we are bought and sold by fear
Our bodies which we should hold dear are manipulated and managed
By an untrue terror that is instilled,
Insisted upon and insidiously enforced by stories whispered,
Threatened from the cradle with the horrors of the grave.

I love life gorgeous in its infinite complex tangible way,
Its endless opportunities and unexpected days,
Do not underestimate how I cherish it when I go on to say that
Death has unfairly been given a bad name.

I long to live long and have many days on earth
And I have been devastated and disheartened by death
Have lost loved ones who seemed taken untimely or violently
Wept for the mothers who weep for sons and daughters killed mindlessly,
Yet I come to say fighting death and fearing our natural course
Is harming us, hurting life, creating great remorse in the days when we should
Live for living
Not fear for dying
Live for living
And accept that

Death is a home
The turn of the spiral that composts, nourishes, restores
Before rebirth
Death is the name of the angel who ushers us on our way
Wherever in the universe we’re meant in that moment to be
Inevitably

Why has this lie that death is our enemy come to be the alma mater of modern society?
Once upon a time every one lived knowing that someday they would die
They accepted it, they carried it with them through their days and
It was no source of fear and
It was no source of pain
It just was.


Now we’ve been taught to dread our approach to the grave
We’ve learned that we must beg to assure we get the most days
We’ve been told that there are supernatural ways
Of cheating cruel nature and her unfair play of forcing us to have losses and to age
and for each of us to someday lay decomposing underground.

To buy in to the fabulous miracle of evading death, we learn
We must literally buy in.
We are convinced that every dollar we spend will save us from an untimely end,
From the maternity ward to the auto lot to the grocery store
We are convinced that the more money we spend, the more we can live
and the less we will die
and it is simply not true.

I do not lie to you when I say that our fear of death is thrust upon us at our births.
From the moment we are conceived we feel acutely the energy
Directed to us
From our mothers and fathers and doctors and friends, and
No one in this room was born in a time
when all those well-intentioned people
Did not fear and project and
Act crazily over the possibility that our new lives could end
Suddenly or unexpectedly without intervention.
We learned before our births it is unacceptable to die
Thus our births were ruled by the unacceptable lie
That the only way to be born safely and live
is to supersede natural law
Which has every animal on the planet
Birthing in her natural home amongst her own
Without doctors, machines, drugs and insurance
Without bells and whistles and untrue assurance
That her baby will live no matter what
Because that’s not true.
Like every animal mother your mothers’ chances of giving birth to you alive
Were very, very, very high
Regardless of location or the presence of experts
Regardless of technology, regardless of excess,
But she never had a guarantee
That all her offspring would live because
Regardless of location or the presence of experts
Regardless of technology, regardless of excess
Babies still die.

And I say
As unpopular as it may be
That it is time we accept the nature of natural losses
And stop starting our lives under the worst of curses
Which is to fear constantly even as we live
To fear constantly on the brink of new life
Of the death that will surely seek us in its own time
And to still take care of ourselves and be careful and be healthy
But to no longer be ruled by that mythology so stealthy
That tells us if we buy good doctors and safe hospitals and new drugs
If we buy bigger cars and stronger militaries to depose foreign thugs
That we will live forever,
That our children will never die
Because they will.

As women we experience the undue burden of culture’s death scorn
As carriers of life we’re expected to fulfill the fabled promise of new life guaranteed born
And our bodies have become battlefields for powers that be
To vent their frustration at their inability
to have complete, unswayable control of all things wild and unpredictable.

We are wild and unpredictable
Despite the laws that have been decreed as to where, how and if we give birth,
Despite the unwritten laws that say how we as women should look, act and feel, and
We cannot tell anymore what is real.
We experience insecurity feeling we cannot have control over
Our own bodies and our paths,
We are objectified as bodies expected to perform certain tasks that
someone else determined for us, and
We are having a hard time knowing who we are and what to do.

Well let me tell you-
There is no shame in our bodies and no shame in our blood
There is no shame in our abortions and, regardless of outcome,
No shame in our births.
We cannot judge one another or ourselves on the merits of our reproductive worth
Because that’s exactly what the patriarch wants us to do.

Have you ever held an embryo in the palm of your hand?
Have you ever held an embryo in your heart, in your womb, in your soul,
An embryo whose heart never beat without yours?
How many women in this room have known death inside their own bodies?
How many women in this room have carried life that never made it to light
whether the end was of your choosing or of theirs?
Raise your hand, raise it up,
You have nothing to hide-
We must tell our stories to each other if none others if we are to survive.


