Roots & Wings — Ode to Mom #2

Lately I’ve been meditating a great deal, to reinforce an inner sense of stability even as events in the outside world seem to be wresting control away from even those individuals and groups who typically seem in control. I’ve also been speaking wonderfully more often with a wider range of family and friends than I usually do while on an assignment.

A thing we’ve talked about these past two weeks in particular is my mother. One of my brothers and I had a phone call to mark just about the exact one-year mark of her passing, early in the morning of March 30^th in NYC last year. Many of Mom’s closest relatives talked about her again this morning, when it was already the anniversary of her birthday at least by my time – April 11^th dawns in Bangladesh 10 hours earlier than it does in NYC. These family conversations, with groups large and small on both sides of my family, have caused me to reflect so very much on all that I have from my parents, grandparents and ancestors all the way back. The most obvious part is the fundamentally optimistic “can-do” approach which my mother must clearly have inherited from a long line of our ancestors going back, I assume, millennia and longer. After all, biologically speaking, it feels to me as though the decision to try walking upright or to shift from hunter-gatherer to seasonal-agriculture has to be a fundamentally optimistic one, in the sense that some people somewhere just decided to try something new and see where it got them. Luckily for us, thus far it’s led to those of us now faced with the challenge of finding new and optimistic ways forward through the challenges currently facing our beautiful, diverse and hurting world.

So I’ve chosen what would have been her birthday, in the midst of what is clearly a global emergency, to channel more nourishing memories of my mother and the light she reflected and encouraged in and with everyone around her, certainly for the whole time I knew her and presumably even before. She gave me roots and enough confidence to occasionally try my wings…so, hey, thanks, Mom 😊.

And oh by the way, I think these are all photos which I didn’t manage to dig out when I first posted or later adapted last year’s Ode to My Mother post. But if you want to verify it or just enjoy more of Mom, check that one out here: https://somuchworldsolittletime.com/2019/03/31/an-ode-to-my-mother/

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