To be Beauty Full

The Goddess Dances                                     by Lucy Pierce     

To Be Beauty Full

I remember as a child in the sometimes cruel and harsh world of the school ground terms like, “She’s so up herself!” or “She loves herself!” being spat out with the most caustic of venom towards any girl who seemed in some way to set her own standard of self-evaluation and failed to find herself lacking, anyone who did not fit the cultural imperative to never be enough, or to always believe in the other more beautiful ones, over their own blessed and beloved flesh and blood.

It was almost the worst thing someone could say to you, as though, how dare you be self-possessed? How dare you exhibit self-love, self-determination? For some of us our autonomy was beaten out of us, or buried deep inside the psyche as we followed the imperative to fit in and belong. I feel that as a girl and then as a woman I was taught by my culture to always seek beauty through the eye of the beholder, the eternal question, am I beautiful enough? Can I belong to the externalised, ever-changing, ever-elusive phantasm that society enthrals us with? I am beautiful when you say so, I am beautiful when boys like me, I am beautiful when you see me. And when I am not seen, not liked, not met, I am left with the innate assumption of my own failing in the face of the task of being beautiful.

A part of me gave up a long time ago trying to be beautiful in the eyes of the world and I have felt a sense of liberation in that surrender to being something other than what the world was telling me beauty was, with my hairy armpits and unpainted face. Claiming myself for myself in a secret, private way, turning my gaze from that of the world and choosing to love myself despite the fact that I did not belong to the myth of beauty. But now I come to see a deeper layer, which we are so deeply robbed of, the birthright of our own sense of innate beauty, that essential flowering of essence, that overflowing love that oozes from the heart of one who knows themselves to be truly deeply loved and beheld in beauty, not in any worldly sense but in the sense of deeply belonging within their own skin, to their own body, their own unique expression of the myriad ways of being beautiful in this vast tapestry of life. Indeed there are as many ways to be beautiful as there are beings alive on the Earth. How revolutionary an act it is to love oneself for all that one is and to boldly gift the world with that walking in the truth of one’s own beauty. Showing life what it looks like to belong to one’s self. Thankfully not all of us are subdued. I am always in awe when I witness this in a woman, her flagrant blooming in the face of the world’s smallness, eclipsing our narrow prescriptions of conformity.

Each one of us has a birthright to beauty and belonging, to knowing oneself to be deeply loved and treasured by the great river of life from which we spring. I long for my daughters to know themselves as this, and to know this more deeply than the shallow projections of our world, of too fat, too short, too flat, too round, too soft, too old, too wrinkled, too dark, too light.

Shame is a terrible affliction to carry through one’s life and our culture breeds it with relish. It is the essential ingredient in the monopoly on beauty, the multi-million dollar industry of women seeking to know their beauty through the lens of the world, an eternally futile endeavor. We will never arrive in ourselves, never catch our own tails in that cruel dance of manipulation.

I long for a world where every woman wears her body with pride and belonging. If I could whisper in the ears of those little girls in the school yard who were chided for their sin of self-love I would say, “I dare you to! I dare you to love yourself with all your vast power and might! I beseech you to belong to yourself and claim the birth right of your very own beauty, pluck it ripe and sweet right off the tree of life and take a big juicy bite. Know yourself and let that knowing illuminate the world with the radiance of a beauty lit from within. Do what you will in the game of beauty that you play with the world, but know that unless you come to know yourself with love, you will never be loved like you long to be. No one will ever tell you that you are beautiful enough times for you to know it yourself unless you claim it for yourself within your very own being, to know yourself as beauty, unhindered and unashamed.”

The beauty of the feminine is such a profoundly powerful force, it makes the stars turn on their axis, and the flowers bloom, it calls forth the bird’s song and the summer rain. When you see it truly and deeply expressed it brings tears to your eyes and joy to your heart. Our world is full of images of beautiful women, but I think there is a deep cultural fear of empowered expressions of feminine beauty and love. There is also I believe, a deep collective hunger to see this energy birth itself more robustly into our world, wholehearted and alive, liberated from it’s shackles of fear and shame, this tyranny we each carry within us.

I wonder if there is a more radical act in the face of this cultural conspiracy than to do this deep inner work of truly coming to inhabit one's own unique expression of power and beauty. To really relish the swinging of one's own hips, to really treasure the swell of one's chest under the rise and fall of one's own enlivened breath, to truly grasp the miracle of one's own incarnation. This sentiment of self-love is epitomised so exquisitely in the writing of the recently deceased and extraordinary poet and writer Maya Angelou. In her poem Still I Rise she writes,

“Does my sexiness upset you? 


Does it come as a surprise


That I dance like I've got diamonds


At the meeting of my thighs?” 


We come home to ourselves in all that we are through inhabiting our profound capacity to be the sacred receptacle for the love and the beauty and the power that is the feminine gift to life.

