The Midwives

The Midwives by Lucy Pierce

This is image is an offering of immense gratitude to all the amazing sisters who have midwifed me through my life as woman birthing herself into being. Our capacity as women to hold space for each other, to hold and nurture, encourage and stretch, nourish and behold one another is an almighty magic which is changing the vibration of the planet. I feel so deeply indebted to all the midwives in my life, in whose reflection I have learnt to become ever more deeply and authentically my own self, deepening through the layers of cultural oppression and personal suppression of the truly awesome power, profound love and holy eroticism that lies at the heart and deep within the womb of each and every one of us as woman.

As each one of us takes responsibility for the sacred rituals of our own becoming, journeying ever deeper into the labyrinthine wisdom of the womb, we find within ourselves the ancient song lines of the sacred feminine, as she is deeply embedded in the body of our Earth Mother. As a sisterhood we dance ourselves alive, reclaiming the voice of our own unique birthsong, as we come to embody the ecstasy and the agony of our own emergence into the vast mystery of creation, the reawakening of our ancient knowing and the birthing of a new consciousness on Earth. We are each of us midwife, birthing Mama and newborn, each of us moving through the great cosmic pelvis, each of us gathered up in the hands of Spirit.

Through the attunement of our dancing feet, the rhythm of our drums and the quest of our song, through the wisdom and medicine of the Earth, through our capacity to be vulnerable and real with one another, in our courage to let go of that which no longer serves us and to embrace the new wisdom within ourselves, through our tender awakening to the dire imperative of our own self -love and radical self-care, we learn to become Mother to ourselves, to our children, to our planet and to one another as Midwives to each other and our collective evolution. 

Wishing heartfull blessings to all on this day of new moon, solar eclipse, autumn equinox.

Prints of "The Midwives" will be available in the coming weeks from my Etsy store www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce

Image and words © Lucy Pierce

Full Woman Born

Pain is a gateway

through which I birth myself.

I come here to this portal within to pray,

to press my ear as close as I can bare to that hurting

and to beseech the song that lies behind,

the glorious part of me that the world said I could not be,

and the part of me that listened,

the part that needed and did not receive,

the permission to be whole or loved,

raucous or infinitely gentle,

sexual, sensual,

alive and full,

powerful and expressed.

How many generations ago

did this prohibition come

to dwell within my cells?

So that now it is as though

some vast and incomprehensible energy

of primal freedom,

some raw and vital and powerful

embodiment of Woman,

has been packaged away

in this clumsy and bewildered container

of my own mortal flesh,

the unlived lifetimes bound and gagged,

caged and restrained like a wild thing denied,

the energy required to hold it there

an exhausting entreaty to smallness,

and yet so fierce the holding

so crippling the fear

of releasing that which has no face yet weeps,

she who has no mouth yet wails within

like a siren song,

drawing me ever closer to hear.