Come As You Are Is An Initiation
Hello Radiant One! Welcome to Seed & Spark: Journal of the Fertility Abundance Garden. Thank you for being here and witnessing our labors to share our sacred stories. Our stories are our wealth and in the Garden we are discovering the bounty of our stories and how to apply that wealth to the cultivation of our abundance. The Fertility Abundance Garden is a congregation for creators, a sanctuary for mothers, and a dreamscape for sacred storytellers. To learn more about the Garden or to join as a creator, please visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center. If someone forwarded this post to you and you want to receive your own, subscribe to Seed & Spark and receive the Fertile Friday love note every week that highlights new shares in the journal. So much life, labor, and love goes into creating and sustaining the Garden and everything we share. The Garden is sustained by the kindness and generosity of creators and supporters. If any part of our magical world touches your heart and nourishes your being as a creator, please do pour into our Giving Well or join a Sustainability Circle today. If you are already contributing to our bounty, THANK YOU FOR THE LOVE!
Come as you are is an initiation
Fertile Friday Love Note
Listen + dance along to the Fertile Friday love note. Soundtrack posted below.
By mother mother binahkaye joy
29 april 2022
Happy Fertile Friday, Beautiful Creators,
What surprised you most this week?
Who blessed you with their presence or their energy today?
When's the last time you drank water?
I am so excited to bring more magic, more awareness, more illumination to the beauty and the abundance that has been unfolding and expanding in the Garden this week.
Thank you for witnessing, thank you for celebrating, thank you for pouring in, thank you for holding space, thank you for being here in whichever ways are a Yes for you. It is all appreciated, it is all felt, it is all nourishing, and we celebrate you!
So many things to share! Okay, so we are preparing for a new process in the Garden. Starting in the Fall Garden, it’s going to be a new activated space called the Come As You Are Practice Spiral. It’s going to be a hybrid practice portal that lives in the Garden. There’s also going to be some collaborative-time gatherings that open up the different seeds of our foundational practices.
The Come As You Are Seed Spiral Map is being revealed today to softly introduce this really magical, expansive process that is being born. We’re going to be diving deep over the next few months and bringing it to life in the Fall Garden. Creators who are excited by this and are excited to pour into this are welcome to join the dream circle, the dreaming labors.
Have you recently or previously joined the Garden?
Welcome home, Beautiful Creator! If you feel the Yes in your heart and you’re ready to experience more engagement in the Garden, connect with other amazing creators, attend our live gatherings, and access the magic of the Creators Portal, please visit the Sanctuary to complete the process for joining the Creators Circle. In the Sanctuary you can confirm or reconfirm conscious participation. If you are joining the Garden for the first time, visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center to begin your journey. Thank you for being here!
Come As You Are is foundational to everything we do in the Garden. Come As You Are is our mantra and we’ve been saying it for a long time now. Creator Zindzi shared with us a while ago, Come As You Are is an initiation. And then when she said that it really clicked because yeah, Come As You Are is a process because we don’t live in a world that gives us space to come as we are. We’ve adapted. Many of us have adapted to compressing, silencing, holding some piece of ourselves back, you know. Making ourselves smaller, making ourselves less visible for survival, whatever it may be. And in the Garden we’ve invited you to...we’ve invited everyone to undo that conditioning and to really bring the bounty of themselves to the experiment, to this space of cultivation of our dreams, of our ideas, of our sistership.
Mother Catherine Seals is one of our creative foremothers and she was a spiritual leader in New Orleans in the 1920s. And she built her temple, the Temple of the Innocent Blood. She built it in what is now the Ninth Ward but it was away from the main city and you actually had to cross a marsh land to get there and sometimes depending on the rain, there would be waist deep mud and like [tall grass], and all this. You know, you’re wading through stuff to get to her temple. And she, it was intentional. She was like, she didn’t want people just popping in having a look. It’s like if you were coming to her temple, you wanted it to be there. You crossed the marsh, right. And so in many ways Come As You Are is a spiritual marsh in that sense. Like if you want to be in the Garden, if you want to experience the bounty and the majesty of the Garden, then you will journey into the Come As You Are majesties in your own rhythm and in your own time.
“And in the Garden we’ve invited everyone to undo that conditioning, and to really bring the bounty of themselves to the experiment, to this space of cultivation of our dreams, of our ideas, of our sistership. ”
Come As You Are Seed Spiral Map: This is a map of our foundational seeds of fertility abundance.
Every seed is another way into the Garden. Which seed speaks to you heart? Which affirmation inspires you to grow deeper into your process as a creator?
That’s why there is no mandate. There is only an invitation. For some creators, the Come As You Are process is immediate. For some it takes seasons, orbits, years, cycles. It takes coming and going, again and again. And in all of that we cultivate so much love, so much beauty, so much bounty of understanding because we’re all different. We have different ways that we create and different ways that we navigate the world, and all of these things. We learn by watching each other’s Come As You Are journey. It’s beautiful. Come As You Are stories are so generative, are so juicy.
