The Delicate Gestures of Creation

"Abundance" by Shaunna Henshall 2017

I am so delighted to have become the custodian of this beautiful painting by Shaunna Henshall of @theforgottenhymn and nestandroam.wordpress.com.

I feel so enlivened to behold those of us who live with such courageous sensitivity and intimate receptivity to the world around them, those who spend time dwelling in the in-between realms, bringing new life forth through the sensorial dimensions of their soulful permeability and the minutia of stroke, stitch, tone, strum on the taut canvas of the world, making life holy with the newness of their seeing and their trust in the unknowable. 

The courage of those who live in such fine attunment with the etheric interface with creation is where my hope lies for our earth. That She may birth a new future for Herself, through the whispers we still ourselves to hear, we will ourselves to trust, cultivating a relationship of reciprocity with the unseen, becoming the conduit through which the sacred is reborn anew to our kind.

The vast majesty of this cohesive world is made up of a multitude of fine, tender, delicate expressions of faith, the blade of grass, the leaf, the petal, the plume, the strand of hair or fur, the fin, the skin, the molecules and particles of creation. I feel we should never underestimate the power of fine and delicate things. Like the strands of grass that weave together to become a sturdy basket, which gapes wide to receive unto itself the mysteries of starlight and the vast night sky; the minute brush stroke of a bird's wing or a leaf's vein, that gives the soul flight. The world is put together by small things, it is made rich and relational by all the tiny offerings of our sovereign love, the choice to risk the actioning of what we cannot know until the step is taken, the formless given shape and meaning through our hand, the vision made realised through the embodied offering of the purity of our genesis. 

Life is given meaning by all the delicate gestures put together, through the maternal touch of care, the soulful tending of craft, gesture upon gesture upon gesture, alchemizing earth, air, fire, water, spirit into manifest reality, the heartfull caress of the body, the union of vibration and movement, song and dance, poetry and motion, paint stroke and cross stitch, bringing us home to eternity through the sensate presencing of our magnificent power to co-create this exquisite symphony of collaborative existence.


Image shown courtesy of Shaunna Henshall
Text © Lucy Pierce 2017

Newborn

Newborn

The mystical threshold of motherhood,

death and rebirth,

turning in towards that which repels us,

mothering the inner child, 

nursing the wound,

alongside the wonder,

allowing the breast to be a conduit

 for the cosmic river of milky love, 

nourishing us as it flows 

through the being to the ravenous mouth of the small one 

who wakes us up, 

as the activation of our milky love nourishes the stars in turn,

making the cosmos more beautiful,

mothering self and child, 

the two as one,

learning what it is that holds you 

as you hold other,

the excruciating death of becoming nothing 

but a conduit for creation, 

in service to love, 

the weight of the gift, 

the displacement of it,

the longing to bounce out 

and to have again what came before, 

what will come again after,

tears flowing rivers, 

healing the separation

of ourselves with source, 

the mother to her child, 

the child to her mother,

the self to the world,

the world to self,

dissolving into the transmutation,

making the world safe, 

by feeling it all and owning ourselves, 

the light and the dark, 

the giving and the withholding, 

the nourishing and the wounding, 

powerful work,

deep medicine work in the body of woman, 

flesh as magic, spirit as form, 

pain as becoming, surrender as arrival.

Psychically shielding the primal matrix from the world,

as life creates itself 

in the enduring trimester 

of our becoming earth bound 

with our babes, 

through our babes, 

and their still-tethered-to-the-spirit-world gaze.

Drinking, drinking, drinking 

in the divine mother Gaia's love,

we cannot survive this without her,

as we cradle the babe,

allowing ourselves to be the babe that is cradled, 

dying, being reborn, 

annihilated, retrieved, 

ecstasy, bliss,

terror, annihilation, 

tears, milk, blood,

love, grief, dislocation,

making whole, 

soothing the unmet child inside, 

returning to the cosmic womb, 

being rewoven into the miracle that is 

the embodied, sovereign, 

powerful, attuned mother

in this world that would scorn her.

Radical revolution of love and care,
transmuting in the cells,

driving in new roots, 

powerful work, becoming whole, 

and giving the child the opportunity 

to know herself as all things,  

always returning to love.

Image and text Lucy Pierce © 2017

Her Dark Face

Her Dark Face

I think that one thing it's safe to say about those of us who are mothers is that we love our children. We could also say that as mothers we do the best that we can with what we have, with what has been given to us. I think it's also safe to say that what we are given as humans-becoming-mothers in our western culture is often not sufficient to keep our babies completely emotionally intact and heartfully incarnated. For some of us it is not always possible, especially the first time around, to keep our children completely safe from harm, safe from violence, shame, neglect, not just those threats which might come from the world around us, but also those which arise from within us as care-givers. 

