On this Mother’s Day, I’m not thinking of cards or flowers. I’m thinking about presence—the quiet, steady kind that doesn’t ask to be noticed. The kind of presence that holds things together, even when they seem to be falling apart.
This morning in meditation, I watched how experience unfolds: thoughts rise, sensations shift, breath moves. Attention drifts—sometimes to the mind, sometimes back to the body. It’s a cycle that mirrors daily life. We rarely see the whole picture. Most of what comes in through the senses is never fully noticed. Yet something—call it awareness—keeps showing up, holding space for it all.
It reminds me of the way a mother might stand in the background of a room, alert to what’s needed, not asking for thanks. Noticing without being noticed. There’s a steadiness in that kind of watching, a calm that doesn’t deny the storm, but doesn’t get lost in it either.
We often treat the mind, body, and spirit as something separate from the world around us, like passengers moving through a landscape. But more and more I sense that we are part of that landscape, not apart from it. The boundaries we draw—between self and other, inner and outer—are thinner than we think.
So today, I’m thinking of that quality of presence. The one that doesn’t need a reason to pay attention. That doesn’t perform or demand. That simply watches, listens, breathes.
Maybe that’s the quiet gift of this day—not sentiment, but recognition. Of how deeply we’re shaped by what’s steady and unseen. Of how experience itself can mother us, if we let it.
Spiritual Gravity 