November 3, 2016

Listening at the Loom of Her Love



“I feel that in our modern western culture we are taught as women to judge, compare, belittle and compete with one another to find our place in the world. Self-love and deep belonging to one's inner wisdom and to the awesome power of our sisterhood is scorned and we are taught to  seek our salvation in the futile and exhaustive commodified quest to become something that the impossible standards of the external gaze will find acceptable, that we might finally become beautiful and exceptional enough to be worthy of love. 
It has been through my experiences of being in women's circles and partaking in festivals like Seven Sisters, where the deep primal power of the collective feminine has shown itself to me, as a world-changing, earth-quaking, truth-making force that is an imperative evolution at this time. It is not always comfortable as we truly learn to belong to ourselves and to the tribe that is our community of sisters, but it feels so very deeply gratifying to feel the jubilant and joyful celebration of love as we open, teach, guide, learn and reveal the truth of our reciprocal connectivity, and that together we are so much stronger than when we stand apart.”

This is a new image I painted for the call to artists for the Spirit Weavers Gathering 2017. I am feeling deeply honoured to have been selected as a finalist and very grateful for all those who supported me with their votes. I hope to make it over to this festival one day.

I now have prints and cards available of this image on my Etsy store 


Words and image ©Lucy Pierce 2016


October 10, 2016

A Water Prayer for Standing Rock




I feel so present at this time to all the peoples gathering together at Standing Rock. That place feels so very far away from where I am, the landscape and people so different in so many ways, and yet I feel a resonance of hope and truth, reverberating across the planet to rest in my faraway heart, from that potent impulse to gather and protect, that is happening there as a stand against the proposed oil pipeline. This action stands as a symbol for all people, the people of Earth, standing up across borders and boundaries and speaking with deep strength, power and love to the destructive paradigm of futile hunger and ravaging greed, which would desecrate our sacred Earth, plundering her resources for the benefit of an elite and the detriment of an entire ecosystem. 
There are a thousand ways we could all be standing and joining together in this way, in each and every country to put our collective voice to this story, of the ancient and wise people who listen and honour their Earth, threatened by the mindless consumption of a brutalising and disconnected force of consumption. My own country has its own vast history of persecution of its First Nations people, desecration of their sacred sites and ceremonial lands, and brutalisation of the environment we all share. 
In my dream last night I received a teaching about water. In the dream I was struggling to carry a very heavy object which held within it a great knowledge, a precious but somehow impenetrable information that the people who had gathered upstream required for their council. The object was far too heavy for me to lift, or push or roll, across the muddy ground, up hill and down, across the land that stretched out vast and immeasurable before me. But in the dream I realised, in a euphoric epiphany, that I just had to get it down to the river, down to the water's edge that nestled in the valley below, and that from there the knowledge and information would be received by everyone through the water. Once the knowledge was in the water, it would touch every living thing on the planet. 
On waking I thought about this conductive quality of water, about its connectivity and the way it has no boundary, that it permeates and cycles and transcends separation. Water has no territorial boundary, it is always in deep communication with itself and with all life, the ocean with the cloud, the river with the sea, the mist and the dew, the lake and the rain, the tear and the blood. It is everywhere, and essential for our survival and it communicates and responds to the forms of our thoughts and our prayers. 
And so today I descended from my hilltop to the valley and the river's edge, and I sent a little woven offering, of grasses and blooms, feathers and butterfly wings, a raft of my prayers upon the river of my far away home, to the people gathered at Standing Rock across the globe, across deserts and cities and forests and prairies, across oceans and skies, and also to the people and the land and the water and the creatures of my own country and every country. I send a prayer in gratitude for your work of protecting our planet, in solidarity for your integrity as a people working so deeply with the harmony of Earth and its mystery, giving thanks for your courage and honour. I send a prayer that the mindless desecration may cease to be the dominant paradigm in this world so on the edge of itself, a species so close to losing its own magnificence. 
Standing Rock, I add my voice to yours through the ever present alchemy of our shared water in this vast biosphere. I trust that my prayers will be heard, in the lapping of your rivers or springs, or in the settling of the morning dew upon the gentle Earth, as she cradles your feet, or the curve of your resting cheek, as the sun rises on another day together on this planet. Blessings.



