Hydrotherapy (water savior) relief for the low back/pelvic bowl/myofascia. Splashing, wrapping itself around while you wrap yourself around every contraction. I think about playing in water as a child, its magnitude/scale often overwhelming me (river, waterfall, ocean). There is a reason we call them waves, the contracting uterine muscle pushing through and down, retracting away for a break. We breathe like waves (inhaling grace and exhaling adoration)..

Truly, madly, deeply - the mania of losing my first home, trying to find some way back. Somersaulting, tying knots, searching for meaning, searching for place. The jelly of umbilical cord that keeps me tethered, sliding closer to home, then further away. Attachment to place, placental attachment.

A true knot changed my life, the apex of maidenhood bound in the looping of my son's cord, coming together, coming home?

How do we hold visual space during birth, what does that even mean? I think about all the images I do not take, the millions of moments when my gaze is enough and my memory is enough and I witness the contraction, to let the image imprint on my mind alone. Then there are the photos I do decide to take, imprinted on both psyche and a translucent film negative, my interpretation of that fleeting moment. Holding this visual space, knowing the difference between the right time to capture and the right time to see without obstruction, trusting that the mental images are as important as the physical. When I think about bringing my artistic eye to birth, I think about my eyes witnessing birth and the profound responsibility of holding those memories. Light etched on a film negative, birth etched on my soul. It means that holding visual space during birth is holding the photographs themselves, and being transformed by them.

Sacred cesarean, birthing from your belly, in two worlds at the same time - skin to skin with your baby and layer by layer with your surgeon. Opening and closing womb, opening and closing hands and mouth and eyes and portals.

Doula, doing less, doing more, doing nothing, holding space, holding images in my imagination, in dreams at night, phone tucked under my pillow like a talisman, all fingers reaching across the pool, my memory of that first birth, twelve years ago during a new moon when I believed in a god, before birthwork brought me low and high and my faith was placed in the unknown, the uncertainty and the ceremony of being born.

Gentle trimester, come and gone, like a comet. My celestial body is orbiting around other people’s births. Photographing this pregnancy is like trying to photograph the sun/the moon, an impossible feat. My gaze can’t rest too long on that bright burning light, surface of a faceless moon, this waxing body. “Earth mama” trope never resonated with me - I feel like I’m exploring deep space, growing an orb, holding a globe in my belly, looking down from the dark wondering who you are…

My atheistic/aesthetic associations are these: my son in my arms, a sculpture of Mary cradling Jesus after his crucifixion, the drape of my robe when I lift it to breastfeed, blood in the manger, my hands and Madonna’s hands in a prayer at night, in a grieving gesture, in the garden, in the dark, a movement from private to public, throwing everything together. “Mary, who has just given birth, gathers scattered revelations—the angelic announcement, cousin Elizabeth’s words, Simeon’s prophecy—and throws them together within her heart. This inward symballō sets the pattern for devotional meditation.”

Searching for the uncanny family, exploring a feeling of lore, tension and relief existing within the maelstrom of home and land and lineage, interwoven together, held down by fleeting photographs, an heirloom feeling, a quilting point. I bring feeble vocabulary to the family image, remembering that we are born into language, creating scaffolding for our psyche with words, familiar and unfamiliar, repressed and suppressed, the uncanny. What can the family photograph reveal to me by way of unconscious slips, bungled actions, psychic dreams? I ask myself questions while I'm asking you questions to repeat back to you what you said. Mirroring camera, mirroring gaze.

Her arms receiving her baby and his arms supporting her body and their midwife’s arms reaching out for a warm receiving blanket to gently contain the moment, after the powerful rush/high of a speedy labor and delivery.

Operating room as portal, a limbo place that when gently tread can guide us into transcendental moments, divine visions, ecstatic revelations. What do phenomena such as these teach me about birth? That in moments of surrender, the sacred cesarean is performed and our children are born. I remain open to the possibility that arriving this way, bathed in light and surrounded by shadows, is liturgical surgery and the sterile birth is not devoid of love and warmth and spiritual rite. To enter the world through the portal of the belly or the valley of the bowl is to begin your life in harmony with humanity, the chorus of humans circling around this open window, reaching into your belly home and bringing your body above the deep.

