We Are Dreaming All The Time | Fertile Awakenings Story Lab | Story Map
Hello Creative One! Welcome to Seed & Spark: Journal of the Fertility Abundance Garden. This is a Fertile Awakenings Story Lab Story Map. Learn more about the Fertile Awakenings Story Lab practice below. To attend a Fertile Awakenings Story Lab you must be a creator in the Creators Circle or Sanctuary Circle. All creators in the Garden can access the Fertile Awakenings Story Lab Soft-Time Practice Portal. 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!
We Are Dreaming All The Time
Fertile Activations Seeded From Dream Majesties + Story Map
Mother Mother tells the simplified story of how she came into conscious of Mother Catherine Seals, and traces that story along the growth of the Garden. She shares about a powerful dream where she communed with Mother Catherine, and how this dream inspires the practice for this installation of the lab.
Collaborative-time | Creators Circle + Sanctuary Circle
Wednesday | 24 August 2022 | 10pm Et
The Fertile Awakenings Story Lab is an experiment in activating a central labor of our process in the Garden: Our Stories Are Our Wealth. But how do we access the stories that hold that wealth? What labors must we do, what journeys must we take to get inside our own stories, and realize the possibilities from there?
The Fertile Awakenings Story Lab is where I am experimenting with the unearthing of parts of my story that I have never shared out loud before. In each lab I reveal a core element of my fertility that I’m still discovering language for. I believe that the very stories that we’ve kept so tightly tucked away, are also the ones that are extremely generative for our sustenance as creators—if only we can find a way to let them expand, live, and grow that bounty in our lives.
In We Are Dreaming All The Time, I share a dream I had about Mother Catherine Seals (see Sitting With The Mothers below) almost two years ago. The dream came soon after I had learned about Mother Catherine, and I have never spoken about to anyone. I didn’t even write about this dream in my journal. It has just sat with me, in my heart, in my energy field, swirling and sparkling, and taking up space in my body. I am ready to let the story breathe.
In this lab I am experimenting with the birth of language for a story that I know is a sacred component of my spiritual becoming as Mother Mother. Our Stories Are Our Wealth. I know that bringing this story forth will create space for me to be more present with the possibilities it illuminates as I deepen into growing this congregation and spiritual softhouse for mothers. I feel that this sharing will lead to more generative creations and applications of my stories in the cultivation of my abundance. I welcome witnesses and softness as I find the words to express what has been so rapturous, so beyond words.
In this lab you are invited to join me in the sharing of magical, transformative moments seeded in your dreams. This is a moment to reflect and recall the fluid, dynamic nature of your dream consciousness, and to thread that awareness into your waking moments. I offer these questions for continuing reflection and exploration:
Who is the most interesting person/entity that ever visited you in a dream?
Have you ever received a message or insight from a dream that supported you in your waking life?
How do you consciously labor to remember your dreams? What tools or practices have you discovered that enhance your dream magic?
this Story lab includes these elements:
Workshop in development/experimental practice
Vision mapping/dreaming
Writing practice
Story sharing/dialogue circle
italicized language is defined and expanded on in the glossary.
Sitting With The Mothers
Sitting With The Mothers is a growing practice space, seeded in the Fertility Abundance Garden. Initially it began as a communion portal with our creator foremothers, those brilliant ancestor mamas whose writing, and dances, and art, and teachings, and creations nourish us as creators in this now moment. Since the first iteration of Sitting With The Mothers, it has evolved into other realms beyond the celebration of our creator foremothers, including a constellation of methodologies for holding space with our motherselves, birthing mothers and other mothers who are navigating their sacred life labors.
