The parent-mirror of the Earth

My daughter and I see ourselves

This week COVID has moved through our family like a wrecking ball, knocking each of us down, one-by-one, like bowling pins. We’re officially at the beach now, somehow moving ahead with our family vacation even though we all feel like we’ve survived a shipwreck.

Since I’m still operating at half capacity, I thought it would be a good time to share this piece I wrote when I was postpartum for a mothering magazine that (I think) no longer exists.

It felt apt, as I spent this whole week asking the parent of the Earth to hold me as I struggled to hold everything else 🤍

(psst..This piece includes an excerpt from my book Mirrors in the Earth)

My daughter was born in winter, on the edge of a departing snowstorm. Though the tumble of white soon melted, that whirlwind of energy followed us into postpartum, where for months afterwards we stayed swaddled in our home, learning about the words colic and cradle and cry.

The only mirror she saw then was the glass of the bathwater as we lowered her into my waiting arms. The scent of lavender and rose petals soothing her wails when nothing else would.

Just as the fourth trimester ended, spring arrived. At first, she would fidget and fuss every time I brought her outside— until I turned her outward to look at the world. Then, eyes wide with awe, she’d hold onto my fingers, grasping them as if they were guardrails while she peered over the precipice of wonder.

That first spring we walked in slow circles around the garden, ducking underneath drooping boughs of cedar and the flutter of falling petals. We sat by the creek while the water lulled her into a soft melt of sleep. When the lilacs bloomed, we’d stand under the arms of the branches and I’d sweep my hands over the blossoms, loosening a shower of small purple flowers, falling like rain onto our arms.

In the garden, among the trees, with the mirrors of the Earth, I could feel her finally arrive with peace into her body, and into this world.   

Before mirrored glass was invented, the only way we could catch a glimpse of our own image was through the natural world—calm waters, mica flakes, the onyx in someone else’s eyes.

Though today we have cameras and selfies, we still lack the ability to see who we truly are. With nature, however, there remains a place where it’s possible to come into direct, caring contact with our soul. We need only look into the benevolent mirror of the Earth.

In healthy parenting, part of a caregiver’s role is to mirror their child.

When children first begin to have an emotional experience of themselves as individuals, a parent’s job is to reflect these feelings, along with the child’s innate goodness, back to them so they can build self-worth. Many of us didn’t experience enough of this early phase of healthy reflection.

But no matter what our family of origin was like, we all continue to have access to this essential source of nurturance, because nature is the parent-mirror that will never forsake us.

Nature is our lifelong caregiver. It is the source from which our lives are made possible, a mirror here to help us when we have lost sight of ourselves.

Whenever we peek out from our hard places and hiding spaces, nature will reflect back to us the depth of our goodness and belonging—not because the denizens of nature are objects onto which we project ourselves, or because the more-than-human world lacks its own personalities and sentience, but because the beings of the natural world are our kin, our elders, and our teachers.

As Potawatomi author and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer recounts, “In some Native languages, the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’” We are the youngest children of creation. When we see ourselves in the wider world, we remember who we are.

When my daughter found her way into the garden to meet the trees and the creek, she met a caregiver who will be with her forever. The mother who is mother to us all. The one who, no matter how much we thrash or cry, will be there to hold us and remind us of who we are— natural beings who innately belong.  Those who are made of the same stuff as cedar bough and creek body, branch and lilac flower.

Today, when I walk around the garden with my daughter, I watch as she mimics the trees, waving her arms against the sky. Birds call and she calls back to them. She arches her back to gaze up at the clouds and I swear a cloud arcs softly over the horizon in response.

With the clear eyes of someone newly arrived on this planet, she sees what I have only just recently remembered.

I am a part of this swirling whole of beauty, of sunsets and sentience and petal. I belong here.

And when I can see myself with the same measure of compassion that the Earth sees me— I remember the spark I carry within me. The small flame that has survived through every snow of my life and that now, as an adult, I can blow into coals. The bonfire that signals high summer, the deep remembrance of all the gifts I was meant to give to this world— and the boldness to give them.

I hold my daughter in my arms and we gaze into the mirror of the Earth together, and the beauty of everything, within and without, enchants us both into silence, into joy.