Mothers Milk, and Honey

I recently revisited a book that a few years ago course-corrected my life.  It’s an unassuming book written by psychologist, social philosopher and author, Enrich Fromm.  For me it’s a masterpiece in less than 150 pages.  Its title, The Art of Loving.

The book examines all forms of love: brotherly love, motherly love, erotic love, self-love, and love of God.  It offers sobering insight into the practice of becoming a loving person.

Poor love, so misunderstood.  We assume it to be as natural as breathing, but instead it’s natural like learning to walk: falling and failing.  As children we face our disappointment without fear, simply with blind purpose.  However, as adults, we face the challenge of learning love, especially intimate love, with scars and painful memories that convince many it’s too damaging to try anything beyond knowing how to crawl.

One form of love we sense comes as natural as breathing is motherly love.  To underscore the point, Fromm references symbols.  Land, the symbol of mother – like mother-earth.  In this instance land represents “the promised land” flowing with milk and honey.

Milk is the symbol of the first aspects of love – care and affirmation.  Honey is life’s sweetness – the pure joy of being alive.

By nature, a majority of mothers provide milk to a suckling child, but few can provide honey, too.  How is this?  In order to give honey, a mother must not only be a good parent, she must also genuinely be a happy person.

Dr. Fromm maintained that the effect of a mother’s natural disposition on her child could never be exaggerated or overstated.  A mother’s love is transparent to her young, her joy infectious, her anxiety poisonous.
Honey in a mother’s disposition instils a love for life in a child, a passion for living, a feeling that it is good to be alive, and that it’s good to have been born.  It’s an attitude grafted onto the soul of a child.

Think of it, of your friends, how many do you sense got only milk as an infant, and how many tasted honey as well?  How many do you know who live life perpetually in a land of promise they initiate?

Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. Enrich Fromm

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