tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1026320583241188542024-03-13T21:42:36.152+11:00Soulskin MusingsRetrieving the within, beseeching the beyond. Poetry, Art and Musings by Lucy PierceLucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.comBlogger123125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-32534481791675248422022-11-01T21:14:00.002+11:002022-11-01T21:26:30.747+11:00Artisan's Week<p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfzGTRSh6qILIgXir71YBdS3OowTPYzyvIo_6-aFmY-6Sb73rxLyQnYG5UwLfeRSu7ZL5jXWjBC91ftsXrOFPO6JZ8k5HGOikVvK2vYdCUJ1yoPCyQY_Nk0iwp2DZwOfpntoWY-THxdK4GjNzku9Eqan6oHqHgtTuvFtm-lpzQPheJFBNvdPisOslZ/s1280/thumbnail_IMG_3030.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="388" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfzGTRSh6qILIgXir71YBdS3OowTPYzyvIo_6-aFmY-6Sb73rxLyQnYG5UwLfeRSu7ZL5jXWjBC91ftsXrOFPO6JZ8k5HGOikVvK2vYdCUJ1yoPCyQY_Nk0iwp2DZwOfpntoWY-THxdK4GjNzku9Eqan6oHqHgtTuvFtm-lpzQPheJFBNvdPisOslZ/w291-h388/thumbnail_IMG_3030.jpg" width="291" /></a><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">Artisan's Week</p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">We are nestled here between mountains. Our valley nestled like a bowl, a vessel, between mountains. The vessel of our valley is full of goodness, clean air and water, fertile earth, all the growing things, all the living beings that feed from the growing things. Deeper down beneath us there nestles the clay and minerals and oxides and further down still, the fire that lives inside our precious Earth. Above us during the day there shines the fire of our life-giving sun and at night the glow of our moon, the mysterious twinkle of the stars. The rain gently falling, or fervently falling, filling the river that flows past us, carrying our stories to the sea. Mists rise, as springtime birds suckle nectar from the rich blooms that abound. All these elements coalesce around us, pulling forth the seed, furling forth the plants, the leaf, stem, pod, flower, that feed the animals, that give the fibre, that feed and nourish the human, that make the medicines to tend the ailments of body, that craft the paper and dye the yarn, that become the wood that is crafted into precious objects of utility and beauty, the wood that fuels the forge, that feeds the fire, that sinters the clay, the clay dug from the deep, the metal refined by the hand from the minerals deep beneath. Earth made anew, transformed by the maker.</p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">This week we have been blessed to journey with our elders of craft and amidst all the making there were threads of story, weaving through the loom. The work making meaning in the heart and restoring wholeness to the spirit. We spoke of the colour of stars and the colour of flames, the mythological underpinnings of the origins of Iron, it’s great gift to life and also our need to be vigilant to it’s potential for harm. We sensed the imperative of a deepening responsibility, to offer ballast to the technologies we grow in our evolving capacity to craft complexity from raw matter. Our need for greatest care and attention, and allowing the thing between our hands to matter enormously for a moment, even in the risk of its breaking. We spoke of the moving from what is known, through to what is imagined but feared, to the new place of knowing and integrating embodied wisdom, the work of our hands leading the way, the limitations of the material providing the framework, the bounds of our imaginations offering the scope. </p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">I could feel such goodness in these people, young and old. How we have been crafted ourselves by place and by earth and the hard work of the hands, to become humans who bare gifts for our tribe, humble gifts of understanding and transmutation, of purpose and nourishment, of presence and patience and perseverance. The wood workers bending together with gentle humour as they work, coaxing the material towards a new wholeness, a new goodness in the shape of a stool. Heads bowed together at the loom, reimagining the warp and the weft of our patterning. The synchronised striking of hammer to copper & iron, the music made by this shared making. This music serenading the fierce concentration required in finding centre, within the malleable clay at the potters wheel. The quiet toil of the binding of books, creating worlds in which future words and images will unfurl our future. The nourishing sustenance of food, alchemised to please and satiate the taste buds, the eyes, the belly, the wholeness of being.</p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">Materials coalesce in cross pollinations of modality. Copper hammered to form vessel, copper in the rich green of the glaze that seals the rough rawness of clay, refining. Alumina as mordant to dye red cabbage yarn, Alumina fusing with Silica to sinter the clay that it may hold water and bear food, foods rich in minerals, drawn from the earth by water through roots. The pots smouldering in sawdust, wood shavings, from wood sculpted, drawn, whittled, carved. Wood burnt to hone charcoal for the fierce heat that will melt the metal, fruits grown from wood harvested for feasting, artfully prepared and tastefully seasoned, paper crafted from wood, made vessel for meaning, wood grown from Earth. Metal extracted from Earth, Iron in the fire in the forge, Iron in the clay, pinky-red between the potters hands, iron in the pigments that paint the leaf and blossom that cover the books that tell the stories of our makings, Iron as mordant for dying yarn, the plantain rich in Iron to nourish our blood. Metal as the Potters wheel, wood as the spinners wheel, wooden and metal tools, needle, hammer, tong, axe, pan, knife, block, cup. Our hands as the tool of Earth, the living tool transmuting itself into ever more various forms.</p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">The materials of the earth offer themselves up and are braided together by our song of creation. The wood of the wheel that spins the wool, the metal of the shears forged in fire, that harvest the fleece of sheep, the sheep grown fat from spring grasses and weeds grown of earth, as we are nourished by her gentle harvest. Earth that is dug and turns the bowl to hold the food that feeds the folk. Earth that refined becomes the Iron that shears the sheep. It cycles around, again and again, this great spiralling reciprocity, this noble generative force of our living. This earth that feeds us in every way, that nourishes us and offers us this bountiful array of ways in which we may ennoble ourselves with hand and heart, ensouling matter. </p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">Within this lies the alchemizing ingredients of disappointment and heartbreak. The broken pot, the burnt finger, the splintered wood, the arduous grappling with the sometimes unfathomable distance that lies between the imagined outcome and the thwarted reality. But I see the goodness that this questing has grown in us, has forged in us as makers. The way these materials have shaped us and made us a worthy instrument of this living celebration of life, that we may be bent by an unseen hand to transform and transmute raw matter, into useful tool with which to purposefully toil, into structures, fragrant with beeswax and linseed oil, that offer comfort and shelter for our weary bones, into humble vessels with which to contain our nourishment and quenching, into cloth with which to cover and warm and adorn the vulnerability of our bodies, the food that feeds both body and soul, the balms and tinctures that heal and cure when care is called for, the paper and tomes that carry the words of praise, the accumulated wisdoms of this grand adventure that is life upon this land. That is life within this bowl, this vessel of a valley encircled by mountains. </p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">We have laboured long and hard and strong at this work. We have made beauty and purpose. We have been humbled by our limitations of capacity and material, we have been wearied in the most satisfying of ways. We have been forged in the fire, shaped at the wheel, woven on the loom, whittled by the maker, hammer, shuttle, bowl, knife, tong, needle, drill, wheel, anvil, spoon, spindle, blade, flame, air, water, earth, ether.</p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhncWsmhpuW5Z-tiiOBtkp8pCWZvsHzAntLsXTjzRlnffOVTSjWbRk_lUyppN0BJTRDat45xjx14JFXy_-txd1r8yDGyFXr2gstBynof4m8PaHEh23w5Ht5TYbozuThmcvqZ9yF8s4gMVylYY9IXRrJAXavYixyZ2GfxmsmBcSuqvkBpi-K8wxpVL-x/s1280/thumbnail_C01D9CD3-ADE2-4858-A1EE-84EF0DB265F4-2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1024" height="411" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhncWsmhpuW5Z-tiiOBtkp8pCWZvsHzAntLsXTjzRlnffOVTSjWbRk_lUyppN0BJTRDat45xjx14JFXy_-txd1r8yDGyFXr2gstBynof4m8PaHEh23w5Ht5TYbozuThmcvqZ9yF8s4gMVylYY9IXRrJAXavYixyZ2GfxmsmBcSuqvkBpi-K8wxpVL-x/w329-h411/thumbnail_C01D9CD3-ADE2-4858-A1EE-84EF0DB265F4-2.jpg" width="329" /></a></div><br /></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKkaIYPcs6ZJ8gNpAcdpe7SiYF4PFDay1O8MQliik49b1YV3j3F2wz6TJTRApX1ngXCbZD9r39FkxNVE0ZXIXlIuWg-k2tE2U5sWHSX-5TsiDMQK4is47r_sFPZ4rODkjYIRo_dWm6HmQjJjuYHImqPFdyYpksvCV5lfRobY1WAYTO1eQRDqwgzylz/s1280/thumbnail_IMG_3062.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="355" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKkaIYPcs6ZJ8gNpAcdpe7SiYF4PFDay1O8MQliik49b1YV3j3F2wz6TJTRApX1ngXCbZD9r39FkxNVE0ZXIXlIuWg-k2tE2U5sWHSX-5TsiDMQK4is47r_sFPZ4rODkjYIRo_dWm6HmQjJjuYHImqPFdyYpksvCV5lfRobY1WAYTO1eQRDqwgzylz/w473-h355/thumbnail_IMG_3062.jpg" width="473" /></a></div><br /><p style="color: #79080a; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20px;"> Images and Text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022</p>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-38326155808104921482022-08-29T12:30:00.021+10:002022-11-01T12:40:31.946+11:00When Grief Grows Roots<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEittLNrGyIOXjyxrSbtymfmat0272fhSqoNv_fFpNLCKE27pNkVik4DfPfqdk63nQ1taFBUcv7_LsKGddQuiGUlskcnu9Er_-u2LbMDC-mnNVNoA2B6ggMXEHTi19RNYO4qLRzg6ckkae8rD0KOgoxY7WsfVgwvh1R5CyHhfIJ7i264dhvwyh-sby_T/s2048/smaller%20file-When%20the%20Ungrieved%20for%20Past%20Besieges%20the%20Now%20copy%20copy.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1473" height="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEittLNrGyIOXjyxrSbtymfmat0272fhSqoNv_fFpNLCKE27pNkVik4DfPfqdk63nQ1taFBUcv7_LsKGddQuiGUlskcnu9Er_-u2LbMDC-mnNVNoA2B6ggMXEHTi19RNYO4qLRzg6ckkae8rD0KOgoxY7WsfVgwvh1R5CyHhfIJ7i264dhvwyh-sby_T/w351-h488/smaller%20file-When%20the%20Ungrieved%20for%20Past%20Besieges%20the%20Now%20copy%20copy.jpg" width="351" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: small;">When the Ungreived for Past Beseiges The Now</span></div><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">When we have been parentified, emotionally or energetically from a very young age, caring and attuning and being of service can come to feel like our super power. Good girl, they praise us and we know what is being asked. It becomes entwined with our self-perception, entangled in our identity in ways that we may never fully understand or disentangle. The self has only ever known how to accomodate and perpetuate cycles of co-dependence and sacrifice. Sometimes before our sense of seperate self has had a chance to emerge from the enmeshed dyadic union of infancy, we are entrained to hold space, to surrogate, to carry for other. Some of us are still trying to engender a sense of self-as-seperate-to-other well into the fullness of our adult lives.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Then the time may come when we must grapple with the shadows of this archetypal compulsion to care, that has entangled in its roots our very quest to survive, our imperative to adapt in order to receive the life giving thread that would hold us to life, that would allow our soul to have a centre through which to live, a purpose in which to coalesce. The way we have learnt to care has been formed in the urgent imperative of survival, as understood by a very helpless and immature psyche and at it’s heart this impulse is a self protective force. In a sense our care becomes the shield with which we defend ourselves against unbearable rupture, our care becomes the weapon with which we assure our life-or-death dependence on relationship.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I am coming to understand that this way of contractual giving, this captive way of loving, can have a weaponisation encoded in it’s heart. As we grow and form adult intimate relationships, this adaptive way of relating is not always received by others as love, as care. It might in truth be more about control. Relationships may die in it’s wake, or perpetuate in stagnation. It can be a life long pattern of relating that holds us entrapped within the isolating defences of our original abandonment. Self perpetuating cycles of rejection and betrayal, because in spite of all our attending, we are unable to foster the true intimacy we long for. All our caring and centring of other does not equate to the reciprocal exchange of energy which we deeply hunger for. All our sacrifice does not bring us closer to the unconditional acceptance that we crave from other. Rather it pushes love further away and leaves us perpetually triggered, by the original trauma of unmet need and insecure attachment.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">We may have a deep instinct for love, yet the time of such selfless care has missed its generative activation, it’s origin most fittingly placed in that oxytocin drenched, immersive field of the newly born mother and babe, intoxicating love pouring through in a one directional imperative to care and attend at the alter of this heaven lit dyad, with the otherworldly visitor at the breast. When this primal alter of motherhood is supported and held as the sacred threshold that it is, we learn unequivocally what it is to be loved and to have our needs met unapologetically by other, the nascent narcissism of our own helplessness instilling a deep intuitive knowing of safety and connection and merging, as well as eventually, boundary and cohesive selfhood, healthy separateness.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">When this paradisiacal coalescence of love is absent however, or hindered, or made conditional, at any stage along the journey from infancy to maturity, we must make something happen in it’s place, we intelligently find or craft or create something that feels near enough, close enough to love. A subversion of the natural order, in the absence of loving capacity, we take complicit responsibility for the default, in ways subtle or overt, we become carer to the care-giver. We form belief systems about how safe a thing love is, how surrendered we should be in the receiving of it or how deeply we must protect ourselves from it. We form beliefs around what it means about us, about who we are, our value and worth, when love is showered in abundance, or when it is weaponised, absent or made dependant upon particular ways of relating and behaving. We grow our personality, our identity, our careers, our family structures around the ways we either heartfully received or desperately protected ourselves from this primary experience of love or it’s absence, depending on its capacity or lack as it moved towards us, depending on its purity or toxicity, it’s availability or it’s entanglement in the ancestral weave of inter-generational trauma. We raise our children from inside these beliefs, from within these adaptive survival strategies, these self protective shields from the unbearable affects of our own infancies, as we in turn were raised.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">This subconscious imperative to habitually attend to the need of others is often seeded in the excruciating paralysis of a chronic freeze response or the ingratiating tyranny of a fawn response, the reactivity of a chronically over-burdened and under nourished nervous system. However beneath the placid facade of this placatory, pleasing, accomodating, self-sacrificing conditioning, there may often lurk profound abyss’s of grief and despair, torrential uprisings of rage, hatred, disgust. Whilst these are a natural and understandable response to the reality of one’s less than ideal circumstance of the bereft absence, the terrifying transgression.These feelings, we learnt early were not acceptable, and we may also cultivate substrata’s of shame and humiliation, that may thrive in the underworld of our experience, when we are not relationally titrated and co-regulated by a kind and loving enough other. When this rage and grief is split off from our conscious awareness, it becomes the toxic undercurrent of our loving, the shadow of our relating to other and self, often sabotaging our equilibrium with it’s volatile surfacing, when the pressure becomes too great, damaging our relationships and compromising our own sense of integrity and cohesive self awareness.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">And so the day may come when we realise that what we thought was our super power, our gift to the world, the thing we were groomed for, trained in, indoctrinated to perpetuate; our deep capacity to relate and attune and to connect and to serve, has all along been perpetuating the primal injury of our own incapacity to receive, a way of protecting ourselves from true intimacy and connection, love and unity, because at the time when we were born into the field of love, raised in the innate expectation of care, we came to understand it as a dangerous thing, subtly or overt. A dangerous thing because of what was there that was not love, that may have been violent or cruel, the inflicting of pain, the transgressions, the crimes of commission. Or perhaps a dangerous thing because of what was supposed to come towards us that did not come, the absence, the lack, the invisibility, the diminishment, the crimes of omission.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">In order to survive, one may have been asked to deny themselves a full spectrum of emotional expression. The dark emotions are relegated to the shadow lands of the inexpressible, our bodies may become uninhabitable, the imaginal and dissociative realms a tender respite, addictive behaviours a blessed relief from the fraught tension of holding the forbidden libidinal and enlivening energies at bay. Forever abiding the unconscious imperative of suppression of one’s own true self- emergence. Denying the internal impulse to awaken, we abide the entrained loyalty to the oppressor of our actualisation, the internalised abuser. The poignant longings for our own fruitful becoming, perpetually sabotaged and submerged by the overarching necessitation of our own subjugation.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">When we come to understand that our isolation and disconnection is a result of our own instinctive and intrinsic defence against connection, even when our entire identity has been shaped by the imperative to attend to other, there is a deep reckoning that must be contended with. A retraction of the propensity to blame the Others in our lives for the long and repeating tales of lack and abandonment and disappointment and betrayal. Until we can come to bear the full weight of our part in this story, we will never receive what we most deeply long for. The grief of knowing that after a life of caring in order to be cared for, the debt will never be repaid, the gifting never returned, the care will never be reciprocated, in those relationships with which we have grappled in the shadows, not in the way that we would have wanted it, from that terrified child’s adaptive perception of what love might look like, this perception often forged in its absence. That the other that you love will never be able to be nourished by that version of care, that desperate, extractive seeking of safety and relational security, the daemonic imperative to survive by bonding with those who hold our lives in their ill-equipped hands. The only people who will ever be drawn to this way of loving are those with their own unrealised attachment wounds, their own perversely compatible defensive behaviours and attachment complexes.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">It feels that there is a fundamental self responsibility that must be realised,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">that while our primal wounding was beyond our control, that it was an abuse of power, or an expression of lack, undoubtedly honed by layer upon layer of inter- generational trauma, there is something about our psychic necessity to control the consequences of that wounding, that have perpetuated its constellation within our lives. Perhaps we have allowed ourselves to orbit too long around the imperative to not feel the seemingly unbearable affects that might truly have annihilated us as infants or small children, but which we now have the opportunity to forebear and transmute in our fierce capacity to experience and atone and embody the dissonances of our energetic, emotional, physical, psychological, somatic inheritances, of all that came to pass that was anything other than the intended birthright of attuned care and secure attachment.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">It is one thing to realise the double-binded catch 22, the bewildering impossibility of this dynamic within the psyche, to awaken to the loss of life that has been left in its wake, and it is another to reeducate the heart, to retrain the brain, to regulate the nervous system to understand what true reciprocal relating might look like. This is the journey that I want to take, once the cold knot of my grief grows roots that sink deep enough through the bedrock to the earth’s ecstatic core and are nourished by the eternal fire that dwells there. Once the tongues of my rage have unfurled out as far as the furthest galaxies and been cooled there by the star light of a cosmic belonging and the remembering of a unity more eternal than blood. When I have turned towards my own self in the darkest of nights and in the deepest of pain and said yes, yes to love and risk and trust, yes to all of me, with the fierce heart of a mother’s claiming. Then I will begin to know what it is to root myself in the unequivocal force of my own worthiness of love, my own unconditional entitlement to care, that I might find, finally, an acceptance of my own body, an embracing of my own existence, a receptivity to support and prosperity, an actualisation of my own gentle power and co-creative capacity, an availability to love and connection that is founded in safety, in tender co-regulation and the reciprocity of deep and natural and self-actualised care.