A Glorious Catastrophe

I never asked for it,

the box you gave to me at my birth,

the ask that my vast, wild, eternal nature 

should squeeze itself inside

and make a home for itself.

So excruciatingly crippling,

the conditions of service.

Maybe it never really mattered after all

that I wasn’t ever quite lovable enough,

or desirable enough for you.

Not pleasing or pretty enough,

never quite malleable and subservient enough 

to win the prize of your gaze.

Maybe I was really just born to be

this glorious catastrophe

of heat and hair

and blood and sweat,

trying to hide itself

from the cruel gaze of the predator,

swirling through time like a force of nature,

untamable, unknowable, unpossessable,

sovereign and free, if only she knew.

Maybe I don’t care anymore,

that I don’t actually want what you’re selling,

that I am not and never was for sale,

that I have nothing to sell that you would want to buy.

Unwanted, unhinged from the world,

an act of revolution,

like a thunderstorm or a wildfire

or a weed that sprouts in the gaps of the pavement.

Because I always was and ever will be a little piece of everything.

I am birth and death and all that comes between,

the amniotic fluid and the first breath,

the black shroud and the dark earth,

exquisitely grotesque,

primal and fierce, delicate and fine.

Maybe I don’t even want you to love me any more.

Maybe I just want to find the way

to claim a greater playing sphere

than the one you allocated to me.

One that has a place for all the parts of me,

unbound from the contortions of suppression.

If you only knew how big I was,

if only I could let myself truly know that unfathomable fact,

unshackling the edicts of safety you placed on me.

I am not safe,

I am a turbulent channel of rampant love and pain,

a catastrophic deluge of compassionate rage and sensual harbor.

I am unfurling my torrential magnificence 

into the co-creative field of the universe,

I am weeping in the darkness of my exile.

I am a grief-stricken burgeoning,

a primal harbor for lost parts

and misplaced dreams,

I am big enough to hold all the brokenness and all the hope,

a majestic annihilation of reason,

a formidable imperative of tenderness.

I do not fit in your box and I have all the scars to prove it.

I will not prune myself for you,

be clipped by your infantilising whim.

I am hair and juice, snot and tears,

blood and bone, woman born,

all the years my age and powerful,

unkempt and fertile, life-giving warrioress,

bloodcurdling protector of the vulnerable and the weak.

No I am not pretty and I will not be shamed

and as you cast me aside

I feel the primal undercurrents of creation

scoop me up and feed the ancient rivers within,

of this formidable longing to unshackle

Her vibrant potency,

Her ferocious transmutation,

transcending the captivity of feminine identity,

the psychic imprisonment of fear and belittlement,

that a colonizing culture enforced upon Her.

I exalt the mossy crevices you would manicure and poison,

I relish the succulent decay you would sanitize and bleach,

I trust in the blood-swelling, bone-crunching,

nectar-flowing, sweat-drenched 

brutality of her primordial love,

so tender and fierce.

I will make of Her my home.

I don’t want to please you anymore,

I just want to love myself

and breath my devotion,

in all my magnificent messiness,

a potent mix of all the things a life can be,

born only this once,

as this particular catastrophe of love and grief,

untamable after all the trying,

only able to be loved completely

by a consciousness as vast and unknowable as it’s own self.

I can rest there, in that knowing,

that even though the world would not have me as I truly am,

I know that the place from which I came will take me back,

unapologetic and shining.

She will understand that I was just an ugliness

too exquisite for the world of small boxes,

a beauty too primal and pungent,

too real and honest

for the world of masks.

