“Raised by the women who are stronger than you know
A patchwork quilt of memory only women could have sewn
And the threads were stitched by family hands, protected from the moth
By your mother and her mother, the weavers of your cloth”
-Mary Chapin Carpenter, Family Hands
It occurs to me today that we are all tangled up in the webs of relationships in life. There are many of them. Some are what environmentalists would call “food chains.” We are tied to the people who make our food and the things we need to live. I play a part in the life in the man who fills my oil tank and the student who seeks a better life on the other end of the credits I offer through my college. I can provide the dandelions a sanctuary in my yard and I can actually remember to water my house plants. I pay my taxes and someone else’s child goes to school. I paint my house and the family across the street can look out their window and say “what a lovely shade of blue!” If my neighbor sits on his front porch and plays his guitar, I can enjoy it while I listen to a book that John Grisham wrote for me to read.
In all these relationships, I am giving and receiving. Soliciting aid and being solicited.
Ultimately, these various webs can be categorized in a variety of ways. There are some that were designed to get as much out of me as can be gotten with the least expense. There are others in which the web-maker has every intention to give as much as they can if I will only stay connected to them. My connections to them are umbilical cords of grace extended to me and I am not charged. Amazing. Their kindness never seems to get “put on my tab." The longer you live, the more you realize how rare and valuable these are. You realize that the world seems so full of the webs of spiders being spun to lure you in, trap you to some sticky contrivance that makes it impossible for you to escape while they take your innards out through some well-designed proboscis.
The philosopher Frederic Nietzsche once wrote that all living things express a “will to power” and that the instinct to control, to own, to dominate, and to imperialize is a natural and altogether to be expected part of our natures. “Every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force,” he said. “[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function.”
I am so grateful today that I did not have Frederic Nietzsche for a mother. MY mother seems to have entered my life with what I would call “the will to nurture.”
I would like to thank my mother in particular today. And vicariously, to thank my sister who is also is a very anti-Nietzsche sort of person and a great mom in her own right. I would like to thank my sister-in-laws Heidi and Cheryl who care deeply for their families and friends in their communities. I would like to thank my niece, Steph. I so enjoyed seeing your children’s happy thriving the other day. Rosie. Thanks for what you wrote about your mom in your blog the other day. To C.E., A.W., M.N., R.H., M.L. D.H. A.W., E.H., C.L., P.W.., and to H.M’s mom, and to all the God Mothers (G.O and H.M.) and those other people who I know that may not be mothers but who nurture the world I live in, thank you.
I hope it will be okay if I take a moment here to say thank you to Rebecca and Sally Anne. Thanks for all you do for the two wonderful young men that we were all somehow given to love through this life.
Painting by jackie brown-fourez
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