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 76, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #8c4c17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />Words and image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022</span></span></p><div><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-63371083546403041242022-08-23T12:02:00.005+10:002022-11-01T12:25:43.131+11:00Women's Work<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(147, 56, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #933818; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc2giXnl9v_lsp-YYN6wE49tvB_bHZtjo6yrQ3vo-Tj0w_Pkjm2vQcwDQAjTe4Jn1G7CZ18r1dpbS42oXo-nqoMdj_0T6ESf0yr4FV5znqhht1ZUhfCFdIazCspQPX7lWSpNV3yJeYTjbNlmUGVWyuHEO0W04QfQ4iY2WH6Icp1DZXiqud1WYgim4-/s1280/thumbnail_88BA70C6-A58B-4FF8-A870-75FA4EA43A75.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1024" height="442" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc2giXnl9v_lsp-YYN6wE49tvB_bHZtjo6yrQ3vo-Tj0w_Pkjm2vQcwDQAjTe4Jn1G7CZ18r1dpbS42oXo-nqoMdj_0T6ESf0yr4FV5znqhht1ZUhfCFdIazCspQPX7lWSpNV3yJeYTjbNlmUGVWyuHEO0W04QfQ4iY2WH6Icp1DZXiqud1WYgim4-/w354-h442/thumbnail_88BA70C6-A58B-4FF8-A870-75FA4EA43A75.jpg" width="354" /></a></div><br /><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(147, 56, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #933818; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">All around me I see women, other gentle humans as well, and many, many women, holding the world together in unseen and unpaid ways. Like the dark matter between particles, their love lubricates the space between sharp and jagged structures, offering flow and cushioning and agency, repair and insight to the disparate jarring of linear processes. Many of us cannot choose whether we do that unseen, unpaid work, because it is the very fabric of our being, it is the true work that we are on this Earth to do, to tend, to weave, to stitch and bind, to sooth and offer balm and remedy to the liminal spaces that our extractive, monetised systems fall short in accomodating. They fall short deliberately. The system cultivates our invisibility, it is dependant on our unconscious sublimation.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(147, 56, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #933818; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">We live in a world that invalidates this kind of tending, keeps it in unconscious shadow, because it can’t afford to have us named and made visible. It can’t afford our labour and we would break the system if we all demanded our due. Can you imagine what would happen if we withdrew this labour? I am put in mind of Aristophane’s Lysistrata. How can we broker our true worth, illuminate our true value? How can we make the inequity conscious? What if our economic worth was made overt and it's true value remunerated? Would it in fact break capitalism? Could we end the war, of extractive brutality, to Earth and soul and human? Can we stop bodily absorbing the brunt of the disparity? It is making us sick and draining us of our true inheritance.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(147, 56, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #933818; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">So much of that deep primal intelligence, instinctive emergence, co-creative capacity is held dormant and tethered in the unlived lives of exhausted women whose labour and soul is unsustainably farmed by the state. For some of us it takes everything to just survive inside a brutalising economy. If that energy were valued for what it is and given space to unfurl, if it were cultivated and honed and supported, if it unleashed itself on the world, unbridled, so much of what we know ourselves and the world to be would be irrevocably changed. Can we give back the responsibility of atonement to those structures that are complicit in our exploitation?</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(147, 56, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #933818; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The system is dependant on us believing the story of our own worthlessness. The system shames us, so that it is free to harvest our gifts, that we cannot help but give, that we see as unimportant within a culture of patriarchal values. We have to invite each other to recognise the importance of what we are, of how we weave the world together with our words and touch and cohesive attending and generative repair. How do we centre the liminal? Shine light on the underneath and in-between? How do we withdraw our complicity and unequivocally claim the deep value and true worth and creative emergence of our own magnificent gifting to the great tapestry of life that holds us in its weave.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(147, 56, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #933818; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">May our giving be rightfully reciprocated. May we be known for what we bring. May it be utilised to dismantle and transform the world. May it be used to rebuild and heal the world.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(147, 56, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #933818; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(147, 56, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #933818; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(147, 56, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #933818; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Words & Image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022</span></p><div><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-9835487412919967712022-07-29T12:00:00.001+10:002022-11-01T12:02:16.889+11:00She Who Holds<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCN7Z2fGXdiyvuqtCLDm3HKNvoNOgFTE8IKRtf6SEsg6BRuCZ683ItK2Bn_XZm4gnBuAcHGqzSw4suxOYRMATNTvc_0NyG5CrfwH_mRbtLEAoRbZSYOWgOXQCaGvAPrEz14II34dVpNq3aIRRLawdU-uQh0nOoiAEbIzs6mYDSZC0Dsqro7s_6qtrc/s1280/thumbnail_F689912D-720D-4E6D-8DF7-71F04EB1E61C.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1157" height="548" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCN7Z2fGXdiyvuqtCLDm3HKNvoNOgFTE8IKRtf6SEsg6BRuCZ683ItK2Bn_XZm4gnBuAcHGqzSw4suxOYRMATNTvc_0NyG5CrfwH_mRbtLEAoRbZSYOWgOXQCaGvAPrEz14II34dVpNq3aIRRLawdU-uQh0nOoiAEbIzs6mYDSZC0Dsqro7s_6qtrc/w495-h548/thumbnail_F689912D-720D-4E6D-8DF7-71F04EB1E61C.jpg" width="495" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-89815301109266994062022-06-07T11:58:00.004+10:002022-11-01T12:21:05.119+11:00Beautiful Anna<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ-S7HcLRKaHoWNlZLMsgGUlrwcgjbE5hXbXjFjkV5EWcjnwXRhS9hSMXjul55naAL8I6q4ySZdNufiNlfjGxyj9wYISajQ6QAm0yye2g2x3glArGbdakGrkO5YHnZWX-lBrCkLQeNDKoKPeIZeNUyBeuTrzC3XHhKOkezyeXnkPirl3cr1US7JreN/s800/thumbnail_BEEABE16-C1A7-4F3B-B405-3DA345CD5760.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="640" height="520" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ-S7HcLRKaHoWNlZLMsgGUlrwcgjbE5hXbXjFjkV5EWcjnwXRhS9hSMXjul55naAL8I6q4ySZdNufiNlfjGxyj9wYISajQ6QAm0yye2g2x3glArGbdakGrkO5YHnZWX-lBrCkLQeNDKoKPeIZeNUyBeuTrzC3XHhKOkezyeXnkPirl3cr1US7JreN/w416-h520/thumbnail_BEEABE16-C1A7-4F3B-B405-3DA345CD5760.jpg" width="416" /></a></div><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">In so many ways Anna was everything that I am not. Where I feel slow and sluggish, Anna blazed forth with a fiery sword. Where I feel procrastination and reluctance, Anna knew what she wanted, and seized it with purpose and forthrightness. Where I am so deeply reticent and ambivalent about this whole incarnating on the earth in a human body thing, Anna was getting on with it, tending the micro biome, saving seeds, creating food forests. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Despite these disparities of nature, my friendship with Anna was such a rich source of nourishment and balm to me. Maybe my mistletoe liminality, was lent ballast from Anna’s deep roots, succour from her groundedness. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Honest and real, and always grounded in the practically manifest, I was infinitely impressed with her capacity to wield a chainsaw, providing wood for both of our hearths, as the children and I, dogs underfoot, lugged and hauled the cut logs. I recall homemade sourdough pizza and kiwi fruit wine, music and laughter, the children’s raucous play, as I tucked in amongst the drying calendula in a corner of her kitchen and poured my heart out to the deep receptacle of her space holding. The steep climb up the flanks of Mount Little Joe, flaunting our locked-down 5km limit to celebrate Anna’s birthday. Flourless orange cake with a view, wildflowers abounding. Anna and Nelly climbed that mountain religiously and often for a while there. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">And just this summer gone, long days swimming in the river or the dam, escaping the heat, hot chips and gravy for dinner as the sun set and the air began to cool a little, the children’s capacity to stay in the wet never ceasing. Simple, easy, safe, nourishing beingness. Life with Anna. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">When I see her now, in my minds eye, it is a visage of joy that I see, with a dash of mischief and a lavish dose of compassionate warmth. It was infectious that joy of hers. My melancholic nature was always enlivened vicariously by her company. I became more when I was in her presence. I was made more radiant in her reflection. Life with Anna always felt so full of precious possibility.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Anna did not wait for permission, she threw herself at life. One day when I visited her after she had received her diagnosis and our conversation veered toward the possibility of her death, she spoke to me of how she wondered if she had lived so intensely precisely because a part of her had known it would not be for long. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">She birthed her beautiful children young and as she raised them she studied her passion of herbalism, building and growing gardens and also calling forth her extraordinary business of Community Supported Herbalism. Back to Earth Medicine not only bestowed us with her hand crafted remedies, but also taught us, her community, how to make those remedies ourselves. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">She was a grower, a maker, an educator, a healer, a guide, passionately reinforcing the need to consistently integrate and reliably practice the healing interface between human and plant world. Advocating for it’s capacity to heal and enliven us, as we cultivate a more embodied and actualised relationship with the bountiful Apothacary of nature’s gifts. Putting our roots down, growing the medicine that would heal the whole world. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The natural world was Anna’s playground, gathering herbs and weeds from the wild, gleening apples from the roadside, foraging fungi in the forest. She was a true weedwife, her kitchen always full of fermenting vats and drying racks of herbs, plant matter strung from the rafters and concoctions, brews and potions in various recepticals adorning every surface. Nature’s abundance and medicinal potency permeated every corner of her life. Kombucha, sourdough, fruit wine, mead, herbal teas, tinctures, decoctions, ferments. She was alive with burgeoning becoming. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">And within all of this, so often close by her side, her precious children, equally wild and wise, cheeky and loving. Miraculous in their capacity to identify edible plants, to find and tend to animals of all kind, to build what was needed to create containment and structures through which their wild life could perpetually bloom and multiply, chickens, quail, guinea pigs, goats. Always laughter, always fun, a little chaotic at times, but always life giving, bestowing all who walked in their wake with that vibrant glow of the grace of being alive. My daughter loved her time in the garden with Anna, she’d always come home green-stained and full of new wisdoms. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">We remember the time when Anna was constantly followed by the wild duckling named Fifi, that recognised her as mother for a time. There are many images of her snuggled in close to a chicken beloved, and her bond with Nelly, her rescue dog, was a match made in heaven. Anna’s vocal tone, rising to pitches of the most abiding Motherese, as she bestowed an endless stream of endearments, entoning praise and reassurance upon her beloved animal familiar. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Anna loved deeply and passionately, with a generative tension between the impulse to fiercely follow her own independent path and direction, and her deep capacity for relational succour and transformative connection. The part of Anna that was a huntress of truth, often drove her down pathways that were not always the easy route, but which were steeped in deep enquiry and a wild instinct for integrity and sacred thresholds of becoming. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">In friendship Anna was voluminous, it seems now that she maybe had 101 best friends, each of us coveting our closeness as a precious gem, only to find there were so many of us that held her close in this way. Age was no barrier to her friendship’s, she loved us all, just as she found us. We, as the kith that mattered to her, were nourished so deeply at her hearth and privileged to offer her heart shelter and tending in her own turn. Because she was fierce in her living, but she was also courageous in her capacity for vulnerability. She was good at asking when she had need, she could rest into arms of comfort and weep in her hours of pain, just as she could set the world alight with the twinkle of mischief in her effervescent laughter. She effortlessly called in such profoundly devoted service from her beloveds in the last months of her life. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I have heard others speak of her tendency towards the brutally blunt. It is true she did not dilute her truth very readily, and yet, she was always gentle with me. Perhaps she also understood the fragility that living inside the constellations of our woundedness, the kind that do not heal, can afford us. We shared that root, and offered salve to each other, when those energies rose and entangled our vitality. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">One of the last times I saw Anna, she asked me to brush her hair, which had matted and locked from lying so long, and as I ran the brush through that auburn glow, deep, thick hair, vibrant with health, it seemed such a strange and incomprehensible paradox, to know of the potential imminence of her physical decline, the profundity of her pain and yet to simultaneously behold her vitality and beauty, the warm olive of her skin, the potent vitality of her hair, the thrumming life force of her sleek and potentised body, the purity of her seeking heart, the natural way she inhabited her skin, even in her pain. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">And still a strange liminality lingers, even as her body has passed from this world, yet we are tending our cracked lips with her lemon myrtle balm and administering hawthorn elixir for our broken hearts. All the remedies that were so lovingly crafted by her hand are what we reach for when our bodies have need of healing. She is tending to us yet from her place in the beyond. We have all been left behind, to mourn her loss as she blazes on to her next grand adventure. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I loved Anna, I still do, I always will. She made my life more alive and connected. I am so honoured that she chose me to be numbered as one of her many friends. I want her legacy to embed itself into my days, I want her to shine out to me from the hedgerow, as berry and fruit and leaf and stem and root. I want her to entangle me, to trip me again and again into this connection to the mystery through relationship with nature, through mushroom, moss and lichen, fur and claw, ferment and compost, tooth and bone. I want to drink deep of her moonshine and get drunk on her love for the wild. Her wild love. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">We are all in our own and varied ways profoundly grieved, but also undoubtedly enriched and blessed and privileged to have been amongst those she knew and loved. I know we will all watch her shining out forever, shining out as nature’s offerings, through her exquisite children, and as we, her star struck kin and kith, share our memories of her around the tender hearthfires of our love.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I offer my deepest prayers of solace and peace to her family, to her children, and her inner circle who she treasured so deeply. The loss is unfathomable, to all of us, who will always miss a world that had Anna shining inside of it.</span></p><div><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 51, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913317; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Words copyright Lucy Pierce 2022</span></p><div><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-21315627704269514922022-03-06T11:52:00.012+11:002022-11-01T12:22:51.201+11:00Pottery & Poetry, Simultaneously<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuR78VS1abg4PO73KJg5ZC-upvvZRkwoLLtfSZhy1D0eIF0gV_BKmcj_TEo6QXWqfT-M0jrS-WXm_fdbyRCvbfDju-Is5I9GTWQFdFaI5_TA2F1iPodKJu8aZuQI21NhdDN7Bu8ylnwUEzZU-D69F6Ox56rLJHSxEhsLT2gimlb0Ma1PqzdrahL-M2/s1039/thumbnail_IMG_9824.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1039" data-original-width="827" height="482" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuR78VS1abg4PO73KJg5ZC-upvvZRkwoLLtfSZhy1D0eIF0gV_BKmcj_TEo6QXWqfT-M0jrS-WXm_fdbyRCvbfDju-Is5I9GTWQFdFaI5_TA2F1iPodKJu8aZuQI21NhdDN7Bu8ylnwUEzZU-D69F6Ox56rLJHSxEhsLT2gimlb0Ma1PqzdrahL-M2/w384-h482/thumbnail_IMG_9824.jpg" width="384" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Poetry and Pottery, Similtaneously</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">It’s like that sometimes, move the hands and you move the mind. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I make a cup of Earth,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">She will carry all the mystery or water.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">It feels to me that many of us in this ‘modern’ world would do well to learn a craft. There is nothing more humbling than becoming servant to transmutable matter and it is the greatest teacher I know, other than being a parent, of how it is that we may truly learn to care, learn to take care. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">It teaches us unrelentingly that we are not the master, but the humble servant. That the master is and always will be, the life force behind the matter. That with time we may slowly learn the right mix of elemental fusion, to allow the material to be given life between our hands, to show us it’s capacity of form and eloquence of being, but that this will only happen when we lay aside our brute force and learn that anything worth doing is always, utterly, an expression of our love and an utterance of our care. It is a happenstance of mystery and contains our forebearance for the way life will be made and unmade between the hands of human forever, and what a precious blessing it is, to be made and unmade and made again by the forces that lie beneath and between and within and all around us. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">There is a forging of instinct that happens and a honing of will, our animal intelligence is asked of us. Our capacity to learn the invisible threads that weave a thing into being and hold it in place. The way that all of life makes a thing so. The way it is a relationship. Every thing, a relationship. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">It teaches us that every single gesture matters, every single gesture either makes a thing less tenable or more beautiful, makes the world less secure, or more comforting. That this is how we can come to matter, in our capacity to nurture life into form, spirit into matter. Such a profound and humbling privilege, it undoes us from the inside out, and makes us anew. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">The person who can take a raw material and make a thing of beauty, knows these things in their bones. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: small;">Words and image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022</span></p><div><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-43500304816061802582021-10-20T08:52:00.001+11:002022-11-01T08:55:19.135+11:00The Frontline<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqhX2ThGjKA6WqjJuTsuWvVbQLGhq2Rjgs87Uo8-Z46-S_aF74bjJr6GpOcNMKoP-aiIzJ-l8zhjm-9yQBqJ4f1xDc7XK20zYt0_6BEz_udae5zNmFoL8l4ScskX4kcQxc335Zsoq_IpQxM35nNS6umoG9xfEW8CGTEVSQr2zyQmNuxyCJRFf86jMq/s1280/thumbnail_BB112775-5409-4DB8-B970-CEA41D90B24C.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1080" height="525" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqhX2ThGjKA6WqjJuTsuWvVbQLGhq2Rjgs87Uo8-Z46-S_aF74bjJr6GpOcNMKoP-aiIzJ-l8zhjm-9yQBqJ4f1xDc7XK20zYt0_6BEz_udae5zNmFoL8l4ScskX4kcQxc335Zsoq_IpQxM35nNS6umoG9xfEW8CGTEVSQr2zyQmNuxyCJRFf86jMq/w443-h525/thumbnail_BB112775-5409-4DB8-B970-CEA41D90B24C.jpg" width="443" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 46, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #902e17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 46, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #902e17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 46, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #902e17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 46, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #902e17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 46, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #902e17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 46, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #902e17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 46, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #902e17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Text copyright Lucy Pierce 2021</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-62697276023365028072021-09-22T08:48:00.001+10:002022-11-01T08:52:12.173+11:00Inside Out<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirAAu5PJGY-JgZRXiUSp4tM2-UubxhujQ-9rUXVZnT4_XPdnqVJhO5h-zeYkUmgmQZ--VSixLigwkewAqwrmpVkNxyFGjSmKeLhAFmJb27UadcU57QltgifZhsj0M0AoWgeBkCH8Fb6mXbgta6hXJQHUez8FBB_42QSL8Vxn4XcUBegZLPvtAjX1ec/s1280/thumbnail_DB8C3F3C-B934-49A7-B9FB-E1B810EE935D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1024" height="455" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirAAu5PJGY-JgZRXiUSp4tM2-UubxhujQ-9rUXVZnT4_XPdnqVJhO5h-zeYkUmgmQZ--VSixLigwkewAqwrmpVkNxyFGjSmKeLhAFmJb27UadcU57QltgifZhsj0M0AoWgeBkCH8Fb6mXbgta6hXJQHUez8FBB_42QSL8Vxn4XcUBegZLPvtAjX1ec/w364-h455/thumbnail_DB8C3F3C-B934-49A7-B9FB-E1B810EE935D.jpg" width="364" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Inside Out</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">There is a part of me that believes </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">that because my body is untameable</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">it is also shameful.