Yoga teacher and death doula Fiona Ball is an Australian living on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. Throughout a career of more than forty years, she worked with young children and for the environment, believing that to be whole and healthy, human beings need to be connected to the natural world. She now leads art and nature-based retreats for adults. Her chief loves are family, friends, building community, her Border Collie Sophie, laughing, talking to trees under the open sky, and finding joy in simplicity. She is currently working on anthology of her short stories, poetry and photographs.
What past event do you often reflect upon, and how did that event change you?
My mother drowned when I was eight years old. Although I no longer reflect on this loss with any regularity, her death was life changing and formed me in profound ways. She drowned in a local river where she had taken my sisters and me for an outing. We were all there and saw what happened. Her death affected us each deeply. I feel there are many events in our lives that incrementally change us, and I wonder who I would have been had my mother not died. It has taken time, but I recognize that her death was a gift in the creation of the woman I am.
How does your work add to the quality of your life?
Work has brought me direction, meaning, and a rich quality of life I cannot imagine living without. Being a childless woman has meant work has often been my purpose in being. I have been driven to match my deepest values to the workplace. Work has taken me to the edges in the field of working with children, as well as for the environment, as I am always seeking different ways to connect humanity to Earth, the planet that supports our health, our wellbeing, and our deepest joys.
Tell us a story you would like to share with the world.
This is a love story. I was conceived before my parents were married. In 1960, there were few choices for those who found themselves in such situations. Although my parents decided to marry, they moved to another city to hide their circumstances. To hide my birth. To hide me.
For the first eight years of my life, my birthday was celebrated three months after my actual birth date. After my mother drowned in my eighth year of life, my father without preamble or explanation told me the true date I was born.
When I was 35 years old, I came upon my birth records. They indicated my parents had intended to surrender me for adoption to cover the shame that society had put upon them. But my mother, against the values of the times, decided to keep me. I went to my my father and thanked him for choosing to raise me as part of my birth family. He turned to me and simply said, “You were just too beautiful.”
I was stunned. These words were exactly what was written in the records written by the nurse who attended my mother at my birth. They read: “Mother keeping. Baby too beautiful.”
Author photo: Courtesy of author
Side bar image: Pixabay/Edar
