We inherit our mothers’ stories
Spin
Inside the Creation Stories of Dancing Mother
We inherit our mothers’ stories
a Photo essay by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
I have over 20 years worth of journals. These are most of them, but not all of them.
What if these stories that I’ve preserved are not even for me to look at? What if my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren are going to comb through my stories and piece this stuff together?
Not pictured are the journals that used to live in boxes in my mother’s garage. I’ve since retrieved all those too.
Also not pictured: journals that were destroyed or thrown away, because I didn't think I could bear to revisit their contents.
Also not pictured, millions of bytes of photos, videos, voice recordings from my digital archives
Our stories are our wealth. And we inherit our mothers stories.
Each journal is a collection of moments, of stories. Some I cherish. Some make me cringe. Some make me time travel. Some make me dream.
My body holds all of my stories. The journals are placeholders for memories that might otherwise fade with time. What if my labor is to gather them, and keep them in a place where they can be found some generations forward?
These books, these volumes of my life have followed me everywhere I go. I have been sure to preserve them, to treasure them. More and more I wonder, “what will happen to my stories if all these journals go away?”
In some of these pages, in some of these lines, I don’t even recognize myself. But I know it was me. I know my handwriting.
Some of these I have not opened in over a decade. What will it take to look through it all? Is that really my labor to do? What if the processing of it, and deciphering of it is going to be in the next century, in the next millennium?
I have remembered myself in such deliberate and remarkable ways. Will something come from all of this? I think so. I feel so.
Grow more stories with Curious Seeds!
Curious Seeds is a story building space for parents raising learners in the wild, lush, freedom of life as it is. This is a soft-time circle for parents deepening into their family’s stories of learning and systems of creation. Curious Seeds is for those who are realizing that their stories can help them document their learning practices, and also seed new possibilities for themselves and their communities.
Read Mother Mother’s Wildseed Stories