Searching for the uncanny family, the familiar unknown, unconscious slips that ask and answer the question, Who will I be on the other side of this, what will time reveal? It appears like a phantom, these memory moments connecting a past ancestral lineage of being born and the coming lineage of giving birth, with opportunity in the middle-now to dream up a vision for both. The quilting point of gestation, its crux, its arc, its narrative is folded into a pocket of time that stretches taut, like belly skin, like a pelvic valley, containing the story of what has occurred and what comes next, both an uncanny memory.

The testimony of birth, the deliverance, the delivery, the witness and conversion into something new, into something being born, someone coming into the world, head and hands and shoulders and everything, slippery testimony.

Photographing family, grasping for the dyad between baby and parent without dissolving or divulging too much. Postpartum, slipping between fingers, grainy shadows of that first year, the first everything, gray matter returns but not fully, gray area and gray hairs. Parenting is in the shadow, in the shower, in the dark, always searching for the edge of a solid corner, finding something abstract and sublime instead.

Sacred cesarean, layers of tissue and fascia, layers of light and drape, layers of meaning like a prophecy or a dream. The labyrinth of birth winds us through the operating room, an unconscious cord, umbilical thread connecting past and present. The spellbinding magic of cesarean birth rests in the belief that to receive care is to be in collaboration with the unknowableness of birthing, the mysticism of surgery and the thinning veil between here and there, belly and spirit and cord.

The mysticism of repeat clients, witnessing family evolve and grow, seeing a birth story shapeshift, each birth unfolding uniquely while also flowing from the previous birth, like water, like waves, like a spiral, like the contractions that brought her children here, circles and waves of water. It stirs in me something that feels like a prayer or an offering of food to the altar of repeating patterns and familial love. With every repeat client I’m sinking more and more into ceremony.

Sacred birth, c-section birth, surgical birth, spiritual birth. Through the portal of the belly, seven layers of tissue, a sanctified number. These births are not always part of the plan - instead a surprise, like waiting until this moment to learn that you have a daughter. My respect, my adoration, for those who belly birth increases with every cesarean I see. The powerful sacrifice of surrender to surgery, to anesthesia, to pivot from desired plans - is nothing short of supernatural.

Moving through water, moving through an asymmetrical set of positions the pelvic bones are craving. When I remember this birth, I remember movement and the hours of position changes - in the bath, on the ball, in bed, in the shower, on the bathroom floor in her partner’s arms. Movement, moving through time/space, contending with it. “Laboring” is the word we use to describe this experience, a word that shares roots with collaboration, a labor of love.

What is birth photography? A documentation of course, but is it also family photography? The event of birth yes of course, but also the eldest son greeting the newest, the middlechild still asleep. Searching for family memory within an archetype of my own birth, my brother there, witnessing. This genre bending makes it impossible to view family photography the same without asking myself, "Where is the blood, where is the bond, the afterbirth and the ceremonial cutting of cords?"

Surprise (!) occiput posterior presentation at this beautiful birth. Sunny side up, face towards the sky, molding a tender head to make the journey possible. Plates of her skull still soft, not yet fused together to better adapt to the shape of the pelvic bowl. We exclaimed when we saw her face - forehead, eyelids, nose, lips - until finally she was through. During the golden hours, I admired the impressive form of her head and marveled (again) at the art of birthing.

Sacred cesarean. The translucent/dreamlike moment when seeing your baby for the first time sends a blue wave of oxytocin through the room, while your baby screams pink and those fluorescent lights cast a glow across the landscape of your body which sacrificed everything to get here. The cord pulses and blue hands support this transition unfolding before us, palpable. Seeing through to them, to the other side, between worlds.

Placenta lore, a sense of place or attachment to a place that begins long before being born, before home or the loss of home that is felt deep in the belly, deep in the soul.

I wonder about the longing for somewhere to belong, a search for the lost placenta or yearning for the buried one, gone from us, the afterbirth. Placental detachment, attachment to place.

Donate, consume, bloom, burn. The histories of home-wound begin with womb-wounds from deep inside, deep in our belly. I search for a star magnolia tree, dogwood branches, uprooted laurel, something that will stretch my imagination back to that original tree, the one casting a memory shadow in my dreams.

