The Frontline

I just want to say that the frontline looks different for each and every one of us. In between the gulf of anti and pro, there is a universe of complexity, a plethora of nuance. I want to validate those of us with particular neurological and psychological herstories whose survival response at the moment is to camouflage, or to sink our energies deep into our roots, to still and listen and deflect the gaze of obtuse scrutiny. For some of us it is the wise and possibly the only option. It does not mean we are complacent or complicit, it is just that our work is happening in a different place to the visible and overt. 

It will take many folk, many weavers, many strands and many ways to bring in, to birth forth, a resonantly attuned, intelligently integral and holistically responsive path forward for Earth and the chaotic and catalytic expression of Her human tribe at this time.

We are all inside a collective transmutation and for some of us that has triggered formidable internal pathways that hold us and our behaviours in their grips from previous traumas that we are still constellating within the inner worlds of our psyches, within the cosmologies of our embodied beings. I want to honour those of us wrestling particularly with the freeze and fawn responses because the despair in them is often amplified by the invisibility that also resides there. 

Whatever we are gripped by there is an opportunity to deepen our understanding and broaden our compassion, lend ballast to our roots, bolster our insight into the diversity of our individual and collective ecosystems to find the way to connect and to make safe and to gentle the nervous system and to find kindness for self and other, even as we stand bravely in the ferocities of our own emergences. 

Today I offer gentle blessing to all those who find themselves in the inbetween and the liminal places of the as yet becoming, of the not yet known, of the tenderly emergent, of the uncomfortably newborn immanence of transmutational change.

Text copyright Lucy Pierce 2021

Inside Out

Inside Out

There is a part of me that believes 

that because my body is untameable

it is also shameful.

A part that believes the lies,

that looks with envy in the eyes,

betraying the soft and mountainous 

isness of me.

I am not an itty bitty thing.

I am not strung taut and lean.

I am a big Mumma

making the world.

Like a planet my surface has survived 

meteoric barrage.

I am battle scarred.

There are holes in my soul so big

it takes a harvest to fill them.

Like the ocean’s surface my flesh

ripples with a thousand stories.

I cannot be shrunk to size.

My body flows out like a feast

or a font

or a furnace

of love and holding,

of fear and withholding. 

So far past pretty

I have become an ancient creature

of crevice and moss,

blemish and scar,

my flesh chooses it’s abundance uncontained.

My son says 

you are the most comfortable place, Mumma.

And I know there is more to give than a sleek facade.

My mountains and valleys give life,

they are not wrong.

Because of this dissonance inside,

it’s scorn and scathing,

I am less alive.

I avoid mirror and reflection,

my mind skims quickly 

the quagmires of shame 

that ask me to become less of me

and more pleasing 

to the impossible strangers

who fill my eyes each day,

each glance taking me further away 

from what I am.

From the rugged terrain, 

the untameable universe, 

the myriad wildnesses

of my very own body.

Be still, gaze of my father,

voice of the world 

that says I am wrong and less and flawed 

to be the very shape of me,

the very tone and texture

of me.

There can be a nuanced comfort 

that defies appearance.

A heart inside that pulses 

with a limitless love,

like an ancient tide.

It is enough to be here,

deep feeling of body

spirit made flesh,

a miracle.

Be still, hungry ghost.

I am a big Mumma

making the world,

I am not less,

I am just more. 

This life is a mission 

of mammoth proportions

and I cannot house a traitor in my skin.

With Ariadne’s thread I turn inside 

to hunt the deserted paths,

and track the source of pain,

the harrowing beast of my shame,

her monstrous hatred

of my wild.

My heart was born to love her home

it knows what must be done.

My heart has done this a thousand times,

the redemptive wooing of the broken,

the vast and patient succour 

of a Mumma’s love, 

making the world 

safe,

from the inside out.

Image and text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021

Hinge & Pivot

It feels as though I stand within a hinge or a pivot, the threshold between one imperative and another. I am strung taut, poised between the irreconcilable disparity between the needs of the culture and the needs of my nervous system. 

All my life I have asked what was wrong with me? Why can I not keep up? Why am I so incompetent and lacking in capacity to meet the ask of this world? I am so bone-weary of this question. I have journeyed long enough, deeply enough, to know I am the way I am for many reasons, many of which are the intergenerational repercussions of living inside a brutalising commodification of humankind, of all sentient life, an extractive exploitation of animate resource and desecration of the sacred web of interconnectedness that is our true birthright. It has unfurled amongst our kind with heartless disregard for impact and consequence to the living soul of life. We are reaping the harvest of this now like never before. I cannot pretend this is not so any more.

