The Way of the Mother: The Lost Journey of the Feminine

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This is a sensitive reflection on the spiritual path of woman as mother, wife, colleague and lover. The author shares her meditations on birth, beauty, relationships and wisdom. For Carol LaChance "the way of the mother is the way home... to be a participant in furthering and nurturing new life, physically, psychologically, and spiritually... for in that movement of history, in the terror and ecstasy of our conscious 'yes', lies the possibility and the promise of the future."

Excerpt Chapter Two

Beauty

The Revelation of Love

My first pregnancy allowed me to begin to be at home with the earthiness of my body. I had stopped wearing makeup about a year before as a first step in befriending my physical self. As I carried my first child, I felt extraordinarily beautiful. I watched my body swell and flower, displaying the miracle of my stretching skin and the rich heaviness of my body. As summer came I felt myself ripening, as my body prepared for its season of harvest. There was the milk, warm and sweet. The abundance the body offers its new life is the same as the abundance the earth offers us. Life is profuse, extravagant in the extreme. I knew the aching of the full breast, sore with its fruit, the sticky mess of overflowing milk. I needed to teach myself to value the hours I sat staring at the beauty of a baby's face, listening to the luxurious sound of enthusiastic suckling. It is hard to just be and behold beauty and know that it is valuable. So much of my experience pushes me to do, to keep busy, to achieve, to get things done.

The Author:

Carol Wallas LaChance is the mother of two daughters. She and her husband, Albert LaChance have founded Greenspirit, a center in New Hampshire that specialized in research and education in the spirituality of ecology. She currently teaches the talented and gifted, gives talks, seminars, and retreats.