My menstrual bleeding returned the day my son turned 6 months old, an immense shift in my postpartum body, reunion with a rhythm I’ve come to value as inherently mine. This milestone was parallel to my baby learning how to be more active and alive in his body, emotions and desires. I was estranged from this cyclical schedule for sixteen months completely surrendered to the cycle of my child from the day I conceived. His rhythm is my rhythm, day and night 24/7 but now something entirely my own has possessed my body/soul once more. The weeks leading up to my period felt like it was summoned by me, this idea of an imminent arrival was on my mind everyday, anticipation not unlike being a young girl and waiting for that first bleed.

Birth! The resounding “You did it!” booming throughout the room, my lungs, the universe. Three words to scratch the surface layer of praise for something impossible, something that just occurred on the bedroom floor on a layer of plastic protecting the carpet. “You did it!” really means IT! The ultimate “it” of growing her from scratch, itching through pregnancy, squatting down minutes after the surface of your amniotic sack broke open and fluid sent you rushing into the room where the pressure of her body brought you low - then blood, crying, you did it. Later I’ll notice a thin layer of blood on your hands leftover from bringing her up to your chest. It reads like an amulet, protective prayer on the surface of your skin and I remember the miniature evil eye around your neck.

Cosmic forces brought me to this final phase of pregnancy, not cosmic like God or The Universe but cosmic like a meteor shower, a supernova or zero gravity. My womb spun through time and space to bring him here, my son, my only child. He was so easy to find in the end, easy to feel, easy to capture, easy to birth because he was breech (a “variation of normal but also less than 4%”). The silver outline of his head would glow on the ultrasound screen, contrast like a solar eclipse.

Where to begin? At the beginning, but how to quantify the beginning of something that started long before a spinal, the feeling of falling, arms outstretched, surrender to a surgeon, an artist, first contact with abdominal skin, incisions.

Layers of fascia representing layers of time like lines on a tree, deeper and deeper through time, through muscle, through me completely until I'm empty from the belly but full in my breast and looking through that veil at the beginning, looping into the middle, looping to the end with careful needle work, threading time, circle and line, leaving a scar where my soul was before.

My birth team, my tools for interpretation, my mystical gateway to the liminal world of capturing birth on film which is so much more than just etched light. Imprinting these memories forever with a simple tool (or six) is my life's calling. I'm having conversations with other doulas and birth workers, about holding visual space for clients through this medium by folding it into our care work. I'm having conversations with my fellow photographers about how to take care and to advocate while capturing birth. Worlds merging, my two worlds blending together, liminal space where everything overlaps and doulas are artists and artists doulas, because what's the difference?

The Madonna as a Rorschach test - associations triggered by visual symbolism. I remember a verse from the book of Luke, “Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” Afterbirth, her contemplative prayer, her reply to the angelic news that the son in her arms is the son of the world. Pondered (4820) in the Strong’s concordance, is a word that “portrays the act of throwing together minds, plans, or persons so something new results—reflection, counsel, partnership, confrontation. Across its six New Testament appearances the word traces a movement from private meditation to public mission. Internal reflection that connects separate facts into coherent ideas.”

Receiving relief in the form of an epidural, receiving that small needle in the open spinal space where a gloved hand gently presses, receiving small drops of the liquid medication (miracle) as the waves feel lighter and an inward calm washes over the room. In the hours that follow there is sleep (hopefully) and pillows/peanut balls between legs to help encourage the pelvis to open in the right spot for baby to continue their descent(inlet/midpelvis/outlet). I think about the details of this scene - nitrous oxide to help stay still, holding hands with your partner, a blood pressure cuff squeezing back. I think about all that came before the decision to receive an epidural and all that followed, saying a small thank you for this tool and its support when chosen with intent. Receiving relief, receiving rest, receiving care. My love letter to the epidural is a conditional love of course but when this relief is enlisted intentionally, it’s like magic.

Birthing of the placenta, the final stage of labor, the last push into postpartum. The afterbirth, the tug and cough and fundal press. “No bones, don’t worry!” I’ve heard so many providers say. No bones, but still, a birthing.

Created from impulse and necessity, I act on these possessed moments during daily life and I shoot, a domestic reaction to something spiritually occurring, pagan rituals in our home among the mundane routine of caretaking.Since my son started crawling and my body started bleeding, we've shapeshifted into a different dynamic. The parent/baby dyad has changed, dissolved, and we are slowly growing into two separated entities, crawling into individuation. Everything is still milk stained, but now I can smell the milk on his breath, cloyingly sweet, whereas I was immune to it before because it was our smell, our sweet, our cloy, asleep together in the dark.

