• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Eileen Delehanty Pearkes

Writer, Speaker, Researcher

  • Home
  • About
  • Books
  • Upper Columbia River
    • Sinixt Advocacy through the years
    • Updating the Columbia River Treaty
    • Notebooks
    • Maps
  • Other Work
    • Articles
    • A 6,000 Mile Search for Beauty
  • Contact
  • Blog

Child-rearing as an Act of Devotion

October 1, 2008 by Eileen Delehanty Pearkes

How do we surrender all of our efforts & actions to the divine? Eileen Delehanty Pearkes questions isvara-pranidhanat, in the 9th of a 10-part series exploring the yamas & niyamas.

From ascent magazine, issue 39, autumn 2008:

A decade ago, some crows built a nest and reared their young at the edges of my garden. I have been thinking about those crows lately, as my oldest son prepares to leave home, testing the range and wingspan of my devotion. From the crows,I received a message of effort and dedication that has taken me years to sort out. Only now, as the purpose for my own dedication as a mother winds to an end, can I begin to see what the crows were teaching. The effort over many years was not, as it turns out, for me. It was for my son, who is in the process of leaving the nest where he has been fed, protected and loved for nearly two decades…

Download article (pdf format)

Filed Under: Articles, Ascent

Footer

About Eileen

Eileen Delehanty Pearkes explores landscape, history and the human imagination in writing, maps and visual notebooks.

Recent Posts

  • Challenging conversations: a unique Stanford symposium on the Columbia River
  • 600-Strong: whoever would have thought?
  • Hockey and gravity
  • Salmon and Columbia River Treaty flood control
  • Flexible Concrete and the Imagined Valve

Subscribe to new posts

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Copyright © 2025 · Author Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in