Radiance

Often for me, images and writing lie dormant for a time, between conception and their birthing. For reasons beyond me, this image asked for it's time of birthing to be now, in this dark heart of winter, though she was conceived in the flaming heart of summer. Perhaps she has come to warm my cold bones and remind me that there is also that time of vitality and shining, that will come again.

Radiance by Lucy Pierce

The Sun

I hide from Him,

terrified that He will burn me.

In the cells of my body the story lives,

that He is predator, adversary

and that my only chance of survival is to protect myself,

to contract and hide,

from the warmth of His radiant love.

He did not flinch at my fear,

nor at my rejection of Him.

He kept on shining His love upon me,

as He has every day of my living life.

The playful humour of His fingers teased at me,

wooing me to peak out at Him 

from behind my defended shroud,

a white woman in a black country,

fair skin, fair game.

I hid until the only thing left for me to see

was how farcical my own withholding was.

Once I started looking, I discovered in myself,

the threads and tendrils of the pathways 

that know how to say YES

to say I surrender and I open to you, 

magnificent love.

And in the opening,

the bones of my ancestors yawned within me,

the millennia of stories of persecution and brutality, 

the lifetimes of being victim to distortion,

let go inside my clenched cells and danced out,

down the inside of my thighs,

thundering through my loins,

into the tender light of His radiant shining, 

burning themselves home to love,

making a pyre of my body.

And all through the long day I danced 

between my fear and my longing, 

until the earth beneath me, 

dry and brittle, 

stick and rock, 

ant and spider, 

dry eucalyptus leaves crunching, 

became a nest of the most exquisitely soft holding, 

as I let go and let go, 

as He shone His love down upon me,

so that the clouds dancing in the sky 

became an extension of the sensations 

of Eros within me, 

the pulsing undulations of cosmic love-making

between Earth and Sky,

and me caught between.

And I was home,

and forgiven,

and held in the purity of this love,

with all my relations,

beneath the great dome 

of His magnificent sky.

And every gust of wind a caress, 

a raucous passion

as I let the golden light shine in,

to cleanse and purify

to awaken and ignite,

to conceive and unite,

to know of His love in my bones

and to trust the direction of His shining,

to remember His ever-presence 

and to calibrate my inner experience of life

to the vastness of my own lovedness.

Such a glorious homecoming,

through which I am safer to be more of me,

to trust the masculine as a great force of love, 

more enduring than any distortion of man,

is to feel that life is an experience in which to thrive, 

not just survive,

as I open each and every cell of my body 

to be nourished by His fire. 

Prints and Cards of Radiance available through my Etsy site www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce

Text and image © Lucy Pierce 2017

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

Creative Heroines

This post was created for the Carnival of Creative Mothers to celebrate the launch of  The Rainbow Way: Cultivating Creativity in the Midst of Motherhood
by Lucy H. Pearce.  Today's topic Creative Heroines. 

**********

There have been so many female artists that have inspired me to create in the way that I do but if I had to narrow it down I think I would have to choose Meinrad Craighead, Frida Kahlo and Vali Myers. Meinrad for her exquisite encapsulation of the Dark Feminine as a fierce and deeply loving force, for the magnitude and astonishing depth of her vision. She speaks to my soul like no other ever has. Frida for her exquisite honesty and for the way in which her pain became the gateway of her salvation, and Vali for the fierceness of her authenticity, her self-governance and for her profoundly wild nature.

Enclosed Garden                                                               Meinrad Craighead

Glaringly obvious to me as I write this is the fact that none of these women were/are mothers. And allthough they all reflect a deep kinship with their animal familiars, each of their primary focus in life has been their art. I have often pondered the weight of this power, that is birthed from women when children are not their destiny, and have many a time baulked at the notion of trying to be both a mother and an artist. I feel a conflict within myself rise, one that has the potential to feed into a despair at ever being able to create anything significant and also be this mother that I am, hands so full of children and domesticity.

But when I really listen to what these women gift me with,the quality that I feel has so deeply resonated for me has been their profound insight into that deeply primal matrix of the vast Mother, the feminine force that carries the weight of life and death, nurturance and transmutation, so powerfully in the palm of her hand.

The Love embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and senor Xolotl

-Frida Kahlo

Each of these women have shown me in their own unique way how to forge my own personal relationship with that primal feminine force which knocks at the door of the psyche, asking to be birthed into the world. They have taught me that the relationship with God and the authority to know of the sacred movement of spirit in my life, is deeply embedded in my body and in the narrative of my own life. They have fed that insatiable hunger in me for something more anciently true and primordially real, than anything else my culture was feeding me in regard to what it was to be a woman.

These artists have taught me that as a woman my relationship to the divine is profoundly rooted in the earthly relationships of my body and it’s wild interface with nature and the cycles of the Earth. This lesson is paradoxically the same lesson that my children have birthed in me, awakening me to my own power as a creatrix, awakening me to the profound depth of my own capacity as a woman to love, to birth myself and to care for all creation.

The more I turn my own authority over to this primordial interface of the body/the earth/the divine, the less conflicted I feel about the balance of motherhood and art, as it all ultimately flows from that same deep wellspring of the sacred feminine, birthing itself into being upon the Earth, as it has always done and ever will do, even through the times when She has been met with violence and brutality and desecration.

Witch of Positano                                                  Vali Myers

I am eternally grateful to these Matriachs of the art world for their renewal of a primary imprint of what God the Mother looks like, deeply imbedded in the primacy of one’s own story. They give  me permission to follow the hunt of my own creative nature. They reveal to me the power of birthing something so infinitely tender and intimate, and so fiercely potent into the world and standing strong in the care of that vision, despite sometimes great odds. I feel that I am learning the primacy of what it means to truly care for what it is that I create, be it a piece of art or a child. How do I come to take full responsibility for my feminine nature in a world so desensitised? How do I defy the stereotypes and projections of my culture and fully own my personal vision and creation as my deepest truth? These women guide me with their courage, their wild authority and their deep authenticity.

The Deep Within and Spirit Memory

The Deep Within                                                Lucy Pierce

This piece has been created as a part of the Red Teepee, a community arts project facilitated by Michelle Buggy of Birthing Art Birthing Heart, which has gathered together a myriad of women's creative expressions celebrating their relationships to their wombs and to menstruation.

Spirit Memory

My Spirit so deeply remembers

and I dance both in the exquisite grace of that remembering

and also in the pain of the body’s forgetting,

as though I were still too small somehow

for the bigness of that Spirit memory,

or perhaps still too full of other things.

Life continues to gift me though,

with the clashing dissonance of that interface.

It is infinitely tenacious, the lapping of that memory,

eroding the resistance of my wounds,

the timidity of my with-holding,

opening me ever so tenderly

to eternity

and to love.

Lucy Pierce © 2013