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