The Keening of my Shame

Aboriginal woman,

you wear your dignity

deep inside your bones,

the sun at your head

and the earth at your feet,

standing so tall,

despite the abhorrent atrocities

inflicted on your kind,

inflicted on your people,

inflicted on your land

and on your culture by my kind.

I would love to call you my sister

for I too love this place we share,

it has woven its song into my bones too

and my children, who share a thin thread of your blood,

swing from its branches

and dive in its streams,

but I find that my heart flinches from the knowing of you,

and my eyes drift away, hiding my fear,

and that a crust of withholding lies

between the land and me,

for my shame at the colour of my skin,

for my people who came in boats

and took what was not theirs to take,

who imposed their narrow and brittle belief

upon the matrix of your embedded belonging

to something so deep and vast and majestic.

My people, who raped and murdered,

lied and stole,

plundered and pilaged,

desecrated and brutalised

your sacred inheritance

and the bloodlines of your people.

When I close my eyes

and drop into this land that I love

I feel you there,

with the sun at your head

and the earth at your feet.

As my feet dance upon the earth,

my  tears well and spill,

for the shame that lives in me,

for what the culture of my ancestors did to yours.

And as I keep dancing upon this earth,

as I offer her my keening and the song of my tears,

I feel that she loves me too.

And as I look inside my heart

I know that it is not the same heart, beating there,

as that which crossed the oceans

in the rib cages of my ancestors.

It is a heart full of love and respect

for you and your people,

even in your grief so proud and beauty filled.

How I long to learn from you and call you my friend,

yet my world, peopled with the colours of so many skins,

is rarely blessed with the presence of yours,

though it is your land upon which we walk,

though I feel your ancestors beneath my feet.

I just wanted you to know that my hiding from you

has been on account of my shame,

not my lack of love

and that I will seek to be more brave

when next our eyes meet,

that my gaze might speak more of the love

than of the shame,

that you may know how I honour you,

standing so tall,

with the sun at your head

and the earth at your feet.

Lucy Pierce © 2015

She Suckles the Stars

"She Suckles the Stars"

Extract from Star Milk

Her gaze now is sky bound,

for she has learnt to move towards the vast darkness,

to embrace it as a lusty lover,

losing herself in it’s grasp,

as the milky love that once nursed her babes

flows out to the cosmos now,

it's pulsing light forming stars in the darkness.

Galaxy's are born in the wake of her expression

of what had been withheld,

an erotic stream of reclamation and forgiveness ,

an exultation of imperfection

and the jubilation of her tender acceptance.

 It shimmers in the deep black of her night sky,

this gifting of her love from deep within the song

of her embraced suffering.

And as she dances she opens her mouth, her full lips parting,

and drinks in to herself the self same elixir,

the milky river of star love,

whose ecstatic pulse floods her mouth

like a new born babe at its mother’s breast,

the milk dribbles from the corners of her mouth,

rivulets gush down the contours of her throat,

pooling at her collar bones, as she guzzles the flood,

the nectar of her own divinity, this ancient cosmic beauty.

She grows plump on its succor

as its undulates her succulent body in the full-throated dance.

She has become herself,

disencumbered by beauty and propriety,

this deep well of a woman.

Prints available from my Etsy store.

Image and words © Lucy Pierce 2015

Belonging

"Belonging"

This image is an offering to all those who have carried within themselves an experience of woundedness, who have harbored within a place where no sun can shine, where the shimmering of the stars cannot find its way, where the rain does not fall, nor the Earth nourish. To all of those of us who, because this woundedness is a hidden thing, a thing for which we might feel shame, because this hiddenness we do not even show to our own self, when we are with others, still we feel alone and even when there are eyes upon us, still we feel unseen, and even when a hand of love is extended, still we feel unloved, and even from within the raucous celebrations of our tribe, that deep hidden part of us remains untouched.

This is a picture for all those who have struggled to be seen for all that they are in this life, those who are timid and unsure of how to bring their love and their gifts to commune with the world. For all those who have hidden their light or felt they were alone within the midst of the many. For all the times we forget that we are the centre, however we find ourselves, and that this is the place to start to plant our seeds of love, carefully tending them with our presence, so that that which is still hidden within us may become a bountiful wellspring that feeds the hearts and souls of the all, so that we may find our own unique place in the circle of life.

