Hungering for Sovereign Ways

The blood of my womb has been poured as an offering upon the earth of this country for decades of moon cycles. The birthing blood of three children has been given back to this land that I love, the placentas of my babies buried in the soil of Her body, this land that has held me in its boughs as a wee one, that has fed me with Her love all the days of my living life and before as I walked upon the Earth as an egg in the womb of my mother's body inside my Grandmother's womb. The coming of the people with whom I share skin to this land was a brutal violation, a violent desecration, a travesty of sorrow and cold blooded cruelty, theft, rape, torture, slavery, murder, massacre. There are no words for what was done, and continues to be done in the name of this imperative of domination and impotence, no words for what has been taken and damaged, for what that means for the First Nations people and for the dreaming of this land, what it means for the granddaughters and grandsons of those whose hands the atrocities moved through.

For generations my people have dwelt here, and yet I hear the excruciating heart call, the hireath for my homelands that call to me, and that grieve for those that left and were lost in that tide of colony. For my people had already lost so much before they came to these shores, already they had been broken, their own roots torn from their old ways, their belonging severed with violence and persecution, torture and desecration of woman  from her land, from her wisdom ways, from her herblore and her dreaming, from her ancient ways of being. Stolen was the language and the stories and the ways of belonging. The ancestors of my lineage hung in metal cages from castle walls for long cold years on end in the harsh seasons of Scotland, as punishment for their gender and their belonging to a line that crowned the kings of that land. My people were burnt at the stake for their knowing of the old ways and many learnt to betray in order that their blood line may survive, perhaps with a prayer that what was true was written in the blood and could perhaps be read again, reached back to, through the trauma of our loss, through the indecipherable language of our adaptation to brutality. 

Perhaps what it is that my heart hungers for so acutely was lost long before my people left to come here, but my heart still calls to that other land, where the bones of the ones who belonged sing to me of remembrance and hungering for the time before the madness, when it was not a crime to belong to your country, to belong to the Earth. Perhaps the time has come for us each to sink our roots through the agony of ages, the bedrock of shame and desecration, through the hunger and the exile, to find a way to belong again to the song of the Earth that keens beneath our feet, to remember how she fed us before we covered our souls with protection and normalised her rape and degradation, before we delineated ourselves from each other so divisively, as we had been raped and degraded and divided for so long. We have long forgotten what it was to live in pure integrity with our homeland. The pain stretches back so far, so many brutalized bones in the earth, so much haunted ash. But the bones and the blood of those who knew of another way, a more fierce and gentle way of belonging to the land sing still beneath them, back through the ages, across the great wheel of time. Perhaps we just need to listen more deeply, beyond our own trauma, through the layers of history, to Herstory and Her vast invitation to come home, wherever we have landed on Her beautiful body, to come home to Her.

My womb is full of blood and hunger for sovereign ways, it is full of stories of my bloodline and the times before the dislocation and the severance. I say a prayer for all people to find their ways home, as I pour my blood, red upon the Earth, that is my home now, a displaced woman hankering for belonging on a stolen land. I have carried such shame for what has been done to an intact culture by the brutalizing force of my race, upon the indigenous people of this country. But I am trying to put that shame down now, because I know that I belong with all my heart and soul to the people who came before, that sang and danced upon the land, that fed her with their life blood and wove her a cloak of beauty with the fibres of the soul. I belong to the Earth beneath my feet. My soul remembers what it meant to belong to country. My soul remembers how much it hurt to have it taken away, the ripping severance. Maybe I remember also, that our Mother never left us and that she breaths and dreams and awakens with us all yet, in the stirrings of our blood, in the pulsing of the heartbeat, Hers and ours entwining. Maybe all the roots of all the races entwine in Her heart, touching one another through Her radiant core. Maybe that is the only way home now, through her molten heart, for all our stories to melt together in the fire of Her love, greater than any part, we are all children of the Earth.
My heart is open, to learn and to grow, to give and to receive, to dismantle and to become, at the threshold of our evolutionary interface, as humans upon the Earth.