I feel strung upon a wire, the precarious tension between playing the part of maintaining a viable identity in a world that grows dark by it’s own hand, and honouring the true needs of my soul, the neglected warmth of my own humanity, my innate embeddedness in a larger matrix. There is a bone deep ache to redirect my navigational course, my guiding compass, from outer orientation to inner. To stop asking how can I heal? How can I grow in order to survive and belong? To stop asking what is wrong with me and begin to notice what is actually sensitively responsive and intelligently attuned? To start asking how do I support the needs of the specific nervous system that I have, with all its gift and challenge, it’s capacity and limitation? How do I hold to that, unequivocally? How do I strengthen and nurture and protect my exquisite capacity to feel and know through the body as well as the mind? How do I support my mind-body system to attend to the grief and the rage, the despair and loss that I rightfully feel, so that it does not overwhelm me, so that I can swim those deep and turbulent currents with ballast and resource and kindness? How do I also let in the love and pleasure and joy that is my deepest need, beyond independence and autonomy?  How do I stop asking myself to do what is actually impossible for me to do, when the cost of trying is to exist in perpetual hyperarrousal and dysregulation? I am not an economically viable commodity. I have nothing to sell. I am a feeling, sensing, reciprocating part of the pulsing ecosystem of earth and cosmos. It is this beingness that I seek to become loyal to. 

All my life I have been trained to ask how can I serve others, how can I attend to the expectation of what it is to be a woman in this world, whilst being exciled from my own capacity to inhabit need, desire, authority. It has not worked for me, I am strung so thin I could snap. 

I want to find the courage within to change the questions, to change the imperative, to let go and trust that there is something far more nourishing and sustainable and reciprocal that awaits, beneath the thrashings of a desperate world. This world lives inside of me, desperately driving me forward. It is my struggle to survive in a system that does not love what I love, and I feel it dying. I am dying with it. 

But my nature is there also, underneath, half-sensed, waiting, birthing itself through grinding apertures of stone and starlight. My essence and the gift of my incarnated love, vast and permeable, eternal and true. From this place all that previously made me disposable and ineffective, becomes what makes me perceptive and intelligent. My need to rest and bond and attend and listen becomes adaptive, ecological. My capacity to feel and sense, instead of a too-muchness, becomes my ally and the way I become connected and responsive and receptive to all that I am that lives within and also beyond this animal body and it’s longing and hunger and need. 

I cannot keep walking the road of brutality that the dominator paradigm has laid out for me. It does not fit, and yet I must trust there is time to feel the impulse fully land within, to sniff it out, to track it’s pawprints in the neglected wilderness inside. I know it has more to do with being and less with doing, so I sit here amongst the shadows in the gloaming. I will wait. I know not what it will take to make a different choice, but I am here, alive and listening, dreaming inside, paying attention, with eyes soft focused and seeking to know what it will take to make my animal body safe, safe enough to be this profound love that I know glistens beneath the world as we know it? How can I give the dying world even less of me? How can I drink more deeply from the well that lives inside my own precious temple, soft and deep feeling, sometimes weeping, sometimes trembling with rage, sometimes attending to the fear, tracking pleasure, deepening breath, saying yes to more of me. How can I become safe enough now to know there is nothing wrong with me? I am a human being, shaped by my experience. 

Inside, the transmutation unfurls, like a snake or a song, it flutters like moth’s wings for the ancient moon, it keens and sighs, it is enough, just to breathe. 

As I sit in this place I am remembering that I am also something primordial and ancient, unfathomable. That the minerals of my body are the minerals of the earth recycled through incalculable cycles of decay and formation. That the air I breathe is the breath of giants,  rooted and listening, that I am unfathomably indebted to, that which would ask nothing of me, but my breath in return. May I have the courage to stay listening, to stay soft and embodied, to keep feeling into the unformed becoming, the archaic remembering, the unborn immanence. May I wrestle the invitation nested inside the maelstrom of these days.

Image and text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021

The Sundew and The Star

Image credit Sirion Pierce @nativefocusphotography

The Sundew and the Star

The cacophonous roar of brutal truths, 

clashing in the airwaves

like disembodied necessities for certainty.

Blunt and blind and colliding through flesh, 

sacrificing soul,

a barbed penetration of subtle emergence,

a lambasting of nuanced sensing,

a desecration of co-creative immanence. 

Inside, I feel the urgent imperative to find the dial,

that would diminish the volume 

of viral self-righteousness.

My desensitised ear pressing instead

into the humus of understory, 

I notice the Sundews there, 

emissaries in the wintering cold, 

heralding their trumpeted listening, 

gathering dew and nectar and spore, 

communicating in the silent night with the stars.

Their stems are hair fine,

and themselves covered in filamented receptivity,

poised to imbibe the news of insect’s feet.

Here too from beneath the decaying leaves, 

the fungi, 

blooming their varied hue,

their perplexity of texture

luminous translucence,

amniotic gloss,

feathered underside.

Themselves the blooming, fruited moment

of the vast mycelium that thrives beneath,

the voluminous mythic underpinning of creation,

the transmuting multiplicity, 

the connective tissue of the universe, 

responding, 

in unfathomable sensitivity.

