Speaking the Sacred- Mother

Me, Tania Kavathas and Cameron Semmens at Speaking the Sacred - Mother
Photo- John Englezos

Last month the beautiful soul-weaver Tania Kavathas invited me to speak at the exquisite and intimate event Speaking The Sacred - Mother. There was a very deep sense of collective engagement and a rich opportunity for all present to speak and share what was stirred in them in the presence of this theme. Cameron Semmens offered us all a delightful sample of his poems and offered a very tender and enlightening exploration of the poetic form of the blessing. Here are some photo's of the event by the talented John Englezos. @johnephotography

Partaking in this event stirred a deeper exploration of this theme of Mother in my life, and I felt gifted by the insights that came through as I journeyed it's currents in preparation for this event. These are some new poems that came through.

Atoning the Mother

We pour the oil slicked deluge 

of our detritus down her throat, 

it seeps across her ancient, life-giving  terrain, 

the rivers of her holy water polluted with our debris, 

as we dredge her depths 

for more than we could ever have really needed.

We turn from the life-giving fountain of her love 

and suckle at the dry teat of consumerism.

We have been taught to blame her, 

to validate our wayward betrayal, 

or to numb us from the daily details 

of her rape and pillage, 

all the orphaned pain of our fear and demise 

coming to land in her precious body.

We are taught to fear her, 

to distract us from the true predator 

that feeds the feeble surrogacy 

of our acculturated dismemberment. 

She is scapegoated, 

just as the culture has taught me 

to blame my own mother 

for the mismatch of care, 

inflicted by a mis-attuned people, 

who disrupt the true nature of her blooming, 

with interventions of misogyny, 

an indoctrination of maladapted attachment, 

so that woman is not to be trusted 

just as Earth is not to be trusted, 

as though she were the one to construct 

the devastating infrastructure of dominance, 

with its imperative of mother-blame, 

when her abandonment and neglect 

means that she becomes the hand of not-enoughness, 

she the one who cannot give, 

with her instincts severed, her hands tied 

and the flow of her wild milk brutally dammed. 

We blame her, the one who has been brutalised, 

not the culture behind, 

who has brutally maimed her capacity to love, 

through millenia of colonising the feminine imperative. 

Deforesting her wild terrain, mining her resources, 

making a slave of her care-giving, 

so that she becomes the handmaid of patriarchy itself. 

The withheld love, 

the harrowing ancestral trauma of our own withholding, 

the polluted landscape, 

the depleted resource, 

the incapacitated flow of nurturance,

legacies of our mortally maimed 

and broken inheritance. 

Because we will never stop needing 

the love that She was born to give, 

and its absence is like an aching maw within, 

each and every one of us.

Can we remember how it is that we can trust her, 

the wild earth inside us, the great mother within?

Can we delve deeply down to the bedrock 

of our own depths to find the unpolluted seam 

of pure presence and exquisite attunement 

that is our birthright? 

Can we find again within us, 

and in the earth at our feet, 

the burgeoning wellspring of her ancient sustenance, 

ever flowing, fertile and powerful, 

birth/death mother, so intricately balanced, 

so achingly poised, so bountifully generous, 

so tenderly attuned, 

despite the desecration of our uninitiated mayhem 

upon the back and belly and breast of her sacred terrain?

Can we gather up the millennia of trauma, 

that is the belonging to a culture that seeks 

to dominate the ancient unseen She, 

that has raged war with fire and brimstone 

against a woman free to birth and to heal 

and to keen and to tend as she sees fit 

to the creative interface of existence? 

Can we bundle up, with the gentlest of care 

our ancient wounds, our harrowing shame, 

with at last a tenderness befitting the tragedy 

of our very own severance? 

Can we reach across and place the preciousness 

of our own pain to the pendulous breast of our true Mother, 

trace with our innocent fingers 

the scars of her stretched and ancient flesh, 

may we place our very own brokenness 

into the life-giving curve of her round and comforting arms, 

can we let her rip aside all that does not serve us, 

and may we let her lick the wounds of our becoming clean, 

allowing the weight of our despair 

to rest into the soft warmth of her belly? 

