~ May 7
Mother, you carried me
for nine long months.
Mother, you carried me for
nine long months
and gave birth in an hour.
Mother, you carried me
for nine long months
and bore me and raised me
to be kind and fair and generous.
Mother, you carried me
for nine long months
and bore me and raised me
to be kind and fair and generous
just like you. Just like you.
-Siberian folksong
In this season of burgeoning growth, we celebrate the annual civic feast of motherhood. Julia Ward Howe, a nineteenth-century feminist leader, proposed and promoted the original idea of Mother’s Day, which-before it became an occasion for merchandising—was an attempt to draw attention to women’s great but often invisible contributions in the family.
So, too, the energy of Mother Nature in creating and sustaining her earthly children is often invisible to us. We consume, without acknowledging, her prodigious creativity. We throw away, without recognizing that it is our Mother Earth who must attend to our refuse, just as our individual mothers picked up our toys in distant childhood. As we approach the festival of motherhood, let us remember to honor our greatest mother as well.