Motherhood, Growing me up

For me motherhood has been the gateway through which I have been initiated into my womanhood. Each one of my children has birthed me more deeply into my own being, each asking of me a greater capacity of presence and attunement to how it is that I bring myself to bare in this life. Each child of my womb, fruit of the love that blooms, has asked of me in their pregnancies and birthings, a unique awakening to aspects of myself that might otherwise have dwelt unformed and unlived within me. Each one has asked of me in the particular qualities of their on-going care, to dig and delve and find those parts of myself that are shrouded in my own wounding, demanding of me that I bring more of myself to account, demanding that I heal in order to be more present to my love for them.

And I find again and again I must stop and bow down to this sacred work of motherhood, relentless and unseen. And though I struggle at times with this asking, to be so deeply and completely invested in the lives of others, with the giving over of myself so mercilessly to this service, it is also the very thing that I owe my self-hood to. My children have taught me what it is to love, what it is to stay in the asking of what it is that we are needing to receive in order to feel safe and awake and held.

Having children has birthed me ever deeper into the arms of our Great Mother, who holds the beseeching heart of my own flawed and fallible, passionate and earnest motherhood in her hands so tenderly. That vast feminine power that soothes and offers forgiveness to the one within that is sometimes not good enough, when I see through the impotent eyes of my own pain and wounding, when I rage and withhold and sometimes fail the tender cargo of my care, when I respond as one who is yet awakening to love. Still  I feel the energy of the Primordial Mother walking with me, guiding my hand with the ever-present returning to the knowing that I am after all enough to shepherd these precious souls into this world. She opens my heart to see and to learn the ways in which they so diligently present to me, what it is that I must become in order to be more true.

My children are my teachers and my becoming, my love for them is the balm that eases the contractions of my own birthing of self, that I may become the one who is truly worthy of walking with the divine and awesome unfolding of love incarnating on the Earth, of flesh and blood and bone made from nothing but the union of love, gestated in the awesome power of a woman's body to manifest life.

As a people do we truly see the magnitude of this miracle and the great responsibility for care that this miracle bestows. There are times when I long for a more socially sanctioned and financially lucrative endeavor, one with a knock off time and recognition for accomplishments, but my deepest heart knows that there is restitution in offering the tenderness of my own unknowing to these exquisitely sensitive and beseeching souls. It is in the very act of relinquishing myself to the holding of that which I have created that I will come to know myself most truly. No other path could so baldly confront me with my own shortcomings, no other accomplishment lead me so deeply and relentlessly into the forest of my own heart, as I carry the at times excruciating, at times heartbreakingly beautiful responsibility, of holding this process of incarnation of life on the Earth, in the world we have made, lives founded in as much integrity and truth as I can muster, awake to feeling and compassion, awake to love and to beauty and to goodness and to forgiveness. To fully feel just how safe and respected and cherished a child deserves to be.

They ask me to remember myself, as she who cares, she who understands how to respond from love, she who is big enough to hold all of who it is that we might be when we express ourselves fully, beyond the cultural maskings of shame and restraint and apology. Rising to the challenge of baring witness rather than shutting down, feeling uncomfortable rather than suppressing, learning to be kind and to care for that which is hurting, stilling and going slow rather than running away, not knowing rather than pretending to know.

And again and again I must remind myself that this is the work my spirit has most deeply chosen to enact in this life. That I must cease the poison of comparison, and come to fully and powerfully own that although my culture does not always value this task, I know it to be of profound value. That it is the weaving of strands into the warp and weft of the universe. It is a sending forth of tendrils of tentative life into an unknown future and that it is a reconfiguring of our taproots deep into the Earth, the work of coming to know again what it is to be bonded to and nurtured by our Mother, to come home, deeply, powerfully, poignantly home to that sacred and vastly loving body, the Earth. The work of protecting what is innocent and pure, holding reverence for life, because it is of itself holy, not because we can ourselves benefit from it, but because it is the deeply sacred mystery of life becoming itself, of love giving itself eyes with which to see, ears with which to hear itself, a reflection in which to know itself.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

To Offer Wholeness

Surrender

To Offer Wholeness

There have been times in my life

when without the strong anchor

of my own fierce embodiment,

I have felt like a leaf,

blown and buffeted by the wind,

slipping through cracks,

seeking respite in the shelter of quiet corners,

too afraid somehow and tentative

to come deeply down,

into the body, onto the Earth.

