time makes you bolder

even children get older, and i'm gettin' older too.

If a picture can tell a thousand words, this one could tell a thousand stories, and even then only begin to start to tell the saga of my 30 years of mothering.

That's Isaac on the left, it was just about this time 29 years ago that I was an 18 year old student at New College in Sarasota, studying philosophy and set theory. It all changed in one bright instant along the Tamiami Trail. I walked through a doorway, wandered down the aisles of The Granary and saw the cover of Spiritual Midwifery, picked it up and it flipped open to the last page. In the early 80's, that final page was an invitation for the lost gravida to come to Summertown, where a band of hippies was Out To Save The World, and to reclaim the ways of giving birth in America. I hopped a Greyhound with no money and no food except one gigantic organic carrot, with only enough money for a ticket to Chattanooga. I went to the top of Lookout Mountain, high above the Tennessee Valley, and I stuck out my thumb and hitchiked across the long width of the state of Tennessee. I slept in fields on the side of highway 64, heeded the warning to walk, not hitchike, through Pulaski, the home of the Ku Klux Clan. Out of Pulaski I got a ride all the way to Summertown. The guy wasn't going there, but got me there anyway, telling stories of Monterey Pop and Europe 72. I made it to Drakes Lane, to The Farm. Isaac was born in my tiny bedroom there not so long after, on a day that the world was One. Imagine. John Lennon had just been killed, and on Dec 14th Yoko asked that the entire world unite in a moment of silent prayer and a vision of world peace. That's the day that my baby was being born. All we are still saying, is give peace a chance. War is over, if you want it. War is over now.

Living there, living those ways, I learned about life, plugged into the switchboard of beatnik bell, dispatching the EMTs, making and autoclaving sterile packs for the midwife crew. All these years later, I still practice Spiritual Midwifery every day of my life. In a way, to the core, I'm still living on that land in Summertown, still birthin' babies in a strong, gentle, committed, woman-centered and spiritual way, still Out to Save The World. This is still my vision, still my medicine, still my dream.

Avie was born there too, in a little cabin called Dogwood Bottom, 1982. In the photo above,beside me there's an empty spot. It was this time of year in 1983, (when she was eight months old) that she was abducted by her father and raised by wolves. Since then she's been, as she is in this photo, conspicuous by her absence. For all these years. Come home, Avie, come home.

In the middle, flanked by Isaac and me, is Mark. He's an adult now too; just turned 18 this week. He's driving, and thriving, as you can see. Even being so much younger, he's traveled as many roads as any of the rest of us, already.

So many roads, so many roads.