“How different it would be if we looked at the earth as our mother. Do you treat the planet with the same love, care, respect and honor that you treat your mother?”— Peter Walsh, from his Oprah Radio show
I came across this quote yesterday and it stopped me in my tracks. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been thinking a great deal about the atrocities that are committed to women and girls every day all over the world and realizing that women are the recipients of the things we hold in the darkest part of our shadow complex.
How many people really do treat their mother with love, care, respect and honor? How many of us treat the role of mother with respect and honor? How many of us treat the female body with care and respect?
I don’t doubt for a moment that Peter Walsh loves his mother and this really isn’t about him. I think most of us love our mother, but do we even for a moment really know what it means to love our mother? Do we dare to look deeper at how we treat her, how we hold her and how much we respect the sacredness of the female body and its ability to bring life into life? I feel the real question is not how we treat our mother, something we pay homage to on Mother’s Day, or the glorified Madonna archetype that many times carries with it the corresponding archetype of whore.
The real question is how to we treat the physical manifestation of Mother, the female body and her ability to support and nurture life into being? How do we treat women and their bodies? Do we honor the female body with love and respect? Do we care for female bodies? Do you care for your own? Do you respect the sacredness and the divinity that it is? And, do we respect all bodies, those of men and boys as well?
For the correspondence between one’s Mother and the planet is about the life-giving ability that women offer. Our planet is alive. The Mother is all of matter. Everything that is alive is the Mother. It is all sacred. We are all sacred.
When we no longer see a distinction between all living things, and we honor all of life, then maybe we’ll wake up to Life as it truly is, not as something to rape and use to satisfy our insatiable appetite for more and more. Look around you and see how we treat the female body.
Look into your own experience with open eyes, but more importantly an open heart. What would it be to love, with all your heart, your mother, yourself, your body, the Earth and all of Life?
Interesting questions, Julie. I love the blogs I’ve read so far, you pose such interesting questions. How do I treat my mother? with contempt mostly. With fear and loathing at times. Shame comes into it. She was alcoholic, had eight children in ten years. I wrote a book of poems which includes a section on her, and on my childhood, fraught with unpredictable mothering and occasional neglect. How do I want to be treated as a mother? Huh! with great respect, utmost kindness, compassionate understanding and never ever with a snarky teen attitude or raised volume voice. Is there a huge disconnect here? thanks for pointing this out to me.
If you don’t mind, I will borrow this question for my upcoming creative journaling classes. A great one for women who mother.