In becoming mothers in the world in which we currently find ourselves living, we are left relatively ill-equipped and unassisted in the soul work of becoming a parent, in attending to the task of raising a new-born human-being, who is completely helpless but for the capacity of us as parents to attune and attend in a profoundly selfless way to our children, even when we did not receive this attunement ourselves in our own beginnings of life. Often our own wounds of becoming have not been adequately tended to, and some of us are besieged with the afflictions of having been raised in a culture that abdicates our authentic, embodied sovereignty and purpose, for a submissive subservience to a violent, power driven and disembodied culture of suppression, control and avoidance. 

Often it is the very act of becoming a mother or a parent that puts us up against the deep stories that we carry unattended within our own bodies. Certainly for me becoming a mother was the beginning of my awakening into all the ways I did not feel safe to be myself and also into beginning to discover the true power of my birthright as a woman. The touching up against that primal and visceral profundity that is the birthing journey left me forever changed, but the journey of discovering how to hold the capacity to deeply attune and attend to the needs of another on an ongoing daily basis, was long and arduous and not without its casualties. 

The way in which I have unconsciously embodied uncomprehended feelings of grief, pain, shame and powerlessness in my journey as a human being, have at times impacted on my capacity to mother, and I understand that this has at times taken it’s psychic toll on my children. As a young woman I did not innately know how to selflessly and fiercely, deeply and profoundly give myself to the task of mothering my first born baby, glorious as she was. My heart was hers completely from the start and for always, but I had not been schooled in how to wholeheartedly surrender to the force of maternal love, that I definitely tasted in the oxytocic waves of my biological becoming of mother, but which were so deeply triggering to my own life-times worth of conditioned suppression of emotion, and within that the feelings of being deeply unsafe in my own skin. 

There were implications to my exquisite daughter's capacity to wildly abandon herself to her emotional expression, through her crying as a baby, her tantrums as a toddler, her needs as a young child, that required me to sift and sort through the chaff and grain of my own acculturation and upbringing. It has taken an enormous amount of psychological work to unravel my embeddedness in a system that requires at it’s core, for our true wild feminine natures to be suppressed and controlled, in order that we can be manipulated as commodified entities in an economically driven paradigm that really has very little room for motherhood or for caring in general. 

I have carried great shame and soul-loss over events that have occurred, primarily in my early years of mothering. I have struggled to own the times I have resorted to punitive approaches to conflict resolution; the times where my own lack of boundaries have put my children in unsafe places, unsafe relationships; using the power imbalances in our relationships as adult to child to dominate rather than befriend arising energies, to avoid facing my own shortcomings and lack of resource; all the times I have handled my children too roughly, with too much force, rather than deepening my breath and fearlessly embracing the unknown and the uncomfortable within my own psyche; all the times I have raised my voice; all the times my unconscious preoccupation has caused my children harm. There have been times when my own struggle for truth and autonomy have led me into dark places where my children would have felt the full weight of my unavailability, my lack of capacity to heartfully hold, so bound up I was in the internal wrestling with my own wounded inner child. 

But I am wondering now if I can allow my deep love for the great primordial force of motherhood to grow and expand to accommodate all these short-comings, so that I can be more available to my own being in this life. I feel that I no longer want to hide from this story that lives inside me, but rather take a deep breath and give it voice. What if for a moment I entertained the possibility of accepting a more multi-dimensional quality to the role of motherhood in the shaping of a life? That as part of the terrain of being mother there is the wounding as well as the sheltering, the destructive as well as the nourishing qualities, the dark as well as the light aspects of Her holy face?

I feel that I am in the midst of this personal awakening to an acceptance and a re-homing within myself of this dark face of mother, her shadowy underbelly, the one who has wounded or damaged her children, as well as having offered them comfort and love, solace and care, because whilst the damage is done from that which is unformed or suppressed or distorted within our own psyches, I also see a deep distortion and indeed, a violence in what our expectations are of ourselves as mothers and the unattainable nature of our idealisations of the maternal imperative, which can leave us wallowing in a deep stew of shame and inadequacy. 

I want to try on for size a different personification of mother, one which can hold two equally potent expressions and a myriad of shades in between, the all-giving nurturer and also the death-wielding destroyer. A primal and ancient part of my psyche knows both of these faces and when I can take a step back and embrace a more accepting and compassionate countenance, I can see that both of these faces are in fact life-giving, and necessary for the growth and evolution of our kind. I am trying on the mask of this dark mother and finding she sits with a potency and alchemical frisson that liberates life-force energy within me. This dark and destructive face of mother is a natural part of our inheritance as women, to accept on a most intimate level that her terrain contains both light and shadow, to disavow the duplicity of espousing her virginal and pure aspects over her chaotic, instinctive imperatives, thus coming to belong more deeply to ourselves as whole and complex humans.