August 2, 2016

Leaning into the Unknowable


Photo by Scanlon Carter Photography


I recently had two very beautiful women come and visit me in my home to interview and photograph me about my practice as an artist living in the Upper Yarra Valley. The day prior to their arrival I reached for the phone many times to call and cancel their coming, with many internal voices chattering in my mind. The voices said that I'm not really an artist, that I am too distracted by the endless tasks of motherhood and too enslaved by domestic drudgery to still call myself an artist, that I'm too heavy and morose to offer anything life-giving to their project, the narrative of my winter having been the grappling in the labrynthine darkness of my underworld, attempting to befriend the Minotaur, grappling at the interface of the seeker, red-thread in hand, and the abandoned and outcast aspects of my own psyche. In the face of this I was feeling altogether not sparkly enough, not successful enough, not productive and polished enough to be interviewed.

The ask of this meeting brought me face to face with the fraudulent feelings I have whenever I am asked to state my occupation. I write "Mother and Artist" or "Artist and Mother", but really who do I think I am kidding, to think that either of these activities were a "proper" occupation, despite the fact that they have wrung every ounce of effort and persistent force of will, blood, sweat and tears from my being for the majority of my adult life. I thought that maybe in coming they wouldl feel obliged to include me in their project, and despite my obvious inadequacy, would feel obliged to include me rather than hurt my feelings, so that maybe I should save them from the discomfort of having to either reject or tolerate me..... 

Another, deeper part resisted the urge to hide under my bushel and so by default of my not following through on any phone calls, they arrived on my doorstep on a Friday morning and I ended up having a beautiful morning of conversation and connection, delightfully losing myself in the fumbling attempts to articulate the bones of things that are often left unspoken to. 

I wrote this in the aftermath of their visit, grateful for the questions and the quality of listening that asked for more of me, rather than less. These are some of the ways that I feel I am an artist, regardless of success or productivity, these are some of the ways I come to belong to myself.

"I feel that at its best, the experience of making art, song, poetry, or at least the receiving of the inspiration for these things, is a deep listening at the interface of self and that which is beyond the self, a moving towards what is vulnerable and unformed, tender and ephemeral, in order to receive something new about oneself or the condition of life. Often the things received in this place are far from grandiose visions of salvation but rather gentle and intimate homecomings, private revelations of understanding about the patterns and shapes of our wounds and our gifts, and a sensing of what the balm might be. 

I feel we have so much to learn at this time about how to bring ourselves as a people into a greater balance and a deeper respect for our planet and for all living things, I feel we have so direly lost our way and that the answers for how we can reclaim our integrity will not come from what we already know, but from what we are gifted by our attuned listening, our stillness in the moment, in our receptivity to a higher wisdom, in our capacity to sensitively receive guidance from that great creative river of life. We will learn to protect the earth by deeply listening to the consciousness of the Earth itself. She will teach us. 

In a sense there comes to be a leaning into the unknowable, a moving across the threshold of what is known, to see what medicine we can find there. There is less and less agenda for me, and more of a seeking of what feels in my body to be true. This is not an easy thing in this time, it is my daily task to bring myself to this endeavour of embodying into the moment and receiving the inspiration that life is asking to birth in me, rather than attending to the thousand and one distractions that pull me away from what is deeply true. And many days I fall short, many days I sleepwalk through, full of forgetting, believing in lack and the separation, my shame or stories of blame. 

I feel that there is a great deal of trauma that exists in the bodies of many of us in this modern world, and for me my art practice has been a way of speaking to what it is that exists beneath the experience of trauma, I feel that I am asked to source the remedy for my own disconnection, I am asked to break through my complacency and humbly drink from the wellspring of creation. It feels to me that there is a sense of personal salvation that opens to me when I open myself to receive from the beyond, from nature and the earth beneath me and all around me, and the vast and mysterious cosmos above me, to be alive to the way that life is asking us to be made anew in every moment, to create for ourselves, in sovereignty, a new reality that serves the whole of creation. 

