Soulskin Musings

Liminal Entreaties

2023-12-10T20:58:00.018+11:00

Liminal entreaties

to knowings

and understandings

that blaze in their absence,

ungraspable,

they gawp in their vacuumed void,

swimming just out

of the colonised mind's eye,

the twinkle of luminescent waters

when the moon is dark.

The capacity for embedded thinking

thwarted by generations

of necessitated blindnesses.

So fragile a willingness

to be with the unknown

to believe the unfathomable.

So easily overwhelmed by the petrifying belief

in my own annihilating seperateness,

the insidious hegemony of insignificance,

the frozen landscapes of self inflicted

and culturally commodified shame.

So rigid and unyielding the scaffolding

of my flimsy mind.

Can it surrender the banal violence

the flaccid madness

of it's own perceived innocence?

And yet I turn toward

the uncomfortable unrest

of the alchemising body

and it's deep feeling sense,

it's generous availability to metabolise

the indoctrinated traumas

of bloodline,

the weaponised conquest

of the wildlands of interiority,

the brutalising purification,

the violent homogenisation,

the agreigeous deforestation,

the disinfected sterility

of modernity consciousness.

It is too easy to feel nothing

of our organic inheritance,

our mytho-poetic dowry,

so easy to numb our exquisite burden

to become.

How do I court the new and ancient bacterium

of infectious connectivity,

the creeping mycelium

of informational pollutants,

linking past knowings to present delirium,

broken trust to healed fecundity,

barren ground to storied canopy.

Like a spider weaving a web

across millennia and continent,

across oceanic current and feathered flyways

and groaning land masses

of rootedness and migration,

across extinguished languages

and sacred undying flames

of rhythm and pulse,

remembering.

Like the tendriled strands

on the grandmother's loom,

on the grandfather's lute,

braiding starlight and lichen,

birdsong and bone

and the brail of ancestral bequeath.

And I trust the bodies edge

of comfort and pain,

emptying and filling

and emptying again.

I trust it more than the numb coldness

of complicit acquiescence.

And knowing that I inhabit a body

that is so shrouded and cushioned

by layers and layers of protection,

in all it's enabled whiteness,

knowing I dwell not at the frontline,

I push past what feels safe,

and all the world that ever was is here

and I let myself burn inside,

break and flood and unfurl inside,

bloom and unravel and dissolve inside,

occuping the liminal edge

of the putrid pain,

the hollow guilt,

the ragged shame,

the corrosive rage,

the harrowing grief,

the raucous desire,

asking to be beheld,

embodied,

emblazoned

with our long forgotten love,

with our once remembered unison

so that a new world may seed

in the nourished ground

of our abandoned obedience to shiny surfaces,

to relinquish the vacuous polishing

of hollow identity.

May my body become the alter

through which life prays.

My soul the passage of birth,

the cave, portal, cairn, burial mound

through which peace is born.

How much innocent life must die,

before my mind collapses,

and my body,

now soft and horizontal as soil

is seeded and pollinated anew,

with wild ancient

and tender fertile

prayers of unending dream

of remedy

and solace.

Vast Multiplicity

2023-12-02T20:54:00.006+11:00

If, for most of my days

alive upon this earth

I had been swallowed

by an impotent collapse,

how would I rise

into generative purpose

without abusing the animal softness

of my body.

How do I also hold to the wisdom

of that collapse

that was something about gentleness

and a longing for truth.

How do I slow,

in the face of a harrowing regime

of mindless obeyance to busyness,

to learn to listen to the whispered wisdoms

that sing inside

the endless temple of soma?

How do I learn to listen?

If I have been taught to override,

with mind and vacant distraction,

how do I learn to slow and revere

the voices that howl and moan,

that ululate and keen

in the holy resonance chamber,

the unruly menagerie

of my own interiority?

To drop to my knees and scry

the star studded waters

for hidden pleasure,

treasured devotion,

ancient hungering.

If I have been raised to suppress,

to colonise and civilise

the wild gestures,

the harrowing dance

the tender beseeching

of my instinct,

how do I flower the great inner ear

of my embracing becoming?

To seek and to coax

and to patiently unfurl

the tightly curled impulse

of my wholeness?

How do I make peace

with the driven tyrants

that drive me forward

in mechanised defence?

Driving me beyond my innate need

for care and regeneration,

for tenderness and communion,

gestation and grief.

How do I dismantle the harrowing dictatorships

that preside over my own body being?

How do I give equal weight

to each of the subjugated voices

that call in the dark chasm

of my unconscious sub-terrain

so that when I speak

my voice is a generous multitude

of possibilities?

That when I look I am seeing

from the eye of both the bird and the worm,

the blazing sun and also

the dark eye at the centre of the heavy earth,

from the driven imperative

and the still reflection,

from the silent

and the beseeching both?

