Look for a new post of Sunday Brunch every month on the first Sunday. This column features Tripod Poems, poetic micro essays inspired by three randomly chosen words. These words become the title of the piece, are contained within the piece and are developed into observations on life in the Southwest and beyond.
Happy Mothers Day to all of our mothers.
Stay – Meditate – Harmonic
In New Mexico,
querencia is relationship
with the landscape
as deep home.
For those who are born
in a place and stay,
querencia is un regalo,
a gift of innate belonging.
It is attunement
with the harmonic overtones
of a familiar homeland.
It is to know the heritage
of a place as your own,
and call it, mother land.
To know a landscape
as mother is to meditate
on the meaning
of being rooted.
A mother is a witness
to our internal lives
from our very conception.
If she stays, she is
the enduring presence
that oversees our being,
the telling of our story.
If we are thusly blessed,
she is our compass,
our confident, our mentor.
And even when
she is our tormentor,
or our challenge,
she is nonetheless
our mirror and our
umbilical connection
with our deep roots.
When we accept landscape,
habitat, place as mother,
we become extended family
with all that resides there,
from soil to all sentience.
We can then choose
to also become a mother
to our environments.
Even as we must learn to mother
our mothers as they and we age,
we can become a nurturer
of our natural environment,
a witness to all that goes on,
a testimony to the complex web
of life that perpetually weaves
its own heritage in place.
Photo: “Dancing Aspen,” Acrylic painting by Eve West Bessier