I would like to surrender more deeply into this process of creativity, to come more deeply into this service to creation, be more courageous at the threshold, to become more comfortable with the feeling of annihilation in the wake of belonging less to the world and more to the void of creative potential, have less fear and less need to control and say yes more deeply and more often to losing myself to the making new. 

There is always a great deal of discomfort for me at the beginning of a creative birthing, a battling with distraction and lethargy and complacency, requiring a force of will that feels momentous to muster. And then always for me the finishing of a piece of art is very similar in feeling to falling in love. It holds that sense of elation and wonder, of madness and joy, of open hearted recognition and devotion, as though a part of myself that had been buried and unformed has been made visible to me, brought from darkness into light, born of the heart and life-giving.

There is a part of me that endeavours through my creative expression to become the channel that is open to receiving life's capacity to create itself anew, cultivating an attunement of the psyche to receive a gift from the mytho-poetic strata of life, a willingness and capacity to be blind and unseeing in the realms of shadow and of grief, facing one's own discomfort to become more deeply at home in oneself. I feel that art and life are inseparable in this sense, the art a distillation of the living one does, an expression of where one's attention has been in all the moments of our days.

What matters to me now as an artist seems to be more about what matters to me as a human, inseparable from productivity, the valuing of the beingness behind it. How do I make myself a receptive instrument for divine guidance, sick of the inadequacies of my limited solutions, defence mechanisms, self protections? How do I let go and trust that there is a magnificence at work that I am worthy of receiving? What is life most deeply asking of me at this time? And what am I carrying that impedes the flow of creation through the bones of my being?

I feel I have lived much of my life from outside of my body, often very disassociated, conditioned as we all are in our modern world by an individualistic intellectualism, deeply saturated in an underbelly of grief for what has been lost. In the vacuum of my own uncertainty a deep keening arises, for true intimacy and authenticity. 

As I have journeyed deeper into this life I have discovered that all the magic comes when I enter deeply into the body, into the dance, into the heart and the womb and to the web of life, within which I am embedded. It is as simple as this really, this coming home to a deeper more embodied, more embedded self. But this has been momentous work for me, it has taken all I have. 

My creative offerings are the gifts, alongside the children I have birthed, that my body has given me when I have stopped long enough to listen. They are the microcosmic gifts that may or may not reflect something at work in the greater macrocosm, but which I offer up all the same, as the only true thing I have learnt about what matters in this life."



©LucyPierce2016

July 3, 2016

Medicine Voice


Medicine Voice - Lucy Pierce
(image courtesy of Medicine Voice)

I had the pleasure  of working with the beautiful Sar Friedman earlier this year on her project Medicine Voice, with an image for the album I and Thou, which she released in May.
The process was such a lovely blend of intuition and trust and the gentle inspiration of Sar’s rich relationship to symbol and spirit. The creation of the piece for me, conjured themes of sovereignty and power, and I loved immersing myself in the wonderful soundscapes and  lyrical richness of the album I and Thou.
 You can find the album here 
And prints and cards of the image are available on my Etsy site courtesy of Medicine Voice.


April 19, 2016

Three Sisters

Three Sisters, their voices weaving the universe together, plaiting the strands of Cosmos, Body and Earth. Embedding the song into the deep. Connecting hearts and souls with sound, vibration and the joy of communion.

Grateful to Megan Frasheski for the inspiration, in honour of the beauty she is weaving with the Three Sisters Song Collective.



Prints and Cards of Three Sisters are available from my Etsy store.

