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May 13, 2001

Mother’s Day

Mother
Nature
Mother
Earth
Mother may I
place in order
all things
always
Mother first

I treasure my mother,
not the more so for having lost my father, (though the implication is surely felt,) but because she upholds the place of honor custom, and our hearts, assign her.
The site of Origin is always Holy.
She is the beginning of my World.
I am the issue of hers,
and only an imitator, seeking to gain some semblance of her wisdom, of her understanding, of her grace. I know it is customary for children to think their parents the epitome; the wisest of beings, but in the case of my mother, I have yet to be convinced otherwise. Everything I feel, and write, and do, flows from a stream she thought, and spoke, and read,
to me,
just to me,
in the beginning.

I derive from her mind, as much as from her body.
Her melancholy, and her joy, inform me, along with her habit of seeing more in things than what the surface shows. From her I learned that every point is the starting place, the entry point, into an interconnected world of poetry and history that’s wound around the meanest of facts. Such was the story she told to me at bedtime, merging with slumber, dreamed into my being. Still I hold the tale before me, the glass I view through, as I cast my eye upon the Park, and all of Life outside its gates.

Outside the gates.
If Adam and Eve had had a mother, I imagine we’d still be living in the Garden.
There are two ways back there:
tear down the gates,
or make this place into that one.
They amount to the same thing.
If we cannot find the Gates of Paradise locally, we’ll do best to try improving what we have here, and make our World presentable, the kind of place you wouldn’t be ashamed to have your Mother visit.

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