Liminal Entreaties

Liminal entreaties

to knowings 

and understandings 

that blaze in their absence, 

ungraspable, 

they gawp in their vacuumed void, 

swimming just out 

of the colonised mind's eye, 

the twinkle of luminescent waters 

when the moon is dark.

The capacity for embedded thinking

thwarted by generations

of necessitated blindnesses. 

So fragile a willingness 

to be with the unknown 

to believe the unfathomable.

So easily overwhelmed by the petrifying belief

in my own annihilating seperateness, 

the insidious hegemony of insignificance,

the frozen landscapes of self inflicted 

and culturally commodified shame. 

So rigid and unyielding the scaffolding 

of my flimsy mind.

Can it surrender the banal violence 

the flaccid madness 

of it's own perceived innocence? 

And yet I turn toward 

the uncomfortable unrest 

of the alchemising body 

and it's deep feeling sense,

it's generous availability to metabolise 

the indoctrinated traumas 

of bloodline,

the weaponised conquest 

of the wildlands of interiority, 

the brutalising purification, 

the violent homogenisation, 

the agreigeous deforestation,

the disinfected sterility 

of modernity consciousness.

It is too easy to feel nothing 

of our organic inheritance, 

our mytho-poetic dowry, 

so easy to numb our exquisite burden 

to become. 

How do I court the new and ancient bacterium

of infectious connectivity, 

the creeping mycelium

of informational pollutants, 

linking past knowings to present delirium, 

broken trust to healed fecundity, 

barren ground to storied canopy. 

Like a spider weaving a web 

across millennia and continent, 

across oceanic current and feathered flyways

and groaning land masses 

of rootedness and migration, 

across extinguished languages 

and sacred undying flames 

of rhythm and pulse,

remembering. 

Like the tendriled strands 

on the grandmother's loom, 

on the grandfather's lute,

braiding starlight and lichen,  

birdsong and bone 

and the brail of ancestral bequeath. 

And I trust the bodies edge 

of comfort and pain,  

emptying and filling 

and emptying again.

I trust it more than the numb coldness 

of complicit acquiescence.

And knowing that I inhabit a body 

that is so shrouded and cushioned 

by layers and layers of protection,

in all it's enabled whiteness,

knowing I dwell not at the frontline,

I push past what feels safe, 

and all the world that ever was is here

and I let myself burn inside, 

break and flood and unfurl inside, 

bloom and unravel and dissolve inside,

occuping the liminal edge 

of the putrid pain, 

the hollow guilt,

the ragged shame,

the corrosive rage, 

the harrowing grief, 

the raucous desire,

asking to be beheld,

embodied, 

emblazoned 

with our long forgotten love, 

with our once remembered unison

so that a new world may seed 

in the nourished ground

of our abandoned obedience to shiny surfaces,

to relinquish the vacuous polishing 

of hollow identity.

May my body become the alter 

through which life prays.

My soul the passage of birth,

the cave, portal, cairn, burial mound

through which peace is born. 

How much innocent life must die, 

before my mind collapses, 

and my body, 

now soft and horizontal as soil 

is seeded and pollinated anew,

with wild ancient 

and tender fertile 

prayers of unending dream

of remedy 

and solace.

Vast Multiplicity

If, for most of my days 

alive upon this earth

I had been swallowed 

by an impotent collapse,

how would I rise 

into generative purpose

without abusing the animal softness 

of my body.

How do I also hold to the wisdom 

of that collapse 

that was something about gentleness 

and a longing for truth.

How do I slow, 

in the face of a harrowing regime 

of mindless obeyance to busyness, 

to learn to listen to the whispered wisdoms 

that sing inside 

the endless temple of soma?

How do I learn to listen?

If I have been taught to override,

with mind and vacant distraction,

how do I learn to slow and revere 

the voices that howl and moan, 

that ululate and keen 

in the holy resonance chamber,

the unruly menagerie

of my own interiority?

To drop to my knees and scry 

the star studded waters 

for hidden pleasure, 

treasured devotion, 

ancient hungering.

If I have been raised to suppress, 

to colonise and civilise 

the wild gestures,

the harrowing dance 

the tender beseeching

of my instinct,

how do I flower the great inner ear 

of my embracing becoming?

