The Passionate Love of The Mother

At the end of the world, when the rivers have dried up and the last green shoots have turned to dust, when animals and humans have finished their long arc through time, the one thing that remains is the passionate love of the mother. A whisper that keeps saying I love you, I love you, even when no one is left to hear it.

In that whisper, the first breath of the next world begins.

Mary is perhaps the most recognised mythological woman the world has ever known. Worshipped, adored, derided. And yet the more I look, the more I see how little we truly know her.

For centuries, the patriarchal church has imprisoned her splendour and her power by relentlessly celebrating her as humble, gentle, patient, self-effacing. A damaging half-truth. Older stories, hidden gospels, and mystical visions reveal her as something far more whole: humble and radical, gentle and fierce, deeply human and profoundly devoted to social, spiritual, and political transformation through the living power of Love.

So what is the other side of the story?

Imagine Mary not as an icon, but as a girl,
a girl who said yes at twelve to something in trust of her knowing,
a yes that marked her to carry a life and a destiny that would overturn worlds,
a girl carrying a pregnancy under threat of violence,
giving birth in a manger,
fleeing Herod’s attacks with a newborn to keep him alive.

See her as a young mother raising a strange, magical, often misunderstood child, supporting him, protecting him, believing in him, and eventually letting him go when he symbolically rejected her so he could declare that all women are his mothers. She accepted even that, trusting the larger purpose of his life.

She stood upright at the cross, not collapsed or hysterical as so many depictions suggest, but as mystics like Elizabeth of Schönau saw her: steady, feeding him her strength, her hope, her fierce faith in the divine plan, even as she watched her child be crucified.

And after his death, she steadied the disciples, assuring them he would rise, staying with them through their terror, confusion, and persecution.

In her story is encoded a very particular kind of love.
A love strong enough to hold what others cannot hold.
A love powerful enough to withstand what should break the heart.
A love that does not withdraw.
A passionate love.

We tend to connect the word passion to fire and intensity, but the origin of the word is the Latin passio meaning to suffer or endure.

We are living through a time marked by immense suffering.

Ecological catastrophe, political aggression, war, spiritual and psychological disorientation. In a moment like this, it feels almost impossible to imagine another world. How, we ask, could we possibly move from this moment to a world shaped by peace, equality, and unity, where systems grow from care and reciprocity, where the structures we build nourish rather than extract, and where every being has the conditions to thrive?

Recently, I have found myself thinking about the moment the first plane took flight. What it must have been like to live in a world of horses and carts and be told that metal vessels would one day rise into the sky, a reality so far beyond the available worldview that it could not yet be imagined. And yet within two generations, humans flew.

Paradigms do not shift gradually; they leap. Thomas Kuhn called these leaps ruptures, moments when the dominant model becomes too incoherent to hold what is emerging. Anthropologists speak of liminal thresholds, where old structures dissolve long before new ones take shape. In those in-between spaces, hope often collapses before possibility becomes visible.

I used to resist the idea that our era is uniquely significant. It felt like human arrogance, as if every generation does not imagine itself standing at the edge of history. But something in me can no longer deny that this moment is significant.

In Hindu cosmology, the Kali Yuga is the age of spiritual forgetting, an era shaped by confusion, fragmentation, distortion, and the unravelling of old forms. And there is a feeling now, undeniable in its depth, that we are reaching its final stages.

We are not living in a stable era with a few social challenges. We are living in profound collapse.

From the inside, it feels like everything is breaking. Institutions failing, narratives shattering, identities dissolving, meaning scattering.

But what if what feels like collapse is actually a contraction? Painful, disorienting, overwhelming, yet the very force that makes birth possible.

Birth is never clean. It is rupture, pressure, blood, pain, disorientation and extraordinary strength. I believe this is where we are now. In the birth canal.

When I was giving birth to Zemi last year in the corner of our bedroom with Jack, our midwife Anna, and our doula Cyd beside me, there was a moment, minutes before he entered the world, when his head was crowning at the threshold. The pain was so excruciating I felt like I was breaking from the inside out. I looked at Anna and screamed, “I can’t do this.” She met my eyes and said, “You can.”

Seconds later, with a cry pulled from deep in the earth, Zemi slipped into the world.

Anyone who has birthed, or lived through grief, heartbreak, transition, knows that moment. The moment the heart thinks it cannot go on, and yet it does. Because the love is greater than the breaking.

This is what this moment calls forth,
in our hearts,
in our leadership,
in our humanity.

As I write this, I am looking out over my garden. I love my garden.

In it we have seven olive trees that are apparently more than two thousand years old. Part of our rental contract is that we must look after them. But even if it were not, I would feel bound to them. Devoted. I talk to them. We trim the weeds at their roots. We teach the children not to climb them. We care for them not out of fear of what would happen if they die, but because we love them.

I think about this often in the context of climate catastrophe. So much of the dominant narrative around preventing collapse is driven by fear and control, deadlines counting down the years we supposedly have left, or campaigns warning that each choice we make is a step toward extinction.

I understand this impulse; in an emergency, fear and control feel like the only tools available. Anything to avert destruction.

But what if we are not in an emergency, but an emergence?

If that were true, it would explain why fear and control do not work. Why we can be told, with absolute clarity, that we have a limited number of years to act and yet still continue on as before.

Childbirth reminds us of this. Fear and control do not bring the baby through. They slow the birth, make it more painful, and in the worst cases place life at risk.

If we are in the birth of a new earth, then fear and control cannot be the forces we lean on. Perhaps what we must turn to instead is love.

Because what will make us protect the earth will not be sanctions or shame. It will be falling back in love, with rivers, hedgehogs, marshes, forests, olive trees, and becoming so devoted to them that protection overflows from the heart the way a mother’s passionate love overflows for her child.

Anthropological work on transitional societies shows that what carries people through collapse are continuity resources, inner capacities that hold meaning and relationship steady when external structures fail. Psychologists might call it resilience. Mystics call it devotion. I am invoking it as the passionate love of the archetypal mother, the force that stays with the process of becoming no matter how chaotic the process becomes.

Passionate love as a code for leadership is then less an emotion than a structural capacity, the ability to remain committed to life even as systems fail and new forms struggle to emerge.

And so we return to Mary, who embodies this principle in its purest form, the girl who said “let it be done to me” in devotion to humanity, the mother who carried her child across borders to keep him alive, the woman who stood upright at the cross, steady as everything shattered.

If we are living in the birth of a new paradigm, if the future is struggling to come through the pressures of the present, then what is required of leadership is not managerial competence but the archetypal capacity of the Mother: a passionate, unbreakable love for life; a love that sees beyond human flaws and failings and protects life no matter what; a love that can hold contractions without losing faith in what is trying to be born; a love steady enough to midwife a new earth.

Because at the end of any civilisation in contraction, the one force that remains structurally indestructible, psychologically, spiritually, mythologically, is the mother’s passionate love.

It is the strongest continuity resource we have, the presence that carries us through thresholds, steadies life as it crosses them, and moves us from one world into the next.