Our culture’s fear of death has left us paralyzed and alone amongst each other.
It spends billions to wage war and murder thousands of innocents
While screaming and insisting that every conceptus in every womb must live
Despite its mother’s impetus.
This is madness, this contradiction under which we’re forced to live
Something has got to give.

It is time to embrace death as a part of our lives
and to refuse to live meekly under her shadow.
It is time to rage against death’s misuse
as she is meted out murderously upon others deemed unworthy,
Others perceived to threaten our tenuous existence
They are murdered by the false promise that with their deaths
Our deaths are indefinitely delayed
The false promise that says by killing these others our lives will be saved.
Refuse to accept the lies that you are told
And stand up for the right
Of every human being to live their full story so boldly and free
that humanity can finally achieve peace.

We are going to die every single one of us-
Me and you
And my children and your children, too.
It is true and beautiful despite the pain at the loss
It is our life’s destiny to die and it is rightfully ours.

To live life fully one who loves life must learn to love death,
Have compassion for death
She waits patiently for the day she’ll hold us in her arms
Though we scorn and dread her all the while.
Take comfort in knowing that when the right time comes
She is waiting to whisper in your ear,
Have no fear my love,
Your remains will now rest in the bosom of the earth and
Your spirit will soar amongst the timelessness of the universe.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

happy birthday just a position! : what's in a year?


I did it. I have consistently written in this blog and kept it active and growing for one full year. I am pleased and proud! Tonight I am composing my 46th entry, so in 12 months time that means I have averaged writing near to once a week. Hooray!

So why is this significant? Well, if you go back to my very first post you will read that one of my main reasons for starting a blog was so that I would have a tool that would compel me to be accountable to my writing and to write regularly. I am a writer, a poet, a wordsmith, a speller, an editor, a complete and total fool for the written word. Writing is my one true art, my love, my passion, my therapy and my pastime. Why then did I need compulsion to keep writing on a regular basis? Because, as many of you know, I am also a single, homeschooling, work at home mother, as well as an activist, a trance dancing priestess, a birth attendant in varying forms, a dog rescuer, a friend to many, a lover to a few, a cook, and a Burner, and that all takes up a whole, big lot of my time, and sometimes writing gets lost in it. But since I started my blog 1 year ago I have been writing more than I have in years. Hip, hip hooray!

So what else have my blog and I accomplished this year? We have seen deaths and births and sometimes both at the same time and have continued to work out our feelings about such matters. We have facilitated the beginning stages of my sons' adolescent years with sensitivity and just a hint of hilarity. We rescued and adopted a large, male rottweiler to add to our pack of two females, an elderly black lab and an also recently rescued, young husky shepherd. We also brought home an entire family of chickens, one mother hen and 10 chicks who grew up and then were systematically decimated by said husky shepherd leaving us, once again, chickenless. We have seen friends come live on our land, then leave no longer quite what I could call friends, to be replaced by other kind people with whom we share the land, and it seems there is a continual coming and going of the occupants of this place. We fulfilled the dream of many years of attending Burning Man, and decided that we ought to continue to go ad infinitum. We have had my lovers drift in and drift out, yet I am still occupying the romantic limbo that has been my place for many years now. We have been trying, essentially, to learn about and to live in love. We have enjoyed many, many moments with my young sons, and laughed heartily together. We have propagated poetry onto the planet. We have survived the season of the snake on this here mountain, and successfully hosted a breathtaking wedding ceremony practically in the rattlesnake snake den with no ill outcomes. We have trance danced and explored the ethers then come back to tell the tales. We have thought at times we would die from the exquisite pain of it all and others as though the deafening bliss would keep us aloft infinitely. We, apparently, have bonded, my blog and I, because I am now referring to my blog together with myself in the first person plural as if we were the best of buddies out doing all this wild marauding together. And thus, we must be.

