December 29, 2013

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

December 11, 2013

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


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She Meets Herself                                                                Lucy Pierce

Creation

As an artist I am Midwife.
The imagery calls,
whispers from the cavernous realm
of the formless place
and I am charged with the task
of engendering this birthing into being.
Asked to bare witness
to this emergence of becoming.
To turn up and be present
and ride the waves.
Wiping the sweat and the blood,
accommodating with my hands
and heart and words
the inseparable passage of ecstasy and pain,
of resistance and release.
Sometimes sitting still in the quiet corner,
in the dim-light of the pre-dawn,
in the hush, of the eye,
of that magnificent storm,
as creation navigates its own
thunderously graceful
pathway into existence.
Sometimes, and more often than not,
being the boundary that says
“Yes you can, and lets get on with it!”
Scouring the psyche
for the point of most resistance
and laying it bare;
A gratitude deep and wide
for the baring witness
to something holy of spirit,
that breaks the heart
ever more open
to receive
and reciprocate.

As an artist I am Mother.
Called upon to carry these vessels of life
upon my hip, upon my shoulders,
even when they get really heavy;
Cupping them with my heart
when they look awkward,
ferocious, raw, ugly even,
loving them still;
Suckling my charge in the night hours,
enduring the animal instinct
of love so strong
it’s an effort not to devour
that softly solid little form,
tucked up in the crook of my arm,
in the hollow space
between my soft, round belly
and my thighs,
making do with a kiss and a squeeze;
Accepting the weight
of being bound to something,
inextricably, forever;
Suffering the surprise
and sometimes embarrassment,
when something that was once inside of me,
so utterly intimate and private,
moves out into the world
in a way so unexpectedly independent.
Revealing so much more
than my own censored heart might condone.
The child, rambunctious and proud,
demanding and difficult,
where I am timid and afraid;
Allowing my eyes to shine with the hope
that my love so desperately elicits,
even when the world seems an unlikely
and dangerous place
to house these delicate futures.

As an artist I am Child,
So very, very small and new
in a world so very big.
Rooting around like a grub in the dark,
looking for something real and comforting.
So hungry for the succor
of that sweet, warm and mighty breast,
and the light-filled fluid
filling my immense vulnerability to the core
with an equal measure of love and faith.
The circle of my mother’s arms
such a tender haven,
from my endeavoring
to know a world
I am mostly blind to,
so ill-equipped for,
clumsy and mute,
my skin too soft,
in the face of my task.
And yet the spirit that spurs me forth
into that other vast beating I hear beyond me.
A tenacious drive arising
to learn and to grow
and to become more of who I am,
but also becoming somehow less;
Delighting in what I know
and thankfully ignorant of what I do not,
least the path seem insurmountable.
Trusting in the things that cannot be spoken,
and at the mercy of the goodwill of the universe,
with a prayer that nurture
is indeed the guiding principle
after all.
It is the part of me that says
“Can’t I stop now?”
“Do I really have to finish?”
“Will you carry me?”
“How much further to go?”
The devastating suspicion
that I am nothing
and worth naught;
The precious and dangerous part
that does not know where I end and you begin;
The part that has not yet learnt
to separate my will from the will of God;
Creating secret hiding places
for the precious things that do not fit,
hiding them so well it takes a lifetime
to find my way back to the heart of them
and claim them
truly as my own.

As an artist I am Lover.
Endeavoring to allow
the romance of the universe
to ravish me utterly,
to open me so completely to the majestic
and sometimes terrifying
and sometimes mundane seeming,
Other.
To choose to leap
off that death defying cliff
even when I am tired
and feeling the tantalizing pull
to comfort and safety.
To gather up my too many muffins in the belly,
worn-out nippled,
weary-boned body
and say yes to you,
forever and always.
Seduce me even in the quiet, dark corners
I have thought to preserve only for me,
Even in the places I go to retreat
from loves unflinching gaze
and to revel in my wounds;
Even these I must surrender back to you,
so that you may fill me utterly,
my mouth, my eyes, my ears ,
my yoni, my womb, my heart,
squeezing out all my separation,
all my withholding.
Making me new, like a clean sheet of paper,
awaiting the dawn,
awaiting the pen and the brush,
to be born anew as form
and the familiar;
The wooing awake
the ocean-deep yearning of the heart,
braving the weight of that longing;
Whispering the haunted mating song
to the barren void
again and again
until the ground gives way
and I am swept away
into that turbulent current,
alive again
and love;
The echoes of the aching
like a bruise
receding from the skin,
remnants of the pleasure of it
remnants of the pain of it.
And oh, the sweet pulsing honey-love,
ululation of union
where I forget
who I am.