Image ©Lucy Pierce 2016




April 16, 2016

Earth Angel

This painting is a tribute to an incredible woman who passed beyond this life earlier this year. She left such a profound legacy of abundant beauty and love, of connection and joy,  generosity and realness. I am so grateful to have known her.
EARTH ANGEL

Beautiful woman, you fed the soul of the world.
You nourished our eyes with the grace of your beauty,
you nourished our hearts with your fierce and radiant love.
Our bodies you nourished from the gifts of your hearth,
the twinkle in your eye,
and each and every step of your dance,
every note of your song,
nourishing the soul of our beings
and quivering through the sky to the farthest of stars,
your humble offerings of magnificent love a gift to the cosmos.
I am sorry that we could not hold you here,
that our drinking of your beauty
could not ease the suffering
that your vastness also held,
the private serenade of pain
that often belies the surface of our lives.
I'm sorry we were not a more tender resting place,
a more truthful mirror,
I'm sorry that we could not reach in
to touch that place of no return,
I am sorry that our culture does not make ceremony
through which we may purge our grief and our torment,
through which we may be seen to the depth of our shadow
and held as we are in all our earthly offerings to the light.
All the world mourns the passing of you,
your shining heart and generosity of spirit.
All the world is a sadder place
that we did not make a home of you
till your hair turned white
and your skin became a treasure map
of all your pleasures and all of your pains,
of all of the gifts that you bore us,
the tears that you shed
and the gentle shimmering of your joy,
of your courageous depth of feeling.



Cards and prints of this image are available from my Etsy store, with 50% percentage of profits going towards supporting the passions Trish fostered in her living, through Trish's Legacy Fund, contributing to The Growing Abundance Project and in support of the Yolgnu women.


Image and words © Lucy Pierce 2016




February 20, 2016

Etsy Updates




I've just listed most of my images as large cards on my Etsy site. www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce
They are printed on lovely fine art paper with Epson inks and are a nice big size. It's also possible to buy 6 cards of your choice at a cheaper price.
If there are ever any images you'd like as a card that aren't listed please let me know.


 I’m also having a 50% off clearance sale on selected prints (limited stock).
Clearing the old to make way for the new!
Blessings and love to all.

February 11, 2016

They Trust in the Journey

"They trust in the journey"
Prints available www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce


For dear friends deeply loved as they embark upon bold new adventures!


February 8, 2016

As She Tends the Holy Wound Within Her She Brings Fertility to the Earth


THE WOUND

In my life I seem to continuously cycle through these times when I become swallowed by my wound, engulfed by the density of my own shadow. Like a wave that pulls me under I flail in the current that is stronger than my own will, more compelling than my own inner promptings toward clarity and self-determination, goodness and belonging. I am flung into the dark turmoil of my own pain and unconsciousness. It is so hard at these times to make healthy choices, the things that I once habitually and unconsciously clung to for comfort become again the narcotic impulse to zone out and switch of and numb down the pain of my own pummeling. Despite the fact that I now know these impulses further sicken my body and insult my soul, the overwhelmed child within does who not yet know how not to ask for comfort in these ways and I watch myself reach for the things again and again that are poison to my system, wondering at my lack of will, bemused by the absence of my so diligently fought for self responsibility and control.

At these times I find myself lost in the realm of the wounded child and it is so painful to be there, to feel the ways that I don't as yet know how to parent her, as she pushes away all intimacy, even from within my own self, in an attempt to keep herself safe. Many feelings are present in this state, of blame and shame and despair and utter overwhelm, the not knowing of how to keep walking this life, longing to be annihilated as a perceived end to suffering, as I push away people and reach for impersonal comforts that are not invested in human betrayal and yet which have come to betray my body in such a deeply destructive way as I now grapple with the links between diet, stress and the autoimmune disease I now suffer from. 

There have been so many tears cried from this place and an excruciating  rage to navigate, as though every emotion I ever chose not to feel is asking for its time now, erupting from the smooth surface of my own suppression. When I am in this place I often brutally tear my own self and my relationship apart, as I fail in that disassociated place to differentiate experiences of pain and isolation from my past with my present reality, and often project the role of antagonist onto those who care the most for me. This is quite an excruciating unraveling of the stability and peace that has been pain stakingly built in the times when I am free from this overwhelmed and overwhelming expression of my own psychological and emotional pain and physical exhaustion. Thankfully these episodes never last too long and I always seem to find my way back to a rhythm that resembles normality.

