We Feel Therefore We Know | 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 Feel therefore We know
A Starseed Communion Discovery + Story Map
Mother Mother introduces the magic of starseeds and shares a sacred story about an experience when she communed with a future starseed. She invites creators to consider the stories of their starseeds, and the power we have to choose how our fertile majesties are realized in our lives.
Collaborative-time | Creators Circle + Sanctuary Circle
Wednesday | 10 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 Feel Therefore We Know, I unpack the language of starseed and starseed communion, terminology that I reference often in the Garden and in my daily labors as a creator and black birthing mother. I share untold stories of moments from my fertility journeys where I communed with my starseeds. I feel our starseeds are physically represented by the eggs in our ovaries. As creators we spend our lives discovering the bounty of our fertile energies, and each creation that comes from us is a study in applying our creative power to that which nourishes our Yes. Our starseeds have infinite potential, and they can become our children, our creations, our travels, our enterprises—whoever, whatever we feel is wanting to be born.
In this lab you are invited to join me in feeling for who your starseeds are (or have been), and what/who they are revealing to you. I offer these questions for continuing reflection and exploration:
What do you think of your eggs and your ovaries? Do you have different language for these elements of your fertility?
How do your starseeds communicate with you? What rituals have you discovered in the process of deepening your communion with your starseeds?
We Feel Therefore We Know is an expansion on one of the Garden’s core scriptures: “I feel therefore I know.” What do you feel? What do you know?
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 Nina Simone. You are invited to listen, sing, dance, dream, and sit with Mother Nina inside the For the Love of Nina fertile soundscape, mixed by DJ Mother Mother Be. Also included is a story I wrote about how I came to know Mother Nina and how communing with her music, her stories, her brilliance has been nourishing to me and my fertility for a long time now.
Soundtrack | Nina Simone See-Line Woman | Funkier Than A Mosquito's Tweeter | Return Home | Sinnerman | I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free | The House of the Rising Sun | Obeah Woman Live | Obeah Woman (DJ Logic Remix) | Feeling Good (Bassnector Remix) | Heaven Belongs To You
A Song For Nina
By Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
I never knew who Nina Simone was until my favorite professor in college, a lovely poet named Hermine Pinson, introduced her to me in my junior year. She spoke about Mother Nina with such awe and fascination. "You have to listen to Nina," Professor Pinson kept saying. "You have to know her." That was fall of 2002. Mother Nina would pass away less than a year after I first heard her sing a song.
Professor Pinson's words stayed with me. The next weekend I was home I went to a music store in Dupont Circle and got my first Nina Simone CD. I listened to it again and again, trying to hear what was so special about her voice and her song. I didn't immediately know exactly what I was feeling when her words and melodies filled the speakers, but there was a warmth inside her song, a warmth that seemed necessary to a young woman coming of age in a world she wasn't quite sure what to make of.
I started listening to Mother Nina whenever I could. I got more and more CDs every time I went home. I danced to two of her songs for my senior recital in the Dance Minors program, a solo called "Girlchild in the Promised Land," and a trio I choreographed for three friends who agreed to be in my final project. Even though I was graduating from the program, and I'd been dancing since I was 5 years old, I still didn't yet feel I was good enough to call myself a dancer. But rehearsing for hours and hours to Mother Nina boosted my confidence. When I was in the studio, with Mother Nina blasting her notes and pressing hard on those keys, I felt a little less alone at my white school where I was often the only brown girl dancing in the room.
It was later that I learned that Mother Nina had the best songs for healing from all life's heartaches from failing relationships to depression to protostar births. I was amazed that she could sing about my precise situation 40 years before it even happened. I would play whatever song I needed to for as long as the tears were running. And then when I was ready to accept whatever loss, whatever grief was still there, she had other songs for me too. Songs for hoping, songs for standing up for yourself, songs for feeling sexy again, songs for letting go, songs for finding the courage to walk away, songs for taking the leap into your dreams.
Mother Nina is one of the only people who can sing to me when I am writing. I usually have to have instrumental music or songs that are sung in something other than English. But Mother Nina doesn't disrupt my ability to hear myself. We've always been able to coexist in the creative space.