Photo courtesy of Angela Rivas of Lunasol Photography for the book From This Place.
Text © Lucy Pierce 2017

An Animal of Earth

An Animal of Earth

There is a space, a gap,

a chasm, a schism, 

a rift between my body 

and my eyes that perceive it. 

Like a cleft membrane, 

as though there were a mismatch 

between the form

that my acculturated eyes 

can narrowly receive,

and the actual rugged peripheries 

and contours of my real life body.

And in the space between 

a great grief dwells, 

unmet and in search of asylum. 

This space is filled with the wasteland 

that says I could never be enough,

that I always was 

and ever will be, too big,

too soft, too textured,

not quite right, 

not deservedly worthy.

When I look with these eyes,

they see through the lens 

of this judgement,

this critical imposition,

punitive imperative,

through the lens of this brittle world,

and it leaves the animal of my body

in perpetual isolation,

forever unseen 

for all the beauty she expresses,

all the generosity she exudes. 

There is a chasm of unlovedness,

between the body and the eye,

and I see now it has always been 

the eye that does not belong,

the eye that imposes the exile

on the perfectly imperfect body,

that has only ever wanted love,

only ever wanted to belong to itself,

nothing more,

just to belong to its own self.

But every time the eyes look,

they shame and demean,

all they ever see

is the not-good-enoughness.

I feel a whisper now,

a longing to integrate 

the space between 

the eye and the body,

I want to fill that space with silence,

and in the stillness,

I want to fill it with the presence of love.

I want to bridge that gulf, 

with a gentle acceptance, 

a homely comfort,

a tender generosity of heart.

I want to retrieve my gaze from the world

and bring it home to my body, 

home to the animal of Earth.

I want my eyes to belong to my soul,

like a baby belongs to its mother,

fiercely protected

by eyes that see only with love 

and the great responsibility 

of being a shelter 

from the harshness 

of the world.

My beautiful body has been torn to shreds 

with the sharp edge of every mirror,

or happened upon reflection. 

My eyes inflicting cruelty

with razor sharp dexterity,

amputating myself from belonging.

With every gaze, a violence done.

I want my eyes and my body 

to curl up together,

to wrap themselves up tight,

like my dog, 

when she curls 

around herself to sleep.

I want them to be together, gently,

for all the time that it might take 

for the world inside them to die,

for the space between them

to still and to close,

to mend and to heal,

for friendship to forge,

so that finally they can belong again

together in the one skin,

singing the one song 

that says,

you are enough,

and you are home,

and to know 

what a riotous blessing it is

to be home in a body. 

To be home on the earth,

in love. 

Word and Image © Lucy Pierce 2017

Eve

Eve

For decades and millennia,

she had been a woman uprooted, 

but now was one whose potent shoots

were again sinking deep into the fertile soil.

And so the woman scorned, 
turned to He 

in whose name she had been shamed,

and said “No, enough, I am done.

You will not do harm unto my sovereignty any longer.

I have done no wrong here and there is no part of me 

that deserves your punishment. 

My body is a temple, it is sacred.”

And the God within Eve,

which knew itself through her holy embodiment,

said unto the God who spoke in punitive tones from on high,

“You cannot cast me out, 

because I cannot leave the sanctuary of my own beingness,

it is the gate through which I walk. 

I claim my own authority as a direct interface 

with the threshold of divinity.

I cannot be exiled because I am a part of everything, 

I cannot be made separate 
because I am whole unto myself and all of love. 

You cannot banish me from the garden

because I am a living expression of that garden.

She blooms more verdantly within me 

with each passing of the moon. 

I reclaim the snake, 

for she is my great ally.

She is the ladder that links the polarities of divinity, 

the conduit of union between the earth and cosmos, 

she taught me that life is sweet and juicy 

and ripe for the plucking, 

that there is a path to awakening that is found 

by entering into the body, 

taking the fruit of life inside, 

through inclusion, nourishment, 
harvest, bounty, 

the sacrament of endarkenment, 

to balance the mystery of our enlightenment. 

