Major decisions and new life goals

Hi everybody, it has been a long time since I've posted anything, mostly because I've been horrendously busy with school and life, and also because I was having a problem accessing my account; but I'm back now, and I've made some major decisions which I think will move my life closer to the person I eventually envision myself becoming.

I've been having a series of nervous breakdowns lately and I've come to the conclusion that some things in my life are very unbalanced, unhealthy and completely unnecessary. Midwifery school is at the top of that list. Not that I haven't learned some incredible, amazing things while at midwifery school, but on Friday, one of my favorite teachers, Rhonda Ray came in as a "guest speaker" to our Midwifery Culture class and spoke about the way she learned midwifery and although I knew before in my head that I could learn midwifery in a very organic, old-fashioned, apprenticeship model, I suddenly knew in my heart that I was spending too much time in the classroom when I could be having real life experiences in the real world and become a midwife that way as well. Rhonda's story was sort of the classic coming-of-age midwifery story from the seventies; she knew she liked women and babies and health care, so she just started asking friends to be at their births and joined woman's health collectives and woman's self-help groups and learned about cervixes and pregnancy, etc from hands on experience. She also didn't charge people to be at births in those days; she said she mostly took trades, and as long as someone gave her gas money to drive her VW bug to the next birth, she was happy. Something in my brain was suddenly like "yeah, that's what you want...you don't want a "career" as a midwife, you want to attend births for the joy of it!" And, I want the life Rhonda described as her early years as a midwife; living communally out in the woods, building cabins, hailing water, being really strong and having no trouble birthing because I'm so physically strong and mentally prepared for anything. Rhonda seemed convinced that those births she attended in her early days as a midwife where she attended "pioneer" back-to-the-land women, where much easier then the women she later attended in Portland, for two reasons: 1) the women out in the woods where completely committed to home birth because the closest hospital was hours away and so they mentally prepared themselves to be able to handle any situation at home, 2) they where more physically ready as well; they where constantly moving and working, cutting firewood, hailing water, building gardens and cabins, and so they trusted their bodies intensely, to the point where they didn't feel they needed midwifes to be there, but if they where great, but if the midwives didn't show up, they felt certain they could handle it on their own. These are the type of women I want to serve, those women who I'm now starting to finally network with and butcher roadkill with, radical women who are so strong they hold off rapists with their butchering knives and women who trap animals and make chainsaw art and are musicians and writers and poets; women who live in the cold of Minnesota in school buses and who hitchhike alone around the country; train hopping girls and the babies they bare; some radical women do have babies and I want to be there to catch them.

This weekend I've done some things to re-invite wildness into my life;