Lumens Creation Story | A Soils Lab with Mother Mother | Practice Map
Hello Creative One! Welcome to Seed & Spark: Journal of the Fertility Abundance Garden. This is a Soils Lab Practice Map. Learn more about An Introduction to Soils and the Soils Lab practice below. To attend a Soils Lab you must be a creator in the Creators Circle. To learn more about the Garden or to join as a creator, please visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center. 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!
Lumens Creation Story
Soils Lab with Mother Mother | Practice Map
Mother Mother dances through the dismantling of capitalism in her body.
monday | 11 April 2022 | 6pm Et
When the Garden first began two years ago, all I knew then was that there could be no fee for joining in the Garden. It was a spiritual directive, much like the one that set me on my path as a fertility priestess 4 years before the Garden was born. When I closed my eyes I saw the Garden as a space where we reclaim sacred energies, a softhouse for creators recovering their majesties—for themselves—after years of laboring (for others) and navigating the harsh, constricting mandates of capitalism—grind, accelerate, crush, conquer. The Garden was to be a world outside of that. Our ways of being had to exist beyond the normalized ways of relating to people and their brilliance as products to be bought and sold.
Through conversation and communion, my language evolved from “there’s no cost to be in the Garden” to “the Garden does not participate in capitalist systems.” While I was clear that the Garden was to be open to creators who feel the yes in their hearts, for a long time I didn’t have clarity about what currency we actually functioned in. If not capitalism, then what? If not money, then what?
In the absence of alternative language or context, creators adopted what was most accessible—the language of capitalism—to describe the “cost” of the Garden as “free.” While this inwardly grated my soul, I still didn’t have something else to put forth. Quietly I contemplated this conundrum, occasionally having juicy, mind-opening dialogues with creators who were sometimes baffled as to why I didn’t charge a minimum for the Garden. Each time I was asked this question, it brought me closer to identifying and articulating the threads of consciousness that would finally reveal the currency of the Garden. One cold, bright morning in February of this year, I was dancing and the name of our currency landed in my heart, like an offering of the most radiant flowers at my feet, lumens.
In the Lumens Creation Story Soils Lab we journey into the discovery of lumens, the Garden’s round light currency. I will share the elemental framework of what I understand so far about this currency, and how the lumens system gives every creator space and opportunity to embody our practice of Come As You Are in her own way. I will share some of the dances that have surfaced from the lumens discovery communiography that I experiment with during my sunrise movement rituals. We will begin mapping some of the labors and creations that different creators do to pour light into the Garden.
this soils lab includes these elements:
Workshop in development/experimental practice
Lecture/presentation
Dance performance
Vision mapping/dreaming
Story sharing/dialogue circle
italicized language is defined and expanded on in the glossary.
Dancing Mother Reals are movements captured in the realness of Mother Mother’s life and labors. Set A/B of Lumens Creation Story show two different moments from the same morning movement ritual discovery. Searching for language to bring the lumens currency to life, Mother Mother feels for pathways of freedom and expansion in her body. As the dance blooms she realizes she must uncover and release hidden strangleholds of capitalism from her breath, blood, and bones.
meet mother mother
Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
I imagine, design, and bring to life multisensory, immersive practice portals that support creators in activating generative realities for their wildest fertility dreams. I consciously create expansive, soft-structure, slow-paced spaces that feel safe and liberating for mothers. My creations, programs, and experiments span a multitude of artistic genres and engage diverse platforms.
I am a Mother Mother, black birthing mother, fertility priestess, spiritual midwife, dancing mother, afrofuturist bush mother, movement facilitator, sacred nourishment practitioner, writer, sacred storyteller, culture maker, emerging DJ, budding astronomer, and devoted caretaker of mothers in my glocal village. I have birthed 4 children that the world can see, ages 8, 6, 4, and 2, and more starseeds that transitioned early before they could be known beyond my womb. My birthing pathways have been through homebirth cesarean, homebirth, and supported free birthing at home. I am a full presence mother and I navigate life as a multitudinous mothering entity. I live in Washington, DC with my co-creator and our children.
The birth of my youngest child seeded the momentum for what would become the Fertility Abundance Garden, a virtual congregation for creators, and sanctuary for mothers. I am currently evolving Dancing Mother, a spiral movement galaxy and digital archive installation portal sourced by the discovery, expansion, and celebration of dance and movement practices that nurture and sustain mothers.
I spend most of my days dancing by the light of the sun, bouncing around with the munchkins, nourishing babies from my body, nurturing my children’s brilliance and discoveries at Wildseed, our family learning lab practice, holding space for the mothers in my community, and dreaming up innovative ways that the world can be a softer, sweeter, and more lovingly vibrant place for mothers.
italicized language is defined and expanded on in the glossary.
about our soils lab
Soils Lab is a central component of Mother Mother’s evolving creative practice methodology, An Introduction to Soils: Preparing the Heart, Mind and Body for Deeply Generative Creations.
Soils Labs are where we explore practices that nourish our soil of creation, the substance from which we create everything we do. Soils Labs journey into diverse creative realms like writing, storytelling, visual art, sacred rituals, healing practices, movement, birth and fertility studies, and so much more. Every creator shares from the wealth of her brilliance, and we all grow from there.
attending soils lab
Soils Labs are collaborative-time (live), virtual gatherings. To honor and protect the intimacy of our sharing, Soils Labs are not recorded. We are a Come As You Are congregation and you are welcome to attend as much or as little of the lab as you like. You must be a creator in the Garden who has confirmed conscious participation to receive the access link for the labs. Please visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center to join the Garden and begin attending Soils Labs. If you have recently or previously joined the Garden, visit the Sanctuary to confirm or reconfirm your conscious participation.
ABOUT SOFT-TIME
The Garden thrives in soft-time expansions. While the Soils Lab is a collaborative-time gathering, we consciously create multiple points of engagement for all creators to participate in the majesty of our explorations and experiments, whether or not you attend the lab. In addition to the practice maps, our Soils Labs are archived in multiple places inside the Creators Portal and the Creators Shared Diary. We also extend conversations and discovery opportunities in the Creators Channel and Fertile Majesties groups. Mattering soft-time practice spaces is a vital way that we disrupt mandates of capitalism, and continue to decentralize fixed-time and cumpulsory-time standards as universally legitimate and relevant. In making space for the diversity of our life rhythms and labors, we take great care to develop generative, nourishing methodologies that honor the fluid nature of our lives as creators.
ITALICIZED WORDS DEFINED AND EXPANDED ON IN THE GLOSSARY
where do you share your stories?
Ask a question + share your story with us. The Fertility Abundance Garden is a congregation for creators, a sanctuary for mothers, a dreamscape for sacred storytellers. To learn more and to join the Garden, visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center.
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