Earth Mothers

This article is dedicated to the great trinity of Earth Mothers who have shaped me:

Mary Oliver: the muse of long walks, content wondering, and wild geese

Tracy Rupp: the patron saint of travel, rivers, and motherhood

Deb Detwiler: the grace of bare feet, scarves, and female solidarity

---

My mother is a turquoise elitist. She will not stand for plastic dyed a pathetic robin-egg blue, nor will she accept that mainstream Sleeping Beauty turquoise that might as well be plastic. If it doesn’t have inclusions, it will not be included in her minimalist jewelry collection. For her turquoise needs to be rough and segmented as a tortoiseshell, all while having the color of the waters of Santorini.

That is the kind of turquoise my mother mailed as a gift to Deb Detwiler, my voice teacher and choir director during my first two years of college. In the spring semester of sophomore year, she told us her cancer had come back, and my mom thought the stone would be “healing.” I found out about the gift from Deb during one of my voice lessons, and I felt everything in my body hit the eject button. If I were a music teacher and I suddenly got an envelope with a rock from one of my students’ parents, I’d assume the next letter would include a ransom note.

Thankfully, Deb wasn’t me. She was and is much better than me. She is a lot of things including a feminist folklore scholar, a loving grandmother, and a contemplative breather. But most importantly, she was a lover of bare feet and women sharing their voices without fear. And thus she spent the last twenty years of her life teaching women and nonbinary college students to do the same.

That year, Deb found me and my mom after the Earthtones concert to thank her. She stood at least half a foot shorter than my mom, but her energy still seemed to fill the room.

“Thank you so much for the turquoise!” I love it. In fact, I just emailed my friend about setting for a necklace.” She and my mom went on in their own little coven until finally parting with a hug. Afterward, I walked out of the music center with my mom, and I could see the thought on her face: the “what if” of Deb not being around to wear that turquoise necklace once the stone was set.

“I really like her.” Her eyes were glued to her feet as she spoke. “She’s an earth mother—like me. I can tell.”

“Earth mother.” As it is a Tracy Rupp original, its meaning is hard to pin down. Outside of my familial zeitgeist, “earth mother” is a way to refer to the earthly manifestation of the great mother archetype seen across world mythologies. But when my mom called Deb an “earth mother,” she wasn’t calling her the cosmic manifestation of the human life force. She was talking about women who smell like patchouli and smudged sage. Women who stand against any cage that encaptures them from impossible body standards to sexual violence to shoes. To hell with shoes! They’d rather rest their soles on the physical and metaphysical paths.

I am not an “earth mother.” And I don’t know what went wrong. At one time, it looked like I was on track. My mom says that when I was five, I used to ride my bike around our garage singing about how I “just wanted to be free.” But one day, I must have woken up and realized I would rather wear bras then burn them. My soles are too soft for gravel, my time table is too rigid, and patchouli aggravates my asthma. I love Western medicine and Target, and I don’t care for unexplained rocks in the mail.

But it’s not the fashion nor the yoga practice that makes the earth mother. Beyond the simplistic (but also totally accurate) stereotypes is the value of connection. Whether it be the universe or God or a collective spirit, a greater energy dwells in us and the planet we live on. Now, it is important to distinguish that the theology here is not the most important aspect of what makes an earth mother an earth mother. Religion does not make the earth mother. Rather, it is spirituality in its most basic definition: “the belief that people can connect with something that is beyond mind and matter.” For Deb and for my mom, that “something” is everywhere and in everyone.

The rest of the world and I had lost another earth mother just a few months before. Mary Oliver, the canonic goddess of modern poetry, habitually walked and embraced the unexplainable throughout her later years. I will not put a label on Oliver’s belief system as I know she would find anyone I tried suffocating, but she would also not call herself an adherent to any major religion. Rather, her attention to nature was her prayer, and her poems were hymns to the universe’s great apathy towards our existence. After reading about her death before my Thursday night class, I climbed the stairs of the Admissions building with a hundred pounds of grief sitting in the pit of my stomach.

On the day Deb left us, that hundred pounds was given two new zeros on the end. And as with Mary, I walked with it. After crying in my roommate’s arms on the second floor of the Good Library, I had to start walking to the cafeteria. It was a warm day for April, almost magically so for a state where April snow is far too common. I was wearing my flowered halter top that Deb had told me looked like something she would have worn when she was my age. I walked past this one magnolia tree, its flowers suddenly pink as the Vietnamese áo dài Deb had worn for our Earth Tones concert just a week before. Although I carried my pain like a brick in my stomach, I felt the strength to carry it wash over me like the pink flush in those petals. A sliver of her spirit was within me, and that was enough.

I’m not an earth mother. But maybe there is hope for me yet.

---

Photo Credit: Goshen College at https://www.goshen.edu/photos/2019/april-2019-snapshots/#&gid=1&pid=9