Book of Mother Mother: A photo essay of my journal archive
Hello Creative One! Welcome to Seed & Spark: Journal of the Fertility Abundance Garden. This is a photo essay inspired by the Garden House Press: Book of Mother Mother program. To learn more about the Garden or to join as a creator, please visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center.
Book of Mother Mother
A photo essay of my journal archive
“What if these stories that I’ve preserved are not even for me to look at? What if my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren are going to comb through my stories and piece this stuff together? What if my labor is to gather them, and keep them in a place where they can be found some generations forward. What if the processing of it, and deciphering of it is going to be in the next century, in the next millennium…”
Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
I have over 20 years worth of journals. These are most of them, but not all of them.
Not pictured are the journals in boxes in my mother’s garage.
Also not pictured, journals that were destroyed or thrown away, because I didn't think I could bear to revisit their contents.
Also not pictured, millions of bytes of photos, videos, voice recordings from my digital archives
Our stories are our wealth. And we inherit our mothers stories.
Each journal is a collection of moments, of stories. Some I cherish. Some make me cringe. Some make me time travel. Some make me dream.
My body holds all of my stories. The journals are placeholders for memories that might otherwise fade with time.
These books, these volumes of my life have followed me everywhere I go. I have been sure to preserve them, to treasure them. More and more I wonder, “what will happen to my stories if all these journals go away?”
In some of these pages, in some of these lines, I don’t even recognize myself. But I know it was me. I know my handwriting.
Some of these I have not opened in over a decade. What will it take to look through it all? Is that really my labor to do?
I have remembered myself in such deliberate and remarkable ways. Will something come from all of this? I think so. I feel so.
My stories are a comfort. They are a resource. They are mine.
meet mother mother
Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy is a dancing mother, fertility priestess, spiritual midwife, sacred nourishment practitioner, afrofuturist bush mother, ringshout synergist, and radiant superconductor of divine creation intelligence. She cares for the mothers in her village by creating soft spaces for them to (re)discover the bounty of their wildest fertility dreams. Mother Mother is the generative pulse of the Fertility Abundance Garden, a congregation for creators and a sanctuary for mothers. She spends most of her days dancing by the light of the sun, bouncing around with the munchkins, nourishing babies from her body, and nurturing her children’s brilliance and discoveries at Wildseed, her family learning lab practice. Mother Mother is devoted to holding space for the mothers, and dreaming up innovative ways that the world can be a softer, sweeter, and more lovingly vibrant place for mothers. She is the co-visionary and principal activator of her family’s love-seeded enterprise, The Family Dances. A budding astronomer who is fascinated by the correlation between the birthing of stars and our fertility codes, Mother Mother is also a writer, sacred storyteller, communiographer, fertile soundscape artist, and liberation technologist navigating life as a black birthing mother and a multitudinous mothering entity. She lives in Washington, DC with her co-creator, Bushman, and their children, Bloom, Wonder, Jubilee, and Revelation.
Visit Mother Mother’s Story Maps to learn more.