So yes, we are beginning. There’s a lot that’s going to be inside the Come As You Are practice portal. And we are creating this space to support new creators, curious creators, and current creators who want to have a deeper engagement with the Garden, and who want to feel more connected to the sistership, and who want support in the their walk, in the Come As You Are initiation. And then also, as everything in the Garden, it’ll also be a soft-time practice portal. So, you know for those who want to journey through it in their own soft-time, and in their own rhythm, and in their own evolution, they can do that as well. So very excited! Come As You Are, is taking on more shapes, and dimensions, and language, and so much juiciness is coming with that.
And then, along with the Come As You Are initiation journeys that we’re seeding, we are going to be activating welcome circles, weekly welcome circles, for new and curious creators. So these will be collaborative-time gatherings that are open to whoever feels the Yes. And if you have questions about the Garden, if you’re curious about what this world is, if you just want to dip your toe in the water and see if it’s your vibe, we’ll be holding those sessions starting soon. And different creators will take turns facilitating. There’ll be really soft practice moments of togetherness. We’ll share different parts of our practice. We’ll answer questions. We’ll give people tours of the Garden. Yeah, so stay tuned, hello Creators. That will be the name of the welcome circles—hello Creators— and it’ll be weekly. And everyone is welcome to join. If you are curious, if you’ve been in the Garden for a while, you’re still like, “What is this space? What am I doing here?” Yeah, the hello Creators welcome circle is for you.
Fertile Friday Love Note Soundtrack | Atjazz, Dominique Fils-Aimé See-Line Woman {Extended Instrumental/Extended Mix} | Tweety, Lea, Muzikman Edition Songbird (Atjazz Love Soul Remix/Instrumental)
Story behind the cover photo: Bloom was whining to insert himself into the laundry basket where his baby brother and sister were playing their made-up game. They did not want to play with him because he was too big to fit in the basket. I asked him if he needed to get on my back and be a baby. And he said yes. He is so huge and I made him get down so he wouldn’t break the carrier with his big self!
WATCH: Witnessing A Metamorphosis, link available through 8 May 2022 @ 11pm ET
We are celebrating big, beautiful news! We are celebrating Creator Netsenet! She premiered her film Witnessing a Metamorphosis this week. It is a film that shares the story of her healing as a sexual abuse survivor. And it is powerful, and it is mighty, and it is already activating so much healing! She had a beautiful opening night of her premiere and she’s actually gifted our Garden family access to the film* for a preview before she creates more majesties with it. So yes, we are celebrating Netsenet! Yaaaaaay, congratulations!
She followed her Yes. She followed her Yes. And the story of how this film was born is so powerful. And it is an honor to have been a part of that, witnessing her activating her Yes when she first felt into the Yes to begin the journey in creating this film. And so, those of us who’ve been able to hold space with her in the Garden and witness her along the way we are nourished, we are deeply honored, and we are celebrating and cheering for her! So beautiful! So check it out, Witnessing a Metamorphosis over at Netsenet's webhome, Sacred Womb Works.
*access to witnessing a metamorphosis will close 8 May 2022 @ 11pm ET.
“That’s why there is no mandate. There is only an invitation. For some creators, the Come As You Are process is immediate. For some it takes seasons, orbits, years, cycles. It takes coming and going, again and again. And in all of that we cultivate so much love, so much beauty, so much bounty of understanding because we’re all different. We have different ways that we create and different ways that we navigate the world, and all of these things. We learn by watching each other’s Come As You Are journey. It’s beautiful. ”
Okay, so one more thing. In the Garden, we have Soils Labs on Mondays, but we’re going to do something different this week because no one signed up to facilitate the Soils Lab. We’re going to try a different practice. We’re going to have an Open Dreamscape to collectively imagine this Come As You Are Seed Spiral Map, and how it can be animated and activated to support creators in understanding what our world is. You can check out the Open Dreamscape portal to see more about what that can look like. There’s different practice prompts and different invitations for us to begin exploring what the Come As You Are Practice Spiral and the portal can look like and what the process can be. I share more details—
[Revvy trying to take my scripture book where my notes are written]
And so yeah, I share more details about the open dreamscape. I’m being kicked out of my own sacred texts book—
[Deep Mama sigh, Revvy wins. This love note is over.]
Thank you for listening! Thank you for being a part of our world! Thank you for celebrating the magic of creation in all its forms! You are powerful! You are beautiful! You are Love! You are magic! You are necessary! We celebrate you! We love you!
Happy Fertile Friday!
Word map generated by the transcription record of this love note
A Note on Mother Mother’s labors for the creation of this Fertile Friday love note | Dancing to feel into the stories for today’s shares | Making notes + mapping shares in sacred text book | Selecting music and preparing audio tracks | Recording love note | Transcribing and editing love note | Developing the graphics | Creating the Come As You Are seed spiral map, narration, and video | Creating audio-video fo love note | Building the post | Editing design and layout | Sending out the newsletter | Proofreading and making additional edits | Creating more graphics
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