May 14th, 2017

Happy Mother's Day 2017

“Oh we don’t take much notice of mother’s day in our family”….
This is what I often say or find myself thinking as the time approaches when you cannot go anywhere without having your senses bombarded with advertisers tugging at your heart-strings trying to persuade you to invest in their products or services for your beloved, or not so beloved mother. 
 
People talk about how commercial mother's day is. Restaurants are booked months in advance and traffic goes into gridlock as families gather to honour and celebrate their mothers and grandmothers.
Unfortunately not very often from a genuine place of gratitude and love, but from a place of obligation and responsibility.
 
How has this come about?
Surely mothers deserve acknowledgement and gratitude?
 
Your mother or original carer is the person who taught you about love. This led to your sense of self-worth, and taught you how to give and receive love.
Your mother’s love and care taught you about looking after yourself and your loved ones. Your mother laid the foundation of how you are with yourself in the world.
 
In that first few years nearly every cell in her body, every neuron in your mother’s consciousness was taken up with your needs, making sure you were fed, warm, safe, dry, clean and held.  She barely had a moment to take care of her own needs.
Ofcourse these are generalizations, because everyone has their own unique history with their mothers.
 
I find myself wincing when I ask a woman: “what do you do?” and they answer:
“Oh, I’m just a mother”.
 
‘The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.’                         Eric Fromm
 
Mother’s even take themselves for granted and undervalue the deep complexity of their role. But I believe that this is the most important job of all. This is the foundation of how we are all going to perceive life, love, community, nourishment and our earth.
 
Our earth who unconditionally feeds and nourishes all life, and continues to do so, even though we plunder, bomb, trash, and clear her, stabbing deeply into her depths to acquire her ancient fossils for our frantic greed and materialism, always looking for identification in what is outside of ourselves, and giving that more value than inner Beingness, Essence our true spiritual nourishment, which is Love.  

Maybe our mothers and their mothers, and their mothers were so busy with survival that they forgot this, and only passed on the belief system that survival is the only gig and
that the biological imperative of life on earth, means we are separate from each other and in competition with all of life to survive as individuals or tribes.
 
We are a dysfunctional species! Something is broken when you believe that love only comes in the guise of food or material needs. We have somehow mostly forgotten that we are all aspects of Oneness, the Divine, Light, God or whatever you want to call it. Unfortunately that knowing has been boxed up and tethered to conditions and rules; sliced and processed beyond recognition in the way we live and bring up our young.
 
To begin with, we need to make a deep bow of gratitude and reverence for Mother everyday. Not just our own mother’s or the mothers of our spouses on mothers day.
But for the very symbol of motherhood: the great Mother in all of us, the sacred feminine aspect of our psyche’s, and our great Gaia who feeds our bodies generation after generation.
 
The mothering instinct is in all of life. The newly arrived get taken into the arms of mothers and carers instinctively, whether it’s the life that gave birth or not, we all have an imperative to tend to the vulnerable and fragile in our world.
Even trees stay connected psychically to their shootlings it has now been proven.
(book: 'The Hidden Life of Trees' ~ Peter Wohlleben)

For the last three or four thousand years we have become disconnected from the deep feminine aspect of our humanness.
 
The great Goddess who is now emerging again in her full glory, radiant abundance and generous gift of life; she is flowering again after millennia of being sidelined and repressed.

There is still a lot of work to do.

​But we can all do our little bit by noticing her, and acknowledging her in each and every life form on earth.
 
Notice the miraculous, the awesome beauty in nature, in each other and all life.
 
Deep bow for the Great Mother