The earth, 

always so gracious in her capacity 

to accomodate polarities, 

to make space for complexity, 

to house the unknown and the unknowable.

Every inch of her deep skin

a eulogy to the dying, 

a murmurating coo to the newborn, 

a sustenance to everything that lies between.

So generously she harbours the ungamely

and the as yet not fully formed, 

carving refuges for uncertainty and contradiction, 

for the myriad stories of her fruitfulness, 

creating a cohesive weave of kindness and care.

Listen, can you hear it, 

the resonant song of sundew and star.

They have been conversing for millenia, 

and still they seek not 

the limitations of a fixed 

and uniformed certainty? 

Could the star define the sundew,

Or the sundew, the star? 

There is a secret language 

written like brail across the surface of the universe.

May we grow the fineness of feeling 

in our sacred fingertips,

sensitive like a moths feeling for the moon,

to decipher the hidden meaning 

of the rich multiplicity 

of our layered existence.

Text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021

Always Held

                                                               Always Held by Lucy Pierce

I see this as one woman, moving through her life, from crib to grave, from the bedrock of her ancestry. Across the stretch of time that she lives and breathes, she is made rich by her experience, precious in her fortitude and breadth. She contains within her all the long journeyings of her life, and perhaps it is even so, that her younger incarnations are given ballast, outside of the weave of linear time, by the one she will eventually become. She reaches back through time with the capacity that has grown within her, with her ageing, to hold and cherish her younger self, at times when that capacity and wisdom had not yet fully grown within her. In a way this image arrises from the tenuousness of the grasp I have had on my own life at times, the pain and struggle that we can feel as human beings, to find meaning and purpose amidst suffering. Yet the older I get, the more I intuit a deeper understanding. I find myself reaching back across the stretches of time, with compassion and the perspective of what the struggle to live meant, encompassing and lending energy to my younger incarnations.

It is perhaps also a prayer that I will stay here, on this precious earth, long enough to know myself as an old woman, to watch my children grow to adulthood, maybe to hold my grandchildren in my arms and to know the whole journey. It is a nod to a life lived full and long, and not prematurely left as I have sometimes longed for. 

Also it is a bow to the ancestors, from whom we arise and to whom we return, and an embrace of death as a force that walks with us all the days of our life, as a friend who lends life, who reminds us to cherish the magnificent birthright of who we are, wherever we are, in the journey of our lives. 

And then there’s something else again, which I’m not certain of and only sometimes begin to glimpse, which is that even when the wounding has been deep, there’s a chance we may yet be able to grow within our own selves a love that is deep enough to hold all of who we are, a love that might become a vessel vast and holy enough to come to land inside, fully born, knowing our worth, upright inside our challenge, cherishing our wholeness, bestowing our gift. And that it is not in spite of our pain and grief and longing, but because of it, that this love can grow. My prayer is that I may one day grow into a safe enough harbour for all of the orphaned parts to find their way home to. 

Cards and prints available on Etsy. 

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Bless

Words and Image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021

Already Given

Already Given

We tend a world of smoke and mirrors 

that hold us back from the real.

So tenaciously we attend to personas through which

we will never meet the true self.

What parades as culture is a torture,

keeping us from sleep, 

prodding us with tools of pain,

and unattainable ideals,

twisting our minds,

deceiving our bodies.

We are relentless in our chasing 

of the bells and the whistles,

our heart beats pounding,

faltering, breaking,

as we keep the wheels turning, 

grinding away at the soul,

the soul of the self,

the soul of the world,

the soul of the earth.

Bewildered,

in pain,

afraid.

All of us slaves in our way,

to a false and deceitful master.

Beneath it all the earth breathes, 

deep and slow.

She unfurls the dawn mist 

as the intricate design of a moth's wings,

flutter on my night dress, 

to the serenade of water 

falling through the sky,

collecting to slake our thirst 

and draw up life.

She gives her gifts for free

and they actually nourish, 

they are all we could ever need.

We must remember ourselves as her, 

we must let her be enough again.

We must come to remember anew 

the miracle that each of us are,

as we quake and tremble in our cells 

at this miracle called life,

thrumming, resplendent

in the mere mundanity of our existing.

What might it mean to be generous,

with our breath, 

our love,

our care, 

our pleasure, 

our embodied attendance,

our attuned listening. 

Just to breathe and to hold, 

to sing and to sustain,

to dance our barefooted rhythms 

on the sacred ground.

To listen at the threshold

of Earth's eternal chorus of becoming. 

To know ourselves inside

and to share that with each other. 

Enough.

More, in fact,

than we could ever dream of wanting. 

As though it is the eyes through which we see

that must evolve and eclipse,

so that they are able to behold

what has already been given.

May we break from the trance.

May we grow the eyes to see Her.

May we tend the heartgarden that can know

what it is we truly are.

Already given.

Turn from the smoke screen and slow.

Rip the shackles and fall deep,

deep, deep down,

into the arms

of our true mother.

Words and Image  Copyright  2021