You will no longer set me apart from man, 

he is my equal and my friend, 

I carry his qualities within me 

as he carries mine within him, 

and we stand side by side in this life.

I renounce the grief that has wracked me for millennia,

the illusion of our separateness.

I give you back the lie that he would have dominion over me, 

for in doing so he does harm unto all of life.

The energy dwells within me as my purity of purpose,

and walks beside me as my friend and ally, 

together from here we are facing forwards,
and there is no longer room for all the harm done,
each to each in the woundedness of our exile,
we renounce the pain and seek only love in the spaces between.

No longer will he be my misguided direction, 

nor my heroic salvation,

for I am already home and whole.

No longer will I make of him the grand distraction 

from the immutable knowing of my own righteous wilderness.”

And to Lilith, her ancient rival in uprootedness, she said,

“Come back, my sister, come in,

come dwell here with us, 

there is room for the many faces of woman. 

Your power does not threaten me, 

the world is made more bright by our difference. 

Let us tend the diversity of this garden together, 

we cannot be turned out, 

for it is our birthright 

and it flowers in our hearts. 

We will raise the food to nourish the whole, 

we will plant the seeds that will create the magnificence 

of our own reflections, 

our resonant vibrations a testament to the unshakable offering 

of our own communion with the interface of creation, 

each of us a face of the Source of life, 

no one less than another, 

each sovereign and powerful in their capacity 

to know themselves as the unshakable presence of Love.

So deeply embedded in my own becoming, 

I understand that no sister was ever my rival, 

only my teacher, 

and another woman's power is never a threat, 

but rather serves to embolden the clarity of my inner-sense 

to know myself as whole. 

Here we shall dwell together with all our daughters 

and tend the garden side by side.”

And to those daughters she said, 

“Don't believe the lies that anyone can take anything away from you. 

You are so fiercely protected by the interface 

of your own embodiment in the heart of love.

Enter into the wilderness of your own chaos 

and come to know yourself.

Feel the starry crown descend upon your brow 

as you sink your mud encrusted feet 

into the cells of your own earthly becoming, 

deep roots into the power of your love 

that no one can rob from you.”

And to any who would know woman 
as a lesser thing , she said, 

“The pain of my womb as it brings forth life unto itself,

is my greatest blessing, 

through it I am birthed anew, 

through the eye of the needle 

into the kingdom of heaven 

which dwells within me, 

and between the union that seeded the life that blooms, 

and between the babe who suckles unashamed at my breast. 

Your curse has become the most transmutable of gifts.

It has become the portal through which I enter 

into exquisite intimacy with the dark edge that gives me power, 

the shadowed veils of this embodied life 

which have gifted me temerity and endurance.

Through my pain the future is born quivering from my thighs,

and this power to face and know myself through the darkest of hours

has brought me home again to the garden of my birth rite,

has become the primal gateway through which I enter again 

the powerful perfection of my imperfect embodiment.

Your punitive imperative no longer holds sway here,

in the wake of my immaculate conception, 

gestation and birthing of sovereignty.

Spirit speaks to me through the fecund folds of my flesh,

the succulent creation of new tissue,

the fertile flow of my blood,

the bitter tears of my shedding,

the glistening filaments of my dreaming soul,

connected imperceptibly to the tomes of cosmic lore.

For I am the earth from which the garden blooms

and She, my mother, carries me on Her back in every living moment.

She will not have me forget who it is that I am,

how deeply I belong in the matrix of Her love.

I have come home to the garden,

and it is in need of my tending,

for the eons have swelled in the wake of my forgetting, 

upon the false tides of the myth that I am separate.

And now the story of my excile 

has become so old that it is dying.

And in its place a new one is being born, 

woven from the threads 

of our immutable belonging.”

Image and Text © Lucy Pierce 2017