Softening The Soil: On Nurturing Gentle, Restorative Dialogues About Our Fertility
/// multitudinous mothering entity /// A mother who moves through the world and navigates spaces while attached to or in close, physical proximity of her children. Italicized words expanded on in the Glossary.
Softening the Soil
On Nurturing Gentle, Restorative Dialogues About Our Fertility
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
Just like a tree is nourished by its many roots and the soil that holds everything in place, every story we tell can begin in many places and is sourced by the words we choose to piece it all together.
The Garden is teaching me so much about finding soft, gentle ways into our deepest, most intimate fertility narratives. Opening up and becoming more receptive to the internal dialogues we have with ourselves and each other as creators is one way we transform and reimagine our relationships with our fertility and creativity. Being able to access and articulate what we truly feel and how we want to create is vital to sustaining a healthy flow of our creations and nurturing optimal wellness as a creator.
Just like we soften the soil before we dig out the weeds, so as to not unnecessarily harm the roots of the plant we want to save, so too do the language and lens with which we talk about our fertility stories. The softness of our soil also determines how much we are able to unearth, and how honestly we can articulate the stories that emerge from the excavation.
There is a way to journey into our darkest, most hidden places without causing more harm or kaleidoscopes to ourselves. There may be parts of our stories are so layered, so tangled in knots, that just thinking about it from a chronological or “just the facts” perspective sparks waves of anxiety or an instinct to shutdown and retreat for self-preservation. This discomfort and distress is exacerbated when the words we use to tell our story are not even our own, but rather the artificial imprints of conversations other people are having about our stories.
A critical first step in the softening of our soil is to ensure that the language we are using is truly our own. We embody more power, and accelerate the healing process in the wake of grief, loss, and heartbreak, when we decide how our stories are told and define what each moment means for ourselves. The truth is, only we can author what has happened in our bodies, and this authoring is every creator’s sacred responsibility, now and always.
When the soil has not yet been softened enough, it’s very difficult—and sometimes even impossible—for new questions, thoughts, and understandings to be received and absorbed. Nurturing a gentler way into our stories means consciously choosing language that centers our power as creators. It also means slowing down to the pace of possibility when processing and unpacking our stories so that the liberating truth of a matter has a chance to take root, emerge, and be seen and experienced in a healthy, soul-restorative way.
Essential to the labors of cultivating and sharing authentic narratives about our birth stories, sitting with possibilities, mothering journeys, fertility practices, relationships with partners and co-creators, passions, creative projects, girlhood-to-womanhood memories, relationships with our mothers and mother figures, dreams and visions—and whatever else we feel called to speak on—is a radical commitment to the truth of whatever it is our bodies, hearts, and minds have lived through.
The substance of everything we need to say is already alive and pulsing within. When the softening happens, the words come to us more fluidly and the stories come to life more vibrantly.
Soft, moist, vibrant soil yields generous, new freedoms when crafting fertility narratives. Inside the expansive world of our fertile soil, we are able to take up more space within our stories. With more ease, we identify the real words and then take great care to organize and situate our words in ways that amplify our realities as creators.
With each evolution of the telling and the sharing we discover the vastness of our beings and our creations. We remember with love, celebration and gratitude that when the soil is soft we really can bring forth the most beautiful transformative, courageous, and affirming parts of ourselves and our stories to life.
Practice & Process: FERTILITY WORD SPROUTS
Find your journal, open up a fresh page on your laptop, start a new email to yourself. Get ready to write, however you like to do it.
Think about a critical turning point in your evolution as a creator:
When did you realize a new truth about your fertility?
How did you know that your creativity needed to be expressed in a certain way?
Where were you when a piercing clarity awakened you to the life you are living now?
When you have a memory that rises to the surface, write down what it is with one or two sentences.
From the following question seeds, choose one that feels most relevant or most resonates with you:
What happened to me?
Why is this moment so significant to my story?
How do I feel about this moment now?
How did I feel about it when it first happened?
How did this make me grow?
What did this lead me to create?
Write your selected question seed on your page. Then somewhere else on your page, or posted up somewhere visible to you in your writing space, write down: My story, my words, my truth.
Take a moment to reread those words aloud or in your mind, My story, my words, my truth. As you repeat the mantra, become more aware of your breath. Deepening the breath and feeling the expansion within, say the mantra internally as you continue to inhale and exhale.
Return to the space on your page and begin answering with a stream of conscious, free write. Allow all the words to come as the do. Keep writing for at least 5 continuous minutes. Don’t erase, edit, or censor. Just write.
When you feel like you have generated an amount of content that feels good to you, set it down. Take a few minutes to rest and step away from your writing.
When you are ready to come back to the process, revisit the mantra for a moment, My story, my words, my truth.
Read through what you wrote. Soften the impulse to edit or amend and just read.
Now read it again with your authentic truth lens:
Read one sentence (or one line, or one phrase—whatever makes sense for how you wrote it down) at a time.
After ever sentence, ask yourself, Is this true?
Underline everything that is true.
Now read through it once more with your feeling lens:
Going sentence by sentence, circle all the words that make you feel an expansion in your body, a warmth in your fingertips, or a flutter in your belly.
Take a breath and notice each sensation.
Try your best not to assign judgments of “good” or “bad” to the feelings that are surfacing.
On a separate page (or underneath what you have written) make a list of all the words you circled. These are your fertility story word sprouts.
Over the next few days, weeks, or months, revisit your word sprouts.
When you are ready to go deeper into writing about this story, pick one of your sprouts to explore.
Begin writing about the original memory (or another memory if it’s shifted through your writing) by centering the lens of your storytelling to your chosen word sprout and the feeling(s) it generated within you.
Observe how your story goes, trusting the journey as the words unfold from your heart and onto the page.
When you need a change or want to experiment with a different beginning to your story, choose a new word sprout or go back to the question seeds, and then start the process over again.
