I can’t say for sure, but I have this notion that if we treated Mother Earth the way my mother kept her household there would be no environmental crisis. Clothes, dishes, linen, toys, were passed down, not thrown out. Whatever was used could be reused. Worn chairs, cupboard doors, couch cushions, were not replaced but mended. Leftovers were redeemed. Water for dishes, laundry, bathing, was ample but kept to a minimum. Lights were turned off. Nothing was left running. Notes about love she found in her New Testament were taped to the fridge. And in her bare-bones kitchen, messages of gratitude and thanksgiving, for the abundance, were embroidered into found fabric, placed in frames and hung on the wall above the family table.

She didn’t know, nor would she have put it this way, but my mother practiced a practical, homespun, embodied mysticism. She was present, listening, carried a disposition for the well-being of others, was a volunteer in the kingdom of simplicity; and she enjoyed a good celebration, she would have smiled at our last reunion — the festal shouts of children ringing out in the hall.

Forgive me children. To my shame I’ve squandered my lessons, became a pawn to the ad, an average-over-consumer, an unwitting yet willing participant of capitalist excess with its conquering, subduing, extracting orientation to nature. The very same excess that now calls the young person leading the climate strike “a deeply disturbed messiah for the global warming movement.”

If a way through remains it will be by shifting course; following the sacred reality of the divine feminine, the spirit of interdependence; that balm, once called stewardship, of a nurturing inter-relational approach to our wounded earth and broken culture. The grandmothers holding their bowls of water know this. My mother knew this. Knew it with her knees sunk into the soil, her hands pulling weeds, smoothing back the ground.