Mothers are symbolic of creation, and in turn hope. It is a mother who must carry and nurture a new life for nine months. It is a mother who gives birth to life in a moment that is miraculous and humbling. In our high-tech world, perhaps we do not give enough reverence to this simple miracle. And perhaps we do not give enough value to the life that mothers bring into this world.
Wrote Virginia Woolf, "As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." In the words of Buddha, "As a mother, even at the risk of her own life, loves and protects her child, so let a man cultivate love without measure toward the whole world."
I would like to leave you with the stories of two "mothers" -- one ancient, one modern -- who represent both ends of the spectrum of women's ability to give and nurture life, and hope.
Unlike the creation stories of Judaism and Christianity, the creation stories of Native Americans reject the notions of human apartness and superiority over the natural world. People originated in the womb of the Earth Mother, from which they were called into the daylight of their Sun Father. The earth is Mother not metaphorically but actually, and all life -- human, animal, plant, and mineral -- is born from within her. Her spiritual role is to establish harmony among all the orders of creation.
Spider Woman was the first woman and universal source of life within the Hopi creation story. Other tribes gave the incarnation of the first woman different names -- such as Clan Mother, Grandmother Turtle, Rainwater Woman, Corn Mother, or Early Morning Woman -- but the stories are all strikingly similar.
According to legend, when Spider Woman awoke to life, she asked why she was here. The answer: "Here is this earth we have created. It has shape and substance, direction and time, a beginning and an end. But there is no life upon it. We see no joyful movement. We hear no joyful sound. What is life without sound and movement? So you have been given the power to help us create this life. You have been given the knowledge, wisdom, and love to bless all the beings you create. That is why you are here."
From thousands of years ago we fast-forward to the period of 1906 to 1975, the lifetime of Hannah Arendt. She is just one example of a woman among many women who, regardless of whether or not they have personally borne a child, have nurtured life. She fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, worked in France relocating dispossessed Jewish refugee children, and became an important intellectual voice in New York in the 1940s. Here is an excerpt from what many consider to be her masterpiece, The Human Condition:
The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility -- of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what they were doing -- is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two faculties belong together in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose "sins" hang like Damocles' sword over every new generation; and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between people.
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfilment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each individual's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities -- a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfils, can dispel.
From the body to the mind, a mother's legacy is life-giving.