To seek and to coax 

and to patiently unfurl 

the tightly curled impulse 

of my wholeness?

How do I make peace 

with the driven tyrants 

that drive me forward 

in mechanised defence?

Driving me beyond my innate need 

for care and regeneration, 

for tenderness and communion, 

gestation and grief.

How do I dismantle the harrowing dictatorships 

that preside over my own body being?

How do I give equal weight 

to each of the subjugated voices 

that call in the dark chasm 

of my unconscious sub-terrain 

so that when I speak 

my voice is a generous multitude 

of possibilities?

That when I look I am seeing 

from the eye of both the bird and the worm, 

the blazing sun and also 

the dark eye at the centre of the heavy earth, 

from the driven imperative 

and the still reflection, 

from the silent 

and the beseeching both?

A receptive listening, 

an enduring council 

to the biodiversity of body speak, 

to the ecology of wisdoms, 

that swirl and erupt 

in the deep mystery 

of my own vast multiplicity.

Unfathomable Care

Fierce protection, unfathomable care and unequivocal tenderness 

for all the precious children of our world.

May we Centre the needs of the children,

all our children.

May we enable the capacity for care to all the mothers and fathers, 

who raise the world in peace. 

Fierce protection, unfathomable care and unequivocal tenderness, 

for all the bereaved and endangered, 

the wounded and grieving of the world. 

Fierce protection, unfathomable care and unequivocal tenderness, 

for all those on this precious earth 

who have been subjugated, oppressed, displaced, brutalised, 

decimated by forces of violence and domination.

We must stop harming and killing the children and the earth of their future.

Now. 

Let us begin to forge a way forward, 

where there may be 

fierce protection, unfathomable care and unequivocal tenderness 

for all the precious children 

of our world.

Reflections On Clay and the Craft, from Artisans Week 2023

RELECTIONS ON CLAY AND THE CRAFT FROM ARTISANS WEEK 2023

Working with clay has been for me a making and a shaping, a breaking and a recreating of my mindbody being across the span of a lifetime. I dare to imagine that if I have been made into a vessel of usefulness, it is only through this lived relationship with the material across time. Somehow drawn, as a child, as a young person to it’s dark, dense matter, it’s grounding solidity and forgiving receptivity, adaptability. I unconsciously gravitated towards it’s density, myself so ephemeral, tentative unformed, I somehow became more solid and real with the animacy of this malleable matter in my hands. I somehow was allowed an agency to impact and imprint the receptive substance, to mark make and autonomously shape and wilfully engage with creation in a way that my timidity inhibited in my other experiences of engagement with life, with others, with the world. 

Somehow it felt safe, in a way I otherwise didn’t, to matter in this powerful way to the clay, to be in dynamic relationship with a force of reciprocity. It was safe that my agency and will, my gesture and attention could matter to the clay in a way I couldn’t allow in my human relationships. I could let the matter be changed by me, and then somehow sense myself as someone, as something that mattered. With the clay I was afforded the opportunity to practice over and over again what it meant to be a human being. 

Making with clay can be a heart altering evolution as the plasticity, elasticity, maliability, receptivity of the material, alchemises into something much less forgiving. As the moisture departs from the material we are left with an exquisite brittleness, so easily ruptured, cracked, shattered. Again and again we face the loss of our notions of control over outcome, of our attachment to perfection, again and again we must meet this capacity to hand over to chance and the sometimes necessity of letting go. 

We experience the tender gift of loss and the transmutations of grief so repetitively if we continue to work with clay for any amount of time, with so many opportunities to surrender what we thought mattered, to forgo our attachment to perfection, to the reflection of wholeness, that we must learn a deep abiding attention, our hands becoming sacred vessels for both the capacity for life-tending and also death-wielding. We begin to titrate, to practice meeting, with each blessed mistake, each careless gesture that lands with loss of cohesion, the full spectrum of our own effectiveness, the weight of our own ability to impact creation, to tend and to harm, to birth and to cull, to bloom and to prune our experience. We practice death and loss again and again, building the elasticity, the plasticity, the malleability of the hearts capacity to feel. 

