SHELTERING
Mothering as a Path of Awakening
opening
This world needs all kinds of women and every kind of mother. Maybe you have not birthed a baby and instead you mother the world. Or your niece and nephew or your friends’ kids. Or you adopted a child who came through another woman’s body. Or perhaps you have grown a person in your own womb, and the first time you look into the eyes of your baby boy or girl and they look back, you feel your heart is going to explode.
You thought you had loved before—your first boyfriend, for instance, who took his own life at sixteen; your Grandma Rose, who always saw the best and most beautiful in you; your cats; or the father of the new little person you are now holding in your arms. But this is a quantum love leap. It takes your breath away and makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time, and so you are catapulted into hushed astonishment, and there you rest, gazing.
You are paralyzed by joy—yes, of course—and something else. A peripheral pain. You fear that you were destined to mess this thing up, this mothering thing. That no matter how many books you read on conscious child-rearing or how diligently you practice mindfulness, you are bound to get lost in the woods of parenting, dragging your poor kid behind you and doing irreparable damage along the way.
As the years go by, you will not be able to believe the shit that will come out of your mouth sometimes. The very opposite of the ways you are now vowing to speak to your child. You will sound like your shrill Aunt Shirley. There will be times when all you will want is to be left alone, and you will slam your door like a teenager, or grab your keys and drive away, or bellow until your child’s eyes grow wide with alarm and you can see the crack forming in their soul like a fault line. You’ll know that you put it there.
And as you gaze at your newborn baby now, there is yet a deeper sorrow behind your resignation to failure: you know that you will be unable to protect your beloved child from the pain of this world. You know you will try anyway. Try with all your might. That you will do anything to keep this beloved person from bearing a fraction of the suffering you have endured. That you would die for them.
And you do. To be someone’s mother is to die again and again. Die to who you thought you were and who you hoped you would become. Die to your cherished notions of what a child of yours should look like, sound like, behave like. Die to your illusions of control. Control of your own emotions, control of your child’s experiences. And in proportion to all your deaths you will be blessed with endless resurrections. You will rise, radiant, from the flames of what you thought was the end of the world. And your child will rise, luminous, from the ashes of your errors.
Then there will be those moments of perfect wholeness—many more of these than the broken ones—when you are driving together to a ballet lesson or the hardware store and a feeling of utter contentment will wash over you. Looking over at the being you call your son or daughter, you will say, “Do you know that you are my favorite person in the world to hang out with?” And they will smile and nod and say, “Me too,” meaning this person, your child, wouldn’t trade these times with you for anything. And something in your soul will understand that the torn fabric of the world has just been mended a little by the ordinary miracle of your love.
You will not carry responsibility for shepherding this human being through the world by yourself (you cannot). The Great Mother holds you even as you hold your son or daughter. When you feel incapable of making the next decision or even taking the next breath, you will turn to that Mother. You’ll lay your head in her lap, unburden your heart, and listen for her guidance. And then, warmed beside her hearth, you will go back into the forest and pick up your baby and continue your journey.
Householder Yoga
Give me a cave in the Himalayas with no heat aside from a smoky fire pit, only the food brought to me by those willing to hike up the mountain, and nothing to do all day but meditate and chant and read the ancient scriptures. Such a sadhana, or spiritual practice, has got to be easier than raising a child, living with her other parent, and trying to make a harmonious home.
What person on a spiritual path who also has a family has not had this thought?
Welcome to Householder Yoga. If yoga means “path to union with God,” then hooking up with a life partner and having kids together can be as valid—and certainly as rigorous—as living in an ashram engaged in spiritual discipline all day and into the night. And as transformational. Every culture and religious tradition controlled by men has placed higher importance on scriptural study and ritual observance than on feeding babies and cleaning up after them. Women have internalized our own devaluation. No wonder many women with the privilege of making the choice are choosing not to have children. Child-rearing is arguably the most difficult path possible, a hero’s journey that leads us on harrowing adventures but for which we receive almost no credit.
So, given that being a parent is such a challenging and unglamorous enterprise, why bother? Because sentient beings are made to. Most of us are, anyway. We’re biologically, socially, and spiritually programmed to connect with one another and create new humans. And we are perfectly designed to care for them. The mistakes we make are part of the package. Our fears for their well-being are impossible to circumvent. We are bound to stumble through the experience of being someone’s mom, just as our mothers fumbled through their own motherly missions. Maybe with more awareness than they did, but not with any more certainty.
