Mothers' Day...an Invitation to Remember
[art: Autumn Skye….check out her incredible body of work here.]
I had a wonderful mother who was, nevertheless, inadequate and flawed, because she was a human being--and human beings were never meant to mother as individuals.
[Patricia Havens Finn with baby Perdita, 1962]
We we were meant to be mothered by an entire clan of kith and kin...many women, young and old, who nursed us and thought of us as their children; many men, young and old, who held and cherished us not as property or belongings but as elders returned; and of course by all of the beings of this earth...the animals and plants that fed us, the mountains and trees and caves that sheltered us, and the very ground that bore us up and to which our bodies would return.
What would it be like if EVERYONE--whatever their gender, their biology, or their age--went out into the world each day knowing they were a MOTHER? What if leaders and generals were mothers? What if corporate ceos and tech bros were mothers? What if teenage boys dreamed of becoming...good mothers?
[St. Anthony with baby Jesus. Note: all through France the Madonna is flanked by two statues: Joan of Arc in full armor with a sword and St. Anthony in robes with a baby. There are lots of ways of mothering in the world and they are not gender specific.]
I have been mothered not just by the extraordinary woman who bore and birthed and nursed me but by cats, by boa constrictors, by dogs, by men, by children, by women, and by the ocean and the mountains.
The whole world is nothing but mothers.
Patriachy's greatest violence has been to reduce "mother" into a singular biological entity that can be scapegoated, sentimentalized, and diminished.
Resist.
Dream of being a mother today. Be a mother. Remember that in lifetimes past and in lifetimes to come you will be the mother to every soul you meet today. You ARE a mother.
You have been my mother. I have been your mother.
Imagine a world with me filled with mothers, with enough mothering to fill the god-shaped hole in our lives with a thousand, ten-thousand loving hands and heart of ten-thousand times ten thousand mothers.
Let us become, YOU, each of YOU, all of US, the mothers the world needs us to remember we are.
Every day is Mother's Day. The whole world is a mother, time is a mother, Matter is a Mater.
You are a Mother, whether you remember and claim it or not.
[pachamama, artist unknown]
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Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. They are currently at work on their next book together Circles Not Lines: Spiritual Community Beyond Patriarchy. To find out more about her devotion to “ecology not theology” visit wayoftherose.org
In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, spirit workers, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Perdita Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead. Participants are empowered to activate the miracles in their own lives with the help of their ancestors and recover their own intuitive magic. Her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is an intimate journey through her recovery of these lost ways. She speaks widely on how to collaborate with those on the other side, on the urgent necessity of a new romantic animism, and on the sobriety that emerges when we claim the long story of our souls. Her next book is The Body of My Mother.
Find out more about her workshops at takebackthemagic.com
She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.