Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder writes at the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred. She has a masters of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and has worked as a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine, a publication exploring the intersection of ecology, culture, and spirituality. Her work has also been featured in The Common, The Slowdown, Crannóg Magazine, From the Ground Up, the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and Katie Holten's The Language of Trees. Having grown up in the Great Plains of Nebraska and Oklahoma, she and her family live in northern New England.
Description
Prologue
Introduction
Part I. Centering: Orienting to Sacred Place
Heartbeat
Axis Mundi
Coming into Being
The Good Mother
A Mothering Language
Part II. Belonging: Taking Flight with Birds
Ascendance
Setting Bearings
Hoopoe, i
Sensory Orientation
Hoopoe, ii
Disruption
Hoopoe, iii
Quickening
Unraveling
Hoopoe, iv
Part III. Entanglement: Tracking Whales
Bodies in Orbit
Bloodlines, Milklines
Scrimshaw
Flukeprint
Dream
Urban Whale
Devour
Whale Chase
Whalefall
Chimera
Knife's Edge
Farewell
Part IV. Community: Imagining Trees
Mythical Forests
Cultivating Roots
Cutting Down the World
Retrained Growth
Creation Story
Tree Seed
Part V. Edge-Work: Traversing Salt Marshes
Vulnerable Nest
Porous Boundaries
Between the Tides
Edge Erosion
Passageways
Reclamation
Wild Transgression
Flood
Hurricane
Tide-Work
Part VI. Homemaking: Tending the Seasons
Inhabiting
Wonder (Summer)
Music (Fall)
A Particular Love (Winter)
Rebirth (Spring)
Ritual (Summer)
Creating Possible Futures
"This is a heartachingly beautiful, deeply life-altering book, one I will be placing into the hands of many mothers, creatures, and kin. Tenderly we are reminded of all the ways in which we have become lost; all the ways we find to become found once more. On community, interconnectedness, and ecologies of care, this book has widened my heart beyond compare. There is grace here, and hope, and the light we need to guide us onward. A book for these times." --Kerri ni´ Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places and Cacophony of Bone
"This is a beautiful book--the prose, the stories, the sentiments and values. It belongs in the company of works by Ursula K. Le Guin, Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, and Robin Kimmerer, all of whom are inspiring presences in these pages. While Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder writes vividly about bearing and nurturing a child, she also invites us to understand mothering in a larger sense, as caring for all creatures--for birds and whales, trees and grasses, the entire web of life." --Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination
"Mother, Creature, Kin is both an education and an affirmation of our most essential and connected ways of being. Nuanced and layered, its language is a force of love." --Jamie Figueroa, author of Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer and Mother Island
"Lyrical and level-headed at once, Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder roots her elegant writing firmly in science while learning from the awe of mystics and, like the best of mothers, leads us lovingly and with utmost care and awareness through the debris of the Sixth Extinction on a path toward radical hope and wonder." --Anna Badkhen, author of Bright Unbearable Reality
"I felt that I'd been waiting for this book--you do not have to be a mother to read it. It's gentle, personal, and powerfully benign: a story of mothering as a practical expression of love, whether for a child, or a whale, or a tree, or a single-celled organism, or all these lives together." --Daisy Hildyard, author of Emergency
"A luminous, compellingly readable account of the power of wild kindness and of the extraordinary things that happen if we pay proper attention to the world. This is potent literary alchemy. Let it transform you." --Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast