In the garden

The poppies and calendula are still going strong, and the Iris’s are out in full force!

During the commute

Relistening to People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks, a favorite of mine

In print

Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary, by Maddie Ballard

In the mail

Catching up on old issues of Hand Papermaking—every issue is so gorgeous!

In my bag/around my neck

It’s a month and a half now with my new Fujifilm X-S10 and I still feel like I’m just barely getting to know it.But patience and persistence pays off, and I am more frequently rewarded with photos that I am pleased with.

On my desk/altar

Corporal Writing’s Oracles deck has been a constant companion lately. This gorgeous deck is such an inspiration these days for my work and play.

In the city

Treasuring this little gem of a state park in city limits, adjacent to a community farm where my kiddo goes to outdoor school…

What does it mean, exactly, to hold space? What does good listening feel like in the body? And if we were to translate this experience into poetry, what would it sound like, in meter, verse, rhythm, and rhyme?

These questions informed the poems in this collection, which was written as the final practicum project for my training as a Certified Listener Poet, a five week course offered by The Good Listening Project. Over the course of 32 hours, our cohort delved into skills of quickly building trust through deep embodied listening, and leveraging the form and practice of poetry to forge connection and affirmation.

Although I came into this training with nearly a decade of clinical experience as a certified nurse-midwife and felt at ease in the world of holding space, what I learned in these short five weeks was nothing less than transformational. The power, beauty, and insight of deep listening–without an agenda–is not to be underestimated. Reconnecting with poetry, a form of communication that relies more on musicality and embodied rhythm than on intellect and disembodied rationality, was the most freeing experience after a decade of trying to shorten my chart notes as much as possible.

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So there are lots of selfies of my kiddo and I, or my kiddo and their Papa, but few that are true candid shots of me living my daily life. Just washing dishes, getting ready in the morning, feeding the cats, reading in my favorite chair.

And there are no pictures of me at work. The place where I spend a large chunk of my time each month, nearly 160 hours, is a place in which I have never been photographed doing my job. It’s a pity, because I think those would be beautiful photos. But HIPAA, yadda yadda. Most patients, rightly so, are focused on the mom, not the midwife catching. Sometimes a birth photographer will snap a photo of me (which, according to hospital muckity mucks, they’re not supposed to do), but I have never gotten a copy of any of those.

So the thing that is most meaningful to me outside of parenting and my marriage—midwifery—is invisible to the rest of the world. I can describe it, with limitations (again, HIPAA), but it’s not the same as the immediate visual impact of a photo.

When my friend came over this weekend to take pictures, we chatted while I worked. It was casual, my office/studio was a mess, and she was constantly tripping over piles of stuff in the tiny space. This was no Martha Stewart shoot. I wore no make up, just thew an apron on over the skirt I was wearing, and got to work doing the thing I love best these days—working with paper.

The results were stunning. I’ve never had photos taken of me like this before—deep in the flow of something I love. It was so beautiful to see what she witnessed in these photos, which is a kind of tenderness and love for working with my hands, these hands that catch babies, put in IUD’s, remove placentas, give reassuring pats on the shoulder, or mighty hip squeezes during labor.

While they don’t show me at work as a midwife, the peace and contentment you see here is exactly the same as when I’m laboring with a patient, in moment together, briefly able to set aside any concern for the past and future and just truly inhabit the present moment. This breath, this contraction, this fold.

Navie, I’m so grateful and deeply touched by these beautiful photos, which I will treasure forever.

Later this week, I’ll share a poem I wrote about the invisibility of our work as midwives, as part of my practicum for the Certified Listener Poet training I did last fall. But in the meantime, here are some of Navie’s wonderful photos.

As a girl, she was always so surprised by how little she knew of her parents’ childhoods. They just didn’t share many stories. Especially her father. But even her mother, who grew up in the very house they live in now, shared next to nothing...and she thought it so strange that should could walk through her mother’s house and know so little of what her mother’s life had been like right here, where she stood in this moment.

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The house has old bones, and stories it keeps hidden that it won’t share when I ask. My mother grew up in this house, spent her entire childhood here, only two years of her adulthood in an apartment a few miles away, but still, I know so little of this house’s life when she lived in it as a girl.

What I know are things like this:

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It happened again. I was speaking almost fluent Korean wtih my mom when I first went to her bedside.

I’ve shared before that I’ve lost most of my Korean speaking due to trauma and assimilation. It came back once briefly with a Korean patient’s family, and it came back with my mom when I saw her broken body.

It’s gone again, but pain seems to return me to my first language. It’s there somewhere.

They call it our mother tongue. That means more now than it ever has.

J.S. Park, hospital chaplain

품Poom. The space inside someone’s arms–not just the embrace, but the feeling of complete safety, acceptance, unconditional warmth. Another person’s presence as a place–somewhere you can rest. Somewhere that holds you. The emotional shelter that exists between two people, or someone and the world that receives them.

@myfirstkorea

I have not yet felt like the Korean language has offered me 품. There is no place for me to rest in this language that should be my mother tongue. It is a fascinating language, one that reveals so much of the Korean way of thinking and seeing the world--the rare use of the pronoun you (or any pronoun, for that matter), the rare use of the pronoun my, rather the use of the collective we. The way in which word order is looser and the verb comes at the end--one has to wait and hear the context before drawing a conclusion about the meaning of a sentence.

Nothing about learning Korean has come naturally. It is a grueling process. I speak Spanish far better than speak Korean. It’s been hard even to write about the process of learning Korean. This too, does not come naturally.

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The visors, the permed hair. The swift movement of gaitors being pulled up, then grabbing a knife and a plastic bag before heading out to the edge of the sea in search of miyuk. They radiate Korean. Their stance, sturdy and strong, no hesitation. Their eyes steady on the horizon.

And mine do not leav…

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We were one week away from starting our first intrapartum rotation–fancy word f…

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Every year thereafter—once I was old enough to remember—we did something special. Part of …

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Instagram and watched

a video of a veterinarian in

New York performing a wing

transplant

on a monarch butterfly.

I watched as they oh, so gently

cut a perfect wing off

a dead butterfly.

It has no nerves or blood vessels,

they said.

Tenderly, a golden adhesive

was applied to the wounded wing

of the living monarch,

held still by wires and the w…

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