WRITER, RESEARCHER, AND DOT CONNECTOR

I am at once both a gentle, compassionate healer engaging with babies (at any age) and known for rabble-rousing activism and confrontation of contradictions in systems.

I coined the word, Babykeeper, my moniker, which I define as “one who keeps the soul’s journey into this world through a woman’s body - with a man - as the focus of birth.” At birth I am present for the baby. I am the Babykeeper, a reverent, silent sacred witness.

Out in the world though, I am a fierce and outspoken activist intent on ending the abuse of the medical system that harms the newly born person and mother. And, the father, grandmother, and family.

My intention is to always be kind, and to use productive, non-violent communication to create space to talk deeply about intense subjects. They are intense because we are all very wounded in our early lives (brain!)

I love a conundrum, a puzzle to solve. I seek the truth in the middle of all of the perceptions and I am known to often say, “Both are true.” I am an avid researcher and seek to connect the dots to come to deeper understanding.

About my perspective.

In my early days of first job in counseling, I realized quickly talk-therapy was a practice in seeking that small grain of truth between or among the parties - plus all the voices in their heads! Since then I have used the piano as an image, a metaphor for how we all have perceptions of same thing, depending on our position and view - our upbringing, or what I now call our neural programming.

Imagine two people on opposite sides of the piano, and one insists they see a row of black and white keys and the others says no it is a flat back.

That is what happens all day long in every issue in our culture today.

The blue piano in this photo, arguing unrelentingly that the piano leg is either light or dark blue!

And refusing to look at or consider the other side.

We really need to stop this style of divisive, stubborn, either-or-but-never-both thinking and communication.

I learned from two great thinkers who were at odds with each other but rarely truly disagreed.

Every single day of my life my older sister and my dad argued. I was the family clown and comic relief or I stayed out it completely; a master at disassociation, thank you, birth trauma. Mostly I just listened and watched them like a fast and furious ping pong truth match and refereed in my head. Chris Cuomo (playing the role of storyteller dad) and Kelly Ann Conway (as my alternative facts sister) going at it. Law school friends and colleagues at total odds, but mostly just enjoying the fight, makes me appreciate my late dad and late sister on a soul level.

I appreciate that they were part of my soul path and wiring my early brain to see and discern the validity in all points. They created a new way of seeing that they didn’t and couldn’t see - and as the origin of myself being a human lie detector, I was both respected by and frustrating for them both.

Anyway, I spent my life as truth seeker, a thinker, and an investigator in whatever was going down. I was mostly taking in info until the 90’s and the internet happened. Then I found my voice. My blog archives of thinking, researching, synthesizing, and writing follow this section.

The Pink Piano in the Room!

Imagine a group gathered to discuss the standard upright black or wooden piano. Everyone is gathered around it - the topic. So many external variations. Then add some color and some flare - one light blue and one dark blue leg. Or a PINK PIANO. Oh, my! Who grew up with a PINK piano!

Today, in 2020, there are so many topics, all with competing and conflicting “scientific proof”. Climate change, vaccines, gender identity, and other social pink pianos in the room: the election, the Super Bowl half time show, sex trafficking, porn, the fentanyl epidemic, the impeachment process, health care, student loans, national security - all divided by left vs right, conservative vs liberal. Black and white, truth and lies, do not even exist anymore.

Those on the back side can not agree or grasp what the heck the people on the other side are talking about. “No! There are no black and white keys. It is a wooden straight back of nothing. No, it is not black, it’s pink.”

”Pink!” “Three legs?”

“Oh! So, you a crazy pinkster now?” On and on it goes.

Or if someone is standing by a grand piano and someone else is looking at an upright piano, one is insisting there are not three legs, while trying to convince the other that there are two large legs, one on either side.

If someone is looking inside the piano and describing it, there is no pink or black, or black and white keys, and no legs.

This is me. I acknowledge all the outer perspectives and ask, can we talk about how the insides work? What makes the MUSIC?! How does your soul work? How does it work with the other parts?

Yes, it is pink and it has three legs, and it is a piano. Look inside.

People absolutely will never agree because they are both right - unless they are willing to be open to seeing perspectives of others.

• We have to be willing to acknowledge that we only see what we see.

• We have to be willing to get up, move, and to look at what others are looking at.

• We have to be willing to wade, swim, and plow through our neural wiring to see why we believe what we do.

• We have to be willing to sit in our emotions and discover that we believe that because of “bad learning” my mentor, Dr. Chamberlain called our early experiences and resulting neural wiring. Bad neural wiring from our early years and our family lineages.

• We have to be willing to learn how to RESPOND while IN our emotional triggers, not react. We need to be willing to rewire our nervous system. When someone says, “Oh, oh, so you are saying” and then serves their best oppositional ping pong serve, in the effort to prove it is either/or, we have to learn how to not play.

Now imagine colorful, one of a kind pianos!

My art work is in Black and white so that the co-artist who colors it can fill it in with all the colors of their life and experience.

Even pianos are not black and white. Sometimes pianos are blue, not black. Or red, yellow, green, or pink. Life is in color, not in black and white. Check out Sing for Hope! (I hope to do a piano some day soon. Maybe in black and white with white board paint that allows people to use dry markers to color in!)

Imagine again people on opposite sides of the pianos arguing unrelentingly about pianos and coming to consensus on what these look like! That is what happens all day long in every issue in our culture today.

That would be me trying to get my dad and sister to see that they were both right (there is a light and dark blue leg! It’s yellow, it’s greens, with animals on it. You are both right), and can we please talk about how both legs are needed and how they work together to hold up the piano, so it can be played?

Let’s make music, not war!

I have spent my lifetime really, but certainly my professional life of four decades, seeking to find the truth of root cause of human dysfunction. I found that root of dysfunction or health is when - and how - we bring in our babies - the next generation - to this planet. If we want to create a healthy, happy, and harmonious humanity we need to create that at birth birth. We need to wire new humans for that: healthy, happy and harmonious.

Birth is the only time that we are truly equal beings. Every baby everywhere in the world, regardless of mother’s age, race, religion, gender identity, education, financial status, and geography needs the very same physiologic experience of being born drug-free, intervention-free, trauma-free, and to be free to securely attach to the mother’s breast.

This is the freedom we should fight for. This is the equality we seek established in our neural wiring.

I believe the only truth is that this will facilitate a humanity that is just and humane and honors freedom of others.

I live for the moment that a person gets on a visceral level that at their birth it was their birth, their experience. They were the baby.

You were the baby in your mother’s birth story, and you had rights to what you biologically and emotionally needed as a human baby - to attach securely, without disruptions, to their mother. When one has that “Oh, my God,” visceral moment of, “I was the baby”, it changes how one sees themselves and every other human. One can no longer do what is done to babies routinely when one embraces their own baby self.

I challenge everyone to consider how the answer to solving any human issue we have is to collectively embrace conscious conception, and to resource - fund - pregnancy/gestation, physiologic and natural birth, and to #fundmothering.

It means that we stop harming the human who is just coming in and we integrate our own experience of that being a wounded experience.