There is a story I love that Ram Dass tells about his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Mahara-ji. If you know anything about the role a guru can play in a person’s life, you know that gurus are in touch with a profound inner knowing. They know exactly what a person needs to hear on the spiritual path. That is because true gurus are true mirrors, reflecting back to a spiritual aspirant exactly where they are stuck.
Usually the a small and succinct phrase, like a Zen Buddhist Koan, told at the right time is enough to catalyze a person’s spiritual awakening. So Ram Dass relates a very simple phrase that changed his perspective forever, where is guru Mahara-ji said,
“See everything as the Mother and you will know God.”
And for weeks afterward Ram Dass mulled over what this means and what Mahara-ji truly meant with the phrase.
This is a lesson I myself have been returning back to again and again. What does it mean to look at everything as the Mother? Ram Dass, being steeped in Indian religion and new age philosophy, interpreted the statement that the Divine Mother is consciousness, energy, and the world is a manifestation of the Goddess.
But I take the perspective a little differently, because to me “seeing everything as the Mother” means seeing the creative force that gives birth to the world around us.
If you connect Mahara-ji’s statement to a more indigenous world philosophy, seeing everything as the mother means tapping into what many call Mother Earth, or Madre Tierra, Pacha Mamma, or simply Gaia. We can connect the same creative force that brought us into this world as the same creation principle that brought this whole world together. The poet Joy Harjo, member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation, talks of this in one of my favorite poems of hers, Remember,
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
“Seeing everything as the mother” means seeing us all as connected to all mothers throughout history.
The past few weeks I have been exploring the basic idea that in order for us to save the world, we must first love it. I argue that the reason humanity continues to condone such egregious environmental destruction is because we do not feel a sense of kinship and belonging with nonhuman life.
And part of cultivating a loving relationship with the Earth is to see that this relationship is reciprocal, and we can only possibly dream of giving the Earth the same amount of love that She gives us. Because the love of Madre Tierra is unconditional, as the flowers, trees, rivers, and mountains are given to us so freely and openly. The Suquamish and Duwamish Chief Seattle put it wonderfully when he said, “Bless me to love what comes from Mother Earth and teach me how to love your gifts.”
In my own practice, I have found that the more I love the world, the more I see it as loving. The more I see the world as loving, the more I love the world. This is one of the great lessons of love, that the more we give away, the more we have.
Many of these themes I cover in my most recent poetry collection, Pebbles. Once of my favorite poems form the collection goes,
as mothers
wrap lunches
for their childrenmother earth
wraps her gifts toooranges in their peels
golden berries
in their small delicate leavesgiven as freely
as gentle raintell me
will anyone work to save
what they do not see
as loving
There is always a few hidden messages in my poems, and one allusion in this one is the term “gentle rain,” which is actually a reference to metta, or loving-kindness. One translation of the term “metta” is gentle rain, because when it rains, the droplets touch everything. The rain doesn’t discriminate where it lands. This is a lesson of unconditional love from the Great Mother. So too when we practice loving kindness for all beings, we really mean all beings. We can nourish the entire world with our loving kindness.
If we see everything as the Mother, we will see ourselves as children of the Earth, being taken care of by the world around us. This is true on many levels, from the food, water, and air that nourishes us, to the need for peace and tranquility that a walk in the wood provides. Seeing ourselves as children of the Earth also points our own naivete, while recognizing the wisdom of this loving Earth. In just a few hundred years since the Industrial revolution, we have made an awfully big mess of things. It would be silly to think they the solution to our problems is simply technological advancements in the form of solar panels and recyclable plastic.
No, the solution to humans living in harmony with the Earth is to see that the Earth has been living in Harmony with itself for millions of years. We are merely babies in the grand scheme of the cosmos, and all that we hold dear is just a blink of an eye on the time-scale of the universe.
Unfortunately, the world might disappear in that same blink of an eye, if we do not learn to live in the right relationship with The Great Mother. But it starts by recognizing that all mothers deserve cherishing, our own, others, and the Earth.
