And Now We Are Home
Sweet Sunday blessings to you, Passionate Creators!
I greet you from the quiet morning flow of Mother Mother land. My biggest boy and my big girl are awake, but chilling peacefully on their tablets. The other brothers are still in dreamland. Soft music by Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabate plays from the little bluetooth speaker. I am using a pillow as my desk-on-the-bed. I’m a little stuffy with sinus congestion, but otherwise I am feeling soft and well. I am excited to be getting inside my words.
Since our last love note we welcomed another creator back to the Garden! Take a moment to celebrate the awesome Myquel and read her powerful share in the Creator Directory. Welcome Welcome, Myquel! We’re so happy you’re here! New creators are also joining the Sanctuary all the time too. The Sanctuary is where creators land when they first join the Garden (or don’t choose to reconfirm conscious participation). Sanctuary members are welcome to join/rejoin the Creators Circle at any time. If you have lovelies you want to share the Garden with, invite them to join here. Yaaay for growth and expansion!
This weekend I’ve been pouring into the Creators Portal, adding shares and designing more dimensions of the Creator Brilliance discovery sphere, Workshops. I’ve added Story Seeds, story prompts inspired by magical images by photographers of the African Diaspora. I’ve also generated placeholders for 15 of our ancestral creator foremothers in Sitting With the Mothers. Just seeing their names and faces makes me sooooo happy! Gradually the squares will come to life as I upload the creations and shares associated with each creator foremother. These are the mamas I’ve been sitting with most in these first 16 months of the Garden. Yes, HAPPY SIXTEEN MONTHS to the Garden!
I’ve also uploaded some juicy listening majesties in our Oral Realms portal that have been making their way to the Creators Portal for some time. I shared a short teaser of my acorn fertility sermon, Every Yes Lights The Way in Fertile Majesties at the beginning of the summer Garden. It was awakened when I revisited the Follow Your Light Morning Dances practice one day.
The acorn sermon is the seed of the sermon that is still becoming. For over 5 years now, ever since saying Yes to my initiation as a fertility priestess, I have been feeling my way into what my sermons would be, how they would come, what shape they would take. I am now starting to really see and feel into the fullness of my process, and the long, slow labors that bring my sacred scriptures forth.
The scriptures are born of my dancing body when I am in deep communion with the wordless, voidal, galactic frequencies of creation. Without force or urgency, the subtle etchings of a word, a mantra, an affirmation will surface up through my sweat, seep through my muscles, find their way onto a page in my journal. Oftentimes the journal is laid open on a surface while I am dancing to capture the raw texts that erupt spontaneously from movement. So that I don’t come out of the dance before it’s time, I place the word or phrase on the paper, and then return to the nonverbal magic of the dance. When the movements have quieted in my body, and when I can be with pen and paper for a few minutes (which may or may not be some time after the dance—depends on the munchkin happenings), then I go back to the page and let what words need to come emerge.
The Garden has softened me so much in my writing. I no longer press myself out to write. I understand that there will never be enough words to say it all, to capture it all. I don’t try to record and document every miraculous thing. Rather, I trust that the words that come in their organic, unhurried flow are the words that need to come, are the words that are most able to hold the sacred consciousness that is wanting to be expressed in textual form. In the sermon, Every Yes Lights The Way, I share, “Sacred Storytellers translate creation majesties into words.”
In the Garden, we are experimenting with and developing our methodologies for these divine translation labors. Our stories are our wealth. As creators, each one of us with our own body—literally and figuratively—of sacred stories, we are responsible for accessing that wealth, and applying the brilliance of our creations to the sustenance and cultivation of the wealth that our stories provide. The Garden is a place to practice feeling for, listening to, naming and sharing these sacred stories. The Garden is a home where we can live together sweetly, gently, abundantly, inside the long labors of learning how to translate, express, and expand the majesties of our creations, the reach of our stories, in all the ways we want them to grow.
Revvy is wide awake now. We’ve been to the bathroom, brushed teeth, found pants—well Revvy at least. Bloom is teasing Revvy and he crying to be picked up. I will now shift to typing with one hand and balancing Revvy with the other arm while he nurses and finishes his wake up process.
We have had two Soils Lab adventures this season, Joy Journaling and Dream Ecosystems. You can read through pieces of our collective brilliance in the Creators Shared Diary: Chapter 62: Multidimensional Joy Spaces and Chapter 63: By Nature I Dream Big Dreams. Our expanded, self-guided practices for Soils Lab are still being imagined, mapped, and implemented in the Garden. I am dreaming of a configuration where practices born from each Soils Lab will be collected together so that anyone can reference the bounty born from each lab, whether or not she attended the live gathering. This is also so that the labors we nourish in the labs can live on through continued in engagement in the Creators Portal.
