The depth of life’s interconnection is our greatest vulnerability and our greatest hope. We are beings in relation.
Today we celebrate Mother’s Day. Drenched in some strange amalgam of consumerism and genuine desire to nurture the ones who have nurtured us, we buy flowers and gift cards. We plan Sunday brunches or make that extra-long phone call to our mothers living far from us. My own mother, to whom I owe my courage and creativity, lives two thousand miles away. It was she whose breath gave rise to my own, whose gentle strength and fierce passion made way for my being in the world. It is my mother to whom I trace my beginning, and yet, if life is as Anais Nin imagines it, a “process of becoming” are we not ever-beginning? If all life itself is in process, if the powers of destruction and creation flow, creating and re-creating all that is, I wonder at the wombs that make and re-make us.
This process of becoming is an adventure through the whirlwind, a tour of the chaosmos. Our becoming, wrapped up with the becoming of Creation itself, is an unwinding of the fibers of the universe and our own souls, spiraling toward liberation. And so, on this Mother’s Day, I offer gratitude and honor toward all that gives us birth, to all who take part in our process of becoming.
In honor of ourselves. There is a sense that each of our beginnings emerges out of a wound, out of a dying. The day I was born was the day I received my first scar. I was a C-Section baby and the doctor nicked the edge of my forehead narrowly missing my eye. Soon enough, the wound healed and I still have a tiny scar by my right eye. Today, many years and many scars later, I marvel at our ability to heal. We give life to ourselves, after the movements of death have swept through us, after long nights of grief and the collapse of all we knew. In the quiet stillness of a soul razed, creativity moves. Continue reading “In Honor of All that Gives Life by Ashley Anderson”
Feminism and Religion 