Kundalini Splendor

 Free Spirit to a Wise Elder––Mirabai Starr

My hippie mother did not interfere when I left home as a teen to seek enlightenment. But she has picked the mantle of motherhood back up.

May 10, 2019


“You seem to think I have relinquished my role as your mother,” my mother wrote to me when I was 15 and living with another family in Staten Island. It was just across the river from where I had been born in Brooklyn, but 2,000 miles away from where my family had settled in the mountains of northern New Mexico.

I had to look up the word “relinquish.”

She was on to something. Growing up in the counterculture of the early 1970s, I was granted an excessive degree of autonomy by my parents and, like many of my contemporaries, I didn’t know what to do with it. While my friends went riding off on the backs of Harleys and sleeping with their drivers, I was tracking the footprints of a series of spiritual teachers, quasi-Eastern and questionably legitimate, in the hope that they would lead me to enlightenment. One such teacher lived in New York City, and I was bargaining that — in the shelter of her magical powers — I might become a guru myself by age 16. Eighteen, tops.

I waited each day for the mailman to bring me a dose of mother-love. But my mom rarely reached out, and her silence intensified my alienation. That was partly because she was busy building a small business, tending to my younger siblings and accommodating the bizarre demands of a brilliant and bipolar boyfriend.

But it was also because she believed in me. I said I wanted God and even though my mother leaned toward atheism herself, she did not interfere.

I assured her that the family I was living with was taking good care of me. She could not have known that the dad, 25 years older than me with kids my own age, was working on luring me to his bed in the name of my spiritual development. I was the eldest living child in our family, the responsible one, serious and driven. My mom did not question that I knew what I was doing.

I did not know what I was doing.

“Last night I had an anxiety dream about you,” she confessed in one of those infrequent letters, and she described a long hallway through which she was frantically searching for me because I needed her, but as soon as she got close I would slip into another room, quietly closing the door behind me, and disappear all over again.

I looked up “anxiety dream.”

A part of me wanted to be saved, and yet if she had tried, I would have thwarted her efforts, proclaiming that she could never understand the depth of my soul. I would have insisted that there was no place for me in the New Mexico house where she lived, a house filled with intermingled clouds of homegrown pot, menthol cigarettes and green aspen split and shoved in the wood stove. A never-quiet house where Janis Joplin took turns with Kris Kristofferson blaring from the cassette player so that a girl could not meditate if she tried. A cynical house where the only gods allowed were drunken poets.

Twenty-five years later my mother held me on the porch of the New Mexico house I shared with my boyfriend and our daughters. She was rocking me and I was screaming. The police had just come to the door, hats pressed to their chests, to inform me that my 14-year-old daughter, Jenny, had been killed in a car accident on the downslope of U.S. Hill, a favorite local sledding spot between the Mora Valley and our home in Taos.

“We were blessed to have them in our lives for the time they were with us,” my mother was murmuring. Her face, smeared with tears, was pressed against my face, smeared with tears. There was nothing to say, really. There was only this hollow amphitheater of anguish where we clung to each other. All I understood in that moment was that my mother knew this ravaged landscape and that I was safe with her.

My mother too was a bereaved mother.

My older brother, Matty, died of a brain tumor when he was 10 and I was 7, and for a time we lost our mom to the wilderness of grief. This probably accounted for the lapse in parenting that characterized that crucial span of my upbringing. But over the years, my mother absorbed her impossible loss and picked the mantle of motherhood back up. She has modeled for me what it looks like to shatter and mend, to defy social norms and find your own voice. My mother’s vulnerability gave me permission to be vulnerable, and her ferocity allowed me to be fierce.

She is in her mid-80s now, vibrant and eccentric and devoted to her family. She never shows up at our house without bearing bags or boxes or baskets of treasures she picked up at yard sales or at the local thrift store. Incomplete sets of handblown Mexican water glasses carefully wrapped (“Who needs exactly eight?”). An alpaca sweater, extra small (“Perfect for you”). A challah (“To stash in the freezer for French toast”) or chocolate chip cookies from a bake sale (“For when the kids come over,” she says, referring to her great-grandchildren, who occasionally stop by).

My mother’s overflowing love of life has shown me what true happiness looks like. She has taught me how to be open to amazement in the face of life’s small beauties: a mourning dove drinking from a hollow of rock, a child unbraiding her grandmother’s hair, a well-balanced soup.

When I watched the mailbox for word from her in my teenage years, hungry and hopeful yet also huffy and aloof, I could never have imagined how the arcs of our lives would send us back toward each other. Now I cannot imagine stepping up to the call that’s been seeping through the seams of my life without this calm, complicated, unconditionally loving being holding my hand.

Mirabai Starr is a New Mexico-based writer and the author of “Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics.”