Skin to skin in the operating room, on the operating table where they pulled her from deep within and you pulled from deep within. Rooting and sucking, cuing to us that she is ready to latch and stimulate that golden hour golden colostrum from deep within. The fluorescent lights, my camera flash, create a glow and illuminate the moment. This birth pause is an opportunity to let past/present/future self settle back into the bed, the pool, the operating table.

Holga magic, sacred cesarean, my own belly birth anniversary around the corner, around that sterile drape, the blue and blur speeding me towards spring in the operating theatre, a holy procession, liturgical surgeons wearing medical blue. I'm surrounded by blue and every new thing, pushing up from below, from the depths, from the belly of the world, bulb flowers, perennial symbols casting their lights across my face, my hands, my baby. Operating table, warming table, altar and womb. Everything glows when I close my eyes and remember.

Placenta lore, a forgotten story of first home, the afterbirth, the wildcard. Do I remember ruby red dreaming, eyelids opening and closing, a source of life ("the tree of life") pulsing and looking back at me? I think about blood and veins, about aged hands holding me, my placenta holding me. I think about what it's like to be born from this place into oxygen and language, into hands. My home, buried deep in the soil, in the dark. Ancestry, dying trees, cut umbilical cords, placenta lore.

Golden hour, golden milk, a golden morning after laboring through the night, through the void, through all odds, through those navy hours until the sun broke through. I wonder why it’s called the golden hour until I remember all of the blue ones it took to get here, the spectrum and the color, that transitional place between dark and daybreak. Watching this moment between two beings mirror that moment in light feels like witnessing something transcendental (the sublime).

Placenta magic, replaying this moment in my mind over and over because the room was aglow with a luminous celebration of her birth/afterbirth. Midwife held it by the amniotic sack with her gloved hand to demonstrate its strength, my client then touched it with her bare hands. A returning home, turning your baby’s home into capsules. This is time travel for me, remembering my (original) home, seeing this red time capsule lit up by the bedroom skylight.

Hydrotherapy (water savior) relief for the low back/pelvic bowl/myofascia. Splashing, wrapping itself around while you wrap yourself around every contraction. I think about playing in water as a child, its magnitude/scale often overwhelming me (river, waterfall, ocean). There is a reason we call them waves, the contracting uterine muscle pushing through and down, retracting away for a break. We breathe like waves (inhaling grace and exhaling adoration)..

Truly, madly, deeply - the mania of losing my first home, trying to find some way back. Somersaulting, tying knots, searching for meaning, searching for place. The jelly of umbilical cord that keeps me tethered, sliding closer to home, then further away. Attachment to place, placental attachment.

A true knot changed my life, the apex of maidenhood bound in the looping of my son's cord, coming together, coming home?

How do we hold visual space during birth, what does that even mean? I think about all the images I do not take, the millions of moments when my gaze is enough and my memory is enough and I witness the contraction, to let the image imprint on my mind alone. Then there are the photos I do decide to take, imprinted on both psyche and a translucent film negative, my interpretation of that fleeting moment. Holding this visual space, knowing the difference between the right time to capture and the right time to see without obstruction, trusting that the mental images are as important as the physical. When I think about bringing my artistic eye to birth, I think about my eyes witnessing birth and the profound responsibility of holding those memories. Light etched on a film negative, birth etched on my soul. It means that holding visual space during birth is holding the photographs themselves, and being transformed by them.

Sacred cesarean, birthing from your belly, in two worlds at the same time - skin to skin with your baby and layer by layer with your surgeon. Opening and closing womb, opening and closing hands and mouth and eyes and portals.

Doula, doing less, doing more, doing nothing, holding space, holding images in my imagination, in dreams at night, phone tucked under my pillow like a talisman, all fingers reaching across the pool, my memory of that first birth, twelve years ago during a new moon when I believed in a god, before birthwork brought me low and high and my faith was placed in the unknown, the uncertainty and the ceremony of being born.