Do you hear the constant measure of her heart beat 

and how it reweaves the broken strands, 

as she floods our mouths with the cosmic star-milk 

of our own immutable belonging? 

Can you feel the medicines sprouting from her earthen pores, 

balm for the breaks and bruises of our enculturation casualty? 

Can you feel her great womb taking us all in again, 

making us her own again, 

newborn and ancient, 

sons and daughters once more,

of the mother?

Her Greatest Gift

I see now, in its excruciating magnificence, 

the full extent of her dual face,

the light and the dark of her,

what it truly is that she carries for us,

and that perhaps her greatest gift is not her love after all,

but her wounding to the love, 

so that we may come to know it from within our own selves.

and she carries this task as her greatest sacrifice,

that even though she gives us everything in her power,

to nurture and to nourish and to sustain,

even when she does this with little or no support from her culture,

even though every fibre of her being is honed to care,

it is written into the stars that she will also wound us, 

it will be her greatest gift and it is her cross to bare,

that there will be the time

when she cannot meet our tender needs 

in the particular way that is needed

in that particular moment

and the wound will slice,

and she may not even know that she has done it,

but there will be blood on the sword

that she weighs in her hand.

Because without this wound,

 we would stay child to this mother forever,

without her not enoughness

we would never leave

the temple of her grace.

It is her capacity to hurt us,

that will become the path of our own individuation,

it is the first seed of our impetus

to come to know the archetypal mother within our own beings,

rather than always seeking her from without, 

So that we may come to inhabit and embody 

our own great capacity to mother,

self and other,

and world and earth,

and child and creation and cosmos.

And because we have lost our mythic intelligence,

we take the wound so literally

and we might live our whole life

stuck in the blame we feel

towards our personal mother,

the betrayal of her love

becoming the excuse for our own not-enoughness.

But if we can dig in deeply

to unearth this gift

of her inadvertent severing of us 

from the primal unified field

in which we are immersed in, if we are lucky,

in the womb and then at her breast,

and inside her gaze and her unconditional regard,

When we can mature enough to pick up this wound as our greatest gift,

it opens a path for us

to come to know this primal unified field within our own beings.

This is the two faces of mother,

she is wired to nourish

and she is wired to wound,

And it is because she is actually woman, 

she is not god.

and she will do both of these things without thanks, 

the nurturing and the wounding,

and she will carry the weight of it to her grave

unless we come to pick up the gift

that is buried inside the wound.

The Earth needs us all to remember ourselves now as Mother,

this vast capacity to hold

apposing energies in a unified field,

to nourish and to nurture,

to exquisitely attune and selflessly care,

to fiercely protect,

to fiercely protect,

to fiercely protect.

Mother blame is a weapon of a dominator society,

that wants us all to remain insatiable children,

we cannot love the Earth until we make peace

with the personal mother who gave us everything she had

in a world that would not hold her giving in any sort of regard,

though her hands were bound by trauma, 

her breasts withheld from her own withheld love for self,

her empty cup, 

her power suppressed by her fear,

her fierce love gagged

by a disempowerment hammered in

for generations of desecration

to the feminine principle of life.

She still gave everything she had

to nourish and to nurture 

and the thing is,

it was never going to be enough,

and you were always meant to wake up

to the fact that the wounds she gave you were her greatest gifts,

because through them you will come to follow

the path to knowing the divine face

of the holy mother inside your own cells,

it is only through the excruciating pain of her absence

that we will come to know her as the God within us,

who reminds us what it is to birth and to hold,

the alchemical matter of our blood and our semen

and our sweat and our tears,

the sacred waters of our wombs manifesting life into being,

our bodily intelligence gestating in collaboration with the masculine,

bringing forth,

primally birthing and tenderly attending

the world into being

in every living moment,

each and every one of us.

