December 30, 2018

The Doorway Of My Heart



The Doorway Of My Heart


It is raining, 
soft and purifying, 
melancholy sky,
my heart is a tender doorway, 
many things are passing through 
and I try not to brace against their passage.
My heart a fiercely feeling conduit 
between now and before and the yet to come, 
between the given and the withheld,
between the manifest and the gestating,
seeding space for tomorrow’s fruition. 
It is a vessel beyond time, 
so that which once was, 
is conjured now by some mysterious dreaming, 
the sense of it come suddenly present again, 
and all the futile longing for it to be other
than what it is
and this presencing that comes,
it’s time has come to be wept for 
and so I weep, 
like the rain, soft and purifying.
My sadness seeding the fertile ground 
of my becoming,
and I try not to brace against its passage,
for it is what is asked of me,
inside this particular eternal moment,
what is asked 
beyond thought and hope,
just to love what it is that rises inside,
just this melancholy sky
and the doorway of my heart
and all of life, 
passing through.




© Lucy Pierce 2018

December 12, 2018

An Alchemical Birth



As children we are born utterly helpless and entirely dependant upon the capacity of our care-givers to create the cohesive and attuned vessel of love into which our ensouled inspiritus might feel safe enough to land, to ground, to begin the journey of incarnating into the visceral embodiment of life on this good earth. Considering the intergenerational trauma that is now manifest in almost all the bloodlines of humanity, when we consider the hidden stories and legacies of trauma that are passed down the family lines, down the inherited cultural lines of abuse and domination, without even beginning to equate the lessons we come with from our spirit lines, it is of no surprise that the receiving vessel is not always what we need it to be, in order for us to arrive intact, awake and alive, to begin the enactment of the true purpose of our soul’s destiny on the earth plain. It is of no surprise that for some of us the great work of this life is that of forging the heartfull vessel of love, through which we are finally able to birth ourselves into full soulful presence in our living. Meticulously crafting the container of  love that will facilitate our own becoming. This birthing for me feels to always be through the very eye of the wound, through the channel of perceived brokenness, the alchemical work of coming to know the unmetness as not of our own true making, but a troubled circumstance requiring of our dismantlement. It was never our own magnificence that was at question, never our own worthiness of love, but rather the absence of a consciousness big enough to birth us through. We are together now, forging that birthing hut, soft floored and warm eyed, plant allies at the ready, the receptive hands of our midwives outstretched to receive our gentle arrival. We are forging this space with the sinews of our care and compassion and co-creative striving. As we make of ourselves the alchemical vessels, turning shit into gold in the furnace of our own courage to bear the wound, the heart break, our fierce holding to a deeper knowing of who it is that we are, and what we were truly born to, an arrival begins to occur. The true birth of our vast consciousness, through the body, through mother/father/sister/brother/lover, wound and gift, we birth each other through the heart of our glorious love, and through the excruciating pain of its absence, to know our own true faces, received at last in the oxcytocic glow of our own arrival, to know ourselves utterly worthy of the life that has been gifted to us, that we are truly blessed to inhabit, and uniquely equipped to bestow.


© Lucy Pierce 2018

October 20, 2018

Tender Harvest



My heart is so full of love for and gratitude to all the good folk who came and bore witness to my exhibition opening Tender Harvest last night.
I love the way that a rectangular room, miraculously transformed itself into a circle as the work was hung. This intimate, round space then required the anchoring of an alter, so that when my reflections were shared into the space it became a ceremony, a circle of shining faces to greet me in the round.
There was something sweet in this unintended ritualising of what has felt potent initiatory work for me, the shadow work of tending to all the wounded aspects that arise to be seen and healed, allowing me to share my work and to stand and share my voice from a place of truth.
The outer expression inconsequential, it sometimes seems, in relation to the powerful inner workings of the journey.








TENDER HARVEST

I would like to take a moment to speak for my paintings because to me they have been way-showers, truth-speakers, meaning makers, gifts from my own chthonic underworld to my emergent and awakening sense of Self.
As someone who has struggled to find a place for myself in this world, these paintings have been one of the ways of mirroring myself back to myself, so that I could see who it is that I truly am.
They have been made as offerings to the threshold of my soul, as offerings to the creator spirit, so that I might gaze upon that nascent emergence of what it was an unknowable part of me knew to be truth. They are a struggling to make conscious, the enveloping world of my own interiority, which has always, painfully, held more power than the lived reality, a making solid of what is experienced as an enchantingly unformed realm of my own imaginative solace.
They are a way of coming to know myself, and to push back against the fear that I was nothing and nobody, with nothing to say.
They are my rebellion against being handed a concensus reality, they are my way of loving that which asked to birth itself through my being.
They have been created at times as remedy for the despair that has teetered to engulf me, they are gestures from my body, they are hewn from the blood of my womb, and the tears of my heart.
These paintings are my prayers, prayers for unity in the face of disintegration, for cohesion in the face of strife, for birth in the face of inertia, for Love In the face of fear, for selfhood in the face of annihilation.
Each mark made, a binding of myself back into this manifest reality from the other more compelling dreamweave of myself, each scratch of the pen a compelling gesture of assertion of my own vision as something of value, as something of worth. The choice to know my way of seeing as worthy of sight. The carving of a place, a space, for self in the world.
These paintings have been, over the years, a way of experiencing myself as real, in case I came to mean nothing at all, in case in the gaze of a world that honours not the animal beingness, I might become invisible.
It is not an easy thing to be an artist in this world, it is more and more a leap of faith that anyone will find a body-born unique, visceral expression of worth. I am so very grateful for your witness here, for helping me to complete this creative cycle. This for me the hardest part, the giving over, the being seen, the letting go, like a mother who has clung too long at her cubs fully grown.
This is a part of the tender harvest of the last decade of life for me, a visible substrata of lived expression, carved out between the care giving and the survival, in spite of procrastination and a powerful will to excarnate, despite feelings of defeat and resignation, there have also been songs and poems and not least of all my precious children. This is a selection of the fruit that has been born of my deep rooted striving to make sense of things, and to know myself and I am deeply grateful that you could join me for their harvesting.


