This past week has been both full and somehow quite luxurious.  I realize now, as I finally sit down to check in here, that almost every day for the past several days, I have been focused on friends.  Connecting with new friends and kindred spirits on the road; visiting and talking with friends from lifetimes ago; loving Mama friends while they get ready to birth their babies; absorbing sage advice and care from a mentor and teacher who has been with me for, well, my entire adult life; missing the friends I haven’t seen in a while.  Birthday parties and impromptu get-togethers.  Snowstorms, but also the twinges of a shift towards the light after a long (and continuing!) winter in New Brunswick.

I have been feeling both focused and expectant.  I am making some incredible headway with current projects, but I am also feeling called–in several ways–by birth and birth work.  I am still trying to figure out how to translate what I have learned about birth and power and independence in a way that might be more accessible to women who  are fearful.  And I am feeling strangely calm about a birth I may be attending soon, in hospital, as I focus on the love I have for my friend and her baby, and the hope that I will be able to offer some measure of protection and guidance in that mad world.

Yes, I did write about doulas in the hospital.  Contradictions ever-present.  Then again, I am just a friend.

And all the while I have been putting in many hours of desk-work at the dining room table, Felix nursing away, while the kids build towers under foot.  When the squabbling and general din becomes too much, I whip out the watercolours and set the kids up with their art-making beside me at the table, or I take a break to read another book from the library stack.  And sometimes I kick everyone outside with Lee, although lately, it is really much too cold for our usual long expeditions.  The world will open up soon, and we will be out in the studio again, and cutting wood for our next firing.  We are all looking forward to that kind of work once more.

As you can see, Felix is bonny beyond belief, and somehow we all just fall deeper in love with him each day.  Horus refers to him as “my boy”, and Treva calls him “My Baby”, and for the past several months, whenever Treva falls or bangs herself up (which happens with some regularity, poor sweetheart, she’s at that age),  she rushes over, tears in her eyes, and says “I just have to touch Felix” as though his softness and sweetness and tender joyfulness are medicinal, which they absolutely are, without a doubt.