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">A part that believes the lies,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">that looks with envy in the eyes,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">betraying the soft and mountainous </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">isness of me.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I am not an itty bitty thing.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I am not strung taut and lean.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I am a big Mumma</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">making the world.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Like a planet my surface has survived </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">meteoric barrage.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I am battle scarred.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">There are holes in my soul so big</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">it takes a harvest to fill them.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Like the ocean’s surface my flesh</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">ripples with a thousand stories.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I cannot be shrunk to size.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">My body flows out like a feast</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">or a font</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">or a furnace</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of love and holding,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of fear and withholding. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">So far past pretty</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I have become an ancient creature</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of crevice and moss,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">blemish and scar,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">my flesh chooses it’s abundance uncontained.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">My son says </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">you are the most comfortable place, Mumma.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">And I know there is more to give than a sleek facade.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">My mountains and valleys give life,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">they are not wrong.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Because of this dissonance inside,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">it’s scorn and scathing,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I am less alive.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I avoid mirror and reflection,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">my mind skims quickly </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the quagmires of shame </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">that ask me to become less of me</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and more pleasing </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">to the impossible strangers</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">who fill my eyes each day,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">each glance taking me further away </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">from what I am.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">From the rugged terrain, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the untameable universe, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the myriad wildnesses</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of my very own body.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Be still, gaze of my father,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">voice of the world </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">that says I am wrong and less and flawed </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">to be the very shape of me,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the very tone and texture</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of me.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">There can be a nuanced comfort </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">that defies appearance.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">A heart inside that pulses </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">with a limitless love,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">like an ancient tide.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">It is enough to be here,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">deep feeling of body</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">spirit made flesh,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">a miracle.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Be still, hungry ghost.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I am a big Mumma</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">making the world,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I am not less,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I am just more. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">This life is a mission </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of mammoth proportions</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and I cannot house a traitor in my skin.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">With Ariadne’s thread I turn inside </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">to hunt the deserted paths,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and track the source of pain,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the harrowing beast of my shame,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">her monstrous hatred</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of my wild.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">My heart was born to love her home</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">it knows what must be done.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">My heart has done this a thousand times,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the redemptive wooing of the broken,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the vast and patient succour </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of a Mumma’s love, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">making the world </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">safe,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">from the inside out.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Image and text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021</span></p><div><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-50011634296467548952021-08-19T08:32:00.002+10:002022-11-01T21:27:18.426+11:00Hinge & Pivot<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZSQlwLm-KHe0KvS5PdiQ--DQOuJWokCv2XlNsGrrbyEyahK3aliFhV_ElBL7s5p7CkhbPqsBO30bGnipmusxJYdBg1sRFHmnNBG3izxlS5lfQ8T1ydqBbMZg67q6MERO0ND56Bwg9BLTP85fPjZxRRMO6S2sDDzsh-FZgUk_O2TOrliqabELziqAz/s1280/thumbnail_63424AFE-3170-4750-8061-6E5FE50D13B7-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1083" height="518" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZSQlwLm-KHe0KvS5PdiQ--DQOuJWokCv2XlNsGrrbyEyahK3aliFhV_ElBL7s5p7CkhbPqsBO30bGnipmusxJYdBg1sRFHmnNBG3izxlS5lfQ8T1ydqBbMZg67q6MERO0ND56Bwg9BLTP85fPjZxRRMO6S2sDDzsh-FZgUk_O2TOrliqabELziqAz/w439-h518/thumbnail_63424AFE-3170-4750-8061-6E5FE50D13B7-2.jpg" width="439" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">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.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Image and text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021</span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(5, 5, 5); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 17px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-84332125351236706432021-07-27T07:43:00.002+10:002022-11-01T21:27:40.700+11:00The Sundew and The Star<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUjBYvG1N_xRlkTzOOucMYxvoLbmYcc1eLp_tOQOrGeHU6t7tjyV7XTJX_Jn9v4lHQwSOD6L3zaOtjL_lYWSg2uny-7w4I89gaW2JzmqC58enks9ISTdPrPHyKYA_xhvqkDbr7vm9-dyEc9pX9FKUdbbg7l1iYyCIUYNyFjB-FZp85y24bELFhnKm0/s827/thumbnail_IMG_5558.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="539" data-original-width="827" height="307" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUjBYvG1N_xRlkTzOOucMYxvoLbmYcc1eLp_tOQOrGeHU6t7tjyV7XTJX_Jn9v4lHQwSOD6L3zaOtjL_lYWSg2uny-7w4I89gaW2JzmqC58enks9ISTdPrPHyKYA_xhvqkDbr7vm9-dyEc9pX9FKUdbbg7l1iYyCIUYNyFjB-FZp85y24bELFhnKm0/w470-h307/thumbnail_IMG_5558.jpg" width="470" /></a></div><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Image credit Sirion Pierce @nativefocusphotography</span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The Sundew and the Star</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The cacophonous roar of brutal truths, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">clashing in the airwaves</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">like disembodied necessities for certainty.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Blunt and blind and colliding through flesh, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">sacrificing soul,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">a barbed penetration of subtle emergence,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">a lambasting of nuanced sensing,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">a desecration of co-creative immanence. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Inside, I feel the urgent imperative to find the dial,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">that would diminish the volume </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of viral self-righteousness.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">My desensitised ear pressing instead</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">into the humus of understory, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">I notice the Sundews there, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">emissaries in the wintering cold, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">heralding their trumpeted listening, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">gathering dew and nectar and spore, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">communicating in the silent night with the stars.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Their stems are hair fine,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and themselves covered in filamented receptivity,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">poised to imbibe the news of insect’s feet.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Here too from beneath the decaying leaves, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the fungi, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">blooming their varied hue,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">their perplexity of texture</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">luminous translucence,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">amniotic gloss,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">feathered underside.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Themselves the blooming, fruited moment</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of the vast mycelium that thrives beneath,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the voluminous mythic underpinning of creation,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the transmuting multiplicity, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the connective tissue of the universe, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">responding, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">in unfathomable sensitivity.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The earth, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">always so gracious in her capacity </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">to accomodate polarities, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">to make space for complexity, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">to house the unknown and the unknowable.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Every inch of her deep skin</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">a eulogy to the dying, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">a murmurating coo to the newborn, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">a sustenance to everything that lies between.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">So generously she harbours the ungamely</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and the as yet not fully formed, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">carving refuges for uncertainty and contradiction, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">for the myriad stories of her fruitfulness, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">creating a cohesive weave of kindness and care.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Listen, can you hear it, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the resonant song of sundew and star.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">They have been conversing for millenia, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and still they seek not </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the limitations of a fixed </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and uniformed certainty? </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Could the star define the sundew,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Or the sundew, the star? </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">There is a secret language </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">written like brail across the surface of the universe.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">May we grow the fineness of feeling </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">in our sacred fingertips,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">sensitive like a moths feeling for the moon,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">to decipher the hidden meaning </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of the rich multiplicity </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">of our layered existence<span style="font-size: 15px;">.</span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(124, 44, 21); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #7c2c15; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021</span></span></p><div><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-24466621628870417982021-07-05T06:51:00.024+10:002022-11-01T12:24:42.876+11:00Always Held<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDivs3Kqj8fLSsKD4A8StJ26wWYzg0kyIv7xoNKdaPwbOjCfnn8Rk3iFFA9S17XJdVUBee2a-pT5qvFYcplbcMCJp-kPODzThs_3Y9ZQuIofA0Zs0_Y1WgfyBgolod37nuteUNrNMnEIGLzHDihoVmq-8TTRSbfK4NrCB9NvENQm-Vvg1QVSyJGT3C/s847/IMG_2092-2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="847" data-original-width="825" height="421" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDivs3Kqj8fLSsKD4A8StJ26wWYzg0kyIv7xoNKdaPwbOjCfnn8Rk3iFFA9S17XJdVUBee2a-pT5qvFYcplbcMCJp-kPODzThs_3Y9ZQuIofA0Zs0_Y1WgfyBgolod37nuteUNrNMnEIGLzHDihoVmq-8TTRSbfK4NrCB9NvENQm-Vvg1QVSyJGT3C/w410-h421/IMG_2092-2.jpg" width="410" /></a></div><br /><span style="color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; text-align: center;"> Always Held by Lucy Pierce</span><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">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.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 18px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">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. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 18px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Cards and prints available on Etsy. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none; text-decoration: underline;">www.etsy.com/shop/lucypierce</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Bless</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(140, 46, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #8c2e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Words and Image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021</span></p><div><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-19125219246067079492021-05-17T06:42:00.005+10:002022-11-01T12:29:33.822+11:00Already Given<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLPhqgxhPKvJK86jSOy4-z6OtdZMlFXqVOEjm1yS3K98ob89D5qplpYM_2fNskCKZ8iiIytqw00a8-JBDDYgT7CSEpcOqiQcJ7As79s3mLaN_LKkzGbheIWi-hRqhagWu9tkaSiijBL-DBgbQ0pY7tolWbIDsy6V8r99WPP__CwnqrGI0APmUXSqSY/s827/thumbnail_IMG_4598.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="820" data-original-width="827" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLPhqgxhPKvJK86jSOy4-z6OtdZMlFXqVOEjm1yS3K98ob89D5qplpYM_2fNskCKZ8iiIytqw00a8-JBDDYgT7CSEpcOqiQcJ7As79s3mLaN_LKkzGbheIWi-hRqhagWu9tkaSiijBL-DBgbQ0pY7tolWbIDsy6V8r99WPP__CwnqrGI0APmUXSqSY/w384-h380/thumbnail_IMG_4598.jpg" width="384" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus;">Already Given</span></div><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">We tend a world of smoke and mirrors </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">that hold us back from the real.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">So tenaciously we attend to personas through which</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">we will never meet the true self.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">What parades as culture is a torture,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">keeping us from sleep, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">prodding us with tools of pain,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and unattainable ideals,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">twisting our minds,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">deceiving our bodies.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">We are relentless in our chasing </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">of the bells and the whistles,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">our heart beats pounding,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">faltering, breaking,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">as we keep the wheels turning, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">grinding away at the soul,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the soul of the self,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the soul of the world,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the soul of the earth.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Bewildered,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">in pain,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">afraid.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">All of us slaves in our way,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">to a false and deceitful master.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 18px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Beneath it all the earth breathes, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">deep and slow.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">She unfurls the dawn mist </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">as the intricate design of a moth's wings,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">flutter on my night dress, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">to the serenade of water </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">falling through the sky,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">collecting to slake our thirst </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and draw up life.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">She gives her gifts for free</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and they actually nourish, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">they are all we could ever need.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">We must remember ourselves as her, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">we must let her be enough again.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">We must come to remember anew </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the miracle that each of us are,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">as we quake and tremble in our cells </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">at this miracle called life,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">thrumming, resplendent</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">in the mere mundanity of our existing.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">What might it mean to be generous,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">with our breath, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">our love,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">our care, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">our pleasure, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">our embodied attendance,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">our attuned listening. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Just to breathe and to hold, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">to sing and to sustain,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">to dance our barefooted rhythms </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">on the sacred ground.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">To listen at the threshold</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">of Earth's eternal chorus of becoming. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">To know ourselves inside</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and to share that with each other. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Enough.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">More, in fact,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">than we could ever dream of wanting. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">As though it is the eyes through which we see</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">that must evolve and eclipse,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">so that they are able to behold</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">what has already been given.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">May we break from the trance.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">May we grow the eyes to see Her.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">May we tend the heartgarden that can know</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">what it is we truly are.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Already given.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Turn from the smoke screen and slow.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Rip the shackles and fall deep,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">deep, deep down,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">into the arms</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">of our true mother.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Words and Image Copyright 2021</span></p><div><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-47320693242534067292021-05-13T13:38:00.014+10:002022-11-01T12:28:43.007+11:00Liminal Becoming<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVPb471jPiABZkNE8YnqNTyByNq8My_hSz8x0u4rebdjRs_5qhZchEho56qK3jfSc6y-VHdeqVFRG7FdmKhwnjYzu5S6_w4hXn_4MsYTN28o2R8AGcC1BCgEdrAE6RrhpEmSJ8gvUwoHKnRIymGymlwCQvH71nH7mnxeos_zCA8VMN57SGoOiawCtU/s3543/A4%20Print-%20Belonging.tif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3514" data-original-width="3543" height="421" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVPb471jPiABZkNE8YnqNTyByNq8My_hSz8x0u4rebdjRs_5qhZchEho56qK3jfSc6y-VHdeqVFRG7FdmKhwnjYzu5S6_w4hXn_4MsYTN28o2R8AGcC1BCgEdrAE6RrhpEmSJ8gvUwoHKnRIymGymlwCQvH71nH7mnxeos_zCA8VMN57SGoOiawCtU/w425-h421/A4%20Print-%20Belonging.tif" width="425" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">Belonging by Lucy Pierce</span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">I</span> am really struggling to know myself right now. Struggling to locate myself in the world, to meet its insatiable ask. I feel like I want to curl inside a cocoon and wait until I know who I really am, what I really have to give, how it matters that I give that, how to be known for who I am, how to ever be enough. I want to sleep and dream and become something truer, but the asks of mothering and working and of having a personhood, feel daunting and relentless. I am struggling to meet the upside, outside world.</span></p><div><span style="color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus;">It is not a broken place I find myself in, though I've known my share of those. The felt sense is one of gloaming, where the sensing of what is lost and past is still more pregnant, than that of what is yet to come. There is a tension sometimes, in holding to the unknown spaces, the in between places, that speak of mystery and disintegration and rebirth, in a culture that can so often cling to the known and the certain. It is a practice, to keep letting ourselves die, when it is death that is being asked.</span></div><div><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I want to remember a slower, more expressive self, that felt she had something to offer, of image to the void, of word to the silence, of heartfullness to the darkness. But I cannot turn back to her, I must move forward into the unknown of me, however uncomfortable the ask. Right now I feel empty and lost, and unable to belong to a world that is oblivious to the nuances of our time and in that oblivion, feels dangerous, but I remain unknowing of what it might mean to belong in a way that feels true and nourishing to something greater, something that is more fitting and embodied and sustainable and real. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Sometimes it'<br />s hard to trust what we thought was growth, when it is in the deathing stage and all the trees have been stripped of their fertile leaves. Hard to trust the journey when it leads us into the brittle, frozen lands of the psyche, trusting that the enlivening thaw will happen, however painful the cold, however slow the turning of that wheel, watching for the drip of the melting ice, trusting that spring will return, that dawn will come again for us, one day. I have lost a layer of false protection and am yet to grow a reciprocal response to the new aliveness that feels almost unbearable, raw and newborn and laid bare to the elements. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">With you as my witness, I invite breath and stillness and courage and deep succour to this inbetween self, that knows not what it means to matter to this world as it stands, what it looks like to live a life that can make a difference, that is a fitting response to the real experience of this life at this time. Not knowing whether to rise or to fall, to fight or to surrender, to cling or to let go, I poise here, softly listening, heartbeat as timekeeper, in breath and out breath as wayshower.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Text and Image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021</span></span></p><div><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-76193179528645666642020-11-18T21:16:00.010+11:002022-11-01T21:24:27.362+11:00Clay<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb739hr-UiZ8dZeuZrP7jfwd1i1V0DM-J-SgdYYeONNxpu5_f9jgSKddUT528QQdjJrcmknFTrSj5hlkJpdxTdmWBHx73MeW0FJiuEA38ui2O0ldv3wyKw-bnvhMmG9re8Z2Ja4omrIio6-faoVW5ZpsgE5Q1SS_IfqDF21LU4_UHHIqnuuFBBceM0/s1280/thumbnail_434C4BBB-81ED-472C-A0DC-E570CC535FBF.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1280" height="409" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb739hr-UiZ8dZeuZrP7jfwd1i1V0DM-J-SgdYYeONNxpu5_f9jgSKddUT528QQdjJrcmknFTrSj5hlkJpdxTdmWBHx73MeW0FJiuEA38ui2O0ldv3wyKw-bnvhMmG9re8Z2Ja4omrIio6-faoVW5ZpsgE5Q1SS_IfqDF21LU4_UHHIqnuuFBBceM0/w409-h409/thumbnail_434C4BBB-81ED-472C-A0DC-E570CC535FBF.jpg" width="409" /></a></div><br /><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Clay</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 23px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Forged of densest matter,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">body of earth.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Meticulous care to navigate the form making,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">we precipitate the limitations of material,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">element, time and space.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">In patient tending we follow the way,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the ask of tenacious will </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and mindful purpose.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Attending at the threshold </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of the not yet manifest,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">we come to embody the form.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The way is sometimes easeful </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and the making good.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes the way is hard.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes there is fruition.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes there is pain in the breaking,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the thing we cared for and laboured with,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">not what we’d hoped it would become.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes things are made more beautiful </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">in their brokenness, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">in their survival at such odds.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The gold in the cracks. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">But always we return,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">our hands to the clay,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">remembering ourselves as earth,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and fire,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and water,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and also air,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and the wild, untameable spirit of creation.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">In creating vessel we make containment.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">We form an empty space,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">a receptive place,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">a place to receive,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the harvest of nourishing food,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">rejuvenating fluid.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Or the harvest of emptiness,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of stillness,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">of waiting to be filled again.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The emptying and the filling. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The beautiful, cyclic nature,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">grappling with matter,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">holding space for source.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Made of the earth, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">we become the vessel, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">clay, earth, body, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">source, vessel, harvest, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">loss, grief, joy, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">labour, rythmn, care,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">contentment. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The broken and the whole.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Beautiful.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Making the space,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">the empty place,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">inside the silent body </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and also through the hands into being,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">that will nourish the world.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 64, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #914017; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Text and Image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2020</span></span></p><div><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-30132424637493822142020-10-15T13:38:00.002+11:002022-10-31T21:44:17.879+11:00An Emissary of Love Between The Worlds<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju1u47g6rnTzy9urKKzlBAxGH5t7VZN_1vFTt0OczGSCSPJ_c9jaBW5u4jvDaLFrzrBYBhhqgBeu0uMLm7R9YzVjc1koCMhwY8wjg1Azv2b5IaCHlql_ScHzPYK8g3JNniCoYIFaM2PAcHiY47oJJr0wcusENuOzYBOqXw5PW_OR2wceD_CPu3pEYW/s3508/A4-%20An%20Emissary%20Of%20Love%20between%20The%20Worlds.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3508" data-original-width="2480" height="556" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju1u47g6rnTzy9urKKzlBAxGH5t7VZN_1vFTt0OczGSCSPJ_c9jaBW5u4jvDaLFrzrBYBhhqgBeu0uMLm7R9YzVjc1koCMhwY8wjg1Azv2b5IaCHlql_ScHzPYK8g3JNniCoYIFaM2PAcHiY47oJJr0wcusENuOzYBOqXw5PW_OR2wceD_CPu3pEYW/w393-h556/A4-%20An%20Emissary%20Of%20Love%20between%20The%20Worlds.tif" width="393" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px;">An </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); caret-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); font-size: 12px;">Emissary</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px;"> of Love Between The Worlds</span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px;">By Lucy Pierce</span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">So strange to have completed this image without realising it is a day of remembrance for pregnancy loss and infant death. </span></span></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; text-align: left;">So many have braved the raw journey of having a babe come and then pass back to the other side again, before they could set foot upon the earth. I made this image for those families who have navigated this passage between the worlds, where life and death are held in the balance and sometimes we are asked to let go of the embodied love that has grown so tenderly within, rocking the world, to let go of what is most precious and yet only to be shared a short while.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; text-align: left;"> </span></div></div><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">More and more I have a sense for the ways we are held so intricately and so lovingly by the unseen forces of the spaces beyond this known existence, as well as the human and other than human allies. Contact is made with astonishing care, not to diminish the pain of life, but to hold us while it tempers us, breaks us and makes us anew, holding us so we can feel the heartbreak or the tenuous hope and yet still take breath, still arise to face the dawn of what is yet to come. Ourselves born anew, made deep and holy by what we have loved and lost.</span></p><div><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-14602231816886585242020-09-23T12:36:00.010+10:002020-09-30T17:38:00.350+10:00Refleshing The Bones<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVCnmHNKuDM7rRmTOakxSQBI_5ShmgZaBo_BagdnccLl8P5PIlY1w9U8eVgwi31uSie-8Rl65961uINiM0H_B4k74qT89AP2CTExlvczRxjMOuAL-ac8C2XLugnoBYVNL23PbzesFFbhI/s2048/IMG_2160.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVCnmHNKuDM7rRmTOakxSQBI_5ShmgZaBo_BagdnccLl8P5PIlY1w9U8eVgwi31uSie-8Rl65961uINiM0H_B4k74qT89AP2CTExlvczRxjMOuAL-ac8C2XLugnoBYVNL23PbzesFFbhI/w480-h640/IMG_2160.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Some describe the emergence of Coronavirus as being an inevitable expression of an out of balance microbiome, a natural response arising from within an increasingly toxicified ecosystem, subsumed with pollution and ravaged by monocultural over-use, I wonder too if the powerful emergence of overly simplistic, divisive narratives at this time in our collective discourses is a similar expression of the loss of healthy habitat and indeed the desecration, of our psychological and mythic underpinnings.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Just as the ecology of our planet has been colonised and transgressed by a paradigm of domination, so our cultural narratives have become desperately degraded. Akin to the way the Coronavirus is toxic to the human body so too perhaps are our cultural narratives toxic to the human psyche. Simplistic and binary, obscenely outcome-oriented, good vs bad, hierachical, proliferating violence and domination, ensnaring us in the victim/perpetrator polarity, us/them, bereft of creative nuance or mythic ambiguity, they are banally happy-ever-after.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I sometimes wonder whether as a culture at large, or at least for many amongst us, we suffer from collective attachment trauma, in utero, birth, first years of life, childhood, adolescence. The unbearable affect that can present within the undifferentiated psyche of the child causing the authentic self to defend itself against feeling in order to survive its own existence, in the face of a lack of good enough co-regulation from care givers, in the presence of abuse/intergenerational trauma and/or the annihilating absence of care and soulful presence.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I believe the dominant overculture perpetuates an institutionalisation of birth violence and attachment trauma, it’s economic imperatives disinherit us from our profound capacity to attune and to devote ourselves to the non-profitable task of caring and tending, of fusing the soul to its earth-home, weaving a tapestry of integrated sensitivity through gentle presence, impeccable nurturance and timely nourishment, supported by a family, community, society that prioritises attunement and care, deep listening, depth and breadth, wisdom and embodied power. The Mamatoto of wholistic becoming.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Conversely our modern human world institutionalises care and compassion. There is a cultural somatics of loss. This becomes an intergenerational legacy of psychic dissonance, a breeding ground for mental health disturbance, addiction, suicidality, despair, dislocation, avoidance, aggression/abuse, dissociation from emotional pain. For many there is a ravenous dirth of belonging and connection to authentic self, dare I say it is a pandemic.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Just as the earth has been traumatised with the unrealistic demands of a ravenous consumerism, so the psyche has been violated and transgressed by a hollow and brutalising cultural legacy, of capitalism, consumerism, suppression of feeling, violence, economic inequality, systemic racism/sexism/ableism, all the ways we dismantle diversity of being, shaming “otherness” in terms of sexuality, identity, belief. This tyrannical and narrowing system impinges on mind, body and soul.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">In a toxically imbalanced ecosystem viruses emerge and thrive, ultimately I’m sure as a deeper expression of intelligence within an ecosystem attempting to right itself. Is the burgeoning of these over simplistic conspiratorial theories an expression of the same thing? A transmitted virus of the psyche, a virulent expression of the toxicity of our psychic landscape, an inevitable consequence of the profound trauma of colonisation, as people are stripped of their ancestral roots of localised language and lore, story and medicine, connection to country and healing practices, birthing traditions and collective child-rearing, intergenerational cohabitation. Almost annihilated in the current cultural narratives is a mythological underpinning of meaning and morality, that binds a person in context and place, connects us to our ancestral inheritance, plants us deeply and with nuance into the fertile soil of community, earth and cosmos. Disease thrives in the psychic landscape of dislocation and emotional pain, that have been epigenetically instilled by the absence of a biodiversity of ecologically embedded selfhood.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">In the absence of a cultural code of care for the soul, of a complex and nuanced relationship to the psyche, to emotions and the deep feeling body, of the immanence of spirit through deep ecological relationship to self and place, we can be tempted to cling to the narratives our brutalising culture offers us.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">As we are force-fed movies of horror and violence, so we overlay and underpin these narratives of meaning and sensemaking upon a world in crisis. We are existing in a monocultural apocalypse of the mythic. The obtuse narratives of conspiracy theory are perhaps an expression of this dire lack of subtlety and nuance, of emotional intelligence and depth of feeling, tenderness and tolerance, of complexity and biodiversity that our psychically malnourished muscle for sense-making and myth-making has been acculturated to.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Those of us who are held in the grips of developmental woundings that inhibit our capacity to feel safe and embedded in a primal matrix of belonging, are in essence already and always in the grip of mythic and annihilatingly archetypal forces. Unable to meaningfully bridge self to other to culture to earth we are forced to draw on the archetypal forces for sense making and connection. It is our enormous task to tame the archetypal and the mythic so that it can be a life enhancing, enriching force, rather than a weaponised mechanism for justifying our severance from our own authentic self and truest nature, from the unity of human experience, the dislocation from the reciprocity of attuned human and ecological co-regulation. For those of us who are mythically wounded, archetypally defended, I wonder whether part of the remedy must also, by necessity, come from or through this numinous realm, this chthonic threshold, this mythic interface?</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I sense that many of us alive today, disenfranchised by the ancient war against indigenosity, need to tend to the battered roots of our stories, our personal myths, repopulate the world with tender and generative, fertile and fecund tales of reclamation, mobilising the mycelium of complex reciprocity that is the true inheritance of life on this planet, complex and diverse, symbiotic and sustainable. How do we even begin to do this, from the tenuous brink, the barren wasteland, of a human world in such deep healing crisis?</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Can we be akin to Psyche, tirelessly engaging the multitudinous tasks required of her, that she might at last arrive embedded within her own divine nature? Can we be like unto Isis, tenaciously retrieving, re-membering the severed pieces of her beloved Osiris, building temples across the land of our own grief and love?</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Do we, as the fisherfolk, dare to dangle a dubious fishing line over the edge of our battered and scarred dinghy, into the deep waters of our timeless, collective origins, hoping, even as we dread, to hook ourselves to, inexorably entangle ourselves with, the plight of Skeleton Woman? So that even as we flee and hide from her in horror, we may begin the potent work, in the deep of night, by the glow of the ancient fire light, to reflesh the bones, restore the blood and muscle, enliven the sinew and ligament, drum back the heart, of a sensuously embodied existence, a permaculture of the soul. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Text and image © Lucy Pierce 2020</span></p><div><br /></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-28531117767155501672020-09-14T12:30:00.015+10:002020-09-30T17:38:23.921+10:00The Sub-terrain<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS5b_fuL-MIL9VGO836x_H_fcyv58asEj89jOe__xRCx7toPLh1EbBwyvsJkz4Y2GRf-3PtR8GdaR3N6LgoLQZDxfndApa8VET4yxIylG3aN0ghdoVWpb3Beqi9_WJe3KXlENMGfZ1tXQ/s2048/IMG_1931.