The spin is everything
Spin
Inside the Creation Stories of Dancing Mother
The spin is everything
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
The elemental movement of all life frequencies is the spin. I’ve been studying the magic of the spin and the matters within its powerful perimeter since I was a girlchild. I remember always preferring circle formations over straight lines. In my doodles and drawings I made spirals and suns all over the page. At restaurants I was delighted to sit with my family at a big round table where there was no head and no tail, no start and no stop. In classes and workshops, I enjoyed teachers who organized us in circles rather than rows and columns. From the circle we could all make eye contact, and nurture warmth and connection amongst the group more organically. I prefer spoons and deep bowls to forks and flat plates. In all things, big and small, I seek out the spin. And it always finds me.
When I dance I map orbits and loops of all sizes and speeds. I do microscopic and galactic booty rolls. I find circular patterns in my shoulders, my wrists, my knees. I step into circle pathways on the floor. I wave my arms up to the sky and make more circles in the air. I constantly play with the possibilities, shifting my relationship to gravity to understand how that feels. I change levels, directions, surfaces, soundscapes—anything can spark another experience in the spin, and create a new access point along its circumference again and again.
The spin, and all its variations, is a central fascination of my movement practice. My deep observations have shown me that every living creature, tree, plant, organism, single-cell amoeba, star, and atom participates in this essential labor of creation: to go round and round the center. This is how we all grow. This is how life happens.
This spin consciousness is why dance, and specifically the ringshout, is so vital to the expansion of my fertility radiance. I know that my fertility code is intrinsically calibrated to the same life sustaining spin that powers our planet, that moves our oceans, that transforms the seeds, that lifts the sun each morning. I feel in every part of my being that I must dance to live, and that the spin must be at the heart of my dance.
The ringshout is a spin, an embodied turn through the parallels of time, a way to touch all the moments that led to my existence, even as the physical reality that is me is contained right here in this singular now. I spin backwards a few centuries and I’m dancing with my ancestral foremothers, wading through the waters that we call dreams in the place where I come from.
I spin forwards through the ringshout a few billion years and I am swirling through space in the dazzling evolutions of everything and everyone born of my fertility. I exist as multiple forms of light and life, a star come and gone and come back again. In the spin I experience another future, commune with the intelligence of my sister-star systems, expand beyond the story that some automated authority has tried to convince me is complete as is. My dancing, twirling, rotating body knows better. When I am spinning it’s always so clear how much more there is to feel and discover, how much more of me there really is.
I love sitting with the sacred spins of our fertility. The egg, newly awakened from its many lifetimes of preparation in the ovary, spins a holy orbit at a particular frequency, sending out a vibrational call to millions of potentialities that only one of them can fully hear. When the single sperm receives its unique invitation, it spins with exuberance as it reaches the center of the egg and sparks a life force, a blessed starseed that might grow into the miracle called a baby. It is amazing to think that as different as we sometimes feel we are, we all began in a mother’s womb as a primordial seed activated by a specific, intelligent and collaborative spin.
That same, wondrous spin is still in motion. When we dance we can feel it and amplify its majesty in our day to day moments. The spin can save us, it can revive us, it can carry us through the storms. The spin is a way to keep the energy moving even when, and especially when, there is no certain place to go from here. It’s how our African ancestors who were enslaved in these lands could time travel and have praise parties with their gods all the way on the other side of the Atlantic and their feet never even left the ground.
The spin is a portal, and as we enter it, we immerse ourselves in the very essence of all life. When I dance I am spinning in harmony with the magic that surrounds me. Everywhere I look, the spin reaffirms itself as the source of my divine creation intelligence as the substance of what we call breath and blood, muscle and bone.
And on days when I am feeling small and defeated, I can tap into the mightiness of myself by just considering where I am in time and space. I can be grateful that the Earth still spins around herself every day. I can watch the moon’s cycles as it spins slowly around itself, as it orbits the Earth. On my birthday I can do a celebration dance that the Earth has completed another spin around the sun. And I can try and fathom how the sun feels every 220 million years that it takes to complete its spin around the Milky Way. And I can wonder vastly and wildly at where our galaxy is spinning to, and what other galaxies it might one day integrate or reconfigure.
There are so many spins to be with, and I can feel them all when I dance. Each intentional rotation keeps some part of me, of you, alive. So I give myself over to the spin as much as possible. With every spin I shout and echo and proclaim to the seen and the unseen, “I am alive! I am alive!”