My own kid karma has been endlessly bewildering to me. I adopted two children of mixed race who had been abused in their families of origin. I fell so deeply in love with them I couldn’t imagine adoring a child conceived and ripened in my own uterus any more fully. One of these daughters moved far away, both geographically and emotionally, though she will always be my first child and holds a singular seat on a lotus in my heart. The other one died. My two older stepdaughters have always been kind, but a bit reserved. They don’t climb into bed with me and cry when they’re sad, and I’m not the first (or even the fifth) person they text with good news. I have wistfully commented to their dad that I think they see me as a secretary from Iowa—harmless, but a little boring (with no offense to actual secretaries from Iowa).
My youngest stepdaughter, Kali, is different. She is as much my child as my own children have ever been. My youngest, Jenny, and I moved in with Ganga Das and Kali when our girls were both nine, and we became the family I had longed to give birth to. Those were the sweetest years of my life. I gave myself over to mothering Jenny and Kali. Science projects and first periods, birthday parties and unrequited crushes. The two girls were inseparable, and the relationship between them brought me great joy.
After Jenny’s sudden death at fourteen, Kali went to stay with her mom and never came back. I lost my family overnight. At first I could not understand why Kali would withdraw from me, both physically and emotionally, at a time when I felt we urgently needed the refuge of each other. We were the two people who loved Jenny most and whom she had most deeply loved. But Jenny’s death plunged Kali into turmoil and confusion, and it took years for her to integrate the trauma of losing her beloved sister and best friend and to sort out who I was to her now that Jenny was gone.
Little by little, as she entered young adulthood, Kali made her way back into my life and began to rest again in the safety of my love. There was something in me, though, that held myself back. Not wanting to squash the fragile flower of our reconnection with smothering mothering nor trespass on her loyalty to her own mom, I maintained a tender yet spacious footing with my stepdaughter.
Until one day around ten years after Jenny’s death when Ganga Das and I were traveling in France. Our friend Andrew had offered his tiny apartment in Chartres for a few days so that we could explore the cathedral, famous for its iconic labyrinth, its elaborate rose windows, and most of all for its Black Madonna—a statue of the Blessed Mother that exudes a quality of the primordial feminine, a being who both encompasses and transcends the Virgin Mary.
That day, as Ganga Das and I walked around the cathedral in the rain, talking about our children, I felt a rush of pain about the distance between Kali and me, and I started to cry. I admitted that I was tired of holding myself back for fear of violating her boundaries. I was ready to let go. I wanted to help Kali with her graduate school applications and listen to her concerns about current events, buy her things I saw that I knew she would love and take her with me to some of the amazing places where I was invited to teach, without fear of transgression.
“Well, then go ahead and mother her,” a voice resounded in my mind. “What have you been waiting for?” In that moment, a stone lifted from my heart. I realized that I didn’t need to wait for Kali’s approval of my plan. Nor did I require that she reciprocate my dedication to her. I could simply unlock the gates and get on with loving her as my daughter. This did not negate her relationship with her mother. It simply affirmed what was true for me.
I did not rush home and tell Kali about my epiphany. I just quietly acted on it. I reclaimed our bond and treated her as my own child, an adult child now, but still young and vulnerable. Kali was strong and passionate about human rights and climate change and spiritual awakening—the very same issues I was passionate about! Without my saying a word, Kali began to respond to my maternal devotion. She started coming by for tea. We’d talk about her plans for founding a nonprofit to make art with underserved children, or she’d fill me in on her love life. We’d reminisce about Jenny, sometimes with tears, but more often laughing over Jenny’s adorable idiosyncrasies, which the two of us can recall more vividly than anyone else ever could. Kali and I have grown closer since the Holy Mother came to me outside her home in Chartres, woke me up, and reopened my own Mother Heart.
MY MOM
I have a mother who has transformed over the course of her lifetime from a free spirit into a wise elder, and along the way she taught me what it is to be a woman. A bereaved mother herself, she lost our older brother, Matty, to a brain tumor when he was ten, and for a time we lost her to the wilderness of grief. But over the years, my mom integrated this harrowing experience and picked the mantle of motherhood back up. She has modeled for me what it looks like to shatter and mend, to defy social norms and find your own voice, to place beauty over safety and generosity over profit. Susanna’s vulnerability has given me permission to be vulnerable, and her ferocity has allowed me to be fierce. Her overflowing love of life has shown me what true happiness looks like.