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS5b_fuL-MIL9VGO836x_H_fcyv58asEj89jOe__xRCx7toPLh1EbBwyvsJkz4Y2GRf-3PtR8GdaR3N6LgoLQZDxfndApa8VET4yxIylG3aN0ghdoVWpb3Beqi9_WJe3KXlENMGfZ1tXQ/w480-h640/IMG_1931.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">More than anything else, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I feel we are missing roots, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">deep roots. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Roots into body and feeling, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">roots into the deep self that transcends time and space, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">embedded in earth. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Roots into story and song. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Roots into myth and archetype, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">symbol and image. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">That eternal subterranean map of morality </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">that binds a people to their place, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">a heart to it's truest purpose.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Roots and bones and stones of earth, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">digging into the before and beyond </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">to bring the deep nourishing waters up through the subterrain, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">to the radiant light of day. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Tap root latching on, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">pushing in, through the bedrock, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">ballast and nutrient, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">succulent and dark. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Drinking from the deep dark earth, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">drinking of the wisdom of bloodlines </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and mythic templates forged across ages. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Sensing the wild primordial seeds of creation </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">singing by our side as we seek a deeper hold, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">as we labour in the chthonic soil </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">of our annihilating undoing </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and our emergent becoming. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">The reverberations of the gods </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">undulating the dark field of our endeavour.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">This is not something known but rather sensed,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">like the amputee of a limb long gone.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">And yet we drift, severed, rootless, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">cultureless, orphaned, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">exiled. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">This is not by chance, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">there has been deep violence in the severance, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">meticulous intent in the brutal disconnection </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and the dross that replaced the first truth </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">of our innate belonging. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I long for my body to learn </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">how to send it’s succours down </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">through this hard, fertile, stolen ground </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and to know myself home. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Down through the substrate </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">to the wellspring of story and dream</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">that would teach me how to live true.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">How do we grow roots worthy of the profound privilege, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">of being the embodied faces of our ancestors, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">miraculously alive in the now?</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(145, 49, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #913117; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Text and image © Lucy Pierce 2020</span></p><div><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-91542960503415698682020-06-25T13:35:00.015+10:002020-09-30T17:38:19.205+10:00The Many Faced God<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcf073zQK4NVoJVrtU448zY5e_eB7DuO9lMkcVdMmPX9XDgB8fzJfiebFI6lPE8DOm9A6srcjwIibNatyUhdARnnmmq6Dtahlck7TdVOD4ScTVDMO6Wcn_HuAHHTfrVzhv45GraEA60ss/s828/IMG_2224.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="822" data-original-width="828" height="398" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcf073zQK4NVoJVrtU448zY5e_eB7DuO9lMkcVdMmPX9XDgB8fzJfiebFI6lPE8DOm9A6srcjwIibNatyUhdARnnmmq6Dtahlck7TdVOD4ScTVDMO6Wcn_HuAHHTfrVzhv45GraEA60ss/w400-h398/IMG_2224.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I recoil from the false belonging,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the maladapted attachment to toxic comfort, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">an insidious protection, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">an anaesthetised severance,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">a sanitised dismemberment.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I embrace instead</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the sickeningly unstable terrain,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the reclamation of dismembered histories</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">alive in my skin,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the vast complexity of existence </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">that swirls and smarts within me,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">that stings and swoops inside,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">just as it does without.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">The truth, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">at once annihilating </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and restorative.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I reach down deep to the loamy soil, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">to dig my own grave. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">From my turreted captivity I reach down,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">dizzy, undone.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Even just the reaching down, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">a disloyalty to my enscripted direction. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Tender mother,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">child of rape,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">birthing the predator.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I am forging the grave </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">within my own living flesh,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">earth and blood on my hands.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I am making space for the little deaths </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and for the big one also,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">space for the reality of the violation,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the implications of the travesty </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">we have begot.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Down deep with the worms </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and the maggots </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and the mycelium.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I am crafting the living tomb within my body,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">that connects me to life,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">a power source,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">a placenta, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">a comfort,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">a dismantlement,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">a composting,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">a resting place.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">The cold and clammy body, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">earth stained and damp,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">of the murdered instinct</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">is birthing itself back into existence,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">from my encapsulated witholding.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Through each psychic pore, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">through the walls of my civilisation,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the push and the stretch,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">each cell a birth canal,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">to my severed and harrowing humanity.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I turn to face inside,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">that which is the opposite of goodness,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the goodness I was so brutally groomed </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">to believe myself to be. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">There too I choose to know myself,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">in this darkness that I also am,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">as brutal perpetrator, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">as senseless violence,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">as immoral desecration.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I am a vast bridge that spans</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the eternal complexity </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">of the many-faced god,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the formidable trickster,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the life-giving paradox,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">that dwells within me and all around.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Life, the vast bridge</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">between birth and death,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">between good and evil,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">between ether and earth,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">between god and the devil,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">between goddess and the killer.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">There is room inside me for all of it.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">That is how big I am.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">That is how loved.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(144, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #903e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Image and text © Lucy Pierce 2020</span></p><div><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-57975820523107188342020-06-11T11:17:00.001+10:002020-06-11T11:17:37.320+10:00Closing the Gap<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGjXQBUhaCcOLu0IdoSanTxMqbLBaqxJrD0Od_VzltDgGnLIC-sz392UvrFe1iSxQUWAtTnf5m3sPwKLZrDWV32sdCHU5KBZFLqyYVAo4UrhdugtT_2mcmCYE96iKYRkpiw5WR9Li7I8g/s1600/IMG_5088+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1470" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGjXQBUhaCcOLu0IdoSanTxMqbLBaqxJrD0Od_VzltDgGnLIC-sz392UvrFe1iSxQUWAtTnf5m3sPwKLZrDWV32sdCHU5KBZFLqyYVAo4UrhdugtT_2mcmCYE96iKYRkpiw5WR9Li7I8g/s400/IMG_5088+2.jpg" width="367" /></a></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Closing the gap,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between love and fear,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between exile and belonging,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between mind and earth,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between pain and care.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">So that we are all wet and sleek as newborns,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">brushed with the dust of earth,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">gathered into arms of kindness,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">coming home,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">return</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">return,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">return.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Closing the gap</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between shame and unified nurturance,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between trauma and embodied integration,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between blame and rightful atonement.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">So that body and skin, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">feeling and thought,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">inner and outer,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">become lovers,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">pressed tight in reconciliation,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">so that psyche returns to the birthright of earth,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">to the embrace of kindness and kin,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">returns to primal unity,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">to sovereign power,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">returns,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">returns, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">returns.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Closing the gap</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">between thought and action,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between bigotry and restitution,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between prejudice and restoration,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between abuse and safety,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between isolation and inclusivity,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between manipulation and regeneration.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">So that only love remains,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">fierce and brave,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">in all Her wild faces.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And deep listening also </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">at the interface of self and other and the inbetween,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">eternal homecoming,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">genesis,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">return,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">return.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Closing the gap </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">between the spite of domination and benevolent sovereignty,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between history and the healing presence to love’s living moment,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between agony and nourishment,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between the orphaned and the inclusive hearth.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Closing the gap </span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between belief and action,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between injustice and attuned advocacy,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between the injury of betrayal and fiercely accountable acknowledgment,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Closing the gap so that we all become kin </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">at the feasting place of creation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To each partake of the pristine succour</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">of our empowered existence</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">inside an ecologically embedded macrocosm of grace.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">No longer split and splintered</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and brutal and cruel,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">but returned,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">returned,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">returned.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Closing the gap</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between the unfathomable grief and an embodied shore,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between violent rage and rightful justice,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between dissociated terror and deeply courageous feeling,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between brutal incarceration and regenerative healing,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between shackled suppression and exuberant expression,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between need and privilege,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between brutal travesty and artful remedy.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">So that body and skin and world and self </span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">and human and land and cosmos </span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">and animal and plant and microbiom </span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">and fire and water and earth and air </span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">and spirit</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">sit together at the one fire,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">in reciprocal alignment,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">coexistent in a unified field of belonging</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">and love,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">tender and fierce,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">in all Her wild faces, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">returned.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 20px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Closing the gap</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between dream and lived immersion,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between prayer and reality,</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between hope and accountable becoming.</span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(181, 23, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #b51700; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">So that the wound that will not heal,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the shame scar as deep as Hades,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">will always be given wing and balm,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the smoke of prayers,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the touch of care,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and succour and vision,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and a friendly hand to hold in the dark times.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So that we may each walk at peace </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">with our very own deaths,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">life-giving,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">so that we are made rich again</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and whole and kind and brave.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Closing the gap within.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Closing the gap without.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Return.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Return.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Return,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">to love </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">in all Her fierce </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and wild</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and tender </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">faces.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