From dense, dark, wet, heavy matter, through fragile, dry, brittle precariousness we must now meet the fire, an alchemical agent of otherness that we must hand over our precious creations to. Again we risk loss, but also the perilous joy of surrendering our carefully tended creations over to a force far greater than our own intentions. Again we must meet the tragic surprise, as well as the happy one, as what we have moulded with the willingness of our hands is made other, by the harnessing of powerful forces.

 

 It took a long time for me to find the capacity to meet the fire in this way, to let my relationship to the soft body of me be changed by that much power, to become brave enough to risk disintegration and loss, and in so doing come to know myself as an agent of, a servant to, greater forces of change and transmutation, forces that hold the capacity again to destroy, but also the agency to transform the dissolvable material into something strong and durable, something of purpose and usefulness. The unstable porosity gains a structural integrity and a useful impermeability when it meets with the fire, a gift for containing and protecting precious content, blessed bounty, the creation of receptive space with the capacity to hold. The vessel becomes a carrier of usefulness to community when it has met with the life altering ferocities of fire and survived whole and intact. 

 As makers we become changed by this embodied knowing, that it is only in meeting and engaging with these alchemising forces, which hold ultimate power over life, that we are forged into something useful and worthy of purpose. It solidifies a formidable trust and a holy surrender. It fosters a glimpse, an insight into how the forces that are greater than ourselves shape us across time, that we are made other by the furnaces of life and our engagement with the archetypal powers. That it is only in the risking of love and loss, that we become a vessel useful to the world. 

Clay has taught me to risk mattering, to learn what it means to care, to lose, to transmute loss into a deeper purpose. It has taught me. It has humbled me to know I am at the mercy of formidably agential  and alchemical forces, and that I must risk dancing with them, at the risk of being burnt in order to become more than I had ever imagined I could be, transmuted by otherness, enriched and incarnated by reciprocal relationship with earth, with air, water and fire.  Clay has taught me to risk mattering, to learn what it means to care, to lose, to transmute loss into a deeper purpose. It has taught me. It has humbled me to know I am at the mercy of formidably agential  and alchemical forces, and that I must risk dancing with them, at the risk of being burnt in order to become more than I had ever imagined I could be, transmuted by otherness, enriched and incarnated by reciprocal relationship with earth, with air, water and fire. 

Bone Crunching Grief

About a month ago I had a dream that I had lost my child. It was conveyed to me that he had died, but I felt nothing, it was as though I was split off from what that meant and it was just words. Then all of a sudden, the full knowing of what had happened, of what I had lost landed in my body, slammed into my being like a freight train, shook my very bones. In the dream I sunk to my knees and wailed, “He has gone, he has left us, he is gone!” In the dream my hands slammed into the rocky earth until they bled. I woke choked and terrorised, tears on my face, my heart pounding, my throat clenched with grief, to lie stunned and terrified in the thin dawn light, slowly finding my way back to breath and the knowing that my son was safe in his bed. 

In the days since this dream, since the troubles in Israel and Gaza began, I have been swept into a maelstrom of busyness, my days mightily consumed by the fulsome work of my life, raising children, trying to do my own small part in an aggrieved and conspicuously wounding world, trying always to keep my head above water in a culture of safety and privilege, that is never the less shrouded in the brutally patriarchal and capitalistic culture that has colonised humanity.

And then there it is, the bone-crunching, gut-wrenching knowing of what it is to lose a child, one beloved child, even if only in a dream. How many mothers are left childless now, in those lands so far from my own? How many motherless, fatherless, on this beautiful planet that we seem not to know how to treasure and share. How many aggrieved bodies are being wracked right now by those bone crunching sobs of loss and horror at the stolen life, the treasured gifts of heart and soul and spirit, of blood and bone and care, unfathomable care, desecrated by the blindness of violence and war. 

Mother, grant me the grace to be big enough, alive enough, to grieve these children, all of these children as I would grieve my own. Help me to embody the knowledge that all the children are sacred, they are each a cherished arising, a holy unfurling from the umbilicus of our shared world, of our beautiful earth. They are each and every one, the sacred body that Earth bestows unto herself, that she may know herself as the love that she is, the unfathomably tender love that she is. How far we have come from that love. May I know in my bones how precious each life is, how unfathomable each loss. May we stop killing our children, may we cherish the lives of all of our children, may we find another way forward. 