As though a good part of me

still dangled amongst the stars,

vast and unfixed,

blown so wide open

and so femininely fluid,

that when life has ask of me

to bring myself to bare,

it is such an almighty mustering

that must take place,

of all my disparate cells,

scattered through the cosmos,

to come in now, to come home,

to this moment, and to this body,

with it's broad feet,

it's curved circumference and furrowed brow,

to be someone and to belong, here,

solidly planted, with great twining roots

sinking deeply through the Earth’s crust,

exquisitely aware of the cradle of my pelvis,

the gravity of my bones

and the sweet whisper of my tomb.

Eyes and ears and heart and womb,

mind and soul awake

and entrained to the asking,

an offering of my wholeness

to this birthing of the moment.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

Blessings of Earth

Bear Woman                               Lucy Pierce

Blessings of Earth

May your love be a source of sustenance to the world,

May it continue to seed and flower and bare fruit

to nourish the life-blood of the soul,

the wellspring of the whole.

May your bodies be ever entwined

in the pleasures of this earthly garden of your love.

May you drink ever deeply from the cup of your own making.

May the moist and fertile soil of your own becoming

open to receive the seeds of your dreaming.

When it seems that that which lies between has withered,

may you return to the dark den of her womb

and reseed, restore, renew.

May you always walk together

to the rhythm

of the heartbeat

of the Mother.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

When my beautiful friends Simone Touissant and Andrew Darling were married at the beginning of the year it was such an honour to stand in ceremony with them, with my own beloved David beside me in the Earth element. This was my offering to them on their union. The Bear Mother finally fired all these moons later, and finally gifted so many years after she was first seeded. Thanks for your patience Simone! 

Check out Simone Touisant Darlings Cherokee Bodywork and Birth Keeper-Birth Support work at Wolf-Mother Healer. 

The Gravity of Darkness

Uncoiling the shadows                     Lucy Pierce    

    

The Gravity of Darkness

Oh dark one,

how long must I be apprenticed to you?

The cycle of your shadow’s descent

is sometimes like unto drowning to me,

as though all the world but me

held the privilege of holding its face up to the sun

and although I walk amongst them

my heart is shrouded by the dark side of the moon.

My most loyal mistress

you lure me in to see

the true depth of the unknown wound

while all the others are at play,

to gently lap at the edges of the pain

pretending that we are going somewhere.

And it is as though it were two lives that I lived

simultaneously trying to be in the world,

the desperation of this longing to be sleek and honed,

clear and simple,

basking in the light of all creation,

and then the deep inward turning eye,

scrupulous and brutal.

The part of me that longs for the sun

resists drowning completely

in the other gravitational fore 

of my own darkness.

But to compete in the sun

is to know so agonizingly

of my own aching shadow lands

pulling me away always from the brink of the world,

as I stand on the edge of things,

alone and somehow dually unlived,

a slave to both worlds

and a child of none.

And I beg of you Dark One,

birth me,

birth me whole,

that my being might be as wide

as the star studded sky,

and straddle the all of me,

without apology,

the inner and outer,

the light and the dark.

I feel your great pelvis shudder

with the weight of me,

and I feel your earth shattering contractions

like I did that first time around.

Deliver me wholly unto you Dark Mother,

that you may eat the after-birth of me

and be sated,

that I may no longer shy from your face

but drink deeply from your breast

the rich river of your stories,

that I might also carry you with me

into the light,

into the radiant shining

of the ancient Other,

She of the sun,

with her undulating pelt of pleasure,

and the celebration of who we are

when we have birthed ourselves home,

no longer caring for pretence,

but alive to life,

the life of the self

and the life of the world,

seamlessly met.


Lucy Pierce © 2013

Fragments of Light Returning

photo courtesy of Kylie 'Ma Bower'

Fragments of Light Returning

Such a gentle and holy reclamation

of power and birthright,

so exquisitely feminine and encompassing,

allowing the deep grief to gently swell and fall

knowing the futility of drowning in the depths

of the horror of withheld love,

only humbly touching the edges

of that unfathomable pain

of lives lived in such shadow.

