Thresholds Make The World Shake

My window is filthy from driving the dusty back roads of Placerville, making rounds to see round bellies. It's cracked from various rocks and pebbles the mountain trolls hastily kicked at our speedy Midwife car, daring to dash through their territory in the hours that only mountain trolls linger in.

We wind our way through the ups and downs in the dark, and at last we come to the threshold of sunrise. Sunrise, when mountain trolls return to their caves, curl into boulders and quietly rest. Sunrise, when then dark is burned away from everywhere except to silhouette our beautiful California palm trees.

Sunrise, when the world is still hushed. When morning becomes a threshold. A place of in between. Night and day. Dark and light. Babies linger here.

Just behind the veil of maiden stretch marks across the horizon, there is a mother. She breathes and surrenders to the transition, as the dark surrenders to the sunrise. The threshold of birth. Her own sunrise lingers just below the line between here and there, sending preemptive streaks of peach and pink to the underlining of the clouds. She shakes with quakes of hormones and blessings of ancestors and we hurry just a little faster.

We hurry because we know what's next.

This place of in-between, this hush of pre-dawn, is holy. We know that babies come, not by clock or calendar, but by tide and tremble, by root and rhythm. They come by moons that are dark and storms that block out sunshine entirely. We know that the mother at the edge of herself is also at the edge of everything.

And she will never be the same. The whole world will never be the same.

We arrive with hands and hearts ready, windshield smeared with the dust of our devotion, cracked yes, but unbroken. And in the hush, in the glow, in the sacred breath between contractions, we meet her there.

Face instantly relieved that we made it. To her own threshold. To her own sunrise.

This is Midwifery. It's dusty. It's cracked. It's rushed-driveways-gravel-flying.

It's also holding space for hours more, knowing and believing she can and will.

This is ceremony. In every doorway. In every entry. In every clock that's hands continue to steadily move despite our asking it to hold still, or mercifully speed up. It doesn't work that way. It's right here. Right now. In this moment of in between. It's finding the magic in the moans, the sacred cleansing in the sweat of the brow, the forever awe of the strength and endurance that it takes.

No, it'll never get old, this magic. The privilege of being allowed at the alter. I will never take for granted what it means to cross the threshold and witness the rising of her. The moment the sun crests the horizon. That sacred second a maiden becomes a mother. The whole world shakes. Can you feel it?