If we did not have a belief system that prioritized the single male sky god, would we be able to listen to Mother Earth?
When I was 13, my parents bought a house in the country; it was, at least as I understood it later, a compromise. My mother had never wanted to move back to the city where she’d been raised. She wanted to live in Berkeley, where she and my father went to graduate school, in a house with a yard, a place where she could be outside and put her hands in the soil. But my father wanted to live in New York City, and their life was there.
So my parents bought a modest saltbox house, next to a stream, down a dirt road, in Columbia County where they could go on the weekends. The house was nothing spectacular; it sat in a clearing amid modest-sized trees and didn’t have a view, but it was decidedly different from the concrete and steel of Manhattan, and after dinner on Friday, we’d drive through the evening and arrive, the moon there to greet us, and the scent of humus, pine leaves, the dew on the petals of the flowers.
The first thing my mother did that first autumn was plant bulbs—hundreds of bulbs around the house and under the trees. Crocuses, daffodils, tulips. She’d wake up in the morning, go outside, and spend hours digging holes, placing bulbs, pulling up roots that were in the way, cutting back overgrown bushes.
The next spring, before the trees were filled out with their green leaves, we had yellow, white, and purple crocuses; then, amid the new grasses, daffodils in different shapes and sizes that we’d pick and put in coffee tins to take back to our apartment in the city, their scent filling the car; tulips in brilliant reds, pinks, and oranges came next.
Over the years, my mother made the modest clearing in the woods into a spectacular garden with perennial flowers and grasses; she put annuals in terracotta pots around the patio and continued to spend hours of each weekend digging in the dirt, planting, watering.
I enjoyed the flowers, appreciated them even, but didn’t really understand why my mother was spending so much time on this of all things. In fact, I felt frustrated by my mother’s gardening. I wanted her to do something different, wanted her, in her free time, in her artistic endeavor, not to cultivate her little personal garden, but to cultivate her voice.
My father was the writer in the family; he was the one who talked to me about books, the one who talked about ideas at our dinner table. I never doubted that my mother was as smart as he, but it was he who steered the conversation about anything intellectual, anything political, anything having to do with the larger world.
I loved thinking about the world, loved reading, loved trying to understand the big picture of what it meant to be alive, and it confused me that my mother, so strong and elegant, so full of energy and so capable, my mother to whom I looked up to as a model, seemed to leave it to my father to take the lead in these areas of the mind.
It also confused me that my father, when there was any major decision or any altercation, would say, This is my table, my house, my family. What did that mean? Why was it his more than my mother’s? Why were we, my mother, my sister, and I, his more than we were all my mother’s? Or our own?
At 13, I didn’t quite have language for these questions, but they bothered me, and when my mother would put on her boots and her old jeans and go dig in the garden for hours, it made me angry.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that I became a writer. I wanted to claim my voice.
Although there are some exceptions, in almost every culture it is Mother Earth and Father Sky, the mother that tends to the body and the father that tends to the mind. In almost every culture, Mother Earth and Father Sky are both seen as necessary.
But in Monotheism, in the history of the West for the past 2,000 years, we have a system that prioritizes the sky god, the God of the mind, over the body, the male over the female. We are schooled in the mind, but not schooled in the body. And we prioritize the human over the natural.
To understand myself, to understand where I came from and my own story, I needed to claim my voice.
But I also needed to reclaim my body, and to do that, I needed to sink into silence, drop down beneath the head and listen. The more I paid attention, the more I wanted to get out of the city myself, go into the woods, put my hands in the soil and touch the earth. I thought of my mother getting down on her knees, planting bulbs, weeding. I began to understand why she did this.
I have a greater respect and appreciation now for my mother’s gardening. The earth grounded my mother. But though she had a sharp tongue of her own and was very smart, her voice ultimately remained dominated by my father’s. It remained my father’s house, my father whose word was supreme.
I don’t talk to my parents now. Who was allowed to have a voice, what was allowed to be said, the truths of my body that I needed to silence in order to keep those relations were too much. But I can’t help wondering: if the divisions between sky and earth, voice and silence, male and female were not so polarized, if there were space for all of those aspects and no single one was supreme, would my story—my family’s story—be different?
When I was young, I wanted to have a voice like my father, but I see now that both my mother and my father were cut off from parts of themselves. My father’s need to control also came from not only a culture but also a self that was not whole.
These issues may seem abstract, but they are urgent. The polarization of earth and sky has led not only to hierarchies and splits within families and the self, but also to violence within our political and social fabric and to our entire ecosystem.
The rise of autocracies and dictators, the growing inequality in the U.S. and around the world, the devastation of our environment—these are all founded on a belief system that divides the world into artificial power structures and that fundamentally cut us off from our own sense of belonging in ourselves and here on this earth.
Nadia Colburn is the author of two poetry books, most recently I Say the Sky. She’s the founder of the Align Your Story Writing School, which brings traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. Find her at nadiacolburn.com.
Header photo of Earth Goddess at Atlanta Botanical Garden by Nicholas Lamontanaro, courtesy Shutterstock.