When I speak of beauty I do not mean pretty or tame or ornamental. Beauty is not always easily digestible, it can be fierce and can alter the course of one's life. Beauty is not always safe, and it can be found in the ugliest of places. It can be expressed through powerful emotions of rage and compassion. Beauty is often unearthed in our pain, when we fully come to own our shadow places and the terrain of our wounding. It is found in the most unlikely of places, within us and without.

When we are taught to be ashamed of ourselves, there can manifest a great hidden fear of being seen, or heard, or even ever truly known for the fear of not being enough. And all of that divine expression of beauty and love is withheld, thwarted, submerged, compressed and I see now that the world misses out on the fullness of our feminine blooming, that we lose so many opportunities to let life sing us, unhindered and abandoned, holy conduits each, for the source from which we are born and will return to.

What if I had known from my youth that it was my right to sing myself into being, seen or unseen? That it was my right to belong to my life, whether I was passed over or beheld by the eyes of man. For it is not that I am special, that I now commit to allowing myself to know myself as beauty, it is not because I am or ever have been better than or more worthy of praise than any other in the expression of my beauty, but it is because life has only ever manifested this unique expression once, in all the history of the world. There is no one else who can sing this particular song in this particular way. All of my ancestors since the beginning of time have given their lives so that I could be me, alive in this body, at this time, in this blessed moment. I no longer want to wait for permission to shine. Why do I need anyone else to tell me whether or not I am worthy of my own love? Why do I need to know that I am liked before I can set my fire to blazing and sing my heart-song to the universe?

I am free to be beautiful, in my worn and weathered skin, with all my scars and curves, and holy treasures. I am free to be beautiful, because I am me and I am alive and because I am beauty and love embodied, as we each are, every single one.

Lucy Pierce © 2014

Bedrock

Deepest gratitude to Talulah Gough of Making Sacred  for the potent 

experience of birthing my Medicine Drum.

Bedrock

In the darkness I am heaving with all my might,

sweating and sliding against the force,

striving to turn the tide, with it’s own mighty weight,

that I might pause a moment, to turn,

and bare witness to the consequences of my pain body

laid out like a war-field behind me,

stretching out before me into the lives of my children,

that I might stop and start to strip myself back,

veil by veil, layer by layer, less of me,

in the hope of one day being somehow more.

Even my own body is saying no now

to the false god of my own pretense,

to all the feeble structures I have built

to disguise the  shifting sands,

the marshlands of my own tenuous foundation.

It is time to dig deeper, down to the bedrock,

to become nothing that does not move

from the unknown truth within me,

to be nothing, so as not to be something false.

With my eyes closed, alone in the still darkness,

I am dismantling that place I made for myself,

so young and wounded,

when I felt the great eye of the world

turn to me and ask me who I was,

when I had barely begun to see myself,

already begun to burry myself,

had never really ever felt  safe enough to arrive.

But to please the world I smiled and pushed my pain down.

I smiled and started to build myself up,

like a child with lego blocks.

But that structure will no longer house my children,

with their tender hearts and robust wills.

It will not house the enormity of my love

and the man who dwells with me there.

My pain, it leaks out always from the cracks

that form in the walls I have built, toxic and corrosive,

as the ground shifts and quakes beneath me,

and though it seems I gain some ground,

the delayed collapse of the dominoes of my past action,

keep crashing down upon me.

And so with bloodied hands I am pulling it down,

piece by piece I am scraping back the debris

of all my failed attempts at being something.

I am seeking the bedrock of my being

so that the little one within can be seen again,

can be held while she weeps,

can say to the world, “turn your eye from me!

I am not yet ready, I have no yet arrived here,

from my starry realm.”

I am digging in the hope that perhaps the children I have born

need not pretend quite so much as I have,

that the truth of them might incarnate a little more fully,

through the terra strata of my pain

to the bedrock of my love.

Lucy Pierce © 2014

Birthday Bliss

 Easter Eggs, onion skin dye with plant relief

Nest of Redbox Leaves

Winter Solstice Bonfire Signs- Montsalvat

 Gingerbread Doily Biccies

A Word from a Fierce Frontier

Dear Ones, who have bent their ears close to listen to the reverberations, murmurings, whisperings of my heart, I feel it is time to declare myself, as the silence has become loud and conspicuous to me across the ethers.

A few months ago now I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, which has been affecting the skin on my chest and my yoni. I have begun a journey to understand more clearly the patterns within me that are causing this disruption and have begun to gain some insight into those entrenched pathways of being that have led to this place of imbalance.

I am seeking to understand more deeply the ways in which I have not always listened to my own deep wisdom, opting instead for the survival mechanisms of suppressing myself and prioritizing the needs of others, this pattern instilled on such a deep and primal level. I am coming to understand the ways in which I have been habituated to a state of stress that I have been blind to, but which I now seek to disengage from, changing my relationship to myself and to the other.

