To Mothers

This year, unexpectedly, I walked into a conference room and had one of the most profound experiences of my life.

We were guided through a Seventh Generation meditation — invited to sit not only with ourselves, not only to feel the presence of our parents and ancestors, but to stand-up, reach out and hold our children’s hand and then feel them reach out and hold their children’s hands until the energy of the seventh generation flowed through us. We were asked to stand there with courage or shame and look into the eyes of future generations and to really take a moment to see and feel the presence of the children yet to come. The faces of my children and future generations appeared in my mind with startling clarity. Their eyes. Their trust. Their dependence on what we choose now. And their cry for courage now — and clarity on how what we value now will be felt in such stark ways in the future.

It recentered me completely.

The work we are doing here in our small town of Singing Bridge has always been about community, resilience, and remembering how to live more generously together and belong to one another again. But in that moment it grounded me in something even deeper: our work is nourished by an invisible covenant with the future. We are trying, imperfectly but earnestly, to become ancestors our descendants might one day thank.

To be able to look future generations in the eye — even imaginatively — and say: We cared. We tried. We did not turn away even when everything in the system we have unleashed tries to crush those trying to protect the interests of generations yet to come.

So many mothers are carrying these unbearable questions.

How did we arrive at a place where money is valued more than the quality of the air our children breathe?

How did we normalize an economy that rewards extraction while exhausting the people who nourish and nurture life itself?

How do mothers welcome babies into a world where cruelty is amplified, where greed is celebrated as “success”, where trauma dumping on others is considered brilliant, and where those who volunteer for their community — strengthen local institutions and government, protect watersheds, defend forests, feed neighbors, or stand courageously for future generations are so often dismissed, starved, mocked, or crushed by systems too numb to recognize their worth?

There is a particular ache mothers carry right now — a grief that lives below language. It is the sorrow of loving children so completely while watching a culture behave as though their future is disposable.

And still, the mothers continue.

They plant gardens. They adjust solar panels towards the light. They organize meal trains. They sit beside hospital beds. They protect libraries and rivers and schools. They hold frightened teenagers in the middle of the night. They keep showing up at town meetings. They make soup for neighbors, stand-up to bullies, and still hold the capacity for generosity and care while witnessing the world unraveling. They somehow continue to create tenderness in an age that rewards hardness.

This may be the most radical thing happening on Earth. Not domination. Not conquest. Not accumulation. But mothers — and all those who mother — continuing to choose love anyway.

The very act of courageous mothering is arguably the most important jobs on the planet. The willingness to remain present to both the beauty and the pain of the world. A refusal to abandon our relationship with life. Standing-up to and speaking out against the bullies and repeatedly choosing courage again and again and again.

We took a moment in that meditation room to gaze into the eyes of our future generations — not to break the gaze, but to look with honesty and say: yes we know better so we choose courage. No we will not look away. No we will not let go of your hand and pick the easy path and discard your future for our short term pleasure and gain. No what we witnessed in that meditation was not denial, but a deep remembering that we belong to a long human river flowing both backward and forward through time. Our lives are not isolated events — the children of the future are already depending on the moral imagination of the present.

So perhaps this Mother’s Day is not about Hallmark cards and polished celebrations.

Perhaps it is about honoring the exhausted courage of those tending and carrying life forward anyway. The mothers trying to raise kind children in a system hellbent on extraction and exterminating life. The grandmothers nourishing roots and protecting memory. The grieving mothers. The Earth mothers. The aunties and mentors and volunteers and guardians. The ones who still believe future generations deserve clean water, beauty, belonging, and joy.

So to all of you practicing the great hope-filled art of mothering:

Thank you for refusing to give up on life.

Thank you for carrying love forward across impossible terrain.

And to the generations coming after us — may we look you in the eye and become worthy of your trust.