As the nights have grown longer the temperatures have dipped, allowing us to open windows and bring fresh, cool air into our home. Midsummer has begun to pass, and midsummer flowers such as purple Ironweed, bright yellow Goldenrod and other have begun to wane. In our yard, few flowers from the long summer season remain, but purple, red, white and yellow Zinnias, along with red and yellow Marigolds are still blooming, providing bouquets for our table.

The produce is still profuse at the action and Farmer’s Market, allowing us to make rich meals mainly from local sources. Cucumber-Tomato-Sweet Onion sandwiches with cream cheese, Curried Potatoes and Peas cooked in Tomatoes, Heirloom Tomato-Feta-Basil salad, Grape and Apple pie, and several other dishes have been featured in the last week.

Our garden and hollow is still productive after a midsummer lull, with our first muskmelons ready for harvest and the very first apples to be harvested from a tree I planted with my wife and our niece a few years ago. My wife has a close relationship with our niece, who we cherish and have shared many good times with.

When I first began to date my wife, I noticed that she had many intimate, close relationships with women. She would frequently speak with her friends and women in her family for an hour at a time, sharing their struggles and seeking to support each other in their journeys. As someone who grew up in an isolated and patriarchal family and community and had learned about the feminine only in an abstract, academic way, it seemed to me that it was good for me to be supportive of my wife’s web of life. I thought to myself, as I listened to my wife’s conversations with these women, that “Women’s relationships are the life-blood of the Goddess.” The strength of my wife’s connection to other women was valuable to moving her web of life forward in a positive, life-loving way.

In a similar way, while I watched the woman who is the young mother in our family grow up, I noticed that she had close relationships with girlfriends. I recall seeing a couple of birthday parties when she was in her early teens and noticing that she was surrounded by many girlfriends. I felt that this was important, but I didn’t understand exactly why.

Years later, the young Mom still has contact with many of her youthful girlfriends, some of whom still live in our community. The young Mom has also made friends with other young women, creating a community of young women who she shares time and activities with.

Following the very hard series of deaths and illnesses that shook our web of life a few years ago, including the loss of my wife’s dear mother, the young women around us underwent a wave of pregnancies and births, including with the young woman in our family. With several of the young women living nearby, the web of women friends has turned into a community of young Moms who share time, ideas and support to one another.

To me, this points to the first two axioms of life in the essential:

The children must be cared for.
The community must help the parents in their work.

The children of these young Mom are growing up in this community of mothers, meeting each other and becoming enamored with each other, sharing their Mom’s affection for each other. This community of young Mom’s is essential to fostering a robust, loving and healthy community of young families for their children to grow up into. Their many years of close connections form a strong web of life supporting the young infants slowly entering this hard and wonderful world. This community of grandmothers, mothers and children will provide a center—a womb of sorts—around the children as they grow up and begin to explore the world outside their families.

As part of the essential aspects of life, caring for children and supporting parents is crucial to the sacred re-creation of life. With a strong community of life-long and new friends for the children to grow up in, the children are receiving an advantage in life that many woefully lack. Looking back on my observation that my wife and the women in her family and web of life were in a strong, supportive community, I understand with much greater depth the importance of women’s relationships in the sacred river of life.

The web of life around these very young lives features these strong relationships between mothers and, for the most part, fathers who take seriously their roles as helpmates to the mothers of their children. Unlike eons of patriarchal fathers before, these younger men see themselves as equals to the mothers of their children. Unlike traditional patriarchal webs of life, where women and children are supposed to be subservient to a self-centered father, our web of life has empowered women in strong relationships with each other seeking to bring forth their children with the support of their partners.

I cannot know the future for these children, but I can see that whatever challenges they encounter will be softened by an inter-generational community of grandmothers and mothers, freer than past generations from dependency on egoistic, self-centered patriarchs. In that way, the journey that my wife and the other grandmothers in this web of life took to liberate themselves from being servants in a male-centered world provides a promise of a strength in the feminine that so many people are still denied. For all my worry for the future, I am comforted to see the strength this community of women provide to the vulnerable young lives who will replace us in the Earthly river of life.