So come one and come all and join my blog and me on the fabulous adventure of life through the next year. Let's continue to learn and grow and think and feel together, all of us. I have so thoroughly enjoyed the great dialogue that has arisen out my last posts and their comments; this is exactly the type of discourse I have always hoped for. Talk to me! Tell me what you think when I tell you what I think! Let's dialogue (I love using that word in a verb tense). I was telling a friend (you know who you are you sweet thing ;) tonight while celebrating the glory of my one year old blog that what I miss the most about the academic setting, and dear god I do miss it, is the excellent discourse amongst peers. It is one thing to read and write and formulate opinions and proffer them, but it is through the process of discussing them and sharing them and dissecting them then integrating others' input and ideas that allows us to grow and develop the most in our thinking and learning. I want to do that with all of you: those who have regularly followed my meanderings and those who occasionally drop in and those who are totally new to my zealous opining (ooh, that's another really sexy but atypical verb tense. See? I just love words!). Stick around, let's think together. Let's write together. Let's get our groovy letter rhumba on together!

For my blog's birthday my offer to you, dear readers, is a birthday gift. For every reader who leaves a comment on this birthday post, I promise to write a personal and individualized haiku in response to your comment. I assure that these haiku will be authentic and finely crafted pieces of poetic pleasure that you will treasure for years to come. I'd love to make poetry for all of you, and that is what I shall do. Thank you for your support and input, dear readers. I hope you'll stick around.

Tonight's composition was accompanied by a deeply steeped and well-cooled quart of red lavender tea.

Monday, November 13, 2006

living free: more thoughts on birthing autonomously


This post is a continuation of the comments from the Birthing Autonomously post:

When it comes right down to it, after another discussion with another friend on this topic today, I realized I am just plain fucking scared to go to prison. I realize that I would be the "perfect" midwife to be able to walk into a woman's home with nothing but her birth on mind; even in the most supportive of cultures I'd still have all of my own personal issues with which to contend. It feels like a massive defeat to admit this because I always felt so brave before, I felt like I was doing the work of the righteous and therefore I'd be protected, and I don't feel that way anymore. I feel defeated. I feel like "they" won. I no longer feel like that brave, radical protector of women and children who would do anything to spare them the horrors of Western medical obstetrical care. I feel like a wounded warrior who just wants to rest comfortably at home.

And the truth of the matter is I can say my inability to make the ultimate sacrifice is for my children, that I have chosen my primary path in this lifetime, and as closely linked to my mother path as midwifery is that my obligation to the two children I brought forth myself must be my first obligation, my undying commitment. It simply would not be fair to sacrifice my freedom to mother them for the benefit of another's child while they still need me. I could say that, and I do. And yet I find myself wondering if choosing motherhood wasn't in some ways my out for making all the sacrifices I feel I should have in this lifetime. Being a mother has allowed me to excuse myself from not being on the front lines in Oaxaca and in all the other places around the globe that have needed witnesses for peace and workers for justice. I always say that motherhood is my primary activism, and I still believe that to be true. I know that by raising conscientious, compassionate, honorable men I am doing the world a much-needed favor. But it feels a little like I took the cush route.

When my sister went to prison to serve her time for an act of civil disobedience directed at shutting down the School of Americas I was baffled by her choice and simultaneously enormously impressed that she could choose that level of sacrifice in the name of protecting others. I don't believe I could live without my freedom; I think I am a spoiled American convinced that I am entitled to be free even while others are oppressed. And I am working myself into a quandary trying to figure out how I am to be grateful for and manifest additional security and comfort and ease in my life, because I feel like I want and need that, while at the same time living in solidarity with those whose entire lives have been nothing but suffering and challenge and loss and pain.

Everything in our world is so fucking fucked up. You’re right, Ashaya, fuck all of that shit. I just don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know how to fight the good fight and not get lost in it, and so I’ve been trying to live the good life to loose that vibration onto the planet, that’s what all the trance dancing and the Burning Man adventures have been. I seek the balance between following what my own heart wants for my children and myself and what my heart wants for all the children on the planet. It is difficult to find.

While I am at it I want to continue to express how angry I am at this maniacal state our world has gotten into because I feel it also impacts my ability to be a good mother. Yes, I know I am a good mother and I know I’d receive a bevy of protests if I tried to suggest otherwise, but only I can know how much better a mother I’d be if I weren’t forever having to sacrifice my time to the lords of money, if I weren’t parenting alone due to my own or my partners’ inabilities to sustain healthy relationships because our world never taught us how, if I weren’t always chasing some social validation to appease my wounded soul and always needing sleep and therapy to mend my broken body and psyche-- all casualties of my lifetime under the patriarchy. I am frustrated that none of us get to fully be who we could be because of the shackles that capitalism and sexism and racism and environmental degradation and dehumanization has wrought upon our lives. FUCK!!! And all my ranting and all my raving does nothing but give me an outlet so I can clear my privileged head enough to lay it upon my pillow and sleep through the night so I can get back on my hamster wheel and start my routine of doing the best I can under the circumstances all over again tomorrow.

