The Unseen Labors Of Love
Greetings and Happy Monday, Glorious Creators!
I greet you from the quiet interlude of Revvy’s nap. African house music is playing softly on the laptop. A cool breeze whispers through the window. I am sitting cross-legged on Juju’s bed, one of my transient writing stations. The big kids are at the playground with their father.
I am feeling into a web of discoveries related to the unseen realms of our fertility labors. I am exploring layers and contexts and am still arriving to what it will all mean. Unseen like spirits, ancestors, magic, and divine knowing. Unseen like what happens behind closed doors, away from the world’s eyes. Unseen like unmattered, irrevelevant, erased. There are so many stories to explore with this one word.
The spark for our journey into the unseen labors of love was initiated this weekend when I learned more details about my first few months of life on Earth. I will be opening up these stories more and more as I sit with them. Here is the piece of the story that has been vibrating and illuminating more questions, memories, and sensations:
When I was one month old I had pneumonia and was in the hospital for 3 days away from my mother. As continues the backwards-ass, nonintuitive, unnecessarily traumatic policy in many hospitals in America today, mothers were not “allowed” to stay with their sick babies while they received treatment. My mother says it was such an odd site to see my tiny brown body against the stark white ocean of the sheets on the adult sized hospital bed.
I’ve heard both my parents tell parts of this story over the years, but something about the way my mother described the scene of me alone in the big hospital bed sparked a memory from infancy. The memory I came to is of me screaming in terror for my mother, and not knowing where she was, or where I was, or if we’d ever see each other again. The early imprint of that frightful separation changed the course of my life, I now know.
I remember that the intensity of my screaming pierced a veil between the waking world and the spirit world. I cried so loud, and so long that my infant wails called forth a council of mothers to settle my heart. They came to surround me, hold me, nurse me, warm me, soothe me. I have never forgotten the vision of the circle of mothers hovering around my hospital bed, invisible to the nurses and doctors who would have been there.
It’s only now that I am able to trace back to the origin of these flashes of a floating circle of mothers that I have been seeing throughout my life. This weekend when my mother told me the story again, I connected it all. The spirit mothers revealed themselves to me when I was a one month old baby, a secret I don’t know if I would have discovered in the same way had I not been unexpectedly separated from my mother. So I’ve been sitting with the implications of these moments, and the various wounds and anxiety imprints that early separation left in my body. All of these thread my life together and have shaped how I mother and how I Mother Mother. Even more, I realize the root of my ability to feel connected to the reality of things I cannot see or necessarily explain. This practice is an essential part of how I seed abundance, and how I am dreaming the Garden forward.
I welcome more discovery inside the Garden as it relates to other creators’ moments of experiencing support from realms beyond our physical world. When we gather later today for Soils Lab (and even if you can’t join in today’s session), you are invited to bring stories connected to the unseen, invisible, and unnamed entities that you feel support you in your life, mothering, and creation labors. The practices we’ll explore are still coming to me. I know a beautiful and magical unfolding will happen when we gather.
Feeling into the depths of “unseen labors,” I’ve added a new chapter in the metanarratives of life at Mother Mother Sanctuary. My Back Is My Childcare is something that I’ve been wanting to place on our sacred altar of witnessing and story sharing for some time now. These words are me gently, and maybe not so gently, writing into a knot that is so massive and that touches on many tender spaces, some that are still pulsing and bleeding. I feel like I am making a way for more love-filled explorations, though. I feel good knowing that I’ve been able to bring at least a little light to the complicated stories of why I’ve been wearing my baby on my back in the ways I have.
Last week I felt into the possibility of joy by dancing into a new Morning Dances practice, Gratitude & Flow. A clarity emerged inside the movement: The more gratitude we feel, the more abundance we experience. This dance offering was seeded from a powerful transmutation. The night before I was feeling angry, but came to the healing—and liberating—truth that anger would not nourish me. Sadness followed the clarity, and I sat inside the sad feelings all night. When I woke up the next day a softness, lightness, and brightness was in the air. Releasing the anger narrative had freed me in a way that I hadn’t realized would be so satisfying. Nothing had changed about the situation, except that I wasn't angry about it anymore. And this feeling of freedom from the anger brought about waves of gratitude. And so I took it into the dance and Gratitude & Flow is what was birthed to share with my lovelies in the Garden. Enjoy the dance!
Yesterday I recorded a Mother’s Day fertility sermon while making dinner. Divine Creation Intelligence is a celebration of our innate, magical intelligence as creators, and our power to create in vast and imaginative ways. We are extensions of the same immensely intelligent and majestic creation frequencies that birthed the universe, and that intelligence didn’t stop being alive and present when we were born as ourselves. Divine creation intelligence is all around us! It’s why trees have these intricate, communication networks in their roots. It’s why the moon has a magnetic pull on the ocean. It’s why my breasts can produce one composition of breastmilk for infant Revvy, and a wholly different composition for toddler Juju. Everything living, breathing, moving, and transforming in our world is coded with this divine creation intelligence. The Garden is a loving space where you can be witnessed, affirmed, held, and echoed, and supported as you activate the fullness of your divine creation intelligence. We welcome your stories about what Divine Creation Intelligence, or any other shares in the Garden, brings up for you.
Please take from these gifts only what feels like a Yes in your heart, and leave all else behind.
Revvy woke up to nurse and then went back to sleep on my lap. My legs are a bit numb, but I will stretch them out soon. I will see if I can lay with him a few minutes before he wakes up and before the big kids come home. I feel they’re close.
I love you & I am dancing with you!
Love,
Binah
Have you danced today? Check out Gratitude & Flow and dance into the abundance of all you are grateful for!