I Offer This Heart, My Heart, to the Sun

Everything is being reimagined, constantly...
That’s a part of the magic of this process, continuous evolution and feeling into the Yes.
Because the Yes is not static.
The Yes is active.
It’s fluid.
The Yes is responsive to our hearts.

5 December 2021

I am so grateful for your presence inside this communion with me. I see you, I celebrate you, I love you!

Dancing Mother has many origin stories. I am feeling into the Yes and taking great care to matter and visibilize* all parts of these stories. My labors right now center on combing through my archive of movement creation, an archive that I feel I began consciously and intentionally pouring into when I was 15 years old. I have often wondered why I document my everyday moments so extensively—a practice that has grown with me as I’ve grown as a mother. Now I see I have been collecting these memories throughout my life so that I could create Dancing Mother.

In placing these shares inside the seed spiral communion portal I am initiating conversations between the content I am re/discovering, the multiple iterations of Binah at the center of the development of these creations, and the sacred witnesses who are helping me to see and understand my practice and evolution in new, expansive ways.

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The Dancing Mother archive is living through multiple entities. The ancient, elemental pulse of the archive begins in my heart, my body, my memories. There are embodied pieces of the stories in my cells, blood, and bones. There are some things physically contained in boxes at my mother’s house, on shelves in my closet, in pockets of handbags I no longer use. There are hundreds of thousands of bytes of my dancing body stored on flash drives and external hard drives, on my phone and computers, on deactivated social media accounts and contained inside inaccessible inboxes.

There are drawers, and boxes and tubs of journals in every color and size, with lined and unlined pages. There are endless notes, videos, photos, blogs, interviews, research papers, facilitation programs, client records, testimonials, travel itineraries, stories, emails, message threads, voice notes and more materials spanning nearly a quarter century of living. In a sense, I am everywhere, my stories are everywhere. And so now I am gathering the pieces of me so that I can see the whole of myself as a miraculous creation story.

Inside this seed spiral I am breathing, and remembering, and feeling, and connecting. I am witnessing myself in the making and bringing visibility to threads of my becoming that stretch backwards and forwards through the planes and parallels of time.

Seed Spiral Communion 01: I Offer This Heart, My Heart, to the Sun initiates a dialogue between 4 moments in time over the last few weeks. The central and largely invisible labor of this season has been my recovery from a protostar birth in September. Each share remembers a scene where I found a way to access the dance inside the swirl of mothering, birthing, and bleeding labors.

Today is day 78 of my 96-day Sacred Return** season. I have been documenting my recovery, my changing body, my energy fluctuations, and my continuous arrival into my sacred communions all the while. There has been intense grief, intense joy, intense healing, and intense reckoning in this Sacred Return. In many ways, Dancing Mother is the birth that continues even though the possibility that was once growing in my womb transitioned early. The need to give birth did not leave me, rather the light created by this life force is bringing me into wondrous and holy dimensions of myself as a creator.

The title of this week’s seed spiral is inspired by a revelatory moment that happened in this morning’s sunrise devotions, which spirit led me to capture on film and include in the communion. Thank you for witnessing me. I welcome your reflections as you feel led to share.

**matter and vizibilize* | new language + meaning expansion by creator Araba Evelyn Johnston Arthur in the fertility abundance garden, see the Language Reimagined features in This Is A Sanctuary For Mothers to explore the evolution of meanings that we’ve discovered in the Garden

**Sacred return | new language by zindzi janaan of womb + word for reimagining and expanding one what is popularly referred to as the “postpartum” season

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One | In Between | 30 October 2021 | Soundtrack: Alice Coltrane Blue Nile

This movement is emerging on the 14th day of continuous, heavy bleeding in what I have named the Pearl Moon, the first sacred bleeding time after a protostar birth. I shed more blood with this birth than any of my other births where people were born, where no people were born.

In this moment I am so sick of pads. I am so over the staining of underwear and clothes. I want to dance, and also I want to lay down. But the munchkins will be all over me if I lay down, so this dance is an example of resting on my feet while my children play. I think it’s magical that they are running a ringshout around me.

I am also enjoying being braless now, something I haven’t done much since becoming a nursing mother. Now I embrace the pull and density of my breasts. I like to feel them swing and slap. I listen for the sounds my mothering body makes when I’m dancing.

Bloom is asking me questions about the starseed that transitioned. We talk frequently about the protostar birth and my recovery labors. My children witnessed me giving birth early, and the blood that was everywhere, and me being in bed for two weeks. For them, me up and dancing, even if slowly, is a sign that Mommy is feeling better, and their life rhythms are returning to normal.