As part of the expanding experiment that is the Fertile Awakenings Story Lab, I am integrating another dimension of the Sitting With The Mothers practice here by sharing pieces of different mothers’ stories that are related to our explorations in the lab. For this practice we are joined by Mother Catherine Seals, a powerful spiritual leader and healer in 1920s New Orleans. I first heard about Mother Catherine Seals almost 2 years ago when our lovely Creator Zindzi sent me this article, Mother Catherine Seals And The Temple Of The Innocent Blood. I recently discovered the book Spiritual and Social Transformation in African American Churches: More than Conjurers by Margarita Simon Guillory. In this book there is a chapter devoted to Mother Catherine Seals. The entire book is linked as a pdf to nourish our discoveries in the lab. You are invited to discover pieces of Mother Catherine’s story, and feel into all it brings up for you.
Photograph of Mother Catherine wearing beaded sequined raiment,1925. Photo: Xavier Archives And Special Collections, New Orleans, Louisiana. The chapter devoted to Mother Catherine Seals is on pages 60-89.
Awakening My Research Majesties
I love research! And I am joyfully finding my way back to research and archival majesties for the things I love, nearly 20 years after my research projects when in college. I am delisting in this liberated discovery space, where I can slowly pour through materials, look up sources, dream up site visits, comb through library catalogues, and uncover direct quotes from the mothers I am studying. This is so exciting! This chapter that I’m sharing inside this lab installation came to me from following a resource guide in someone’s blog who was highlighting people who’ve archived Mother Catherine’s work. And the chapter itself has over 70 additional resources for me to follow-up on!
This brings me so much joy! There is no paper due, no presentation to submit, no thesis to defend. This is me living and loving the journey. Once upon a time I put all my research joy down because I thought it was only accessible through academia…but it’s all around me I now know. I am luxuriating in the bounty of technology, the magic of connections that bring to life these previously unknowable pieces of our creator foremothers’ sacred stories. I’ve been sitting with Mother Catherine for nearly 2 years now. And I am still at the beginning. So much more is coming…I can feel it!
I am planning a field trip to the MLK Library in Washington, DC where they have a copy of Mother Zora Neale Hurston’s The Sanctified Church that you can view and copy (but not checkout). Mother Zora also devoted a chapter to Mother Catherine about her experience visiting the Temple of the Innocent Blood. There are online versions of Mother Zora’s chapter about Mother Catherine, but spirit is leading me through the labors of gathering and collecting these creator foremothers’ words and work with care. I am saying Yes to the journey. Something beautiful, holy, and powerful is being born.
from the dancing mother archive
As part of my ongoing experiment to document and weave story connections from my movement practices and fertility journeys, the Fertile Awakenings Story Lab is another space where I can bring visibility to different parts of my dancing mother evolution and the fertility stories hidden there. By placing these archival moments inside the story map, I am acknowledging that I am ready to unearth and live more courageously from the bounty of these untold parts of my stories.
give thanks + The Mother Project
Mother Mother opens her first JOYISM! show with a movement prayer ritual called give thanks. Following the opening piece, Mother Mother welcomes everyone to the show and shares more about the intentionally interactive flow of this performance space. She then presents the first three sections of The Mother Project, a choreopoem exploring the lives and labors of the mothers in her line.
Capitol Hill Arts Workshop
Washington, DC
1 May 2009
The following is an excerpt from a creation story, Open The Way To Love, that I first shared in the Dancing Mother Communion Temple earlier this year. This is my first time sharing it with the world. I’ve made a few edits (omissions) in places where I’m still not ready to unpack it all publicly. Thank you for witnessing the gentle birthing and unearthing of my sacred stories!
When I think of where the idea to go to Trinidad was seeded, I often come back to this night. The first performance of my newly-formed company, JOYISM! I don’t like to call it a one-woman show, because I wasn’t alone on stage, and so many dear ones helped me produce the show. The evening consisted of 5 interactive movement pieces. The first two pieces, give thanks and The Mother Project are offered here as part of this communion portal.