Image: After the Fire 2010

HearthFire- An Imbolc Offering

 

An Antidote to Shame

This is a love poem to a way of witnessing that is an antidote to shame.

You come like a quenching rain 

on ground so dry its brittleness is a harsh bark, 

a ragged ache, 

an ugly wrenching.

You come from beyond time, 

from the place before the pain gripped 

and cut across the expanse of life, 

as though it were there right from the very beginning, 

crippling, 

all there ever was.

You come like generosity at last,

like tenderness and permission 

and a leaning in, 

towards what is small 

and screaming inside.

You come like a thousand arms hugging 

the split off atrocities 

I house in my bones and in my blood.

They all sing now in the warmth of this regard,

their unsung songs of forgotten power 

and formidable beauty.

I tremble and quake in the strength of them

stretching inside of me.

The fullness of me, 

awkward and teetering on the edge 

of a deeper wholeness 

than I had known was possible before. 

What will I do now, with all this budding grist?

How will I move now, that I am walking closer to myself?

You come like a mirror of care, 

teaching me to expand and to receive 

that which shame made small and forbidden.

You come like a dark matter of love

filling all the spaces between 

the obtuse injuries.

Healing scar tissue, 

recalibrating cellular potential, 

to an orientation of fiercely embedded belonging. 

Interiority blooms in the wake of this witness.

My voice resounds inside now

with the intonation of this teaching,

of this gracious humour of cherishing,

this profundity of kindness.

Thank you

Thank you

Thank you 

Deepest gratitude to David Bedrick’s profound work on Unshaming. 🌿🙏🏼🌿

Wool and Bloom

Today not much is making sense.

The way I am made seems unfit for this world,

even for this life, 

this, my very own life.

And my heart hurts 

in ways it has not yet found words for 

or meaning from, 

and the hurt is a river that rises to my eyes.

Over and over again the heart-hurt 

arising to my eyes, 

tenaciously arresting 

the impulse to distract.

And there it flows like a river,

a trickle, a stream

and I am trying not to make this wrong, 

the pain of the not fitting, 

the not understanding how to rise 

and reach and meet 

the ask of my days 

and the ask of all the souls 

that have woven their way 

into my warp and weft, 

how to meet them all 

and still have something left for me? 

Still have this day,

that pulls me in a thousand ways and yet, 

the only thing that makes sense 

is to ball the skein of worsted wool, 

the deep earth tone a nourishing, 

it sings somehow between womb and heart,

and my hands circle the ball over and over 

and the long loops are gathered in 

to come to rest 

as cohesive handful. 

The gum blossoms are here with me also,

as ally,

fugitively gathered from the roadside,

in yesterday’s harrowing.

The gum blossoms gather in 

the tears of the bruised heart 

to their own honeyed bosoms 

as I wind the wool. 

Their honeyed bosoms, 

so effulgent and kind, 

so silvered green, 

so generous in their witness. 

And the clouds are a blanket on the world,

concentrating melancholy like a muted prayer,

like my heart is muffled 

by the blanket of it’s ineffable grief, 

an autumnal titration,

heavy and tenaciously indwelling. 

And through the river of tears, 

through the honeyed blossom, 

through the warmth of wool 

and the work of hands, 

through the muffled cloud 

I seek to find my way, 

not knowing, 

just gently loving 

and seeking the simple balm 

of beauty 

and tears.

Rue

My little family is traversing a very tender threshold as we seek to deeply listen, with our treasured four legged friend, to come to an understanding of when just the right time might be to say the long goodbye, as an aggressive and largely untreatable osteo-sarcoma grows behind her eye, making her increasingly uncomfortable. 

Despite her conspicuous  unfriendliness towards small people and other dogs, to her human friends Rue has been so fiercely loving, loyal and constant. She is supremely fond of a good belly rub and in only the recent past, has been passionate in her pursuit of any hurtled sticks that came her way.  She has however had a propensity to bury whole, expensive blocks of organic butter in the vegetable garden if the butter was left unattended on the kitchen bench outside of human eyesight. 

