We Begin With The Booty | 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 Begin With The Booty
An Introduction to the Practice + Story Map
Mother Mother introduces the Fertile Awakenings Story Lab and threads the origins of her expanding booty consciousness as a core element of her fertility story.
Collaborative-time gathering
Wednesday | 13 July 2022 | 10pm Et
In our first installation of the Fertile Awakenings Story Lab, Mother Mother welcomes creators into a new sharing and discovery portal that is centered on our fertility stories. 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?
As this experiment evolves, I will offer stories and practices in the weekly labs + the soft-time practice portal that encourage creators to identify the most potent story seeds from their fertility stories. We Begin With The Booty offers a bootylicious example of tracing our fertility stories through the spaces in our body where we are holding those stories. For me, the booty has been a powerful activation space of my fertility consciousness.
In this lab I share the origins of Bootyism and the Liberated Booty movement practices, and I illuminate how the initiation of my booty consciousness is seeded in the after-labors of two kaleidoscopic birthing moments in the winter of 2008. I offer these questions for exploration:
Where in your body do your stories live?
Are your stories happy there?
Are they seeking a way out?
this Story lab includes these elements:
Workshop in development/experimental practice
Vision mapping/dreaming
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. Mother Zora Neale Hurston is the mother who offered to sit with us as we activate the Fertile Awakenings Story Lab. I am fascinated by many of her stories. Currently I’m slow-reading Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, about Mother Zora’s research sojourns in 1936 and 1937. It was while she was in Haiti that she wrote her most known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 7 weeks time.
When Mother Zora appeared to sit with us in the creation flows for We Begin With The Booty, I wasn’t exactly sure where or how her story fit in. I was looking for something literal at first. So then I had to soften and let the connection simmer on its own. It will come, the mothers told me.
And it did. I came across a reference of Alice Walker’s illuminating 1975 essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. Magazine that brought Mother Zora, by then an ancestor, back into the literary light. The reactivation of Mother Zora’s stories in modern literature studies—in English and also translated into many other languages— was sparked by Alice Walker’s labors to unearth Mother Zora’s stories. The power of this story generates so many thoughts and feelings for me. Mother Zora’s writings, her characters, her courage and boldness—I realize I am able to know of this because Alice Walker reached back into time, literally found Mother Zora’s unmarked grave and discarded brilliance, and made a way for it to be given back to us. Our stories are our wealth.
So then it became clearer to me. This is why Mother Zora is sitting with us for this first adventure in the Fertile Awakenings Story Lab. Many of us are living with untold stories, transformational, healing, brilliant stories that could change our lives, our families, and the world. We are holding these stories, unsure of how to birth them, possibly afraid of going deeper into them. The Fertile Awakenings Story Lab is a soft space to matter and reveal our stories to ourselves. The sacred excavation of Mother Zora’s texts by Alice Walker makes me think of our sacred excavations that so many of us are longing to do for our own stories. This is a reminder; this is an invitation. Mother Zora is letting us know: We do not have to wait for someone else to remember us and find our stories. We can access our stories now. We can share our stories and live inside the bounty of their nourishment now. What stories are you holding? What stories are ready to be born?
Mother Mother invites you to read the full 1975 Ms. Magazine article by Alice Walker, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” about her journey to bring Mother Zora’s stories back into the light. Mother Mother also recommends this collection of videos from Alice Walker’s 2003 lecture at Barnard College as the Gildersleeve Lecturer for Jumpin’ at the Sun: Reassessing the Life & Work of Zora Neale Hurston.
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.
Since we are beginning with the booty, I sifted through videos and creations inspired by my booty dances, and selected this moment from a decade ago, a year and a half before I became a visible mother and gave birth to my first child. BootyMa Makes the Sun Rise is a part of the Booty Folklore movement constellation. I love watching myself in this performance. It fascinates me how much joy and delight I was holding in my body, and how much fun I was having with the audience. I come back to this scene in my becoming again and again because of the irony of my resplendent joys. In this moment I don’t know that I am sitting with possibilities, or that my journey will evolve into a protostar birth a few weeks after this performance.
In this way, my dances are always coded with memories that live in my body alongside the long labors of my fertility journeys. During and after the messy, bloody, lonely moments of the protostar birth, I had the unedited footage of my performance to be with me. I could witness myself in joy, and remember that restoration was possible, and that the only way to prepare for my future starseeds was to go all the way through my labors, to be present with all I was feeling, to matter the weight of life as it is. Every time I watched myself in BootyMa Makes the Sun Rise, singing and dancing and radiating, I remembered, joy is possible again. It was the spark of joy whenever I revisited this performance, and many other moments inside my creation majesties too, that eventually helped me recover my body and root once again in the possibility of my fertility.
BOOTYMA MAKES THE SUN RISE
BootyMa Makes the Sun Rise is an excerpt of the Booty Folklore constellation, a work inspired by our power to create and birth the stories that will nourish our future generations. All of the Booty Folklore works are experiments in myth creation, storytelling, body-mapping, and communiography that she expanded on when feeling into the Liberated Booty movement methodology. Liberated Booty, once upon a time known as Bootyism, was seeded from Mother Mother’s long and lonely healing labors when she was reclaiming her body joy after kaleidoscopic birthing journeys. In BootyMa Makes the Sun Rise, Mother Mother tells the story of how BootyMa accidentally shifts the rhythms of night and day for the whole Earth with her dancing booty.
WOMEN ON WEDNESDAYS @ BRECHT FORUM
NEW YORK, NY
15 FEBRUARY 2012
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?
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