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. 

**********

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.

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

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

The Song

The Song

I find myself now singing a song

and sometimes it seems that the song

is like a tree with roots and branches,

reaching and grasping

and spreading the light from within

the dark core of its matter.

Delighted I find, that I am finally brave enough to share,

my voice woven into a matrix of other voices.

And although my song may fumble,

or my melody stumble

I am so deeply grateful for the song

and the delight of singing it,

surrounded by the harmonies of my fellow kin.

Knowing that my whole life might have passed,

without the gift of this sharing.

Because passing now are the years

of always wrestling with the lack,

and with the thought that there was something

that I was not,

that I somehow should have  been.

Too afraid to share the most true,

for fear of not being enough.

Too timid to gift the simplicity of my centre,

too complex even to see that gentle kernel,

so many layers of deceit wound around my heart.

And then making  that slow and gentle love

in the long dark nights

with She who loathes,

until I find that now, joy of joys,

I begin to see that I move more and more
from that centre point,

owning the wellspring within.

The dance rises, the image swells,

the creation moves itself

from that place that I value most within myself,

that fine and delicate gateway to beyond.

And I create not because I am good or not good,

but because I am alive.

The pure delight of sharing what feels most true,

that which belongs to the essence of this life-hood.

And I know now, sometimes timidly

and sometimes beyond a shadow of a doubt

that all that I need in this life,

I carry within me,

though still there are shrouds that fall

and rest in wait in the darkness,

still the stones and debris that stem the flow

of that ancient soul river,

that is myself from so long before I came to be me.

And I see now that age is in fact the blessing,

that it is the very falling away

of what I once had valued

that strips me bare of what has withheld me from myself

and as I shed and diminish in some ways

in others I ripen.

The medicine building in my bones,

the dream more textured with meaning,

the richness of the song,

finding its roots

twining back to the very pure beginning

when I was once awake

and deeply inside

the song of the universe.

Lucy Pierce © 2013