What does a good mother do when mothering time is done? As I stand in the water, my eyes brim and drop salt tears into the freshwater at my feet. Fortunately, my daughters are not clones of their mother, nor must I disintegrate to set them free, but I wonder how the fabric is changed when the release of daughters tears a hole. Does it heal over quickly, or does the empty space remain? And how do the daughter cells make new connections? How is the fabric rewoven?
A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings, seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother.
Cresting the ridge releases me into an explosion of light and space and wind.
Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities.
A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit.
I’m told that the Chinese character for catastrophe is the same as that which represents opportunity.
But isn’t play the way we get limbered up for the work of the world?
Imagine raising children in a culture in which gratitude is the first priority.
I cherish a witch hazel kind of day, a scrap of color, a light in the window when winter is closing all around.
I smile when I hear my colleagues say “I discovered X.” That’s kind of like Columbus claiming to have discovered America. It was here all along, it’s just that he didn’t know it. Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.
A printmaker I know showed me that if you stare for a long time at a block of yellow and then shift your gaze to a white sheet of paper, you will see it, for a moment, as violet. This phenomenon – the colored afterimage – occurs because there is energetic reciprocity between purple and yellow pigments, which goldenrod and asters knew well before we did.
They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick...
That September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other.
In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition.
Ignorance makes it too easy to jump to conclusions.
The world is more than your thoughtless commute.
From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the “gift” is deemed to be “free” because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a “bundle of rights,” whereas in a gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached.
Their dad had just pulled up stakes, left the country – and us. He said that he no longer wanted a life with so much responsibility, so the responsibility was all mine.
Linked by sweetgrass, there is reciprocity between you, linked by sweetgrass, the holder as vital as the braider.
So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world.