Closing the Gap

Closing the gap,

between love and fear,

between exile and belonging,

between mind and earth,

between pain and care.

So that we are all wet and sleek as newborns,

brushed with the dust of earth,

gathered into arms of kindness,

coming home,

return

return,

return.

Closing the gap

between shame and unified nurturance,

between trauma and embodied integration,

between blame and rightful atonement.

So that body and skin, 

feeling and thought,

inner and outer,

become lovers,

pressed tight in reconciliation,

so that psyche returns to the birthright of earth,

to the embrace of kindness and kin,

returns to primal unity,

to sovereign power,

returns,

returns, 

returns.

Closing the gap

between thought and action,

between bigotry and restitution,

between prejudice and restoration,

between abuse and safety,

between isolation and inclusivity,

between manipulation and regeneration.

So that only love remains,

fierce and brave,

in all Her wild faces.

And deep listening also 

at the interface of self and other and the inbetween,

eternal homecoming,

genesis,

return,

return.

Closing the gap 

between the spite of domination and benevolent sovereignty,

between history and the healing presence to love’s living moment,

between agony and nourishment,

between the orphaned and the inclusive hearth.

Closing the gap 

between belief and action,

between injustice and attuned advocacy,

between the injury of betrayal and fiercely accountable acknowledgment,

Closing the gap so that we all become kin 

at the feasting place of creation.

To each partake of the pristine succour

of our empowered existence

inside an ecologically embedded macrocosm of grace.

No longer split and splintered

and brutal and cruel,

but returned,

returned,

returned.

Closing the gap

between the unfathomable grief and an embodied shore,

between violent rage and rightful justice,

between dissociated terror and deeply courageous feeling,

between brutal incarceration and regenerative healing,

between shackled suppression and exuberant expression,

between need and privilege,

between brutal travesty and artful remedy.

So that body and skin and world and self 

and human and land and cosmos 

and animal and plant and microbiom 

and fire and water and earth and air 

and spirit

sit together at the one fire,

in reciprocal alignment,

coexistent in a unified field of belonging

and love,

tender and fierce,

in all Her wild faces, 

returned.

Closing the gap

between dream and lived immersion,

between prayer and reality,

between hope and accountable becoming.

So that the wound that will not heal,

the shame scar as deep as Hades,

will always be given wing and balm,

the smoke of prayers,

the touch of care,

and succour and vision,

and a friendly hand to hold in the dark times.

So that we may each walk at peace 

with our very own deaths,

life-giving,

so that we are made rich again

and whole and kind and brave.

Closing the gap within.

Closing the gap without.

Return.

Return.

Return,

to love 

in all Her fierce 

and wild

and tender 

faces.

Image "Placenta Bowl" and words © Lucy Pierce 2020

A Brutal Lens

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.

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.

Most of us in this culture are slogging away in blind obedience, unless of course we are one of  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.

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. 

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 congratulations of a social media post. 

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.

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. Instead, 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.

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.

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.

Image and text © Lucy Pierce 2020

Sovereign and Sacred

It feels so feeble to say that black lives matter.

I want to be able to say black lives are cherished and revered,

black lives are sovereign and sacred,

black lives are a blessing of beauty and power and grace, 

stardust, bedrock, 

blood of our mother.

I want to learn how to bend down low,

until I have learned all the ways 

my privilege betrays 

and brutalises the lores of life, 

the bodies of brethren, 

the soul of our origins, 

the memory of my first ancestors. 

Learn, so that together we may discover 

how to birth the new earth, 

from the old stories,

where we may truly walk 

side by side,

all skins, 

all colours,

sons and daughters 

of the earth.

Incredible image by Bobbi Lockyer

You can view her work here.

Words © Lucy Pierce 2020

Fertile Ground

FERTILE GROUND                                                                                                       

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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? 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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?

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?

How  can I allow those deep underwater currents of my creativity to flush

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?

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?

© Lucy Pierce 2020

Reflections On a Shared Birthday in Lockdown

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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....?” 

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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. 

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. 

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?

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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? 

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.

© Lucy Pierce 2020