We are all born with the primal imprint

of the maternal matrix

of the feminine face of god within us, 

waiting to wake up to ourselves,

as the custodians and caretakers

of ourselves and each other,

and of the earth

and Her cosmic interface.

And I know this because I have been the child loved

and I have been the child wounded.

And I know this because I have been the mother who loves,

and I have been the mother who wounds,

and I am so bone wearily tired

of living my life through the lens of the wound,

instead of seeing it through the lens of the gift.

The gift of the love and the gift of the wound

which is the homecoming to the heart of love 

and the belonging to the Mother 

who lives beyond and beneath and behind and within,

The gift which is the coming to know this mother inside of me,

to feel the magnitude of that love, and the pain of that sacrifice, 

the mother who wounds and gives life,

the mother who loves and gives life,

and that even as she lives inside of me 

she is also one of the faces of the multitudinous god,

into whom I was born.

Photos © John Englezos 2018

Text © Lucy Pierce  2018

Dancing at the Soul-Wound

May All The Gods and Goddesses Love Each Other Through You 

by Lucy Pierce

DANCING THE SOUL WOUND -PART 1

For a person, any person, to commit violent atrocities against another person, against other peoples, against the Earth, I believe they must be living inside an embodied experience of deep pain, maladaption, misattunement, disconnection from authentic relationship with self and other and Earth and Spirit. The psyche a tangle of trauma and pain and projection, housing unconscious beliefs about self/other and the world which are destructive and violent. 

All these things eventuate from a misattunement in our lived experience from birth, through childhood and adolescence, into adulthood, a generational passing on of maladapted survival strategy and

epigenetic trauma. We live in a culture that has desecrated the feminine experience of life and the principles of care and connection for millenia. In our culture we obtain our identities not through our capacity to attend and care and include, to heal and nurture, but through our capacity to exclude and exploit, compartmentalise and to hoard, to dominate and suppress. 

We have lost connection to the birthright of control over our own food production, healing practices, hand crafts, instincts. We spew forth into our environment a constant toxic deluge. Everyone who is successfully acculturated to our western world is deeply traumatised, and often implicitly we don’t even realise that we are. From birth through to death we are drugged, institutionalised, disempowered, disconnected, severed from truth, force fed fear and escapism, entertained with violence and pornogrified power-plays. We are living inside the belly of a monster. It is not outside of us, lurking in the shadows. We are inside of it.

We have lost our rituals and mother-tongues, our myths and our poetic understanding, we have lost our integrity and lore as a people, the roots of our culture are rotten to the core, we poison the water that gives us life, we desecrate the maternal imperative of a life-sustaining reverence, the paternal integrity of a life-protecting imperative. We barely even recognise that we are a part of an eco-system anymore. We are traumatised and wounded, surrogating materialism for real connection and belonging to self and other, to earth and nature, world and cosmos. 

The vast majority of us just struggling to survive, while the few feast on the cream of the world. So many families broken, so much violence and pain and misunderstanding between the inseparable dualities of existence. Mothers and Fathers are not supported to deeply attune and care for their offspring, many don’t know what this looks like because they didn’t receive it themselves, or haven’t truly known the truth of that care for generations, and the economic imperative is all-abiding. Birth and post-partum is medicalised and disembodied and fraught with trauma, and the mother-wound cuts deeper still. Rights of passage are sublimated or medicated or institutionalised. We surrender the education of our children to the state that enslaves us. We all dissociate with technology that robs us of our sovereignty and our true creative capacity, and of true relationship with existence. We are destroying the very environment and it’s glorious diversity, that makes our very existence possible. We are a people of tantruming, insatiable children. We are taught to suppress our pain, suppress our grief, our rage, our feeling, our true power. We are killing one another, we are killing ourselves, we are killing the Earth and our children are given guns to play with. We hand our sons and daughters over to a rape culture. We offer a constant stream of violent pornography and are shocked by rape. We are a people so very thoroughly colonised by dominance and brutality.

