Care-Based Creative Futures
Regenerative Maternal Ethics
Are you feeling a stirring in the collective consciousness of this moment?
A humbling. An awakening to what we've always known but somehow forgot: that our natural life support systems are not separate from us, that a wilderness communicates and shares nourishment through intelligent underground networks and fungi, that the wisdom of renewal has been held in the hands of seasoned nurturers for millennia.
I'm pleased to share that my chapter "Care-Based Creative Futures: Regenerative Maternal Ethics" will be published early next year in Demeter Press's upcoming collection Mothering and Climate Change. It’s an invitation to explore together what becomes possible when we remember that we are, fundamentally, beings designed to thrive relationally and through care.
We're living through what scholars call a "polycrisis"—multiple catastrophic events happening simultaneously. But here's what I keep returning to in my research: what if the blueprint for our most thriving futures lies not in yet-to-be-invented technologies, but in what Italian philosopher Luisa Muraro calls "the symbolic order of the mother"?
When we truly value mothers' wellbeing and recognize their innate power to create not just life but the very fabric of care that holds our world together, perspective shifts. As Muraro reminds us, "knowing how to love the mother creates symbolic order"—the foundation for a world restored to care and oriented to thriving life.
What would it look like if we designed our communities around the understanding that caring for mothers and caregivers is caring for the overall health and wellbeing of our society and collective future?
Care Based Cultures
Archaeological evidence reveals that before patriarchal invasions around 5,000 years ago, much of prehistoric Europe lived in what archaeomythologist Marija Gimbutas called matristic societies—civilizations that flourished for thousands of years without destroying their environments, shared resources through economies where abundance flowed freely, and made decisions through partnership rather than domination.
The principles of care never fully disappeared. They've been preserved in mothering practices, Indigenous cultures, subcultures, and the deep knowing many of us carry in our bones.
What I'm discovering through my research method, (r)evolutionary matrisophy, is how this mother centered wisdom is re-emerging to challenge our delusions of motherlessness. I’ve constructed a maternal ethics tree of knowledge, rooted in our evolutionary potential for caring intelligence in social systems where all mothers and children are sufficiently supported in community.
What would it look like if we approached maternal support the way forests approach nourishment—as an intelligent web of interconnected care?
The leading causes of death for new mothers in the United States are suicide and overdose. These statistics should shake us awake. But what if instead of treating crisis after it occurs, we focused on creating conditions where mothers thrive from the beginning?
Churches: How do we move beyond expecting mothers to serve and instead create circles of care around them?
Mental health practitioners: What if we understood maternal struggles not as individual pathology but as responses to systems that fail to support our fundamental need for community?
Medical providers: How do we shift from seeing pregnancy as a medical event to understanding it as a profound life transition requiring sustained relational support?
Social service organizations: What would happen if we designed programs based on what mothers need—time, rest, nourishment, community, participation in wider callings?
Think of the blood rich placenta, that remarkable organ that willingly exits the body once its life-giving purpose is fulfilled. Scholar and birth keeper Nané Jordan elaborates on "placental thinking"—understanding that the most powerful acts are often unilateral gifts that create conditions for life to flourish.
This is the quality of care our world is remembering: abundant, regenerative. Not martyrdom, but the deep knowing that when we tend life, life tends us.
How do we cultivate care-based approaches that address root causes rather than merely responding to crisis after crisis? How can we tend a way of seeing and being that emerges from the profound wisdom embedded in caring relationships? We are seeing it emerge in organizations that prioritize wellbeing, in communities embracing gift economy principles, in healing practices that restore our capacity for relationship.
With regenerative maternal ethics, I offer some starting points for how we expand care without losing its intimate essence and re-learn how to honor individual agency while acknowledging our deep interdependence.
How do we create systems that support rather than exhaust those who care?
My work represents years of transdisciplinary research, but it's written for anyone who believes another way is possible. I'm honored to explore these ideas with individuals and communities ready to discover what regenerative leadership is in care-full practice.
If you'd like to explore bringing this conversation to your community, I'd love to connect.