RUTLAND — When Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, Vermont author of “Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling,” trekked through the woods one chilly spring day, pausing to appreciate the life that was about to be breathed into the world, “I noticed that buds had appeared on the weeping cherry tree in our backyard. The dogwood, the apple tree, and the lilac followed suit. Given the weather, they were all right on time – mid to high forties at night and high fifties during the day. The sun shone down, and, like a siren song, it beckoned the sap to run through the veins of these trees, bringing signs of life to the tips of their branches.”

Thoughts began to cross her mind that the last frosts were likely not entirely over and she wondered – as she cupped her hand around the tender young buds to, just briefly and however futile, transfer her warmth to them – if they would survive.

Steinauer-Scudder was in her first trimester of pregnancy, and expecting her first child – a girl. However, in that same early spring, just days after that trek through the gently budding woods, “…the world changed – COVID-19 arrived on the East Coast,” and she watched as the world began losing its elders, its vulnerable, its weakest. She recalled that, “In the best of conditions, pregnancy is a vulnerable time,” and “the line between joy and worry, vulnerability and safety, became confused.”

Looking out, she saw the trees were still budding, but it was snowing.

Her child was growing inside of her, preparing for birth, but the world outside of her had come to a fearsome and uncertain halt. Faced with the certainty that she might do everything right to protect her child and that, “this disease would still make a home among us,” she felt the panic of an inevitable and impending situation.

And then, the obstetrician asked if she wanted to hear the heartbeat of her child.

“And there, lying on the table, I remember too, how the worry dissipated completely for a long moment,” recalled Steinauer-Scudder. “All I could hear, at 156 beats per minute, was joy, joy, joy.”

Navigating the pregnancy, birth, and growth of her daughter with a heightened and combined sense of terror, trepidation, fight, perseverance, acceptance, adaptability, and grace that has faced countless mothers in crisis, mothers of all species over all the millenium, Steinauer-Scudder did what she understood – she turned inward toward reflection – and she turned outward in appreciation for the wonder of the life around her.

“Mother, Creature, Kin” is this story – the story of this young mother looking at a world that is fast unraveling, not just due to the pandemic, but due to climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the whole of the ecological and environmental challenges facing the world – and due to the human activity and inactivity that are driving that collapse.

It is the story of the interactions with nature that fill us with an intrinsic and sacred sense of awe, wonder, belonging, and centering. It is also the story of an interconnectedness of all species in this fragile world that we call home.

It is the story of foraminifera, an ancient order of protists – neither male nor female – as they birth and release the next generation asexually; and, it is the story of the legacy of time that they leave behind. It is an anecdote about the Buddhist monks in Cambodia ordaining trees to protect them from loggers. It is a tale about a river named River, who plays host to eons of meltwater, rainwater, stream water, and aquifer water – and thus becomes a time weaver. It is an ode of the constantly changing patterns of the rain, and how they inspire introspection. It is a recollection of the howl of the timber wolf, and the answering howl of a human – and the silence that then followed.

Steinauer-Scudder explores the mysterious vanishing golden winged warblers, who evacuated in droves from their Tennessee arboreal abodes one year, only to return to the area after a massive storm swept through. That storm, responsible for 84 tornadoes and 35 human deaths, had been sensed by the warblers when it was still more than 500 miles away. Ancient cultures knew that birds were harbingers, but we – in our modern busy world – have forgotten.

She explores the kinship and connective bonds between a calf and a mother North Atlantic right whale, both of a species whose population is undergoing an UME – or, an “unusual mortality event.”

“The passiveness of that phrase is unsettling,” adds Steinauer-Scudder, “and the acronym feels almost cruel. For these beings are dying at our hands, on our watch. It’s an active sort of undoing. Critically, the population is losing its females of reproductive age – whales that could go on to have another dozen or more calves in their long lives. It’s believed that, given the chance, a female right whale could live the better part of a century and remain in reproductive health well into her old age.”

As there are, according to Steinauer-Scudder, fewer than seventy reproductive females left, the population is literally losing its mothers and is approaching “functional extinction” within the next few decades – and she wonders about what that loss will mean. As researchers work to study the population, Steinauer-Scudder recalled the “intimacy” of that relationship as well, as the researchers are knowledgeable of the identity and history of every single member of that population.

Steinauer-Scudder’s book is also a recognition that we are born into this world already feeling an appreciation for communication and personhood – with trees, with stones, with insects, with the clouds above. For Steinauer-Scudder, that early kinship might have been with the grasses that grew at the Nature Conservancy that she called home when she was a child. For her daughter, though, that sense of belonging and consciousness is everywhere.

“[My daughter] does not discriminate. She delights in the inherent being of all creatures,” explained Steinauer-Scudder, as she laughed at how this simple act could hold so much awareness. “‘Hi,’ is now a family practice. Together we greet crab apples, blackberries, the osprey that dives into the churning sea, the quiet shell on the beach, each other, the dewy morning, and the brisk evening.”

“We are living in a time of ecological collapse,” wrote Steinauer-Scudder in the introduction to her book. “There is no way around it. But there is, I think, a way through. Perhaps the best we can do is to keep renewing the world and our love for it.”

“Mothering” is the closest word that Steinauer-Scudder can identify “for examining the work that love calls us to do.”

While Steinauer-Scudder is adamant that use of the term mothering is nongendered, she does recognize that it holds different meanings to different people. For her, though, it is about nurturing and caring. It is also about strengthening, fulfilling, and sustaining all of the relationships that we, as humans, can have with this natural world. It is about healing, care, embracing hope, and – above all – finding spiritual resilience together as we navigate the needs of this challenging world that we inhabit.