As we deeply honor the grief of our perceived separateness, we find our connection to the whole, for the world needs us now. Our mother Gaia needs us all, to bring our gifts out from the dark corners of our own unworthiness, into the light of our collective becoming. You have never been alone dear heart. No longer believe the shame, it is a lie you whisper to yourself to keep yourself small and you are so far from small, you are a magnificent human being. We may need to endure the terror of exposing our own magnificence. It is true that to begin with it might feel deeply uncomfortable to be seen, but it is time, tender one, hiding in the shadows, to offer love to your own un-livedness, to become the safe place to land your heart in the world, with its vast medicine bundle of beauty.

As we each turn within, to offer our limitless capacity of love to our own true selves, no longer giving any other being the authority or responsibility of keeping us small or safe, or to give us permission to shine, we come to know that what we carry within us is ours to give, no longer believing those that might once have told us our bigness was not wanted, was not welcome. By loving ourselves, caring for and tending to the aliveness of our own interiority, we become strong and deep-rooted in our capacity to give of ourselves, the newborn nectar of our own true purpose.

I pray that we may each come to know a place of belonging completely to our own selves, surrounded by the tribe that would have us be all that we are. From the edge we become the centre, as the deep listening to the soft within becomes the rich, fertile compost which mobilizes our capacity to worship the divine creative essence of our own healing, of our own belonging, to self, to tribe, to Earth, to Cosmos. We receive ourselves and are home.

Prints available from my Etsy Store 

Image and words © Lucy Pierce 2015

Flowering Mama

It was such an honour to be asked by the lovely Cherie Nixon of the Australian Homebirth Association to create a little gift for all the guest speakers at this year's Homebirth Conference held at the Melbourne Town Hall at the end of May.

This Flowering Mama was the little figure created and she is now available for sale through my Etsy store.

All my sculptures are left to charge under the moon with the cosmic energies of their time of emergence. They are then smudged and cleansed with sage, charged with a prayer of intention, imbued with song and attuned to the Earth’s heart with the rhythm of medicine drum.

FLOWERING MAMA

May you know yourself to be

the sacred embodiment of creation,

your heart the cosmic Weaver,

your womb the temple of life,

trusting deeply in the great mystery of your own becoming

and held so tenderly in the love of our Earth Mother,

swayed by the exquisite dance of your own softness

and your own power,

You are Blessed. 
Blessed be.

The Midwives

The Midwives by Lucy Pierce

This is image is an offering of immense gratitude to all the amazing sisters who have midwifed me through my life as woman birthing herself into being. Our capacity as women to hold space for each other, to hold and nurture, encourage and stretch, nourish and behold one another is an almighty magic which is changing the vibration of the planet. I feel so deeply indebted to all the midwives in my life, in whose reflection I have learnt to become ever more deeply and authentically my own self, deepening through the layers of cultural oppression and personal suppression of the truly awesome power, profound love and holy eroticism that lies at the heart and deep within the womb of each and every one of us as woman.

As each one of us takes responsibility for the sacred rituals of our own becoming, journeying ever deeper into the labyrinthine wisdom of the womb, we find within ourselves the ancient song lines of the sacred feminine, as she is deeply embedded in the body of our Earth Mother. As a sisterhood we dance ourselves alive, reclaiming the voice of our own unique birthsong, as we come to embody the ecstasy and the agony of our own emergence into the vast mystery of creation, the reawakening of our ancient knowing and the birthing of a new consciousness on Earth. We are each of us midwife, birthing Mama and newborn, each of us moving through the great cosmic pelvis, each of us gathered up in the hands of Spirit.

Through the attunement of our dancing feet, the rhythm of our drums and the quest of our song, through the wisdom and medicine of the Earth, through our capacity to be vulnerable and real with one another, in our courage to let go of that which no longer serves us and to embrace the new wisdom within ourselves, through our tender awakening to the dire imperative of our own self -love and radical self-care, we learn to become Mother to ourselves, to our children, to our planet and to one another as Midwives to each other and our collective evolution. 

Wishing heartfull blessings to all on this day of new moon, solar eclipse, autumn equinox.

Prints of "The Midwives" will be available in the coming weeks from my Etsy store www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce

Image and words © Lucy Pierce

New Goodies on Etsy

 I am now printing my cards at home on lovely archival quality paper and I have made up a few packs of the larger sized cards to sell, a Goddess Pack and also a Four Phases of Woman set of 4 cards, depicting the Maiden, Mother, Maga, Crone.

They are available on my Etsy site.

 www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce

 Pack of 7 Goddess Cards 

Four Phases of Woman-Set of 4 Cards

New Day Dawning

Here’s a new little song I’ve written, seeded around the campfire on our wild bush and beach adventure over the summer holidays.