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

Four Phases of Woman

Such a deep pleasure to create these images for the School of Shamanic Midwifery, and deepen into my understanding of how our medicine as women does not diminish, though we may shed some things along the way, but that it rather builds and ripens. It has left me with a longing to more deeply venerate the elders of our culture, understanding that they have journeyed long and far, passing through so many gates of initiation to stand in that place of  wisdom and experience. 

I also feel gifted with the sense of rightness to each phase of a woman's life, that within each chapter there is a very particular quality of energy to be received, and that there is no other place to be than in the medicine of the moment. 

Jane Hardwicke Collings writes so beautiful in Moonsong about the lengthening of our modern life span and articulates the richness and gifting of this time of Maga, after our children have grown and before the passage into crone. I feel such a potency to this recognition of women as they gift the world with their finely crafted and empowered gleanings of a life deeply lived.

Blessed be.

 Maiden

 Mother

 Maga

 Crone