I mean in no way to condone or excuse the mistreatment of the vulnerable, but rather to liberate the reality of motherhood from the petrifying ideal of the all-giving, all-nurturing provider of love and care that actually creates even more separation and trauma in the psyche of woman. In truth my heart is always asking me to find a deeper expression of my love for those in my life and in my care, but what if I extend that life-giving accommodation that I aspire to in the care of my children to my own self first and foremost, to be forgiving and tolerant, rather than punitive and dismissive, in regard to the behavior that has presented in my journey to becoming a more compassionate, aware and awake human being. Perhaps it is only now, having journeyed so deeply, and for so long, with my healing of this shadow side of motherhood that I am truly able to distance myself enough to see it. This story has been the main catalyst for so much soulful digging and delving into the far reaches of my being and I am now finally feeling a deeper resonance with the great evolutionary journey of learning how to love.

Perhaps the darker aspects of the archetype of Mother only become destructive in the absence of their free expression, in the suppression of their life-giving imperatives and attributes. It is perhaps in the absence of these powerfully embodied, instinctual qualities of the feminine principle that our fear and shame turns violent and punitive, as a secondary response to the lack of that potent, healing and transformational alchemy of our full spectrum of expression and experience of our wholeness, of our fierce boundaries and soulful attendance to the needs of the self.  I feel it is this imperative to be whole and fully expressed and in possession of a powerful sense of self knowledge that our culture fails to school us in, as we journey towards parenthood. Indeed perhaps it is this imperative to autonomy and internally sourced power that is in fact overtly suppressed, enabling the passing on of destructive coping mechanisms, formed in response to our own impotence and rage as a suppressed people, caught in the viscous cycles of intergenerational trauma.

So...I am endeavoring to take responsibility for the ways in which I see that I have inhabited She Who Wounds, harms, abandons, neglects, betrays, does damage to the precious life that is placed in her care, because this is a part of my story and also I think, a part of our greater cultural narrative. As I understand the ways in which I have perpetuated energies of suppression and control upon my children I am also embarking upon a crusade of equal measure, to deeply forgive myself for this inhabitation, because what this situation requires to the least degree is more shame. Shame can be such a festering disease that poisons the vulnerable and the traumatized while leaving the overarching paradigm of a brutalizing culture unhindered, unaccountable for the soul loss it inflicts on those who are wounded within its midsts. Can I accept and bring a deep compassion to bare upon myself, not just as the abused but also as the abuser, and beyond that can I be the bringer of the love, compassion and kindness that was the missing requirement from the beginning? Can I be both the wounded and the source of the wounding, as well as the balm that heals the wound? 

I am endeavoring to see myself as a player in a vast interplay of energies, where the wounded go on to wound, until this cycle becomes so excruciating that we begin to wake up. The beginning of this waking up for me is this taking of responsibility. I am finding it takes a great courage to squarely shoulder the blame for the pain that has flourished from one's own hand. It requires a great presence to not justify and defend but to just sit still, in the discomfort, feeling the weight of it in the body. I have come to see that this weight is fully mine to bare in this moment, in this life, not in order to more deeply punish myself but rather to cease asking it of my children to make this situation okay for me, to cease asking them to collude with me in protecting me from fully seeing the truth of my own participation in cycles of pain and impotency. I need to carry the full weight of it so that I do not have to be invested in their lives in an inhibiting way, with the stifling imperative for them to be good, in order that I can know that I was a good-enough mother, as though my salvation were their salvation. I realise that I don't have to use them to feel okay about myself, and use my investment in their wellbeing as a way of avoiding taking responsibility for my own part in this perpetuation of pain. I feel that if I can forgive myself, which I find when it comes down to it that I can, for my perpetuation of abusive cycles, I do not have to ask them to do the work of forgiveness for me, liberating them to use their own life force to tend to the consequences of their own wounds, and ultimately their own healing. 

The answer for me, as I see it as one of the walking wounded, has not been to remove myself from the task of mothering, institutionalizing it’s imperatives as our culture would encourage us to do, but instead to firmly shoulder the responsibility for healing this paradigm of lack and separation, from the inside out, by claiming the life-giving aspects of Mother, both the gentle and selfless, and the fiercely clawed and toothed. Coming to embody the intimate immersion and the boundaried differentiation, so that I no longer need to fall into the paralysis or violence of the more shadowed realms of her inhabitation.

