Been hard to get to the keyboard this weekend to write and reflect on what starry moments are inviting me to contemplate. I have been considering dark spaces that make the stars seem brighter and found myself wallowing in some of that darkness. A perverse inversion of light is haunting. With mother’s day in the mix, it was inevitable I would be thinking about the ones I have mothered and mother, where they are, how they have received, rejected, welcomed, ran away from, invited in, asked for guidance, had intentional and unintentional recipients of laughter, trauma and joy. It is a vexed role being a mother. The generations of mothers who have come before me have done the best they could as I know I have too.
I have been reading about the sky show of the Aurora and it being due to the sun throwing out, pouring out, multiple blobs of material from its surface into space and in this interaction with our atmosphere resulting in geomagnetic storms. I think this phenomenon is a bit like motherhood. Like the sun, mothers throw out their best blobs of love and light to their children, and the electromagnetic power of attraction or its opposite, repulsion, may cause technicolour storms visible to the human eye and, silent.
I am missing my kids who aren’t here. I am loving up the one who is and her little ones. I still have my mother earthside which is its own blessing. I think of the relationship that brought me to motherhood, the waiting and the false starts before forty-four years ago becoming a mother for the first time and the incredible joy of that role being added to my identity. There are no gold stars for motherhood. Doing your best really is all that there is.
Prof Brian Cox reflected on the Aurora and his message on X last night has been with me all day. The invitation from Nature to remind us how lucky we are, to be in this cosmos, to have a magnetic field protecting us, a motherlode of magnetic love, that keeps us safe, that enables particles charged up and travelling at warp speed to greet us, that reminds us we too are particles of light, star dust, precious and hopefully grown up enough to take responsibility for our shared future. Maybe I am hearing an Ode from the Cosmos to all the earthlings, fostered by Mother Earth? She must feel a little lost and abandoned too, forlorn and sometimes forgotten by her children. These wild nights of colour and contrasts of shadow and light, the swale of motherhood in the ridges of the sky.
As you watch the Aurora this evening, it’s worth reflecting that you’re getting a rare direct glimpse of the power of Nature. Those charged particles causing the atmosphere to glow came from a sunspot complex 17 times the diameter of Earth and traveled across 90 million miles at a million miles an hour. Without our magnetic field to protect us, our atmosphere would have been lost to space long ago. Those colours in the sky are Nature reminding us that we’re very lucky to be here amidst the violence. And perhaps therefore also reminding us not to shite it all up 🙂
Letters to 