My mom never shows up at our house without bearing bags or boxes or baskets of treasures she picked up at yard sales or at the local thrift store. Incomplete sets of hand-blown Mexican water glasses carefully wrapped (“Who needs exactly eight?”). An alpaca sweater, extra small (“Perfect for you”). A challah (“To stash in the freezer for french toast”) or chocolate chip cookies from a bake sale (“For when the kids come over,” she says 100 percent of the time, referring to her great-grandchildren, who occasionally stop by). She reads what I write, even when it is excessively theistic (while she tends toward pantheism) and unfailingly pronounces it profound and moving. I can spin out and lose my shit with her, enumerating my collection of stressors in a shrill voice, and she will calmly bear witness, identify just enough with my victim trip to make me feel supported, and then suggest a variety of practical solutions, most of which are right on target. She doesn’t complain about her health or her partner or her business. Our time together is almost always about me.
I cannot imagine stepping up to the call that’s been seeping through the seams of my life if I didn’t have this calm, complicated, unconditionally loving being holding my hand.
ASHA
Taking on family life as an opportunity for spiritual transformation requires vigilance, humility, and the ability to see the cosmic joke in the midst of our children’s fractured digits and our partner’s flirtations with people who aren’t us. Praising God by praising our kindergartener’s first painting. Worshiping at the altar of the kitchen stove, making offerings of rice and veggies and blueberry muffins to the Holy One. Bowing to the Beloved in the form of an angry teenager or a needy spouse. And most of all welcoming the presence of the sacred in every cell of our body while singing our daughter to sleep, or watching her eyelids flutter in the mornings when we wake her for school, or catching our partner gazing at us in adoration as we cuddle our little ones close, explaining why the baby bird that fell out of the nest will never fly.
Asha Greer is a lifelong friend and mentor. A visionary artist and Sufi teacher, Asha is the cofounder of Lama, the interspiritual community in the mountains of northern New Mexico where I grew up. As the mother of four girls, Asha recognized early on that unless she focused on parenting as a spiritual practice, she would have no spiritual life. When I left home at fourteen and moved to Lama Foundation, Asha was my “guardian.” This made it possible for a minor like me to live there on my own. She didn’t try to parent me, but she did pay attention to my physical well-being and spiritual development.
Asha’s complicated marriage to a charismatic spiritual leader came to a dramatic end in the midst of community life. It was also community that saved her. The people she lived with at Lama flowed into the spaces left behind when Asha was falling apart, granting her the capacity to be more present for her children the rest of the time.
Six feet tall and sturdy as a great tree, Asha is on the opposite end of the physical spectrum from me (I’m less than five feet tall and not much over a hundred pounds). Her personality is direct to the point of being brusque, and her mind is brilliantly original, so that the most startling things come spontaneously tumbling from her mouth. She makes little distinction between famous spiritual luminaries and children, offering each being her disarming attention and freely dispensing her unorthodox wisdom. Asha is one of the most present people on the planet.
“Family is the most powerful spiritual teacher I have ever known,” Asha told me (and she has known many teachers, all of whom at one time or another passed through Lama). “It pokes you and wakes you up. It’s easy to become complacent on the spiritual path, to start thinking you know something and have freed yourself from your bad habits. No matter where you are in your practice, family can undercut your awakened state and pull you right out of the present moment.” She acknowledged that when you have young children it’s almost impossible to maintain a spiritual practice (“or an artistic practice,” Asha added, which for her is the same thing). Your family has to be your practice. And the opportunities for practicing are abundant!
“Don’t be fooled,” Asha reminded me. “Most of the spiritual books that have influenced us were written by men in societies where women were not included. You’ve been programmed by a lot of dead men who had no idea what it is to be a woman.” Women are learning to resacralize our ordinary embodied experience. We are no longer willing to wait for invitations from men’s ancient elite clubs; we do not believe true spiritual experience is limited to these privileged spaces. Instead, we find the face of the Holy One in the faces of our babies and our lovers, our elders and our coworkers, the dirty dishes and the deep quiet that falls over our homes when everyone else is sleeping and we stand at the window, looking at the moon.
God-the-Mother
For the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, it was obvious that God is a mother.
That wasn’t Julian’s real name, by the way. The woman we know as Julian of Norwich was an anonymous medieval anchoress who walled herself into a small cell attached to the St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, England, where she produced some of the most stunning and subversive writings in the history of Christendom. While the majority of her time was spent in prayer and contemplation, Julian also cultivated a garden in a small courtyard adjoining her anchorage, and she kept bees. She was not a hermit, however. The anchoress kept designated hours at a window that opened onto the busy streets of Norwich, from which she offered counsel to the townspeople about everything from the deaths of their loved ones to the interpretation of their dreams.
