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Like many of us,
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I've had several careers in my life,
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and although they've been varied,
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my first job set the foundation
for all of them.
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I was a home-birth midwife
throughout my 20s.
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Delivering babies taught me
valuable and sometimes surprising things,
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like how to start a car at 2am.
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when it's 10 degrees below zero.
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(Laughter)
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Or how to revive a father
who's fainted at the sight of blood.
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(Laughter)
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Or how to cut the umbilical cord just so,
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to make a beautiful belly button.
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But those aren't the things
that stuck with me or guided me
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when I stopped being a midwife
and started other jobs.
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What stuck with me was this bedrock belief
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that each one of us comes into this world
with a unique worth.
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When I looked into the face of a newborn,
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I caught a glimpse of that worthiness,
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that sense of unapologetic selfhood,
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that unique spark.
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I use the word "soul"
to describe that spark,
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because it's the only word in English
that comes close to naming
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what each baby brought into the room.
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Every newborn was as singular
as a snowflake,
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a matchless mash-up of biology
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and ancestry and mystery.
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And then that baby grows up,
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and in order to fit into the family,
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to conform to the culture,
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to the community, to the gender,
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that little one begins to cover its soul,
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layer by layer.
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We're born this way,
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but --
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(Laughter)
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But as we grow, a lot
of things happen to us
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that make us ...
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want to hide our soulful
eccentricities and authenticity.
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We've all done this.
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Everyone in this room is a former baby --
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(Laughter)
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with a distinctive birthright.
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But as adults, we spend so much
of our time uncomfortable in our own skin,
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like we have ADD:
authenticity deficit disorder.
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But not those babies --
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not yet.
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Their message to me was:
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uncover your soul
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and look for that soul-spark
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in everyone else.
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It's still there.
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And here's what I learned
from laboring women.
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Their message was about staying open,
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even when things are painful.
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A woman's cervix normally looks like this.
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It's a tight little muscle
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at the base of the uterus.
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And during labor,
it has to stretch from this
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to this.
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Ouch!
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If you fight against that pain,
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you just create more pain,
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and you block what wants to be born.
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I'll never forget the magic
that would happen
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when a woman stopped resisting the pain
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and opened.
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It was as if the forces
of the universe took notice
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and sent in a wave of help.
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I never forgot that message,
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and now, when difficult
or painful things happen to me
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in my life or my work,
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of course at first I resist them,
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but then I remember
what I learned from the mothers:
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stay open.
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Stay curious.
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Ask the pain what it's come to deliver.
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Something new wants to be born.
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And there was one more big soulful lesson,
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and that one I learned
from Albert Einstein.
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He wasn't at any of the births, but --
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(Laughter)
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It was a lesson about time.
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At the end of his life,
Albert Einstein concluded
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that our normal, hamster-wheel
experience of life
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is an illusion.
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We run round and round, faster and faster,
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trying to get somewhere.
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And all the while,
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underneath surface time
is this whole other dimension
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where the past and the present
and the future merge
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and become deep time.
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And there's nowhere to get to.
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Albert Einstein called
this state, this dimension,
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"only being."
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And he said when he experienced it,
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he knew sacred awe.
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When I was delivering babies,
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I was forced off the hamster wheel.
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Sometimes I had to sit for days,
hours and hours,
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just breathing with the parents;
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just being.
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And I got a big dose of sacred awe.
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So those are the three lessons
I took with me from midwifery.
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One: uncover your soul.
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Two: when things get difficult
or painful, try to stay open.
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And three: every now and then,
step off your hamster wheel
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into deep time.
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Those lessons have served me
throughout my life,
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but they really served me recently,
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when I took on the most
important job of my life thus far.
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Two years ago, my younger sister
came out of remission
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from a rare blood cancer,
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and the only treatment left for her
was a bone marrow transplant.
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And against the odds,
we found a match for her,
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who turned out to be me.
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I come from a family of four girls,
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and when my sisters found out that
I was my sister's perfect genetic match,
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their reaction was, "Really? You?"
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(Laughter)
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"A perfect match for her?"
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Which is pretty typical for siblings.
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In a sibling society,
there's lots of things.
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There's love and there's friendship
and there's protection.
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But there's also jealousy
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and competition
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and rejection and attack.
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In siblinghood, that's where we start
assembling many of those first layers
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that cover our soul.
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When I discovered I was my sister's match,
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I went into research mode.
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And I discovered that
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the premise of transplants
is pretty straightforward.
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You destroy all the bone marrow
in the cancer patient
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with massive doses of chemotherapy,
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and then you replace that marrow
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with several million healthy
marrow cells from a donor.
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And then you do everything you can
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to make sure that those new cells
engraft in the patient.
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I also learned that bone marrow
transplants are fraught with danger.
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If my sister made it
through the near-lethal chemotherapy,
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she still would face other challenges.
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My cells
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might attack her body.
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And her body might reject my cells.
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They call this rejection or attack,
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and both could kill her.
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Rejection. Attack.
