Laughter Medicine from the Great Mother
In a world filled with war, fear, high fuel prices, and a decade of unprecedented times, how do you remain hopeful and keep going every day?
As you probably have noticed if you’ve been reading along, my default is to wade into topics submerged in the depths of the human experience. Death, Sex, Money, Religion, Existential ponderings, these topics are not light. I know that. So first, I thank you for coming along anyways.
Though I am realizing I can’t stay in the deep shadows of the human experience forever. I must come up for air. The relief I have been finding to balance out the shadow of our ever-turning world has been humor lately. I recently finished two uplifting books by author and spiritual teacher, Tosha Silver. Her book, Outrageous Openness provided the comedic insight I needed deeply. Her anecdotal storytelling style to teach lessons about the Divine Order of our Universe was refreshing and lighthearted. One quote that really stood out to me from Tosha is,
“The letters in Divine also spell out dive in. And maybe that’s all the Divine wants us to do is dive in.”
I’ve always loved a play on words like how God backwards in dog. But this idea of the Divine being an invitation to dive in more fully into living, loving, hoping, and just purely being is uplifting to me. Finding the humor in life feels especially powerful when times feel dark and uncertain.
Tosha’s work has been making me think back to an author my mom loved in my childhood, Erma Bombeck. Around the time of early puberty my mom shared some of her books with me as comedic relief for how bizarre and wild being becoming a woman and living life in a female body can be. Her work is dated for sure and a product of a time where motherhood was the default assumption for a woman’s life purpose. But her humor reminds me of my mom and what being a mother means to so many. This brings a smile to my heart.
In honoring Mother’s Day today, I reflect on how this holiday can be weighted with many emotions for so many. For the motherless, for the one’s who have lost children and don’t know how to speak about being a mother anymore, for the one’s who yearn to be a mother but the Divine has other plans, for the one’s who have never felt a Mother’s love— the complications of motherhood unfold endlessly. This day of celebration of the maternal can be joyous and deeply loving for some and for others a painful reminder of loss and sorrow. The duplicity of this day is a challenge to say the least.
If you experience complicated emotions on this day each year, you are not alone. This year I will be leaning more into humor and the little joys that bring me laughter connected to my mom to honor her memory and navigate the celebration of a day which doesn’t feel wholly mine anymore to participate in.
The poem below I wrote on Mother’s Day 2024 as a comedic relief for the pain I was experiencing in that moment. It’s irreverent, contains some cursing and crude humor but in the end it is an allegorical anecdote about how carrying the weight of our ancestors can happen automatically. Though through intentional awareness, liberation from the weight we carry from others can free us and the one’s we love reciprocally.
The Allegory of The Honey bucket Bag
Gazing wonderingly at the beetle tickling your arm, basking in the sunlight
The Celtic Wheel of Life - marking the passage of physical time and the connection we have to the movement of season, internal and external.
I wonder when will he leave?
Then just like that, he flies away- adrift into the breeze.
Pondering then, what can I learn from others when I let go?
The lesson is that everything is transiently moving and changing around me.
My sanity trickles away in the moments I grasp at the grains of sand of the present,
As if trying to hold on to commitments ever morphing by this decision and the next.
That’s probably why they say God finds humor in human’s efforts to control.
I feel sick and tired, and then better and invigorated by life.
This constant wave is enough to have me giving up the self-made map of life.
I’ll take this one step here today, and then I’ll start again.
Tracing back the threads of my past, hoping they will somehow lead me to my future, is madness.
I’ll begin as I am right here because this is the most real version of myself I know.
Noticing all the areas I am overextending and reverting back to old habits.
Patterns I was born with
Their talons are in me from the first breath.
Not a pretty sight
An infant being clawed at by their spools of ancestral residue.
But the insatiable hunger to run away, all too often in rejection and fear, is not wholly my own.
For this experience, I present an allegory on the lessons of learning and unlearning from my lineage and here-and-now reality.
A Great Mother Tree reaches her branches up high into the sky making a protective canopy for the young around her. Cool shade, protection, and care all in one action.
Habitual patterns are like a handbag someone once handed me before they entered an infrequently-serviced Port-o-potty.
Neither party knew why we were there,
But all the same, the woman looked me in the eye and said,
“Hey, can you hold this? I can’t bear to set my beautiful Kate Spade purse on the ground of this shitter.”
I smile obligingly taking the bag into my hands.
Minutes pass to hours, and my stomach growls.
Worried, I finally walk up and knock at the door of the ominous outhouse,
It pushes in,
…Empty
Puzzled, I look around,
…No one
Then my eyes catch the peculiar object in my hand,
…The handbag
Eventually, I worked up the courage to look in the bag,
A bunch of nondescript crap.
Half-used cherry-flavored lip balms,
100 pens,
Scraps of paper with words like apples and Preparation-H scribbled in just legible handwriting, Dozens of gum wrappers,
Empty hotel lotions.
You know, the typical purse wrap sheet.
But no wallet or phone, so I have no idea how to get it back to the elusive owner.
Contemplation of leaving the bag or holding onto it just in case they come back grips me.
The situation makes no logical sense.
