A Picture and Two Poems

The Power to Open                                Lucy Pierce

The Caged and the Free

I am feeling the fractious edge,

the tight-rope pledge,

fingernails slipping from the cliff-face

of the part that wants control,

that baulks and fusses at the chaos

that the true living of life elicits,

the part that knows not how to surrender.

The walled garden I have built of my heart

feels in danger of crumbling down

and the one who built it so very long ago,

is squirming in the shadows of that fortress

begging me not to risk it’s demise, she is raging,

while the great fist of the universe knocks from the outside,

knock, knock, like a great muted chime.

Although from out there, in the free-fall of the universe

it is a brittle sound,

tap, tap, as though it were only a fragile shell after all

separating me from that vast chaotic love

where the Other shines and the boundaries dissolve.

Inside, everything is slightly muted and dull,

there is only me here,

safe from harm and hurt

but utterly alone and so hungry for you

and the radiant death of my safety.

So hungry that it has become the gnawing anger,

that feels that it could kill,

the unconditional isolation deep within,

repelling love like a force field,

keeping me safe, keeping me separate.

She tells me that it must be so

for me to hold what I hold, it must be so,

the impeccable control,

the safety of a protected heart

but I know this truth is also a lie and a forgetting,

for the part of me that has always danced

in the great beyond grows.

She is remembering

what it is that happens

when we forget that we are alone and separate.

We are remembering together,

the caged and the free,

on the fractious edge of becoming.

Lucy Pierce ©2013

Rip Tide

Her body suffers, atrophies

and when she looks she sees

that her heart is a caged thing.

A great wall defending it,

for though she gives her heart,

she never gives it fully, so afraid she is.

She seeks within for the touch

that would disarm this protection

for she knows she must give it all now,

that life will no longer tolerate less from her.

And the riptide is turning

and churning

and the slow dismantling

sends wild currents

free flowing through her channels,

surging fear from a thousand quivers withheld,

flooding tears from a thousand hurts untended.

A vast fear of dying descends,

a terror for her children left behind

and the great barricade

that surrounds her heart

is falling now,

more to give, more to feel,

for she holds the power to open

even when the tide carries her so far out

on the mysterious sea

of her own withholding unleashed,

that she wonders if she will ever

feel the good solid Earth

beneath her feet again.

Lucy Pierce ©2013

Creative Inheritance

Welcome to Week Three of the month-long Carnival of Creative Mothers to celebrate the launch of The Rainbow Way: Cultivating Creativity in the Midst of Motherhood
by Lucy H. Pearce. 

Today's topic is Creative Inheritance. 

The  home where I grew up as a child was like a vibrant, living alter. My mother, Jan Pierce, makes an art of everything. Ordinary life always becomes filled with a great, tender and fulsome beauty wherever my mother’s hand has had a say. A deep holistic integrity of material and aesthetic resounds in her, a fierce warriors heart to protect our Earth and the small creatures that dwell upon Her back, a passion for all things made with the hand from the tools of nature.

It seems as though thinking back with the eyes of my child self, that there were always candles lit in our house, that soft, warm, reverent light emanating from black burnished angel candlesticks from Mexico, full skirted and winged. The house was always full of great billowing bunches of blooms, gathered from the beautiful native garden mum always has growing or from the road-side edge, their glorious filaments of colour and texture consuming the table, music always floating on the ether and food flowing like a love song always, abundant and beautiful. Copper pots of dying fabric scattered around the house like cauldrons, the smell of wax being ironed from batik, the smells and sounds and the feeling of knitting yarn, sewing cloth, embroidering, singing, cooking, painting….dancing, mum has always loved to dance.

The walls of our home hung with my mum’s beautiful paintings, visions of children and wildflowers, figures and animals, trees brimming with birds, moths, butterflies, fungi, moss, birds and more birds. I used to love watching Mum paint, the poise of her mouth, ripe with the expectation of her creation, her body a symphony of focus, beneath the halo of her lamp, her paint box a treasure trove of mystery.

As children mum would take my 3 brothers and I walking in the bush and draw our eyes always to the small plants emerging from the Earth, the native orchids and lilies in the spring and summer, the fungi and moss in the winter months, teaching us to see and to know, the detailed and the miraculous. Awakening the artist's eye in me, teaching me the face of the divine as it manifested on our little patch of ground.

Of all the qualities my Mother carries with her in this life, it is this capacity to create beauty, and to make life artful, to see always through the poetic lens of the creative soul, that I cherish most in her.

