Life has been so incredibly beautiful and crazy and scary and scary, crazy beautiful since arriving home from Bali. Kris commented yesterday that Bali feels like a dream now and I don’t disagree. Especially when looking back on pictures of the trip. My memories of a year ago, here in our cabin are clearer than my memories of Bali. This seems like a normal experience, but the part that is strange is how my work at the birth center has changed me. Since the whole experience seems dreamlike, how the knowledge I picked up there has become integrated into my midwifery thinking feels a bit like a vulcan mind meld. I suddenly find that there is information in there to guide my thinking! It has been a really beautiful and terrifying feeling to realize that I am starting to have opinions and thoughts about a woman’s care. I hope that I will always have the curiosity and humble heart of a beginner but though I’m FAR from being an expert or even “advanced”…I’m not a beginner any more. Maybe a better way to put it is that I’m no longer a beginning student, I’m an advanced student and creeping up on being a (very) beginning midwife. I have attended 76 births, 28 of those babes were born through my hands. That thought brings tears to my eyes. What an incredible honor this work is. Last week, I headed to a birth at 5am. It was the most incredible morning I think I’ve driven through. Both the Cascades and the Olympics lit up in the pink glow of the sunrise while my heart mirrored that glow from the love of my work.  A wonderful midwife I know recently described this feeling as a “sticky heart”. No other description has felt more accurate. And I know that my sticky heart that carries all these stories and memories is always glowing pink.