It wasn't so much the particulars that made Mother's Day special this year.
It wasn't the facts of the breakfast, though I did appreciate the organic oats and fruit my daughter laid out for me. It wasn't the perfection of the roses, one for each child, that Emily brought in a Mason jar, or the words she and her two brothers wrote on cards. It wasn't just that my daughter drove me through Big Sky mountain country to the scenic Gallatin River at the edge of Yellowstone National Park near Bozeman, Montana, where I have been visiting her.
It was the intentionality.
It was the pact Emily I made at the beginning of the day, to make the kind of day we both know we crave: slow, spontaneous and present to the other, so that while the oats were bubbling, I asked Emily if I could read an essay to her that spoke to me. And she stopped, and sat, and with full attention, and no cell phone in her hand, listened.
The beauty of the day lay in its unplanned simplicity, in the lunch we packed for the river that was whatever we could find in the refrigerator: hummus and bread, cucumbers and olives, fruit and tea.
It was in the unhurried way we determined to get to the river, stopping first to wash the buggy windshield because Emily wanted to make sure I could see, and then meandering through town so she could point out places of meaning she'd been wanting to show me.
It was in the knowing that we only had so much time, yet acting like we had all the time in the world, stopping at points along the spirited river and holding our arms outstretched to the blue sky. We knelt by the river, named by Meriwether Lewis, and dipped our hands into the coolness of the spring thaw. We saw that the sun shone brightly and said many times how grateful we were for the beauty of the day.
When we found a spot along the banks we liked, we spread a blanket, where we ate our hummus and bread, where we lay for a long time, simply watching the evergreens bend in the breeze above our heads. When we were concerned that the sun was too intense, we pulled the blanket a few feet into the shade, and when we thought to be quiet and listen for the river and the birds that flew along the waters, we did that too.
Deepened into a slowing of time against a backdrop of trusted human connection and the free flow of a timeless river, I felt the routine fears, rumblings and racings drop away on Mother's Day. I marveled that this must be what happens when we are connected to our best selves and the elder wisdom of nature within the framework of our most treasured relationships, when we remove time from moments, when there is no hurrying to the next thing, because there is no next thing, nor cell phones, even, because there are no towers in the wild.
The next day, I basked in the memory of time well-spent, an unusual feeling in our race-to-the-finish modern lives.
Then suddenly, I felt doomed, by the double knowledge, of what it is that gives me life against the likelihood that I wouldn't have this again any time soon.
Realistically, when would I find this again, and with whom? I couldn't routinely have this with my daughter, an adult with a busy life 1,700 miles away. Who among my busy friends could or would do this with me? Even if they had time, how could I expect to re-create the feelings of a mother-daughter relationship on Mother's Day? I was afraid my friends would think me silly or crazy for even asking for such a thing.
But then, in the midst of this primordial longing that seems to plague contemporary humanity, something else occurred to me: If we don't reach for what we want, we can almost guarantee we'll never have it.
What the heck, I texted a handful of close, local friends, told them about my Mother's Day, and asked: "Do you think we can we touch something like this together?"
The responses I got back were sweet and affirming, as was the reading that appeared in my inbox from Daily Om that day: "It is not about trying. It is about simply being in a receptive new flow."
We know these things, we mothers especially perhaps chance to encounter these things when we step into remembered heart space with the best people we know. But in our hurry, we forget.
This was the gift of Mother's Day, the river as metaphor, winding alive and wild through high alpine meadows, flowing free into the rocky canyon and out into the openness of the valley.
My grown daughter, who once learned from me, now is teacher/reminder of how time and relationship can be.
We think we have forgotten how to live in these modern times, when sometimes we just need to slow the passage of time, and watch the remembering come.