There is so little true leadership, that is willing to take us all into the violent soul-wound of our people, to dance at the sacred interface of our own annihilation and to see if there is any last gesture of beauty and belonging, of care and of love, that we can offer back to this precious life. There is so little sacred understanding of the magnitude of our severance from the sacred lore of life. For us to truly know the extent of who we are is to face the most astonishing abyss of grief and despair and I don’t know if we are capable at this stage, collectively, of mustering up that much courage, to truly see, the bitter root of our desecration. 

But when I wrap my arms around the tender body of my beautiful son, I pray that we are capable of it. When I hold my beautiful daughters in my arms I pray that enough of us can find our way beyond the collective trauma of our own wounding and violence and trauma and unrecognised pain, to find the bedrock of something vastly more true and life-giving in which to plant the seed of a future worth giving to them. One where we know our place in the great macrocosm of the universe, where we can know ourselves as agents of love and where we deeply recognise the innately peaceful and restorative and generative and respectful imperatives or possibilities of existence, one where the first footfalls of healing may reverberate through the psyches of our deeply broken kind.

DANCING THE SOUL-WOUND PART 2
If I am to broach the realms of gender I would say, from a place of great compassion for my brothers, that I am so deeply blessed to know myself as woman. For me this is to say that I exist in a place of great privilege. This privilege exists beyond that which I already carry, of class and race and education, and it exists from inside the disadvantage my culture would suggest my gender is. I feel my privilege because I was born with a living womb inside my very own body and so I innately understand, even though I have been deliberately and systematically separated from that understanding, the co-creative power of the cosmos. I know it because it lives here inside of my body and the biological processes that I embody through my life as a woman, are in and of themselves initiatory processes. And I could almost say, (could I?) that I feel this to be a true advantage, that I hold over my brothers. That something has been happening to me from within my own body since my menarche, that has dragged me, sometimes kicking and screaming into initiation. Even though I may be weaker physically, or more vulnerable in terms of my capacity to be physically dominated, I actually hold this immense power that has been gifted to me from being born into the body of woman, and with this power, this advantage, I feel the quickening of its responsibility to enable those who do not share this privilege. 

My biology is innately embedded in the primal matrix of unity and co-creation and it has awakened me deeper than my indoctrinated culture, initiated me more profoundly than the edicts of misogyny that dwell at the heart of my social conditioning. My blood-time, my capacity to gestate and grow life inside of me, my birth-rites, my star-milk, my moon-pause to come, have and will continue to awaken me to just how deeply loved and held I truly am within the matrix of a greater cosmic mother, an archetype of nurturance that transcends my personal wounding and restores my capacity to rise to meet life from a place of power and tenderness. Over time this has meant that my own primal wounds and brutal enculturation have slowly healed as the sacred forces of Mother have forced their way through the biological processes of my body, to awaken love within me. 

And I name this here because I wonder if there is this same biological initiation in the psyche of man, or does his initiation come through his tribe, a social awakening to his sacred imperative to become custodian and protector of the sacred womb of life, as it exists energetically inside his own body, though he stands outside and alongside the physical womb of woman, as it exists in the Mother Earth beneath his feet, who feeds him and nourishes his life, as it exists in the woman who gave him life, and as it exists in the women/men/others with whom he unites and collaborates with, in the co-creative, psycho-sexual interplay of Union, within the gendered duality of the inseparable space of divinity that swells within each of us, and also as it exists in the fruits of his offerings to life, perhaps in his sons and his daughters, and also in all the brave offerings he sends forth into the world to tend and repair the cohesive field of our co-created reality. 

What are his mechanisms for awakening and initiation in a culture that would have him stay a child/slave to its own economic imperatives? What do we do when the culture fails us, in this most primary of needs? 

