Yanomama Mother & Child

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

© Durga Yael Bernhard

Here is another illustration from A Ride On Mother’s Back: a Yanomama mother carrying her baby through the Amazon jungle.  This part of the world is completely foreign to me, and I relied heavily on books to research the image.  I also watched the film At Play in the Fields of the Lord, checked out other picture books on the subject such as The Great Kapok Tree, and took note of my own children’s studies of the Amazon rainforest in school.  All of this helped me convey the richness and diversity of this unique environment that teems with life like no other place on earth.

By our standards, the Yanomama people live a primitive, tribal life – at least up until recent decades.  Yet the world around them is incredibly intricate, and the Yanomama are integrated into that world in a way that is hard for our contemporary minds to grasp.  Indeed, this is the place in which the modern concept of attachment parenting is rooted.  Jean Liedloff, the author of The Continuum Concept, spent several years living with “stone age Indians” in the South American jungle, learning to appreciate the evolutionary hardwiring of the human infant’s brain.  That brain is shared by all of us, no matter how modern our lifestyle.  To live in alignment with our species’ deeply ingrained expectations is what attachment parenting is all about.  Liedloff found a profound intelligence and sanity in that approach to raising children – and as a young mother years ago, so did I.  It was from the precepts of The Continuum Concept that A Ride On Mother’s Back was conceived and born.

I carried my babies on my back or in a sling while working on many an illustration!

You can order a signed copy of A Ride On Mother’s Back here.

A good week to all!