Tendering the Wounded Ones Within

Tendering the Wounded Ones Within    by Lucy Pierce

My art plays in my life as a therapy of sorts. It has been such a journey with this piece, discovering paradox, the light of me and the dark shadow. The indwelling of pen and ink, brush and paint across the surface of the paper bringing awareness to this aspect of the deep within that seeks revelation, so that it’s meaning is never the same at it’s conception, as at it’s birth.

Reflections at the beginning of the drawing:

“My life has been so steeped in this aspect of the wound, my days revolving around it’s sacred gift and also it’s treachery and tragic life-eating qualities. To feel it’s violence, bitterness and isolation, and also it’s sensitivity, compassion and truth seeking is to dwell within the excruciating transmutation of the One who dwells within the wound, to She who also moves beyond it. Opening the No into the Yes, changing the berating into the gentle tendering.

Both of us carry our own wounds, our stories weave together, beneath and between our days, overlaying pain with healing, rejection with acceptance, exile with belonging…Sometimes I am very small and scared, sometimes I am a creature wild and fierce. Sometimes I am the Mother, Her love consuming my heart to love the small frightened one. Sometimes he is so very close and still, and sometimes he is an ancient God remembering himself. Each of us tending the child within, sometimes we jar and clash and the walls are red with the blood of our battles, wrestling the mute, obstinate and traumatized ones within. And sometimes the sublime arm of grace, reaches through time and retrieves a part that was once lost, that may now return to the wheel of life. Sometimes entering the wound there is a small hand that reaches out to meet me, and hand in hand we leave the aching purgatory and with young eyes, new born to the world, we meet the new day, a little more restored to our primal unity.”

 Reflections at it’s completion, with much journeyed in the space between:

 “I see how as a tender girl child this quality of care-taker was validated above all others. I now seek to transmute the shadow aspects of this archetype. How do I subsume the self to tend and validate the other? What does it look like to expose the defensive protection of this stance? What does it feel like to let myself be held? What tyranny of smallness is this inheritance? There is so much more power to me than the one who tends the wounded bird. It is my own self that I must mother, and the tender children of my womb for whom this task is rightful. As I tend to the boundaries of self, my daughters watch and learn what is safe and what is not in the becoming of woman. I want to find who I might become, if I lived my life as though it had been wholly and freely given to me, beyond this task of being less of me and more for Other.”

Lucy Pierce © 2014