Four Phases of Woman

Such a deep pleasure to create these images for the School of Shamanic Midwifery, and deepen into my understanding of how our medicine as women does not diminish, though we may shed some things along the way, but that it rather builds and ripens. It has left me with a longing to more deeply venerate the elders of our culture, understanding that they have journeyed long and far, passing through so many gates of initiation to stand in that place of  wisdom and experience. 

I also feel gifted with the sense of rightness to each phase of a woman's life, that within each chapter there is a very particular quality of energy to be received, and that there is no other place to be than in the medicine of the moment. 

Jane Hardwicke Collings writes so beautiful in Moonsong about the lengthening of our modern life span and articulates the richness and gifting of this time of Maga, after our children have grown and before the passage into crone. I feel such a potency to this recognition of women as they gift the world with their finely crafted and empowered gleanings of a life deeply lived.

Blessed be.

 Maiden

 Mother

 Maga

 Crone

Her Keening Heart

Dancing the Universe

Her Keening Heart

It is as though the deepest most hidden part of me,

the most rejected and unlived part

is the one that must find her voice to beseech you,

to find a shining more mesmerizing

than all the bright lights of the world,

a keening more compelling than the sirens of the sea.

She who is most afraid, most shriveled and hungry,

must find that unnamable courage,

from the terror of how far she might fall

in the face of more rejection,

to risk herself and call you unto her,

even though it feels as though

there could be no tomorrow

if she called and you did not come,

if she called and you turned your face yet

to the fruitless world that beckons you away

from her aching and bountiful love.

She has hidden herself so exquisitely

in the folds of my heart,

her gentle aching there a quiet discontent,

the knowing that she deserves more,

softly vented in my weeping,

or spewed forth in purging rage.

What would it be to courageously occupy her,

the one who beckons love, to be vulnerably her,

in all her aching fullness and decades of neglect.

To be home to her, letting her breath her way

into all the filaments of my heart.

What courage I must muster,

to neither preempt your scorn

nor hide the beauty of her face,

for what she might ask of me to surrender.

And I take heed now of how I hide her from you,

she who longs to be seen,

so tightly I hold her hidden, safe from harm,

so precious to me she is,

that my protection has her smothering,

like a caged one, she waits under lock and key,

and it is me who must set her free.

My fear says I can only trust another with her

if I am certain that she will be safe,

but she cannot be loved if she cannot be seen,

and therein lies the great gamble of life,

for to love is always to risk oblivion,

there can be no other way.

I must feed her tender morsels,

ripe and juicy seeds of pomegranate,

full lipped and red blooded fig,

wooing her forth within me,

that she may stand before you,

plump and ripe,

so real and true that you could not turn

for all the treasures of the world,

for you would know beyond a doubt

that it was you that she births herself for,

it is she that you move from and must return to,

and that she sees herself most clearly,

she of the forever and the everywhere,

when the light from your very own heart

shines upon her,

as the Earth blooms

for the Sun.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

The Song

The Song

I find myself now singing a song

and sometimes it seems that the song

is like a tree with roots and branches,

reaching and grasping

and spreading the light from within

the dark core of its matter.

Delighted I find, that I am finally brave enough to share,

my voice woven into a matrix of other voices.

And although my song may fumble,

or my melody stumble

I am so deeply grateful for the song

and the delight of singing it,

surrounded by the harmonies of my fellow kin.

Knowing that my whole life might have passed,

without the gift of this sharing.

Because passing now are the years

of always wrestling with the lack,

and with the thought that there was something

that I was not,

that I somehow should have  been.

Too afraid to share the most true,

for fear of not being enough.

Too timid to gift the simplicity of my centre,

too complex even to see that gentle kernel,

so many layers of deceit wound around my heart.

And then making  that slow and gentle love

in the long dark nights

with She who loathes,

until I find that now, joy of joys,

I begin to see that I move more and more
from that centre point,

owning the wellspring within.

The dance rises, the image swells,

the creation moves itself

from that place that I value most within myself,

that fine and delicate gateway to beyond.

And I create not because I am good or not good,

but because I am alive.

The pure delight of sharing what feels most true,

that which belongs to the essence of this life-hood.

And I know now, sometimes timidly

and sometimes beyond a shadow of a doubt

that all that I need in this life,

I carry within me,

though still there are shrouds that fall

and rest in wait in the darkness,

still the stones and debris that stem the flow

of that ancient soul river,

that is myself from so long before I came to be me.

