06 Sep THE MOTHER IS EVERYWHERE

Six summers ago, on the eve of my mother’s birthday, she faded with the dimming evening sky and rode a receding sunbeam over the western horizon as the sun set.

I was left behind holding my baby, a motherless mother crying out for my mama. Like my own infant daughter each time I was momentarily out of sight, I desperately searched for the eyes that saw me, the arms that embraced me, and body that bore me.

The scale of my grief was existential. I wondered if I was still alive without the one who had given me life. In her absence I experienced acutely that the world as I knew it – made of words and beliefs – had been constructed by her.

Don’t get me wrong, by the time of my mother’s death I had done more than my fair share of differentiation, self-destructive rebellion, therapy, healing, personal growth, and individuation. My mother was no saint. In truth, she was a wounded addict who I kept at quite a distance. But, as I realized after she was gone, she was also my original world-maker, my Creatrix.

Without the matrix my mother had provided, my world fractured down different lines. My perception shifted and my reality began to change. As my inner child searched for mother, I began to find the Mother everywhere I looked. Hawks on the hunt drawing circles in the sky, the geometric perfection of salsify gone to seed, paper whites following their bliss then colliding with my windshield; grief opened the apertures of my senses.

In the wilderness outside my home I became intimate with Sister Wind, Hummingbird Mother, Grandmother Creek. Cacophonous insects sounded like choruses singing devotion to the Mother. The stinging heartache of losing my mother – and my mysterious life-long loneliness – faded when I came into communion with Life.

I began to hear the natural world speak.

Just the other day, on a family bike ride, stopped at an intersection, I looked at a patch of flowers in someone’s yard and heard the voice of the Mother:

“The world is constantly rising to meet your gaze and rearranging itself to meet your expectations.”

The Mother is everywhere, waiting patiently for your eyes to meet Hers.

Catherine Brooks, 2023

Photo: my mother and me, 1980