The most controversial of Julian’s teachings was her declaration of God-the-Mother. The second person of the Trinity, Julian reasoned, had to be female, because who but a mother would break herself open and pour herself out for love of her children? This is what Christ did, Julian reminds us. He incarnated for love. And this is what he continues to do. Like a loving mother, Christ takes a personal interest in every single being, forgiving us when we screw up and rejoicing when we return to love. “Only He who is our true Mother and source of all life may rightfully be called by this name,” Julian wrote, sweeping aside gender binaries. “Nature, love, wisdom and knowledge are all attributes of the Mother, which is God.”
How did she get away with this? you might ask. Was the patriarchy on vacation when Julian proclaimed the Motherhood of the Divine? Were men more tolerant in the Middle Ages? Hardly! Julian hid her writings under her bed. And after she died, a protégé (also anonymous) spirited the pages away, where they were more or less lost in obscurity for about five hundred years before being rediscovered and translated from Middle English to modern English at the turn of the twentieth century. Julian, a contemporary of Chaucer, was the first woman to write in English. Because she was not permitted to learn Latin, the language of the church, the only way for her to express herself was in the vernacular.
It’s not as if Julian suddenly decided to risk everything and speak out about God. A near-death experience impelled her. When Julian was thirty, having borne witness to three rounds of the plague—estimated to have wiped out a third of the population of England (which means at least three out of every ten people Julian knew and loved died a terrible death)—she became gravely ill herself. Her mother called the priest to administer last rites. The cleric held a crucifix above Julian’s face, instructing her to gaze at the suffering Christ on the cross, assuring her that when she died she would go directly to heaven to be with him.
As Julian stared at her crucified Beloved, the room around her began to fade, and Jesus sprang to life. In a series of visions she calls “The Showings,” Christ revealed to Julian the nature of the Universe (Love) and of the human soul (Love) and of God’s attitude toward all of creation (unmitigated, unconditional Love). When, against all odds, she recovered her health, how could she do anything else but write it all down so that she would never forget it? Julian insists that she wasn’t trying to correct the “Holy Mother Church” in reporting the details of the teachings she received. She was simply testifying as accurately as she could to the blessing of her own experience.
It was clear to Julian that Christ made these revelations, not for her alone, but for all humanity. So she pledged her life to God and to living what he (she) had revealed. She entered the anchorage and contemplated the notes she had initially made of everything Christ said to her (known as the “short text”). Then, over the course of twenty years, Julian proceeded to write commentaries on each the sixteen showings (known as the “long text”). I had the great fortune of translating this masterpiece into contemporary English.
Julian of Norwich understood that the Divine Essence embodies the full range of feminine qualities, from mercy in response to wickedness to courage in the face of danger, from “homey friendliness” to passion. God-the-Mother encourages us in states of paralyzing doubt, even as she challenges us to subvert entrenched systems of power and authority and cultivate a direct relationship with the Holy in the temple (or anchorage!) of our own souls.
Loving Each Other
On the spiritual path, the Beloved asks only two things of us: that we love him and that we love each other. This is all we have to strive for. . . . In my opinion, the most reliable sign that we are following both these teachings is that we are loving each other. . . . Be assured that the more progress you make in loving your neighbor, the greater will be your love for God. His Majesty loves us so much that he repays us for loving our neighbor by increasing our love for him in a thousand ways. I cannot doubt this. . . . Oh, friends! I can clearly see how important love of your neighbor is to some of you, and how others of you just don’t seem to care. If only you could understand how vital this virtue is to all of us, you wouldn’t engage in any other study. TERESA OF ÁVILA
Wherever we hover on the gender spectrum, if we identify as female at all, the company of other women can be singularly healing. Mothers and daughters making a meal together or figuring out a profit-and-loss statement; one sister consoling another in the wake of a romantic betrayal; introverted friends hoisting themselves out of the safe cave of their homes for a birthday celebration and lifting their glasses to praise the birthday girl, one by one, in detail.
