What will you be doing for Mother’s Day? I confess it’s never been a big deal in my family, either with my mom or as a mom. Somehow, we just never got on the breakfast in bed, flowers, greeting card bandwagon. I don’t know why. It’s not that I don’t think mothers deserve to be honored. Let’s face it. Mothering is the hardest job in the world. I do not mean that metaphorically, or hyperbolically. It’s the hardest job. Every other job has days off, or at least hours off. Every other job has a limited field of expertise, and doesn’t require that you be simultaneously teacher, doctor, housemaid, entertainer, counselor and a whole host of jobs like construction worker that you might never have anticipated. Every other job, if you get mad at the boss, you can complain to your friends without having to feel like you’re a horrible person and that it’s all your fault. Every other job, if the boss hits you or calls you names you can sue. Every other job, if it gets stressful or tedious or overwhelming enough, you can up and quit.

OK, fathering could conceivably be as difficult as mothering, but it usually isn’t. Dad, if you’re the one who cleans up the barf and checks the homework and calls the teacher when things aren’t going well and strategizes how to deal with mean and gossipy friends and holds the croupy baby in the shower and drives to doctor appointments and reads The Runaway Bunny over and over and over again after washing the dishes and seeing that teeth are brushed and jammies on and explaining why it is that it gets dark at night then let’s face it, you’re a mom. I’m talking about you too.

You, whoever you are, deserve all the kudos that you may or may not get. Not just the dads who are moms, but also the grandparents, aunts, uncles, foster moms, step moms, all of you. You know who you are. However you got there, whether you struggled for years to conceive or adopt, or whether kids got dumped in your lap by circumstances you chose or didn’t choose, whoever you are, if you’re doing the job for life, with no chance of parole, I honor you.

I honor the amazing, creative moms who are helping their children to flower into artists who are moment by moment creating their lives. I honor the patient, calm moms who somehow manage to keep their tempers through the onslaughts of unruly toddlers and sarcastic teens. I honor the moms who exude love from every pore, whose kids learn that some behaviors are unacceptable, but that they themselves are cherished in every moment for the unique and precious beings that they are.

But more than that, I honor the moms who are just getting by. Who entered motherhood not as a divine calling, but as something that have taken responsibility for and will never give up on, no matter how brutal it may feel. The moms who mean well, but get sucked into screaming matches even when they know there’s no point. The moms who sit their toddlers in front of the television for a precious break from the clinging and the running and the mind-numbing repetitiveness of toddler games. The moms who drop their kids off for a play date with a sigh of relief, and who pick them up with utterly untrue assurances that they were missed.

I get it. It’s really that hard. OK, maybe being president is harder, but there’s an eight year limit on that gig. At year eight moms are just getting started. And while presidents may feel the weight of the free world on their shoulders, moms don’t ever get to set down the burden of wondering if their children will be all right, whether they will be happy, whether they will ever learn to put new toilet paper on the roll or wash their own dishes, whether they will turn out to be drug dealers, whether they will have children they are not prepared to raise that could, unthinkably, turn up just at the point when you thought the mothering job was done.

So for all of you moms, of whatever gender and biological relation to your children, here’s a bouquet of virtual roses. I hope that sometime between now and Mother’s Day you get a quiet moment to remember the real gifts that you’ve gotten throughout the year: not only the hugs and the smiles and the sweet snuggling at bedtime, but also the moments when your child has trusted you enough to cry on your shoulder, the times when you genuinely laughed at your child’s joke or they laughed at yours, the flash of insight when you were able to see the world through their eyes. Truly, motherhood is the toughest job you’ll ever love. On a good day.

Happy Valentine’s Day. If, you know, that’s your thing. If you happen to be one of the people who not only is in a relationship, but is in the kind of relationship where you send each other flowers and mushy notes before your romantic evening out, then good on ya’. But if you happen to be one of the many, many people who doesn’t have a love interest, or broke up, or lost your long-term partner to death, or prefer to be single, or don’t feel that you can be out about your sexual orientation, or know that your partner will forget to buy you something special or have agreed with your partner that both of you couldn’t care less about Valentines, then where is holiday for you? Where does the love in your life, wherever you find it, get the honors?

