Mothers

This family invitation is to honor, memorialize, capture or in some other way crystalize your most personal, subjective, inner felt-sensed experiences of your mother.

Mothers are incredible, huge, divine, awe-inspiring, sometimes horrible, and complicated. Mothers being as important as they are, they may be reason for many works of art, and your feelings about mom are likely deep if not devastating.

Over the years I have expressed the exquisitely layered feelings I have about my own remarkable, hilarious and powerful mother in multiple pieces. My example below is a poem, with a very narrow frame of following a specific memory, a way to process just a tiny, digestible piece of a gigantic topic.

My invitation to you: take a few moments to settle into your breath and inner channels of sensation. When you’re ready, feel into some small, concrete piece, aspect, memory, or quality of your mother. When the impression is strong and you have ahold of it, open your eyes and capture it in a quick and easy sketch of some kind, in any medium.

~~

There is a soft form
placed into shape inside me, 
pushed gently into a cavity
between the whalebone cage of ribs.
High as the light notes, inflected
flecks of white, pressed into a shape
starting to look more and more
like you. 

       the bones are the memories of a whale calf
       we could run in and out of them
       they were made in plaster of paris
       porous dips and wings,
       golden oak leaves, 
       trails along the brook,
       placards.

The egg shell keeps me sage. 

Mounted aerated
white matter, linked by ribbons
to the gray matter, to the alma
mater and to my mother. All folded in.
All faltered. The mound, the almonds
ticking inside you.

Come to me now, I am calling you,
wind song, grass shush, it is me calling to you.
I am waiting for your answer.

~~

Thumbnail image lovingly borrowed from Jane Rey’s illustrations for Hummingbird by Nicola Davies