A more beautiful world
Spin
Inside the Creation Stories of Dancing Mother
A More Beautiful World
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
Before my children were born I lived as an invisible mother. I labored quietly, and oftentimes with much shame and heartache too, through successive protostar births for many years. Dance was at the center of the revival of my fertility every time a starseed transitioned early. Dance was where I felt safe to grieve the sweet ones whose lives had begun inside of me, but who did not continue on their journey to become wholly human. Dance gave me room to cry, to scream, to moan, to rage, to go through all the stages of the death so that I could access the possibility of rebirth. Dance gave me the oxygen to also be with the accumulated hurts and heartaches that were so plentiful because at that time most of the people in my life did not see or celebrate me as a mother.
Dance was where I found the courage to dream forward into the possibilities of trying again. Dance was how I recovered connection and confidence in my body, in my womb. Dance was how I communed with my ancestral mothers and listened to the stories they were telling me about the mothers in our family line. Dance was essential in every way to making space and seeding strong creation currents for my starseeds who would be, who could be, born. So when my babies did miraculously arrive earthside, continuing to dance felt like the essential, and also the obvious, thing to do.
A critical part of my evolution as a dancing mother has been to practice dancing with my children. From even before my oldest, Bloom, was born, I always envisioned creating in ways that preserved the sacredness of togetherness between a mother and her children. Over time I came to seriously question the intelligence of places and protocols that made no provisions for a mother who wanted to be with her children while engaging in her creations or participating in a conference or attending a program. Why was it so unusual to imagine a mother desiring proximity to her children while she works, creates, plays, explores new places, gives a talk, teaches a class, learns something new? Why didn’t I feel welcome in spaces that supposedly accommodated mothers? Why were there so many systems and structures in place to support separation from my children? Why had so little energy been given to imagining more multitudinous mothering friendly environments?
These questions gnawed at me, and gradually, imperfectly, messily, beautifully, the tiny sparks of new ways and new worlds began emerging. The complexity of everything I was unraveling was very stimulating. There were many spiritual, philosophical, logistical, physical, emotional, and material matters to consider when mapping out more spacious realities for multitudinous mothering entities. All of this pushed me into crafting some brilliant experiments for myself as a dancing mother, and for other mothers in my community. The birth of each child initiated another realm of experimentation, and brought new variables and opportunities to the surface.
These discoveries—like my mothering body that has been expanding and birthing and healing and reconfiguring itself every few years for more than a decade now— are soft and malleable, able to shift and flow in a different direction when needed. Sometimes it feels like a lot of starts and stops, like those last weeks before the baby comes and all the warm-up sensations make you think every contraction could be thee moment. I have come to deeply appreciate the labors of learning, that a clear outcome is not always the point or necessary for the journey to be meaningful and inspiring. This ability to trust and explore is why I have been able to play with programming frameworks that are intentionally generated to be accessible to mothers. Everything I create is designed thinking about mothers who live, labor, and move through their seconds, minutes and hours with their children attached to their bodies or in close physical relationship to their body in any given space.
These different experiments nurtured vibrant fieldwork and presented multiple opportunities to test out and learn best practices for bringing mothers together, and doing so in ways that did not add stress, cause harm, or exploit our vulnerabilities. This research and development has supported the growth of Dancing Mother, and has happened alongside my evolution as a mother, my initiations as a fertility priestess and a Mother Mother, and also my skills building as a soft-time space and sanctuary holder for mamas in my village.
These soul awakenings and heart creations have also been extremely wild and wobbly orbits. It is dizzying and tiring to live by feeling first, and my willingness to trust the intelligence of my feelings is at the core of everything I do. The dance is how I keep going, even on days when there’s no proof that any of this matters. The dance has held me together and brought me back to life again and again.
The movements that come to me in my sacred communions have watered me generously inside the long labors of dreaming into a world yet to come. When I dance I see this world, and it is real and tangible and alive. A more beautiful world that is consciously, and lovingly, made for a mother like me is attainable. The more I dance, the more I feel this new world coming into being. My body is co-writing the story with the divine. The dance holds it all, makes space for it all.
