On this day that brings joy for some and anguish for others, holding space for the tangle of possible emotions. Early this morning I revisited this meditation I wrote several years ago. Sharing with love for those who find themselves on the margins today, for anyone in need of a balm.
Today my heart is with the empty arms. With the grieving. With all the mamas who’ve lost their babies. With the babies who’ve lost their mamas.
My thoughts circle around estrangement, abandonment, addiction, mental illness, incarceration, poverty. The myriad ways motherhood and childhood are strained or stunted or ended abruptly, out of order, before their time.
Waves of love sent towards the jagged edges that border tender places of primal loss. Waves of gratitude for those reaching out to bear witness to that suffering, creating new love in the wake of loss.
Today and always, may we shine a bright light on all who all walk willingly into the empty spaces. Those who see these voids and move toward them with love. Those who comfort the brokenhearted, bring hope to the despondent. Those who have mothered us and those who have modeled for us how to mother others.
The nurturers and the comforters. The helpers and the healers. The aunties and the foster moms. The mentors and the counselors. The grandmothers and the sisters. The nurses and the teachers and the social workers. The caretakers.
Prayers of thanksgiving for all those who rise up to meet these needs wherever they are encountered, inhabiting empty spaces with tenderness and compassion. Those for whom motherly love is never defined by bloodlines, whose outreach continually redefines our notion of kinship. For those who nourish and uplift and expand the horizons of community. For those whose devotion helps us to recognize again and again that we are all connected.
There are limitless opportunities to pour our hearts into the places where love is not, into the cracks and gaps where love has yet to reach, to acknowledge and heal the wounds that isolate, to ease the pain that divides and disconnects.
There are a million ways to mother the world.
