Happy Mother's Day

One's mother incarnates and models the archetype of life. Though fathers contribute their chromosomal heritage, the mother is the place of origin, locus of parturition and omphalos of our world. Such "torrents of ancestry" are entrusted to the fragile vessel of a single person, a woman, who phenomenologically communicates the mystery of life itself and who, in the specific relationship between mother and child, embodies all sorts of messages about our relationship to the life force. The mother's biochemistry in utero, the treatment of the child by his mother, her affirmations or denials of his personhood, are primal messages to boys about their own being.

Just as human life emerged from the primordial seas, so we emerged from umbilical waters. How we are related to those origins and how we are to comprehend ourselves and our place in the cosmos are initially construed through the mother-child encounter. Not only do we share most of our early, formative days and years with her — the more so if fathers are distant or not there at all — but her role is replicated by teachers and other caretakers who in our culture are still primarily female. Hence the major influx of information men receive about themselves, and what life is about, comes from woman.

— James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: 

The Wounding and Healing of Men

Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit 

     of the rest,

You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

— Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric