We Live Inside The Majesty Of Our Fertility | 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 Live Inside The majesty Of Our Fertility
On Nurturing Radical Fertile Futures + Story Map
Mother Mother explains the central intention of the Fertile Awakenings Story Lab. She does her best to preface the intimacies and vulnerabilities of the upcoming story lab gathering, without revealing anything she’s not ready to say on camera.
Collaborative-time gathering
Wednesday | 27 July 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 Live Inside The Majesty Of Our Fertility: On Nurturing Radical Fertile Futures, I open up some of the messy, complex, uncomfortable moments of my journey as a fertility priestess and black birthing mother living in a world, in a community, in a family, that is not well-practiced at loving mothers who center their fertility. I begin tracing story threads from pivotal moments in my life where I radically chose my fertility futures, even in the midst of harshness and unkindness from those around me.
In this lab you are invited to join me in re/membering the roots of your fertility pathways, choices and labors you have poured into for your fertility. I offer these questions for continuing reflection and exploration:
What do you know to be true about your fertility?
What moments from your girlhood/young womanhood altered/illuminated the way you understand your fertility?
What uncomfortable or difficult reality about your fertility are you learning to navigate?
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 Audre Lorde. You are invited to commune inside the brilliance of Mother Audre’s timeless work, Poetry Is Not A Luxury, shared in full below. Listen and dance along to Mother Audre’s essay inside the accompanying fertile soundscape created by DJ Mother Mother Be.
Audre Lorde is the author of this essay, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” | Read by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy | Soundtrack | Zap Mama Mizike | Abadou | Meshell Ndegeocello Good Intentions | Come Smoke My Herb
POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY
BY AUDRE LORDE
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.
As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.
For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness” and of impotence.
These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.
When we view living, in the european mode, only as a problem to be solved, we then rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious.
But as we become more in touch with our own ancient, black, non-european view of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and therefore lasting action comes.
At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches as keystone for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.
Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is also not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety. We see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of non-universality, of self-centeredness, of sensuality. And who asks the question: am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? (Even the latter is no mean task, but one that must be rather seen within the context of a true alteration of the texture of our lives.)
The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet- whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom. However, experience has taught us that the action in the now is also always necessary. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?
Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves, along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions our dreams imply and some of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only our poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.
For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as we were meant to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is a luxury, then we have given up the core-the fountain-of our power, our womanness; we have give up the future of our worlds.
For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.
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.
SNCAKTIME BOOTY
Mother Mother dances to one of her favorite go-go anthems of all time while hungry munchkins demand that her dance joy not interrupt the distribution of their snacks. Healing from a protostar birth, Mother Mother intentionally documents the unseen labors of her belly and bodyscape, as she makes peace with the life that is no longer growing there. These booty-affirming dances are also a vital part of restoring her fertility radiance to prepare the way for the next starseed to come.
SOUNDTRACK: NORTH EAST GROOVERS BOOTY CALL
KITCHEN STUDIO
WINTER 2019
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!
