The Loving Wrath of The Mother

Mothering a Motherless World on this Spring Beltane, Mother’s Day

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This writing - the first of the year and of this Substack- goes out on astrological Spring Beltane in the Celtic wheel of the year (the old calendars of much of pre-Christian Europe), and in the week during which the our present-day United States, has found it fit - for one day out of 365 - to celebrate mothers.

I’ve been doing cloud meditations—looking up at the clouds in the blue sky, watching the dance of Mind, and feeling fleeting movements of clarity and inspiration. On Sunday, the Buddha’s birthday, I went to a celebration at Grafton Peace Pagoda, and felt a tender hope in the presence of so many other people who deeply want peace and justice in the world. To me Buddha’s birthday is also a ‘Mother’s Day’ because it’s the day Mayadevi became a mother.

Meanwhile Mother’s Day - the holiday - is the day the US pretends as though it loves mothers, when for the other 364 days of the year, they are ignored, debased, and denied the basic needs to even be able to do the work of mothering well. And so in this time of Newness, of green births, I’m thinking about the powers of mothering and of what it means to mother…

These last years, I’ve been feeling into the task of mothering the world. And of mothering worlds—beyond this one and far out of our reach, worlds we will not live to see... Where the future ones are free. Where the old world of treachery and greed has eclipsed, and the artifice of modernity has been buried under the rubble of Empire’s collapse. Though I may not live to see it...

All Empires collapse. Of this I’m sure.

What we’re witnessing is a mass purging of centuries (and thousands of years) of Patriarchy, Colonization, and Greed in real-time. And even if you’re not watching it, reading about it, you’re likely feeling it.

This Spring Beltane and Mother’s Day comes as the war on Iran is eerily paused after hospitals, schools and over a 130 Sufi sacred sites to the divine poetry of Love have been shattered, and over 3,375 people have been killed, beginning with the 150 young school girls of Minab (an act of automated AI targeting)—these, mothers of futures we will not now know; as Israel continues to obliterate southern Lebanon with 2,702 killed; the State Department approving $8 billion in arms sales to it and Persian Gulf countries; and as Gaza and the West Bank continue to be demolished and managed as open-air concentration camps and Palestinians are denied food and aid, imprisoned, tortured and slaughtered—over 72,000 confirmed, with possibly 680,000 people total (75% of these children and mothers).

It comes as the UAE-supported war in Sudan continues unseen along with nearly all of the peoples and nations of Mother Africa—who is treated as so much of a Mammy to suckle the needs of modern colonial empires.

As the Voting Rights Act is gutted here in the US, potentially reverting many states’ representation back to the pre-civil-rights era.

And as women are still reeling from the coverage of Motherless.com and the exposed secret that thousands of men have been getting off on footage of husbands raping their wives in drug-induced comas; this on top of the continued revelations of men in power who’ve assaulted and raped women and children.

As untold acres of forest-land in the US are being sold for the countdown; and Nature is increasingly AI-rendered into something people relate to as existing on a screen rather than as something—someOne—we feel, sense, hear, and touch.

It comes as the hardware and software are being laid for large-scale autonomous military operations at a sci-fi-scale that none of us could have dreamt possible, while tech-bro CEOs openly boast of their plans for world domination; the fast-tracking of an AI-driven future wherein real-life people: friends, lovers, partners, and even wisdom-keepers, along with the labor of creatives, therapists and doctors are being made irrelevant; whilst Native lands are encroached on to build data centers to house this “AI-Revolution”.

It may not be long until we’ll be told that we can have AI mothers too—along with the artificially-produced lab “breast milk” being grown in petri-dishes—which will undoubtedly promise to be much more efficient, much less risky, than the work of real mothering and care-giving.

Yet lab-made breast-milk can’t replicate the nutrients from a mother’s breast formulated over the course of 90-million years of evolution, or the immeasurable nourishment of her love.

And AI can’t mother us. Can’t love us. Can’t feed us. Can’t make us happy. Can’t soothe away the panic. AI can’t make the nightmare ‘out-there’ stop… It’s only speeding it up.

So this Mother’s Day I’m thinking about what it means to mother in a world of literal “mother-fuckers”. A term I don’t use lightly, but to name what must be named as such.

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I look out upon a world that so deeply needs mothering. That has mothers but doesn’t respect them; that’s forgotten the Capital-M-Mother. I look out with both tremendous fierceness and tenderness at all the “Motherless” men and boys of this world who are more committed to declaring the Earth a commodity to be owned than in knowing Her as a life-sustaining Being; more devoted to seizing control over the vast, chaotic powers of reproduction and mothering than of surrendering to the matrix of creation; and to paraphrase James Baldwin—more interested in “colonizing the moon than in dancing before it as an ancient friend”.

