Love Notes

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june 2026 love note

Every birth, seen and unseen, changes our bodies

By Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy

Life moves us, and we discover something new about these bodies we’ve been given every time. 

In the beginning of this year my body was rippling with the early expansions of new life. I gave this starseed a name, and wrote to them in my journal. I danced a ringshout around a beautiful tree and sang my ancestral mothers’ prayer songs. Before long this starseed revealed themselves to have a different destiny from the dreams I had of bringing them forth earthside. They returned to the light one winter morning just before the sun pierced the horizon with its orange promise.

I labored slowly, tenderly, peacefully in front of my children, who were also my gracious little birthkeepers. It was my first protostar birth journey where even the younger ones were able to talk about what was happening as it was happening, about who this life could have become, and why they didn't choose to stay and join our family adventure in human form. 

Laid out on my bed, I made space for all their questions, and it softened the way for me, added much-needed breath to my labors. Even after the bleeding had quieted, my children came to me, one by one, to unpack more pieces of the mysteries of birth and creation. I didn’t reach for answers if I didn’t have them. We practiced feeling the invisible weight of the unknowns, as the silent rush of our collective, unlived memories filled in the blank spaces around the words we could speak. There was no pressure to smooth it over, to make it plain. We let it all be, the messy, the tangled, the raw, the essential.

When the moon had turned around itself one good time, I had recovered enough to go out on my own with all the children. I went to the water nearest me and moved my body in small circles, mostly with my hips, neck, and shoulders. Luminous Glory was at my breast, and my arm muscles warmed with the heat of supporting her toddler body. The breeze was strong and the waves rolled in quickly. I welcomed the abundant revival of oxygen to all my cells, ever grateful for the ways that dancing by the sea always regenerates me. 

When the dance returns to me after a birth, the healing is more accessible and takes up more space in my everyday moments. As much as I sometimes want to rush this crucial progression, I know I cannot summon a full-bodied dance before my body is ready to carry it. The rebirth of movement is another kind of initiation, one that pushes and pulls on all the things I thought I understood about myself. There are reconfigured fertility codes to integrate and reimagined creative capacities to explore in my post-birthing body. To take it all in I have to be patient with the process; I have to wait on the dance, and be present enough to feel its weight moving through me. 

Every birth, seen and unseen, changes our bodies, rewires our internal circuits, leaves striations on the heart cavities where the particular love for that life force had made its home. Every birth involves some matter of death within as we shed the blood that was keeping that dream, that story, that baby alive. In my journey the dance has always illuminated the way to life after this death, and shown me the intricacies of my reborn self as a new being, as a new mother. 

Something interesting and fascinating is unfolding now. It has been nearly half a turn around the sun since that protostar birth. I feel like I am the heaviest I’ve ever been when not sitting with possibilities with a growing starseed. I stare at my naked body, and I turn to each side. My belly is round, and at certain angles, it’s as if a baby really grows there, almost like I kept making a home for that starseed who isn’t here in the flesh anymore. 

On different days I have different feelings about this. At times I am curious, frustrated, baffled, deflated, annoyed, inspired, resolved. After all, I am a fertility priestess. I have devoted the greater part of my life to growing new people from within me. I continuously study the stars, the trees, the waters—and all of these ancient systems teach me the infinite ways our wombs transform, swell, and birth. These extra pounds and inches remind me that my body knows well how to bring forth life.

When I embrace this phenomenon of resonant creation intelligence, the inconvenience of ill-fitting clothes and achier-than-usual knees takes on new meaning. It is more generative to me to follow the thread of this idea that there is magic in my body’s ability to sustain a state of readiness for new life. And that maybe my spinal cord is so steeped in my fertility dreams, and the creation consciousness necessary for making babies, that even after a starseed’s physical truth has departed, my spinal pathways will still send signals for expansion to my innermost sanctuary. This way of celebrating myself feels better than frowning at what I see in the camera or the mirror, than lamenting that my bigger, rounder form is somehow less capable than earlier renditions of my body when I felt lighter in the space. This gravity is a blessing. I want to live in deep and everlasting gratitude for this birthing body of mine. I want to dance with reverence for its power, its beauty, its radiance.

Birth alters whatever was there before. We get to trust and honor the journey, however the birth transforms our inner and outer selves. It will take time, it will take love, it will take spaciousness to feel into all our new and reimagined parts. The dance is how I do this work of rediscovery. The dance is how I breathe and feel into who I am now that the birth has delivered me into my new life.

love note photo story

These screen stills are from a sunrise communion practice a few months after the protostar birth. Dancing in the morning, with the sunlight warming my bare skin is a healing ritual, always.

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