I see the ways in which I have colluded with my culture to attempt to inhabit a one dimensional caricature of the perfect mother, how I have punished and withheld love from myself for my inability to maintain this unattainable illusion, how this has had at times wounding impact on my children. I believe most powerfully in our capacity as human souls to see and to heal and to atone and to repair the unconscious damage we do in our living. Through these musings I am attempting to reclaim myself as the flawed and messy and passionate and loving mother that I am, so deeply full of wounds and scars but so fiercely in love with my children, and so ravenously hungry to belong to myself and to my tribe and to this life in a way that enables a deeper resonance of kindness and truth, tender care and raucous expression of life becoming more of itself, through the generations of our human awakening.

Image and text © Lucy Pierce © 2017

Radiance

Often for me, images and writing lie dormant for a time, between conception and their birthing. For reasons beyond me, this image asked for it's time of birthing to be now, in this dark heart of winter, though she was conceived in the flaming heart of summer. Perhaps she has come to warm my cold bones and remind me that there is also that time of vitality and shining, that will come again.

Radiance by Lucy Pierce

The Sun

I hide from Him,

terrified that He will burn me.

In the cells of my body the story lives,

that He is predator, adversary

and that my only chance of survival is to protect myself,

to contract and hide,

from the warmth of His radiant love.

He did not flinch at my fear,

nor at my rejection of Him.

He kept on shining His love upon me,

as He has every day of my living life.

The playful humour of His fingers teased at me,

wooing me to peak out at Him 

from behind my defended shroud,

a white woman in a black country,

fair skin, fair game.

I hid until the only thing left for me to see

was how farcical my own withholding was.

Once I started looking, I discovered in myself,

the threads and tendrils of the pathways 

that know how to say YES

to say I surrender and I open to you, 

magnificent love.

And in the opening,

the bones of my ancestors yawned within me,

the millennia of stories of persecution and brutality, 

the lifetimes of being victim to distortion,

let go inside my clenched cells and danced out,

down the inside of my thighs,

thundering through my loins,

into the tender light of His radiant shining, 

burning themselves home to love,

making a pyre of my body.

And all through the long day I danced 

between my fear and my longing, 

until the earth beneath me, 

dry and brittle, 

stick and rock, 

ant and spider, 

dry eucalyptus leaves crunching, 

became a nest of the most exquisitely soft holding, 

as I let go and let go, 

as He shone His love down upon me,

so that the clouds dancing in the sky 

became an extension of the sensations 

of Eros within me, 

the pulsing undulations of cosmic love-making

between Earth and Sky,

and me caught between.

And I was home,

and forgiven,

and held in the purity of this love,

with all my relations,

beneath the great dome 

of His magnificent sky.

And every gust of wind a caress, 

a raucous passion

as I let the golden light shine in,

to cleanse and purify

to awaken and ignite,

to conceive and unite,

to know of His love in my bones

and to trust the direction of His shining,

to remember His ever-presence 

and to calibrate my inner experience of life

to the vastness of my own lovedness.

Such a glorious homecoming,

through which I am safer to be more of me,

to trust the masculine as a great force of love, 

more enduring than any distortion of man,

is to feel that life is an experience in which to thrive, 

not just survive,

as I open each and every cell of my body 

to be nourished by His fire. 

Prints and Cards of Radiance available through my Etsy site www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce

Text and image © Lucy Pierce 2017

Some of Us

Some of us where born to the anesthetized or adrenalized or disembodied birthing mother, the raped or sleeping, energetically bound or gagged woman, whose imperative to survive had made her compliant to the world that asked her to be nothing. Some of us were the new born infant crying alone in the nursery crib, longing for the skin to skin, maternal gazing, oxytocic exchange that would ensure the essential quality of safety to enable the soul to fully incarnate into the body. Some of us knew the screaming hunger of a rigid feeding schedule, longing for the milk-filled breast that satiates the magnificent trauma of being helpless in a new born human body. The smell of plastic and disinfectant, the calculating gaze of doctors and nurses, replacing the pheromonal cocktail of euphoric intimacy and the exquisite gaze of life's claim upon us through the eyes of our new-born mothers. Instead she lay alone between starched sheets, the pheromonal dance of her scent, one of fear and shame, washed from her exhausted and disassociated body, cut and shaved and stitched back together, deodorized, as the immune-building elixir of her colostrum is poured down the sink. 

For some of us, the placenta, the organ of our primal unity, is disposed of as hazardous waste, incinerated, obliterated, leaving in its wake a gaping place in the ground where we were supposed to be received by our Great Mother the Earth. Home now, we slept alone in cots, in dark rooms, isolated from the human body that we depended upon completely for our survival, screaming with the rage of our need and not being embraced or crooned to, reassured by the beating of a bigger heart than our own. Some of us were taught that our only salvation was to eventually fall asleep with our needs unmet, a glowering inferno still burning within and so we took a step away from ourselves, each time further away, falling asleep, falling asleep, eating the poison apple of knowing our need for love would not be met. 

