Without mothers we are nothing.
We come from our mothers and we know that. (Sometimes even our mothers don’t know who the father is.) For the gift of life we should be grateful to our mothers every day.
We are drawn to our mothers, even though we might argue with them. We start our existence in them. Of course as an embryo, then fetus, we are nothing still. Not able to develop into an infant without the protection of mother’s body. Even then it makes a difference how our mother behaves. Is she calm, happy, healthy, eating well, protected? Or is she stressed, running from danger, abused, fearful? She will do what she can to protect the potential emerging in her womb, but if the stress is extreme the fetus will not survive. In nature, without high tech science that can create virtual environments to save life, it is the mother that might sacrifice her own fetus in order to survive and recreate again. They have the power and wisdom to do that, even though that traumatic decision requires strength of mind that few of us can imagine, let alone apply.
Mother represents the feminine, which seems so overpowered in our patriarchal world. In this system of social agreements we debase the virtues of nurturing, care, protection, patience in favour of dominance, risk taking, bigness, physicality. This imbalance is toxic to the world we live in. Our systems are killing nature as the system attempts to dominate nature, extracting life from it to serve convenience of the plutocracy in our world.
It’s not than men can’t have feminine traits, nor that women can’t have masculine traits, but cultures throughout the world tend to promote the masculine while controlling the feminine. That fear of feminine does not serve us well. It belies our childish ignorance and lack of confidence. Both men and women live happier when the develop potential in a spectrum of characteristics from care and patience to risk taking and power projection. Development of human potential occurs when a person has satisfied the needs of survival, air, water, food, shelter, friends, and self knowledge so that they can contribute to organisation and collaboration, capacities which are virtues of the individual and collective consciousness. And there is more. Once we have the confidence of understanding ourselves, we can let go of ego and find peace in the expression of compassion and service. It is this behaviour which reveals humanity’s potential, or more generally the capacity to connect with the metaphysical dimension. This is spirituality and feels right to us.
Religion purports to offer this spiritual connection, and in fact it does. Religion offers peace (although it is the reason for war), it offers succour (although it is advocates killing), it offers refuge (from war and killing), it offers a dogmatic virtue, it offers a good feeling with music, singing, beautiful buildings and so on. But it does not serve the spirit because it does not release people from dogma or duty. It does not have the feminine quality of patience that accepts differences between people (no child is the same – every parent will agree). Religion seeks to dominate at the cost of people, community and environment. It is sadly selfish and naive. If it were generous and mature it would have let go of dogma for reason. It would have let go of leadership for community. It would have let go of power in favour of nature.
Nature is the mother of life. We live on a spherical ball of rock floating in space near a star in whose orbit that rock agglomerated over four and a half billion years ago. After a couple of hundred million years that ball of burning rock had cooled a bit and started to think about life. Another 4 billion years and life started to get complicated as it emerged from the water and worked out how to exist on land. Hominins emerged a couple of million years ago and silly homo sapiens started roaming the planet only about 250,000 years ago. Today we (and our domesticated food supplies) dominate animal life. We come from the planet that we call Earth. It is from this planet that all food, water and air comes from . Earth is our mother.
We have neglected Earth’s well being. But nature is bigger than us and we can not dominate it. To think that humans can dominate nature is a childish, ignorant fallacy. Nature is simply the way the universe works. It is interconnected. To kill nature is to kill our mother Earth. It’s not a good idea. The universe will continue without life on Earth and without the consciousness that is within us all.
The message is that our systems don’t serve us or our world, and we can choose to change them. We can grow up. We can change behaviour. We can balance our strength with compassion. We can employ physicality to protect. We can take risks to serve others rather than hurt them or our world. Each of us can stop and reflect on the service our mothers did for us from birth to nurturing to love and patience and learn to adopt them ourselves. A little rebalancing of the masculine can make all the difference. The masculine offers the discipline and strength required for compassion and self-sacrifice. It offers the pragmatism for self-care instead of self-promotion. It offers the power to control emotions and work hard and well. It offers the self-reliance to respect the feminine. It offers the self-control to accept death. We can all turn to nature to guide our future without a pyramid of power and reconnect with Earth a and each other. Let go of ego and let love thrive.
Thank you, mothers.
Comments