Image and text © Lucy Pierce

Hungering for Sovereign Ways

The blood of my womb has been poured as an offering upon the earth of this country for decades of moon cycles. The birthing blood of three children has been given back to this land that I love, the placentas of my babies buried in the soil of Her body, this land that has held me in its boughs as a wee one, that has fed me with Her love all the days of my living life and before as I walked upon the Earth as an egg in the womb of my mother's body inside my Grandmother's womb. The coming of the people with whom I share skin to this land was a brutal violation, a violent desecration, a travesty of sorrow and cold blooded cruelty, theft, rape, torture, slavery, murder, massacre. There are no words for what was done, and continues to be done in the name of this imperative of domination and impotence, no words for what has been taken and damaged, for what that means for the First Nations people and for the dreaming of this land, what it means for the granddaughters and grandsons of those whose hands the atrocities moved through.

For generations my people have dwelt here, and yet I hear the excruciating heart call, the hireath for my homelands that call to me, and that grieve for those that left and were lost in that tide of colony. For my people had already lost so much before they came to these shores, already they had been broken, their own roots torn from their old ways, their belonging severed with violence and persecution, torture and desecration of woman  from her land, from her wisdom ways, from her herblore and her dreaming, from her ancient ways of being. Stolen was the language and the stories and the ways of belonging. The ancestors of my lineage hung in metal cages from castle walls for long cold years on end in the harsh seasons of Scotland, as punishment for their gender and their belonging to a line that crowned the kings of that land. My people were burnt at the stake for their knowing of the old ways and many learnt to betray in order that their blood line may survive, perhaps with a prayer that what was true was written in the blood and could perhaps be read again, reached back to, through the trauma of our loss, through the indecipherable language of our adaptation to brutality. 

Perhaps what it is that my heart hungers for so acutely was lost long before my people left to come here, but my heart still calls to that other land, where the bones of the ones who belonged sing to me of remembrance and hungering for the time before the madness, when it was not a crime to belong to your country, to belong to the Earth. Perhaps the time has come for us each to sink our roots through the agony of ages, the bedrock of shame and desecration, through the hunger and the exile, to find a way to belong again to the song of the Earth that keens beneath our feet, to remember how she fed us before we covered our souls with protection and normalised her rape and degradation, before we delineated ourselves from each other so divisively, as we had been raped and degraded and divided for so long. We have long forgotten what it was to live in pure integrity with our homeland. The pain stretches back so far, so many brutalized bones in the earth, so much haunted ash. But the bones and the blood of those who knew of another way, a more fierce and gentle way of belonging to the land sing still beneath them, back through the ages, across the great wheel of time. Perhaps we just need to listen more deeply, beyond our own trauma, through the layers of history, to Herstory and Her vast invitation to come home, wherever we have landed on Her beautiful body, to come home to Her.

My womb is full of blood and hunger for sovereign ways, it is full of stories of my bloodline and the times before the dislocation and the severance. I say a prayer for all people to find their ways home, as I pour my blood, red upon the Earth, that is my home now, a displaced woman hankering for belonging on a stolen land. I have carried such shame for what has been done to an intact culture by the brutalizing force of my race, upon the indigenous people of this country. But I am trying to put that shame down now, because I know that I belong with all my heart and soul to the people who came before, that sang and danced upon the land, that fed her with their life blood and wove her a cloak of beauty with the fibres of the soul. I belong to the Earth beneath my feet. My soul remembers what it meant to belong to country. My soul remembers how much it hurt to have it taken away, the ripping severance. Maybe I remember also, that our Mother never left us and that she breaths and dreams and awakens with us all yet, in the stirrings of our blood, in the pulsing of the heartbeat, Hers and ours entwining. Maybe all the roots of all the races entwine in Her heart, touching one another through Her radiant core. Maybe that is the only way home now, through her molten heart, for all our stories to melt together in the fire of Her love, greater than any part, we are all children of the Earth.
My heart is open, to learn and to grow, to give and to receive, to dismantle and to become, at the threshold of our evolutionary interface, as humans upon the Earth.