Some of us grew up knowing that it was not safe to have needs, not safe to ask for what we wanted, the hyper vigilance of being utterly dependent on the gaze and approval of people who had never fully received us in the way our souls required them to. For some of us the imperative to always please the other, to be good, to stay safe was carved deeply into our bodies, with the violence of fist or belt or words of shame and belittlement, it was so much easier to abide here now that we'd taken  so many steps away from ourselves, from the intensity of feeling, from the petrifying grip of betrayal, from that which we had compressed into the small space in our tiny bodies, in such a way that it was no longer inhabitable. Expressing the untenable situation of being a vast being that is not allowed to have feelings, the impossibility of that compression, and the disassociation that is the only pathway to relief. 

Some of us were told that you just need to be good and nice and pretty and you will receive praise and love, and you will be shamed and shunned if you display any feelings that are not welcome. Your sense of dislocation is not welcome, your hunger is not welcome, your anger is not welcome, your need is not welcome. Too painful to feel all the rage and fear and hope and robust vitality, panic and grief. Better to play it safe, pass under the radar, stay asleep. There are so many other ways to surrogate the intimacy, there is food and booze and drugs and TV and movies and fiction and shopping and work, always moving, always busy, always producing the empty output of futile consumerist imperatives....and there's sex....because all the stories say, it will all be redeemed when you meet a man who will love you, he'll love you in such a way as to redeem all past betrayals, you will meet and he will know you as the one from before and he will kiss you and you will wake up....but when eventually you meet him, it doesn't work like that because you are so asleep and so is he. 

You have both walked so far from that first longing to be met by love, to be fed by love, to nestle against the breast of love, your hunger has forgotten its source. It is so hard now, impossible even, to find that pure trust of being met when your heart reaches for nurture, so terrifying to allow oneself that degree of innocence, of vulnerability, so painful to inhabit that level of trust and presence to expect it, that which didn't come all the other times of your asking, so long ago in the plastic crib, in the dark room.

And so you give yourself to the only source that the world has granted you, and you take him into you, you take his unconscious pain inside, you take his ancient longing and his seething rage, deep inside of your sleeping body, you give yourself to him, unconscious and numb. You do not ask for the needs you aren't allowed to have in the voice that ran dry in that cot long ago. You drink him in as though he were the breast your mother withheld from you. But it doesn't taste of heart, and the milk doesn't fill you in the way it promises to. And your hunger grows deeper and more shallow every time.

This, so far from the truth of what a woman was born to be, unapologetically magnificent and wild and chaotic, deep feeling rivers of transformative emotion sweeping through life and changing its face, keeping us all clean and vital, ferocious in the primal instinct of Her love, abundant flooding of heart milk, unapologetic undulation of hip and belly and thigh, furious and protective, hilarious and ecstatic, compassionate and vastly forgiving, warm skin soothing, heart beat comforting, warm gaze receiving, deeply belonging to the profoundly sensitive animal of our sensate bodies, an abundant feast spilling forth to feed any hunger that would swell and rise and fall again in Her vast capacity to meet the need of our very own humanness. The squall of our hunger, the keening of our grief, the wail of our imperative to be loved so that we may in turn love the daughters that are born through our thighs, sweat gleaming with the labour of our sacrifice to life, the life-giving crimson of our blood, sleek and wet, the thick cream of vernix, alive on our baby's skin, our eyes bright and tear-filled with the miracle we are a part of, our bodies become the temple through which Gaia lives, through which love births itself upon the earth. We are awake and fierce in that primal meeting with the daughter, who will birth our granddaughters, who will birth our great granddaughters, who will make the world anew with the fierceness of their love. 

Our arms are the most tender of cradles, our breasts the most nourishing of wellsprings, welcoming consciousness to incarnate fully into the body, onto the earth, coming home to annihilate the forgetting of how magnificently powerful and deeply feeling we were all born to be.

I am rewriting my script, here and now, reaching into the wheel of time and redreaming the story. I am that baby, thick with vernix and the birthing blood from my mother's womb, we are not washed and sanitized, we linger together for an eternity, her arms around me like an impenetrable force-field of claim, the scent of her triumphant love, a reminder of my own divinity, and a belonging so vast, it stretches back to the beginning of creation......we swim for weeks, months, years on the oxytocic tides of each other's gaze, the milk flows freely and there is no need for hunger. My mother’s heart-beat is ever-present, a reassurance that I am safe to unfurl, to let the exquisite fineness of my senses be undiluted and pure in their meeting with the world, for I am whole and holy and I belong. My mother has buried my placenta into the Earth of our primal matrix and I am received there, recognized in my entirety as a daughter of the earth, at home in her skin, alive to her senses, an attuned extension of the primordial feminine principle of life, alive and awake on the Earth, fierce in my belonging to the truth of Her. 

