Mothering Culture

I can only begin with where I am at today. 

Three weeks into a new school year my 6th grader experienced his third lock-in at school. This was not a drill, though they practice lock-in and lock-down drills monthly in anticipation of threat, which has seemed to become a matter of when rather than if. Threat and violence have become so normalized in our society’s rhetoric and actions that it feels nearly inevitable, maybe especially at schools. Something, a lot of things, feel very lost in this, very off, very not ok. We are losing our humanity.

In the past couple of weeks, I have been moved by the confessions of what lies within your hearts and I have felt my own cadence of fears thrumming through the tight walls of my chest as well. Feelings of chaos, psychosis, displacement, confusion around reality and truth. There’s a particular chaos afoot, that I can only feebly understand best as a blanketing affect of astrological, social-political and personal gravitas, a cosmological collision that disquiets my nervous system. It courses around like wind in my body, tangling tissue into tension, tightening and fixing my breath, erupting worry, and what is most striking is that I cannot find myself. I cannot feel myself - or rather - I cannot find or feel the plumbline of stability that comes from being well-cultured, well-cared for, well-known and well-found. I cannot feel the home or hearth inside of me, where I am warmed from the center, my returning place of ancestral belonging. I feel affected by the loss of a mothering culture, and the loss of elderhood. The loss of mentorship and kin keeping. 

To be clear from the start, when I speak of Mother Culture I am not referring to the binary of societal norms, gender roles or religious dogma. This is deeper, older and polyidein* (I just made this word up, to express “to see many ways or forms”, queer in essence.) To uphold Mother Culture is to hold reverence for the home and hearth within each of us that desires and deserves a place of rest, love, belonging, nourishment and respect. It translates into the home and hearth literally - as a symbol of returning to a warm center, a gathering or meeting place where community lands. A well-community is the Mothering Culture. 

I’ve been made aware of a new show called Tucci in Italy that I have not seen, but in one of the previews  that I did watch Tucci describes that the communities are defined by the ones who are in earshot of the same bell tower - that whatever bell tower you can hear from home - that’s the community you belong to. The bell tower becomes a symbol of what the Mother Culture represents, the bell tower is the hearth center of community, a returning place. This feels a lot different than the culture I feel myself a part of, and yet this is not to discredit the uprising of community that forms at times of tragedy and hardship, and those who are re-learning how to village together. I am certainly not the first to have this idea, and it is an idea that is being re-membered and re-sown within each of us. It is alive and will continue to evolve within me, to change and reform over and over again. It is what is breathing life into me right now at a time when my body, my child and my community are being shaken by chaos without the sound of a bell tower to remind us who we belong to, or where, or what the culture’s responsibility to each other is. My best effort to describe what’s been lost or amiss is the loss of a Mothering Culture, at a time when our Great Mother is on fire and people are suffering under the reverberations of collapsing systems. We are only where we are right now, and inside of me I feel the need to feed my fire of home and hearth, pelvic first, nourishment next, with widening arms to hold who’s near and share in the prudence of mutual care through loving and feeding one another. 

I’ve made an altar to all the strong women who are holding so much and bracing so much that care feels impossible to receive. I want to call you back in, for a place to hold connection to something deeper, to remember that the divine is in each of us, within reach for each of us, and is each of our birth right. All that is simply needed is a resting place. May we hold that in service of one another. 

Bloodstone woman of high heart

Where did you go?

I feel you holding, I know you are bracing

My pelvis knows this tension too.

May we call each other back

May we allow ourselves to be held

May we receive the care that our sisters came to give

And stop bleeding for the world.

May we hold our blood.

And not question our own sanity but the insanity of the cracked container that fails us.

May we birth our pain

And grief

Back to the compost heap

And weave from it what we divine to see

What we know to be true

From the deepest places within us.

In honor and gratitude for all you do, and with deep and high regard.