Photo courtesy of Angela Rivas of Lunasol Photography for the book From This Place.
Text © Lucy Pierce 2017

Bloodmoon Blessing- a prayer, picture and poem

May the wombs of all daughters be blessed, as eggs in the ovaries of their mothers, inside the wombs of their grandmothers, blessed at their conception and blessed at their birth. May the wombs of all maidens be blessed at their menarche. May the wombs of all women be blessed always at the alter of their loving, through the cycles of their blood, in their terminations and their miscarriages and at the birthing of their babes. May the womb of woman be blessed through all the years of her blood tide and beyond, in her menopause and through all the years of her wisdom giving and also blessed at her death, for all she has dreamed and birthed into being for the all. May all wombs be known as sacred.

Daughter of the mystery

when your time comes

and your moon blood flows

may you know what it is 

that you have become.

May there be fragrant blossoms 

and loving hands

and tender care to escort you

through the threshold.

May there be tears of grief and praise,

for what has been lost 

and what has become,

for death and rebirth

for joy and longing.

May your blood be claimed 

as the powerful medicine it is,

the reciprocal conduit of your sovereign relationship 

to the Mother Earth beneath your feet

and also now within your womb,

birthing your sensitive interface

with her magnificence

with each cycle of the moon.

You are blooming and rising to become

the living embodiment 

of life's co-creative capacity,

with it the great gift and the responsibility

for what is born of our endeavouring 

to know and to love

the beingness of our bodies,

the longing of our hearts

the knowings of our souls,

returning the nourishing harvest of our wombs,

the potent gift of our blood

to the earth who sustains us.

May we, the world that holds you 

be fierce and uncompromising 

in our advocacy of you,

in our celebration of your exquisite becoming.

May you know yourself to be as the moon

and as the cycling tides,

embedded in the vast serenade of creation,

your body marking the rythmns of the universe 

within the intimacy of your temple,

the holy treasure of your skin.

May you know the preciousness

of your own becoming,

how sacred it is. 

May we know how to welcome you,

woman born,

birthing love

on this good earth.

Cards and Prints of Blessed Be The Blood available on Etsy.

Text and image © Lucy Pierce 2017

Shaped by Unseen Histories

I am forged in the fire of my own forgetting 

as much as I am hewn from the tome of my recollection.

Forged by the great amnesia of my shadow's blind deductions, 

the things that were too hard to grasp, too exiled to love, too painful to embody, 

by the other side of the coin of love, the face of my fear. 

I am born of my ancestor's suffering as much as from their joy, 

I am dismantling beliefs that have twisted and crippled at the root, 

retrieving what was abandoned so long before my birth, 

restoring oxygen to severed limbs and disembodied narratives, 

extracting power from pain, reweaving love from shame, 

recalibrating warmth from the numb scarification of millennia of suffering. 

Too much has passed before me that could not be held to the light, 

that fled to corners where the shadows eased the edges of agony, 

where brutality was softened by the darkness and retreat from the predatory gaze. 

I am scouring the cosmos for the dark matter of my undoing, 

purifying pain with the wrestled out light of my dim remembering, 

adding minuscule brushstrokes of a half recalled love 

to the tapestry of my forgetting and misguided assumption, 

that because I am made of pain and shadow I am anything less than a miracle. 

I am breathing love home to an ostracized defense 

against the perfection of my own place in creation.

I am made of smoke and mirrors, 

ancient forces shrouded in benign preconceptions.

I am a rampant wilderness tamed to an impotent forgetting.

I am hunger and blindness.

I am remembering.

I am shaped by my own unlivedness, the timbre of that from which I am withheld,

as much as from the neural pathways of the known.

I am molded by my own judgement and fear, 

carved from my hunger and blindness, 

perimetered by my incapacity to perceive vastness, 

prohibited by my misunderstanding of time and eternity. 

I am squeezed through the eye of a needle, 

crushed beneath the anvil of my own craving to be made small and unseen, 

to stay safe and oblivious and inconsequential....

And yet this vast ancient belonging reduced to a solitary yearning 

to know myself for what I most truly am, 

and have most magnificently forgotten how to be. 