This Mother of ours She says, "Wake up, my daughter, Wake up!"



Words and image © Lucy Pierce 2017

Self Love

Growing up as a young girl, self-love and sensual embodiment were not a part of my education, rather I was educated in the denial of these things. The cost of this appartied against the feminine nature was profound,  the loss of energetic availability to my very own body, an energetic absorption of so many things that were not ever true to me, a crippling assumption that there was something deeply wrong with me, with my body and my beingness.  My instinctual self was suppressed, the forming of addictions that numbed the pain of my own unlivedness and a myriad of beliefs formed in my psyche that compensated for the lack of love that my body experienced in my becoming. This was not conveyed to me in a malicious way, it was done very subtly, in a myriad of small, innocuous ways, because I was born to a culture of women whose feminine impulse, the impulse to love and to love fiercely, the impulse to protect, the impulse to pulse and sway and croon and keen, to shake and rage and transform was deep deep underground, in the subcutaneous layers of the suppressed self, sleeping, seething with rage, exploding to the surface in toxic and confusing ways. The dark face of the feminine has been stolen from my people.

Now, after years and years of unearthing, of digging and delving, of howling and weeping and crawling through the dark passages of self loathing that have festered in my mind, I am finding my way home to the crucible of self love. And from this place I am asking how much of myself can I allow myself to feel? How open can I allow myself to be? How deeply can I allow myself to drink and receive of that great earthly love, that vast cosmic love that is actually my true birthright and available to me in every living moment of my life? How exquisitely fine and magnificently beauty full can we know ourselves to be, individually and collectively in our world, not just on the outside but from the inside? How much capacity for love is available to us? How much love do we allow ourselves access to from the inner font of source, exquisitely nestled within our bodies, in our yonis, our wombs, our hearts, our throats, our mouths?

Deprived of my right to love myself, I grasp in the futile compulsion to fill myself from without, grasping at the teat of the mother/lover, ravenous and separated from the well-spring, hungering to know the source of love, seeking it from without, not knowing that the font springs eternally within, the infantilised woman, sold our own reflections and exiled from the internal experience of being. How can I come to dance this exquisite treasure of a body from within, as a sacred gifting of beauty between self and God/dess? Transcending the imperative of the external gaze, the judgemental paradigm of performance and critique and the desire for superficial validation. What does my song sound when it is a pure expression of experience, unique and raw and primal, the uluations of this sacred instrument, emptied of shame and expectation and illusions of unattainable perfection?

As women in this world, our exterior surface is taken from us by the external gaze and then sold back to us as a commodity, when all along we were free to fully own ourselves from the inside out, our natural beauty and belonging burgeoning from the source of creation within our very own beings. Self love, deep belonging in one's own skin as a woman in this world is an act of revolution against the colonisation of the feminine and of the body, by a brutally suppressive imperative. When we belong to ourselves we are powerful beyond measure, when we deeply own our own voices we cannot be controlled, when we are swayed by the cosmic energies and the pulse of the Mother's heartbeat we are autonomous co-creators, when we are home in our bodies we weave the sacred web of life and are connected to all things, and the putrid paradigm  cannot touch us there.



Text © Lucy Pierce 2017

When the Ungrieved for Past Besieges The Now

When The Ungrieved For Past Besieges The Now

Inside, deep, deep inside, there is the wounded one, her hurt so deep she has sabotaged all love in my adult life. She has been so hungry for something to come from the outside to sooth and to see and to attune and to somehow accept her and celebrate her, praise and validate her in a way she has not known how to do for herself.

And because this exultant claim of love does not come, or at least never enough of it, she has been filled not only with longing but also with rage, with bitter entitlement to some grand recompensatory gesture, some magnificent atonement for all the things she longed to have received but could not ask for, swaddled, bound, mute. 

She has been punitive and judgemental of any expressions of love towards her. It is never enough to appease the hungry and the rage-full one. And always she lives with the apposing centrifugal forces of the yearning for intimacy, immersion in a primal unified field of attunement, and a repelling of connection because it is not safe. She knows not how to trust what comes as love. Is it a wolf in sheep's clothing? The impulse to push away just as she pulls towards herself. 

It is her time now for me, I can go no further without meeting her in all her tyrannical complexity and narcissistic entitlement, and aching need and punitive protection and vulnerable longing for love. And it is no longer appropriate for that love to come from outside of myself, and thank the goddess, I've done enough work to know now that everything she needs I have within me. 

Enough of me knows how to mother and attune to other to meet her there in her deep dark cave, her shadowy crevices. I know my heart is a font of foreverness that is longing to flow to her, to retrieve her from the barren lands of her withholding. I have learnt enough about boundaries not to be subsumed by her. I can say no when it does not serve us for her to call the shots, but I can say yes to her longing and I can love her cleanly and true. 

