Mother's Day, revisited

Checking my NetVibes this morning, I came across a YouTube video on Conversation at the Edge, which found it at Skepchick, which found it at Feministing, and well, I guess they found it in some old advertising archive for Goodyear!  At any rate, it makes an amazing contrast to the reading I'm planning on doing this morning at our first Sunday Morning Fire Circle.

First, the wild, product-of-its-time YouTube video:

Click on the GoodYear logo below to view the YouTube video:

Or here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td6m3OhO5zE

I remember seeing this adverstisement as a teenager, and not thinking twice about the 'real' message.  We've made progress in awareness but it's going to take generations to change the deeply-seated belief structures portrayed, in living color (!), so clearly in this YouTube video.

And now...for the other side of this particular coin...a reading about the universal energy of Mother:

It's a bastardization, on Mother's Day of the Hafiz poem "The God Who Only Knows Four Words".  I substitute "Mother" for God, because Hafiz wouldn't mind,in fact, probably would be delighted,  and furthermore, it's now public domain since written in the 1300's!

"Every child has known Mother.

Not the Mother of names.

Not the Mother of don'ts.

Not the Mother who ever does anything weird.

But the Mother who only knows four words

And keeps repeating them, saying:

"Come dance with me."

Come

Dance."

With great sweeping hat-off bow to Hafiz...I add this quote from Iris Murdoch: "Love is the extremely difficult realization that someone other than oneself is real."

Here's to all the Mothers in the world...those who dance and who can't, for whatever reason, but who want their children and their children's children to dance. And for those, who through the blood, sweat and angst of their bodies and souls, know that their children our outside of themselves and are real...and struggle to love those children better than they have loved themselves.  And for those Mothers who have never been outside themselves, for whatever reason, and therefore don't know that the children their bodies have borne are real...we send these Mothers love and realness.

Sweet, deep, rich, loamy, *humus-like  Mother's Day  to all of us.

* In soil science, humus refers to any organic matter which has reached a point of stability, where it will break down no further and might, if conditions do not change, remain essentially as it is for centuries, if not millennia.

In agriculture, humus is sometimes also used to describe mature compost, or natural compost extracted from a forest or other spontaneous source for use to amend soil.