Trinidad itself wasn’t explicitly stated or even consciously on my mind at that time—and it would be another year-and-a-half before I actually boarded the plane—but this show was the most expanded realm I had created to express my invisible motherself. As much as I poured into producing them, I knew the mother-centered choreopoems I was developing were a critical initiation, but they alone weren’t enough to really matter and witness the kaleidoscopes, secrets, and wounds I was siting with. I knew I needed more space, new air, new land, new waters.
I didn’t know I was going to Trinidad, but I knew I had to go somewhere. I didn’t know that more starseeds would come and then go, and then light the way for me to go to Trinidad. But all of this was what was about to unfold in my life when the JOYISM! show is happening.
The reason returning to this night as a beginning of my Trinidad sojourn is such a radical act of healing for me is because (———) was a collaborator in this performance. And he is (partly) who I was running away from too when I escaped to Trinidad to recover my fertility dreams. For years, for more than a decade now, the entire footage of this hour-long show has been stored on one hard drive to another. I always backed it up and saved it, but rarely did I watch it or really look at it. I had edited a few clips as work samples, housed them on a Youtube channel I no longer use, and sent them out once upon a time for grants or residencies. Beyond that, until this weekend in the labors of preparing the communion portal for Dancing Mother, I hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t been able to, watch this performance because it meant being with the sticky-icky, mucky-muck, at-times-heartbreaking memories still lingering when it comes to being real about all the moments that happened with (———).
In Soils Lab on Monday I started to mention some of these delicate knots I was still figuring out how to unravel. And I talked about not being able to look at parts of my own archive because (———) was a part of it. And I have PLENTY of content without him, so I could easily dig into other parts of my story, and NEVER revisit the places where he intersects my narratives and my creations. But the calling, the invitation in Dancing Mother is to create this galaxy where a mother and her stories can be loved. How am I to birth such a world if I am too afraid to love myself and my stories in the process?
So here I am, looking at myself on this night, finally. Here I am consciously witnessing myself in all my visible and invisible glories, shining bright for my family and the audience, bringing all the Binah magic to the stage, giving my whole self over to the dance and dancing beautifully (something I see now more than I ever did back then…a whole other story there, obviously!), having a fabulous time launching JOYISM! for the world, hiding the very unhealthy relationship entanglement from the people around me, ignoring all sorts of flags and warnings about (———), longing for someone to affirm me as a mother, to give me the one thing that I haven’t yet learned I can only give to myself.
This is that moment. This me looking at that moment. At all of it, finally.
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.
italicized language is defined and expanded on in the glossary.
About the Fertile Awakenings Story Lab
The Fertile Awakenings Story Lab is where we experiment and invite loving witnesses for our labors to live into one of the Garden’s central practices: Our Stories Are Our Wealth. This practice realm is where we uncover our authentic pathways and generative possibilities for extracting the wealth, the sustenance, the abundance, from our own stories. As creators we get to be nourished by our stories first. What does that mean for you and your stories? Where in your body do your stories live? Are they happy there? Are they seeking a way out? The Fertile Awakenings Story Lab is a soft space to ask ourselves the most urgent questions for the stories within us that are yearning to be told.
Attending Fertile Awakenings Story lab
Fertile Awakenings Story Labs are collaborative-time (live), virtual gatherings. To honor and protect the intimacy of our sharing, Fertile Awakenings Story 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 Creators Circle or Sanctuary Circle to receive the access link for the labs. Please visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center to join the Garden and begin attending Fertile Awakenings Story Labs.
ABOUT SOFT-TIME
The Garden thrives in soft-time expansions. While the Fertile Awakenings Story Lab has a weekly collaborative-time component, 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 Fertile Awakenings Story 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. Learn more about how we activate more possibilities with time in Mother Mother’s story-essay, Time Is All We Have.
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.
Are you feeling inspired to share the love?
Thank you for witnessing our sacred labors in the Garden. If any part of this love nourished your being as a creator, please pour into our Giving Well. If there is someone you think would appreciate communing with this post or other shares inside Seed & Spark, please share and post this link with your lovelies and wherever else your spirit moves you. Thank you for being here!
