Lessons from My Greatest Spiritual Teacher

The joy of surrender and embracing the ordinary

Raven, my two-year-old daughter who feels known to me for lifetimes, has taught me the radical joy of just being. It is no longer necessary to climb a career mountain, only to dip into a deep well of inner peace. It is from her that I learned that motherhood, and life at-large, can be a sanctuary instead of a battle.

There is a softening in me. Kneeling in the dirt, gently brushing hair from her eyes, I often think of the mothers who can’t share moments like these. Their stories, beautiful and ordinary, are the limbs of human existence, reminding me of the strength found in everyday love and loss.

What the neuroscientists call “matrescence” barely scratches the surface of what actually happens. What pregnancy and postpartum does to a woman’s brain, nobody has quite figured out. Something shifts that you can’t feel shifting. Danger stops going through the usual channels. You catch it earlier, in the gut before the brain, some older system that doesn’t wait around to be asked. It drops below thought entirely and sits there, waiting. Birth rattled something loose you didn’t know was curled asleep inside your own soul. Tuesdays lasted weeks. Yet those same weeks flew by until they were years. Same three songs every night. Those songs weren’t only for her. They were also necessary for you.

In the pockets of silence, however, my mind drifts to the other women.

I have sat with mothers in cities battered down to their foundations. In camps wedged between one country’s indifference and another’s paperwork. A woman in Mosul showed me a piece of paper she had kept folded in her coat pocket for three years. Her children’s school schedules, written out by hand. The siege had been going on the whole time. She smoothed it flat on her knee before she let me see it. In Afghanistan, I sat with a mother who knew her daughter’s favorite poem by heart and said it to me all the way through. Present tense. The girl had been dead since winter.

Perhaps there is no matrescence for them. No quiet falling apart for them. No sitting with the oddness of who you are becoming. The day doesn’t have room for that. It has the next thing, and the thing after that. While holding their children against them, they move forward. They think about water. How much is left? They lie down by their child’s feet in bomb shelters and talk about nothing and anything, until they finally fall into a deep slumber and their cheeks are reddened by the impression of a thin pillow.

They hold themselves together not because they have found some reserve of extraordinary strength but because their children are watching their faces, reading them for news about whether the world is still a place worth being in.

I think about them when I am holding Raven, the room is quiet, and the only emergency is a lost stuffed animal. I think about the gap between my life and theirs not with guilt, exactly, but with a kind of ferocious tenderness. A refusal to look away. The unnecessary loss.

Their love is not smaller than mine. If anything, it is larger, having been asked to carry more.

For the first time, perhaps the only time in my life, I feel as though I don’t need to prove myself. I didn’t come here to climb or shine or be the best at anything. I came to sit, to listen, to fold into the tepid currents of my own being and open my palms to those I love most in the world. I don’t need to keep reaching for the moon when I’m already standing in a magically messy garden of sunlight.

It’s not giving up. It’s a transformation from running up the steep mountain, hustling to be somebody who matters, to walking beside the glistening riverbank, knowing you are everything to the most important little somebody. I’d rather be nestled away from the lights and the shouting, floating with the ordinary, extraordinarily ordinary: to wake and tend the small things, go down the twisty slide until we both feel our headspin and bake three-ingredient waffles, trusting that the small seeds of life will continue to sprout and flourish when I’m gone. The wind will still drift through the trees; the waves will still lap against the shore, and the memory of who you once were will fade.

And that is all okay.

I do not know much about where future chapters of life will lead me, but I know that motherhood is the greatest thing I have done and ever will do. And that is enough.

I find a quiet, effortless peace in surrender, releasing control, embracing the wild dance of toddler words, and the tender truth of why we mother and why we exist: to love, to give love, to be love. I believe there is no greater purpose for humankind, whether this be children, parents, pets, or friends. We are love.

I light lanterns on paths I will never walk. Some things you do without any expectation of return. You send love out like a letter with no address, trusting it will find its way. You build something solid, then step back and let other feet cross it. What I give Raven, I will never fully see. It will travel into rooms I won’t enter, reach people I will never know, outlast everything I thought was mine to keep.

I am not going anywhere. Not climbing, not proving, and not bracing. Just here in the stillness of the day, hands open. Still learning.

The greatest spiritual teacher I have ever known fit in the crook of my arm. The next one is already on the way, turning quietly in the dark, unhurried, unaware of my questions. I am trying to match that patience. To trust that what I don’t yet understand about this new life arriving is exactly what I’m supposed to learn next.

This love is the only revolution I have left in me. The one I would choose again.

Motherhood has no final page. It just keeps going. She shows up in every form. The woman whose tears roll silently so as not to wake her littles. The one kneeling in muddy puddles. Honor all of it. The valor in the ordinary. The ordinary in the valor. You have probably met her. You may well be her.

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