So gently we danced,

like fragments of light

upon the surface of the well,

summoning that which longed to move

from that place beneath,

from the deep waters.

As we summoned our strength

from the wellsprings of memory,

through  the dappled sunlight of ancient green

forests of the heart,

seeking the seer,

reclaiming the word,

reforming the container,

stronger now and more true.

A radiant gathering of pilgrims we were,

with brimming hearts and a myriad of colours

displayed in our feathers,

in the twinkling eye 
and the joy of our togetherness,

the sweetness of it a flame 
so artfully tended

by that Lady of the Swan,

she of the water and the word,

awakening.

We journeyed deep, deep into the past

and returned ancient and wise

and more free than we had been when we left,

we returned with animal companions,

a wild menagerie in our midst,

and with us the wise ones of our blood-lines,

all gathering, strong and open,

to aid the passage of the women and children
of the Magdalene Laundries.

With a raucous reverence we walked,

we drummed and we rattled,

we danced and we sang.
Beloved sister the beacon 
and shepherd of our song.

Our bejeweled feet thumping their love

through the foundations

to caress the bones that lay below.

Gathering into the heart of our mighty sound

the lost and the silent,

the trapped and forgotten ones,

the ululation of our feelingness

enlivening the air

awakening the unseen

and calling them to return

as we wind our way back now,

to the ancient river, sparkling.

The trees bending close to hear,

swaying and dancing with the glistening sunlight,

their celebration and resonance

with this timely passage of freedom.

Our voices still entwining,

weaving the warp and the weft of the basket

that would be their boat.

And by the waters edge,

our taproots entwining with the roots

of that vast and ancient tree of life

in the heart of the Earth, our Mother.

Silent now, deep in the medicine of this mystery,

the sole voice, so intimately sweet,

the song resounding from she

who is so strong to be so soft and still be heard.

And we feel them finding their own way now,
the one's that would come,

the Magdalenes, the forgotten ones,

home to the Waiting One’s,

the air alive with the subtle vibrations of their release,

the bindings falling free,

the light returning to that which has dwelt

so long in the shadow.

Wordless now and feeling the fine filaments of love,

entraining the universe,

as though there was suddenly more room

for sunlight and love,

more room for forgiveness

and fearless becoming.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

This poem is a reflection on an amazing day spent at the Abbottsford Convent with Julia Inglis at her workshop Swan Blessing: Femmina Unbound- Return of the Medicine Woman. I have abounding gratitude for the experience and can't recommend her work more highly. You can find out more about Julia's work at www.sacredfamiliar.com

Ancient Rhythm

Blood Bowl                      Lucy Pierce

Ancient Rhythm

Nested so precisely in the crux of the invisible moon,

my womb spills forth her crimson elixir

and I delight in my body’s having come

finally to rest in this ancient rhythm.

The inward eye of the blood

reflected in the hidden face of the moon,

the treasure of the darkness two-fold,

the inner and the outer

and I know without a doubt

that She is my timepiece and my compass,

and that though I am Earth bound

my being spans the cosmos,

the workings of my womb

mirrored in the vast workings of the universe

and that I am a part of the plan,

so much bigger on the inside.

My blood is a fertile gifting from the stars

where the Grandmothers wait, watching.

It’s slick and pendulous flow

the caress that calls me home

to the molten heart of the earth

and to the mercurial mysteries of the universe

fathomed from within.

Lucy Pierce © 2013

The Life Giving Terrain

The Life Giving Terrain

Breasts full and pendulous,

belly soft and beseeching,

sweeping down as though to hear more deeply

the Earth’s listening Heart.

The body of woman that holds and transmutes,

the body of woman as the body of the Earth

whole and bountiful,

it exudes it’s own gravitational pull

as you occupy the continent of your skin

with your sensual pleasure,

embodying the delight of a plump and juicy heart.

You remind me that the pieces of myself

that I feel are too much

are really the abundance of being

the body of the earth

in the body of woman,

with hill and dale and mossy outcrops,

the life-giving terrain,

textured and curvaceous and full.

You pull me in and down

with your embodied invitation

to inhabit the space so tenderly given

that is this body of love and of life

and of the undulating She-scape.

Lucy Pierce © 2013