"The mother: Seed, sacrifice, and sky"

How is a life measured? What is the true reason for living? Do we really know where we come from? What—or who—is God? Thousands of alliances sway in a vast dance of experiences and memories. Oh God, Divine Everything, how much love you pour into a mother!

You created her from love, to love and to be loved. You delight in your creation, for a mother will never fail you, and she will always be forgiven—no matter what she does—because the mother is a strong mare bearing the heaviest, yet most beautiful burden.

A mother is many beings in one: She is a fierce feline, a mule, a whale, a gorilla, a she-wolf.

She is a magician, a slave, a lover all at once. She is brave, a scythe when necessary—for in a single moment she can halt the course of human evolution. She is linden and valerian, soothing as tea, yet also a stimulant that wakes the whole world. A mother is a wise teacher, showing new life how to grow, when the soul first awakens as a wanderer in this wondrous world of beautiful madmen—and those other mad ones, the destroyers. With sacred patience, she nurses her child even if it scars her with the most pleasurable stretch marks in existence. She endures every pain for her little one, watches over its sleep, becomes its shadow. She no longer lives for herself. She is unique, capable of devouring the world in a single bite—and sometimes she must. She carries the world on her back, walking far, far away, where—if lucky—she finds something to feed her child. God rejoices in her creation, for woman is His most beautiful portrait. With her, He achieved His dream. Yet He knows the weaknesses of man, and the ingratitude that consumes him. That is why, in some places, woman has always been stoned, violated, stripped of her sacred essence as the feminine force who shapes this endless stage. She has been burned for being “mad”, robbed of the rights she has deserved as a human being since the beginning of time. Her womb is sacred, yet many have desecrated it with cruelty. In some cultures, her most erogenous zone has been taken from her— “the less she feels, the better,” they say. She becomes a coal worker, a floor scrubber, a harvester of entire orchards while she tills the earth— Yet she may also sacrifice her dignity, open her legs, and sell her body to feed her child.

A woman, a mother, will give her entire life for her child—even if that child becomes a murderer. She understands and accepts his mistakes, but how could she not love him?

And a woman who has not given birth can love just as deeply as one who has— why? Because she carries the essence of motherhood inside her: Ovaries, a womb, breasts… and a powerful brain that reminds her: “You were born to create life.” Woman and mother are made in the image of the universe’s womb. They are the same—exactly the same. Her mission: to create life, to be refuge for the fertilized cell. She no longer sleeps once her children exist. She becomes a robot the moment she gives birth, capable of doing a hundred things at once. She cleans their waste without a hint of disgust. She invents money out of thin air. She becomes the most precise of mathematicians, for she always imagines, always creates— But gives her child what is necessary. She is doctor, lawyer, heroine, scientist, soldier, miner, laborer, farmer. She becomes everything her body and soul can carry. And yet… she withers. She dies slowly, even while being profoundly happy. Her face—

from the very moment she becomes a mother— begins to show exhaustion, the lines of time drawn too soon. Her hair, dual colored with age and neglect, whispers to her that she still exists. But she is happy. All she asks of God is to live long enough to watch her child grow—

to see them crawl, to see that first tooth, to savor their scent and drown in that ocean of body-odors she can recognize at a distance, even blindfolded. She rejoices watching them walk, Reading, writing, singing, leaping, playing. If it’s a daughter, the mother smiles and cries when her first blood comes— she knows that it won’t be long before some man possesses her child, and she begs the almighty to bring her a kind husband. If it’s a son, she prays that no bad group will seduce him, that he will never return home in a coffin—or bleeding. And then comes marriage. The children leave. The mother walks slowly toward the end. She fulfills her sacred contract. And one day, those eternal little ones give her the greatest gift of all: Grandchildren. The continuation of her bloodline, the dream once conceived with her beloved It is then that she sees the snow settle on her hair. And she understands that the end is near. She asks herself if her harvest was good. For it is in old age that we reap what we have sown. She will discover whether it was all worth it— whether she fulfilled the sacred vow: To give life to life, and love without end. And at the very end, she asks herself once more: What is the reason for existence? Why do we live? For a woman and mother, there is but one answer: To love. We return to where we came from— To the Nothing,

and to the All.

With deepest love: Yirka Gonzalez