For now, I have been leaving a story or fertility talk inspired by our Soils Lab in Fertile Majesties. Choosing Joy, inspired by our Joy Journaling Soils Lab, is a part of the Becoming Mother Mother story threads. It tells the story of how my last name came to be. We spent part of our Dream Ecosystems Soils Lab talking about how we protect our dreams and our dreaming labors. This led me to share the story of how I protect the dream that is the Garden in a new fertility talk, Evolving Protection Labors for the Garden.
I’m also super excited to share The Garden is like an amusement park… with everyone. THIS is the talk that I think will help new creators, and any creator who is still arriving to the magic of our world, to understand and really breathe into the possibilities, softness, and loveliness of our Come As You Are majesties. When we go to an amusement park, we feel free to do what we want, ride what we like, watch what we are drawn to, snack on whatever we enjoy. We don’t feel obligated to do it all. We don’t apologize for skipping the rollercoaster. We don’t feel like we have to justify our desire to get another funnel cake (waves hand…I love funnel cake!). We just LIVE OUR HAPPY LIVES! This is what the Garden is! A space for you to live, be, explore, do, try, experiment, attend or not, speak up or not, share or not—the Garden is a space where we practice making every moment of this adventure our own. I lovingly offer that if you are still discovering the freedom of Come As You Are, then listen to this talk, and feel into the expansive frequencies of living into your radical, liberated Yes as a creator in the Garden.
Everything in the Garden in going through another holy transformation. I am laboring deeply and joyfully inside creation labors to nurture more self-direction and self-guided practices in our sanctuary. I will be hosting less real-time gatherings, and cultivating more soft, fluid, do-in-your-own-time communions. Some shares that are in the works will be by-request-only, and I will offer them directly to creators who ask for them. Other offerings that have been living on the Creators Portal will be transitioning off to become accessible to the world outside of the Garden as I experiment with activating soft revenue streams from some of the practices I’ve birthed inside the Garden. Creators who feel called to facilitate labs, design practices and dreamscapes, or contribute their brilliance in other ways are welcome to do so. The way is open for everyone who wants to make herself a home here.
The Garden is where I practice creating. I am not afraid of anything being perfect or permanent. It’s all a becoming. And by sharing with you, I grow as a creator, every time. Even if no one comments, or reads, or watches, or listens, I still grow because I followed my Yes all the way and something I needed to create was born. This is the constant invitation in the Garden: to bring your creations forth for yourself, for your learning, for your discovery—and then see what happens, see who you become in the process.
I truly feel at home in the Garden now. I created this world so that I could nourish my creation labors, and be lovingly witnessed by others while I discovered the depths and bounty of my Yes. This is happening now, every moment of every day. Love pours out generously to me from all directions. I feel held, seen, witnessed, celebrated, and supported every day by the creators in the Garden. I feel abundant from all this love. My prayer for each sister in our congregation is that she follows her Yes, takes what she needs from the Garden for her journey as a creator, and is nourished by all the love that is here for her too.
Everyone is up. I hear shouts, cries, complaints, feet stomping up the steps to Mommy. Revvy has resumed his post on my left breast, and is kicking my right hand away from the keyboard every time I type. My time inside these textual wonders is coming to a close.
Today I’m having a very soft pop-up sanctuary flow at Malcolm X Park. I realize that the labors of traveling as a family on public transportation shift my capacity to hold the sanctuary space as I first imagined it. The vision of the pop-up sanctuary is still there, but I see where I am right now, what I can hold right now, is more of an energetic frequency than a stationary, physical pop-up space. So, I will arrive whenever we get there (maybe around 4pm, maybe later…text me if you’re coming through). I welcome organic evolutions of communions as they come. I will probably be floating in and around the capoeristas to support the co-creator and Bloom in their roda magic. I am mostly surrendering to the labors of being present with my family, and managing munchkin needs in public space. I am also excited to enjoy the sunshine.
Tomorrow is our Soils Lab: Body Majesty. I’ll be introducing our exploration theme for the Fall Garden, which is inspired by a call to witness and explore the vast brilliance and magic of our own bodies. My body is the site of all my creations, and all my creations must come from me. Ideas are overflowing already, even though we are still in the midst of our summer season. As part of the Open Dreamscapes discovery sphere, I am inviting collaboration, dream partners, practice development, lab design and mapping, resource curation, and other elements to begin shaping our possibilities now. I am so excited for what we’ll be creating! Here we grow!
The music is still playing. I am momentarily solo again. I am standing on my feet, stretching my back and making soft booty rolls around my center. This is how I am wrapping up these love note labors: proofreading, rewording sentences, preparing the email for the Garden. Thank you for reading. Thank you for witnessing all the love I weave into these words and offerings.
Love,
Mother Mother
Have you communed with the power of your Yes today? Listen to Mother Mother’s latest fertility sermon, Every Yes Lights The Way and deepen into your majesties as a creator!