Women singing together, in unison or harmony, softly crooning to the dying or belting out the blues. Women gathering for ceremony: honoring the harvest moon or the spring equinox, the birth of someone’s first grandchild or the onset of menstruation. Women getting together to write letters of protest to their state representatives or peacefully demonstrating in the streets, willingly getting arrested. Women teaching each other how to meditate, or play the flute, or speak Spanish, or sharing enough of a working knowledge of the carbon cycle to be able to meaningfully engage in climate activism. Women holding onto each other as we navigate the criminal justice system or embedded discrimination in the workplace. Women being willing to engage in difficult conversations with each other about white privilege and systemic racism. Women organizing formal gatherings for a common cause or informal clusterings just for fun.
Women soothe each other’s nervous systems, make it safe to open our hearts, create a listening vessel for our pain and a cheering squad for our accomplishments. (And sometimes we call each other on our shit, which we endeavor to do with tenderness and courage, humor and humility.)
Female relationships take manifold forms. Some women do not have a mom to remind them of who they really are (a radiant being worthy of everything good). So we can adopt one. There are lonesome mothers everywhere in need of a daughter to adore. They exist in kindly neighbors and invisible authors, in Mata Durga and Mother Mary and Mother Earth.
Some moms are no longer alive, and we ache for their embrace; we can be still, close our eyes, and tune in to that part of ourselves and that part of her that are always and forever united. We can talk to her while we drive home from the grocery store or plant lettuce. We can call on the spirits of our ancestors—our Polish grandmothers and our Lebanese great-grandmothers and our African great-great-grandmothers—for guidance and confidence and a better sense of humor.
Those of us who have not had children can harness all that unspent maternal energy and go forth and mother the world or pick someone especially in need of our motherly love and mother them.
Those of us without sisters can make our friends into our sisters or borrow someone else’s. Our students can be our daughters, and our teachers can be our aunties. When we do not have a close female friend, we can light a candle and sit on our knees and ask the Divine Mother to send us one. Or we can find her in the pages of good literature, in the notes of every kind of music, among peace activists and spiritual guides. They do not have to even know we exist for us to draw sustenance from our relationship with them. But we have to leave the door of our hearts open so that they can slip in.
Some of us have been so deeply damaged by our mothers that we recoil from the company of women. The whole notion of a Divine Mother may trigger our woundedness around the ways we were or weren’t mothered. There is no reason to force a connection to the sacred feminine. Maybe our true home rests in formlessness. We may find refuge in the holy emptiness, devoid of binary characteristics, free from traumatic associations. The more we seek and attend to what is real inside the holy temple of our own hearts, the more we will find healthy and loving manifestations of her in the world.
When our connection with the women in our lives has been strained or severed, we can either let these women go with love or fight with all our might to get them back. For some, the Divine Mother, in the form of Kali or Durga, Mary or Gaia, becomes a vital and living being who heals our ruptured relationship with our moms, sisters, friends.
None of these beloved women may look anything like our preconceived notions of mother, sister, daughter, friend, mentor. But our hearts will recognize her. We can post a lookout in our hearts, cast a message in a bottle on the ocean of our longing. We can risk letting women matter to us.
Mothering the World
Many of the women in my life do not have children, either because of infertility, or because they never hooked up with the “right” partner, or because they consciously chose not to procreate. And every one of these women is in some way mothering the world.
My friend Saraswati has surrendered to not birthing a child. It just didn’t work out. She tried with her first husband and tried with her second, both of whom came to the relationship with children of their own. Saraswati is a doctor of oriental medicine who specializes in women’s health. The vulnerability that accompanies her own fertility issues make her even more available to her patients; she is determined to help them get to the bottom of their concerns and also sympathetic and supportive when there is no solution.
Saraswati is also a yoga teacher. I have watched her pour her motherly energy onto her students, and I see how they soften and unfold in her presence. I myself have been one of those thirsty saplings that green up when I practice with Saraswati. Choosing to focus her beam on women has created a safe and vibrant space for the feminine to flourish.
In yoga literature, Saraswati tells me, we discover that the word hatha (asana practice) contains the roots of the words for sun (ha) and moon (tha). The solar element is about constancy; when you look at the sun, it’s always the same—a disk of fiery light that sets at the end of each day and rises again the next morning. The moon appears to be different every day as she cycles through her phases. She is in flux. She darkens and hides. She blooms and shines.
“Hatha yoga is the study of opposites,” Saraswati says. “It’s not about polarity, but about connecting and relating.” The masculine aspect of our being learns to cultivate softness, and the feminine learns to cultivate stillness. Just as the fluctuating mind reflects a lack of equilibrium, so are our beings out of balance when we deny the value of the emotional, the dark, the hidden. “It’s time to reclaim the power of sensitivity, empathy, the capacity to be with,” Saraswati says. In other words, it’s time to reclaim the feminine.