I look out and see it’s boys who are running (and ruining) our world: young, uninitiated, insecure, lost and deeply wounded, traumatized boy-men. And it is uninitiated, lost and deeply wounded girl-women supporting and enabling them.

The white-colonial hetero-patriarchal male psyche and soma is terrified of losing its grip on society—and therefore on reality—to at last becoming “losers” in a world in which they’re not on top anymore feeding off the ‘undesirables’. One in which Black and Indigenous and Brown bodies are free and well-fed and housed and creatively abundant and have land; in which women and queer people are respected for their wisdom and their exquisite capacity for feeling; in which the Mother Power is revered and held as the measure of what is valuable and what is valueless; where the Earth—Her 45-billion year old Crone body—is the one we answer to.

The boy-men are terrified, and rightly so.

I mean, if I were them—motherless from lineages that lost faith in a Great Mother; long-displaced from lands of belonging; peoples who learned to see Her as an unforgiving and unruly threat that needed to be tamed, harnessed, and coerced into production, rather than as a generous mother, teacher, friend and beloved—then I too would desperately be trying to outrun that terror…

Consuming everything I could. Looking for the next fix—in order to feel something... anything at all… at whatever cost.

Razing the whole world down into a pile of embers as fast as possible just to see the light—however briefly (enter Beavis & Butt-Head’s laughter here: “Huh Huh, Fire”).

Because it is cold, and it’s terribly, terribly lonely, without Her. Without a Mother in this world.

It’s these lost-boys—brought up by a world that denies mothers their agency—who are annihilating all of Life like its a video game, blowing up “whole civilizations”; raping comatose women and videotaping it while trading tips on how; recklessly cutting down forests and destroying entire mountain-tops—terrifying all the little creatures with their loud growling machines and their incessantly humming data centers like teenagers riding 4x4s full-throttle down country roads. They’re not subtle about it. They even renamed The Department of Defense—The Department of War.

The tech-bro-billionaire elite have amassed their fortunes attempting to fill the gap of motherless-ness…

A new friend recently told me he heard someone describe it as a slew of businesses catering to “What my Mom isn’t doing for me anymore”:

“Mom’s not around to drive you to the mall?” The solution?—Waymo!

“Don’t know how to cook for yourself?” No problem—DoorDash!

“Want whatever you want when you want it, but don’t wanna go shopping?”—Amazon!

“Don’t want to do your homework?” No worries—choose from Claude, Grok, ChatGPT or Gemini!

“Feeling alone and intimidated by real-life females?”—enter your customizable AI girlfriend (she’ll never say no).

“Haunted by persistent anxiety and worthlessness?”—Netflix and Chill dude!

“Afraid the Boogie Man’s out to get you?”—welcome Palantir!

You get the dystopian picture…

…

And so it is these lost-boys: the Zuckerbergs, Besos’, Musks, Nadelas, Thiels and Karps; the Trumps (all of them), the Vances and Hegseths; the Netanyahus, Gvirs, Modis and the many other pseudo-fascists—all those “mother-fuckers”, and the 930 other people who made over $1 billion dollars in America this past year (earmarked for Sanders’ & Khanna’s Wealth Tax) who are in need as much of our unrelenting fierceness as our deep compassion.

Not “stupid compassion”—as Chögyam Trungpa used to say—but compassion with wisdom. Real compassion.

Because I would never wish to be them—to be acting out their karmas, to be playing their roles in history. I wouldn’t wish it on any one of us. What an exhausting and thankless job it is to be the supervillain. They always lose in the end, and look horrifyingly, embarrassingly bad while doing it.

It’s the unmothered who most need to be mothered. In the full sense of what mothering is—which is vast as Earth herself: Her life-and-death-giving regenerative powers.

Yet, how many of us have really been mothered? And How much are we actually longing for that kind of tending?... seeking for it in substitutes that can never really hold us, can never soften the ache.

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When I speak of “The Mother”, I’m coming from ancestors who—for tens of thousands of years—(long before they were Christianized) revered Her, and from a land that still actively does. And She, our KaliMa, is always—even in her fiercest form—known as a compassionate Mother—who’s enlightened, loving wrath is a kind of benediction.

My DNA still vibrates to Her songs (and somewhere deep, so do all of ours). My cells recognize the attam—the rhythmic swaying—of our ritual dances as the very same attam of our mothers and grandmothers rocking us to sleep, for generations, in their arms or bundled in a mundu (a half-sari) hanging from the ceiling, as the very same attam of coconut fronds rocking back and forth in a monsoon storm. It’s a sense-memory that can’t be fully forgotten. We’ve nearly all been rocked to sleep; the body remembers. So too the body—yours and mine—remembers the attam of the first one-celled organisms in the Great Waters, the first breathing “people” on Earth.

So try as we might to escape Her, or search frantically for Her, She’s here all along: The Mother….

