Welcome To The Realness Of Come As You Are

“You are right in assuming that I am indifferent to the pattern of things. I am. I have never liked stale phrases and bodyless courage. I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”
Mother Zora Neale Hurston
excerpted from letter to her friend, Countee Cullen, March 5, 1943

Sweet New Day, Glorious Creators!

I begin today’s love note in our basement play land. Legos, bakugans, big wheels, blocks, dismembered race cars, and assorted pieces of lost toys no one will ever find surround me. We’ve just come in from snack time on the porch sanctuary for a change of scenery. I am composing these lines with my thumbs. It is cacophonous, and at any moment a flying object or a flailing child might crash into my head. And still I write. Because I love you. Because I love me and my labors. And because these are the moments I have.

Today’s practice is core to every element of life in the Garden. I invite you to explore Welcome To The Realness Of Come As You Are and to celebrate the abundant majesty of your being. Come As You Are nourishes the freedom to discover our creation frequencies in organic, unhurried, unpressured ways. The realness of you in every moment, in every way, is cherished in the Garden.

The party has moved upstairs because the munchkins are having capoeira class with their father. Juju and Revvy are occupying themselves with a banana and in between sentences I am wiping smushed banana off of the floor and other surfaces.

I first learned of Come As You Are at the black baptist church where I grew up and where my parents are still deeply connected to this day. Ironically, I live 5 minutes from the church, but don’t participate in the congregation. We make occasional appearances as a family and all the church mamas who had a hand in raising me make a fuss over my children and admonish me for not bringing “their” kids to see them.

In the early 1990s the neighborhood where the church is was going through its wave of the crack epidemic. Violence, drugs, and poverty swirled together to create crisis after crisis. The new young pastor had a cultural war brewing in his pews. The old establishment, more affluent, more light-skinned black folks wanted to maintain a level of decorum, pressuring the young pastor to adhere to the traditions that had elevated the status of the church and its congregants for generations. But the young reverend had not grown up in that church or the esteem of that privilege. He came from a humble, working class town in the Midwest. He brought with him new blood and a new way.

Deeply unsettling to many of the longtime members, the new pastor saw promise and possibility in the groups of loud teenagers playing basketball and hustling on the corner. He encouraged the mothers at the bus stop with babies in strollers to bring their kids to children’s church. His wife taught at the neighborhood elementary school and many families who had once felt unwelcome at the church started to join. Slowly the congregation began to change, younger, browner, poorer. My parents, having recently relocated back to Washington, DC, joined the church because my father and the pastor had become friends years earlier. We didn’t live in the neighborhood and commuted 40 minutes across town every Sunday. I didn’t understand the color politics at the time, but as I grew older and heard the stories, and pieced things together I came to understand that my brown-skinned, middle class family was a sort of anomaly in the congregation once upon time.

Seeing the unspoken tensions in the sanctuary on Sunday mornings when the older members wore their Sunday best and the neighborhood folks stressed over wrinkling their one good white shirt that had to also be clean for Monday morning, the young pastor introduced a radical change: Every Sunday was now come as you are. Wear what you have. Jeans and sneakers are ok. Coming to church no longer meant you had to be dressed up, or have your hair done, or wear stockings (this was my personal favorite…I HATE STOCKINGS!). Everyone was welcome in the sanctuary, period.

*They love filming for the “Fertility Of Abundance Garden,” as Bloom calls it.*

I have been administering snacks, scooping Revvy off of tables and chairs so he won’t fall on his head, having a back and forth with the co-creator because he said some nonsense. Now I just nursed Revvy to nap and I am transferring this writing to the computer. Today’s sound study, Summer Breeze (listen + download below) plays sweetly in my room. I mixed it this morning so that it could nourish me as I prepared today’s offerings. The rest of the house is quiet. The big kids are on a walk to the store with their father to get lunch making items.

Word spread quickly that the old church was singing a new tune. All sorts of folks who never felt good enough to enter the church started attending. A new, hip choir was born and it sang upbeat gospel jams. A dance ministry that would seed my lifelong labors as a movement facilitator had space to be dreamed and co-birthed by me and another sister. Their was more laughter, more color, more food from the African diaspora, and a vibrant spirit of community as the doors of the church opened to everyone who wanted to come.

I was a young girl on the verge of adolescence when come as you are was introduced as a way of life at the church—and is still very much in practice 30 years later. In my own journeys of being and becoming, artist and woman, mother and Mother Mother, the spirit of come as you are stayed with me in all things. I was always sensitive to spaces feeling welcoming, and then when I had Bloom and discovered quite painfully that the majority of the world was not mother-friendly, I set out to create spaces where mothers could feel safe, welcome, and seen. I dreamed of spaces where the norm was that mothers can be with their children as they needed to be.

These years of experimenting, designing, practicing, and playing in mother-centered spaces seeded the Come As You Are practice in the Garden. Come As You Are means different things to different people. Whatever that thing is that you usually feel like you have to tuck away, or hide, or clean, or trim, or silence, or suppress, or wipe away before you let yourself be seen by others—that’s the thing you get to leave right where it is when you are in the Garden. The crud in your eye, or in your life, is not going to scare any of us away. In fact we will be lovingly all ears and all eyes and open hearts for you as you see yourself in the sweet light of who you are, as you are, crud and all.

Come As You Are has grown like a wildflower in our Garden. We didn’t even start out with Come As You Are 15 months ago, but it had to grow, and take over every space and practice in the Garden so that the Garden could grow. I had to soften, and come as I am, so that the Garden could flourish. So that there could be space for the dreams to breathe. In the beginning when I would get a vision or an idea I would push myself to produce it right then. I thought, Spirit gave this to me. I have to use it now or I’ll lose it. Joyful and magical as the early seasons were, sometimes I was creating out of this conditioned practice that my fertile majesty would diminish if I didn’t hurry and generate/produce/deliver right away.

I have come sooooooo far from that now! And I am so overjoyed to be in the truth of my calling now. Because I see, I trust, I know:` I have all the time I need to create. Time is all I have. And there is no rush. There is no late. There is no incomplete. This is all a becoming. A continuous, rapturous becoming.

The crew has returned from their walk, and miraculously just before the rain. Juju just came to get her Revvy-is-sleeping midday nunu. The boys wanted to search for lost bakugans amidst the chaos of my room and WAKE MY BABY—so I was like NOOOO! and sent them out out.

I didn’t know this part of the Come As You Are story would surface today, so this has been an interesting unfolding. There are so many more layers for us to explore together. I am going to pause here and move to some other Garden labors for the day. I welcome your Come As You Are stories as we deepen into the majesty of this freedom to be, to simply be ourselves, and to be seen and celebrated for it. Thank you for being here. Thank you for adding to our abundance, as you are.

Revvy is now waking to nurse. More next time.
I love you!

Welcome To The Realness Of Come As You Are

DANCING MOTHER IS MOTHER MOTHER BINAHKAYE JOY.