The problem with Valentine’s Day is that it only addresses one particular kind of love – what the ancient Greeks called eros. Erotic love; passionate, pulse-racing, grabbing each other in dark corners love is a glorious thing, and there’s nothing wrong with celebrating it with some flowers and chocolate. But let’s not kid ourselves that eros is the only—or even the most important—kind of love. Of course, the Greeks acknowledged other kinds of love: the unconditional love of agape, the friendship of philia. But I think that there is room for celebrating quite a few other kinds of love as well. How about:

Canifelios: The love shared between people and their pets. Get real. How much time do you spend cuddling with a human partner compared with the physical affection you lavish on a cat or dog? The mutual love of a human and a pet includes loyalty and mutual care and wordless devotion. It includes the physical intimacy of stroking and snuggling. It gives you the rush of the hormone oxytocin that is also associated with the connection between mothers and infants and adults in the first flush of falling in love.

Compania: The love of long-time best friends, or couples who have stayed together across decades, or siblings or cousins who are there for each other every step of the way. Compania is founded in deep trust that the person will always be there for you, in inside jokes that you’ve shared for years, in the profound knowledge of one another’s quirks and failings as well as gifts and talents. Compania leads us to stick up for one another, to tell the truth in love and to choose a judicious white lie every now and then, to hold one another up when we think that maybe we can’t keep going.

Biophilia: Love for nature, for all living things. Biophilia leads us to find renewal in nature, to rest in the shade of giant redwoods or beside singing creeks. Biophilia is lived out in gardens where people become intimate with the soil of their particular location, at feeders where people celebrate and support the flashing beauty of birds, at summer camps where kids swim in lakes and get covered in dirt, on backpacking trips filled with the scent of pines and stars so bright that whole galaxies lean into this sphere of love.

Logoros: Love of learning, and of books. Logoros sucks up our time with articles on the internet on brain chemistry and economics, and keeps us up at night with books that we simply can put down. It leads us into new worlds, expands our hearts with compassion for people who don’t even exist, expands our minds with knowledge that we many never use, but which makes our understanding of the world that much richer and more complex. Logoros may seem abstract, but in reality it is an expression of our connection to this world in all of its details, the need to touch the particulars of our shared human life in the way you would explore a lover’s body with your fingertips.

Thelios: Love for the All, for the Connecting Principle, the Ground of Being, God. The love we return to the love that will not let us go. It could be love for a personal god who holds and comforts and carries us. It could be love for the wonder of the creative universe, an awe-struck connection to the sum of all the beauty that surrounds us. Big Love.

So if you want to celebrate Valentine’s Day with chocolate and flowers, by all means feel free. But feel just as free to celebrate the ways you love with a tug toy, a phone call, a walk in the woods, a new book, a prayer. There can’t be too many ways or too many days to honor love.

It turns out I’m not as good at daydreaming as I used to be. When I was about nine, my mother would have to physically rouse me from my bed, not because I was sleeping, but because I was spending happy hours imagining my life as Mrs. Paul McCartney.

My fantasies involved boats, castles, me on stage at Beatles concerts—that is, ‘me’ bearing no physical resemblance to any adult I might ever grow up and become. I was devastated when, one day, somehow, I let my dream slip out and my older brother said scornfully, “Why would Paul McCartney marry a nine year old in Akron, Ohio?”

After that I got more realistic. I moved on to George Harrison, the youngest Beatle. Perhaps that first ‘realistic’ decision was the beginning of the demise of my fantasizing prowess.

Because these days, it turns out, I’m no good at daydreaming at all. Over the years I’ve gotten much better at planning, and actually executing plans. I’ve moved across country, switched jobs, launched projects, had a wedding, adopted a kid—done all kinds of other things that took hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny acts and choices, promptly scratched off my to-do list. But somewhere in there, daydreaming fell off the table.

I didn’t know how bad I’d gotten at it until my spiritual teacher gave me an assignment this week. Take time each day, she said. Stare into space. Daydream. Imagine what would be most fulfilling, delicious, inspiring, to do and to be. It doesn’t matter if you’ll never do it, if no one ever could. Just see what you imagine! Find your young self, see through her eyes!

What once would have been a breeze is now really hard. Back then, along with being tall and willowy and beautiful, and marrying a Beatle, I had every intention of being super-wealthy, being a famous writer, traveling to the most exotic places. Now my rational mind jumps right in. Super-wealthy? I say? You want to be part of the one percent? And instead of enjoying, even for a moment, some delicious luxury vacation, or even the philanthropist I might become, I am fuming about the ‘fiscal cliff’ and drafting imaginary letters to Congress. Word by word.

I think what my spiritual teacher is pointing me to (though she is a bit cryptic and never says why she gives me the particular assignments she does) is to find joy in the longing itself. To allow the imagining to take on a life of its own, but primarily to allow that quality of desire and longing to truly take root in me, until I remember what my young self knew—that we are made to dream, as well as to act.