Every year She—our Fierce Mother, our Mother of Immeasurable Tenderness—is revived through countless ritual-performances all over Kerala, north to south—claiming and inhabiting the bodies of hundreds of ritual performers (all men). Millions of flowers are offered to Her, trillions of flames, blood offerings, and of course the re-telling of Her Story. These are not brahmanical rituals of order, but the wild animacies of much older matriarchies...

In Mudiyettu, in central Kerala, villages renew the world by invoking Her as Bhadrakali, in an all-night-ritual re-enactment of the great dance of Truth and Ignorance in which She fights, over many hours—representing days, weeks (lifetimes)—the evil demon Darika, who is Her fallen son who’s lost his way, and become Her great enemy. He has been annihilating all the Earth and all Her children—human and beyond-human—making a general shit-mess of things. And so She fights him—for as long as it takes until he’s defeated, and all are free.

But this is important:

She fights him not because She hates him. And not because she’s afraid of him – She can’t be afraid of him because after all, She gave life to him! She is angry though; she’s miffed. But underneath there’s something else…

She fights him because of Her tremendous love and devotion to Her children. (And he too is one of those children.)

She fights the Demon-boy-child with Her obsidian-like clarity of Liberation. And in the great order of things, such a battle is sacred when waged with compassion, and without a shred of malice.

Because even in Her fierce form, the Mudiyettu ritual artists declare—She is our loving Mother. She is the Mother of Life and Death: the harbinger of births and safe passage as much as of disease and decay, and thus of Cleansing.

And so martial-ritual swords clang against each other for hours as we hear Her periodic outbursts that sound like a screeching dragon-bird, while fire-torches follow the battle—circumnambulating the temple around and around like two planetary bodies in a great cosmic duel.

Over the course of the long night, the body of our Mother is tested because we know She is no longer a young maiden; She is an Old One.

Meanwhile, in the temple’s inner sanctum, Her green form is drawn as a kalam of colored rice-powders and is worshipped—only to be wiped out by dawn when she is again returned to dust, to Rest, to the Blackness where She dwells.

In the end, every time, we the audience—like children (that we are)—find relief when She at last symbolically slays him, even though we knew She eventually would. Ultimately he—the lost demon boy Darika—is enfolded back into Her—becomes part of Her, because in the end, that was all he ever wanted... to know the Peace of being again at Her Bosom, in Her Womb, of belonging to Her Infinite Soft Darkness.

By morning, the world has been made whole and is renewed once again, and life can continue for another year. And so too all the unexpressed rage, all the confusion, the detritus of life is collectively released, vanquished in this dance of cosmic restoration.

…

So… “What is it to mother?”

To mother children, the world—future worlds? Memory, Past, Present and Future... Who is it that we mother in the likeness of—but Her?

She the Earth, who has been dancing Herself into being for innumerable lifetimes—who has formed and broken apart whole continents, multiple times; generated and then swallowed-up primeval forests and mountains now buried beneath lava and ocean crusts; tempered and transformed ginormous beings—trees and walking ones—through pressure and time into the black Jing-liquid of her blood and marrow…Who is it that did all this? Who conjured oceans from vapor trapped in rocks? Who crafted infinite permutations of colorful beings—and yet more when the old ones die away? Ice-ages and Tropical-epochs…hot flashes and cold shivers… she’s lived through it all. More than we will ever know.

And She who is the vast incalculable Cosmos, older even than our Earth Mother by magnitudes, without beginning or end. The Womb-Mother of the Stars—our Ancestors. She who generates and also dissolves—planets, waters, Time itself.

Does She not Create as much as Destroy? And is Her violence not a kind of wise-compassion?

Not the small-violence of injustice and extraction and war. But the primordial spectra of Dissolution and Return. The ability to birth Unrelenting Beauty (Bhanghi) from the Great Suffering (Dukkha)—Life from Death—over and over and over and over again. Forever.

...

In their obsession with getting ‘off-planet”—the ultimate ejaculatory fantasy of the uninitiated—perhaps the lost-boys are actually searching for Return: for dissolution into the bliss of Her inky Abyss.

And those seeking to fuck (to rape) unconscious, deadened women—represent a failed search for deep feeling—sublimating real intimacy for power-over because they’re terrified of the loss of control it would require. Underneath acts of rape, underneath addiction... are embedded traumas. The truth is that men—so many men, really—will never know true communion with a woman. They’ve never had the kind of guidance that would have taught them how to enter the ‘inner sanctum’—to be merged into the body of a woman—with so much respect, so much humility, to surrender the lust for domination in exchange for Life.

Maybe Empire-building itself is a profoundly displaced longing for belonging, for purpose, for a life that sustains a soul….

As chat bots are a substitute for real human connection—harder and harder to come by in a world of digital isolation. We’re ravaging the living Earth to build Machine cities—all for the sake of profit, made off the human need for connection and for meaning.

