On Building Lush Laboratories for Fertility Studies
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Inside the Creation Stories of Dancing Mother
Once upon a Mother Mother, one-year priestess anniversary, sitting with possibilities and preparing to birth her 3rd child, photo by Colin A. Danville
On Building Lush Laboratories for Fertility Studies
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
I am celebrating 9 years since saying Yes to my initiation as a fertility priestess. What I thought would be a single summer of discovery and deepening understanding of my life, has expanded and grown in phenomenal and majestic ways. In the spring of 2016, when I was taking my first conscious steps along this path, I was a mother of 2 with a toddler and an infant. Without me knowing where any of it was going, my initiation led me on a soulquaking journey of learning how to trust what I felt. And the more I danced, the more I could feel.
It is this passionate, wild, intimate dance that waters and amplifies my fertility consciousness for bringing my babies earthside. I have birthed three more children since embracing my calling as a fertility priestess. It is this same dance that seeds the work at Dancing Mother, and continues to power all the dreams and creations coming now. My invitation to anyone who resonates with the world I am nurturing at Dancing Mother is to trust the inner guidance of their raw, unscripted movements. No one else can show us how to do that internally-sourced dance. We have to feel it for ourselves.
“My invitation to anyone who resonates with the world I am nurturing at Dancing Mother is to trust the inner guidance of their raw, unscripted movements. No one else can show us how to do that internally-sourced dance. We have to feel it for ourselves.”
Sometimes though, life is messy and we’re steeped in the tangles of spirit and sustenance. Our capacity to sense so deeply might seem diminished, and our willingness to listen and trust ourselves can feel too much to ask of our hearts at times. This is a place I know well, and from where I have recovered my fertility and my dance time and time again. It is from here that I lovingly offer my practices, stories, and movement explorations to the mothers and creators who feel the Yes to work with me. At the core of everything I do is the cultivation of lush learning laboratories for fertility, movement, and mothering studies. To be truly rooted in our creation majesties, we need the space to play, to dream, to feel alive in the Yes. The dance facilitates all of this and more.
Every June I do something special to acknowledge the great shift that began nearly a decade ago. For this year’s priestess anniversary I am launching 2 new adventures at Dancing Mother, The Daily Dancer’s first monthly workshop, Revival of Joy and the activation of Open Studio 3.0, our experimental soft-time performance community and movement laboratory. I’m excited for those who feel the Yes to join me in the dance in soft-time!
“At the core of everything I do is the cultivation of lush learning laboratories for fertility, movement, and mothering studies. To be truly rooted in our creation majesties, we need the space to play, to dream, to feel alive in the Yes. The dance facilitates all of this and more.”
Nine years ago when I said Yes to this path, I attempted to “write” my first sermon, not yet realizing that these holy scriptures could only be born of my dancing body. The origins of The Daily Dancer practices, and so much of what I have dreamed into as resources and supports for mothers and creators at Dancing Mother, are the many experiments and creations I discovered while learning how my sermons would come through my body.
It has been and still is a wild and mighty journey. All those years ago I could not have fully grasped the depth of transformation that was sparked when I said Yes. As every birth has the power to do, cosmic shifts were felt in all things: learning to live out loud as a fertility priestess (still figuring this out!), discovering the majesty of birthing my children in my sovereignty, nurturing spiritual revivals for mothers and creators, realizing my gifts as a midwife of the long labor. The dances emerging, and the sermons coming forth, as part of this priestess path continue to bring new ways of being, new systems of living, and new language for shaping my reality. My identity as an afrofuturist bush mama and as a multitudinous mothering entity, my intelligence of protostar birth labors, the articulation of sacred nourishment as the more accurate description of bringing our babies to the breast, the beautiful, messy, hilarious experiment of Wildseed, and my audacious activations of a life in soft-time—all of these, and so much more, are radiant expansions of that once upon a time Yes.
One of the scriptures that came from a movement practice years ago is, Every Yes lights the way. I live into this, tenderly, courageously, everyday. When I dance I water the Yes, give it more room to expand and illuminate the possibilities swirling all around me. The more I dance, the more space the Yes has to grow and become. I am 9 years into this long labor of being and becoming a fertility priestess. I see and feel life in everything I do. With each dance, with each breath, I am full of gratitude. I am curious and joyful for the journeys to come.
Once upon a Mother Mother, celebrating 2 years into her fertility priestess initiation, with an infant Jubilee at the breast.
“My identity as an afrofuturist bush mama and as a multitudinous mothering entity, my intelligence of protostar birth labors, the articulation of sacred nourishment as the more accurate description of bringing our babies to the breast, the beautiful, messy, hilarious experiment of Wildseed, and my audacious activations of a life in soft-time—all of these, and so much more, are radiant expansions of that once upon a time Yes. ”