I am shrouded in beliefs forged in the mind of a child 

who would have done anything to subvert the suffering she could not understand, 

I am unpicking the clumsy stitches of the false garments of my presumptions

with the blunt tools of my hope and my faith,

that it could possibly be made to fit a little more comfortably 

with a more expansive identity than the infantile beliefs 

of a ravenous pain-body, passed down through the ages,

adorned with the beads and buttons of eons of ancestral trauma 

transmuting through the vulnerable and visceral flesh and blood beneath. 

I hunger to awaken to what I was before the pain and forgetting, 

before the mind manipulated matter to be perceived by the smallness of our servitude to brutality, through the lens of our avoidance of pain,

rather than the orchestral resonance of a cosmic belonging 

to the threads of eternal remembering that all life is seeded in love 

and all life to love returns.


Photo taken by the beautiful Angela Rivas of Lunasol Photography for the book From This Place.
Text © Lucy Pierce 2017

To Still And To Slow

I feel that so many of us at this time are receiving an enormous recalibration, as though there were an imperative for us all to slow and to still and to enter into the threshold space that exists between the hard matter of our own certainty, and the infinite realms of the spirit and its manifestation as the nature of our Mother the Earth. It feels as though there is an invitation at play, to step outside of the timescape of the world, with its frenetic haste and unending imperative to strive and to produce, and instead there feels to be an opportunity to access another realm of body time or soul time, an experience more akin to the timescape of our planet as apposed to the superimposed impossibility of our modern acculturation. 

So many of us are so tired and have never learnt to rest, so many burnt out and in adrenal exhaustion, unable to keep up with the ask of our time. I believe the Earth needs us to become much more articulate in the languages of love and care, of kindness, tenderness and trust. Revolutionary it feels, to begin to learn the sweet art of leaning into the discomfort of our fear about not being enough, not doing enough, not producing enough, just leaning and waiting to see if the world does truly collapse if we step back a little from the demands and imperatives to never cease in our toil to become something magnificent, to own something magnificent, to create something magnificently sought after. 

I feel the whimsically whispered possibilities that maybe there might be enough for us all, already, after all, just as we are, even as we become less and less, and rest more and more, and move more deeply from a place of aligned purpose rather than harried mania. Do we not already have all that we need, are we not already almightily magnificent enough, just as we are, regaled in all our glorious flaws and decorative shortcomings? 

I'm not sure that we can heal our damage to the earth from a place of manic action, I feel like we might need to do some deep soul healing on our own selves before we can find the answer our Earth is asking of us. I think it might have something to do with speaking less and listening more, doing less and feeling more, and slipping through, at every chance, the space between the timescapes of interdimensional becoming. 

It might have something to do also with leaning into the grief and horror and despair that keeps us all running so fast. I wonder in fact, if the salvation of our kind upon this earth, might just spontaneous emerge, as the unsought after gift, the enlightening, that materialises as the ballast, to our capacity to feel our own darkness and pain. 

Image and text © Lucy Pierce 2017

Becoming Safe to Feel

We need all of our feelings, they are there for a reason and they need to be felt. We need to know we're big enough to feel them all, even the most excruciatingly uncomfortable ones, even the ones that mean we have to disrupt the expectations of life and other people and our own limitations to feel them. I was raised in a culture, at a time, when I was taught it was not safe to feel my own feelings, not acceptable to express all the hues and shades and textures of my human emotions as they arose. What happened for me was that then my body became so full of all the suppressed feelings that couldn't be felt, that I had to leave my body because it had become a toxic dumping ground. Because I knew I would not be loved and held through the process of releasing the painful and uncomfortable or raucously jubilant emotions that perpetually bubbled up from within, I swallowed them down in a constant imperative to suppress. I used any means I had to spread wings and fly from the impossibility of being full of things one could not be loved for, but that had nowhere else to go.