So, here’s what I’ll do, needing structure to help me out. I’m piling up all of the magazines, random bits of ribbon or paper and 2012 calendars in the house, which I would otherwise be recycling as I clean up the holiday wreckage. I picture looking through all of the materials with one focus—to find items which evoke longing in me, which provoke desire, even if I’m not sure exactly why!

After I gather up images, words, whatever I want—ribbons, sheets of color, fabrics, who knows? I’ll piece them together to see how they fit, to see what shapes they make.

And then, at the end of the day, I’ll have—I don’t know what!!! A jumbled mess? A picture of young Paul McCartney, back when he was cuter than a puppy? What I hope to have is a little bit of a snapshot about what longing feels like in me, so that I can begin to recognize its voice when it whispers in my ear. So that I can become a respectful vessel for my heart’s deepest longings. So I get better at this again.

On New Years’ Day, I plan to go through my usual practice, with friends, of making gratitude boards for the year that’s over, and a vision board for the year that’s coming—same process of cutting and pasting, but with a very different focus as I look through my materials. This time, celebrating 2012 and envisioning things I actually hope and plan to do in 2013.

I’m going to be really curious to see what effect, if any, my extra session of fantasizing has on the visioning process. The fun thing about creative experiments is that you can never guess their results!

However you see in 2013, however you imagine it and live it, may it be full of blessings for you and yours. See you next year!

You Got People

This Public Service Announcement brought to you by a Unitarian Universalist minister who has just been creatively reminded by the universe of this important truth.

Beloveds, in the crush of this season of holidays, remember that YOU GOT PEOPLE.

Contrary to the images of loneliness and unworthiness being projected onto us during this commercialized season – you are intimately and ultimately connected to all of creation.
Whether you buy or receive holiday gifts, send cards, light menorahs, kinaras, or bonfires – during the longest nights of the year and during the longest days and every time in between, you are not alone.

The myth of our culture is one of worth based on stuff and perfection.
The myth of our culture says you have to earn grace.
The myth of our culture is deeply isolating and numbing.

These are not life affirming myths.
These are not myths to live by.

Sister Joan Chittister declares that “The paradox is that to be human is to be imperfect but it is exactly our imperfection that is our claim to the best of the human condition. We are not a sorry lot. We have one another. We are not expected to be self-sufficient. It is precisely our vulnerability that entitles us to love and guarantees us a hearing from the rest of the human race.”

In this season of need and greed remember:
You are enough.
You belong.
You are not alone.

You got people.

As a New Yorker, I should be accustomed to the fact that the annual Fourth of July hot-dog eating contest held in Brooklyn is local news. I should be, but I still cringe whenever I turn on my evening newscast only to see a line of people stuffing frankfurters and buns into their mouths at nauseating speed. Then I stop to think about why this is news (people actually enjoy watching it, it’s a “sport” we can all relate to, etc. etc.), and the minister in me reacts.

Of the many things I find objectionable about this yearly American ritual, the one that sticks with me the longest is how it celebrates quantity over quality. This is a disease that is rampant in the dominant cultures of our world. It is a disease that is poisoning our species, our relationships and our Earth.

“More, more, more,” we cry, never satisfied. Our national hunger for stuff–lots of stuff, any stuff, more stuff–is impossible to ignore. Like a person who needs only 2,000 calories a day consuming 19,000 calories of hot dogs in just a few minutes, we eagerly snap up the latest contraptions, gadgets and fashions with no concern about how our overconsumption affects others.

We decry the high cost of gasoline because we have built communities in which our individual vehicles are required to get us to our individual activities. We protest at the merest notion that our taxes should be used to support mass transportation, say, or renewable energy (much less fuel efficiency). Meanwhile, we’re spewing carbon into the atmosphere at an almost unfathomable rate. Our Secretary of State goes to China to talk about low-emission cookstoves in poor households while millions of Americans drive behemoth SUVs for neither sport nor utility.

We measure our economy by the number of new houses built, largely because building new houses means hiring tradespeople and buying appliances. Despite the fact that our national policies are designed to spur the construction of more and more houses, more and more people are, simultaneously, forced to live on the streets, in the woods and in their cars.

I’m part of the problem, too. I love my electronic toys (I’m typing this on my iPad), and yet I pay little attention to the pollution caused in China by the factories that make the screen I’m looking at, or the child labor in Africa used to mine the rare metals inside my phone.

And so I see myself in the face of the eating contest participant shoving processed meat and refined white bread into his mouth, trying to do nothing but eat more than the person standing next to him. I look into the mirror of truth, and see something I cannot live with. I need to go on a diet. A stuff diet. Maybe you’ll join me. We’ll be healthier together that way.