With fertility there are no promises, only possibilities
Spin
Inside the Creation Stories of Dancing Mother
Photo by Colin A. Danville
With fertility there are no promises, only possibilities
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
Once upon a time I ran away to Trinidad & Tobago because I was convinced my fertility futures, my innermost dreams of becoming a visible mother, could not be realized in Washington, DC. By the time I had my one-way ticket to Piarco International Airport in Port of Spain I had discovered the horrors of a transvaginal unltrasound in more than one emergency room, the wayward wand unceremoniously reporting back that it couldn’t detect the presence of life.
In that awful moment I felt broken in many ways, least of all by the shattered glass laying at my feet when a former entanglement fretted at the thought of a baby coming. A baby who would not survive the first moons (what many call the “first trimester”) of life in my tender, red sanctum. Most of all I felt devastated at this haunting pattern of starseeds transitioning early. This was not supposed to be my story. I danced. I was healthy. I was strong. The doctors could tell me nothing. They ran all the tests. Everything’s normal, they said. You’re young, they said.
But I sensed there was more for me to journey through, and to learn from and to understand about my fertility and what I now experience as my divine creation intelligence. I had questions, visions, soul-stirring intuitions about my calling to be a mother. Once, in the lonely winter months after a starseed had left my body early, I dreamed of my baby at the breast. It felt so real in my dream, and it would be years before my first child was born earthside and I would realize the sensations were the same.
Many times after a protostar birth, and especially the ones I had before becoming a visible mother, I descended to the bottom of hope. The bottom was more an energetic frequency than a physical place. It’s where my fertility dreams felt out of reach and everything else in life seemed cold and hard and dead. It was when I was in the bottom that I would remember the dream about nursing my baby. I would crawl in the darkness toward that thin flicker of possibility, beaming steady and true into my field from the beyond. My body remembers being a mother, I heard echoing within. So it must still be possible.
“But I sensed there was more for me to journey through, and to learn from and to understand about my fertility and what I now experience as my divine creation intelligence. I had questions, visions, soul-stirring intuitions about my calling to be a mother.”
Mother Mother in Trinidad, photo by Renaldo de Silva
Naturally, there was more than blood and bone at work, more than could be measured, or calculated or predicted. I was being ushered onto a spiritual path that would in time become central to my life’s work. The mothers were calling my name, but I couldn’t yet hear them fully as I cried and grieved in my years of being an invisible mother. Whatever form my grieving took on, I knew this: my fertility and my future as a mother felt too precious to leave in anyone else’s hands but my own.
Here is where I am certain my life took on a new meaning and became a dance about fertility, mothering, birth, and creation. Here is where the college degree I had worked so diligently for became less and less relevant in the swells and undulations of making my way to motherhood. I think if I had never experienced the early unraveling of a starseed that is returning to the light, that is not growing into their human story, I would for sure be a different kind of mother, another kind of person altogether.
But all those years ago I hadn’t yet awakened to the language and consciousness of protostar birth. I very much believed I had lost each unborn child. And I thought my heartache was too thick and all consuming to have a chance at a new story ever coming through my womb if I stayed in Washington, DC, or anywhere in America at that. I told myself the geography was at the root of my fertility challenges, and that going to a new land with new air and new waters would change me, would fix me, for the better.
I was delighted to be accepted into a dance residency in Trinidad. I could then stay, explore and find my own way. I am forever grateful to the many kind artists, mamas, aunties, uncles, sisters and brothers who took me in, claimed me as family in the months I lived in Trinidad. They took such sweet care of me, and they danced with me, and made beautiful art with me. And it was my great secret that I was also there to regenerate a sense of possibility in my fertility. I had to find a way to feel alive again, to feel that my starseeds were still willing to come if I was willing to clear the way for them.
“Naturally, there was more than blood and bone at work, more than could be measured, or calculated or predicted. I was being ushered onto a spiritual path that would in time become central to my life’s work.”
And I really thought I had cleared that way by the time I returned to Washington, DC. I was deliciously saturated with the sun, and my eyes and heart were refreshed by the Caribbean Sea. I had danced in so many magical and mundane spaces all over Trinidad & Tobago. I had connected with loving people, been fed good food, played my first mas in Carnival. I had made community, and I was proud of that. I didn’t even really mind the last song of snow that fell after the first day of spring when I got home. I was still warm on the inside, wide open, thoroughly renewed.
So a few months later, when I am sitting with possibilities with a new starseed I am not expecting to have to go through any more storms. Trinidad healed me, right? That’s all behind me, right?
Of all my protostar birth journeys, the one I had right after coming back from Trinidad was my most painful experience. I see now my pain was so immense because of how I refused to let go of that starseed. Its spirit had given me so many signs that it was not going to stay, and I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t believe that even after my courageous sojourn, all the way to another land to restore my fertility, I still hadn’t “fixed” whatever it was. I clung to every hope that maybe this blood didn’t mean what it meant, and that the slack in my once full breasts wasn’t the tell-tale it always was for me that a starseed was transitioning early.