I can wrap her and croon to her and tell her that after all she is okay, that she is enough, that there is a home for her here inside this body, that she is safe to grow from this infantile encapsulation, that all of me is safe for her to play in, to become. I can tell her that everything she needs is here within me, she need not be dependant for love on those who know not the depths of her longing. She can drink from me, from the vast elixir of star milk that flows through my being, from the deep primal vibration of our first mother. 

But I will also say that she will no longer make decisions for me in this life, no longer will she choose to put all her eggs in the basket of one who knows not how to give of their love. I know that she does this so that she can stay in the wound and perpetuate the pain and always have someone to blame for the lack, the poverty, so that there can always be someone there to play the role of the withholder, shaming and threatening and belittling her need. She perpetuates this for it's all she's known. Not any longer. 

She will no longer sabotage my initiations of power and emergent creativity, I will not believe her anymore that the world is not safe to share in, or that I am not safe to give of myself. I will take from her hands the reins of my power and evolve beyond her pain, and the great stuckness of her grief. I will reclaim from her the parentified imperative. She will receive her age-appropriate care so that she may return to her place in the line of my evolution, she will always be there but not as the wildcard that covertly governs the strings, but as the one, that received late, but not too late, the things she missed when she needed them most. 

I feel this great inward turning, an impulse to be still and to meet this one, for she is mine to meet and I will never be home if there is a part of me that believes my salvation dwells outside of my own being. So much longing and grasping and hungering and removing myself from the needful one. I am turning now to meet her, with all my heart.



Prints of the image available at my Etsy site.


Words and image © Lucy Pierce 2017

Prayer for Unity

Prayer For Unity                                    by Lucy Pierce

When I go to war with that which diminishes me, when I blame and shame and turn my back, when I take up arms and attack or retreat into bitterness and resentment, I make myself less and I stem the impulse to evolve through the tension of apposing forces, that great fertile ground where opposites meet and collide in a fecund hotbed of confusion and misunderstanding. Those who appear as my enemies are actually my greatest teachers in disguise, and when I seek to annihilate them I rob myself of my own awakening. I walk from the testing ground where understanding and respect have not yet flourished, where what is tender and fragile has not yet been seen underfoot, where the impulse to care for that which is other to us has not yet managed its own cultivation. 
How do I stay with that which triggers my pain? How do I tend to the rifts that dwell between those who have hurt or misrepresented me, so that growth can happen? How do I honour myself and also stay open to teaching the other of how it could be different, of what it is my soul aches and reaches  for in the night? I look at the world around me and I feel so tired of the rending apart of the fabric of life and family, of tribe and blood, of man and woman. I want to stay when my pain is screaming hate, I want to learn what it might look like to come to love that which has transgressed against me. 

And when the shape of our lives have become such that a part of our innocence of expression has been thwarted or crippled, by those who in their unconsciousness knew not the preciousness of our vulnerability, how then do we lean into the shape of that wounding so that we can again embrace the unique shape we have become, and give of ourselves with fullness and purpose, so that our wounds become our gift rather than the excuse for our withholding from what we are? For is not the inevitability of life's capacity to bestow pain as well as joy, only made toxic by our contracting around that pain? Is it not the holding on to the belief that we are not safe to offer our giveaway, where the true poison lies? How do I cultivate such a profound practice of self love that I cannot be belittled or betrayed for I am pristine and incorruptible, answerable only to myself? 

After the great dismantling of 2016, and as my partner and I enter a new year together, I find myself asking many questions. How can we weave a robust fabric from our lives, that will carry the bundle of our children into the future, that they will know that loving has less to do with compatibility and more to do with tenacity and the capacity to hold multiple truths in hand at any given moment, it has more to do with forgiveness than grudge, more to do with human fallibility, with wounds poulticed and bruises salved, than impeccable execution in the first place? 

The love between my man and I can be rugged and fierce, it has at times been a battle ground and there have been times when I have so wanted to make him wrong so that I could be right. How now do we stay with our hearts deepest truth, with our longing and hunger for each to be more than we have ever learnt to give? How do I ask for miracles of love from us, with our wounds and hurts? How do I honour the grand call to unity and intimacy and connection from my own battle scarred heart that has learnt so fiercely to protect itself from those it is supposed to love? 