I have become much more attuned to what it means to take care of myself and have felt a deep compulsion for quiet and darkness as I learn to listen more deeply to my body and what it is truly asking of me.

I have discovered many amazing  things about my physical body, like a genetic mutation that has created a deficiency in the body which in part accounts for decades of depression, digestive intolerance and hormonal imbalance, and am mustering all I have to implement the changes I need in my eating habits and how much I choose to do in my day. I am learning a lot about myself, but am also aware that there is much more to unearth.

I have found many caregivers who are priceless companions on this journey and have been deeply moved by the work of Gabor Mate on attachment and coping mechanisms, on the biology of loss and how the body says no when the woman can not.

So as I have been seeking my own dark terrain, turning out the light and lowering the sail, and resting in the turbulent currents of my own underworld, I have taken the pressure off myself to be doing anything but the bare essentials. It feels enough to be tending to my 3 beautiful children and allowing the space for my own inner exploration, as I journey out onto that wild frontier where my patterns are seeded and the possibility of my own radical healing and transformation exist. The energy that I was turning out into my creativity is seeking to turn in, nourishing the beingness of my life.

I have thought about closing the blog, but feel instead to just remain open to the mystery and forgive myself for the absence of content, there might be some snippets that trickle through that might ask to be shared here, or not, or there might be torrents. My feeling is that the time will come again when the words and the images burst forth from the void, but until then I ask for your patience, baring witness to the silence of my own tender unknown and wild frontier.

I give deep thanks for your support.

Blessings and love,

Lucy

In the meantime, a poem......

The Fierce Frontier

Sometimes we have to sit in that excruciating place

of living into the edge of all that we are,

on the very brink of our own creation,

while the wind blows cold around us,

as we face the enormous task

of allowing ourselves to be unapologetically

as powerful as we really are,

allowing ourselves to ask unapologetically

for what we deserve.

Sometimes our fellow humans

haven't learnt yet how to fully see us,

how to truly behold us in all that we are.

So we stand alone,

courageous and afraid,

exhilarated and uncertain,

baring the fierce winds of this frontier place,

where few dare to tread.

If you look far across, on your periphery,

you will see that you are not alone,

there are others standing on that edge,

equally called to be in the absolute autonomy of their aloneness,

as they too become so uniquely what they were born to be.

Enduring the absolute solitude

when even the people who love us,

don't have eyes with which to see

the truth of who we are.

In this place we might become wild,

driven to the brink of madness and back,

a thousand times.

When we follow our inner most authority

there is no external resource

to reassure and to placate,

just this almighty risk of one's own becoming.

That eternal journeying into the places within

where no man has journeyed before.

The wild frontier,

where hungry beasts howl in the darkness
and the insidious tricks of our shadows

loom and dance grotesque in the solitude.

The jeering voices deriding the innocence,

absconding creation back to the smallness of How dare you?

and Who do you think you are?

As we rise and rise again,

 journeying back into the wilderness

of our own innate wisdom,

relentlessly scratching the ground,

blood and earth in our finger nails,

desperately seeking the taproot

of our own succulent beauty,

our plumply radiant health,

our own awesome empowerment.

A lifetime of longing to be seen,

without ever truly seeing ourselves,

a lifetime of wanting love,

traipsing through the barren biology of loss,

without ever truly gathering up that frightened, hidden, dark one,

into our arms and loving her,

enlivening her,

filling her from our own overflowing breasts,

retrieving her from the darklands.

The wild rage of not having been seen,

and the soft question beneath

of how do we yet hide ourselves,

this deep profound potential of all that we are.

All that we have as the veils fall

and the shackles crumble

in the face of our brave standing in that ferocious wind,

is the anchor of this softly radiant and precious body

and the deep nourishment of our own beauty

as we birth ourselves upon the Earth,

and Her deep thunderous birthsong

crooning to us from the deep,

as alone we emerge,

like the brilliant wildflower births herself

through the barren crust,

or a supernova,

alive in the cosmic throb.

Lucy Pierce © 2014

His Love so Ancient, Deep and Pure

His Love so Ancient Deep and Pure                                                                  Lucy Pierce

Wild God

I feel such a heart full of yearning for Him,

His love so ancient, deep and pure.

His love so true and undefiled.

In the face of all the atrocities,

the rape and the violence,

in the wake of all the chaos and pain,

do I dare to ask for His purity?

I call to Him from the deep of me,

"Teach me to see your face,

reveal to me all the ways I am blind to you."

He who dwells beneath the distortion,

He whose love is as vast as the universe,

as resilient as the wildest storm,

as tender as the softest sensing,

it is You that I long for,

for my sisters and my brothers,

for my sons and my daughters,

for myself, to know you,

to feel Your fierce protection

within me and without.

