The 15th of March, Mother's Day here in the UK, and I chose to mark my moment of silence not indoors, but outside, walking with Mother Nature. I let her be my companion, noticing all the quiet, faithful ways she tends to everything she has made. The light through the branches. The ground holding steady beneath my feet. The way she asks nothing in return.

From that place of stillness, I found my heart reaching outward.

To my own mother. To the estranged children and the estranged mothers, separated by pain neither may fully have words for. To the widows carrying Mother's Day without their person beside them. To those with mother wounds, the deep, tender kind that don't show on the outside. To those whose mothers have died, for whom today arrives like a quiet ache. To the childless mothers, the mothers in waiting, those who yearn and have yearned and are still yearning. To the displaced children, far from everything familiar.

I hold you all.

And I hold especially the mothers in war zones right now, women who risked their bodies and their lives to bring life into the world, and who today are burying their children. That sentence should not exist. And yet it does.

Mothers give life. War takes it away.

On a day that asks us to celebrate, may we also have the tenderness to sit with what is hard. May Mother Nature; patient, generous, enduring, remind us what it means to nurture, to protect, and to refuse to stop caring even when the world is cruel.