And I see now that age is in fact the blessing,

that it is the very falling away

of what I once had valued

that strips me bare of what has withheld me from myself

and as I shed and diminish in some ways

in others I ripen.

The medicine building in my bones,

the dream more textured with meaning,

the richness of the song,

finding its roots

twining back to the very pure beginning

when I was once awake

and deeply inside

the song of the universe.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

The Deep Within and Spirit Memory

The Deep Within                                                Lucy Pierce

This piece has been created as a part of the Red Teepee, a community arts project facilitated by Michelle Buggy of Birthing Art Birthing Heart, which has gathered together a myriad of women's creative expressions celebrating their relationships to their wombs and to menstruation.

Spirit Memory

My Spirit so deeply remembers

and I dance both in the exquisite grace of that remembering

and also in the pain of the body’s forgetting,

as though I were still too small somehow

for the bigness of that Spirit memory,

or perhaps still too full of other things.

Life continues to gift me though,

with the clashing dissonance of that interface.

It is infinitely tenacious, the lapping of that memory,

eroding the resistance of my wounds,

the timidity of my with-holding,

opening me ever so tenderly

to eternity

and to love.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Was There Ever One More Loved Than She

The River of Tears                                          Lucy Pierce

A picture for a family of extraordinary beauty, as they ride on the river of their grief, in the vessel of their vast and immeasurable love and to she who dances now in the everywhere and the forever. Was there ever one more loved than she? 

Wild

Birthing Woman                                                 Lucy Pierce

Wild 

I see you there wild one,

how brave you are to bare your battle scars

and show us your wounds,

each step a courageous risking

of your infinitely tender heart,

to show us who you might really be,

beneath what you have been

so brutally asked to be.

I see you letting your hair go wild,

letting your fur thicken,

taking  the risk of setting the wisdom

of your own pheromones free,

without mask or disguise,

I see the blood on your thighs

and how you paint your brow with it

for a deeper vision.

I see that your awakening is not easy,

I see the torment within

and the undertow of your smallness.

I see your clumsy faltering

and the fear in your eyes

as I feel them within me

and I say to you, show me more,

take me deeper into the great mystery

of what we might be,

what we might become,

unshackled from our shame.

Brave one, I see you

and I honor the courageous path

of your sometimes painful

and exquisitely sweet unfolding.

I see the work you are doing,

there in your darkness.

And dear one I know that you came here

with such a precious and pristine wisdom

to gift to this world,

that you and only you can share.

I know how agonizingly buried

and brutalized that treasure can be,

and I beseech you,

for the sake of our Mother Earth,

to awaken your singing heart,

in the dark soil of your inner being ,

awaken.

Listen to the keening of your gift,

and heed your tentative whisperings

as the path that will lead you

to your knowing again,

of why you came here

and of who you are,

awakened.

We all of us belong here,

embedded deep within the heart

of this sweet Mother Earth,

and to each of us She whispers,

Her keening to heal,

the ululating of Her home-coming,

to Her children who have strayed

so far from the vast lore of Her love.

So come home to your body,

for it is here that She speaks,

and through all those energies

and beings who have already remembered

or never forgot that they belong to Her.

Turn your ear down to Her breast

and listen.

Wounded one,

dive deep into the heart

of your wound

and come to know

what is hidden there.

Stop your battling

and listen to that great silence,

spreading across the land.

Still yourself and listen . . .

I see it now,

I see the gentle power you carry

I sense the roots drop deeper down, 
your anchored gait.

I hear the rhythm of your dance upon her blessed back,

I see your gaze no longer apologizing,

I feel your medicine shine

as you walk with your Mother

home to Her,

awakened.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Holding Us

Holding Us                                                         Lucy Pierce

Sometimes I feel like I am navigating my way through life with three beating hearts, six eyes with which to see and question, three mouths to feed and twelve fumbling limbs to co-ordinate. Sometimes in the wild dance of mothering these little people, I don't know how to also be an artist.

Lucy Pierce  ©2013

Motherhood, Growing me up

For me motherhood has been the gateway through which I have been initiated into my womanhood. Each one of my children has birthed me more deeply into my own being, each asking of me a greater capacity of presence and attunement to how it is that I bring myself to bare in this life. Each child of my womb, fruit of the love that blooms, has asked of me in their pregnancies and birthings, a unique awakening to aspects of myself that might otherwise have dwelt unformed and unlived within me. Each one has asked of me in the particular qualities of their on-going care, to dig and delve and find those parts of myself that are shrouded in my own wounding, demanding of me that I bring more of myself to account, demanding that I heal in order to be more present to my love for them.