I seek You deep inside the eyes of my lover,

through the spiraling strands of his DNA,

stretching all the way back to the very beginning,

You were there then weren’t You?

I call to You in the patterns that I trace

on the sleeping skin of my son.

I reach for You in the memory of my father,

aching for You to have seen me through his eyes,

I beseech You in the marrow of my very own bones.

Help us to see You, Wild God,

whose immeasurable heart we dream within.

Lucy Pierce © 2014

The One who Heals

The Deep Within                                                 Lucy Pierce

The One who Heals

In my dreaming she comes to me,

as I stop and turn to face my back

and the shoulder numb with pain,

ceasing at last the tiresome searching,

ever overextending in an ingratiating attempt

to expunge the wound that festers there,

bitter and black, above my heart.

The cavernous crypt deep in the flesh gapes,

as though it were made by the deep plunge

of a broad blade eons past.

I stop and follow the thread deep inside,

and I find her there,

the one who heals,

forgotten and ancient,

she is waiting with a smile,

she does not judge,

just evenly measures the balm.

She is my innocence, my joy

and she dwells beneath the wound.

She urges me to bare that tenderest place,

and there to reclaim the innocence,
that most primal and primary impulse of purity,

that carries in it’s wake gratitude and grace

and belonging to life 

rather than the bitter stories

of my endless dying.

She scrapes the flesh of it’s festering matter,

she clears the wound of it’s betrayal and pride,

of it’s self-righteousness and greed.

She excavates the sickness within that holds me away 
from knowing the miracle that is this life,

that always wants more and never truly gives thanks,

that always complains and never truly listens,

that always blames and never truly receives,
that always asks and never really gives,

always reinforcing the wound,

the brutal self-scrutiny of relentlessly striving

to prove myself worthy of life

and simultaneously longing for death.

She bathes the site in clean, clear water,

anoints it with herbs.

She smudges me with the cleansing smoke of sage

and sings to me of healing and purification,

that I may heal beyond the wounds and the weakness,

that I may be awake to the purity of this gifted moment,

draped instead in the freedom to truly taste

and receive and rejoice in the miracle of sustenance,

seated in the emptiness that can truly meet the other

in gratitude for what is between,

forever at home in the unfolding mystery

of this vast God that is love.

Lucy Pierce © 2014

Sorrow and Her Embrace

Her Embrace                                                                                 Lucy Pierce

Sorrow

Today I have no strength to hide

and I give you the sorrow

that flowers in the garden of my soul.

Though I try to hide her face from you

she dances with me always

making my movements slow and cumbersome,

as though there were a full grown child

hiding beneath my skirts.

It hurts me to say I am ashamed of her,

longing to be the happiness the world asks of me.

"How are you?" you ask,

and "Good" I reply,

as I feed piecemeal morsels

to the rambunctious child of my suffering,

hoping you will not notice the far away look in my eye,

as though she did not breath with me in every breath,

as though she were not pulling me ever down,

down to the ocean floor of my being,

always asking more of me,

so that I am only ever partially present to this up-side life.

Always she breaks me, opens me,

smashing my tender skin on the brittle rocks of my history,

again and again she submerges me,

as "Enough!" I cry,

again and again she births me back to you,

with new eyes with which to see.

In hiding her face it is my own face I hide,

as with an anguish I hope that you do not notice

that I don't belong here amongst you,

hoping that you don't notice the bruises and welts,

the gashes and cuts,

of my dance with her.

How persistent her befriending,

how brutal my futile resistance.

Hidden from the world, I retreat,

allowing her out to dance her dance

of death and life within me,

and the eons pass in that place

of my grappling to learn her step.

We emerge, disheveled and bewildered

to see that all the world is changed,

moved on without me.

And down we dive again,

my heart her loyal mistress.

She wants me clean and clear and free,

she wants me stripped and pliant and awake,

she will take nothing less of me as we wrestle in the deep.

Her tears strip the plaque of my own deceit.

She would have me be nothing, if not something true.

“How are you?” You ask

and I say “I am sorrow.”

for I am the full-grown child beneath her skirts.

Lucy Pierce © 2014

Soulskin

I have been quiet. I am walking through a deep darkness, and I have no words. Striving for healing in the wordless places within. But here is a picture, of the Selkie, the seal woman, longing for her true home. It sings of the dance within me, between the deep immersion that my soul longs for and the task of enduring life beyond the home of that deep oceanic belonging. The two parts longing for unity, the part that deeply knows and the part that is sometimes removed from my knowing; the part that feels that it cannot endure another moment of exiled existence and the part that dwells eternally in the nourishing waters of life.

Image and text © Lucy Pierce

The Creative Process

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. 

**********

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