Gentle trimester, come and gone, like a comet. My celestial body is orbiting around other people’s births. Photographing this pregnancy is like trying to photograph the sun/the moon, an impossible feat. My gaze can’t rest too long on that bright burning light, surface of a faceless moon, this waxing body. “Earth mama” trope never resonated with me - I feel like I’m exploring deep space, growing an orb, holding a globe in my belly, looking down from the dark wondering who you are…

My atheistic/aesthetic associations are these: my son in my arms, a sculpture of Mary cradling Jesus after his crucifixion, the drape of my robe when I lift it to breastfeed, blood in the manger, my hands and Madonna’s hands in a prayer at night, in a grieving gesture, in the garden, in the dark, a movement from private to public, throwing everything together. “Mary, who has just given birth, gathers scattered revelations—the angelic announcement, cousin Elizabeth’s words, Simeon’s prophecy—and throws them together within her heart. This inward symballō sets the pattern for devotional meditation.”

Searching for the uncanny family, exploring a feeling of lore, tension and relief existing within the maelstrom of home and land and lineage, interwoven together, held down by fleeting photographs, an heirloom feeling, a quilting point. I bring feeble vocabulary to the family image, remembering that we are born into language, creating scaffolding for our psyche with words, familiar and unfamiliar, repressed and suppressed, the uncanny. What can the family photograph reveal to me by way of unconscious slips, bungled actions, psychic dreams? I ask myself questions while I'm asking you questions to repeat back to you what you said. Mirroring camera, mirroring gaze.

Her arms receiving her baby and his arms supporting her body and their midwife’s arms reaching out for a warm receiving blanket to gently contain the moment, after the powerful rush/high of a speedy labor and delivery.

Operating room as portal, a limbo place that when gently tread can guide us into transcendental moments, divine visions, ecstatic revelations. What do phenomena such as these teach me about birth? That in moments of surrender, the sacred cesarean is performed and our children are born. I remain open to the possibility that arriving this way, bathed in light and surrounded by shadows, is liturgical surgery and the sterile birth is not devoid of love and warmth and spiritual rite. To enter the world through the portal of the belly or the valley of the bowl is to begin your life in harmony with humanity, the chorus of humans circling around this open window, reaching into your belly home and bringing your body above the deep.

Searching for the uncanny family, the familiar unknown, unconscious slips that ask and answer the question, Who will I be on the other side of this, what will time reveal? It appears like a phantom, these memory moments connecting a past ancestral lineage of being born and the coming lineage of giving birth, with opportunity in the middle-now to dream up a vision for both. The quilting point of gestation, its crux, its arc, its narrative is folded into a pocket of time that stretches taut, like belly skin, like a pelvic valley, containing the story of what has occurred and what comes next, both an uncanny memory.

The testimony of birth, the deliverance, the delivery, the witness and conversion into something new, into something being born, someone coming into the world, head and hands and shoulders and everything, slippery testimony.

Photographing family, grasping for the dyad between baby and parent without dissolving or divulging too much. Postpartum, slipping between fingers, grainy shadows of that first year, the first everything, gray matter returns but not fully, gray area and gray hairs. Parenting is in the shadow, in the shower, in the dark, always searching for the edge of a solid corner, finding something abstract and sublime instead.

Sacred cesarean, layers of tissue and fascia, layers of light and drape, layers of meaning like a prophecy or a dream. The labyrinth of birth winds us through the operating room, an unconscious cord, umbilical thread connecting past and present. The spellbinding magic of cesarean birth rests in the belief that to receive care is to be in collaboration with the unknowableness of birthing, the mysticism of surgery and the thinning veil between here and there, belly and spirit and cord.

The mysticism of repeat clients, witnessing family evolve and grow, seeing a birth story shapeshift, each birth unfolding uniquely while also flowing from the previous birth, like water, like waves, like a spiral, like the contractions that brought her children here, circles and waves of water. It stirs in me something that feels like a prayer or an offering of food to the altar of repeating patterns and familial love. With every repeat client I’m sinking more and more into ceremony.

Sacred birth, c-section birth, surgical birth, spiritual birth. Through the portal of the belly, seven layers of tissue, a sanctified number. These births are not always part of the plan - instead a surprise, like waiting until this moment to learn that you have a daughter. My respect, my adoration, for those who belly birth increases with every cesarean I see. The powerful sacrifice of surrender to surgery, to anesthesia, to pivot from desired plans - is nothing short of supernatural.

