Sacred Embodiments Of The Living Word

Happy Blooming Monday, Soulful Creators!!!

I greet you from the raucous, whirling playground of Revvy and Juju (also known as Mommy’s room) as I begin today’s love note. I’ve been up since 3:something this morning, nursing babies, soothing babies, listening to mamas, writing to mamas, studying and mixing music, writing, creating, remembering to eat, nursing more babies, settling squabbles, learning about intricacies of beyblade spin variations, making flash cards, and being immersed in other assorted happenings of Mother Mother Sanctuary. I’m a lil’ tired but don’t yet feel it, because I’m so jazzed (pun intended!) about all these creations that are flowing! When Revvy naps I will lay down with him (I think, if no one else is needing something…).

Today I’m so excited to announce our next creator foremother in the Garden, Mother Alice Coltrane!!! Multi-instrumentalist, composer, band leader, jazz visionary, mother of 4, wife and sacred creative partner of John Coltrane, spiritual leader and teacher, Mother Alice moved the world with her music, her wisdom, her love, and her creations.

I’ve been listening to Mother Alice’s music and reading about her life all weekend. I created the Mother Alice Dreams sound study to share a taste of the sounds that have been nourishing me for years. I have several sound studies in mind for Mother Alice that I’m looking forward to experimenting with in the coming weeks. This is super-big for me that I’m not trying to mix all of the music I’m dreaming up in one take! Breathe, Binah, I keep hearing the mother within tell me. This Garden is a long labor.

Speaking of long labors, Mother Alice is thee Queen of Long & Holy Labors. Listening to her music all these years, I didn’t start peeling back the layers of her life until spirit led me to create our newest sound study. When I read that she was barely 4 months postpartum with her 4th baby when John Coltrane transitioned unexpectedly from liver cancer, I was like, WE HAVE TO SIT WITH MOTHER ALICE! I was like WOWWOWOWOWOWOW!!! I had NEVER heard that part of the story. Why, I wondered, had I not known about her mothering labors? How have I been dancing and dreaming inside her melodies and not known a thing about the world she was living in when she birthed her creations? And I also was like, how am I just now remembering her for our Sitting With The Mothers practices! But, everything in it’s time. I’m SO HAPPY Mother Alice is here with us now!

Many things fascinate me about Mother Alice, and we have so much to discover together about her. One of the aspects of her creation majesties I’m very interested in studying is her spiritual work. In 1975 she opened an ashram in California called the Vedantic Center, and it is still open today. Her spiritual name is Turiyasangitananda, which translates to “Transcendental Lord’s highest song of Bliss.” She is also called Swamini by many of her devotees. This weekend I started researching her spiritual texts, where she recorded hundreds of pages of scriptures transmitted to her through her meditations and spiritual journeys. This really resonated with me because several of the “books” I thought I was writing are actually revealing themselves to be spiritual texts that I have to live into, each word another element of holy and miraculous weaving. Our scriptures, I am discovering, are created and called forth by the conscious living, witnessing, and sharing of our own labors. We feel into these scriptures with every part of our being. We speak them, unpack them in our poetry, message them to each other when our hearts are heavy, scribble them on notes posted on our mirrors, whisper them in the dark when we’re feeling alone or afraid.

As creators we are composing scriptures all the time, oftentimes in our everyday, brilliant dialogue internally and with each other. This is why I LOVE LOVE LOVE that in our Creators Shared Diary we get to play and experiment with capturing and documenting the real-time emergence of our powerful, soul-spoken scriptures that are born every time we gather for a lab. Today’s Soils Lab is a deepening into and an expansion of the magical processes and life moments that bring our scriptures forward. I invite you to bring stories that illuminated the sacred scriptures that you live by, or that your mothers or grandmothers discovered through their own life labors. I am still feeling into all of what we’ll do—that’s why it’s a lab! I feel something super powerful and amazing will emerge from our openness, love, and togetherness. If you can’t join us, please consider sharing your sacred scriptures with us through one of our many portals.

The munchkins have moved furniture, dumped laundry, screamed out of windows, banged heads, and nursed and nursed some more. Revvy is sleepy-hungry-cranky. Maybe this nap time is soon come. I will pause for now.

Please take from these offerings only what you need as a creator, and leave all else behind.

I love you & I celebrate you!
Love,
Binah

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