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Image "Placenta Bowl" and words © Lucy Pierce 2020</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-65875180681401103242020-06-08T13:13:00.077+10:002020-09-30T17:38:13.702+10:00A Brutal Lens<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV5KiCpPgdSQv_ZaMbCSIJhW8RT01_zI6yW_LaXlBvNAAk3LYgEKT9w3rsrGrrCKYDEDm4hxC-JsbaqucKRvz_RQ_mT8QE_Q3ohy8M4X_P16WUOH9gdJ_GW76SJSDcecqgEkvEfRzZnOw/s1023/The+Wound+That+Will+Not+Heal.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1023" data-original-width="791" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV5KiCpPgdSQv_ZaMbCSIJhW8RT01_zI6yW_LaXlBvNAAk3LYgEKT9w3rsrGrrCKYDEDm4hxC-JsbaqucKRvz_RQ_mT8QE_Q3ohy8M4X_P16WUOH9gdJ_GW76SJSDcecqgEkvEfRzZnOw/w494-h640/The+Wound+That+Will+Not+Heal.jpg" width="494" /></span></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I’m sure it would be wisest to stay silent. Yet as I only just begin to understand my own complicity in regards to systemic racism, I traverse that all to familiar feeling of the underlying psychic belief in my own wrongness. I begin to suspect that this is something that my culture weaponises against me to keep me compliant. Even as I grapple with shame and distress at my own part in this, I also hold a deeper conviction in my own innate and intrinsic human intelligence, always seeking a benevolent restitution, seeking to understand that there is a deeply redemptive quality of inclusivity and care that is at the heart of this universal experience. As a daughter of this mother Gaia, however waylaid and distorted I may be, I also now understand that I am beloved by Her, by Her vast web of cohesive love, and that I am not loved for my perfection, but rather in spite of my messy, flawed, blind, deluded identity, because I am alive and a very infinitesimal part of a great cohesive whole of evolving and awakening consciousness. As I begin the journey of learning to awaken to and heal with, and attune to this macrocosmic grace, there is yet so much dangerous unconsciousness at play, fumbling and bumbling my way through this messy thing called life, my heart wants to speak to what I see, what I feel and sense, in all my flaws, with all my blindness.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">As people of white skin, living within a paradigm of colonial domination, of supremacy indoctrination, we are actually living inside a harrowing wound of narcissism. Each of us is given the birth-right of being special, of becoming successful, of thriving economically in the face of ecological destruction at the untenable volume of our increase, of being a unique individual contributing inside a hollow and narcotic vacuum, that actually has no space for us, let alone more marginalised voices and has no true care for anyone’s authentic wellbeing in any way that is sustainable to earth, or nourishing to body and soul.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Most of us in this culture are slogging away in blind obedience, unless of course we are one of </span> a very rare few, deemed exemplary enough to become spokespeople of the dream. There is no actual soulful nourishment or integrated belonging in sight, other than that which grows like medicinal weeds on the periphery, through the cracks in the sidewalks, in the fertile crevices of our annihilating grief. Nourishment as dissent.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">For so many of us there is no ancient ancestral wisdom to lean back into, no conscious notion of the mother-ground of earth as intrinsic, reciprocal ecosytem, holding us beyond our fickle notions of identity, not because we are uniquely magnificent, each and every white-skinned being, but because we just are worthy of life and connection and love, just by being born and playing our humble part in the vast web of life inside an ecologically embedded macrocosm. To allow ourselves to die to white privilege is perhaps to die a little to our obsession with personal identity, prestige, gift, talent, contribution, to die to a sense of our own individualistic significance. It is this that keeps us sucking at the dry teat of materialism, consumerism, denialism, ecological annihilation, brutality and desecration of peoples marginalised by the system that holds our shallow and fragile egos afloat. </span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: white;">We are so busy, scrambling up ladders, stepping on the heads and fingers of others to gain the recognition that we delude ourselves would validate our existence in that way that we all hunger for, like addicts, bereft actually and in denial of how very grief- stricken we are. Grief stricken because the system we are born into is a travesty and a farce, yet it is perceived as all that we have. It is founded on exploitation and brutal violence towards any “other” that knows implicitly a deeper belonging, an embedded sense of self that is not dependant on an economic imperative for its survival. Perhaps the deepest reckoning for us, as white skinned humans, sons and daughters of imperialist agendas, is that it has been so so long since our blood lines inhabited their own intact connection to ancestral lands and spoke their own language of country, since our hands tended the soils of our heartland, fed from the foliage and root of our great grandmother’s herbs. So long it has been, since we were truly nourished by something other than vicarious trauma, that we have become the hungry ghosts of a broken world, vampiric, adrift, insatiable, striving to prove ourselves inside a system that will never be able to offer the deep succour that our souls hunger for. Because you can’t buy that kind of love, that kind of aliveness, it can’t be transmitted through the</span></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; background-color: white; font-kerning: none;"> congratulations of a social media post. </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"></span></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">If there is any salvation for us to have it will be in stepping aside and quieting the harrowing tantrum inside, the driven imperative that desperately wants to insist that we matter, that must contend with the trauma of us all being orphans in a way. Orphaned from true belonging, from ancestral wisdom, from connection to place, language, lore, plant medicine, land. Orphaned to care and ritual and intergenerational custodianship and embodied, robust, connected community. Orphaned to love in a world that validates disconnection, from body, from feeling, from earth, from innate wisdom, from dreaming, from creative intelligence.</span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Perhaps there is a miraculous work that is possible for us now, indeed a work that so many of us have already so magnificently begun, that we might find some last ditched imperative in ourselves to partake of, that might involve a deep planting, slow stitching, a silent weaving, an attuned tilling, hands Earth stained with our labour of moulding and kneading, of seeking true form, hands oiled by the rituals of caring for body and plant being, animal kin, sunbeam and star light. Our bodies engaging with the bodies of others who we do not understand, who we have done harm to, humbling, humbling, transmuting, taking responsibility for our pain and dislocation, the wide open ears of our hearts and our wombs awakening to the experience of all beings, and the possibility of belonging to each other after all, as apposed to standing above, monolithic and alone and stained in the blood of those we stepped upon to arrive at our own magnificent agenda, with an imperial presence of our own importance. I</span>nstead, perhaps, this work of tendering ourselves back into the deeper, cohesive matter of existence, through all the sickening layers of moral trauma, as to what we have been perpetuating that is in truth violent and violating.</p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;">For myself I can only do that when I begin to embrace the extremely repellent and uncomfortable dismantling of my own white privilege, my dysregulated attachment to an abusive paradigm of soulless brutality, that has convinced us that each and every one of us can be a super hero, that each and every one of us deserves a place in the spotlight, that we matter to the world. Our own importance a way of appeasing the gaping maw of our own insignificance inside a brutalising, earth-annihilating machine of consumerist destruction, staving off the harrowing realisation that there is actually nothing of substance that our dominator culture has to offer that is worth mattering to. Staving off the deeper truth, which is that even as it provides the opportunity to become individualistically revered, it doesn’t care a jot for us either, beyond our capacity to keep the cogs of this monolithic monster of exploitation and capitalistic destruction turning. We need to wake up. We need to wake up now before it is too late.</p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">As I squirm in my own complicity, I seek to use my hands to learn how to use a needle and thread to trace an intact strand, back through the ages of trauma, of my long ago ancestors who have something worth teaching, before it was taken from them and me in turn, by the same paradigm of colonial brutality that is still at work within humanity. We all belong to this beautiful earth, there was once a time when all of our ancestors knew this. I want to understand the trauma of being white and seek to allow my nervous system to settle and detoxify itself from its marathon of struggle for self importance, in the face of an annihilating dirth of true cultural care and nourishment and reciprocated belonging. I want to truly fathom the barrenness and brokenness of my inheritance and listen at the interface of radical care, profound tenderness, fierce love, transformative accountability, to hopefully begin to know how I can belong to my own self and this beautiful Earth that I call home, in a way that makes me less dangerous to others, less dangerous to the ecosystem that sustains me, less dangerous to myself.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(151, 63, 23); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #973f17; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Image and text © Lucy Pierce 2020</span></p></div>Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-39357315187860833632020-06-05T12:07:00.015+10:002020-09-30T17:38:06.758+10:00Sovereign and Sacred<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3U-dPXvR55IRbV3L3pGn4nYglCyfc-EZ40QO-6CqzUbqh1C6af788P91deHx297FmKdpmufJlmjafuz_zKY4QU9At0zuFkWWski6gg_n6cdiXUd8tlI5gx6fp6brHHxmkLc_Ma6twrNE/s598/Screen+Shot+2020-09-28+at+12.08.54+pm.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="598" data-original-width="598" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3U-dPXvR55IRbV3L3pGn4nYglCyfc-EZ40QO-6CqzUbqh1C6af788P91deHx297FmKdpmufJlmjafuz_zKY4QU9At0zuFkWWski6gg_n6cdiXUd8tlI5gx6fp6brHHxmkLc_Ma6twrNE/w400-h400/Screen+Shot+2020-09-28+at+12.08.54+pm.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">It feels so feeble to say that black lives matter.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I want to be able to say black lives are cherished and revered,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">black lives are sovereign and sacred,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">black lives are a blessing of beauty and power and grace, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">stardust, bedrock, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">blood of our mother.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">I want to learn how to bend down low,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">until I have learned all the ways </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">my privilege betrays </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">and brutalises the lores of life, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the bodies of brethren, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the soul of our origins, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">the memory of my first ancestors. </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Learn, so that together we may discover </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">how to birth the new earth, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">from the old stories,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">where we may truly walk </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">side by side,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">all skins, </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">all colours,</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">sons and daughters </span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">of the earth.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">Incredible image by Bobbi Lockyer</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;">You can view her work <a href="www.bobbilockyer.com">here</a>.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 21px;"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-kerning: none;"></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(156, 62, 24); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; color: #9c3e18; font-family: Papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 21px;">Words © Lucy Pierce 2020</p><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZIVzutyO_qoRNOXPJVca20x7tgwRVm_0nZAaLOcQb3ZDIdoGKFTOhcKM85zSxMHMtGZv1yC2C_9y4SsT6B_jCbN9a0NldzDMwlCCP-P_zTsrjaDFm2iG7Hu1bi8liuA7T_yFYn3Ud1aY/s598/Screen+Shot+2020-09-28+at+12.08.54+pm.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZIVzutyO_qoRNOXPJVca20x7tgwRVm_0nZAaLOcQb3ZDIdoGKFTOhcKM85zSxMHMtGZv1yC2C_9y4SsT6B_jCbN9a0NldzDMwlCCP-P_zTsrjaDFm2iG7Hu1bi8liuA7T_yFYn3Ud1aY/s598/Screen+Shot+2020-09-28+at+12.08.54+pm.png" style="margin-left: 1em; 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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2qNj4ZBShFhVtwRu28Tlf0yjX-6btmK7Ny6Z_bogLuRxdmlYjCwWnPJ7-Qn5VA6aE9HeVKsL-8Wh6dUacBYz_PZIX92pOiSysf3PZ9AbbFe56BNB7Jxb8yLAZnI68qe4rayoTvVot6M8/s1600/IMG_0568.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2qNj4ZBShFhVtwRu28Tlf0yjX-6btmK7Ny6Z_bogLuRxdmlYjCwWnPJ7-Qn5VA6aE9HeVKsL-8Wh6dUacBYz_PZIX92pOiSysf3PZ9AbbFe56BNB7Jxb8yLAZnI68qe4rayoTvVot6M8/s640/IMG_0568.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">FERTILE GROUND </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As I navigate my interiority, at this time of lockdown, there is a thorn in my sock, it is niggling for extraction. As I traverse this ground of quarantine, there is a bird in my ribcage, it is fluttering for release. As I do the work of sorting the beans of my psyche to acclimatise to the ask of these times, there are words pestering in my mind, grief hungering in my heart, insight seeding in my bones, hungering for expression. I have been resisting them but they beseech, so I bow to the unformed and the nebulously emergent and give flight to the shadowed impulse, and add yet another thread to the weave of word and thought that we humans cannot cease to create. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This thing that wants form speaks of the violence that is seeded in the absence of care. I know, it seems to be the thing I am always speaking of, but it wants voice yet, I am still finding my way home to it. I see it in the human world around me at this time of global crisis, ecological, viral....but perhaps it is always safest to name it closer in, to give it intimacy first.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">At the beginning of quarantine there was a power birthing itself through us in the very little world of our family. This birthing of empowered presence and connection was possible because for a moment I let the world stop. Work, school, the pull to attend to other. In that space a garden grew, almost instantly, my children and I like a pride of lions, tumbling in the grass, deep autumnal grace. Dirt beneath our nails from the time tending the soul, fostering the seedlings, praying at the alter of Earth. We roamed our sense of place, came home to the ground that houses us. Walking across her symmetry, we admired the mantel of her funghi, we arranged the hues of fallen eucalyptus leaves, found an orchid whose blooming has strayed so far out of the season of its kinfolk. We, constantly awed by the little miracles of nature, finding our way back into the weave, listening deeply at the bones of things and finding there the profound sensorial opulence of embodied presence, the sweet elixir of rest and nourishment. We came home. Home to our bodies, to each other, to our garden, to our clever hands, to the land that embraces us. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And then the world crept back in, entered our home again via the screen. School began, albeit in a somewhat disembodied version of my children’s wonderful school, it’s meticulous beauty, and impeccable ethos. The need for work drove my gaze out into the world, to share and to draw some succour near, to lure in the means to pay our way, while my other jobs slept. My own schooling in psychotherapy recommenced, an attempt to unravel from within the tangles of trauma that keep me exiled from belonging. And now, five of six weeks in, I feel severed again, blunted. My body speaking it’s language of auto-immunity, my sleep ruptured, my adrenals taking up their vigilant overtime to accomodate for the deficit of care.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That renewal at the beginning seemed so instant, like the sky above cities, once thick with pollution, suddenly clear and blue as a newborn breath. The water of rivers, oceans, so long silted with our plastic and grime, so quickly reinhabited by wild forces as they were cleansed by our conspicuous absence, an innate purification emergent in the slowing, in the stilling, a blatant consequence of our rest from the quest of constant consumerism, the perpetual feeding of our hungry ghosts, the ravenous maw of our dislocated selves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Again things got busy, busier than I can bear, busier than my nervous system can cope with. This is how I have lived most of my life, busier than my embodied self can bear, than my fine tuned nervous system can abide. Obediently loyal to an outer imperative that denies my sovereign need for deep listening and regulation with other humans and with Earth, in ways I have not been schooled in by my culture, but find my way to by the example of other more intact peoples and by the cells of my own blood when I stop long enough and still deeply enough to listen and to hear.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The imperatives of the paradigm of domination that we currently reside in, calls me up into my head, there to flay myself at the ask for a particular sort of productivity that is required to earn sustenance in a world that is severed from its source of true nourishment. And the soft animal of my body, it’s finely tuned breath and intuitive movement and miraculous capacity to cleanse and restore and recalibrate itself back to equilibrium is abandoned to the god of other, of exteriority, of production and output, of brutal dominion over the soft feminine ground of my being. I abandon my fine tuned care, of body/Earth to meet the mind of the world. There is a trauma that drives me, not safe to rest, needs will not be met in surrender to authentic impulse, to presence, to ground. Or will they? Children must be educated, so that they are not cut adrift from the imperatives of the human world. An income must be procured, the hungry maw of the capitalist imperative must be fed, sacrificed to. We must keep up or we will be left behind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I am sad, because I feel again I have left myself behind in the rush to belong to a way of being, I cannot truly abide, and yet cannot yet find my way to exist outside of. There is a potency in this liminal space between world and hearth, where the desires of the cultural paradigm have actually imposed their ask into my very home, it’s sanctuary breached.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I am journeying with my children as they stretch into their futures and enculturated selves, as they practice the patterns of order and structure that scaffold our thinking. The times tables, the way that words fall together to form an internal temple of thought to temporarily house and shroud our not-knowingness and mystery, our vulnerability and aliveness, to keep at bay the wild terrain of our bodied beingness, our instinctive selves. It feels easeful for my daughter, fierce of will, sharp of wit. Yet still I wonder what is it that truly lies behind her fierce diligence, as I see the strain at her brow. And then there is my boy, day after day we sit, with deep resistance and inner turmoil and overwhelm. I am being called to attend to my own educational trauma, so that I can hold to him in his experience of being brought to things, again and again that are not natural to him. I see myself in both of my youngest children, the vigilant and the overwhelmed, but there is deep work being attended to here with my boy, we are repatterning the fabric of our psychic weave. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This sensitive one, who just weeks before gathered rain soaked sap from the dark interior of trees over days of rainfall, and then warmed and stirred the dark, sticky liquid over a fire he had built beneath the sky, until he’d made a glue, to hold the hemp string that he entwined around his tea tree fishing spear to secure and seperate the points that he had hewn and crafted and sanded with such diligent care. This self-directed impulse, so alive and driven, only the week before. There is an astute intelligence in his body-being, his hands and his heart are innately clever, but he struggles with written word, the shapes don’t fit neatly into the shape of his unusual and creative mind. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In these weeks of schooling from home he has been laid bare, again and again, by the intensity of his frustration, in his feeling of not enough, not good enough for the pace and structural imperatives of this ask of remote learning, unbound from the embodied trust he nurtures with his attuned teachers.Is this frustration always there for him at school? Or is it just unearthing itself here in this strange context, where mother is teacher, learning support, specialist teacher, violin tutor, lunch maker, space holder, student, small business owner, creative being, sensate animal, wounded soldier? I can feel the coiled brutality, of what he has had to put aside in himself to abide in the structure of a human focused system, even one so beautifully attuned as his Steiner education. I feel I am baring witness to his aliveness of feeling, slowly unfurl as we learn to make a home for it again. The school work has been put aside again and again to sit with the tears, both of ours, and the angry frustration of the ill fitting garment of the world, where it inadvertently curtails the wild self, without due conversation and time and listening and attunement, between the body and the world, the knowledge and the earth, the imperative of the system and the willingness of the being.