And, specifically I also want to address some of the comments that I have received from the Birthing Autonomously posts, both on Blogger and Tribe. Inevitably and as if on cue, those who are afraid of the loss and afraid of the death or have learned well the story about the dangers of birth that our culture taught them have spoken up to assure me that one way or the other birth really ought best be under the care of trained professionals, ideally in a medical setting, and to you all I will assert once again, that you are wrong. In a well researched comment sent to me via e-mail a friend pointed out:

Global Infant Mortality Trends

For the world, and for both Less Developed Countries (LDCs) and More Developed Countries (MDC) Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) declined significantly between 1960 and 2001. World infant mortality rate declined from 198 in 1960 to 83 in 2001.

However, IMR remained higher in LDCs. In 2001, the Infant Mortality Rate for Less Developed Countries (91) was about 10 times as large as it was for More Developed Countries (8). For Least Developed Countries, the Infant Mortality Rate is 17 times as high as it is for More Developed Countries. Also, while both LDCs and MDCs made dramatic reductions in infant mortality rates, reductions among less developed countries are much less than are reductions among the more developed countries, on average.

As illustrated in Figure I, infant mortality is strongly proportional to decreasing per capita GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

My response to this is that it is not the excellent medical care women receive in MDC’s or the improvement in medical standards in the last 50 years that has lead to a lower infant mortality rates, rather it is the access to nourishing foods, safe and clean water supplies, sanitary living conditions, and reliable information on the best ways to care for oneself during the prenatal period, with access to those conditions being highest in the MDC's. Ironically, the United States, arguably the Most Developed Country, with its epidemically high rate of epidural and cesarean section and almost universal reliance on hospital birth and the use of MD’s as primary maternity caregivers ranks behind 42 other MDC’s for its infant mortality rate. Yes, you read that right. The United States of America ranks 43rd in global infant mortality rates, which means 42 other countries in the world have better success keeping infants alive at birth.

You want to know why? Most of the rest of those countries still have a longstanding tradition of midwifery care and/or a cultural acceptance for homebirth and/or socialized medical care which takes the profits out of giving women medications and surgeries during labor and leans toward providing care that is known to have the best possible outcome, not the highest profit margin.

And while I am not prepared to cite the study right this minute because it is late and I am tired (but I will if you insist, I know it exists because I utilized it both in my midwifery training and in my undergrad research for my BA in Women’s Studies), the most comprehensive research ever done on the safety of homebirth versus hospital birth revealed evidence that not only is homebirth equally as safe, as determined by rate of neonatal and maternal mortality and morbidity, as hospital birth, but even for a “high-risk” birthing population, some evidence shows that homebirth is considered SAFER than hospital birth.

However, I must make it clear that this research proposed those statistics based on homebirth with a trained attendant, i.e. usually a midwife, because to include the spontaneous births at home in the population that did not plan unattended home births but ended up unexpectedly birthing at home without an attendant (due to “precipitous labors” or uneducated/underserved populations who did not seek care because they could not afford it and therefore, in theory, also did not have the appropriate resources for adequate nutrition or education in the prenatal period) throws the numbers out of favor for homebirth. Mind you, NO ONE has ever done a study of the outcomes of planned, unassisted homebirths in a population of informed consumers with sufficient access to adequate nutrition, prenatal education, and self-assessment tools and techniques, so we have no idea what those numbers would look like, but anecdotally, the stories are reassuring.

So to say that because poor women all over the world are still dying in greater numbers when they birth autonomously at home does not adequately support the idea that it is safer to give birth either with an attendant or in the hospital. Sorry. I stand by my story. I still believe it is our fear of and inability to accept death that leads us to cling so desperately to the idea that there is a safer or safest way to give birth in someone else’s hands and on someone else’s terms. Birth is beautiful and birth works, but like the rest of Mother Nature’s wild creation, birth refuses to be tamed and behave in a manner in which we always have control. Birth is autonomous in and of itself, and in the aftermath of facing death at birth’s gate I feel more sure than ever that I trust it as a process.

Blessed be.