I formed addictions which further added to the toxicity of my body as a place of residence. The perception that I was not safe to express who I was led to a sense of immense insecurity and self-loathing, I could not know myself in all my colors and so I couldn't truly know or trust others. I was so isolated and alone, I couldn't express my needs and so I did not feel safe, ever. Everything of value to me, everything life-giving, like creativity, sensuality, sexuality, boundaries, ambition, desire, intimacy, connection was all bound up with all the things I couldn't let out and so became inaccessible to me, became dangerous. I didn't even know what I wanted for myself let alone how to ask for it. I had a vast pain body and mountains of shame and a seemingly bottomless self-loathing. 

Throughout my early life, adolescence and early twenties, more insults and injuries were incurred along the way, but the vastness of my withheld pressure cooker of rage and grief and panic and fear and love and joy was so densely packed in. How does one even begin to address the backlog, let alone attend affectively to the slights of the moment? I was tied, bound and gagged internally, crippled and contorted, hiding in my own skin. When I first became a mother at the age of 25, I had only just begun to address this dire dissociated state of shame and toxic suppression of emotion. I was voiceless and isolated from my own body, because of the things that hadn't been shared and accepted.

Motherhood changed the landscape of my psyche in such a fundamental way. Simultaneously I understood great love and saw the depths of my own trauma. For the first time in my life I felt a dimension of fierce love and responsibility that blew my mind. It showed me that to love and to hold my baby, I would have to begin to feel all the feelings that hadn't yet been felt, in order to offer true advocacy and a deep container of loving compassionate acceptance for all that moved in my child. I had to learn to love myself.

It also made me see that those who are suppressed will suppress in order to avoid feeling the feelings they have been indoctrinated to suppress, in order not to feel the terror and threat of death, abandonment and annihilation, that becomes associated with one's own emotional expression. The powerful instinct of my children to use their emotions to get their needs met was deeply triggering to the wounded child within me. Their anger triggering a deep fear and discomfort that would then lead me to unconsciously control their behavior  in order not to feel so overwhelmed by my own toxic response to the purity of emotional expression. This paradox was so excruciating for me to live with, as I saw my own toxicity impacting on my pure and perfect children. I began to walk the long road toward a restoration of selfhood and healing, one I am still growing and learning upon in each living moment.

The story that it was not safe to be who we are, not safe to feel and be that which rises and falls like the magnificent waves of oceans or storm clouds or spring blooms, began back in the far reaches of our ancestral history, in the intricate twists and turns of our epigenetic traumas. The contortions of our complicit pretense, seeded in the fertile ground of our innocence, began long before our mother's mother's mother walked the Earth. I have been mothering my three children for 17 years now and I have made more mistakes than you could poke a stick at, just as I have loved them as fiercely always as I have known how to. In the years that have ensued, living inside the paradox of needing to fall apart and own my rage and grief and love and fear, let myself be undone, spill open, dismantle the iron maiden of my own withholding, whilst simultaneously holding space for small, vulnerable humans and trying to maintain healthy adult relationships has been fraught with times of chaos and immense vulnerability. 

One who is suppressed has no idea who they might be on the other side of their expression, one only knows one's self for the shame of not being true. Over the years I have allowed myself to feel it all, rivers of tears, snot and spit. Violent rage ripping through my body, spewed out to self and other. Tender apology, stripped back remorse. Cycling in, cycling out. There have been times when I have longed to medicate myself, times when I have felt I was going mad, when I felt I was deeply insane, times when I have wanted to die because it felt too hard to be alive inside my body, with all the things it didn't know how to feel and express, but felt all the same. Damage has been done, my unravelling has taken it's toll, on my children, on the men who have partnered with me, on my body. There were also the more gentle unfurlings, the tender courting of release and surrender. The dancing, meditating on the visceral sensations of unfoldment, the love-making, the crooning and keening, the art and song and sisterhood, the dreaming and all the while the great body of Earth beneath me, and the celestial magnificence of the cosmic dance above, helping me to trust myself and to know that I could be loved in all my shades.

