What Am I Holding?
Hello Radiant One! Welcome to Seed & Spark: Journal of the Fertility Abundance Garden. Thank you for being here and witnessing our labors to share our sacred stories. Our stories are our wealth and in the Garden we are discovering the bounty of our stories and how to apply that wealth to the cultivation of our abundance. The Fertility Abundance Garden is a congregation for creators, a sanctuary for mothers, and a dreamscape for sacred storytellers. To learn more about the Garden or to join as a creator, please visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center. If someone forwarded this post to you and you want to receive your own, subscribe to Seed & Spark and receive the Fertile Friday love note every week that highlights new shares in the journal. 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!
What am I holding?
Body Majesty Soils Lab Practice Map
By mother mother binahkaye joy
In honor of the upcoming Winter Solstice, you are invited to participate in a special two-part Body Majesty Soils Lab: What Am I Holding? on Sunday December 19 & Monday December 20. You are welcome to come to either one or to both.*
What Am I Holding? is the 4th installation of the Body Majesty Soils Labs explorations with Mother Mother. We are continuing to journey deeply into the many ways that our bodies hold all of our stories. Our stories are our wealth, and so the abundance is with us, is us, at all times. How do we access this wealth and apply it to the realization of abundance in our day to day lives? The Body Majesty practice is rooted in these elemental understandings and seed questions.
As we wrap the Fall 2021 Garden and prepare for the invitation of the Winter Solstice energies to let anything that is no longer serving us go, I invite you to consider with love, tenderness and courage, what your body is carrying physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. All of our bodies do the holding in this way. Now is a magical time, on the longest night of the year, to release any excess that is weighing us down, draining our spirits, making us feel too tired to try. If you are feeling the Yes to fully discover how your body is a part of everything you create, the practices we’ll explore in What Am I Holding? will support you. We are looking forward to a magical sharing that is healing, illuminating and inspiring for all of us.
*You must be a creator in the Garden’s Creators Circle to attend gatherings.
Have you recently or previously joined the Garden?
Welcome home, Beautiful Creator! If you feel the Yes in your heart and you’re ready to experience more engagement in the Garden, connect with other amazing creators, attend our live gatherings, and access the magic of the Creators Portal, please visit the Sanctuary to complete the process for joining the Creators Circle. In the Sanctuary you can confirm or reconfirm conscious participation. If you are joining the Garden for the first time, visit the Fertility Abundance Garden Welcome Center to begin your journey. Thank you for being here!
part one | saltwater ringshout | activating deep water communions
Sunday December 19 @ 2pm EST
In this opening session, we will dance multiple rounds of the Saltwater Ringshout to awaken our silenced cellular memories and invite healing, release and clarity. The Saltwater Ringshout is a sacred movement ritual that invites sweat and tears to create clear pathways of transmission in the body, and to soften our soil of creation for what we want to seed and grow.
In unpacking what we are holding, we embrace this opportunity as creators to witness our body majesty in motion and to feel into the unmattered*, unseen parts of our stories. Each round of the ringshout will be followed by an interlude for writing and self reflection. This lab is primarily movement-centered, with an opportunity for dialogue after the last ringhshout round. Creators are welcome to come as they are and engage in the practices in whichever ways nourish their Yes.
what to bring?
Hydrate and nourish well throughout the day. Dress in clothes that feel good to dance in and let your body breathe and sweat. Bring water and your journal.
what is a ringshout?
Mother Mother reimagines the traditional ringshout, a repetitive, counterclockwise movement processional that was created by enslaved African ancestors on plantations in the American South. She expands on the ancient wisdom of the people who tricked their masters into thinking they were singing church hymns, but who were really communicating with their deities and ways of life that had been forbidden to express openly. Mother Mother engages the mystical brilliance of the counterclockwise spatial patterns and realizes the ability to travel across parallels of time, just like her ancestors did when living in bondage. With each ring around the circle prayers, dreams, healing, and sacred awakenings of the heart are seeded, watered and loved into being.
*SEE AN EXPLORATION OF “MATTERING”, A WORD CREATED BY ARABA EVELYN JOHNSTON-ARTHUR
What stories are you holding?
The Garden is a place where you can be loved on and witnessed as you feel into the depths and bounty of your sacred stories. Our stories are our wealth, we say in the Garden. How can your stories nourish and sustain you?
part two | rupture & rapture | Hearts Breaking Open To Divine Truths
Monday December 20 @ 6pm EST
“All which I feel I must write has become obsessive. So many truths seem to be rushing at me as the result of things felt and seen and lived through. Oh, what I think I must tell this world” —Lorraine Hansberry
In our 2nd exploration of What Am I Holding? and our closing Soils Lab of the Fall Garden, we will sit in communion with Mother Lorraine Hansberry as our creator foremother, and journey into our sacred story sharing practices with two self-inquiries:
What great truth has broken my heart?
What divine knowing am I holding in my body that I feel ready to bring forth and fully live into?
We will share our stories and begin dreaming forward small and mighty ways that support us in living in our authentic divine truth.
Dancing Mother, the long-seeded, newly-sprouted synthesis of Mother Mother’s creation labors, is in its seed spiral. Sacred witnesses are invited to lovingly hold space for Mother Mother as she brings the spiral movement galaxy to life.
about our soils lab
Soils Lab is a central component of the 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 center around, but are not limited to, writing, storytelling, artmaking, rituals, healing practices, movement, birth and fertility studies, and explorations in other creative mediums.
Soils Labs are live, virtual gatherings. 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.
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.
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!