Friday, November 03, 2006

birthing autonomously


I wrote this in response to a forum question that a woman posed asking if anyone on the list had had or would have an unattended or unassisted birth, meaning a homebirth without a midwife or doctor present:

If I ever have another baby, which I still pray that I will, then I plan to have an unassisted birth. My boys are 11 and almost 13 y.o. and their births were both attended by a midwife, resulting in one hospital transport and one gentle, straightforward homebirth.

I have been practicing as a lay midwife for the last 7 years and just attended my first stillbirth last month on my birthday. I had been feeling for quite some time that I was ready to quit practicing midwifery, and that most recent birth has propelled me to accept my own resignation. But you see, the reason I had been feeling that I was done practicing was not because I do not want to attend births, but simply because over and over again I felt like I had no business attending these births as the "manager" or the "expert." I believe so strongly in our bodies' ability to give birth and I also believe just as strongly in the natural cycle of birth and death, that I had begun to feel like the women whose births I was attending, the typical, american, homebirth client, the women who were already taking good care of themselves and eating well and educating themselves about pregnancy and birth and motherhood, they did not need me. I felt there was too much potential for me to disempower them. And perhaps some women wouldn't make the leap to have their babies at home without a midwife, and they feel they need that support in our crazy society that doubts them so heavily and instills them with fear, and so I am glad there are midwives out there to do that good work. But me? I am ready to let go and let birth happen on its own.

When that little girl was born dead into my hands I realized that there was nothing anyone could have done to "save" her, and I also realized that there was no need for her to be saved. It is normal for some babies to die, it is the way of the earth, it is the way of nature, it is part of the cycle of life. I began to feel that all of the prenatal testing that we do and most of our society's choices around prenatal care and birth are all rituals we have ascribed to in order to ward off death, and you know, they just don't work. No matter how hard we try to save them all, there will always be babies that die, at home, in the hospital, in utero and sometimes in our arms. And it is sad, so, so sad. No one wants to lose their child and face that grief. But for millennia human and other mammal mothers have been giving birth and losing their young, and no matter how much we intervene what you will find is that most babies survive their pregnancy and birth just fine, and there are always some who don't, but what I believe to be true is that our culture has such an abject fear of death and has vilified it so seriously that we are no longer capable of accepting the normalcy of death and taking it in stride. We act as if a lost child is the greatest of tragedies, and though it is in some ways (my miscarriage was one of the hardest challenges I have ever faced and I thank god for the safety of my living sons every day), it is also a normal part of life. It is our fear of death that has lead us to behave so irrationally about how we birth.

So, I will support my sisters and friends on their birth journeys. I love birth. I want to be there if I am needed to serve a woman and her family as they go through that life changing experience. Of course, I fully support education for all women, in particular in regard to their needs in child-bearing. Women need help learning how to care for themselves during pregnancy, what to eat, how to exercise, how to care for their changing emotional and spiritual needs, in particular because we have lost much of that wisdom that used to passed down from mother to daughter and from sister to sister before we abandoned our care into the hands of obstetricians. Women need to hear birth stories, read birth books, watch birth movies since most of us are no longer blessed with the gift of being present since childhood at the births of our siblings and our cousins and our neighbors. We need to work towards normalizing the concept of birth, and of death as a sometimes part of birth, so that more and more women will feel empowered enough to birth autonomously.

Many women who believe firmly in homebirth with a midwife in attendance will eschew the idea of birthing unattended, and most of the time it is not because they feel like they need one more person at their birth; they have partners and family and friends to hold their hands and look into their eyes and feed them sips of tea while they labor, but because they want one "expert" present at their birth. Truly for most women, they feel they need that expert there to keep them and their baby alive on the off chance they are the one in thousand or a million who will lose their baby or won't live themselves. And I would be remiss to state that there are never situations that can arise in a birth scenario that could lead to dire consequences, including death, in which a trained professional could manage to keep all parties alive, for that is true, there are situations like that. But does every woman who gives birth need to give up certain autonomies and freedoms, does every woman need to thwart what may be the natural consequence of death simply in order so that a few will be saved? I cannot answer that question for anyone but myself, but I know that I am willing to risk that myself or my child is the one that dies so that I can experience birth as authentically, naturally and spontaneously as the universe intends for me by choosing to birth of my own recognizance.

I support all women to have complete freedom to birth wherever and with whomever they choose. Blessed be.