I have had to incrementally grow my self love and acceptance with each new offering of courage to feel and show what has been there, hiding inside of me in all its monstrous ugliness and raw beauty, like the Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth beneath the palace. I have been doing the work of taming him, coaxing him out, feeding him, bringing him home to love. I have been learning what it looks like to be an internal mother for myself, who says yes to it all, who knows how to hold the vast array of human experience without turning or faltering or shaming. It's been a big journey and I have failed to find a path of grace so many times, when my children's unrestrained expression would trigger my own suppressed emotion and there would be two four year olds doing battle for control. My lack of boundaries and my disembodied absence have made mothering an enormous task, the ask of finding my way into a capacity that I could feel proud of, that I could name as true. 

Our salvation has resided in the magnitude of fierce maternal love that was birthed in my being along with my babies, the instinct to hunt for truth and discard that which is poisonous, to always follow the scent of love, even if the way was messy and steep. I have time and again conjured up the humility to say sorry and to reweave the broken or frayed threads back into a semblance of unity and belonging, with each rupture or tear. The reparation of tactile affection, tender gestures of care weaving our bodies back to wholeness, again and again. Our salvation has resided in the magnificent resilience and creativity and kindness and intelligence of my children and there profound capacity to forgive and to make anew, in their keen mistrust of falseness and their wholehearted embrace of truth, they have been my teachers. We so underestimate the life-giving intelligence of our children and their capacity to know what they need. This to me is the true task of motherhood, unfathomably valuable to a culture, brave and hearty work, dismantling and re-membering the ruptured heart and body and soul, again and again in the face of a world that is sometimes cruel and thoughtless. 

In this work of processing the great archive of suppressed feeling it sometimes seems that the strands of my very DNA have restructured themselves, that millennia of acculturation have reformed themselves in my cells, that generations of ancestors have been given a voice and a reason for enduring all that they too were forced to withhold. This journey for me is far from complete but I want to share something small that felt big, that happened recently for me. I picked my little ones up from school and my 8 year old boy was hot and grumpy. We are coming into some warmer weather after a long cold winter. He wanted to go to the river. This is a familiar request and often we will be found there on a warm evening, cooling off in her gentle waters. But not today, internally I had to balance his needs with the needs of the rest of the family, cooking dinner, I had things to prepare for an event the following day, our floor desperately needed vacuuming. I said no. 

My beautiful boy started up, threatening and cursing, crying and raging, throwing his weight around. I checked in with him around safety and reminded him not to let his body stray too far over to his sister's side of the car seat. I told him I was here, that I loved him, that I felt really good that he could really share with us everything he was feeling. When we got home and moved inside there was some more tears and frustration, I offered a hug or just my close physical presence, he wanted space. I offered water, the tears lessened, the anger had a few more cycles to pulse through his system. I stayed in the same room as him but gave him the space he asked for. I kept my energetic body open to him, making my own etheric body available if he needed to draw strength from me and I was deeply holding him in my heart. He eventually softened and lay very still, soft and quiet on the couch. For nearly an hour, he lay, dreamy eyed. 

I sat with him for a bit, stroked his brow, asked him what he needed. He was fine, content just to be. As I looked into his face, he held my eye contact and we just gazed for a while, at the wide open soul exposed from within, and my heart opened so deeply at his beauty, like a landscape after a storm has passed, and the sun breaks through and there is peace and grace and a deep restedness within the body. In that moment he looked so exquisite and pure. We talked about what had happened a little later but the work had already been done, he'd moved on. Later that night, my son came out from his room, where I had already put him to bed, and in the most casual, present way he said, "Mum, if you watch a movie tonight, could you not have the sound too loud because I'm very sensitive to the noise." I said "Sure, thanks for letting me know" and he went back to bed. 

