Welcome to Commusings, our weekly newsletter designed for deep thinking, quiet reflections, and unhurried self-care. Here's what's inside:
Podcasts:
To My Fellow Mothers in Quarantine +
What Drug Companies Don't Disclose // Meditation:
The Frequency of Gratitude // Yoga:
Hip Happy // Teacher Wisdom:
Just Moving vs. Embodied Movement // Behind-the-Scenes:
How Commune Does Sourdough
• • •
Jim,
Last week, my wife-for-life, Schuyler, commemorated 50 orbits around the sun.
From the forced monasticism of quarantine, I etched her a clumsy love letter, alternately irreverent and doting. Having been yoked for 32 years, Schuyler and I have lost our taste for sanctimony and revel in verbal jousting. I share an excerpt with you here:
I sought in you an absurd collection of archetypes;
Nurturing mother offering her soft breast
And lithe nymphet capable of whimsical handstands.
Resilient feminist bread-winner and occasional wanton Jezebel.
Despite the lack of script,
your thespian pedigree has served you (and me) well.
You have played each character with aplomb and warrant nominations for numerous supporting roles.
The world anxiously awaits your next casting: nurse.
I sit here, sheltering-in-place on Mother’s Day, watching her pirouette from task to task; wrangling our three daughters, keeping businesses afloat, sparring with Zoom to stream her next class.
And I am enveloped by a profound sense of awe and gratitude, not just for her, but for all mothers who walk the razor’s edge of both baking and earning the bread, nursing both child and parent.
I envision, somewhat ridiculously, Schuyler as Durga the Hindu goddess, with a dozen arms, bearing not the weapons of ancient India but the tools of modernity: battered iPhone, corporate prospectus, digital thermometer, cast-iron pan, reusable diaper, kitty litter box, father’s bedpan, and wheelbarrow of mulch.
Mothers manage not just to tame chaos but conduct it into symphonies, transforming dots of disparate color into a
Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.
Where patriarchy has attempted to standardize every component of life in the name of growth and operational efficiency, the mother perceives a sustainable beauty in the interconnected web of variety.
In this way, mothers are the holders of the sacred. They recognize the value in the unique and interrelated; the hand-sewn dress, the heirloom necklace, the local yoga studio, the garden-grown cock-eyed carrot.
Mother Nature, too, find its symbiosis in the vast bio-diversity of distinct plants and animals, each of whom she casts to play a small role in the glorious theatre of life.
For mothers, there is no single right answer or one single way to determine it. There is no false pride. There is nuance. There is “yes and…”
During Covid-19, we have witnessed our global female leaders foster social cohesion through a delicate balance of decisiveness and empathy. Without either chest thumping or sanctimony, female heads-of-state have produced superlative results through distributed leadership and emotional intelligence.
Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg deferred medical decisions to the scientists and took the unusual step of directly addressing the country’s children, telling them in two press conferences that it was “permitted to be a little bit scared.”
Armed with a doctorate in quantum chemistry, Germany’s Angela Merkel kept her country’s fatality toll under 5,000 through calm, clear public exposition and an unparalleled marshaling of the health care system.
Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s premier, went hard on early quarantining, while also delivering empathetic “stay home, save lives” videos from her couch. She embraced a kindness-first approach urging New Zealanders to look after their neighbors, take care of the vulnerable, and make sacrifices for the greater good.
Notably, Ardern gave birth to her first child last year in Auckland’s public hospital while serving as Prime Minister, becoming the first world leader to take maternity leave while in office. Only 18 people have died of Covid-19 in New Zealand.
Women make great leaders for the same reason they make great parents; they flourish in the grey zone between question and answer, mystery and manifestation. And this is what makes our mothers – the great ones, the difficult ones, the complicated ones, the devoted ones – endlessly fascinating to us.
Our entire life is a journey back to our mothers, back to the peaceful belonging of the womb, back to the oneness; a re-matriation with the divine, the reunion of Jesus and Mary. As T.S. Eliot wrote, “to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
We pause today to honor all mothers, including our Mother Earth. And to pray this fraught time can serve as a modern Annunciation, that a new savior will be born within the divine mother of each of us, one that inspires us to craft beauty from chaos.
