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