It was a long, multi-day labor, including another agonizing hospital moment. Looking back I see in my unwillingness to embrace the truth of that starseed’s evolution, that I clung instead to the illusion of evidence that the obstetricians and the radiology tech and the monitors and the blood tests could give me. Underneath the tears and despair, I was angry and defiant. And I was weary in my spirit from the labors of denial, because I knew what it was from the first swipe of red on the tissue. But at the hospital I made them search me again and again. Prove it, I nearly dared. Prove that it’s time for me to unclench my fists and see that spark of light no longer there.
“Of all my protostar birth journeys, the one I had right after coming back from Trinidad was my most painful experience. I see now my pain was so immense because of how I refused to let go of that starseed. Its spirit had given me so many signs that it was not going to stay, and I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t believe that even after my courageous sojourn, all the way to another land to restore my fertility, I still hadn’t “fixed” whatever it was.”
Heartbreaking as it was, that birthing moment taught me something profound that has nourished me in all my creating, birthing, and mothering labors since: With fertility there are no promises, only possibilities. Everything we do to nurture, expand, water, grow, and revive our fertility is done in the service of possibility. There are no guarantees, ever. When we understand this, deeply and truly, we are free. This treatment, this hormone cream, that herb, this movement practice, that specialist, that prayer, this procedure, this relationship, that ritual, that job, this therapy, this house, and whatever else we might find or someone tells us is the thing that will make it all better this time—it’s all a maybe.
For a long time the nebulous audacity of the maybe scared me. How can you breathe, how can you rest, inside a maybe? It has been many moons, many starseeds initiations, many storms, and many reckonings discovering this way of being gentle and honest and present with the maybe. I have learned to embrace the mightiest maybes as the most abundant possibilities. In opening my consciousness to the diversity of systems in nature that thrive off of possibility—and not certainty—I have found so much more joy, love, creativity, and beauty in my fertility labors.
Each dance communion I do with my starseeds activates dynamic energies and intelligence that I need for my living right now. This dance that I am dancing, these movements spreading all over my body, dissolving old hurts, softening hard knots, washing away the debris of things that are not a part of what matters to me anymore—every part of this dance is necessary for my life today. When I dance with my starseeds I am making myself well in every way, whether or not my starseeds get to be born earthside one day. All my movements are beautiful and nutritive to so many dimensions of this life’s labors. Nothing is ever wasted; everything grows, transforms and becomes.
“I have learned to embrace the mightiest maybes as the most abundant possibilities. In opening my consciousness to the diversity of systems in nature that thrive off of possibility—and not certainty—I have found so much more joy, love, creativity, and beauty in my fertility labors.”
Photo by Colin A. Danville
I understand now more than I ever could have when I was running away to Trinidad, desperately hoping a new latitude and longitude would cure what ailed me most, that, in following my soul’s calling to that place at that time, I saved my life. Over and over I found ways to give myself back to myself. I danced everywhere, and especially in the sun. I wrote every day and gave myself space to have difficult and revelatory conversations with myself. I collaborated, I taught, I listened, I studied. I walked and walked, and got plenty of rides from friendly strangers, and travelled on boats too. I stumbled and laughed, explored and got lost, cried and breathed. I lived, each day I lived.
I thought in doing all that I could somehow secure a future that was free from any more protostar birth moments, and life quickly showed me that there is no such thing as promising that I’ll never hurt or grieve like that again. In releasing the need to control when and if and how life stings, or bruises, or tears, or breaks me open, I am totally surrendered to the magic and miracles and mystery of creation. From this openhearted space I can access more abundant and fertile energies for the deep and continuous labors of living and loving, for creating and birthing, for feeling and trying.
It’s all possible, I know. When I am dancing I am amplifying my consciousness of possibility in each muscle, heartbeat and breath. I am coding my body with dreams, stories, and visions of what I imagine and what the divine is revealing to me. I can’t know for sure what my efforts will birth, so my commitment is always in seeding more possibilities, and then waiting, watching, listening and feeling for how it all roots and expands from here. When I am dancing I prepare a space within me to hold all I am calling forth. I become a portal of possibility, everything growing wider, brighter and more real each day.
“I thought in doing all that I could somehow secure a future that was free from any more protostar birth moments, and life quickly showed me that there is no such thing as promising that I’ll never hurt or grieve like that again. In releasing the need to control when and if and how life stings, or bruises, or tears, or breaks me open, I am totally surrendered to the magic and miracles and mystery of creation.”
Photo by Elen Awalom
A note about language
A starseed is the physical and energetic matter of a future human being or future creation. I first heard this language from my spiritual midwife and soul sistermama Amber RainMa. In my practice I have come to understand that a starseed is the radiant life energy found within each egg that is preserved in a mother’s ovary, and from which all human life and all creations originate. A starseed is a newly forming being on its way to becoming human, or a dream on its way to becoming realized in the world outside of your body as a dance, a story, or any other form of creation.