Too often I hide,
I turn and forget,
I pretend that it does not serve me
to surrender my hard won position
to the current of chaos
forming itself into grace.
I find that I must offer
more and more of myself,
as an appeasement to God,
the ransom of my being,
for the bone-crunching,
heart-wrenching gift
that life offered me
when she gave me a body
and set my heart to pounding.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

December 7, 2013

A Picture and Two Poems


The Power to Open                                Lucy Pierce

The Caged and the Free

I am feeling the fractious edge,
the tight-rope pledge,
fingernails slipping from the cliff-face
of the part that wants control,
that baulks and fusses at the chaos
that the true living of life elicits,
the part that knows not how to surrender.
The walled garden I have built of my heart
feels in danger of crumbling down
and the one who built it so very long ago,
is squirming in the shadows of that fortress
begging me not to risk it’s demise, she is raging,
while the great fist of the universe knocks from the outside,
knock, knock, like a great muted chime.
Although from out there, in the free-fall of the universe
it is a brittle sound,
tap, tap, as though it were only a fragile shell after all
separating me from that vast chaotic love
where the Other shines and the boundaries dissolve.
Inside, everything is slightly muted and dull,
there is only me here,
safe from harm and hurt
but utterly alone and so hungry for you
and the radiant death of my safety.
So hungry that it has become the gnawing anger,
that feels that it could kill,
the unconditional isolation deep within,
repelling love like a force field,
keeping me safe, keeping me separate.
She tells me that it must be so
for me to hold what I hold, it must be so,
the impeccable control,
the safety of a protected heart
but I know this truth is also a lie and a forgetting,
for the part of me that has always danced
in the great beyond grows.
She is remembering
what it is that happens
when we forget that we are alone and separate.
We are remembering together,
the caged and the free,
on the fractious edge of becoming.

Lucy Pierce ©2013


Rip Tide

Her body suffers, atrophies
and when she looks she sees
that her heart is a caged thing.
A great wall defending it,
for though she gives her heart,
she never gives it fully, so afraid she is.
She seeks within for the touch
that would disarm this protection
for she knows she must give it all now,
that life will no longer tolerate less from her.
And the riptide is turning
and churning
and the slow dismantling
sends wild currents
free flowing through her channels,
surging fear from a thousand quivers withheld,
flooding tears from a thousand hurts untended.
A vast fear of dying descends,
a terror for her children left behind
and the great barricade
that surrounds her heart
is falling now,
more to give, more to feel,
for she holds the power to open
even when the tide carries her so far out
on the mysterious sea
of her own withholding unleashed,
that she wonders if she will ever
feel the good solid Earth
beneath her feet again.

Lucy Pierce ©2013

December 4, 2013

Creative Inheritance

Welcome to Week Three 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

Today's topic is Creative Inheritance



The  home where I grew up as a child was like a vibrant, living alter. My mother, Jan Pierce, makes an art of everything. Ordinary life always becomes filled with a great, tender and fulsome beauty wherever my mother’s hand has had a say. A deep holistic integrity of material and aesthetic resounds in her, a fierce warriors heart to protect our Earth and the small creatures that dwell upon Her back, a passion for all things made with the hand from the tools of nature.

It seems as though thinking back with the eyes of my child self, that there were always candles lit in our house, that soft, warm, reverent light emanating from black burnished angel candlesticks from Mexico, full skirted and winged. The house was always full of great billowing bunches of blooms, gathered from the beautiful native garden mum always has growing or from the road-side edge, their glorious filaments of colour and texture consuming the table, music always floating on the ether and food flowing like a love song always, abundant and beautiful. Copper pots of dying fabric scattered around the house like cauldrons, the smell of wax being ironed from batik, the smells and sounds and the feeling of knitting yarn, sewing cloth, embroidering, singing, cooking, painting….dancing, mum has always loved to dance.

