Welcome to the final week 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 which has been Amazon.co.uk's Hottest New Release in Motherhood for the past week!
Today's topic is The Creative Process.
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She Meets Herself Lucy Pierce
Creation
As an artist I am Midwife.
The imagery calls,
whispers from the cavernous realm
of the formless place
and I am charged with the task
of engendering this birthing into being.
Asked to bare witness
to this emergence of becoming.
To turn up and be present
and ride the waves.
Wiping the sweat and the blood,
accommodating with my hands
and heart and words
the inseparable passage of ecstasy and pain,
of resistance and release.
Sometimes sitting still in the quiet corner,
in the dim-light of the pre-dawn,
in the hush, of the eye,
of that magnificent storm,
as creation navigates its own
thunderously graceful
pathway into existence.
Sometimes, and more often than not,
being the boundary that says
“Yes you can, and lets get on with it!”
Scouring the psyche
for the point of most resistance
and laying it bare;
A gratitude deep and wide
for the baring witness
to something holy of spirit,
that breaks the heart
ever more open
to receive
and reciprocate.
As an artist I am Mother.
Called upon to carry these vessels of life
upon my hip, upon my shoulders,
even when they get really heavy;
Cupping them with my heart
when they look awkward,
ferocious, raw, ugly even,
loving them still;
Suckling my charge in the night hours,
enduring the animal instinct
of love so strong
it’s an effort not to devour
that softly solid little form,
tucked up in the crook of my arm,
in the hollow space
between my soft, round belly
and my thighs,
making do with a kiss and a squeeze;
Accepting the weight
of being bound to something,
inextricably, forever;
Suffering the surprise
and sometimes embarrassment,
when something that was once inside of me,
so utterly intimate and private,
moves out into the world
in a way so unexpectedly independent.
Revealing so much more
than my own censored heart might condone.
The child, rambunctious and proud,
demanding and difficult,
where I am timid and afraid;
Allowing my eyes to shine with the hope
that my love so desperately elicits,
even when the world seems an unlikely
and dangerous place
to house these delicate futures.
As an artist I am Child,
So very, very small and new
in a world so very big.
Rooting around like a grub in the dark,
looking for something real and comforting.
So hungry for the succor
of that sweet, warm and mighty breast,
and the light-filled fluid
filling my immense vulnerability to the core
with an equal measure of love and faith.
The circle of my mother’s arms
such a tender haven,
from my endeavoring
to know a world
I am mostly blind to,
so ill-equipped for,
clumsy and mute,
my skin too soft,
in the face of my task.
And yet the spirit that spurs me forth
into that other vast beating I hear beyond me.
A tenacious drive arising
to learn and to grow
and to become more of who I am,
but also becoming somehow less;
Delighting in what I know
and thankfully ignorant of what I do not,
least the path seem insurmountable.
Trusting in the things that cannot be spoken,
and at the mercy of the goodwill of the universe,
with a prayer that nurture
is indeed the guiding principle
after all.
It is the part of me that says
“Can’t I stop now?”
“Do I really have to finish?”
“Will you carry me?”
“How much further to go?”
The devastating suspicion
that I am nothing
and worth naught;
The precious and dangerous part
that does not know where I end and you begin;
The part that has not yet learnt
to separate my will from the will of God;
Creating secret hiding places
for the precious things that do not fit,
hiding them so well it takes a lifetime
to find my way back to the heart of them
and claim them
truly as my own.
As an artist I am Lover.
Endeavoring to allow
the romance of the universe
to ravish me utterly,
to open me so completely to the majestic
and sometimes terrifying
and sometimes mundane seeming,
Other.
To choose to leap
off that death defying cliff
even when I am tired
and feeling the tantalizing pull
to comfort and safety.
To gather up my too many muffins in the belly,
worn-out nippled,
weary-boned body
and say yes to you,
forever and always.
Seduce me even in the quiet, dark corners
I have thought to preserve only for me,
Even in the places I go to retreat
from loves unflinching gaze
and to revel in my wounds;
Even these I must surrender back to you,
so that you may fill me utterly,
my mouth, my eyes, my ears ,
my yoni, my womb, my heart,
squeezing out all my separation,
all my withholding.
Making me new, like a clean sheet of paper,
awaiting the dawn,
awaiting the pen and the brush,
to be born anew as form
and the familiar;
The wooing awake
the ocean-deep yearning of the heart,
braving the weight of that longing;
Whispering the haunted mating song
to the barren void
again and again
until the ground gives way
and I am swept away
into that turbulent current,
alive again
and love;
The echoes of the aching
like a bruise
receding from the skin,
remnants of the pleasure of it
remnants of the pain of it.
And oh, the sweet pulsing honey-love,
ululation of union
where I forget
who I am.
Too often I hide,
I turn and forget,
I pretend that it does not serve me
to surrender my hard won position
to the current of chaos
forming itself into grace.
I find that I must offer
more and more of myself,
as an appeasement to God,
the ransom of my being,
for the bone-crunching,
heart-wrenching gift
that life offered me
when she gave me a body
and set my heart to pounding.
Lucy Pierce © 2013
