We All Come from a Mother

A Compilation for Mother's Day 2025

We all come from a mother.

That anyone is born,
each precarious success from sperm and egg
to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.
And here I am, alive.
Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.
Not the car I totaled running a stop sign
or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.
Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly
where I was standing — my best friend shoving me
backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.
I’m alive.
And I gave birth to a child.

— Ellen Bass, “Indigo”

Here is a recognition, an honoring for all the mothers who may have lost touch with their inner wild soul. The archetypal mother who takes care of everyone may be ready for their resurrection and restoration of this inner wisdom. It’s the time when the crone years present themselves, when there’s time to breathe, coming back to life, the body may be changing, but the soul and brain are thriving.

Photo by Ian Nicole Reambonanza on Unsplash

“The old woman sings over the bones, and as she sings, the bones flesh out. And the creature lives again.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

At times, the archetypal mother loses touch with their inner wild soul. Clarissa Pinkola Estés tells a story of La Loba, the mother who uses her maternal magic, instinct, and wild wisdom to ignite what has been buried and lost. She lives in the deep silence of the desert, where the stars are infinite and vast and the scent of creosote is carried by the wind.

She lives on the outskirts, where civilization thins and the earth opens her ribs. There, among rocks and shadows, she searches for bones—scattered, forgotten, buried beneath years of forgetting. They are wolf bones. Woman bones.

Soul bones.

Pieces of what once ran wild and free, before the world said Be quiet. Be nice. Be small.

La Loba gathers the bones until they form a full skeleton and she sits them by the fire urging them to remember as she sings them alive. Finding the words to sing, her voice trembles and cracks as the skeleton comes alive again maybe with fur like a wolf, maybe a full woman as it jumps up radiant and alive. A soul reborn.

We cannot forget our inner howl, dear mothers. Our wild wisdom may be sleeping or only living in our dreams, but it is there. It is there for the rebirth, even when we may be in the underworld of diagnosis, death, and heartbreak.

All women have this wild wisdom and we all need it to be reclaimed to howl at the moon for the divine feminine to rise up now. We all come from the mother.

Living the myth of La Loba is not just a poetic notion—it’s a practice. A path. A remembering. And it’s women who can walk together, especially through the heart-opening work of mindfulness and metta (loving-kindness).

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Join me on Fridays at 4 pm PT to practice mindfulness and connection. Your grounding respite into the weekend.

• Turn toward yourself with kindness, even in chaos.

• Reclaim your creativity, your power, your voice.

• Restore the “wild feminine” through spiritual practice and sisterhood.

How? Download the app and join the Chat function to receive the Zoom link. Put it in your calendar right now - Friday Mindfulness Metta with Shelley

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