Mother's Day

Several years ago I walked into a thrift store in Lillooet. I felt drawn to a particular piece of old furniture and I opened the top drawer. Inside it was a Ruth Sanderson print, entitled Heart of the World. I felt very strong emotions as I regarded the illustration but didn't consciously know why. I bought it, put it on the wall of my office and looked at it daily. As Mother's Day drew near, the realization dawned upon me of why I had found it hidden inside that drawer. I composed some prose to go with the illustration and gave the inscribed card to my mother.

“A young woman alone has just come through a massive tangled wood. She has made it to the heart and source of all life and love. It is experienced as a spring which never dries up, lying hidden in the centre of all creation and guarded over by a magnificent, ancient tree.

She is asking about her son, who has been separated from her since the beginning of their journey. She sang so he had a voice to follow from the distance he always maintained. Though deprived of his immediate companionship, she never gave up and continued on. Sometimes he mocked her and threw stones fashioned from his own pain and frustration.

She understood why, for she, like her children, had been placed on her path alone before her time and had suffered ill-treatment as a result. Sometimes she walked beside cruelty with no option but to endure. Her frightened, shamed boy child saw no other option but following from a safe distance.

He, like her, knew that the heart place was real and never gave up searching for it. Much of his way was crooked and his heaviest burdens were his own anger and sorrow. The question, “Why?” was his banner and he explored every How that he encountered along his way.

The boy came to realize that he would have to guide his father, the author of many of his family’s wounds, to that very heart place. It was a momentous task but was a prerequisite for him to accomplish before attaining anything else. He poured his self into the work largely composed of and accomplished in dreams, because his father had taken his own life many years before. Eventually, he received confirmation that with spiritual help, he had managed to show his father where the tree and the spring were located.

This healing was such a relief that unexpressed negative emotions towards his mother, harboured over fifty years, subsumed themselves deeper into his psyche. They soon outgrew their swamp, however and began to make awful commotions. The nearer he got to feeling healed and healthy, the more incessantly they bayed like wolves. He attempted to find a place so remote, that he wouldn't hear them. He plunged on into the woods, up into the mountains and eventually built a little house among some pine trees. He rested there and speculated on the heart of the world. Would anyone ever find it? Is it reserved only for the dead?

Winter came and he stared at his walls for lack of a fireplace to hold his gaze. He heard self-created beasts and even saw their likenesses everywhere around his house. He had evidently unknowingly brought them along with him! In a fit of exasperation, he rose to do battle with his negative emotions, ready and willing to fight to the death of his own ego. Like Ragnar jumping into a pit of hungry wolves with a sword, he killed those evil creations of his own making. The trick to attain victory was to call them out loud by their names, which caused them to stand still long enough to pierce. His ego, which had stubbornly brought him through the difficult path he had chosen so long ago, predictably and necessarily succumbed to it’s wounds.

Now, as a spiritual child, devoid of ego armour, the boy climbed out of the pit and glanced around. To his surprise and astonishment, he saw that he had built his house right beside the ancient tree and within spitting distance of the spring. The first person he saw was his mother, wandering around nearby. Then he saw his two sisters.

All the books he had ever read, all the things he thought he knew and all the wisdom he thought that he had garnered, fell away to dust. He cried with relief knowing that he, like all his fellow humans, knew nothing of any import. For the first time, he understood what motherhood was and that it may not be described in words. He knew that each person must shed their ego in order to reach this heart place while yet alive and in this physical world.

It was somehow akin, he thought, to dying. Most extraordinary! He was not sure how one was supposed to behave in this august place, so he flung open the doors of his house to his most dear family and friends, there and then and in the world beyond.”

fin