Spin

Inside the Creation Stories of Dancing Mother

On finding my true congregation: Me

by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy

I am writing myself into the frame. This is new for me because I am centering myself in a way I have never done before. I’ve always loved holding space for others, facilitating practices that help people get naked with their hearts and fears and dreams, stirring up communal ringshouts and moving congregations toward the holy spirit. And now, I see, I am my own congregation.

It took many years for me to arrive at this understanding. I resisted mightily because gathering the mothers is what I know best, what I enjoy every time. And yet the truth kept calling me home into myself, into these “quiet” (except for the wild bunch of munchkins usually somewhere very close by), interior devotions where it’s me and the movements. Me and the tree. Me and the sun. Me and the wind. These movements teach me how to create community with nature’s many dancing entities, seen and unseen. There is movement happening all around me, so even if no other human is dancing with me, I am not dancing alone.

Even as I appreciate this initiation for all it activates within me, I still at times crave that beautiful togetherness I’ve only really known in fleeting moments throughout my adult dancing life. The magic of rehearsals, costumes and showtime. The laughter and bloopers and impromptu scenes and racing to catch flights. The organic collaborations and live performances that come from dancing with other flesh and bone dancers. The stories that are excavated and tended to as we share the most precious parts of ourselves, breathing through life’s joys and aches, learning each other’s choreography, committing some piece of another’s heart-and-soul creation to muscle and memory. I miss that life, and I also have not been able to authentically access that kind of frequency with joy and ease since becoming a visible mother. And there is great peace and gratitude in this reckoning, and the long, long labors of reimagining my art all these years as a dancing mother.

I comfort myself in the intuitive knowing that such a season will come again. There will be more chances when I get to dance in shared, physical space and time with others. I see it, I feel it in the future of my being. And I also feel deeply that right now, amongst my devoted congregation of one, I am being supported to dance right here. Here where I have ample freedom, space and softness as a multitudinous mothering entity. In my daily, self-sustained practice I nurture a field of generative movements, movements that keep me well-watered and in continuous communion with my divine creation intelligence. This is how the dances come alive in me, coursing through my body in their truest forms, expanding magnificently as they do with every bend, twist, kick, and roll.

And then, graciously, there’s also the writing. The written word gives me much needed space to share a part of this majesty with others, to engage in a holy exchange of creation and ideas, in a way that my body cannot during this mostly solitary, devotional season. These pieces I publish in Spin and the love notes I send out are my soft-time offerings to the ones I would love to be dancing with. When I draft these passages and gather the photo stills, and record reflections on the dances, I am often imagining specific dancing lovelies as I craft shares, remembering sweet moments when we were dancing together, or dreaming about the next time we’ll dance face to face. I place my voice, my stories, my photos, my archives here lovingly and intentionally. Each story and collection echoes and affirms the infinite ways the dance can exist, and the many paths we make to dance with each other, especially across distance and varied life rhythms. So, even as I heed the mothers, and dance with/for/by myself for now, I am ever dancing in spirit with all the ones who can feel me.