Mother is not just a noun, a person/thing/place, an identity (and a vexed one at that.)

It’s also a verb. An action word. A gesture. The act of birthing, creating, tending. (And you don’t need to be a woman, to identify as a woman, to have given birth, to practice mothering.)

Interestingly, in the UK, Mother’s Day is known as Mothering Sunday.

On this day, Mother’s Day, that mothers are acknowledged, brunched, feted with flowers, missed, resented, ignored, cherished, I pull open this lovely little box of Archteype cards I have, to inquire: what is the archetype of the Mother?

Who is THE MOTHER? The origin, the source. The portal through which matter comes into being. Both the light and dark aspects of the feminine.

An action.

And all actions have an equal and opposite reaction.

“the mother both nurtures and prohibits growth.”

How do we bring things into balance?

What small mothering gesture, what small act of tending and care-giving or creating, might you make today to recognize someone in your life, recognize a need, or find a little balance from what might be feeling dim, exhausted, controlling or limiting, to tilt things back to the glowing, generative, creative, nurturing potential that is within us all.

A few ideas that I’m playing around with. I invite your suggestions, reflections or ideas:

• scattering some birdseed in the yard as an offering to Nature, the great mother, all things;
• lighting a candle and thinking about my grandmothers and the lives they lived that I have very little context for understanding and the things I’ve been gifted by them
• planting a few seeds in the Earth, and maybe even getting the dahlias in, who knows (no pressure)
• maybe i’ll find a quiet place and pull out the archetype cards or my journal and ask “what does the Mother archetype or the Great Mother want me to know right now?”
• maybe I’ll look at the Tao te Ching and imagine the Mother of ten thousand things

You are here. You are here. Thanks to your mother, but more cosmically, thanks to the Mother of all Things, and that’s really quite remarkable, isn’t it? And worth a moment of observation and wonder.