If a man is severed from his connection to earth and his indigenous culture, to his myths, stories, songs and his mother tongue, if he lives in a culture that banishes his soul and suppresses his emotions; if his own soul is repetitively violated by brutality and violence and ugliness; if he has experienced betrayal or abandonment or violence or neglect at the hands of his mother, whose hands were tied by the invisible brutality of the culture behind her, she the scape-goat of patriarchy; if he is hurt then again and again in love, or isolated again and again by the absence of love from woman or from man; if those wounds are never tended to, if the balm and salve of healing is never brought, never tenderly administered, what does he do with that pain, but turn upon himself, turn upon the Earth, turn upon woman, turn upon the child, turn upon his fellow man, clinging desperately to the small trophies of belonging he is afforded.

I am not making excuses for this, nor do I have any illusion of having the answers. I understand that there is a long road ahead for us, to lead ourselves back into cohesion and respectful unity, and there is a dire need for accountability to be taken, and a collective naming and addressing of what it is that must stop, and stop now. But I wonder how it might be different if those of us who are women, fully came to own, as many of us are, the profound privilege of our biology and the innate connection to the macrocosmic womb of creation that this offers us. What if collectively, energetically we continued to shake off the oppression, rise through the fear, back into the true birth-right of our place in existence. 

It will be a complex dance we will need to weave, but I think at the heart of life, there is a way-showing that women can offer to the woundedness in man,  because often it is the first wounding that comes from the compromised hand of mother. Can we reflect the face of the healed/healing feminine back to that which is wounded in the soul of man, so that he may know it again within his own being? Just as all those beautiful and profound and life-giving expressions of the healed masculine remind us what that looks like, to know the power of that safety within. Giving so much gratitude for these expressions right now. 

We need to feel safe in order to do this, so the good men in our lives have brave work to do in helping us to feel so, and also the brave work of knowing his strength of love within ourselves as woman. But the safer we are, the more attuned to the sacred interface we can be, and the more attuned we can be, the more powerful we become in the truth of our beingness of love, and the more loving we can be, not in a sacrificial way, not mothering the child in man because that time has passed for him now and he must learn to be his own mother now, but just in our own profound embodiment of our own sacred relationship to life and to the creative field that lives inside our own beings, the more magic will come to dance in the spaces that are beseeching of healing in our very broken world. 

It is a reclaiming of that which has been robbed from us, the imperative to care and to tend where that is needed, to hand back responsibility and accountability where that is required, to be inclusive and to unify apposing forces, to hold a space open between the world, between the veils, a space for healing, to make peace and to nourish and to nurture, to repair and to restore.

I want to be steering the conversation towards the deep wound that sits at the heart of man and woman. No, the one that dwells deeper still. The great wound that exists in our own psyches, as we come to re-member, to know again the two faces of God that dwell inside of us. The Mother/Father that have been ripped asunder, the divine romance of existence severed. How do we love and heal the feminine within us, how do we withhold from Her, dissociate from Her, betray Her, brutalise Her, within our own beings? How do we love and heal the masculine within us, how do we withhold from Him, dissociate from Him, wound and betray Him, within our own beings?  I want to inquire as to how deeply we can attune to our own mother-wounds,  and the wounds imposed by our fathers, in their overbearance or their absence? Not to lay blame at their feet, but to come to know them as the one in a long line of disempowerment and trauma and maladaption. I want to conjure a great capacity to look to the dark places, the shadow realms within ourselves where the wounds fester and compound in their brutality, in the illusions of shame and separation that feed the hungry ghosts of our own domination and violence, to self, to other, to Earth.

Image and words by Lucy Pierce © 2018

The Resurrection

There is a way of belonging to myself

that beckons to me like an undeniable imperative.

It beseeches me from my dreams

and asks that even when I wake

I peel back the veil,

step through to the dream-weave,

so that my mind is transfigured,

unhinged a little from the world

no longer as capable of attending

to the hyper-rational imperative.

Instead her boundaries soften and fray,

stretching wildly into the cosmic terrain

and as I heed the call and stretch and dream,

soften and surrender,

I enter the sensorial theatre

of all the memories that have ever been lived,

but never really felt,

through all the incarnated lifetimes

through all the ancestral bloodlines,

never viscerally embraced,

or kinaesthetically integrated,

into the whole-hearted, 

womb-anchored consciousness of love.

