Retired from Midwifery in May 2018, 22 years of nurturing life into existence. Hard rewarding work.
I spent 3 months in the Orkney islands, experiencing the Neolithic period on an archeological dig at the Cairns and Ness of Brodgar. What did I come away with, 5000 years ago there was a thriving community of people, life was seemingly - we don't know what, because the only thing left is the stone. Structures, bone, a few marks on the stone, and of course our genetically passed on DNA is all that remains.
It's hard not to feel a connection to the remains and it's easy to feel like none of it matters. All the ephemera is gone, anything that could possibly give clues to day to day life, so we imagine. It's going to take awhile to process the significance of insignificance, the feeling of being connected to the past. On an individual level we are all just a grain of sand that gets ground down to dust and recycled again into stone.
