Midwives who came before me, who shared the teachings with the stories of their lives and work seeded my practice. 

The textbooks studied nourished strong roots of knowing.  Most of this beginning was at Maternidad La Luz, a busy birth center in El Paso.  I steeped in hundreds of births there, witnessed many versions. 

I learned Birth by watching it and feeling it in my hands.  I learned Birth with other women, from women.  I fell in love with Birth. 

It was here that I devoured the architecture of midwifery, that which can be learned by study.  It was also here that I began to awaken to the expansive, limitless terrain that is the craft of midwifery, and that is the art I devote my life to. 

It is women and babies who teach me about the depths and breadths of midwifery. 

Each story, each version, each call to listen, witness, love, contain, usher and protect expands and refines my practice.  It is a resolute honing of skills, intuition, ferocity and grace.  It is artistry learned by opening, allowing, receiving, and collaborating with forces I cannot see, prove, command, or always understand. It is continuously growing my Faith in the ritual of Birth, in her penetrating potential to reveal and heal. It is wisdom informed by the personal and universal meeting of Self by walking my own life path: living my own feminine rites, needing my own midwife, being a woman.  It is the daily commitment and recommitment to doing the work of this life and my whole-hearted devotion to midwifery.

It is a most intimate invitation to midwife. To hear soul stories. To witness. To revel in mystery. To honor pain as sacred and Birth as truth. To hold: women in their becoming, babies as they pull their first breaths, families as they are born. To celebrate Life.

The work that I am most compelled by, is the Birth of the woman, the pieces of her remembered, her unrelenting truths, how she integrates them, how she is turned on to her Self, and to her Life. This is what interests me.  And this to me is the highest service of midwifery care.