As a dog with a history of early trauma, some of our wounding’s delivered by the same hand, it is an ineffable mystery to me, the way that her unwavering presence, her steady breathing and warm pressure by my side at night, has performed such a gentle and slow miracle on my fraught nervous system. So many times over the years, her tenacious love, and longing for connection and care, would restore to me a simple and wholesome sense of compassionship and belonging, in my own sometimes dysregulated states, over the sometimes troubled decade we have shared our lives together, side by side. That was supposed to read companionship, but I have chosen to hold to the misspelling of compassionship, because I like it, and maybe that’s actually also an accurate description of what was happening. Together we made a boat of compassion to sail the stormy waters in, together. The rhythms and the pulsing tides of our shared breathing, our synchronised heartbeats, a healing space of sorts.

Not always an easy dog, there have been a few times over the years when I wondered if I could hold to her. Her fear-aggression has been a sometimes mortifyingly problematic affliction, that has blessedly been nullified by the fact that we could offer her 60 acres of bush to roam upon, without the risk of her attacking someone else’s unassuming hound. But even this, became a deep soul lesson for me, a continuous confrontation with my own intrapsychic fear of aggression, of animal instinct, and the sometimes misguided impulse to protect and defend when we are afraid and uncertain, stirring an unavoidable inquiry of what it means to be an angry and hurt female. Of how trauma shapes us, leaves us irrevocably changed. Of how we can adapt and appease some of these injuries with our presence and love and careful attunement. And at the very least, how we can hold to each other in the places that are challenged and fraught, maybe even broken within. Each to each, we have done this for each other, profoundly. 

Her fathomless love, despite sometimes seeming burdensome, has been such a healing and generative force of ballast and strength and tender restoration to my mind body system through many very difficult years. And now watching my three children grieve so beautifully for her, seeing the love they carry, bone deep, for this canine creature of our hearts, kin and kith, ally and protector, is so exquisitely sad and beautiful. To witness the depth of their sorrow, and so poignantly, the depth of their love, and the sense that Rue has come to embody something, to carry something for, or of, each of us in our time here together. My son in particular has resurrected Rue with his exuberant love and claiming. 

We are all doing such a good job of feeling it all, as we say goodbye, to fathom what it might be to release her from suffering when the time arrives. 

I imagine her chasing that one last stick up into the vast blue expanse of sky. I wonder whimsically if she is going to join my childhood companion Clover, up there in the big muddy paddock in the sky, in some other mysterious realm where dogs frolic and howl and chase and scratch and eat and jump and lick and have their bellies rubbed forever, in a timeless place? But if this is all there is, this one precious life, then I can assuredly say, that Lady Queen Ruesophine has been profoundly loved and cherished by her human kin, and that the shape of her sable liveliness, her dark velvet ears, her hazelnut eyes, the lovely thick ruff at the nape of her neck, are indelibly etched in our hearts forever. So grateful are we for the doggy beauty of her in our lives. 

And so we are here praying to the great mystery and all the gods and goddesses of the inbetween.

Artisan's Week

Artisan's Week

We are nestled here between mountains. Our valley nestled like a bowl, a vessel, between mountains. The vessel of our valley is full of goodness, clean air and water, fertile earth, all the growing things, all the living beings that feed from the growing things. Deeper down beneath us there nestles the clay and minerals and oxides and further down still, the fire that lives inside our precious Earth. Above us during the day there shines the fire of our life-giving sun and at night the glow of our moon, the mysterious twinkle of the stars. The rain gently falling, or fervently falling, filling the river that flows past us, carrying our stories to the sea. Mists rise, as springtime birds suckle nectar from the rich blooms that abound. All these elements coalesce around us, pulling forth the seed, furling forth the plants, the leaf, stem, pod, flower, that feed the animals, that give the fibre, that feed and nourish the human, that make the medicines to tend the ailments of body, that craft the paper and dye the yarn, that become the wood that is crafted into precious objects of utility and beauty, the wood that fuels the forge, that feeds the fire, that sinters the clay, the clay dug from the deep, the metal refined by the hand from the minerals deep beneath. Earth made anew, transformed by the maker.

This week we have been blessed to journey with our elders of craft and amidst all the making there were threads of story, weaving through the loom. The work making meaning in the heart and restoring wholeness to the spirit. We spoke of the colour of stars and the colour of flames, the mythological underpinnings of the origins of Iron, it’s great gift to life and also our need to be vigilant to it’s potential for harm. We sensed the imperative of a deepening responsibility, to offer ballast to the technologies we grow in our evolving capacity to craft complexity from raw matter. Our need for greatest care and attention, and allowing the thing between our hands to matter enormously for a moment, even in the risk of its breaking. We spoke of the moving from what is known, through to what is imagined but feared, to the new place of knowing and integrating embodied wisdom, the work of our hands leading the way, the limitations of the material providing the framework, the bounds of our imaginations offering the scope. 