I feel that one of the survival mechanisms that I have cultivated in my life has been to become so seemingly pleasant and unobjectionable that I would go unnoticed, slip beneath the radar, like a cloak of invisibility, my disguise of obsequiousness. I feel as though a part of me decided to give the world what I felt it was asking of me and to hide the reality of my experience from view, like the glassy surface of a lake reflecting light away from the unseemly depths. It never felt safe enough to be real. I wonder if this is something that many of us learn to do in our world, where the surface of things is given so much more value than the true, more complex experience of our internal realities. I feel that for me it has become a form of self-imposed imprisonment that I grapple to dismantle, a shroud of pretence which might once have kept me safe but which now keeps me isolated. I see how I have fostered within myself a compulsion to try to swallow and subsume my internal need and experience of overwhelm so as not to impose myself on the world that does not feel safe and simultaneously to protect myself from the more brutal and antagonistic aspects of life, striving to render myself invisible, attiring myself in the camouflage of togetherness in the hope that the world might leave me alone. 

At this point in my life I can say that there is so much of me that is no longer held in the grip of this suffering, I am proud to have grown over the years the parts of me that know how to make empowering choices. I have found many tools that address and articulate the wound in a way that is life giving and which allow me to rest more deeply into my trust of life and allow me to drop into my body in a more attuned and authentic way, creating space for my own particular incarnation of soul to find it’s strange blooming. However the times still come when despite my best efforts to stay awake and aware, and in a positive parenting relationship with my hurt inner child, there are still those times when I go under and she takes the reins, as the primal fissures tear open and I am again that rabbit in the spotlight, grappling with my own psychic survival, walking again in the darkness of my own shadow lands.

It seems now though, that my body can no longer sustain the child's choice to zone out from the pain that lives inside of me, the cost is now too high and I have children of my own to care for. I cannot curl up in the void for long before one of them comes tugging at my sleeve, asking me in a very real way to action my capacity to activate care and enact my love for them in the daily gestures of tending to the minutiae of our lives.

I give thanks for this, from inside the exhaustion I feel at these times, I see how it has grown me, grown so importantly the part that is witness to the pummeling and  can also say yes to the creation of a life of purpose and meaning, of discipline and self belief in order to care for those beyond myself. I see how my wounded child has been offered such a sense of safety in this growing of the inner advocate. I see how my experiences of suffering have led me to become a warrior in the unraveling of its path through the story of my life, the battle to gain insight and perspective from within the impulse to be numb and unfeeling in the face of too much psychic pain has been a salvation to me, it has given me the part of myself that is no longer held in the grip of the wound, the part that can transcend the experience of pain and offer compassion and self awareness to the part that is still held in it’s grasp. This cyclic experience of suffering in my life has begun to gift me with the need to forge a great tenderness within myself, towards my own self. A great forgiveness and capacity to offer care to that which is in pain, to that which feels exiled from the whole, cut off from the nourishing stream of life force that gathers in to itself belonging and place and purpose and connection.

Sometimes this battle to find love and goodness in the microcosm of my life seems so very small and insignificant when placed beside the bigger picture, in a world where there is such a dire need for advocacy for the myriad of other humans who are being wounded and betrayed by life everyday in the world around me. It seems sometimes all I can manage is to stay afloat within my own being, to stay connected to self and to those I love and who love me. I wonder at how the world will ever become a compassionate creature if I cannot extend that quest beyond my own hearth to the suffering of others, but I also trust that that time might one day come, and that even if it doesn't I can at least rest a little in the knowing that I have strived in the ways that I can, to offer care in the face of despair, endeavoring to grow love where there is loathing, and compassion and connection where there is isolation and grief. Even if this work of coming home to myself, of belonging to my own self all the way through, even in the pummeling tide of my own unconsciousness, is all that I can offer the world, perhaps my children will come to understand in a deeper way than I have, what it means to have self love, and how in that self-love they might offer the world, the one that's left at the other side of all of our suffering, a little more of their care.