As I loosen the imperatives of the mind 

to brutally ride the domesticated beast of my body, 

foaming at the mouth, 

pumping its resources high and dry

on adrenaline and stress and self-loathing,

so as not to feel in the cells of my holy embodiment, 

the millennia of pain and grief 

that has waited on the wings

for its time to step forth and be seen,

to have it’s moment,

to be known and received for what it is,

inside the body.

Lifetimes and generations of disembodied trauma, 

coming to land in the profound interface of the living body,

alive and awake to sensation,

becoming present to this living moment 

that is after all, all that we have.

I surrender to the visceral unravelment,

welcoming the annihilation of the false withholding 

from the truth of why we are here, 

to feel and to sense, to hold and to release, 

to love and to birth, to care and to endure 

the living death in order to awaken to this life.

As I walk this path ever more deeply 

into the body and into the dream,

I choose the pain, I open myself to the repugnant 

and the cold and the brittle and the sharp,

to the barren and the lifeless,

I know myself as the holocaust, 

as the predator, as the ghoul.

I wrap these ancient petrified bones

in succulent wave upon succulent wave

of fleshy, pink, wet love,

homing, beholding,

returning, restoring.

It hurts sometimes, 

as though my skin were raw and flayed,

exposed to the elements,

hideously maimed.

It’s excruciating at times

as though there were a live, exposed cable

resting inside my body

and when my mind’s eye scans

and chances to touch that place,

bolts of charge, surges of volatility 

course through my cells, repelling consciousness,

the shock that seeks to dismember me, 

exile me yet from the nest of my body.

She is violent sometimes,

ripping herself to shreds on the inside

with razor claw and searing tooth,

the visceral annihilation of all the stories left unfelt across time,

waking up inside me.

This my crucifixion,

this the thorn and the nail,

this the Adoni, Adoni.

To feel the stories inside the flesh,

that my ancestors put down,

rose above, suppressed, imprisoned,

that my soul has died for again and again, 

that I have chosen the relief of disembodiment from for millennia,

so that the longing to excarnate has been so intoxicating,

it’s impulse reaching to kiss the lips of death, 

hungering to be released from the overwhelm of the embodied feelings 

of all that has not yet been integrated home to the now,

restored to belonging, 

nurtured back to the heart of love.

I take them inside me now,

I let the claw tear and the tooth rip through my flesh,

I bring my awareness back

again and again to the live shock

of amplified volatility within,

and I bare witness, I allow my love to bare witness.

I cradle my traumatised DNA to the breast

as I would a new-born babe, 

suckling her deep to the bone, 

restoring life to the withered unworthiness 

of my inherited pain.

I pour the healing waters over the vilified flesh,

I anoint the wounds,

I attend to the exposed fascia of my untended experience.

So that at last and after all,

I can belong in the home of my skin,

finally to incarnate into the exquisite birthright 

of my sensorial sovereignty,

so that the shimmering quiver,

the exquisite tremor,

the burgeoning wellspring,

the pregnant bliss,

the enveloping ocean of love’s enthronement,

the ecstatic gestation of the compassionate deluge,

the cosmic intelligence of the one-song of creation 

may also enter

the temporal inhabitation of my body-being, 

enfolding me in healing tendrils,

shining inside me with the one-fire of existence,

inundated with the holy elixir

of our sacred inheritance as the hologram of God, 

of Source, of Creator, of Spirit,

our profound belonging to the truth of love 

and the power of healing within us.

This the resurrection,

this the resurrection

of love upon the Earth. 