I felt Mother Nina needed to be paired with the Softness seed, “My softness seeds more abundance,” because so much of her life was hard. This seed is an offering to her, as her music still carries me through my days and seasons of being and becoming. She embodied so much of the pain that black people were feeling, and she transformed it into music that could pulse and swing and beat and pound and lift and groove her people back to loving themselves. But it cost her, it cost her a lot to labor in those ways.
I read her autobiography a few years ago, and there were moments when I had to just stop and send her a loving thought for what she endured in the name of creating this music we all love. I felt called to witness her in some way, even though it was so many years too late. I have to believe our prayers can still matter today, that it means something to recognize a mother's labors even after she is gone.
Notes | For the Love of Nina fertile soundscape and “A Song For Nina” were originally shared in the Fall 2020 Garden.
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.
First Mary Emerging
Mother Mother dances with a newborn Revelation tied to her body. In the last week of the first season of the Fertility Abundance Garden, Mother Mother enters into an active progression, a series of transcendent dance rituals in communion with her ancestral mothers. This active progression is in honor of her maternal grandfather, Arthur, who is approaching his earthly transition time. As her mother and the extended family gathers and prepares across town, Mother Mother taps in energetically from where she is able to be—at home, with her family—by dancing to honor the labors of the mothers who birthed her grandfather. She dances with her grandfather’s mother, Rossie, and Rossie’s mother, Rev. Laura, over the course of several days. On the day of this dance, First Mary, her maternal grandmother Mary Malissa’s mother (and Arthur’s mother-in-law), also joins her in the active progression ritual.
SOUNDTRACK: Tony Allen Woro Dance
Home STUDIO
April 2020
The following is an Excerpt from a letter to First Mary, my mother’s mother’s mother. This is the text that accompanied First Mary Emerging when I initially shared it in the April 2020 Garden. It was offered as part of the seed discovery for the seed Practice: Everyday I practice creating that which I want to bring to life.
…I hear you telling me to pace myself, to slow down. You say, “Slow down, baby. This is your life.”
The mourning chords of the music make me think of you and the many hurts you survived. My grandmother, your daughter, told us all the stories. Once when we were kids in the backseat as she was driving down Stanton Road we saw furniture on the sidewalk outside of an apartment building. We laughed and made jokes about why someone had all their stuff on the ground like that. And without missing a beat Grandma said, “That's not something to laugh about. When I was a little girl we got evicted.”
It was the first time I'd heard the word. Evicted. In my sheltered, privileged life it didn't occur to me that people could be put out of their home. I knew there were homeless people, but I'd never thought about how someone might become homeless.
At first when I am dancing, these flashes of memory of you surprise me. I am thinking I’m calling out to my mother's other grandmother, Rossie, because that's who has been on my heart. But then it comes to me, as I keep spinning and find myself leaning into this rhythmic stomping motion, why you are such a vital part of this active progression too.
It’s almost as if you and Rossie were collaborating all along. In the fall of 1928 when she conceived Arthur and you conceived Mary Malissa, my mother’s life--and mine too--was set in motion. Laboring just 6 days apart from each other, you each gave birth in August 1929 to my maternal grandparents.
They’ve now spent the last 7 decades together, most of those years as husband and wife. It makes perfect sense to me now that, as Mary Malissa's mother, and as my mother's grandmother, you appear at the altar of my becoming to witness me through this process.
I appreciate you reminding me to breathe through this labor, through this gentle emergence into my priestesshood. This is my practice, this is my life. I keep repeating this to myself as I am dancing.
I have torn myself apart every time I have pushed a baby out. Each time I visualize this soft birthing, but it takes practice to truly soften, to truly release the the muscles and feel the natural progressions of labor. Each birthing gives me a chance to practice again, and each baby has had a more gentle beginning than the one before. Softening, trusting, allowing, breathing, being. These are the labors of the creator. These are my sacred labors. I don't need to rush or cram to get it all figured out today, or this month, or this year.
“This is your life, baby,” I hear you saying again and again. I get it now. I can breathe. I can come more softly into my knowing. This is my life’s work...
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.
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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!