All these things are very ordinary occurrences, just an example of the everyday navigations that life with children entail, but they are also miracles.  We have been through these moments countless times, with varying degrees of surrender and presence from me. But on this day I very clearly saw that my child was free to feel his feelings and that he knew what his needs were and was able to ask for them to be met. In the wake of this experience, a penny has dropped for me and something so fraught and traumatized has come to a resting place within me. All those days spent lost in my own darkness, all the tears berating myself for my preoccupation with my own underworld, my dark underbelly, while everyone else was getting on with their bright and shiny lives, all those endless dark nights of the soul where I came to court death and oblivion while my babies rested in their beds, my love for them singing so powerfully in my heart with the calling for restoration and regeneration and the finding of a way through. I suddenly saw that it was all worth it for this moment, where without knowing that I was even doing it, I was teaching my darling, beautiful son that all of him is welcome here, all his feelings, his rage and his frustration was welcome, not as an inconvenience, but as a treasure, the treasure of the animal body finding its way in the great jungle of life.

I could offer him this because I have finally given enough of this to myself, relentlessly unravelling the tightly curled spring of my pain body to finally make my skin a safe home for my soul to reside in. My son has learnt, or actually is learning still as I am, that it is not helpful to project our feelings onto other people, neither passively or aggressively, but we are welcome to release that which arises from within us, however messy that appears to be. I will undoubtedly make a multitude of mistakes again, but in this moment all the uncertainty of whether that small instinct to move towards the pain rather than continue to remove myself from it, would lead eventually to healing, rather than insanity and persecution, felt to reach a place of peace and integration within my being. At this time in my life, I feel much less volatile, much less passive, much less willing to hurt my own integrity to please others, I feel much less hidden and much more available to honesty and truth, I feel much less defended and controlling. I feel much more self-loving, more able to tend with presence and compassion, to that which arises, from moment to moment, to be seen and integrated into the field of experience, into the heart of love.

I'm not sure that there is an easy way to shed the shackles of being confined to a torturous captivity within your own psyche, I don't know if there is an easy and graceful way of disposing of decades of suppressed emotion without creating some havoc along the way, but I do know that feelings have a purpose, and that the feeling of them is necessary. They have a medicine and guidance and insight, the expression of which is cleansing and purifying and recalibrating. They are the voice of our bodies. They are love's foot soldiers, crafting the rugged terrain of our capacity to be life, bold and unrestrained, wild life. 

I think as a culture with such a backlog of shame and pain, suffering and trauma, we have vastly underestimated the sensitive needs of the visceral body, of the complex nervous system to unravel and be felt, given space and advocacy to discharge and return to a state of equilibrium. A culture that raises its girls to be compliant and subservient and to always serve the needs of others, to be good and to be nice and always to please, groomed for the cultural imperative for us all to be alluring and gorgeous, dewilded and safe, tame and placating, voiceless, empty, available, raises a culture of women and mothers who carry a toxic load of suppressed grief, shame and rage. Raising our boys to be tough and unfeeling, ruthless and unquestioning of their right to take what they want, stoic and numb, brutal and colonizing, driven and unyielding is an ecological and inter-personal disaster. This conditioning expresses itself as emotional or sometimes physical violence,  and an ongoing cycle of suppression  and shame, which we pass on to our sons and our daughters. I don't want to keep doing this. It is time that we create a world that does not leave the soft animal of our bodies, of our feeling selves behind. 

