Mother Mother’s Journal #0001: Breathing Through My Labors

6 february 2022

It’s been nearly a month since I last shared with you all inside the Dancing Mother Communion Portal. There have been so many movements happening all throughout. I’ve been communing with you in my heart, in spirit, in my dreams. The dance is always making more space for things to be and become. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being a sacred witness to this mighty unfolding.

I am sitting with the call to slow down and soften my intense archiving labors. I started out wanting to share in a weekly rhythm—because there’s SO MUCH content to go through + I am creating new material all the time. But the weekly rhythm was too fast. And in January there were other labors being centered, and I couldn’t sustain the pace I’d initially began for Dancing Mother archival majesties. So this moment, this share, this is me taking a deep, long breath. I have more pieces to archive and develop into communion portals to share here, and I also want to activate more ways to connect in addition to the communions offered here. This is me reimagining how I share in this space, and inviting new opportunities for engagement and collaboration with sacred witnesses.

*Spinning into the sunrise communion. I make sure that the sun touches all parts of me during the morning movement ritual.*

I’d like to begin experimenting with more soft-time communions with sacred witnesses who want to “dance with me.” There are so many ways we can do this outside of a collaborative-time (live) format. We can share music. We can exchange videos and voice notes. We can send inspirational offerings from other artists and respond to their creations with our own. We can really be dancing all the time. That is the dream of Dancing Mother, that we seed a world that is soft, open, juicy, warm, and vibrant, and where we feel free to dance any time. The dream of Dancing Mother is also that we experience communion and connection with each other beyond the conjoined realities of time and space. That you be where you are. And I am where I am. And we’re still very much together in our movement possibilities, even when—and especially when—we’re not looking at each other in person or on a screen for collaborative time/space energies.

Part of this breathing moment is me feeling into the multiple frequencies of creation rhythms for Dancing Mother. In a recent fellowship application I expanded the language of Dancing Mother. To “spiral movement galaxy” I added “digital archive installation portal” to reflect that there is both movement happening now and movement being resurrected and remembered from the deepest parts of my memories, ancestral cellular stories, and starseed visions for the ones who are yet to be born. All of these frequencies course through me. And I am learning, discovering, coming into a sustained rhythm of creation with it all.

I begin when the sky is still quite dark. I love seeing the intense band of color breaking the young day open. My movements are soft and round, slowly warming and expanding, just as a the sun gently presses its light into the fresh dawn.

Every month I’d like to do a collaborative-time gathering, like the Open Galaxy, or this month’s Galaxy Party. The Galaxy Party is an invitation to celebrate whatever movements have opened you up, brought you to this now, this space of seeing and being you. I am celebrating the new dimensions of healing that I activated in this last month. At the beginning of January I initiated a sacred movement ritual called luminous expansion, that supports me in deepening into and extending the majestic, fertile frequencies of the ovulation portal. So far I’ve discovered that the sunrise communion makes way for the luminous expansion to happen. Beautiful things are being activated in these rituals. I am feeling my way into how I want to share the depths of these discoveries inside Dancing Mother.

I am coming into the fullness of my visions. I am living my dreams, as they say. And I am still also grieving a lot, moving through waves of sadness, frustration, and heartache around the wounds that are still open, still bleeding, still re-bruised in the long labor of sifting through. The dance helps me remember that my body has space for all my stories. Joy is not a static state, and dancing connects me to the fluidity of life. Our feelings are not unreal or unreliable or insignificant because they are transient. Rather, the movement and fluctuation is the purest signal of life. That everything continues to change, that I feel it all in so many different ways, is my reminder that I am very much alive, and pulsing through all my nows.

*Warming the spine through and through. I twist. I bend. I turn. I sway. I wave and ripple. I do all the things to soften and expand and lengthen in my spine.*

I’ve almost arrived at the Yes for a new opportunity that is waaaaaay outside of my “comfort zone.” I am considering applying to present Dancing Mother at a local dance space in Washington, DC. The application is due in a month, and I’ve started tentatively gathering materials for it. I say I’m “still arriving” to it because the venue is not my ideal space for a Dancing Mother program—because that space doesn’t yet exist! Buuuuut, I think it presents an interesting experiment to see if I can effectively translate elements of Dancing Mother into a more traditional performance space. I’m also leaning into doing this application because I feel it will help me prepare for a much bigger application de in April—one where I have more creative freedom and can expand on the vision of a Dancing Mother interactive performance portal without having to accommodate the limitations of a fixed building/closed site.

I’ve been studying stories of dance companies and artists who created beyond the boundaries imposed on them by expectation, space, age, physical abilities, access to resources. I’m reading and listening to these creators who’ve been with their process for years, for decades, and have developed their visions and art over time. This inspires me so much for Dancing Mother. I’m still getting to the words of it. In my mind I know exactly what this space/dream/idea is. And you are helping me practice put the language in motion by being a sacred witness. Thank you for participating in the unraveling/becoming.

I dance in front of my dream wall, which is also my ancestral mothers communion portal wall. The hearts—created when I was sitting with possibilities with Revelation— are for a different mother in my mother line. This wall faces south—to the southern USA, to the Caribbean, and to South America, where I feel the nexus of my physical majesties were seeded over the last several centuries. The papers on the wall are my various dream boards. I dance and write, dance and sketch, dance and map, dance and make notes about next steps. I jot down phrases and opening lines to stories and essays. This is how I reduce my screentime when I’m writing and creating. I don’t wait until I have it all figured out. I start creating from the now, and flow into deeper understandings.

So more is coming. I am really getting into this archiving majesty discovery. The archive is like a living mirror of my stories. I am creating it for me, but also for my children and their children. And also for the dancing mothers who are here and the others who will come. I am taking great care to matter* and preserve my stories, because they are the bounty, the substance, the translation of my brilliance. Our stories are our wealth. Inside this first birthing of Dancing Mother I am amassing the wealth. I am collecting every bit of me and my becoming and realizing the gift, the blessing, the opening. I am learning how to look at my whole self. I am trying on language and having slow, back-and-forth conversations with myself in the text. I am making space for the rough edges, asymmetrical realities, and unfinished endings. I am giving myself permission to be messy, long-winded, and unordered. I am enjoying this evolution. It is a deeply, soul-satisfying heart-work.

The galaxy is wide open. How do you want to commune, engage, experience? You are invited to feel for your Yes and dance into the possibilities with me in all the ways that feel good and nourishing to you. I welcome voice notes, videos, messages, emails, video call dates, and whatever else we can dream up. This is my world I am dreaming up, and I created it to be another creation home and sanctuary for the dancing mothers who feel called to be here. What is your body, your being, asking for? How do you want to dance, move, be? The way is open. The way is here. The way is now.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for witnessing. I love you.