"A mother is likened unto a mountain spring that nourishes the tree at its root, but one who mothers another's child is likened unto a water that rises into a cloud and goes a long distance to nourish a lone tree in the desert."
- The Talmud
Mother May Apple
Rain fell on spring-soaked soil so much it pooled and flowed unbounded.
Love, blessing and abundance poured out on all God's green earth.
Thick new growth sprouted from every pore from this water feast.
In this vast wilderness, the Mayapple comes prepared for the rainy season.
Her single leaf, an umbrella, lets water flow and protects her single blossom.
That flower, like all creation, is made in secret,
intricately women in the depths of the earth.
It is not fragile or sweet, but miraculous and healing.
Before we ever dreamed of this flower or this rain, her eyes beheld it.
When it finally opens for the world, it is a wondrous delight.
Mayapples flourish in wet Springs as they gather gather in community on hillsides.
Come, celebrate our Mother May apple and the Mother who bears all fruit.
Sing praise to her and to her waters that bring new life to everything.
Count her blessings that number more than all the widflowers in all the woods.
Then pray her waters bring us new life worthy of her children.
"In the nineteen-seventies, Colin Murray Parkes, a British psychiatrist and a pioneer in bereavement research, argued that the dominant element of grief was a restless 'searching.' The heightened physical arousal, anger, and sadness of grief resemble the anxiety that children suffer when they’re separated from their mothers. Parkes, drawing on work by John Bowlby, an early theorist of how human beings form attachments, noted that in both cases—acute grief and children’s separation anxiety—we feel alarm because we no longer have a support system we relied on. Parkes speculated that we continue to 'search' illogically (and in great distress) for a loved one after a death. After failing again and again to find the lost person, we slowly create a new 'assumptive world,' in the therapist’s jargon, the old one having been invalidated by death. Searching, or yearning, crops up in nearly all the contemporary investigations of grief. A 2007 study by Paul Maciejewski found that the feeling that predominated in the bereaved subjects was not depression or disbelief or anger but yearning. Nor does belief in heavenly reunion protect you from grief. As Bonanno says, 'We want to know what has become of our loved ones.'"Eureka, as we say in California. I have found it. Yearning is pretty much my constant life state, and it drives my near-compulsive web-searching. (Isn't it interesting how search is the key to the web? Yearning seems to be so common - is grief a near-universal state?)
