Whether we remember her consciously or not we all "know" the first teacher from whom we learned love. I had a great one & consider myself incredibly lucky.
It was through her that I entered this earth & from this earth that she departed two years ago (May 5, 2018, at age 105) a few days after I made this picture. It is odd that by taking a picture of my own mom I ended up creating what other artists now consider fine art.*
Mom's exit was as soft as was she, so pleasant that my son said, "Dad, I want to sign up for that kind of death."
Obviously, I had nothing to do with her longevity (105). But great as were her genes it was her gifts of love that mattered.
In the course of teaching Radical Loving Care it is often my father whose words I recall. Like me, he used a lot of them. Not mom. Her love spoke through presence.
Some see hands as healing pathways. The ancient ones in the photograph, when they were those of a young mom, were rarely used to swat me in the rear.
Instead, it was those hands that held me to nurse at her breast, those hands that hugged me when I cried & that stroked my face when I was sick. It was those hands that she used to conduct the Rachmaninoff & Beethoven she listened to & those hands that reached out to me in her final days to hold mine & say, "Oh Chip, I hate to see you leave."
Long as we had her, I hated to see her leave & am grateful for her every moment.
Our mom's are our first caregivers. Yet, many great caregivers had bad luck. Moms who were indifferent, unkind or absent. Somehow they found others to teach them Radical Loving Care.
This Journal can help you reflect on your teachers, not just with words like, "My mom was great," or "My minister was terrific." But, to write specifics & stories that illustrate them. Through that exercise you may learn things forgotten or never recognized & thus teach love in new & richer ways.
-Erie "Chip" Chapman
*The great photoartist Imogen Cunningham did a similar thing with her famous image "My Father At Ninety." Prints of it are $20,000!
"Final Days," this image of my mom, hung in the Vanderbilt University Art gallery this past year.
