The Mother: Seed and Soil

The other day, my children were learning more about the life cycle of a tree. We read and talked about how a seed is planted; then, with the right conditions, a seedling sprouts, then a sapling, eventually growing into a mature tree. The tree has grown both up and down from the seed- expanding roots reach deeply from the base and branches stretch toward the heavens.

My daughter asked: does anything else grow from a seed?

There are a lot of things that grow from seeds, I thought. At first, I thought only of the green things, of vegetation and plants and flowers.

Then, with hardly a breath in between my mind’s thought I said, “and you.”

I went on to explain that she was once just a very small seed planted in my womb; she grew into a tiny human and has now metaphorically grown up into a sapling or a tree all her own.

I repeated the identical story of how her brother has done the same.

She looked back at me with a spark of wonder in her pupils, eyes widening.

“Wow. And, you were a seed, too?”

I nodded and a deep sense of peace and steadiness made a home there in the base of my stomach as her brilliant realizations caught my attention.

I was a seedling once, planted in my mother’s womb by my father’s love.

For whatever reason, that was empowering and profound much beyond in that moment, far beyond the initial conversation of trees and leaves and decomposition. It was the catalyst to this string of realizing who we are as mothers, as women, as womb bearers, as those who sustain God’s greatest miracles, who were designed to beckon, to call forth and deliver life.

You see, a seed is planted in the womb and just like land, if the ground is ready to take seed, if it is in the right season for the seed to grow, it will surely sew. It will take form and grow in that land with a sense of effortlessness, sustaining simply by a good watering, nourishment from reach soil and sunshine- miraculous.

In that way, as women, as the wombs, our nature is to nurture, to help things to grow, to give a vision reality, to breathe life into seeds just by being our innate selves.

Take example a mother who gets pregnant. Once the embryo has attached itself to the wall and begun growing, in most instances, there is nothing extraordinary the woman needs to do in order to sustain that life. She eats, sleeps, drinks water, and usually can go about nearly normal as before. She is able to hold and nurture that life with nearly no concerted or conscious effort.

It is in her, through her- the very intelligent design of her.

Without striving, we can sustain life. We are alchemists disguised as common-folk, with the ability to spin and weave the breath into every single thing we touch.

It is our superpower.

If our bodies can literally take the seed, the sperm and grow an entire child from it, what can we not nurture for the good and expansion of this world? What can we not grow into wholeness and life? What can we not restore and make supple from that which may have been simple and barren without our touch, our love, our nourishment.

If our body can take one cell into itself, receiving it as it is and wanting nothing more, then multiple it by the millions and billions, what else can we increase in our world taken as just one?

One ounce of joy.

One speck of kindness.

One gentle touch.

One glimmer of hope.

We can build a life with it. We can take and multiple it all- the joy, the kindness, the gentleness, the hope- until it spans for tens of thousands of generations.

It echoes the age-old sentiments that being a woman is not simple or easy, but it is so good.

It is so divine.

And, when you look at a woman, her full spectrum of capabilities, one can hardly deny the existence of a God.

Surely, in this lesson with my children, I have taken a deeper meaning. I have learned just as much as they or more. One that allows me to observe the energy I have, the frequency I bring, the gift of sustenance and multiplying I carry into every space: my home, my career, my friendships, even, my solitude.

And so, has God not chosen us to be the ones who nurture, who breathe life, who sustain it, who care for, who multiple in their essence and increase what we are given?

Perhaps, it is our divine assignment.

This is not exclusive to childbearing though. In a grander, more worldly sense, it can apply. The femininity wielded with intentionality. It receives, multiples, increase upon it, nurtures and grows it.

We don’t simply Mother children. We Mother ideas. We Mother opportunities. We Mother spaces and places. We Mother communities. We Mother our sons and daughters who will lead nations so in that, we Mother the future’s nations. We Mother ourselves. Some turn right around and Mother their own mothers.

It is without bounds our expansiveness. It is in our ability to grow everything out a speck of something. This is not of us and our intellectual mind but in our body, our bones, in how we were designed.