- She is universal women. With her husband dead in the
fields, at age 43, on a farm in the remote Allegheny Mountains, she raises
eight children alone. They go on to become editors, businessmen, artists,
nurses and doctors.
-
- She is the mother of the handicapped, autistic, crippled
child. She is the wife of the mill worker, auto worker, miner, logger,
farmer, carpenter, and laborer. She deals with the alcoholism, spousal
abuse, infidelities, and anger of a man used up in a world that works him
too early to the grave. She feels his weariness and despair.
-
- She is the Palestinian mother watching her home ripped
down, her olive groves destroyed. She is the Israeli mother whose child
was torn apart in a market square bombing. She is Iraqi and Afghanistan
womanhood, holding her malformed infant, her limbless child. She is Mexican
she is Indonesian and Indian. She is the mother of a peacekeeper, bulldozed
under-shot in the head.
-
 She is American-British
and Canadian, seeing her son back from war mind numbed--maimed or dead.
She is the farmer's wife, watching her land go to auction, unable to compete
with corporate farmers. She lives in the ghetto trying to keep rats from
her child's bed, and fearing the gunshots in the night. She is Columbian
watching her lands being sprayed with poison. She is African, her village
taken over in the quest for oil.
-
- She is the widow sitting alone in a single room, going
through faded photo albums. She is the miners wife, watching her husband
cough out his last breaths from Black Lung. She is the fisherman's wife
watching the distant horizon, and she is Russian, waiting in lines for
everything, in Arctic winds. She is a collage of all the world's religions
that speak love of neighbor.
-
- She doesn't vacation nor shop the world's boutiques;
but waits for her husband, way past retirement age, having to work for
medical benefits. She cuts her medicines in half or doesn't purchase them
at all, having to choose between fuel-medicine-rent or food. She passes
the echoing textile-steel mills--auto factories remembering days past,
when the whistle would blow for noonday lunch.
-
- She nurses a fevered child far into the night, cares
for ailing parents and needy neighbors. She is Native American, suffering
the insults and prejudice of the ignorant. She is the migrant worker, the
maid, the laundress, the cook caring for those who hardly know she exists
-
- She works in rice paddies and sweat shops. Her chapped
cracked hands, wear no fancy rings, her attire is simple and durable. She
bears the humiliation-labeling-bias-and intolerance, of those who see her
lesser. The pains, the wounding, the tears, the fears, the unkind words,
the mocking and ridicule; she takes down the long corridor of her mind
and locks them all far from sight. The anguish of a dead child, a loving
husband killed, loved ones all gone, she holds in a treasured place under
lock and key.
-
- She travels onward and upward, our Universal Mother,
bearing the pain of a suffering world at war. She the baker of bread, the
janitress, cleaning up from others exotic travels. She is not privy to
the world's boardrooms, corporate headquarters, nor summits deciding the
world's fate. She is the watcher, the carrier of prayers and mediations,
of hopes and visions for a better world. She is swallowed up in emptiness,
traveling ever upward in her silent narrow world. She is Universal Motherhood..a
seeker of Peace, searching for a land for her children, where love-hope-and
truth rule men's comings and goings. Where men have no need of war.
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