"I come from a long line of tellers: mesemondok, old Hungarian women who tell while sitting on wooden chairs with their plastic pocketbooks on their laps, their knees apart, their skirts touching the ground ... and cuentistas, old Latina women who stand, robust of breast, hips wide, and cry out the story ranchera style. Both clans storytell in the plain voice of women who have lived blood and babies, bread and bones. For them, story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community." ~Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Childbirth happens every moment, every day, everywhere. Each of the 6 billion people on this planet has experienced birth. Each of them came from a mother who experienced birth. In the next 60 seconds, 245 babies will be born. Birth is so common as to be unnoticeable; like breathing, or sleeping or eating. Yet, ask the mother of any one of these babies to tell her own story, and you find that within this fundamentally ordinary occurrence is an epic journey, a story to rival even the best sagas of adventure, courage and love. These uncelebrated, untold birth stories are seemingly irrelevant to our society -- quaint, but not particularly useful. In fact, they are tremendously important. The very lack of these stories might be viewed as nothing less than deprivation. Do you know they story of your own birth?
The Red Tent Event is a gathering of women, sharing the stories of birth, telling the stories that made us who we are, that brought forth our children, that changed our bodies, our minds, our lives. It is an opportunity to give, to listen, to heal, to laugh, to grieve, to celebrate, to pass on what wisdom there is to be shared.
This free event will be held at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Sept. 27 at Harbor City International School, Fourth Avenue West and Michigan Street in Duluth. Each gathering will last approximately two hours. For more about the Red Tent Event, go to www.boldaction.org/redtent/index.html . For more information about Duluth's Red Tent Event, call Jana at 340-2108.
Also: Check out the second annual performance of "Birth," a critically acclaimed documentary-style play about women's birth stories, starring your favorite Duluth midwives, doulas, friends and neighbors. Find out more at www.birthingways.org .
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~Information courtesy Red Tent Event