Brady is another woman who skipped householder yoga and has dedicated her life to the dharma (Buddhist spiritual teachings). It was one of those choiceless choices. Brady was open to marriage and family. “I always thought I’d have six children,” Brady told me. “Later . . . later . . . and then it got to be later.” No husband; no kids. Instead, Brady has spent more than twenty years immersed in Tibetan Buddhism. She lived in a monastery in Nepal for five of those years. And for an entire year she lived in a box.
The floor of this traditional monastic practice space was around three feet by three feet. The box was open at the top, with a shelf in front on which to read sacred texts and a space underneath to store them. It was too small to lie down in—an intentional feature meant to prevent the practitioner from going fully unconscious, so that part of them stays present even in sleep—and Brady slept sitting up. Her constant companion was the sciatica with which she entered and which grew more intense as the year unfolded. This spinal pain helped connect Brady with the suffering of the world, deepening her compassion and strengthening her aspiration to help all sentient beings become free.
There are many ways to show up in the feminine. Some expressions of the feminine are gentle, soft, classically nurturing. In other women it carries the swordlike quality to cut through illusion and enable them to speak truth to power. For some of us, another human being is a portal to the Divine. Others cultivate a direct connection with the Beloved in the chamber of their own hearts and also out in the world, finding traces of the Holy One in everyone.
Women, whether in our biology, our identities, our spiritual practice, or our work, hear the cries of the world resounding in the ganglia of our own nervous systems. The milk of our soul comes rushing forth to feed the hungry and comfort the frightened.
ANIMAL FAMILY
In my family of origin, one of my nicknames was “Saint Francis.” As a small child on Long Island, I was preternaturally patient about connecting with animals, both wild and domestic (a skill that never did extend to my human relations). I begged my folks for a pet of my own. Reluctant to take on a dog or cat, my parents agreed to a bird. We adopted Enrique, a yellow canary, when I was nine. His cage hung in the kitchen, and it was understood that it would be my job to make sure he had fresh water, feed him the right amount of birdseed, and replace his newspaper floor every few days. I took my canary responsibilities seriously (as I took just about every matter throughout my childhood).
But I also reveled in my bird’s companionship. I taught Enrique to sing. I mean, of course he already knew how to sing—he was a canary—but I made up elaborate whistling games, starting with simple three-note melodies and gradually expanding to more complex musical patterns. Enrique learned them all, cocking his head and watching my mouth with his tiny black eyes and then repeating everything I sang to him, including subtle rhythmic variations. Enrique seemed to be pleased with himself after each of these jam sessions. He would fluff up his downy breast and give himself a satisfying shake. It felt like a canary high five.
One evening, after coming home from a movie (I remember exactly what it was: Little Big Man, with Dustin Hoffman), we found Enrique upside-down on the floor of his cage, dead. I could not figure out what I had done wrong, though I mentally combed through any possible indicators I might have missed that Enrique was unwell. I think it was my dad who finally figured it out. We had recently had our pantry repainted, located only a few feet from Enrique’s cage. The fumes must have asphyxiated him. I was sure that it was really because I had gone out for the evening and Enrique missed me so much he died of a broken heart.
Over the years, although my desire to adopt every stray of every species has only slightly subsided, I found ways to love animals without bringing them all home with me. I have stood very still for deer and mountain goats, willing them to accept my presence. I greet the ravens in the trees surrounding our house, certain that they know me. I stop to pet every dog I encounter out for a walk on city streets or hiking in the wilderness. And I have also had dogs of my own whom I have loved beyond all reason and who loved me with equal devotion. Each one has lifted and carried me through some of life’s most grueling moments, allowing me to discharge my unspent maternal energy into their endlessly receptive dog hearts.
I am not alone in my passion for animals. Many of my friends and acquaintances, especially single people and childless couples, treat their animals as family. Not only is it valid for our pets to occupy a place of primary emotional connection in our lives, but I believe the love we share with these nonhuman beings contributes to uplifting the heart of the world.
Write a letter to a child as if you knew you were going to die soon, passing along what you most wish for them to know. What is your deepest wisdom, your highest truth? The things that delight you, in which you’d like the child also to take delight? Secrets you are ready to reveal or heroes who have inspired you? Distill the essence of your legacy. (For help with this writing, see “Writing Practice Guidelines”.)