It is time we learnt to feel all the feelings that exist within us, taking responsibility for their safe expression, learning how to mother and own, to father and cherish, to nourish and nurture our own emotional states so that we don't need to project so fiercely onto those who trigger those feelings within us. We need to take radical responsibility for the small, wounded, unsafe, silenced, shamed ones within, who have not been given voice by a world that requires us to be commodified purveyors of a materialistic, consumerist imperative based on slavery, abuse, suppression and the violent colonisation of otherness. I don't believe it is ever too late. The implications of my trauma and woundedness has impacted on my children, I have contributed to a cycle of emotional abuse and suppression that has woven its way through my people for millennia  I could wallow in the shame of that, but the fact that some of us are beginning to find our way to a container, a cauldron, a vessel of love that feels spacious enough, to begin to hold and love and feel and allow all the ways in which a body might need to express itself in order to make of itself a safe home, gives me hope for us all. 

As I reach across time to hold the wounded heart of myself as a four year old girl, who made the choice to swallow the pain rather than tantrum it out, for all the times i felt one thing and showed another, for all the times i said yes when I meant no, I bring that advocacy and healing forth, healing the present and in so doing the future. As I learn to love instead of judge and punish the searing despair that rises from the depths, the isolating unbelonging that threatens to engulf me, the misfitted malcontent, the hungry ghosts of my exile, I am, through each gesture of compassion and care, homing the instincts and intuitions, the powerful boundaries and vast capacity that is required of us to bring our world back into balance with the timeless lore of life, which is that there is actually enough love for us all, each to be exactly who we were born to be, there is in fact the time and space for all our feelings to find there rightful expression, to convey their rightful information and to return the body to its natural state of freedom and availability, of communion and belonging. 

Image "After the Fire" © Lucy Pierce

Text © Lucy Pierce 2017

An Animal of Earth

An Animal of Earth

There is a space, a gap,

a chasm, a schism, 

a rift between my body 

and my eyes that perceive it. 

Like a cleft membrane, 

as though there were a mismatch 

between the form

that my acculturated eyes 

can narrowly receive,

and the actual rugged peripheries 

and contours of my real life body.

And in the space between 

a great grief dwells, 

unmet and in search of asylum. 

This space is filled with the wasteland 

that says I could never be enough,

that I always was 

and ever will be, too big,

too soft, too textured,

not quite right, 

not deservedly worthy.

When I look with these eyes,

they see through the lens 

of this judgement,

this critical imposition,

punitive imperative,

through the lens of this brittle world,

and it leaves the animal of my body

in perpetual isolation,

forever unseen 

for all the beauty she expresses,

all the generosity she exudes. 

There is a chasm of unlovedness,

between the body and the eye,

and I see now it has always been 

the eye that does not belong,

the eye that imposes the exile

on the perfectly imperfect body,

that has only ever wanted love,

only ever wanted to belong to itself,

nothing more,

just to belong to its own self.

But every time the eyes look,

they shame and demean,

all they ever see

is the not-good-enoughness.

I feel a whisper now,

a longing to integrate 

the space between 

the eye and the body,

I want to fill that space with silence,

and in the stillness,

I want to fill it with the presence of love.

I want to bridge that gulf, 

with a gentle acceptance, 

a homely comfort,

a tender generosity of heart.

I want to retrieve my gaze from the world

and bring it home to my body, 

home to the animal of Earth.

I want my eyes to belong to my soul,

like a baby belongs to its mother,

fiercely protected

by eyes that see only with love 

and the great responsibility 

of being a shelter 

from the harshness 

of the world.

My beautiful body has been torn to shreds 

with the sharp edge of every mirror,

or happened upon reflection. 

My eyes inflicting cruelty

with razor sharp dexterity,

amputating myself from belonging.

With every gaze, a violence done.

I want my eyes and my body 

to curl up together,

to wrap themselves up tight,

like my dog, 

when she curls 

around herself to sleep.

I want them to be together, gently,

for all the time that it might take 

for the world inside them to die,

for the space between them

to still and to close,

to mend and to heal,

for friendship to forge,

so that finally they can belong again

together in the one skin,

singing the one song 

that says,

you are enough,

and you are home,

and to know 

what a riotous blessing it is

to be home in a body. 

To be home on the earth,

in love. 

Word and Image © Lucy Pierce 2017