Mother, Creature, Kin (learning from other species)

Mother, Creature, Kin is a series of essays about the natural world, asking what other-than-human creatures can teach us about mothering, belonging, caregiving, loss and resilience. What can be learn from the plants and creatures, who mother at the edges of their world’s unravelling?

Becoming a mother in this time, means bringing life into a world that appears to be coming undone. Drawing upon ecology, mythology and her own experiences as a new mother, the author confronts what it means to ‘mother’: to do the good work of being in service to the living world.

What if we could mother the places we live, and the beings with whom we share those places? And what if they also mother us?

In beautiful prose combined with a knowledge of ecology, she writes of the silent flight of barn owls, of nursing whales, of forests, tidal marshes, ancient single-sell organisms and newly-planted gardens.

I set out to write this book, because my daughter was born into a world that is unravelling. And because there are fewer than 350 North Atlantic right whales left. And because there are single-cell 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.

Rooted in wonder while never shying away from loss, this book reaches toward a language of inclusive care learned from creatures living at the brink. Despair and fear will not save the world any more than they will raise our children, and while we don’t know what the future holds, we know it will need mothers.

This is a heartachingly beautiful, deeply life-altering book, one I will be placing into the hands of many mothers, creatures, and kin. There is grace here, and hope, and the light we need to guide us onward. A book for these times. Kerri ni´ Dochartaigh

The author invites us to understand mothering in a larger sense, as caring for all creatures – for birds and whales, trees and grasses, the entire web of life. Scott Russell Sanders

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder has a masters of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and writes for Emergence Magazine, a magazine exploring ecology, culture, and spirituality. She grew up in the Great Plains of Nebraska and Oklahoma, and now lives in New England, USA.