A Mother’s Day Prayer

Mice have found the sweaters and the loose toilet paper.  Wasps knock their heads against every window, floating like stalled drones above a desert of dead flies.  In the fields around the country house, turkeys are doing their fan dance.   At dusk, the deer appear as if they have forgotten humans and their guns.
It is Mother’s Day.

Our delay in returning north this year has not just been relentless winter driving its chill into the center of our hearts.  We have come through more than we want to think about.  Three times since the first frost we have buried the bodies of beautiful young men who took their lives.  Three times in as many months.  Two others, suicides too, we could only witness from a distance.

Can you understand, then, how we might be downright gratified to see mouse droppings and a frill of weeds?   Can you understand how good it feels to dig into the dormant vegetable garden, head to the nursery and spend a morning putting in a flat of tomatoes and some basil?   It is a benediction to install the screens, sweep and clear the winter clutter.

When it is done, we will head back to the city, where some folks I know and many I don’t will put on sneakers and sunscreen and walk the streets in a Mother’s Day March for Peace.  God knows, we need it: just last week, two more beautiful men were killed by the spray of another gang shootout.

But here’s the truth of it.

The war that is killing our young men isn’t just guns and drugs and poverty.

The casualties we have seen this winter are from the same war, but another front: our collective vice-grip on the ever-narrowing opportunities for men to “make it” in America.

Over the deep ecologies of interdependence, we privilege the competitive edge.  Over service and collaboration, celebrity millionaires romp.   If a boy falls short in this equation on any metric – be it social status, learning differences, neighborhood, or family of origin — this war will almost inevitably leave him in the dust.  Destroy self-confidence, drive isolation, and deliver the final punch: a suffocating sense of no-exit.  Guns or ropes or poison.  Take your pick.

As we stand by the newly planted garden and ponder the precious lives that have ended too soon, I know that we need more than the cessation of obvious, headline grabbing violence.  We need to feed our depleted civic and spiritual soil with renewed, real opportunities:  visions of diverse outcomes, varied occupations that earn respect and a livable wage, an ethos that serves interdependence, not our hothouse favorites: the blue-ribbon winners.

There is hope.  Young men I know are graduating this month and heading into city schools to teach at-risk teens the power of high-level math andof writing their own poetry.  We know some who are starting or working organic farms.  Others working to end hunger and malnutrition.  I am grateful for the young men, and their adult mentors, who are seeding these gardens, enriching a soil capable of supporting a vast variety of truly nutritious harvests.

Nature is more forgiving than are we humans.  Soon the blueberries will return and the bears will come in the night to feed off the bushes. There are balances we must respect, lest bears and other creature perish.  For our part, we will repair the broken gate, the busted gutter, the endless things that humans create that will always need repairing.

My Mother’s Day prayer is that we replenish the soil of possibility for our young, so that our current harsh climate gives way to a new and hope-filled spring.