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

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

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

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