How do we put down arms my love, and sit together, with the bloody carnage all around and learn what it is that peace might look like, an embrace of diversity, a growing into the qualities that we are most resistant of within ourselves, a courageous laying bare of the most tender of scars, most annihilating of fears, most punishing of illusions, and learn the deeper lesson, the great and holy grail of loving, the places that once were unlovable, caring for the parts that are most in neglect, severing our attachments to the most entrenched mechanisms of safety, burning on the pyre the illusion that  we are victims to one another, and seeing ourselves instead as great allies in the transcendence of pain, and the seeking and slow finding of belonging to our own selves in our own skins, belonging to one another in some mythic and also mundane way, but maybe most importantly belonging to this great cosmic movement of alchemical transmutation of suffering into blossoming, of separation into unity, of fear into love.

Cards and Prints of the image Prayer for Unity available on my Etsy store. www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce 


Words and image © Lucy Pierce 

Listening at the Loom of Her Love

“I feel that in our modern western culture we are taught as women to judge, compare, belittle and compete with one another to find our place in the world. Self-love and deep belonging to one's inner wisdom and to the awesome power of our sisterhood is scorned and we are taught to  seek our salvation in the futile and exhaustive commodified quest to become something that the impossible standards of the external gaze will find acceptable, that we might finally become beautiful and exceptional enough to be worthy of love. 

It has been through my experiences of being in women's circles and partaking in festivals like Seven Sisters, where the deep primal power of the collective feminine has shown itself to me, as a world-changing, earth-quaking, truth-making force that is an imperative evolution at this time. It is not always comfortable as we truly learn to belong to ourselves and to the tribe that is our community of sisters, but it feels so very deeply gratifying to feel the jubilant and joyful celebration of love as we open, teach, guide, learn and reveal the truth of our reciprocal connectivity, and that together we are so much stronger than when we stand apart.”

This is a new image I painted for the call to artists for the Spirit Weavers Gathering 2017. I am feeling deeply honoured to have been selected as a finalist and very grateful for all those who supported me with their votes. I hope to make it over to this festival one day.

I now have prints and cards available of this image on my Etsy store 

www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce

Words and image ©Lucy Pierce 2016

A Water Prayer for Standing Rock

I feel so present at this time to all the peoples gathering together at Standing Rock. That place feels so very far away from where I am, the landscape and people so different in so many ways, and yet I feel a resonance of hope and truth, reverberating across the planet to rest in my faraway heart, from that potent impulse to gather and protect, that is happening there as a stand against the proposed oil pipeline. This action stands as a symbol for all people, the people of Earth, standing up across borders and boundaries and speaking with deep strength, power and love to the destructive paradigm of futile hunger and ravaging greed, which would desecrate our sacred Earth, plundering her resources for the benefit of an elite and the detriment of an entire ecosystem. 

There are a thousand ways we could all be standing and joining together in this way, in each and every country to put our collective voice to this story, of the ancient and wise people who listen and honour their Earth, threatened by the mindless consumption of a brutalising and disconnected force of consumption. My own country has its own vast history of persecution of its First Nations people, desecration of their sacred sites and ceremonial lands, and brutalisation of the environment we all share. 

In my dream last night I received a teaching about water. In the dream I was struggling to carry a very heavy object which held within it a great knowledge, a precious but somehow impenetrable information that the people who had gathered upstream required for their council. The object was far too heavy for me to lift, or push or roll, across the muddy ground, up hill and down, across the land that stretched out vast and immeasurable before me. But in the dream I realised, in a euphoric epiphany, that I just had to get it down to the river, down to the water's edge that nestled in the valley below, and that from there the knowledge and information would be received by everyone through the water. Once the knowledge was in the water, it would touch every living thing on the planet. 

On waking I thought about this conductive quality of water, about its connectivity and the way it has no boundary, that it permeates and cycles and transcends separation. Water has no territorial boundary, it is always in deep communication with itself and with all life, the ocean with the cloud, the river with the sea, the mist and the dew, the lake and the rain, the tear and the blood. It is everywhere, and essential for our survival and it communicates and responds to the forms of our thoughts and our prayers. 

And so today I descended from my hilltop to the valley and the river's edge, and I sent a little woven offering, of grasses and blooms, feathers and butterfly wings, a raft of my prayers upon the river of my far away home, to the people gathered at Standing Rock across the globe, across deserts and cities and forests and prairies, across oceans and skies, and also to the people and the land and the water and the creatures of my own country and every country. I send a prayer in gratitude for your work of protecting our planet, in solidarity for your integrity as a people working so deeply with the harmony of Earth and its mystery, giving thanks for your courage and honour. I send a prayer that the mindless desecration may cease to be the dominant paradigm in this world so on the edge of itself, a species so close to losing its own magnificence. 

Standing Rock, I add my voice to yours through the ever present alchemy of our shared water in this vast biosphere. I trust that my prayers will be heard, in the lapping of your rivers or springs, or in the settling of the morning dew upon the gentle Earth, as she cradles your feet, or the curve of your resting cheek, as the sun rises on another day together on this planet. Blessings.