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">He deeply loves his school actually, and there is so much there that feeds this wild soul in him, but this is something else and he is not coping with this school in home, mother as teacher. It has been valuable in its unearthing of trauma ground within our shared field, the bare bones of it. It has been useful in the imperative that has arisen for me to learn how to hold my son and myself more fiercely, less conditionally, in our big feelings, in our true pain and outrage, the frustration that lies at the heart of being subtly brutalised by a cultural system and institutional demand that would have you be other than what your true nature would ask of you. The shame and erosion of esteem that can grow in that place, if care and holding and emotional attunement are not brought there with an impeccable and astute will. Care and holding and emotional attunement take time and presence, things we are in short order of when things get busy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There is a deep squeezing, in the ask of our time. It has been valuable for me to see more acutely the polarised pull within me, of the fierce rebellious renegade who longs to unschool, to rewild, to decolonize and along side this, there is alongside this, the hyper diligent good-girl, loyal to the narratives of the cultural ask, even as they kill me and the natural ecosystem I love. I sense within me the obsequious approval seeking mechanism of the dangled carrot of belonging, if I just try a little harder, work a little longer, sacrifice a little more, I will finally arrive in the world of human, exonerated, accomplished, pristine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is often how it is for me in this life, to return to my body, I meet with the bare bones of trauma. There is a hyper-aroused nervous system, a deep chasm of grief, an incapacity to truly ever feel safe in my own skin. There are subterranean geysers of rage and the microcosmic filaments of desire that have never been fully given authority to move and be satisfied. There is a battle between nature and culture alive in my skin. A dance between past and present, in my sensate experience, the unresolved encapsulation of my past seeking resolution through the cellular aliveness of the now. But a part of me keeps asking, can I become big enough, brave enough, resourced enough, nuanced enough to fully land in my own skin, alive to feeling and indebtedness and to the thunderous love for my own existence that would actually give me a home to truly dwell within, a bedrock to truly plant my feet upon? Sovereign, loyal to the true ask of my embodied and inter-connected self.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The parts of me that I have never learnt to listen to and care for, prevent me from being fully available to my children as mother. The bigness of their soulful beings have not always been able to find traction in the conditioned ground of my trauma infused psyche. All my life I have been told not to listen too closely to my own will, but to bend to the imperatives of the other, not to yield to my own emotional turbulence, but to honour instead the narrow pursuit of the mind and obedience to expectations of gender and familial codes. The subtle indoctrination to abide the norms of an emotionally illiterate culture, severed from the true throbbing, aching needs of the embodied self, in an alive and intertwined eco-system. Often my last resort was to just leave my skin, evacuate the sensitive feeling capacity to mitigate the disregulated overwhelm of psychic isolation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In this time of global pandemic there are so many fraught questions and decisions requiring of leadership, I wonder how can we do, whatever it is we do, from a more kind and loving and emotionally informed and body centred place? How can we truly honour and value, those amongst us who have already done the immense emotional labour of learning how to be a safe harbour, a warm sanctuary, an inclusive portal of care? How can we lend credence to those amongst us who know instinctively, how to tend and attune and restore and envision a whole and life-giving and ecologically inclusive solution to the terrible predicaments of our time. In contrast to the way we scapegoat care, the way love is surrogated in an unconsciously parasitic way. Their is a chasm between world and hearth, demand and ecosystem, output and sustenance, drive and care, head and heart/body, human and earth, state and grass-root. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The frontline of this chasm is being lived out in homes, in bodies, in economies, in the hospitals, and the institutions we have built to house the vulnerable and those who less neatly fit the productivity paradigm. I question the way our world sidesteps and sidelines care in times of health and wealth, when it is the handlers of the shadow, the grief walkers, the nurturance givers that are called upon to tend the festering wound of our psychological deficit of care, in the times of crisis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As a people we have severed our roots to earth, to that deep nourishment and succour that comes from allowing ourselves to be cared for by the earth, to truly and deeply drink of her bounty and know our indebtedness to her vast love. As we hide in our houses, our forests are being severed, as we are policed for our obedience to eroded civil liberties, can we be sure that those who hold sway in the world are making decisions founded in emotional intelligence? Are they honouring the profoundly interconnected web of our interdependency, are we attending to the needs of the ones who are on the front line of care? Do we know how to tend to the ones who tend? Do we understand the value of that literacy, the literacy of embodied benevolence? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Do we value the capacity to create an energetic field of safety that has space for all the scope of human experience so that the body being can exist within its own innate intelligence.? So that we can all find the traction required to return to equilibrium, to balance, to health? So that we can be informed from within love’s living moment, of its willingness to respond and its responsibility to care? Are our leaders aware that the treadmill, the brutal imperative, the mental indoctrination is killing us and the whole miraculous ecosystem of this exquisite planet? What would it look like to take a term off school and just to take the time to deeply listen, instead of cramming more and more in? What would it look like for our leaders to redistribute our enormous wealth so that everyone could feel safe and that they are valued enough to be cared for? That their true being is valued, their emotional safety, not just their capacity to produce on the economic treadmill? We are experiencing a collective trauma, the ask for business as usual seems brutal and insane.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I think what I see is the immense wound, as it lives inside me, inside my home, where care and love have not been given the time to find a seat at the table, to take a root into the garden of my being. Also I think I see that we are living a collective trauma response to our own individual experiences of a collective deficit of care, that has been acculturated across millennia by our severance from the true source of life and embodied intelligence in a symbiotically receptive ecosystem. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There is a violence that grows in the absence of care. We are scrambling for solutions in the mind, in the business as usual mode, when perhaps the true solutions lie in attending to the reality of the body. Do we truly feel safe to be all that we feel and know ourselves to be? Are we able to express our grief, shame, violence in ways that don’t harm life, but instead actually free it and us, to find new creative solutions. The frontline of carers in our world are actually the most economically vulnerable, the least valued professions, nurses, teachers, disability workers, care-workers of all kind, mothers and fathers at home, being asked to implement entire curriculums for multiple children while simultaneously procuring an income from the same space, for those of us privileged enough to have the capacity to work, is a sign that our leaders are very cut off from the emotional realities of holding space in a home. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For some it may be easy, but for others, where there are wounds and traumas beneath the surface, that loom large in the absence of the distractions we procure to emotionally surrogate for true healing, it is incredibly hard. The fact that this is not really spoken to with any great intelligence on a level of leadership, suggests to me the emotionally illiterate paradigm we are all being asked to exist within. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">All the while another reality beckons, where Earth shares her medicine and food wholeheartedly, for the beneficial price of hands in soil while the sun graces the crown of our heads, where there is space for the body’s voice to be heard and stretched and given over to, safe and held in the warm knowledge that all of me is welcome here, there is time and space for all of me to be safe and to become present, so that I can live as a sovereign, informed body being, inside a thriving/ nourishing/ life-giving/ death-wielding universe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is not sustainable to cut ourselves off from the care of each other, from the care of the earth, it is not wise to scapegoat the emotionally literate and venerate the mental encapsulation of wealth accumulation, of the domination of destructive human endeavour over the health of the ecosystem that sustains us. It does not seem wise to expect the vulnerable to shoulder the weight of a broken world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I want to courageously address the ways I am severed from myself, the ways I suppress my true nature, the ways I deny care to the vulnerable parts of myself, the way I suppress and do not learn healthy pathways of expression for the wild transformative impulses of my psyche and body-being. I want to make a tender place on my lap for the scared obedient child within me, who feels I will be exiled if I do not abide by a way of being that I depend upon, even if it hurts me. I want more for her, I think we can offer her more now. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I want to be willing to die to what does not serve me and send out deep roots into the fertile ground of the relational field, risking aliveness, even in isolation, befriending death, even as I preserve life. Fostering connection and care, even as I isolate to protect the vulnerable. Growing the immense garden of my heart, to feed and nourish my children and the human world and the natural cacophony of magnificent creation. So that I can respond to a changing world with embodied intelligence, emotional literacy, a deep responsibility of care to the known and the unknown and the unknowable, to the revered qualities and the rejected impulses of humanity alike. I want to create a fertile ground of care that will wrap itself around us all, and bring us home to true belonging, so that we may feel emotionally and psychically safe enough to stop more completely, listen more astutely, rest more deeply, arrive more groundedly into the great ask of this moment. To make our world anew, with room for us all, in the crisp clean air and the brilliantly clear flowing water of our shared ground, awake and ready to feel it all, from inside a great weave of embodied love.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Do we understand the cost when a social animal does not feel safe to be in relationship with others? What gets split off to accomodate the absence of attuned care and living relationship and wholehearted belonging? What will be the cost for those who, in this experience of isolation, are severed from the life-giving connections that are essential to healthy life?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What might grow in our garden if we tended a little more to our being and a little less to our doing? Would there be room at the feast table for us all? Would we each inhabit a psyche that had made a place at the table for all of the parts of who we are, as human beings on this Earth? How is it that I can cultivate the fertile ground of a healthy ecosystem, within my own body, within the culture of my family, within the human world and the greater ecosystem of earth? How alive and awake is my microbiome? How clear the channels of communication and life-force expression? How can I cultivate a sensitivity to nuance and feeling so that the delicate undergrowth and intelligent mycelium that grow underfoot are protected and not trampled?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">How can I allow those deep underwater currents of my creativity to flush</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">up and through the sediment of my being, clearing and purifying the waterways of my living flow so that I can be a clear pool for others to be reflected in and to drink from? How can I choose rightful action so that I’m not polluting the Earth with unnecessary clutter, so that the skies can be clear for the birds to soar through and that the air we breath can be an expression of our purest intent for all of life?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">How can I allow the wild animal of my body to find the soft and undulating thrum that allows each muscle and sinew to unfurl and stretch and find the syncopated rhythm of my dance that returns me to the one-song of creation? How can I express the most honestly aligned intention and life-giving impulses so that what is being lived is not a response to yesterday’s misgivings but a vibrant and vital co-arising field of inclusive and mutually nourishing existence? How can I move beyond the survival of and obedience to a brutal and outdated paradigm, into a thriving co-creation, allowing the terrible nature of grief to rip through the being like a brutal rainstorm, flushing my heart back to reciprocal resonance with the moment, in the courage to delink the misplaced loyalty and double binding beliefs that hold me away from my own true and sovereign magnificence, and my impeccable capacity to care for all life and to harness the blessings of my own death?</span></div>
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</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">© Lucy Pierce 2020</span></div>
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Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-80191965300996165072020-04-05T21:03:00.000+10:002020-05-09T09:25:03.388+10:00Reflections On a Shared Birthday in Lockdown<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Yesterday my daughter and I shared a birthday. It was a four seasons in one day kind of a day, rain and hail, thunder and sunshine, contrast and contradiction, comfort and storm. It’s an interesting thing to share a birthday, stirring lessons of what it is for a fiercely autonomous Aries woman to birth an even more fiercely autonomous Aries woman in the shape of a little girl, on the very day of her own birth. Again and again life forces me to acknowledge that it is so deeply through relationship that we learn and grow. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The lone wolf (or is it the wounded child) in me cries sabotage, to have had the one day of the year that might have been about me, sublimated by the magnificent and demanding otherness of my exquisite daughter. Each year the fantasised visions of what the perfect day would hold for me are dashed against the cruel hard rocks of the demands of being a mother to a daughter on her birthday. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As a fierce introvert, I am constantly seeking ways to find space for poetic communion, creative reverie, solitary union from within the cacophonous roar of otherness that is family life with children still young. Of late there has been no time for this part of me, she has been starved, as I have worked more in the world to support my children as a single mother. And yet it feels that there is a fierce distillation of desire that constellates within the alchemical vessel of thwarted intentions. A fertile summoning in the negated passage of the wills consumation with its purpose.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">These past weeks of lockdown, as the worldly asks have receded, the demands to support my family and meet the world in ways that feel necessary to survival but counter to health, have eased and abated, and I have found myself woken in the night by the wild sent of my soul, where it has padded its way through my house in the dark. Such a blessed return of a more intimate way of knowing myself, my soul’s subtle beckonings emergent in the slowing pace and the retreating world. The softening and the stillness a more natural element to me, as artist I am flooded with images asking to be painted, as wordsmith, elusive words shine again in my mind like star dust. I am internally compelled, drawn away to the quiet corner where I can smell Her most keenly, and yet ...... and yet I am also sharing a small home with two rambunctious, boisterous, creative, chaotic, conflictual creations, who have no need of me to be seperate or courting of the underworld, or communing in the shadows with more ephemeral and delicate, less embodied and robust aspects of self. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Beside my bed, in my cosy and curated den, tower unread books on mysticism, symbol, art, psychology, myth, quest, while my days are beshowered in the perpetual clarion calls of “Look Mum, look!” “Watch me!” Or “I’m hungry” or “When can we....?” </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And there is a bitter sweetness to it all, to the oppositional impulses. I feel attuned to the knowledge that one day I will be left alone to my books and I will long for the infuriating distractions of my children. The day will surely come when I will long for the company of my daughter on this gifted synchronicity of our shared birthday. I am also deeply aware that I would be a very different human if I hadn’t surrendered again and again to the boundary-annihilating, ego-dissoluting, autonomy-dissolving, edge-walking, fiercely intimate, breaking and remaking journey of motherhood. And still, there is the longing for my own uninterrupted, undiluted process.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Indeed, I sense that it is the very tension between these polar opposite impulses, the submission to solitude and creativity, and the imperative to attune with love to other, to take and claim what is rightfully mine, and to surrender all will and purpose beyond that of the moment, that might one day make me someone worthy of having something to share.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Our time of isolation so far has been marked by profound privilege, space, resource, creative capacity. It has been a time of walking in the wild, crafting at the hearth, nourishing food, reading and playing and connecting, growing food, gathering spring water and building chook pens. It has been a time of deep connection and rich nourishment of self and one another. It has also held an underbelly of unresolved tensions, sibling rivalries, triggered mother-ground, tears and rage and conflict and thinly veiled aggression. The places that dwell within the intersections of our shared and individual fields, of the integrated and unintegrated aspects of our psyches and the psyche of the family-body, the family-soul. We are a melting pot of emergent energies, clashing and harmonising, appeasing and provoking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It seems that somehow despite ourselves we have come here to listen and deeply attend to what arises when all else falls away. We are attending to the deep undercurrents of tension and trauma that dwell in the body that hinder the cohesive field, sifting through the conflicted inner impulses that impede our capacity to drop in and share authentically in non-projective ways, to be compassionately present to what is, within ourselves, within our family constellation, within our community, our culture, the human race, a global unified field, a universal consciousness of love. There is deep work to be done here. It is powerful work. There is little room for denial and escape, in this deep work of mothering, and growing, and becoming, at this time of isolation. Glorious and wild and contracting isolation, freeing and consolidating and confronting isolation. I hear the conspiracy theories, I fear for our world politically, but it is this work that I cannot turn from, the work of learning what it means to hold my children, to unwind unrestrained wounding, of learning what it is to love and be loved. Was there ever any more important work than this?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It feels as though in some way we are undertaking a less glamorous, but no less robust equivalent to a vision quest or a hero/ heroine’s journey. As the wilderness warrior must learn to live daily with deprivation of what is seen as essential to life, safety, security, food, water, sleep. Here I as introverted caregiver, am sacrificing solitude and sovereign space. Because it feels true to me, in the bones of my psyche, that solitude is an essential ingredient, as primary as air. And so I dance in this threshold space as woman who is mother, dance in the charged and initiating space between needs of self and needs of other. Glimpsing the potential of one’s creative expression precisely as it’s undertaking is withheld from you, the tenacity of fighting a losing battle with a house each day, but gleaning a deeper victory despite oneself, to sacrifice what is most desired to that which is most imminent, to take responsibility for a deeper calling to care for that which has already been brought forth, rather than courting the rush of new creation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And so amidst the detritus of playing cards and scattered toys, I strum an untuned ukulele and sing a few bars of an unformed song that will never be played again, holding space while my children draw, endlessly reciting the spelling of simple words known to me but utterly new to them. It means making pavlova instead of gluten free quince tart on our birthday, it means going for a wild ramble to dissipate rivalrous energies rather than swooning in my cave to the sonorous resonances of myth and otherworldness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And there is something here that feels rightful. That this holding to the what is, over what is imagined as desired, is perhaps a more tempering and appropriate offering to the now. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If we only ever give on our own terms, is it really giving? Does our capacity to give ever grow without the wrenched excruciation of our safe boundaries being renegotiated against our own will? If we only ever receive what it is that we think we want, will we ever come to see what it is that we already cradle in the nest of our own experience and capacity?