Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn from Nature's Mothers in a Time of Unraveling is an inspiring read from a gifted essayist, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, whose work we are once again proud to feature in this issue.
Each of the chapters in this book could stand on its own as an essay on living in this frightening world. Laid out in five main sections, the book guides us through the centering act of orienting to place in a reverent manner, then looks at stories—of barn owls, of endangered right whales, of forests, of salt marshes with their abundant life and rising tides that are eroding them away—to help us make ritual in our homes and our lives, and to help us find meaning in a broken world.
I needed this book and was grateful to read it. In fact, I couldn’t put it down. Like so many of us, I am easily prone to despair about the unraveling that is happening around us. As I write this review, the EPA has just announced that it will reject climate science, undermining any chance we have of making things better through regulation. It’s up to us now, to people on the ground, in community, with our beautiful children.
Steinauer-Scudder, a mother to another human, Aspen, asks us all to be mothers. To care for one another, for all creatures, for the Earth, in that loving way that surpasses science and facts. The science of climate change and species extinction cannot be denied, nor can we put our heads in the sand, but choosing a loving relationship with Earth may just be the best medicine for the planet and for our souls at the same time.
From the book’s introduction:
I set out to write this book because my daughter was born into a world that is unraveling. And because there are fewer than 350 North Atlantic right whales left. And because there are single-celled organisms dwelling in the peat of salt marshes that are utterly mysterious. And because that peat is, in many places, eroding away and washing out to sea.
…I am afraid…I am grieving an ongoing loss that feels too big to name.
…We are living in a time of ecological collapse. There is no way around it. But there is, I think, a way through. Perhaps the best we can do is to keep renewing the world and our love for it.
I hope that you, reader… will join me in considering that one of the definitions of motherhood is the capacity for expansive love and care that human beings are capable of extending to others, within and beyond the bounds of species. I hope that you will consider the greater-than-human world as being in need of this care, in a daily, obligatory, sacred, practical, nonnegotiable sort of way.
In this moment of widespread, compounding, overwhelming, uncertain ecological crises, I hope you will remember that you have so much love to give.
Learn more and order at Broadleaf Books.
Recommended by Liz Thompson