Today is Father’s Day and here in the Northern Hemisphere we are nearing the longest day of the year with sunlight abounding.
I am blessed to have a father with a heart of gold and while no parental relationship is without complexity, I am eternally grateful to call this man my dad. Hooray for the beautiful fathers of our world!
From my pain-filled relationship with the mother (having an adopted mama who died 10 years ago and being estranged from the mother who gave birth to me) I know that a day like Father’s Day brings more than joy. Holidays can have a way of applying pressure to our wounds. You may have a father who is dead, or who left you before you were born. Or you may have a relationship with your father fraught with abuse, substances, impossible expectations or neglect.
When Mother’s Day rolls around and I feel the absence of my dead angel mama and the still tender wound of my birth mother, I find myself leaning more into the maternal love of the earth. How can I feel motherly love through the soil under my feet and the strawberry flowers that bloom between my toes? There is nothing like human arms to wrap me up, but out of necessity, I also get my mothering from the earth herself.
So today I ask us, beyond our own human dads, what is fathering us? What could healthy father love look like in our world? Dream big!
We are all children of earth and sky and I like to think of the sun as my father, too. I am on a long journey of reclaiming the divine masculine within me and in our world. From years of listening to the earth and wise elders, I have learned of the masculine as yang and the solar energy of the sun. It is the consistent outward energy that nurtures life. My teacher Pat McCabe also speaks of the healthy masculine as the divine architect, the force that holds the structures needed for life to conspire. That solar energy lives within and around all of us.
This summer, I started a garden with my beloved. My angel mama was a master gardener and while I wish I could pick up the phone and call her for advice every five minutes, I know she is proud that I am following in her footsteps with dirt under my fingernails planting golden beet seeds and watering our fruiting green chile plants.
Through late spring, we placed plant starters in the kitchen window and I watched how each tiny chard and watermelon stem reached for the sun with all its might. Every day from sunrise to sunset, they grew a quarter inch leaning at a 45 degree angle toward the sun cascading through the window. They were starving for sunlight. Just like the plants, we need the sun to grow.
The sun will rise every morning to shine no matter how many clouds cover it up. Tiny seeds will emerge and stretch for the food of sunlight. Father sun nurtures life. May we relate to father as the warm consistency of the sun.
As you are celebrating the beautiful fathers in your life or grieving the ones who are no longer here or never quite were, I invite us all to feel the fatherly nature of the sun. Let the sun shine on you a little extra today. Drink it in through the pores of your skin and dream about how the healthy father can nurture our world.
Speaking of sun, Summer Solstice is rapidly approaching and we gather this evening for Summer Solstice Yin & Yoga Nidra. You are invited to come together to honor the sun in its full glory, no matter what season is around you.