Love Notes

Monthly-ish love notes from Dancing Mother to our beautiful circle of dancing mamas
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October 2026 love note

Being in motion with space & time

By Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy

Breathing is essential in this life. There are the breaths we take every day, every minute, every second to survive. Our lungs expand and do the ancient, magical work of transforming oxygen into a liquid form that our blood can then absorb, as it circulates revived plasma to our organs and tissues, our bones and joints. For this breath-and-blood dance I am eternally grateful. It flows without my making, without my conscious engagement. It keeps me alive, and it keeps my children alive as they grow inside of me.

And then there is another breath that is vital for wellness, for peace, for joy. This is the whole-body breath that happens when we get to a space where our enormous energetic field—the one that extends beyond the physical borders of our bodies, the one we meet in our dreams— can expand, soften its edges, and spread out in every direction. We feel the vastness of our being differently in these spaces: on the top of a mountain, amidst the grandeur of a thousand-year old forest, at the shores of Great Mother Ocean, as the sun lifts up over an unimpeded horizon. 

In nature it’s easy to access this kind of breath, because we are obviously so tiny, and so young in the lineage of living things on our planet. The stark reminder that creation has a long memory—and recalls a time before people and war, before evil and sin—it frees us, it lightens the load we must carry to navigate the world as it is. In these organic sanctuaries where we can glimpse the origins of our existence, the armored hearts we’ve learned to bear fall away. And we are left with just our bare selves. This ability to unburden our body’s invisible weight in nature is the breath. This is why we naturally crave such spaces, and feel so good in them.

And when the nature surrounding us is not so loud, is not so readily accessible, we get to use our imagination in new ways. We seek out alternative spaces that stimulate a familiar knowing. For me, living in the city again has meant finding the spaces where my whole body can breathe, where I can dance and my children can move around freely. It requires continuous research and experimentation. The places I go differ in spatial opportunities, and the various combinations of munchkins traveling with me on any given day (and the status of the snack situation while we’re out) also shapes what is possible in these open space laboratories.

My favorite places are outside spaces where I can be barefoot because the grass or ground is smooth and clean and soft. If it’s too cold or littered for bare feet, or if it’s raining and too wet to make our nest outside, I find an indoor space that gives me as much of what I need as it can. I practice being hyper-present with the moment, and seeing and feeling into how this space supports my whole-body breathing.

The best spaces are enhanced by the concurrent phenomenon of nobody being hungry, it not being too hot or too cold or too wet, and the sweet relief of knowing that all bladders are empty (and no one needs to poop either!). This is when I can breathe the most. Sometimes I put hours of labor into planning, packing, walking, commuting on public transit, and wearing a baby who may or may not be nursing on my front or sleeping on my back. I do all this not because a luxurious stretch of dance time is guaranteed in a favorite space, but because activating this kind of spatial abundance, for however long or short it may be, is how I can breathe. 

As a multitudinous mothering entity moving through the hurried and cramped corridors of city life without a car, true spaciousness is rare, and is a treat. I know going into its bounty that it will be fleeting, and that I will have no control over when it starts and when it stops. I’ve learned to trust, however, that another moment will come back around. The space always finds me, somehow.

Still, it feels crushing, though. The collapse of whatever was giving me breath swiftly turning me back over to life’s demands once again. A bathroom urgency. A water fountain shortage. An inadequate amount of food to last for the lengthy commute home. As delicious as the dance gets, inevitably something will upend the soft, spaciousness of the movements, of the expansive whole-body breathing. And I will have to surrender to its might and let it be. Else holding on too tight to what is no longer mine lets the disappointment sink in deeper, and subdues the healing effects of what this bit of space and time has amplified in my body’s field of creation.

The abrupt and arbitrary construct of my life as a dancing mother is how I have become expert at using micro moments of creation to stay warm, juicy, and generative inside my movement practice. Motherhood did not dry me out, as the warnings went. Rather, it disintegrated the huge blocks of time I once knew as mine, and reconfigured the broad landscape of my days into microscopic pockets of possibility.

Birthing a new baby about every 2 years over the span of a decade, ushered me into a dynamic and elastic relationship with time. My practice of living in soft time grew from the necessity of making space for myself as an artist and a mother. Before my children were earthside, my time was very open, each day was a massive and (mostly) blank canvas upon which I could create life for that day. In the mornings I would get up, feel into what felt most possible, and go on from there. If something didn’t get done, tomorrow was coming just around the bend. 