Word and images © Lucy Pierce 2018



July 6, 2018

Speaking the Sacred- Mother


Me, Tania Kavathas and Cameron Semmens at Speaking the Sacred - Mother
Photo- John Englezos

Last month the beautiful soul-weaver Tania Kavathas invited me to speak at the exquisite and intimate event Speaking The Sacred - Mother. There was a very deep sense of collective engagement and a rich opportunity for all present to speak and share what was stirred in them in the presence of this theme. Cameron Semmens offered us all a delightful sample of his poems and offered a very tender and enlightening exploration of the poetic form of the blessing. Here are some photo's of the event by the talented John Englezos. @johnephotography
Partaking in this event stirred a deeper exploration of this theme of Mother in my life, and I felt gifted by the insights that came through as I journeyed it's currents in preparation for this event. These are some new poems that came through.



Atoning the Mother

We pour the oil slicked deluge 
of our detritus down her throat, 
it seeps across her ancient, life-giving  terrain, 
the rivers of her holy water polluted with our debris, 
as we dredge her depths 
for more than we could ever have really needed.
We turn from the life-giving fountain of her love 
and suckle at the dry teat of consumerism.
We have been taught to blame her, 
to validate our wayward betrayal, 
or to numb us from the daily details 
of her rape and pillage, 
all the orphaned pain of our fear and demise 
coming to land in her precious body.
We are taught to fear her, 
to distract us from the true predator 
that feeds the feeble surrogacy 
of our acculturated dismemberment. 
She is scapegoated, 
just as the culture has taught me 
to blame my own mother 
for the mismatch of care, 
inflicted by a mis-attuned people, 
who disrupt the true nature of her blooming, 
with interventions of misogyny, 
an indoctrination of maladapted attachment, 
so that woman is not to be trusted 
just as Earth is not to be trusted, 
as though she were the one to construct 
the devastating infrastructure of dominance, 
with its imperative of mother-blame, 
when her abandonment and neglect 
means that she becomes the hand of not-enoughness, 
she the one who cannot give, 
with her instincts severed, her hands tied 
and the flow of her wild milk brutally dammed. 
We blame her, the one who has been brutalised, 
not the culture behind, 
who has brutally maimed her capacity to love, 
through millenia of colonising the feminine imperative. 
Deforesting her wild terrain, mining her resources, 
making a slave of her care-giving, 
so that she becomes the handmaid of patriarchy itself. 
The withheld love, 
the harrowing ancestral trauma of our own withholding, 
the polluted landscape, 
the depleted resource, 
the incapacitated flow of nurturance,
legacies of our mortally maimed 
and broken inheritance. 
Because we will never stop needing 
the love that She was born to give, 
and its absence is like an aching maw within, 
each and every one of us.

Can we remember how it is that we can trust her, 
the wild earth inside us, the great mother within?
Can we delve deeply down to the bedrock 
of our own depths to find the unpolluted seam 
of pure presence and exquisite attunement 
that is our birthright? 
Can we find again within us, 
and in the earth at our feet, 
the burgeoning wellspring of her ancient sustenance, 
ever flowing, fertile and powerful, 
birth/death mother, so intricately balanced, 
so achingly poised, so bountifully generous, 
so tenderly attuned, 
despite the desecration of our uninitiated mayhem 
upon the back and belly and breast of her sacred terrain?
Can we gather up the millennia of trauma, 
that is the belonging to a culture that seeks 
to dominate the ancient unseen She, 
that has raged war with fire and brimstone 
against a woman free to birth and to heal 
and to keen and to tend as she sees fit 
to the creative interface of existence? 
Can we bundle up, with the gentlest of care 
our ancient wounds, our harrowing shame, 
with at last a tenderness befitting the tragedy 
of our very own severance? 
Can we reach across and place the preciousness 
of our own pain to the pendulous breast of our true Mother, 
trace with our innocent fingers 
the scars of her stretched and ancient flesh, 
may we place our very own brokenness 
into the life-giving curve of her round and comforting arms, 
can we let her rip aside all that does not serve us, 
and may we let her lick the wounds of our becoming clean, 
allowing the weight of our despair 
to rest into the soft warmth of her belly? 
Do you hear the constant measure of her heart beat 
and how it reweaves the broken strands, 
as she floods our mouths with the cosmic star-milk 
of our own immutable belonging? 
Can you feel the medicines sprouting from her earthen pores, 
balm for the breaks and bruises of our enculturation casualty? 
Can you feel her great womb taking us all in again, 
making us her own again, 
newborn and ancient, 
sons and daughters once more,
of the mother?