As a human born to privilege, albeit one who has fallen rather short in the expectations of the capitalist imperative, I feel that sometimes I am only just surviving in my isolation and despair. Not all the time, but sometimes I feel that I have no real place in this world, that I do not really belong, that I exist upon its fringe in a psychological sense, though outwardly I have never endured an overt separation from the herd mentality of the bright and happy, healthy and well adjusted, economically productive persona we are all taught to strive for. It is also true that my children have been raised by a mother who has been immensely preoccupied with surviving her own self protective responses to trauma, the trauma of circumstances and the trauma that ensues from being born sensitive and porous to a world that is often obtuse and harsh. My children have been raised by both the parts of me that have triumphantly learnt how to love, and also by the parts that are as yet still learning what it is to feel safe enough to truly give all of myself to life and to love.

I do understand that in this life I am immensely fortunate and that there are millions of people enduring suffering of a kind that I will never know. I know that I am walking on the shoulders of those whose sacrifice enabled my existence, and that there are those whose experience of life carve a far deeper crevasse through the terrain of suffering and despair than mine ever will. As a white woman, born and raised in a Western Culture there is a part of me that tries to say that I do not have the right to lay any claim to suffering, yet there is another part that recognizes so well that voice of internalized shame, cutting off my escape routes and caging my experience as one unworthy of care. I am moved by the thought of a world compassionate enough to bare witness to all of our stories. Experiences of violence and rape, sexual and emotional abuse, bullying, isolation, stories of trauma, current and ancestral, of mental and physical illness, of natural and human disasters, do not discriminate, they can belong to us all, they do not differentiate between the colour of our skin, our gender, creed or race. Perhaps the current path of our modern world needs to be dismantled from within the dominant culture as well as from without, rather than the passive collusion in the illusion that everything is just fine the way it is.

I feel as though this experience of woundedness is asking me now to say a deeper yes to it’s expression within myself. To absolve myself of a self-imposed illusion of needing to be OK when actually often I am not. I feel that there is treasure in the wound when I cease resisting and say yes to the suffering, to the snot and the tears. What is it asking for?  What is it asking me to grow in myself? What is it teaching me about myself and my existence? How does my vulnerability open me to a deeper and more mystical experience of life? How does my suffering grow my capacity to feel compassion for others? What would happen to my suffering if I could accept myself and love myself completely in it? If this experience is an undeniable part of who I am,  what might happen if I could meet myself there with the most tender and sensual and receptive and finely sensitive of embraces.

I feel curious about this state of woundedness, as it manifests in the stories of many of us, in it’s myriad forms, and I am curious about the lessons that it nestles in it’s folds, because this self-imposed exile from my frequent perception that I do not wholly belong, to myself, to other, to our dominant cultural paradigm, to the overarching indoctrination of well being, this imperative to keep myself pretty and nice and safe for the world, is no longer serving me. So much of the struggle inherent in my experiences of pain is my own judgment of and resistance to the experience, a belief that it is not Ok to not be Ok! I am curious about how my collusion in this paradigm might be dismantled, having been so intrinsically constructed into my psyche for a lifetime. It is something that I feel is central to the manifestation of the autoimmune condition that I now carry, a situation where my body is attacking itself in a way that feels like an expression of that boundary between self and other. A boundary that seems to be at times one lacking in fluid safety, in a full and honest expression, a porous reciprocity. It is one that feels sometimes to be the site of the inner war to keep oneself safe behind enemy lines, where in the honoring of the hyper-rational, western worldly imperative, one can make an enemy of one’s own self.

I name these things primarily in an attempt to dismantle my own self-imposed mask, my vow of silence in this life, the wall that I have erected to keep myself safe that actually renders me invisible and sometimes excruciatingly isolated. I name it in an attempt to relinquish my shame at being a human that experiences suffering and in that suffering, does not feel cohesive with the glossy surface of our world. Perhaps I am not alone in this experience, I do not know. Perhaps many of us are longing for and indeed are in need of, one another’s courageous vulnerability to reveal itself in order to process the trauma of our collective existence. Perhaps many of us nurse our wounds in silent shame and perhaps our suffering might be eased and our world might be changed, if we were less silent and less ashamed of our fragile humanness and our hungering to belong to something which we might lean into at times, something that is us, but is also greater than us, which is imbued with an ethos of compassion, honesty, generosity and care.