And then 13 years ago Bloom was born. And when I would attempt to locate the large canvas of time that I once knew, I instead would find time had morphed itself into a scrap of paper, a discarded napkin, a torn piece of newsprint. I had to learn how to make something beautiful and meaningful with the other textures, shapes, and tones of time. Time went from being flat, and wide and sure to being multidimensional, asymmetric, messy, and unpredictable. 

Being a dancing mother has meant asking more questions of what a dance could be, of where it could exist, of how my body could grow into its new forms. It’s a daily labor, a continuous journey. I dance with my children because that is how I made a way for them to be here. Before they were earthside, I communed with them in the dance because for so long, that was all I had, that was where I could take up space and be a mother. 

So naturally, I have immense gratitude for the dance and its power to nurture fertility dreams. It feels essential to sustain a practice of dancing with my children as they grow into their own understandings of life and its possibilities. These movements are our lifelines, and we are committed to staying alive in our joy, in our creating, in our being.

The more children I had, the more fractured and asynchronous time felt to me. I started to realize time could be found everywhere, especially if I moved outside of the dominant rhythms of life around me. Spaciousness would appear in the releasing of artificial markers like “bed time” and “three meals a day” and “rush hour” and “weekdays” and “weekends.” Since my oldest was born I’ve had at least one baby–and for several years cumulatively, two babies–at the breast every day. I could hold my babies to my body and nourish them like this because I was moving in our own sequencing and prioritizing of life. I was laboring in spaces mostly of my own design, so I could move slowly and gently. We could stop and start, latch-nurse-unlatch, all day and all night long.

When new mamas reach out to me about sacred nourishment labors with their newborns, my first questions are not only about basic check-ins like the latch, or the position of the baby at the breast. I ask about the flow of her days to get a sense of the spaciousness, or compression, of her life. Almost every challenge I witness mamas facing in those initial days of being with their new babies is not a physiological or biological or chemical or hormonal issue. It’s a time issue–either her partner or family is rushing her to get back to doing more, or she feels the clock ticking loudly before maternity leave is over, or some pediatrician is measuring the baby’s weight every 5 seconds and insisting there’s a problem. 

Time, time, time, is what new mamas and babies need! Patience, grace, trust, support, space–all expressions of time. There is no secret remedy, no mysterious fix. If more mamas had people around them to give them time, and if more systems were created to align with the intelligence of our natural body brilliance and its birthing rhythms, the newborn months, and especially the learning and integration of sacred nourishment labors, would flow so much more softer and smoother for mama and baby.

Motherhood taught me that time can be everything, and/or time can be nothing in particular, depending on how you move through your moments. Time is there for me when I can see it and apply it. As my journey as a mother evolved, time became choice. It became consciousness.

What used to be thrown away as “not enough” became cherished pieces of creative time that gave me breath inside the intensity of mommy labors. Being able to dream into a song or a story while holding a baby over a bucket to catch his pee and save a cloth diaper from the wash, or archiving screen stills of my latest dance video while tending to an injured nipple that is slow to heal because the baby has to keep nursing on that side even though it hurts and every time she latches the wound is made fresh, or listening to a movement sermon in my right ear (have to keep the left ear open to hear the kiddos) while figuring out a dinner service for children you already know don’t want to eat what you have—through it all, my creations, my movements, sustain me. Being in motion with the space and time I have keeps me alive and vibrant and well within.

Dancing is whole-body breathing. And the dance is the breath inside the swirls and turbulences of life. When I’m dancing I’m tending to the parts of me that have been squished, and squeezed, and pounded by life. I am reviving myself, even if only for a few minutes here and there. It is something, this little bit of dance I can do before the baby starts crying, before everyone is hungry, before we run out of water. Every movement, every breath carries me forward, gives me something more to dream into, to make a life beautiful and whole.

love note photo story

These screen stills are from a work-in-progress performance constellation called BREATHE. I am assembling images and videos of me whole-body breathing inside movements in wide open spaces. This was filmed at the Kogod Courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. Learn more about this dance in the performance archive at the Dancing Mother Library.

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