I could feel such goodness in these people, young and old. How we have been crafted ourselves by place and by earth and the hard work of the hands, to become humans who bare gifts for our tribe, humble gifts of understanding and transmutation, of purpose and nourishment, of presence and patience and perseverance. The wood workers bending together with gentle humour as they work, coaxing the material towards a new wholeness, a new goodness in the shape of a stool. Heads bowed together at the loom, reimagining the warp and the weft of our patterning. The synchronised striking of hammer to copper & iron, the music made by this shared making. This music serenading the fierce concentration required in finding centre, within the malleable clay at the potters wheel. The quiet toil of the binding of books, creating worlds in which future words and images will unfurl our future. The nourishing sustenance of food, alchemised to please and satiate the taste buds, the eyes, the belly, the wholeness of being.

Materials coalesce in cross pollinations of modality. Copper hammered to form vessel, copper in the rich green of the glaze that seals the rough rawness of clay, refining. Alumina as mordant to dye red cabbage yarn, Alumina fusing with Silica to  sinter the clay that it may hold water and bear food, foods rich in minerals, drawn from the earth by water through roots. The pots smouldering in sawdust, wood shavings, from wood sculpted, drawn, whittled, carved. Wood burnt to hone charcoal for the fierce heat that will melt the metal, fruits grown from wood harvested for feasting, artfully prepared and tastefully seasoned, paper crafted from wood, made vessel for meaning, wood grown from Earth. Metal extracted from Earth, Iron in the fire in the forge, Iron in the clay, pinky-red between the potters hands, iron in the pigments that paint the leaf and blossom that cover the books that tell the stories of our makings, Iron as mordant for dying yarn, the plantain rich in Iron to nourish our blood. Metal as the Potters wheel, wood as the spinners wheel, wooden and metal tools, needle, hammer, tong, axe, pan, knife, block, cup. Our hands as the tool of Earth, the living tool transmuting itself into ever more various forms.

The materials of the earth offer themselves up and are braided together by our song of creation. The wood of the wheel that spins the wool, the metal of the shears forged in fire, that harvest the fleece of sheep, the sheep grown fat from spring grasses and weeds grown of earth, as we are nourished by her gentle harvest. Earth that is dug and  turns the bowl to hold the food that feeds the folk. Earth that refined becomes the Iron that shears the sheep.  It cycles around, again and again, this great spiralling reciprocity, this noble generative force of our living. This earth that feeds us in every way, that nourishes us and offers us this bountiful array of ways in which we may ennoble ourselves with hand and heart, ensouling matter. 

Within this lies the alchemizing ingredients of disappointment and heartbreak. The broken pot, the burnt finger, the splintered wood, the arduous grappling with the sometimes unfathomable distance that lies between the imagined outcome and the thwarted reality. But I see the goodness that this questing has grown in us, has forged in us as makers. The way these materials have shaped us and made us a worthy instrument of this living celebration of life, that we may be bent by an unseen hand to transform and transmute raw matter, into useful tool with which to purposefully toil, into structures, fragrant with beeswax and linseed oil, that offer comfort and shelter for our weary bones, into humble vessels with which to contain our nourishment and quenching, into cloth with which to cover and warm and adorn the vulnerability of our bodies, the food that feeds both body and soul, the balms and tinctures that heal and cure when care is called for, the paper and tomes that carry the words of praise, the accumulated wisdoms of this grand adventure that is life upon this land. That is life within this bowl, this vessel of a valley encircled by mountains. 

We have laboured long and hard and strong at this work. We have made beauty and purpose. We have been humbled by our limitations of capacity and material, we have been wearied in the most satisfying of ways. We have been forged in the fire, shaped at the wheel, woven on the loom, whittled by the maker, hammer, shuttle, bowl, knife, tong, needle, drill, wheel, anvil, spoon, spindle, blade, flame, air, water, earth, ether.

  Images and Text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022