Text © Lucy Pierce 2018

The Primordial Bones of my Belonging

I wrestle and churn, 

hungering for the primordial and the unmediated, 

hankering for the meaning-made-manifest 

through relationship to land and plant, 

animal and bird, elemental primacy, 

enmeshed belonging to the maternal matrix of Gaia, 

to embedded cosmic ecology, 

to tribe and custom and craft and way, 

the free flowing conduit between body and earth 

unsevered and pure, 

the great ear of my heart bent close 

to the cascading current of co-creative arising, 

weaving the vibrational threads of existence into harmony 

through the undulations of my vocal chords 

and the pulsation of my muscles, 

the ululating of my sinews, 

the earthquakes of my pleasure, 

as they are moved by the great dance 

of love’s living moment in cell and bone, 

flesh and organ, 

dancing, toning, undulating, 

partnering in a unified improvisation 

with the primordial web of creation, 

honing myself to source, stilling my mind 

so that the plants and the earth 

and the menagerie of living beings and the planets 

may speak to me of the wisdom they carry 

and of the hungering at the heart of Earth to be received by us, 

to be reciprocated with co-mingling communion,

receiving the magnificent bounty of wealth 

that lies at our feet in every moment, 

the vast and glorious treasures of fresh air and clean water, 

of fertile earth and life-giving fire. 

Even on this stolen land, my womb knows she is indigenous, 

that I belong here, on this Earth body, 

that Her breast is generous enough to offer me 

and my broken heart succour, 

to awaken me, enliven me, 

compost my separation into fecund belonging. 

May the rigid grids and sticky membranes 

of dominator culture decay, 

may the fear of persecution fall away, 

may the separation of my shame dissolve, 

may the illusion of my imprisoned inferiority erode, 

that I may be homed to the unified consciousness of Gaia, 

to the great cosmic web of creation. 

For so long I have been held captive in a colonised mind, 

from the cages of this linear perception, 

the wisdom ways of my people buried and lost so far back, 

in another land, a far distant time, 

I am orphaned from my ancestral power. 

I have not been taught the language of the ways and medicines, 

the stories and dreams and songs and dances of this country 

upon which my body abides. 

I have lost the songs and the stories 

and the language and the lore 

that held me in the tapestry of my own ancestral cohesion. 

And yet in the great cyclic dream-weave 

my soul knows beyond a shadow of a doubt, 

She remembers, that my body belongs to a cosmic weave 

of love more vast and magnificent 

than any shallow trinket promised by my culture, 

than any trauma my personhood can endure. 

I was there at the beginning of all of this 

and I will be there at the end, 

so much bigger and more exquisite than I could ever imagine, 

unified and vast, eternally nourishing, eternally receiving. 

Was I born here, on this Earth at this time, 

misplaced and cast adrift in a culture 

of brutal rape and devouring avarice, 

of plastic and hunger, colonised and dismembered, 

to endlessly drown in the wave upon wave 

of my own lostness and despair? 

Or can I weave my way home to belonging and to cohesion, 

to song and to story, to dance and to vibrational integrity? 

Can I leave the words of separation 

and division and brutal ownership 

that are a part of my cultural inheritance, out of my mouth? 

May they cease to move my tongue? 

May I create new words that bind and attune, 

that embrace and send out roots and shoots 

to mend and to heal, to connect and to re-member? 

Can I allow myself to be re-membered? 

Can I surrender the need to be seen as something seperate and special, 

to know myself as something vastly insignificant and deeply connected? 

Can I recall how to be in relationship 

with the microbiome of soil and the cadence of soul? 

Can I allow myself to be moved by the tide and rustled by the breeze, 

my boundaries thrown wide open to let the sunlight in and the mosquito, 

the owl and the star, the pulse and the spark? 

Can I be born again, wild and instinctual, primal and alive, 

tender and pure, listening and receptive, courageous and co-creative, 

to this Earth that is my home, 

this body that is my nest 

and my deepest rest, 

to this womb that carries the universe within it, 

to this heart that is born to sing in gratitude 

for the rain of blessings life bestows, 

to this mind that has been undone and remade 

across the vast stretches of time, 

that whilst holding a leaden understanding 

of the atrocities of humanity, 

also holds within it the hologram of my own divinity 

and the birth right of my ancient belonging 

in the ever-present ecstasy of the now.

Text © Lucy Pierce 2018