Lisa María Madera
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4/24/2020 0 Comments

Incubation

Friday, April 24 Day 39 of Quito’s COVID Lockdown. 

Day 7 of Insect Egg Incubation.

This is our 6th Shabbat in quarantine. Already we are forming new rituals. Every Friday night we family tele celebrate cross continentally. We hook up Zoom and connect three separate households. My daughter harbored with my brother and sister-in-law in Maryland and my husband’s sister and her wife who dial in from just outside of D.C. In the late afternoon, through the screen of my Iphone, I make challah with my daughter and chat with my brother in his kitchen.

In this time of our metamorphosis, a gazillion itty bitty caterpillars have been born on our windowpane held in place by my makeshift incubator. Just in time for Shabbat! I watch them amazed as they scoot along the pane with the quiet city and volcano behind them.

That night I dream that my house has been invaded by hundreds of huge, fat caterpillars. They crawl on the beams, climb up the stairs, pour out of the closets, march in trains out from under the living room rug. In the dream, I see their mother—a beautiful triangular moth with brown patterns on her wings, fancy red fern antenna and elegant feet, and fluffy red, white and black stripes down her body. She is extraordinary and I am comforted that these fat marching caterpillars overtaking my home are on their way to this new brilliant state of being.
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    About the Author

    Lisa Maria Madera is an Ecuadorian American writer and educator whose work explores how cultural narratives shape our individual and communal relation to the Earth and her creatures.

    Madera's work has appeared in Ecopsychology, Hypertext, JSRNC, Minding Nature and in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations forthcoming from the Center for Humans and Nature. Her short story Luz Maria has been nominated for consideration in Best American Short Stories 2021.

    ​Dedicated to fostering compassionate and resilient communities connected to Nature, Madera also designs and hosts trips to Ecuador providing opportunities for observation and reflection on how our relationship to the world is shaped by the cultural narratives that define us.


    ​Madera offers her work in a vision of hope and blessing that these reflections might empower all of us to realign our relationship in kinship to the Earth, to her many creatures, and to each other, ultimately realigning ourselves in right relation to the world around us so that we might live sustainably and in community.

    Madera is currently working on a memoir entitled The Covid Chronicles: Lessons from Pacha Mama in the Face of Despair.     

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