Kits Beach, Vancouver, BC (photo by Nina Munteanu)
“Flowing Motherhood” (from chapter Water is Beauty)
The beauty of motherhood flows both deep and wide. Being with my young son slowed my world and returned to me a great sense of wonder. A walk to the little store with young Kevin was an expedition. He’d amble, explore, poke, then suddenly squat and study something on the pavement that I’d missed.
He brought me back to the ground, to the extra-ordinary mundane—to the quiet details and the fragrant light. Acting like a macro lens, he pointed me to the little things, Nature’s nuanced designs that I’d forgotten in the larger paradigms of my hurried life.
He brought me back to the immediate, to Nature’s elegant silence and beauty. He showed me the fractal wonders of tree branches, exploding seeds, glorious reflections in puddles, strange mud waves and odd moss-covered rocks. We crouched in halted silence to watch a bee feast from a flower’s nectar then launch itself—a dirigible laden with pollen—into the sky. We followed the brilliant Fibonacci spiral of a sunflower or the circular gossamer web of a spider, both mimicking the greater spiral of our own Milky Way Galaxy. We stuck our tongues out to taste the snow as it cascaded down in heaps or caught hexagonal snowflakes on our sleeves and sadly watched them melt. We stomped in road puddles or threw rocks and watched the circles of waves feed outward, changing the colour and texture of everything. We collected flotsam in nebulous forest pools and made magical potions. We wrote stories in the ocean sand, then leapt from dry rock to dry rock until the sea trapped us in its rushing embrace.
This article is an excerpt from “Water Is…” (Pixl Press) by Nina Munteanu
The Meaning of Water 