Midwifery  guides with skill and expertise,  attending and trusting women’s
abilities and strengths.  Supporting possibilities and challenges.

Human experience thrives on such wise and wholesome energy.
Again and again cultural references to the midwifery way
are in our thoughts,  words and deeds.
The metaphors are many.
Here are a few:

“The purpose of intimate partnership is for us to midwife the perfection in each other.”  Marianne Williamson.
“Democracy needs to be reborn in every generation and education is its midwife.” John Dewey.
“I want you to counsel me the way you midwife birth.” K.L.
“I am a midwife, looking for the truth.”  Socrates, whose mother Phainarete, was a midwife.

Have you been noticing midwifery metaphors too?
They’re in articles, books, conversations. Where else?

I am gathering these metaphors  to help make more public
a  cultural consciousness of midwifery.
With this  work in progress, I invite you to  share with me
the metaphors you find.
This project will benefit by your participation! Thank You!

With the grace of mysterious timing,
pregnancy ends and birth begins.
We do not understand what starts the dynamic process of labor,
yet the wisdom of two bodies, mother and babe know.

The uterus, strongest muscle in the human body, contracts with absorbing persistence.
In giving herself to the power, birthing woman opens fully, instincts accurate and ancient.
Intensity from this enormous effort stretches consciousness beyond language,
to a borderland marked by relentless emotional and physical sensations.
Doubt that she can do this mighty work,
and determination that ‘Yes’ she will, are both true.

Family and friends give comforting words of encouragement,
and touch her with love. Care providers offer their skill and expertise.
These sustain birthing woman in the
solitary work that only she can do.

Excerpt from Brought to Earth by Birth

Our first home was in the body of another. Mother Herself.

I love pondering that we are here on earth because women made space for us in their own bodies.

Becoming human in the alchemy of the womb, we abide in a magnificent abode, growing into our time to be born. Mothers make us all possible, with the awesome power of creation.

The Hebrew word for womb, rechem also means ‘compassion’; the German word for ‘hope’, hoffnung also relates to pregnancy. We are born from blessed space.

For Mother’s Day, I’m celebrating First Home of Mothers’ Splendid Space.
More than one day, it’s a lifetime celebration.
Let’s Celebrate Together!

Photographs from Brought to Earth by Birth

First Home…Body Itself

It is in our nature to be born.
Primal, personal, earthly, eternal.
Birth is the power of our own being.
“Brought to Earth by Birth”
invites you to imagine and remember.
Through poetry of photographs and
weaving of words, experience
whatever birth means to you.

Please share your birth thoughts. I would
love to hear from you!

insight@harriettehartigan.com

Women, whose passionate, epic efforts of opening fully, to birth their babies, are to me, women in perfect progress. Not perfect, as an absolute. Rather as “proficient, completely suited for a particular purpose or situation,”  The American Heritage Dictionary.

Woman’s profound and perfect progress of nurturing life within her womb for nine months, and then releasing this life into the world,…isn’t this magnificent reality?

? Share your thoughts ?

The poem is published in at our core:women writing about power

Photographs are from Brought to Earth by Birth

Brought to Earth by Birth has been gestating,
laboring and birthing within me for many years.
I’m in postpartum awe, gratitude and delight that
this book is now born!

I began photographing pregnancy, labor and birth
in 1973, because women asked. I have continued
because I want everyone to see this magnificent reality.

I invite you to hold the photographs and poetry in
your hands. Gaze and ponder the splendid nature of birth.
See the beauty. Feel the power.
Open to the mystery. Accept its grace.

Moment by moment birth resonates on our planet.
Do you feel this alive in your own being?

“Birth is the experience of a lifetime.
Giving birth and being born brings us
into the essence of creation where the
human spirit is courageous and bold and
the body, a miracle of wisdom.”

Birth blessings~~~Harriette

]]> http://harriettehartigan.com/brought-to-earth-by-birth/feed/ 1 http://harriettehartigan.com/season-of-birth/ http://harriettehartigan.com/season-of-birth/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 21:00:37 +0000 Harriette Hartigan http://harriettehartigan.com/?p=448 We are coming into the Christmas season that honors birth. Each of us has entered this world the way Jesus did, through the power of creation. Women giving birth and babies being born.