The walls of our home hung with my mum’s beautiful paintings, visions of children and wildflowers, figures and animals, trees brimming with birds, moths, butterflies, fungi, moss, birds and more birds. I used to love watching Mum paint, the poise of her mouth, ripe with the expectation of her creation, her body a symphony of focus, beneath the halo of her lamp, her paint box a treasure trove of mystery.

As children mum would take my 3 brothers and I walking in the bush and draw our eyes always to the small plants emerging from the Earth, the native orchids and lilies in the spring and summer, the fungi and moss in the winter months, teaching us to see and to know, the detailed and the miraculous. Awakening the artist's eye in me, teaching me the face of the divine as it manifested on our little patch of ground.
Of all the qualities my Mother carries with her in this life, it is this capacity to create beauty, and to make life artful, to see always through the poetic lens of the creative soul, that I cherish most in her.




 In 2009 the Black Saturday Bushfires came and we lost my beautiful father to that furious firestorm. Mum also lost her home where they had lived, and with it so many amazing paintings and creations, photos and beloved treasures. All the pictures and ceramics shown here are pieces created since the fire, a testament to her tenacity and healing. The home where she now lives is again filled with art, the walls in the kitchen are painted with a beautiful mural and on the bathroom wall these words are painted.

Set aside the learned ways of perceiving the world as dead matter for your use and see if you can recover again your actual perception of the world as a community of beings to whom you are meaningfully related. Erazim Kohak

.....our dreams are pale memories of themselves,
and nagging doubt the false measure of our days.
Even so the spirit voices are singing,
their thoughts are dancing on the dirty air 
their feet touch the cement, the asphalt,
delighting still, they weave dreams upon our 
shadowed skulls.
If we could listen, if we could hear.
Let's go then. Let's find them. Let's listen for the water,
the careful gleaming drops that glisten on the leaves, the flowers.
Lets ride the midnight, the early dawn,
feel the wind striding through our hair.
Let's dance the dance of feathers, the dance of birds.....
the dance of paws and fins, of wildflowers, 
grasses and little wings, 
the dance of the Earthly Child.



Part of the mural on Mum's kitchen wall                    
Jan Pierce



My beautiful Mum and sleeping son


November 27, 2013

Creative Heroines

This post was created for the Carnival of Creative Mothers to celebrate the launch of  The Rainbow Way: Cultivating Creativity in the Midst of Motherhood
by Lucy H. Pearce.  Today's topic Creative Heroines

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There have been so many female artists that have inspired me to create in the way that I do but if I had to narrow it down I think I would have to choose Meinrad Craighead, Frida Kahlo and Vali Myers. Meinrad for her exquisite encapsulation of the Dark Feminine as a fierce and deeply loving force, for the magnitude and astonishing depth of her vision. She speaks to my soul like no other ever has. Frida for her exquisite honesty and for the way in which her pain became the gateway of her salvation, and Vali for the fierceness of her authenticity, her self-governance and for her profoundly wild nature.


Enclosed Garden                                                               Meinrad Craighead

Glaringly obvious to me as I write this is the fact that none of these women were/are mothers. And allthough they all reflect a deep kinship with their animal familiars, each of their primary focus in life has been their art. I have often pondered the weight of this power, that is birthed from women when children are not their destiny, and have many a time baulked at the notion of trying to be both a mother and an artist. I feel a conflict within myself rise, one that has the potential to feed into a despair at ever being able to create anything significant and also be this mother that I am, hands so full of children and domesticity.

But when I really listen to what these women gift me with,the quality that I feel has so deeply resonated for me has been their profound insight into that deeply primal matrix of the vast Mother, the feminine force that carries the weight of life and death, nurturance and transmutation, so powerfully in the palm of her hand.
The Love embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and senor Xolotl
-Frida Kahlo

Each of these women have shown me in their own unique way how to forge my own personal relationship with that primal feminine force which knocks at the door of the psyche, asking to be birthed into the world. They have taught me that the relationship with God and the authority to know of the sacred movement of spirit in my life, is deeply embedded in my body and in the narrative of my own life. They have fed that insatiable hunger in me for something more anciently true and primordially real, than anything else my culture was feeding me in regard to what it was to be a woman.

