Beltane Cancer Moon
Exhausted this weekend. Those six days of thinking, feeling, writing, probing, going down the holy well of the self. All good. But, tiring.
It’s Mother’s Day. Another Hallmark moment, I know. Yet. Mom’s. You don’t get here without one. Except maybe that kid in China. Unless you’re a wonder of high, high tech biology, you came out of a womb. Indian Hills, just down the road from us, has these funny signs. You may have seen them on Facebook. The one today reads, “Mom, thank you for the womb and board.”
I come from a long line of mothers. So do you. This thought always strikes me as strange. Think of how many things had to go right for you to exist. Sure, there’s that whole randomness of the sperm that crosses the finish line, but think historically, think evolutionarily, think all the way back to that first organism that took the lightning bolt or the warmth of the undersea vent. Whenever and however life first appeared. Your existence, and mine, means we exist in an UNBROKEN chain of reproduction from that first wiggler, that first animate entity. One after another after another after another, for billions of years. Maybe 4.1 billion years according to this article. From that beginning until now something protoplasmic has cheated death by producing one of your ancestors. Could be billions of ancestors, maybe even trillions.
To shorten the time frame a bit consider mitochondrial Eve. Who? From wiki: “…the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers, and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman.” Between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago. How many mothers in her line running up to you? Not sure, but a lot. And each one had to survive all the rigors of the out-of-Africa migration, a turn either toward what is now Europe or what is now Asia, and whatever history your ancestors had once civilization began to direct the movement of human populations.
So, when you say happy Mother’s Day, you might consider saying happy Mothers’ Day. After all, no womb and board, no you.