 In 2009 the Black Saturday Bushfires came and we lost my beautiful father to that furious firestorm. Mum also lost her home where they had lived, and with it so many amazing paintings and creations, photos and beloved treasures. All the pictures and ceramics shown here are pieces created since the fire, a testament to her tenacity and healing. The home where she now lives is again filled with art, the walls in the kitchen are painted with a beautiful mural and on the bathroom wall these words are painted.

Set aside the learned ways of perceiving the world as dead matter for your use and see if you can recover again your actual perception of the world as a community of beings to whom you are meaningfully related. Erazim Kohak

.....our dreams are pale memories of themselves,
and nagging doubt the false measure of our days.
Even so the spirit voices are singing,
their thoughts are dancing on the dirty air 
their feet touch the cement, the asphalt,
delighting still, they weave dreams upon our 
shadowed skulls.
If we could listen, if we could hear.
Let's go then. Let's find them. Let's listen for the water,
the careful gleaming drops that glisten on the leaves, the flowers.
Lets ride the midnight, the early dawn,
feel the wind striding through our hair.
Let's dance the dance of feathers, the dance of birds.....
the dance of paws and fins, of wildflowers, 
grasses and little wings, 
the dance of the Earthly Child.

Part of the mural on Mum's kitchen wall                    

Jan Pierce

 

My beautiful Mum and sleeping son

Creative Heroines

This post was created for the Carnival of Creative Mothers to celebrate the launch of  The Rainbow Way: Cultivating Creativity in the Midst of Motherhood
by Lucy H. Pearce.  Today's topic Creative Heroines. 

**********

There have been so many female artists that have inspired me to create in the way that I do but if I had to narrow it down I think I would have to choose Meinrad Craighead, Frida Kahlo and Vali Myers. Meinrad for her exquisite encapsulation of the Dark Feminine as a fierce and deeply loving force, for the magnitude and astonishing depth of her vision. She speaks to my soul like no other ever has. Frida for her exquisite honesty and for the way in which her pain became the gateway of her salvation, and Vali for the fierceness of her authenticity, her self-governance and for her profoundly wild nature.

Enclosed Garden                                                               Meinrad Craighead

Glaringly obvious to me as I write this is the fact that none of these women were/are mothers. And allthough they all reflect a deep kinship with their animal familiars, each of their primary focus in life has been their art. I have often pondered the weight of this power, that is birthed from women when children are not their destiny, and have many a time baulked at the notion of trying to be both a mother and an artist. I feel a conflict within myself rise, one that has the potential to feed into a despair at ever being able to create anything significant and also be this mother that I am, hands so full of children and domesticity.

But when I really listen to what these women gift me with,the quality that I feel has so deeply resonated for me has been their profound insight into that deeply primal matrix of the vast Mother, the feminine force that carries the weight of life and death, nurturance and transmutation, so powerfully in the palm of her hand.

The Love embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and senor Xolotl

-Frida Kahlo

Each of these women have shown me in their own unique way how to forge my own personal relationship with that primal feminine force which knocks at the door of the psyche, asking to be birthed into the world. They have taught me that the relationship with God and the authority to know of the sacred movement of spirit in my life, is deeply embedded in my body and in the narrative of my own life. They have fed that insatiable hunger in me for something more anciently true and primordially real, than anything else my culture was feeding me in regard to what it was to be a woman.

These artists have taught me that as a woman my relationship to the divine is profoundly rooted in the earthly relationships of my body and it’s wild interface with nature and the cycles of the Earth. This lesson is paradoxically the same lesson that my children have birthed in me, awakening me to my own power as a creatrix, awakening me to the profound depth of my own capacity as a woman to love, to birth myself and to care for all creation.

The more I turn my own authority over to this primordial interface of the body/the earth/the divine, the less conflicted I feel about the balance of motherhood and art, as it all ultimately flows from that same deep wellspring of the sacred feminine, birthing itself into being upon the Earth, as it has always done and ever will do, even through the times when She has been met with violence and brutality and desecration.

Witch of Positano                                                  Vali Myers

I am eternally grateful to these Matriachs of the art world for their renewal of a primary imprint of what God the Mother looks like, deeply imbedded in the primacy of one’s own story. They give  me permission to follow the hunt of my own creative nature. They reveal to me the power of birthing something so infinitely tender and intimate, and so fiercely potent into the world and standing strong in the care of that vision, despite sometimes great odds. I feel that I am learning the primacy of what it means to truly care for what it is that I create, be it a piece of art or a child. How do I come to take full responsibility for my feminine nature in a world so desensitised? How do I defy the stereotypes and projections of my culture and fully own my personal vision and creation as my deepest truth? These women guide me with their courage, their wild authority and their deep authenticity.

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