These artists have taught me that as a woman my relationship to the divine is profoundly rooted in the earthly relationships of my body and it’s wild interface with nature and the cycles of the Earth. This lesson is paradoxically the same lesson that my children have birthed in me, awakening me to my own power as a creatrix, awakening me to the profound depth of my own capacity as a woman to love, to birth myself and to care for all creation.

The more I turn my own authority over to this primordial interface of the body/the earth/the divine, the less conflicted I feel about the balance of motherhood and art, as it all ultimately flows from that same deep wellspring of the sacred feminine, birthing itself into being upon the Earth, as it has always done and ever will do, even through the times when She has been met with violence and brutality and desecration.

Witch of Positano                                                  Vali Myers


I am eternally grateful to these Matriachs of the art world for their renewal of a primary imprint of what God the Mother looks like, deeply imbedded in the primacy of one’s own story. They give  me permission to follow the hunt of my own creative nature. They reveal to me the power of birthing something so infinitely tender and intimate, and so fiercely potent into the world and standing strong in the care of that vision, despite sometimes great odds. I feel that I am learning the primacy of what it means to truly care for what it is that I create, be it a piece of art or a child. How do I come to take full responsibility for my feminine nature in a world so desensitised? How do I defy the stereotypes and projections of my culture and fully own my personal vision and creation as my deepest truth? These women guide me with their courage, their wild authority and their deep authenticity.



November 13, 2013

Four Phases of Woman

Such a deep pleasure to create these images for the School of Shamanic Midwifery, and deepen into my understanding of how our medicine as women does not diminish, though we may shed some things along the way, but that it rather builds and ripens. It has left me with a longing to more deeply venerate the elders of our culture, understanding that they have journeyed long and far, passing through so many gates of initiation to stand in that place of  wisdom and experience. 
I also feel gifted with the sense of rightness to each phase of a woman's life, that within each chapter there is a very particular quality of energy to be received, and that there is no other place to be than in the medicine of the moment. 
Jane Hardwicke Collings writes so beautiful in Moonsong about the lengthening of our modern life span and articulates the richness and gifting of this time of Maga, after our children have grown and before the passage into crone. I feel such a potency to this recognition of women as they gift the world with their finely crafted and empowered gleanings of a life deeply lived.
Blessed be.

 Maiden

 Mother

 Maga

 Crone

November 11, 2013

Her Keening Heart


Dancing the Universe

Her Keening Heart

It is as though the deepest most hidden part of me,
the most rejected and unlived part
is the one that must find her voice to beseech you,
to find a shining more mesmerizing
than all the bright lights of the world,
a keening more compelling than the sirens of the sea.
She who is most afraid, most shriveled and hungry,
must find that unnamable courage,
from the terror of how far she might fall
in the face of more rejection,
to risk herself and call you unto her,
even though it feels as though
there could be no tomorrow
if she called and you did not come,
if she called and you turned your face yet
to the fruitless world that beckons you away
from her aching and bountiful love.
She has hidden herself so exquisitely
in the folds of my heart,
her gentle aching there a quiet discontent,
the knowing that she deserves more,
softly vented in my weeping,
or spewed forth in purging rage.
What would it be to courageously occupy her,
the one who beckons love, to be vulnerably her,
in all her aching fullness and decades of neglect.
To be home to her, letting her breath her way
into all the filaments of my heart.
What courage I must muster,
to neither preempt your scorn
nor hide the beauty of her face,
for what she might ask of me to surrender.
And I take heed now of how I hide her from you,
she who longs to be seen,
so tightly I hold her hidden, safe from harm,
so precious to me she is,
that my protection has her smothering,
like a caged one, she waits under lock and key,
and it is me who must set her free.
My fear says I can only trust another with her
if I am certain that she will be safe,
but she cannot be loved if she cannot be seen,
and therein lies the great gamble of life,
for to love is always to risk oblivion,
there can be no other way.
I must feed her tender morsels,
ripe and juicy seeds of pomegranate,
full lipped and red blooded fig,
wooing her forth within me,
that she may stand before you,
plump and ripe,
so real and true that you could not turn
for all the treasures of the world,
for you would know beyond a doubt
that it was you that she births herself for,
it is she that you move from and must return to,
and that she sees herself most clearly,
she of the forever and the everywhere,
when the light from your very own heart
shines upon her,
as the Earth blooms
for the Sun.

Lucy Pierce © 2013