Revelation

It has been so many weeks since my last post because I have not been able to create the mindspace to discuss here the major career change on the horizon. Indeed, the core of this blog—the exploration of heart, brain, and belly—keeps me focused on those essential components of journeying through yoga, motherhood, and the unfolding of intellectual development. That beautiful confluence has inspired a spectacular leap of faith to leave my tenured professorship and embark on a study of nurse midwifery.

For many years I have wondered longingly about medicine. For more years I have been diving slowly into the depths of the body through my practice. And for more years I have been haunted by the exquisite births of my two glorious children. The memories of those extraordinary experiences flow through and around me like ghosts, and the unsettledness of those memories, I have come to realize, is a haunting of the most promising kind—a welcoming, and an invitation. Even with the extreme focus of achieving tenure—a kind of career pinnacle that in many ways is constituted by richness of expertise, the lore of academic tradition, the brightness of rigorous research, the envy of academics seeking that kind of prestige and permanence, and the mystery of what it might be to marry an institution for the rest of one's life—I have asked what seem to me to be deeper questions about love, time, happiness, faith, and a calling from beyond. Even with the slowly moving tidal wave of tenure's critique, I would only have sought to live it fully, traditionally, ethically, and with joy. But in asking these deep questions, I have come to see myself changed in the last several years.

I do not doubt that I have the process of achieving tenure to thank for this revelation. And I arrive inside of it with the keen awareness of a clear and urgent shift in my responsibility to my world. I sit faithfully in the arms of rhetorical study, especially as I witness the rhetorical distance between my intellect and the body so beautifully diminishing. Indeed, I am called to be even closer to the body, with lessening fear and increasing love, as a witness to others' experiences with age, change, birth. I am called to support and soothe, to educate, to encourage. To use my understanding of communication inside of a complex situation of woman, system, tradition, and nature. To draw from many years of political education as I enter a sphere that is fraught with a vexed history and a future that needs nurturing and shaping for the good of humankind.

I find additional faith in what I see as a particular, endearing connection between tenure and my hopes of becoming a nurse midwife. I can only assume that some part of me holds a conviction that achieving the former has been a logical, healthy, and serendipitous precursor to achieving, and thriving in, the life of the latter.