Theoria

Ecocultural Regeneration©

Why Matrescence and Regeneration?

Regeneration is a natural feature of matrescence just as it is a natural phenomenon of life. Human beings are not separate from nature. Therefore, the bio-psycho-social-spiritual rites of passage and transitions of mother becoming are integral and ecological. Matrescence is by nature eco-matrescence©.

As Mothers, we meet new aspects of ourselves while we care for our children, as they reach their own new developmental stages and milestones. We likely learn to mother ourselves in new ways, or to heal our own untended wounds, as we mother others.

Mothering Futures® encourages special attention to renascence, renewal, and thriving through ongoing transitions in relationship with supportive community and surroundings, including our natural life support systems.

Mothering holds immeasurable value. A historical lack of value for caregiving and mothering is tied to the same symbolic disorder that underpins the exploitation of nature. Mothering Futures® offerings are rooted in an understanding that individual transformation is connected to familial, ancestral, cultural, social, and environmental transformation from a whole-systems point of view.

(R)evolutionary Matrisophy©

(R)evolutionary Matrisophy© is a practice and methodology introduced by Jessica Spring Weappa, Ph.D. in her doctoral dissertation. It begins with reflection upon one’s own personal narrative, relationships, and lineages to remember the presence of mothering in its nourishing, healing, and transformative potentials. This method continues to investigate the “missing mother” in personal experience, throughout history, and in present society. Through writing that is rite-ing, (R)evolutionary Matrisophy is informed by thealogy, which embraces female and other diverse perspectives of divinity. It enacts a careful retrieval of iconography, images, myths, and stories that have been subjugated, suppressed, and subsumed through time. A rite is a ceremony or ritual that can interrupt time as a cyclical or linear process by creating a movement of perpetual return, or what feminist philosopher Fanny Söderbäck refers to as “revolutionary time” that neither forgets nor repeats the past but remains open to the possibility of change. 

Though the term revolutionary can be defined in many ways, the focus of this method are the conditions for metamorphosis to occur. The Latin revolvere means “to roll back”, and the Middle English revolucioun refers to cosmological process, and “fundamental change in the way of thinking or visualizing something.” (R)evolutionary Matrisophy is also a righting in that it attempts to restore, redress, and rectify wrong turns in history that have limited our capacities to love and care for our kin and our natural life support systems. It is an enactment of maternal love in research, writing, art, and education. 

(R)evolutionary Matrisophy is both revolutionary and evolutionary, highlighting a need to revisit and reauthor evolutionary narratives about human beings and relationality. Definitions of evolution being a “gradual development or progression of something into a more complex form” and a process of progressive change and development are most relevant to this method. Though philosophy traditionally means love of wisdom, “philo” is replaced by “matri-” to (re)turn Sophia (sophy) to a knowledge loving process that re-emplaces Wisdom within the continuum of human evolution, re-integrating distinctly maternal love. 

A tree trunk is a conduit and anchor that delivers nourishment to the whole of a tree. It produces new bark from within to adapt to outer conditions and to facilitate the needs of the whole tree from strata, mycorrhizal networks, and roots to branches, leaves, flowers, and seeds. Envisioning (R)evolutionary Matrisophy as the “maternal ethics tree of knowledge” facilitates a continuous connection of maternal meaning-making that remains grounded in metaformic origins and evolutionary baselines as they are articulated now, and as they continue to be refined. (R)evolutionary Matrisophy retrieves, reauthors, and recenters maternal and matricultural knowledge to restore matristic ways of knowing, being, and doing.