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. 

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Bless

Words and Image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021