Moving through water, moving through an asymmetrical set of positions the pelvic bones are craving. When I remember this birth, I remember movement and the hours of position changes - in the bath, on the ball, in bed, in the shower, on the bathroom floor in her partner’s arms. Movement, moving through time/space, contending with it. “Laboring” is the word we use to describe this experience, a word that shares roots with collaboration, a labor of love.

What is birth photography? A documentation of course, but is it also family photography? The event of birth yes of course, but also the eldest son greeting the newest, the middlechild still asleep. Searching for family memory within an archetype of my own birth, my brother there, witnessing. This genre bending makes it impossible to view family photography the same without asking myself, "Where is the blood, where is the bond, the afterbirth and the ceremonial cutting of cords?"

Surprise (!) occiput posterior presentation at this beautiful birth. Sunny side up, face towards the sky, molding a tender head to make the journey possible. Plates of her skull still soft, not yet fused together to better adapt to the shape of the pelvic bowl. We exclaimed when we saw her face - forehead, eyelids, nose, lips - until finally she was through. During the golden hours, I admired the impressive form of her head and marveled (again) at the art of birthing.

Sacred cesarean. The translucent/dreamlike moment when seeing your baby for the first time sends a blue wave of oxytocin through the room, while your baby screams pink and those fluorescent lights cast a glow across the landscape of your body which sacrificed everything to get here. The cord pulses and blue hands support this transition unfolding before us, palpable. Seeing through to them, to the other side, between worlds.

Placenta lore, a sense of place or attachment to a place that begins long before being born, before home or the loss of home that is felt deep in the belly, deep in the soul.

I wonder about the longing for somewhere to belong, a search for the lost placenta or yearning for the buried one, gone from us, the afterbirth. Placental detachment, attachment to place.

Donate, consume, bloom, burn. The histories of home-wound begin with womb-wounds from deep inside, deep in our belly. I search for a star magnolia tree, dogwood branches, uprooted laurel, something that will stretch my imagination back to that original tree, the one casting a memory shadow in my dreams.

My menstrual bleeding returned the day my son turned 6 months old, an immense shift in my postpartum body, reunion with a rhythm I’ve come to value as inherently mine. This milestone was parallel to my baby learning how to be more active and alive in his body, emotions and desires. I was estranged from this cyclical schedule for sixteen months completely surrendered to the cycle of my child from the day I conceived. His rhythm is my rhythm, day and night 24/7 but now something entirely my own has possessed my body/soul once more. The weeks leading up to my period felt like it was summoned by me, this idea of an imminent arrival was on my mind everyday, anticipation not unlike being a young girl and waiting for that first bleed.

Birth! The resounding “You did it!” booming throughout the room, my lungs, the universe. Three words to scratch the surface layer of praise for something impossible, something that just occurred on the bedroom floor on a layer of plastic protecting the carpet. “You did it!” really means IT! The ultimate “it” of growing her from scratch, itching through pregnancy, squatting down minutes after the surface of your amniotic sack broke open and fluid sent you rushing into the room where the pressure of her body brought you low - then blood, crying, you did it. Later I’ll notice a thin layer of blood on your hands leftover from bringing her up to your chest. It reads like an amulet, protective prayer on the surface of your skin and I remember the miniature evil eye around your neck.

Cosmic forces brought me to this final phase of pregnancy, not cosmic like God or The Universe but cosmic like a meteor shower, a supernova or zero gravity. My womb spun through time and space to bring him here, my son, my only child. He was so easy to find in the end, easy to feel, easy to capture, easy to birth because he was breech (a “variation of normal but also less than 4%”). The silver outline of his head would glow on the ultrasound screen, contrast like a solar eclipse.

Where to begin? At the beginning, but how to quantify the beginning of something that started long before a spinal, the feeling of falling, arms outstretched, surrender to a surgeon, an artist, first contact with abdominal skin, incisions.

Layers of fascia representing layers of time like lines on a tree, deeper and deeper through time, through muscle, through me completely until I'm empty from the belly but full in my breast and looking through that veil at the beginning, looping into the middle, looping to the end with careful needle work, threading time, circle and line, leaving a scar where my soul was before.