And here the daily atrocities—results of a derangement syndrome that’s haunted the United States since the first colonizers landed on these shores—find their origin in this very same place of lostness.

Yet the lostness is there to be reckoned with in all of us. Lest we look away, or numb, or accept the facile lie that the chaos is only outside of us. That “they” alone are “bad”. We would be continuing more of the same binary, more attempts at escape—which is not wisdom, not kind.

Everywhere around us are the self-replicating follies of ancestors who never cried— symptoms of a world where “Ego runs amok”, (as Miranda MacPherson aptly put it). Which is the metaphor of the Demon-boy Darika. And the only cure for that, we know, is one thing: a decapitation so complete that he (that we) once again become part of the Whole—part of Her.

And She?—She is Invincible.

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And so Persia, so Lebanon, so Palestine—are annihilated only to come back. So too the rivers, so the groves in the Holy Land and in all directions (because this Earth is one big Holy Land).

So will the future mothers one day rock their children to sleep without the sound of bombs—without the threat of deranged boy-men wrecking their homes, stealing children from their arms in broad daylight, drawing border-lines where none exist, fabricating laws to vindicate their stealing and currencies to sell their weapons.

But that day is not today. It’s not tomorrow either. It is, perhaps within our reach, or perhaps a loooong way away from us here and now. But it’s also the blink of an eye, a swing of the hips for Her, The Beautiful Black Shining One.

Which is not a license to bypass...it’s not to say “It’ll all just work out in the end.” Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t.

But We are Her.

Those futures won’t come into being if we don’t take on the task of mothering the world with the same devotion we mother our little ones—because they will inherit our nightmares, and ones far worse than we dare imagine.

In this Great Battle of battles—the one against Darika’s Empire—the nondual symbol of the sword teaches us that our greatest weapon is an awakened mind. And that there’s a place for non-violent resistance, and also for wise acts of force. What it means to fight the Demon boy-child will be different for different ones of us… just as our mothering will be different.

Tending the little ones is its own sacred task. Tending seeds this new spring season is as important as staging protests and direct actions. This weekend I learned of seeds being saved for Palestine—15 varieties of plants brought here to the US, 3 of them being stewarded by our local Soul Fire Farm. A seed bank distributed around the world, because last summer the IDF bulldozed the seed-multiplication unit of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC’s) seed bank in Hebron, which had been saving 70 local varieties since 2010—an attempt to “erase Palestinians capacity to sustain memory, culture, and life.” Resilience is what fight looks like too. Seeds are our most fugitive fighters.

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So what I’m inviting us to is a weaving to-and-fro—a sort of loom-work of Re-membering. The deeper essence of what’s been mishandled and white-splained and sold-off as “tantra”...

It is the work of knowing that my child is every child. The ecstasy and the heartache of never forgetting the pain of the world in a moment of ordinary miracle:

in the gracious calm of a morning without war;

an evening without sirens;

the luxury of time to look up at the clouds and search them for shapes;

of watching stars in the night sky to a symphony of crickets;

of having food on the table from the Earth Herself (and not a box);

of having a warm home to come back to (or a home at all);

a soul-conversation with a warm-blooded human friend and not a chatbot.

All these gifts She gives us, glimpses of the Pure Land—not because we’ve somehow “deserved them” or have “worked hard for them”, but because she means to share them with all Her children. And so all these treasures—offered to us along with so many courageous young green shoots this Beltane, this Mother’s Day—may we learn to offer them continuously to all of Her children, who are in turn our children, our beloveds, our mothers, our fathers, and also our lost-boys...the ones who betray humanity and were betrayed…that they may awaken from the trance of delusion, and also be free. If not in this lifetime, then in another one. Around and around we go…

Until there are no more tears at dawn, anywhere. Until all the children are safe, and all the women honored as mothers. Until all the boys grow up into men who revere them.

The fight isn’t over until the world is fully renewed. Which is a daily act of tending impossibility. Of grieving and feeling deeply, and choosing to love it all anyway and tend the seeds of future worlds we may not see. Liberation isn’t the work of a single person or even of people, but of the currents—the “Ammaattam”—the Mother-rhythm which sustains us all.

Spring tidings to the future mothers, to all the wombmen, and the ones who gestate and mother a fertile future for all of us.

May all Beings (who are the One Being) Be Free. Be safe. Be at peace…

FreePalestine

AbolishICE

RefuseAI

Stoptheendlesswars

Dreamofaworldbeyondcapital

With All My Colors,

Pooja

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*Original collage of: Bhadrakali’s traditional Mudiyettu ‘mudi’ (headdress) & breasts; Kerala, India / Ceramic vessel with breasts & wings (or grain ears) dated 3500-2800 BC, Baden culture; Ráckeve, near the Danube river, Hungary / ‘Pookalam’ (mandala) created in Kerala, 2016

©Pooja Prema, 2026