10/09/2025
This is Whapio, the Mirror of What We Already Are
There are those who teach by words,
and those who teach by being.
Whapio belongs to the latter.
When I came to her,
I was already walking the path,
thirty years of births,
of listening between contractions,
of witnessing life unfold in its own rhythm.
Yet, I had no name for what I was doing.
No definition.
Only the quiet certainty that birth was holy
and needed nothing added to be complete.
Then Whapio held up a mirror.
Not to show me her reflection,
but my own.
In her presence, I recognized myself.
Not a student seeking knowledge,
but a woman remembering.
She speaks the language of the Tao:
The Midwife performs her work by doing nothing.
And suddenly, I understood
the doing is in the being.
The holding, the witnessing,
the trust that all things arise and fall away
in their perfect order.
Through her, I found the name for what I had lived,
Monitrice.
A word that bridges worlds,
that blesses the unseen labor
of those who serve the mystery without control.
It is not a title; it is a reflection.
Whapio teaches without speaking.
She lets things come,
and lets them go.
She creates, but does not possess.
She works, yet lays no claim.
And when her work is done,
it endures because it was never hers to hold.
In her, I see the Wise Woman,
not as an end of youth,
but as the flowering of freedom.
A woman who walks lightly
between worlds,
whose silence is instruction,
whose laughter is initiation.
Through her, I too enter the circle of elders.
Not to arrive,
but to dissolve.
To become the space
where all women can remember
what they have always known.
—Anasuya
© 2025 Anasuya LLC