My birth team, my tools for interpretation, my mystical gateway to the liminal world of capturing birth on film which is so much more than just etched light. Imprinting these memories forever with a simple tool (or six) is my life's calling. I'm having conversations with other doulas and birth workers, about holding visual space for clients through this medium by folding it into our care work. I'm having conversations with my fellow photographers about how to take care and to advocate while capturing birth. Worlds merging, my two worlds blending together, liminal space where everything overlaps and doulas are artists and artists doulas, because what's the difference?

The Madonna as a Rorschach test - associations triggered by visual symbolism. I remember a verse from the book of Luke, “Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” Afterbirth, her contemplative prayer, her reply to the angelic news that the son in her arms is the son of the world. Pondered (4820) in the Strong’s concordance, is a word that “portrays the act of throwing together minds, plans, or persons so something new results—reflection, counsel, partnership, confrontation. Across its six New Testament appearances the word traces a movement from private meditation to public mission. Internal reflection that connects separate facts into coherent ideas.”

Receiving relief in the form of an epidural, receiving that small needle in the open spinal space where a gloved hand gently presses, receiving small drops of the liquid medication (miracle) as the waves feel lighter and an inward calm washes over the room. In the hours that follow there is sleep (hopefully) and pillows/peanut balls between legs to help encourage the pelvis to open in the right spot for baby to continue their descent(inlet/midpelvis/outlet). I think about the details of this scene - nitrous oxide to help stay still, holding hands with your partner, a blood pressure cuff squeezing back. I think about all that came before the decision to receive an epidural and all that followed, saying a small thank you for this tool and its support when chosen with intent. Receiving relief, receiving rest, receiving care. My love letter to the epidural is a conditional love of course but when this relief is enlisted intentionally, it’s like magic.

Birthing of the placenta, the final stage of labor, the last push into postpartum. The afterbirth, the tug and cough and fundal press. “No bones, don’t worry!” I’ve heard so many providers say. No bones, but still, a birthing.

Created from impulse and necessity, I act on these possessed moments during daily life and I shoot, a domestic reaction to something spiritually occurring, pagan rituals in our home among the mundane routine of caretaking.Since my son started crawling and my body started bleeding, we've shapeshifted into a different dynamic. The parent/baby dyad has changed, dissolved, and we are slowly growing into two separated entities, crawling into individuation. Everything is still milk stained, but now I can smell the milk on his breath, cloyingly sweet, whereas I was immune to it before because it was our smell, our sweet, our cloy, asleep together in the dark.

Skin to skin in the operating room, on the operating table where they pulled her from deep within and you pulled from deep within. Rooting and sucking, cuing to us that she is ready to latch and stimulate that golden hour golden colostrum from deep within. The fluorescent lights, my camera flash, create a glow and illuminate the moment. This birth pause is an opportunity to let past/present/future self settle back into the bed, the pool, the operating table.

Holga magic, sacred cesarean, my own belly birth anniversary around the corner, around that sterile drape, the blue and blur speeding me towards spring in the operating theatre, a holy procession, liturgical surgeons wearing medical blue. I'm surrounded by blue and every new thing, pushing up from below, from the depths, from the belly of the world, bulb flowers, perennial symbols casting their lights across my face, my hands, my baby. Operating table, warming table, altar and womb. Everything glows when I close my eyes and remember.

Placenta lore, a forgotten story of first home, the afterbirth, the wildcard. Do I remember ruby red dreaming, eyelids opening and closing, a source of life ("the tree of life") pulsing and looking back at me? I think about blood and veins, about aged hands holding me, my placenta holding me. I think about what it's like to be born from this place into oxygen and language, into hands. My home, buried deep in the soil, in the dark. Ancestry, dying trees, cut umbilical cords, placenta lore.

Golden hour, golden milk, a golden morning after laboring through the night, through the void, through all odds, through those navy hours until the sun broke through. I wonder why it’s called the golden hour until I remember all of the blue ones it took to get here, the spectrum and the color, that transitional place between dark and daybreak. Watching this moment between two beings mirror that moment in light feels like witnessing something transcendental (the sublime).

Placenta magic, replaying this moment in my mind over and over because the room was aglow with a luminous celebration of her birth/afterbirth. Midwife held it by the amniotic sack with her gloved hand to demonstrate its strength, my client then touched it with her bare hands. A returning home, turning your baby’s home into capsules. This is time travel for me, remembering my (original) home, seeing this red time capsule lit up by the bedroom skylight.