The concept of 'time' has been my focus of reflection this week in Germany with my parents. 

What is time?

All I know is that time passes and leaves its tracks.

I have known it to pass incredibly slowly.

Like last Friday, when I was stranded on the train from Frankfurt to Mainz for an hour because the train ahead couldn't release its breaks. And just now as I am sitting on yet another train that's late. This time I am travelling to Frankfurt as I reverse engineer my journey. We are stranded again because they are fixing part of the track. Turns out leaving myself five hours to make it to my plane was good judgement (by the way, late trains used to be a phenomenon that was almost unheard of when I left Germany in 1998, now everyone is talking about how unreliable the train service is).

Those experiences of sitting on the train waiting for it to continue its journey (hoping, that it will) are contained within the entirety of my visit to my parents which, of course, went by way too fast.

My mother insists that time passes more quickly as you get older and I wonder if we are just living in faster times.

We explored both ideas for a while and didn't come up with a concrete answer. 

If you know which it is, be sure to send me a message!

I have also known for time to dissolve entirely.

When a woman travels the liminal space of birth for instance.

In my old world of registered midwifery the passing of time was marked by the pattern of the prescribed observations. Do this every 15 minutes and that every 4 hours. The so-called partograph (a tool for documenting the observations in a linear way) allowed me to see at one glance how many hours had passed.

Occasionally I had the privilege of simply being present, no partograph. When a family asked for us to omit our observations, usually at a home birth, time did not seem to exist.  When you don't observe the clock, time collapses into itself. My awareness of time was anchored only by the patterns of day and night. 

There's a bigger, more general sense of time, too.

Hours turn into days, weeks, months, years.

Time changes you, you get older. Older in your bones and in your skin. For me this has meant more connection to myself and to source. On the physical plane of my life, I have always felt that I step onto the stage with the other protagonists and the play unfolds. The biggest changes often happen in the blink of an eye. Every single encounter impacts, some leave a mark so deep that nothing can ever be the same.

As a midwife I learned that you can only show up in the world of pregnancy and birth if you are prepared to be a different person by the time you go home from your day's (or night's) work. The potential impact of walking this path with families on your own life is massive. 

There's joy and there's grief.

Outside of midwifery and birth work I can see clearly the moments that have shaped my life so far.

Like travelling to Ireland the year after my 24th birthday and the moment I met Gerald.

Like getting pregnant and the moment I gave birth. 

Here I am with my mum celebrating my birthday the year I left Germany.

Pressing 'submit' on my NMC de-registration form was another significant moment.

In many ways the seed for this decision was planted when I was about ten years old. I was cleaning the spokes of my bicycle wheels one hot summer morning finding refuge from the heat in the cool hallway of my gran’s council flat. The repetitive motion of polishing one spoke at a time with my terry cloth and metal polish had been deeply meditative (though then I would have called it boring!). I remember looking up from the spokes into a ray of sunlight streaming in from the doorway. Suddenly I had an insight way beyond anything I could have concluded by simply thinking the thoughts of a ten year old.

A direct download from the universe as I see it.

I realised that every single thing I thought I knew, had been taught to me by an adult who believed it to be true. My parents, my gran, a teacher; my older cousins even who were in their teens then and who seemed so grown up to me. When I had this realisation I wondered in particular if 'Speed' really did equal 'Distance' over 'Time' and in questioning this I understood that every single institution that offered structure to society was simply made up; that there was a universally accepted foundation to every single school of thought that may or may not be true. I decided then that I wouldn't ever blindly trust any authority without first testing if I believed their doctrine to be true, regardless of the consequences (on occasion it takes me a while to get to the bottom of it, like with my journey of conscious uncoupling from registered midwifery).

Naturally, when I came across these words by Gerald Massey a few years later, in my late teens, they resonated with me from the moment I read them. 

“They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority.”

I was reminded of those words during a meditation the day I decided to leave the NMC, but there's an elaboration I need to make before telling you how.

In the year leading up to my 24th birthday I was living right around the corner from a small forest and at the entrance to this forest there’s a meadow and on it there’s my favourite tree.  I used to sit with my back against this tree to relax, usually at sunset. I know the meadow as it moves through the seasons, the golden long grasses in the summer and the frost covered short blades of green in the autumn and winter.

Here I am sitting with my tree yesterday.

Directly opposite my tree there’s another tree that I used to stare at (through my yoga teacher training I realised that I was actually doing yoga nidra without knowing it). Yesterday I went for a morning walk with my dad in search for my tree. Turns out the one directly opposite mine is my dad's favourite tree, isn't that beautiful?

Here's my dad by his tree taking a picture of me at my tree.

I am telling you about my tree, because I had an encounter with it from about a thousand miles away at a beautiful gathering at the Killyman Rectory in County Tyrone. It was on July 16th of this year. There was a shamanic journey on offer as part of the events of the day. A shamanic journey is a type of meditation and this one was facilitated by a beautiful young couple. The atmosphere was very special that day. The people, the setting, the weather, the general vibe of the day, everything was just perfect. Before we were guided into the meditation with the beat of a drum, we were asked to find a total stranger, look them straight in the eye and tell them what was holding us back. For me, immediately, though not out of nowhere, the answer came:

'My regulator, the NMC!'

I explained to my beautiful stranger that the NMC was keeping me from showing up as myself both in my business and as a midwife.

Then came the instruction to get into a comfortable position and imagine that we were travelling into the underworld (signifying our subconscious mind) to find an answer to how we could get unstuck. Imagining a tree trunk and following it down all the way to its roots might help.

The drumming started. 

I decided to meditate sitting up and imagined leaning against my tree. 

VRRROOOMMMMM - I slid right down my tree and into my meditation with the first few beats of the drum. 

I walked past the roots and onto a big meadow and I saw a woman with long grey hair. As I walked towards her, I realised it was me and as I approached further I saw that this wise old version of me held up a scroll. As she let the scroll roll open I saw a word written down the length of it:

T

R

U

T

H

The rest of the meditation was just as mystical and special but this part is the part that reminded me of my roots, of the day with the bicycle spokes and of the Gerald Massey quote. I came out knowing what I had to do and I filled in the paperwork the next morning.

Truth!

In many ways this trip to Germany has felt like coming full circle. This trip is the first trip I am taking as a consciously uncoupled midwife. I was brought back to my 24 year old self through the events of this year and it feels strangely symmetrical that my my own daughter turned 24 just a few weeks ago. Time has left its tracks in my bones and on my skin but I feel more like myself than ever. Last week at my parents' house and meeting some of the people that have been important to me for all or most of my lifetime has been such a gift. 

Lena and I did the photo thing! We were laughing at how 'spontaneous' it felt (not!!!). 

It occurs to me that I'll be waking up in my own bed in Belfast tomorrow morning (though I'll be calling that 'yesterday' by the time my blog is published on Saturday morning at 8am).

It also occurs to me that I should tell you that after almost forty years of deliberation I still have not come up with a way to describe 'Speed' any differently. Though, having had the privilege of experiencing births without measuring its speed (centimetres of cervical dilatation - 'distance' - over time)  I feel strongly that we must revise our commonly accepted protocols and desist the practice of routinely measuring distance in labour so that 'time' can collapse for birth to unfold freely. 

Are you in?