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Those words had a familiar ring
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in the context of being siblings.
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My sister and I had
a long history of love,
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but we also had a long history
of rejection and attack,
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from minor misunderstandings
to bigger betrayals.
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We didn't have
the kind of the relationship
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where we talked about the deeper stuff;
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but, like many siblings and like people
in all kinds of relationships,
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we were hesitant to tell our truths,
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to reveal our wounds,
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to admit our wrongdoings.
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But when I learned about
the dangers of rejection or attack,
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I thought, it's time to change this.
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What if we left the bone marrow
transplant up to the doctors,
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but did something that we later came
to call our "soul marrow transplant?"
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What if we faced any pain
we had caused each other,
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and instead of rejection or attack,
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could we listen?
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Could we forgive?
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Could we merge?
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Would that teach our cells to do the same?
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To woo my skeptical sister,
I turned to my parents' holy text:
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the New Yorker Magazine.
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(Laughter)
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I sent her a cartoon from its pages
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as a way of explaining
why we should visit a therapist
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before having my bone marrow harvested
and transplanted into her body.
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Here it is.
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"I have never forgiven him for that thing
I made up in my head."
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(Laughter)
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I told my sister
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we had probably been doing the same thing,
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carting around made-up stories
in our heads that kept us separate.
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And I told her that after the transplant,
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all of the blood flowing in her veins
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would be my blood,
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made from my marrow cells,
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and that inside the nucleus
of each of those cells
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is a complete set of my DNA.
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"I will be swimming around in you
for the rest of your life,"
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I told my slightly horrified sister.
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(Laughter)
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"I think we better clean up
our relationship."
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A health crisis makes people
do all sorts of risky things,
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like quitting a job
or jumping out of an airplane
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and, in the case of my sister,
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saying "yes" to several therapy sessions,
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during which we got down to the marrow.
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We looked at and released years of stories
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and assumptions about each other
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and blame and shame
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until all that was left was love.
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People have said I was brave
to undergo the bone marrow harvest,
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but I don't think so.
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What felt brave to me
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was that other kind
of harvest and transplant,
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the soul marrow transplant,
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getting emotionally naked
with another human being,
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putting aside pride and defensiveness,
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lifting the layers
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and sharing with each other
our vulnerable souls.
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I called on those midwife lessons:
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uncover your soul.
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Open to what's scary and painful.
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Look for the sacred awe.
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Here I am with my marrow cells
after the harvest.
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That's they call it -- "harvest,"
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like it's some kind of bucolic
farm-to-table event --
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(Laughter)
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Which I can assure you it is not.
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And here is my brave, brave sister
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receiving my cells.
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After the transplant, we began to spend
more and more time together.
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It was as if we were little girls again.
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The past and the present merged.
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We entered deep time.
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I left the hamster wheel of work and life
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to join my sister
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on that lonely island
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of illness and healing.
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We spent months together --
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in the isolation unit,
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in the hospital and in her home.
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Our fast-paced society
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does not support or even value
this kind of work.
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We see it as a disruption
of real life and important work.
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We worry about the emotional drain
and the financial cost --
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and, yes, there is a financial cost.
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But I was paid
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in the kind of currency our culture
seems to have forgotten all about.
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I was paid in love.
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I was paid in soul.
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I was paid in my sister.
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My sister said the year after transplant
was the best year of her life,
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which was surprising.
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She suffered so much.
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But she said life never tasted as sweet,
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and that because of the soul-bearing
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and the truth-telling
we had done with each other,
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she became more unapologetically herself
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with everyone.
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She said things
she'd always needed to say.
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She did things she always wanted to do.
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The same happened for me.
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I became braver about being authentic
with the people in my life.
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I said my truths,
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but more important than that,
I sought the truth of others.
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It wasn't until
the final chapter of this story
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that I realized just how well
midwifery had trained me.
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After that best year of my sister's life,
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the cancer came roaring back,
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and this time there was nothing more
the doctors could do.
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They gave her just
a couple of months to live.
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The night before my sister died,
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I sat by her bedside.
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She was so small and thin.
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I could see the blood pulsing in her neck.
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It was my blood, her blood, our blood.
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When she died, part of me would die, too.
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I tried to make sense of it all,
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how becoming one with each other
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had made us more ourselves,
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our soul selves,
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and how by facing and opening
to the pain of our past,
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we'd finally been delivered to each other,
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and how by stepping out of time,
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we would now be connected forever.
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My sister left me with so many things,
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and I'm going to leave you now
with just one of them.
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You don't have to wait
for a life-or-death situation
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to clean up the relationships
that matter to you,
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to offer the marrow of your soul
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and to seek it in another.
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We can all do this.
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We can be like a new kind
of first responder,
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like the one to take
the first courageous step
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toward the other,
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and to do something or try to do something
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other than rejection or attack.
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We can do this with our siblings
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and our mates
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and our friends and our colleagues.
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We can do this with the disconnection
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and the discord all around us.
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We can do this for the soul of the world.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)