And I find again and again I must stop and bow down to this sacred work of motherhood, relentless and unseen. And though I struggle at times with this asking, to be so deeply and completely invested in the lives of others, with the giving over of myself so mercilessly to this service, it is also the very thing that I owe my self-hood to. My children have taught me what it is to love, what it is to stay in the asking of what it is that we are needing to receive in order to feel safe and awake and held.

Having children has birthed me ever deeper into the arms of our Great Mother, who holds the beseeching heart of my own flawed and fallible, passionate and earnest motherhood in her hands so tenderly. That vast feminine power that soothes and offers forgiveness to the one within that is sometimes not good enough, when I see through the impotent eyes of my own pain and wounding, when I rage and withhold and sometimes fail the tender cargo of my care, when I respond as one who is yet awakening to love. Still  I feel the energy of the Primordial Mother walking with me, guiding my hand with the ever-present returning to the knowing that I am after all enough to shepherd these precious souls into this world. She opens my heart to see and to learn the ways in which they so diligently present to me, what it is that I must become in order to be more true.

My children are my teachers and my becoming, my love for them is the balm that eases the contractions of my own birthing of self, that I may become the one who is truly worthy of walking with the divine and awesome unfolding of love incarnating on the Earth, of flesh and blood and bone made from nothing but the union of love, gestated in the awesome power of a woman's body to manifest life.

As a people do we truly see the magnitude of this miracle and the great responsibility for care that this miracle bestows. There are times when I long for a more socially sanctioned and financially lucrative endeavor, one with a knock off time and recognition for accomplishments, but my deepest heart knows that there is restitution in offering the tenderness of my own unknowing to these exquisitely sensitive and beseeching souls. It is in the very act of relinquishing myself to the holding of that which I have created that I will come to know myself most truly. No other path could so baldly confront me with my own shortcomings, no other accomplishment lead me so deeply and relentlessly into the forest of my own heart, as I carry the at times excruciating, at times heartbreakingly beautiful responsibility, of holding this process of incarnation of life on the Earth, in the world we have made, lives founded in as much integrity and truth as I can muster, awake to feeling and compassion, awake to love and to beauty and to goodness and to forgiveness. To fully feel just how safe and respected and cherished a child deserves to be.

They ask me to remember myself, as she who cares, she who understands how to respond from love, she who is big enough to hold all of who it is that we might be when we express ourselves fully, beyond the cultural maskings of shame and restraint and apology. Rising to the challenge of baring witness rather than shutting down, feeling uncomfortable rather than suppressing, learning to be kind and to care for that which is hurting, stilling and going slow rather than running away, not knowing rather than pretending to know.

And again and again I must remind myself that this is the work my spirit has most deeply chosen to enact in this life. That I must cease the poison of comparison, and come to fully and powerfully own that although my culture does not always value this task, I know it to be of profound value. That it is the weaving of strands into the warp and weft of the universe. It is a sending forth of tendrils of tentative life into an unknown future and that it is a reconfiguring of our taproots deep into the Earth, the work of coming to know again what it is to be bonded to and nurtured by our Mother, to come home, deeply, powerfully, poignantly home to that sacred and vastly loving body, the Earth. The work of protecting what is innocent and pure, holding reverence for life, because it is of itself holy, not because we can ourselves benefit from it, but because it is the deeply sacred mystery of life becoming itself, of love giving itself eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear itself, a reflection in which to know itself.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

To Offer Wholeness

Surrender

To Offer Wholeness

There have been times in my life

when without the strong anchor

of my own fierce embodiment,

I have felt like a leaf,

blown and buffeted by the wind,

slipping through cracks,

seeking respite in the shelter of quiet corners,

too afraid somehow and tentative

to come deeply down,

into the body, onto the Earth.

As though a good part of me

still dangled amongst the stars,

vast and unfixed,

blown so wide open

and so femininely fluid,

that when life has ask of me

to bring myself to bare,

it is such an almighty mustering

that must take place,

of all my disparate cells,

scattered through the cosmos,

to come in now, to come home,

to this moment, and to this body,

with it's broad feet,

it's curved circumference and furrowed brow,

to be someone and to belong, here,

solidly planted, with great twining roots

sinking deeply through the Earth’s crust,

exquisitely aware of the cradle of my pelvis,

the gravity of my bones

and the sweet whisper of my tomb.

Eyes and ears and heart and womb,

mind and soul awake

and entrained to the asking,

an offering of my wholeness

to this birthing of the moment.

Lucy Pierce © 2013