Today is Mother’s Day. My mom and I spent the morning drinking coffee and walking the shores of the beach. It was a beautiful morning. The sky was clear, the breeze was refreshing, and there was such a subtle, quiet inner joy for both of us to be together-my mother and her child, me! My relationship with my mother is interesting. I love and respect, adore and care for her more than anything and anyone. Our love has deep roots. But it is also a difficult love for me, because, as with every close relationship, there is a mirror. In this mirror, we see things as they are. The other person’s faults are our own faults, the other person’s pain is our own pain, the other person’s joy is our joy. We are essentially in a deep relationship with ourselves, whether we recognize it or not. All of our relationships are us and our experience of the other person. Our experience is the key. The joy and the happiness that others give us, is our own validation of what is true about the inner most aspect of our being. The sadness and frustration others give us is also our own validation of what we believe to be true about our innermost being. How much love we have towards ourselves, is how much love we have towards others. How much anger we have towards others is how much anger we have towards ourselves.

As my mother and I continued to walk the shores, we stopped at an interesting cliff, where dozens of seals, sea gulls, pelicans and other species co-existed together in absolute harmony. At one point, I noticed a very small baby seal. Her mother was pulling her by her neck, away from a group of birds. “How cute!”, I thought. My mother and I watched curiously until we noticed that the mother seal was crying. She would pull the baby, and then stop to cry. The baby seal was dead. We continued to watch. After a few moments the mother began to cry deeply and skidded away on the cliff, looking back for a moment to see a few seagulls eating her baby’s tail. She immediately skidded back to her dead baby, and covered it with her whole body, crying, to protect it from the predators, which flew away as the mother continued to cry. I too began to cry.

The love of the mother, the emotions in all of nature, danced around me in absolute harmony. I felt such sadness attached to the experience, seeing loss, pain, grief before me. But behind this loss was such love. This source of this deep grief in this animal, was love-pure, motherly love. This love, the love of the mother towards her child is unconditional. Within it, it beholds the essence of the love which all of existence is made of. The deep and penetrating energy of all of life-Love. This energy only knows it’s true source, and as it breaks of into various expressions of anger, grief, depression, sadness, it is only experiencing a false separation from its own creator. The love of the creator is unconditional, just as the love of the mother is. The creator loves all of humanity in perfect harmony, just as a mother loves her child, regardless of faults and separation. I encourage you today, on Mother’s Day, to take this incredibly beautiful energy-the energy of the Mother, and pour it deeply into your life, into all your relationships, experiences, feelings. Let it heal you and carry you back into it’s loving arms.