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Two | Cascade | 6 November 2021 | Soundtrack: Osunlade ELYODCIRE

One week after In Between, and the bleeding continues. This movement is me surrendering to my still-bleeding body on what is now day 21 of the Pearl Moon. Sometimes I enjoy a solo-bodied dance practice when the baby is sleeping and the big munchkins are doing their own thing or with their father. In this dance I am celebrating my breasts being free, and that even though I am wearing a pad I still feel sexy in my not-at-all-sexy underwear. I am experimenting with wearing clothes that feel soft and pleasurable to my unrestrained breasts. I am honoring all the labors my breasts do. I am feeling what it’s like to dance without resisting gravity, or time, or weight, or life.

I didn’t know the exact definition of “cascade” when I felt for the title of this piece, but I realize it fits perfectly. Cascade means “a large amount of something that flows or hangs down.”

archival majesties | scrolling a lost tumblr page

Screenshots of my original Tumblr posts. Posts are displayed chronologically:
January 2011 | downtown Port of Spain, Trinidad, outside of the National Library
March 2011 | sunset at the Breakfast shed, Port of Spain, Trinidad, photo by Salim October.
July 2011 | Malcolm X Park, Washington, DC, photo by Colin A. Danville
January 2013 | almost 2 moons along with the starseed who will become Bloom, Washington, DC, photo by Colin A. Danville

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Three | Botanic Blue | 18 November 2021

I bought this dress at the thrift store on the first day of the Pearl Moon. I had planned to wear it the next week, assuming my bleeding time would be the usual week-long process. But the Pearl Moon lasted a total of 23 days, 18 of which were heavy bleeding days. I was not wearing this dress until the bleeding was finished.

On the day of this dance I wake up and do my sunrise communions. I feel into the energy of our day and sense, for the first time since even before giving birth in September, that I have the physical, emotional, and mental capacity to take all 4 munchkins on a field trip downtown—which means going far from home. It also means solo-parenting and journeying on bus and train, and possibly dealing with rush hour too.

I usually wear pants with pockets when I’m moving around with kids so that I can simplify negotiating public transportation by not having to open and close a purse so many times. But I took one look at those jeans, and my spirit was like: “No ma’am! NOT today!” The sun was so bright, and it was warm for November. I saw my blue dress that had never been worn, and I thought about how pretty my dress would look in my dance videos at the Botanic Garden. So in a very un-mommy-life manner, I wore a dress with ZERO pockets and went out into the world! And I had so much fun in my dress, just being in it, being colorful, feeling the softness of it, loving how it hugs the curves of my body. I just love this dress! And I was also SUPER PROUD of navigating this big adventure and creating this moment that was so fun for the munchkins.

I was only able to capture a few photos and a few minutes of movement during our adventure. This scene is on the little walk bridge that crosses a small pond. The munchkins are studying the water plants and I am getting my whole life in my dress and in the glorious sun!

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Four | I Offer This Heart, My Heart, to the Sun | 5 December 2021

The sunrise communions usually begin in the dark, before the horizon starts to hint that day is coming. They softly initiate with me dancing in my pajamas and robe because it’s cold and I like the warmth and softness against my skin.

I open the curtain to the east so that I can see the transformation of colors that move across the sky, signaling the sun is nearing its ascent. I rarely film these communions. Most of the time I dance and then write the raw scriptures that come through the movements in my journal.

My dances are where I first receive the scriptures for the fertility sermons. I’ll get one word, or a phrase, and I’ll hold it, and be with it for a time. Sometimes days, weeks, months will pass before that root scripture flowers and connects me to some larger idea or process.

As I move and warm up from the inside, I start removing layers. Dancing naked, being able to look at, touch, and celebrate my naked body, is an integral part of my fertility radiance cultivation. It’s a practice that I gradually recover after a protostar birth. Sometimes it takes me longer to return to this part of my process, to return to my body as it is.

I don’t always bare my whole self to the sun, but that is a powerful part of the practice that I welcome whenever the spirit brings me to do it. The most important part of my sunrise communion is bathing my heart in the first light of the sun.

There is a beautiful synthesis happening within my movement creations that is inspired by these sunrise communions. There are embodied rituals for healing old griefs and heartaches, prayers for compassion, dream sequences for future starseeds, and so much more.

The sunrise communions have been developing for more than 5 years now, ever since I first began my initiation as a fertility priestess. Dancing Mother is where I am discovering how to bring my sacred movement practices out of my body and into the world.