Journal of Sacred Work

     For most of the world’s population, our very first experience of love is through our mothers. It is mother who is the first to coo love to us, to hold us to her breast, to wrap us in her warmth. Regardless of our age, it is mother who we most often call for when we are frightened or in pain. As babies, and beyond, we seek a mother’s love.

     Some psychologists posit that people who have trouble with caregiving may not have received this loving warmth as babies and small infants. Clearly there are exceptions, surrogates who stepped in to give love when a mother died in childbirth or was, for whatever other reason, unable to offer the gift of love to her baby. Our mothers (or their stand-ins) are the ones who teach us love before we can speak.

     Recall the person who first gave you love. Consider how you are passing that gift to others in your work. Read Ancle Rubin’s lovely reflection on motherhood from "Sitting in the Grass", brought to my attention by reader Emily Fluhrer of Greenville, South Carolina…

Sitting in the grass

under the stars

by the extinguished fire.

sitting there after the last trip

with a jug and a pail of water.

amazed at how long the wet logs

continue to sizzle.

mistaking a firefly in the grass

for a spark,

confusing, as I look up,

stars and fireflies,

thinking, though, about my mother.

looking at the brilliant pricks of light

in the dark sky,

at the dark shapes of trees,

darker than the sky they stand up against,

thinking about how much I love

what is no longer visible.

telling my mother out loud,

not loud, really, but very quietly

saying her name

the personal name I had for her

speaking it to the night sky

as our ancestor’s would

pray to those

who went before

and lit a path back

to the source.

.

Ancle Rubin, “Sitting in the Grass.”