Prints of this image are available on my Etsy site www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce 

Words and image © Lucy Pierce 2016

January 8, 2016

Sisters of the Deep Waters and Making Space


Because I have been such a tardy and recalcitrant blogger of late I am throwing caution to the wind and flooding this space with all my withheld offerings. From famine to flood with blessings and love! 



Sisters of the Deep Waters
I am very grateful to the beautiful Jane Hardwick Collings for her enduring request for a mermaid image, inspiring me to connect with these watery beings of the fluid, emotive realms of the ocean. I hadn't realised my inner mermaid until now!
Prints available on Etsy
www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce

Making Space

 I am making space.
I am making a space within which I am enough, in and of myself.
A space with an edge beyond which I end and you begin.
I am making space in rejection of the belief
that there is not room enough for me to exist,
for me to shine and storm,
to inconvenience and disrupt,
to radiate and transform.
I am reaching in through the flesh and the sinew,
I am pulling on bones, stretching out muscles,
making room within for all that I was born to be.
I am being stretched and wrung,
squeezing out all that is not love,
all that would keep me small,
all that would have me believe that I am not enough.
I am wrestling out the voice that would tell me
that I am only safe in the inbetween spaces of dark matter.
I am making space for me to birth myself into being.
I am making space in my pelvis
so that the three million year old woman
can come to rest there,
and guide my every step from her ancient womb.
I am making space in my heart
for a thousand orgasmic blossoms to bloom,
ecstatically fragrant,
thunderously robust,
exquisitely tender.
I am making space in defiance of the story
that I am a worthy receptacle for other people’s pain,
the contract that I make with them to take them into myself
and have them seek their healing through me.
No more! I am making space and I give you back to yourself.
I am making space in order that when I travel out
to the far reaches of the cosmos
a part of me stays close to home,
to hold my self worth by the hearth fire
with the Grandmothers,
not allowing me to take all of me, all the way out there,
in search of the loving boundary
for the small, waiting child within me,
because in this space that I have made for myself
I know that I am loved and infinitely lovable, and here I am safe.
I am making a space with an edge
through which I can filter your opinion of me,
so that even if you don’t like me, I can still like myself.
I am making space for the fierce Mumma roar,
the ancient wild protectress,
who is unshakable in her mercy
for the vulnerable and the innocent,
for the unloved and the wounded.
I am making space in my throat
for the full bodied blooming of my song,
the voice of my power to meet the world
unbound and free,
blossoming and bold.
I am making space for vision to be received,
and for the will to enact the call of what I know to be true,
I am making space so that the gap between
my vision and my actioning is seamless,
because there is space to say Yes to what is mine to give
and I am answerable to none but the ancient lore of life.
I am making space for the blood to flow,
and to be reclaimed by the land
and to receive the ancient lineage of my dream speak
through the precious thread of my moon time,
and to drink deep of the Earth,
primal, raw and sensual.
I am making space to swell and to undulate,
to unravel and enfold,
to dance and to sing, 
to sleep and to dream,
to love and to play.
I am making a space where I am sovereign queen,
from here I do not give myself away,
from here I am whole,
from here there is time and space for me.
I am making space to hold my tender, frightened child
with such a fierce authority of love,
I am making the space to take responsibility for myself,
and my unmet need so that I can set my loved ones free.
I am making space to suckle from the stars,
the sweet milk of vision and mystery
and the ancient story of our belonging.
I am making space to let the Earth mate with the Cosmos,
in sacred union,
through the holy passage of my body
I am making space for my ancestors to shudder through my bones,
their raucous No to all that does not serve my purest becoming,
and their Yes to that which gently opens
a clean fold of being
that will serve all of our futures.


Words and image © Lucy Pierce 2016




Recent Paintings

I have been so blessed this year with the task of painting gifts for dear and beloved people in my life. It feels very different to work with a specific intention and someone in my heart, I feel the work that comes in this way has a different quality to my other paintings. Beautiful to share from my heart in this way though.

"She Drinks of the Deep Waters" 



 "Her Garden of Children"




"Forgiving the Fox"

Prints of all these images are available on my Etsy site. www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce



Images and text © Lucy Pierce 2016