Her Greatest Gift

I see now, in its excruciating magnificence, 
the full extent of her dual face,
the light and the dark of her,
what it truly is that she carries for us,
and that perhaps her greatest gift is not her love after all,
but her wounding to the love, 
so that we may come to know it from within our own selves.
and she carries this task as her greatest sacrifice,
that even though she gives us everything in her power,
to nurture and to nourish and to sustain,
even when she does this with little or no support from her culture,
even though every fibre of her being is honed to care,
it is written into the stars that she will also wound us, 
it will be her greatest gift and it is her cross to bare,
that there will be the time
when she cannot meet our tender needs 
in the particular way that is needed
in that particular moment
and the wound will slice,
and she may not even know that she has done it,
but there will be blood on the sword
that she weighs in her hand.
Because without this wound,
 we would stay child to this mother forever,
without her not enoughness
we would never leave
the temple of her grace.
It is her capacity to hurt us,
that will become the path of our own individuation,
it is the first seed of our impetus
to come to know the archetypal mother within our own beings,
rather than always seeking her from without, 
So that we may come to inhabit and embody 
our own great capacity to mother,
self and other,
and world and earth,
and child and creation and cosmos.
And because we have lost our mythic intelligence,
we take the wound so literally
and we might live our whole life
stuck in the blame we feel
towards our personal mother,
the betrayal of her love
becoming the excuse for our own not-enoughness.
But if we can dig in deeply
to unearth this gift
of her inadvertent severing of us 
from the primal unified field
in which we are immersed in, if we are lucky,
in the womb and then at her breast,
and inside her gaze and her unconditional regard,
When we can mature enough to pick up this wound as our greatest gift,
it opens a path for us
to come to know this primal unified field within our own beings.
This is the two faces of mother,
she is wired to nourish
and she is wired to wound,
And it is because she is actually woman, 
she is not god.
and she will do both of these things without thanks, 
the nurturing and the wounding,
and she will carry the weight of it to her grave
unless we come to pick up the gift
that is buried inside the wound.
The Earth needs us all to remember ourselves now as Mother,
this vast capacity to hold
apposing energies in a unified field,
to nourish and to nurture,
to exquisitely attune and selflessly care,
to fiercely protect,
to fiercely protect,
to fiercely protect.
Mother blame is a weapon of a dominator society,
that wants us all to remain insatiable children,
we cannot love the Earth until we make peace
with the personal mother who gave us everything she had
in a world that would not hold her giving in any sort of regard,
though her hands were bound by trauma, 
her breasts withheld from her own withheld love for self,
her empty cup, 
her power suppressed by her fear,
her fierce love gagged
by a disempowerment hammered in
for generations of desecration
to the feminine principle of life.
She still gave everything she had
to nourish and to nurture 
and the thing is,
it was never going to be enough,
and you were always meant to wake up
to the fact that the wounds she gave you were her greatest gifts,
because through them you will come to follow
the path to knowing the divine face
of the holy mother inside your own cells,
it is only through the excruciating pain of her absence
that we will come to know her as the God within us,
who reminds us what it is to birth and to hold,
the alchemical matter of our blood and our semen
and our sweat and our tears,
the sacred waters of our wombs manifesting life into being,
our bodily intelligence gestating in collaboration with the masculine,
bringing forth,
primally birthing and tenderly attending
the world into being
in every living moment,
each and every one of us.
We are all born with the primal imprint
of the maternal matrix
of the feminine face of god within us, 
waiting to wake up to ourselves,
as the custodians and caretakers
of ourselves and each other,
and of the earth
and Her cosmic interface.
And I know this because I have been the child loved
and I have been the child wounded.
And I know this because I have been the mother who loves,
and I have been the mother who wounds,
and I am so bone wearily tired
of living my life through the lens of the wound,
instead of seeing it through the lens of the gift.
The gift of the love and the gift of the wound
which is the homecoming to the heart of love 
and the belonging to the Mother 
who lives beyond and beneath and behind and within,
The gift which is the coming to know this mother inside of me,
to feel the magnitude of that love, and the pain of that sacrifice, 
the mother who wounds and gives life,
the mother who loves and gives life,
and that even as she lives inside of me 
she is also one of the faces of the multitudinous god,
into whom I was born.


Photos © John Englezos 2018
Text © Lucy Pierce  2018