Why did they leave me with their damn bag in the first place?
Why did I take it?
Thinking and thinking until a wiry grey hair or two sprouts out of my head.
In exasperation, I finally decide to leave all their stuff in the bag and add the entire contents of my old, ugly bag into this much nicer, newer Kate Spade bag.
Makes sense in the moment somehow.
I give a little smirk at my perceived good fortune for this apparent upgrade.
Thinking to myself, if the owner somehow comes hollering for their junk back, at least I’ll have it.
Barely logical, but I tell myself this is for them
I’m carrying this weight for someone who couldn’t hold it anymore.
I’m a good person carrying all their shit around for them just in case they need it back.
Though I’m lugging twice the weight now, I tell myself,
This is “right.”
It’s what a “good person” does.
I hardly ever look in the bag, just keep packing it day in and day out until I almost forget about it.
Till one day, many days, even years later, someone comments on the bag saying,
“Is that the 2018 Brown Suede Christmas Special Satchel by Kate Spade?”
(Movie characters in Legally Blonde and The Devil Wears Prada are the only ones who ask vapid, specific fashion questions like these, but humor me for the antidote, won’t you?)
Can we ask more than this?
To live a life where we step into the unknown with courageous care and levity.
I pause for a moment in a stupor and look the person dead in the eye and say,
“I don’t know, it’s not mine.”
They give you the most rightfully so, puzzled look and say slowly,
“Whose is it?”
I blurt back without thinking,
“Honestly, I really don’t know; some person just handed it to me one day out in front of a Port-o-Potty.”
As the words clamor out of my mouth with dis-ease, I meet the inquirer's wide eyes,
Feeling the insanity and embarrassment wash over me.
They grumble some inaudible nonsense, cautiously retreating away.
Tasting their palpable fear that this craziness is catching.
My curiosity is reawakened.
When I get home from the safety of my room, I take a deep breath, pouring out the contents of the foreigner’s bag onto the bed.
Eyes widen at the astonishing load of crap unveiled.
A near exact replica of the scene with Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club.
(You know the one, and if you don’t stop reading this immediately and go watch it)
((Or don’t, who am I to tell you what to do?))
In perusing the miscellaneous mayhem, I find items I recognize.
Mostly shit I meant to throw away but couldn’t find a garbage.
But also, some important things
Things I forgot I loved-
A Mac lipstick color my Mom used to wear,
A halved Celestite stone,
An old Kindergarten photo of my Dad from 1955, looking like a scowling menace.
These things all make sense and make me smile.
Grateful I finally worked up the courage to look,
I set these treasures aside.
Now only leaving an anonymous collection of items that mean absolutely nothing to me and serve no purpose to my present or future life.
So I give it all a final, puzzling scan, then sweep the whole lot into the bin with a swoosh.
Immediately, I feel a bit lighter when I glance over to the empty Kate Spade bag that started it all.
Connection and separation — a paradoxical dance of learning from others and ourselves.
It lies innocently enough on the comforter.
I pick it up,
Empty and Light.
Looking it over,
Rich brown leather,
Impressively constructed braided straps,
Conveniently sized interior and exterior organization pockets.
Exhaling deeply in contemplation, I whisper to myself,
“Do I even like this bag?”
Really thinking it over,
Committed to deciding if I would have ever chosen to carry this myself…
After a few thoughtful moments, I draw a conclusion,
I like the bag.
It’s practical, pretty comfortable to carry, and stylish to boot.
An unexpected relief washes over me as I slowly put my newly found treasures and essentials back into the pockets.
Then I sling it over my shoulder with ease, turning towards the door,
Catching a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror.
Noticing with curiosity that I appear just the tiniest bit taller and brighter now that I have chosen What and most importantly Who’s shit I am going to live with.
Bruun Idun, created by Danish artist Thomas Dambo from recycled materials. She plays her flute from the forest shores of West Seattle’s Lincoln Park. Her song calls out to Orcas, asking them, “Where did you all go?”
This allegory is a metaphor for the talon bearing baggage of habits and patterns I inherited at birth, and honestly, I think we all do.
So maybe it's when you're 16 or 33 or 47 or 64 or 99, you finally choose to pour out that bag of shit habits, beliefs, thought patterns, and stories, and sift through it.
Painstakingly, one by one, to dispose of the well-meaning but nevertheless garbage collections you were asked or told to put in your bag of life.
Realizing they were never meant for you but someone else’s, completely
Maybe finding you had been thinking you were a totally different person all along
Lost under all the weight of misplaced identities.
So keep pouring out the bag.
Do it for you and maybe for everyone else, too, because through the pain of releasing from intense attachment to what was never ours to hold,
Deep generational edit occurs,
We grow, and so do all those before and after.
Laughing with my mama circa. 1994.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mama.
Love you always, B
I hope this piece brought about a laugh or smile in relatability to the human nature of unknowingly carrying the weight of others and the effect it can have on our lives.
How ever you experience Mother’s Day from your own history, I wish for you a day of feeling nurtured and loved by the original Mother, Earth. The one who holds us and cares for us each and every day. To other the maternal energies past, present, and future I thank you.
With gratitude,
Erica