This is a term coined by Civil Rights leader and longtime Denver activist Vincent Harding. He talks about the need for people who can help give birth to a new way, and calls us social midwives. This term captures the way I work, whether it is as a volunteer helping to give birth to a new organization, or as a doula supporting a family through labor: I listen deeply and assume that the organism in question (the piece of writing, the performance, the audience, the author, the pregnant woman, the family, the team) knows what it needs. My main role is to believe, tell uplifting stories, and hold the space for what’s to come.
In the process of listening deeply – without expectations for where the conversation will or should go – insights emerge. By not getting in the way, the careful listener can identify and illustrate those insights through reflection, storytelling, new questions, and tools. Often, by being listened to, the organism reveals itself to itself, and I don’t even need to intervene, but rather bear witness and affirm.
In everything that I do personally and professionally, it is with this spirit. I have been a teacher of elementary and middle school students, a performance artist, am currently the Assistant Director of the Palm Center, am a law student at the University of Denver, and am developing a project called the Elephant Circle to reengage the sacred role of birth, bonding, and death in our communities and protect our humanity in these threshold spaces.
[...] and peer over the top of this living and see the bigger whole. I take this as my duty as a social midwife, helping to give birth to a new way. Discernment is a tool and a [...]