Read more on Season of Birth…

The wonder of Mona Lisa’s expression, the mystery of her private smile is older by far than Leonardo da Vinci’s well known sixteenth century painting. Her face reflects that ancient knowledge of woman pregnant with child, intimately in touch with the nature of her own body and spirit giving birth to life.

The beautiful wisdom of pregnancy and birth is woman’s heritage, passed from generation to generation of women throughout history. We are born knowing how to create the intricate matrix necessary for conception, gestation and birth. Our bodies, transformed by sacred alchemy of egg and sperm uniting, become vessels of profound form and energy. Tissues multiply, change and grow. Chemistry alters, joints soften. Within us pulses the heartbeat of another life.

Thought and feelings give fertile texture to the nine months of enormous physical and emotional sensations. In our consciousness, we integrate the presence of a new being within our own.

The instinctive insights of a baby’s readiness to be born and a woman to give birth initiate the beginning of labor. Still unknown is how this mysterious harmony starts the dynamic biological, emotional and spiritual process. Yet without own knowledge, birth begins. And the ancient wisdom of women birthing and babies being born continues as it has through the ages.

We have a tremendous amount of medical technology and intellectual information available for use in pregnancy and birth. These are supplemental resources, valuable for the low percentage of difficulties that are normal to birthing. Giving birth and being born is the healthy work of woman and baby. Complications increase as we fail to respect the inherent wisdom and nature of what we are born knowing.

Most essential to wholesome birthing is woman who knows she is entrusted with the power of the universe to bring forth life….who believes intuitively that she has the wisdom and strength within her…who trusts both her instincts and her baby’s will to be born.

Mona Lisa smiles.

Cameras do not take beautiful, poignant, awesome, humorous,
tender, wondrous, timeless, take your breath away photographs.

But people do. This means you!

Here are a few suggestions for photographing with your own insights.
Future posts will have more. Please visit again.

• Begin with the curiosity and innocence of children.
  Be the child you once were, and still are.

• See the familiar for the first time.

• Discover the new again and again.

• Experience yourself creating a photograph.

Tell me, what do you see?

Here’s More . . .
The photographer is my granddaughter
Easton Morgan getting ready to photograph
her newborn sister McKenna. I brought her this
instamatic camera from a resale shop when
I came from Ann Arbor to the Colorado
Rockies to photograph McKenna’s birth.

The mystery of her private smile compels us to wonder. We are drawn to an essence older by far than Leonardo da Vinci’s sixteenth century painting.

As I photographed Linda in 1977, early in my work with women and birth, I asked Linda to look into the lens with who she knew to be.

Linda looks out from herself with the beauty and wisdom of her pregnancy.

Sometime later I was doing a slide presentation (remember slides and film) for a childbirth class. Looking at this photograph projected on the screen, I suddenly saw Mona Lisa!

Mona Lisa was pregnant!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I proclaimed to the audience, excited and deeply certain of this new insight that also felt very old.

Linda and Mona Lisa share an exquisite expression, reflecting women’s ancient power and grace of holding life in their wombs. Women pregnant with the mystery of creation. Their graceful hands rest lightly on this mystery.

I continued speaking about Mona Lisa being pregnant in classes and presentations. My sons grew up patiently listening to me talk this talk. In 1987 I published an article, “Mona Lisa Was Pregnant.”

Recently my oldest son John who is an anthropologist, sent me an article with a note, “You were right.” High grade scans taken at the Louvre in 2004 reveal that details of the veil or shawl Mona Lisa wore in the portrait indicate it was “a garment women of the Italian Renaissance wore when they were expecting, a leading French museum researcher, Michael Menu said.” These scans are in the book “Mona Lisa: Inside the Painting” published in 2006.

I love seeing the Mona Lisa expression on faces of pregnant women.
Do you see Mona Lisa moments too?
Let me know!