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">On a good day I remind myself that I am living a great love story, a tantalised prolonging, cast out across the years, the decades, a deep and careful courting of my own wholeness, a learning of the terrain, an attuning to the greatly nuanced foreplay of my own arrival in the deep and true humanness of my being. There is perhaps a delusional hope that one day I will give myself utterly to my art.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It feels so compelling to retreat to a turreted tower and espouse the narratives of a partially glimpsed transcendence, the numinously sensed insights of self. And yet moment to moment my children are calling me into a perhaps grander quest, one with deeper implications for my experience of humanities unfolding evolution. Again and again they call me to the precipice of the unchartered, to the swamps of the unloved places within. Again and again they beckon me to the wounded and damaged terrain, not so prettily articulated or illustratively curated. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">They flay and floor me on the regular, asking of me a deeper love than the broken child within me could have ever dreamed of receiving, let alone being capable of giving herself. No one sees this work, deep and archaic, indeed often I myself do not recognise it for what it is. I see it often as my own short-comings, my misattunement, to be so undone at times by what is asking to evolve and be integrated in our family soul. A deeper part of me knows this is the ugly terrain of true initiation, of deep ancestral healing, the tangled histories of spirit lines reweaving themselves back into a cohesive pattern of belonging to the living moment. It is the visceral blood and bone interface of awakening love, so that it is not the soul of the hero that emerges magnificently triumphant, enviable and distant, but rather the group-soul that in fact sinks a little deeper into the bedrock of truth and embodied belonging, breathing a collective sigh of relief, as something that was withheld against, comes to rest again at last, back to the numinous breast of love. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I think perhaps the time of individual salvation is passing, I think we now need answers that unite and bind and soothe and appease the trauma wound of our species, and that remind us of our great responsibility, to know ourselves as inseparable from the great heaving, messy whole, human and other, this alive and felt and reciprocated and tender creation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #9b2e18; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">This the uncomfortably grizzly work of a life accountable to the care of others, accountable to the true care of self, when our hungers cannot be appeased by outer or other, by consumerist imperatives and capitalist impulses.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #9b2e18; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 21px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #9b2e18; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">How do I surrender my voice over to becoming an indecipherable cadence of a cohesive whole, like bird song or rainfall? How do I let the soft animal of my body unravel, so that it is a deeper, more embedded me that speaks and translates? How do I hold ballast in the face of the unknown, the unknowable, the subterraneous, the unhealed, the emergent and beseeching? How do I surrender the individual swan-song and grasp full-bodied the sometimes terrifying unravelling of our great undoing. Tending more to what I can give, rather than what I can get, how I can merge and nourish rather than how I can stand apart, how I can embrace rather than how I can transcend? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #9b2e18; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Always for me, since long before my daughter arrived gleaming and sacred from my womb, birthdays have been fraught with unspeakable tendernesses and unnamable needs, unmet yearnings and compulsions to receive something from outside of myself, that never seems to come in the way I expect it to. I’m afraid for me longing is often at critical levels, I am an emergency of longing. In light of this I offer these words as a birthday gift to the world. Thanks for having me here, treasured Earth, beloved kin, for loving me in all the ways that teach me best that I am already the love that I seek, already the salvation that I hunger to arrive at inside.</span><br />
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">© Lucy Pierce 2020</span></div>
Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-76989378376317043772020-01-07T21:25:00.000+11:002020-06-15T09:10:50.133+10:00The Ancient Woman<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Seeds of Our Mystery I</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">by Lucy Pierce</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">THE ANCIENT WOMAN</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The ancient woman feels near, sometimes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She of pomegranate and myrrh,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">of fig and oak and olive grove,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">of swaying hip and sunbrowned feet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She of herbs in her hair, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">animals in her wake, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">stars in her eyes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Primal she stirs,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Like the snakes blood,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">or the the earth’s crust,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">restless with time,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">hungry for breath.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To shrug from her gait the oppression of eons,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">as though she could step through time </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and return to the blazing hearthfire of eternity, </span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the rich tapestry of her wisdom and knowledge, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">unbroken. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The ache of her being so near,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and yet untouchable, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">almost unbearable.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Her scent almost indetectable,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">obscured by spells of danger,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">once necessary webs of protection,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the parched shrouds of survival.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To only know her through the gossamar veil </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">of unknowable paradigms </span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">that clash in the void of the inbetween,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">so heart-breaking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I wish for nothing more </span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">than that her knowing could be mine again,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">returning across the primordial stretches </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">of her persecuted power.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To know her on her home land, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">with her familiars intact,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">with her knowing stored in the blood of ages, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and woven between the stars </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and the plants that she heals with,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the loom in which she dances </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">through the threads of time. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I long for her scent to be mine,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">for her wild instinct to rise in my blood,</span></div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">for her ancient words to trip my tongue,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and yet still, in the speaking,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"> to make the world new again and true. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As it was when she was young to the world</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and the lore of herb and star was hers to give freely,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">when her knowledge could heal the woe </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and her song could break the heart </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">and her yarn could weave it back anew, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">a thing of beauty and power, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">a thing of sinew and sovereign. </span></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">So long it has been since the chain broke.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So long it has been now, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">since the mother taught her daughter </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">who taught her daughter,</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"> who taught her daughter, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">the words and the ways,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">the songs and the portals,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">the names and the thresholds.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">So long it has been since I knew my true name, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">that my power has become such a withered thread, </span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">no ballast or weft, </span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">no grist or tread, </span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">only a glimmer, a glamour,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">of what has been forsaken,</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">and the weight of that</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">too unbearable to know. </span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 21px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I feel the shadow of her inside me, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">of all that she was,</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">maybe still is, in another place, another time. </span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">The longing for her, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">an annihilation that I hide from, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">the impossibility of her, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">intact, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">too brutal a beauty to hope for.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 21px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">And yet I give her my colonised words, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">yoked and bound in the tangled narratives </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">of an oppressor's tongue.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I give her my blood, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">sprung blessed and dark </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">from the deep of me as I sleep and dream. </span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I give her my pleasure </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">bone deep and quenched, </span></div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">and the tears of my grief, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">too long untended, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">unfathomable deep.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I give her my song, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">clumsy and unhinged from the true names of things.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I offer her the swaying of my hips. </span></div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I give her my body in which to plant her seeds, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">that might one day grow </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">the fibres of new language, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">sun drenched and rain soaked, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">star gleamed and moon spun, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">words arising in the compressed space </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">between my foot's sole and Earth.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">As I walk the back of our shared home, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">the Earth whose rhythm and pace is eons wide and eternal, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">as I walk Her, fathoms far </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">from the place where my own blood memory sings, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I am listening still as I walk, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">tenderly with the ear of my heart, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">for an opening to the resonance </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">of her long ago fineness, that ancient sister, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">to the shape of her words for the things we might birth together, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">across the tundras of space, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">listening for the sound of all the names, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">of the vast and the infintesimal, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">the names of the boundless things </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">that bloom and thrive yet, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">in the space between the heart of a woman </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">and the song of her earth </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">and the longing of stars. </span></div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">These things I give, </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">they are all I have left.</span></div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #a82217; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">May she wake inside me yet.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlKWh68pG0IcyVm70TeaCN2V3-m01EOBuOYtBeyiiyozeuh13EMl7i_bF8rKVNS6MrcatelISxbUokb36Scz2wfV-28w4A02NgD7NRDaojT4XnnUV4EhpnaerNXqwOIqC3AnP2FL49LTc/s1600/IMG_0692.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="722" data-original-width="576" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlKWh68pG0IcyVm70TeaCN2V3-m01EOBuOYtBeyiiyozeuh13EMl7i_bF8rKVNS6MrcatelISxbUokb36Scz2wfV-28w4A02NgD7NRDaojT4XnnUV4EhpnaerNXqwOIqC3AnP2FL49LTc/s640/IMG_0692.jpg" width="508" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: x-small;">Seeds of Our Mystery X1</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">by Lucy Pierce</span></div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Word and image © Lucy Pierce 2020 </span></div>
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Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102632058324118854.post-61887271430053517292019-12-05T20:25:00.000+11:002020-05-09T09:25:03.201+10:00Delivering The Divine Unto The World<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfZTdscEf5o3UgzdzoY0IKlwwMXpeUIAylb4B0yBkPN-8QhgvRXmu-HtaeYXnWBYFooOuMerva0WbI1V6ZPHSvLfE-ZQ4up_xZpGEGf_JYkvs_9zZ7EefJ0Ko-beA-PEOzWt_vz8yVbG4/s1600/IMG_0573.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="889" data-original-width="748" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfZTdscEf5o3UgzdzoY0IKlwwMXpeUIAylb4B0yBkPN-8QhgvRXmu-HtaeYXnWBYFooOuMerva0WbI1V6ZPHSvLfE-ZQ4up_xZpGEGf_JYkvs_9zZ7EefJ0Ko-beA-PEOzWt_vz8yVbG4/s640/IMG_0573.jpg" width="537" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Held by Spirit</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">by Lucy pierce</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">DELIVERING THE DIVINE UNTO THE WORLD</span></div>
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><br /></span>
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">As Christmas approaches and I listen to the sweet voice of my beautiful daughter singing songs of donkeys and mangers, of holy mothers and miraculous babies and luminous stars, the mysterious mythic interface rises through my resistance to meet me where I stand. This is what she shows me.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 20px;">
Sometimes, even though we are virgin and sovereign and self-sustaining, we are also pregnant with something that is bigger than we are. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes, our bodies heavy and pendulous with what has gestated within, we roam the landscape, lost, looking for somewhere to rest, somewhere to lay in the warm straw and give birth to the gift that has grown unseen inside of us. We search high and low for the manger that will hold the elusive offering of our treasure. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes the resting place, the shelter from the dark night eludes us and we despair. Sometimes we feel far from home and so very alone and so very full of the thing we have grown that is asking to be birthed into a world that does not necessarily value what we hold inside. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes the culture within which we roam, looking for safe harbour, is hostile to what it is that awaits birth within us. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes what awaits birth inside of us is the very thing that will help to change the culture, to make it a more accepting and less hostile place. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">But for now we have to hold it alone, in the dark unknowingness, we have to learn to love what we do not understand inside of us, which grows from the seed of divinity. Sometimes we are asked to be guide and protector of She who is seeking a place to give birth to that which will change the culture. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes the child is not our own, but that of the great mystery, it is a child conceived of an energy that moves far beyond our scope and means, but we say yes, and we hold space and we guide and protect, we lead the way and relentlessly seek the path and the place for the new to birth itself into the now.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes we stand beside and hold the space for the mystery to be born through another. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes we are the donkey, and we must endure the back breaking work of supporting the body, providing the passage, for the one who is pregnant with mystery, the one who in that moment is birthing the sacred for us all. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes the only place we can find to rest and to begin our birthing song, is a lowly place. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes it is not what we’d hoped for, barren or plain. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Usually the animals are there, arrived before us to pave the way, wise and accepting, where often our fellow man is not. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes all that comes present to bear witness to our miraculous birthing, of that which is beyond us, through the visceral pathways of our own messy embodiment, in that lowly place that is all we have to accommodate the untenable nature of our gestation and the wholehearted devotion required of us to bring that through, is the bright starlight, incandescent and pure, and the humble animals and the unseen winged ones, the imperceptible flutter of their flight, who know things beyond our vision, who see things too big for us to see. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes the wise men come and sometimes there are gifts, but by then the work has already been done. We have already walked alone in the barren land. We have already grown full and ripe and heavy with a vast and unknowable fruit. We have already knocked on the doors of our kith and kin, who could not understand the urgency of our need. We have already been turned away. We have already found our lowly place and our animal kin. We have already said yes, to the inconceivable birthing, to the standing by and husbanding of that birth, to the holding within our humble skin, the vast mystery of creation, the holy miracle of a love that is bigger than us. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes, these days, we walk the path alone, no husband by our side.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes we have a donkey to ride, but sometimes our feet are bloodied and sore from the flint of our wayward paths as we seek and we seek and we seek the place to lay our untold and awkward gift down, even as we are turned away, still we seek, to finally find the place to belong, to open our bodies and to let the thing free, the thing that god seeded within us, that has grown full term, that the angels await, and the stars swell toward. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Most of the time, the thing that is wanting to birth itself inside of us, the thing that was seeded by god, in our virgin and sovereign power, is love. A love bigger than our frail humanity and our awkward brokenness. A love bigger than what we thought we were capable of. A love that will change the world. Sometimes there is no shape in the world we know, for the love that is birthing itself from within us. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes the love we birth lives unrecognised. Sometimes it is misunderstood and brutalised. </span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #7a1002; font-family: papyrus; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sometimes in the end it is crucified, but always the angels are watching and the animals know, and sometimes the unknowable thing we are seeking to birth, is that which will become our saviour.</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Image and words by Lucy Pierce © 2019</span></div>
Lucy Piercehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03630342336186863161noreply@blogger.com0