A receptive listening,

an enduring council

to the biodiversity of body speak,

to the ecology of wisdoms,

that swirl and erupt

in the deep mystery

of my own vast multiplicity.

Unfathomable Care

2023-11-27T20:48:00.001+11:00

Fierce protection, unfathomable care and unequivocal tenderness

for all the precious children of our world.

May we Centre the needs of the children,

all our children.

May we enable the capacity for care to all the mothers and fathers,

who raise the world in peace.

Fierce protection, unfathomable care and unequivocal tenderness,

for all the bereaved and endangered,

the wounded and grieving of the world.

Fierce protection, unfathomable care and unequivocal tenderness,

for all those on this precious earth

who have been subjugated, oppressed, displaced, brutalised,

decimated by forces of violence and domination.

We must stop harming and killing the children and the earth of their future.

Now.

Let us begin to forge a way forward,

where there may be

fierce protection, unfathomable care and unequivocal tenderness

for all the precious children

of our world.

Reflections On Clay and the Craft, from Artisans Week 2023

2023-11-12T10:10:00.045+11:00

RELECTIONS ON CLAY AND THE CRAFT FROM ARTISANS WEEK 2023

Working with clay has been for me a making and a shaping, a breaking and a recreating of my mindbody being across the span of a lifetime. I dare to imagine that if I have been made into a vessel of usefulness, it is only through this lived relationship with the material across time. Somehow drawn, as a child, as a young person to it’s dark, dense matter, it’s grounding solidity and forgiving receptivity, adaptability. I unconsciously gravitated towards it’s density, myself so ephemeral, tentative unformed, I somehow became more solid and real with the animacy of this malleable matter in my hands. I somehow was allowed an agency to impact and imprint the receptive substance, to mark make and autonomously shape and wilfully engage with creation in a way that my timidity inhibited in my other experiences of engagement with life, with others, with the world.

Somehow it felt safe, in a way I otherwise didn’t, to matter in this powerful way to the clay, to be in dynamic relationship with a force of reciprocity. It was safe that my agency and will, my gesture and attention could matter to the clay in a way I couldn’t allow in my human relationships. I could let the matter be changed by me, and then somehow sense myself as someone, as something that mattered. With the clay I was afforded the opportunity to practice over and over again what it meant to be a human being.

Making with clay can be a heart altering evolution as the plasticity, elasticity, maliability, receptivity of the material, alchemises into something much less forgiving. As the moisture departs from the material we are left with an exquisite brittleness, so easily ruptured, cracked, shattered. Again and again we face the loss of our notions of control over outcome, of our attachment to perfection, again and again we must meet this capacity to hand over to chance and the sometimes necessity of letting go.

We experience the tender gift of loss and the transmutations of grief so repetitively if we continue to work with clay for any amount of time, with so many opportunities to surrender what we thought mattered, to forgo our attachment to perfection, to the reflection of wholeness, that we must learn a deep abiding attention, our hands becoming sacred vessels for both the capacity for life-tending and also death-wielding. We begin to titrate, to practice meeting, with each blessed mistake, each careless gesture that lands with loss of cohesion, the full spectrum of our own effectiveness, the weight of our own ability to impact creation, to tend and to harm, to birth and to cull, to bloom and to prune our experience. We practice death and loss again and again, building the elasticity, the plasticity, the malleability of the hearts capacity to feel.

From dense, dark, wet, heavy matter, through fragile, dry, brittle precariousness we must now meet the fire, an alchemical agent of otherness that we must hand over our precious creations to. Again we risk loss, but also the perilous joy of surrendering our carefully tended creations over to a force far greater than our own intentions. Again we must meet the tragic surprise, as well as the happy one, as what we have moulded with the willingness of our hands is made other, by the harnessing of powerful forces.

It took a long time for me to find the capacity to meet the fire in this way, to let my relationship to the soft body of me be changed by that much power, to become brave enough to risk disintegration and loss, and in so doing come to know myself as an agent of, a servant to, greater forces of change and transmutation, forces that hold the capacity again to destroy, but also the agency to transform the dissolvable material into something strong and durable, something of purpose and usefulness. The unstable porosity gains a structural integrity and a useful impermeability when it meets with the fire, a gift for containing and protecting precious content, blessed bounty, the creation of receptive space with the capacity to hold. The vessel becomes a carrier of usefulness to community when it has met with the life altering ferocities of fire and survived whole and intact.

As makers we become changed by this embodied knowing, that it is only in meeting and engaging with these alchemising forces, which hold ultimate power over life, that we are forged into something useful and worthy of purpose. It solidifies a formidable trust and a holy surrender. It fosters a glimpse, an insight into how the forces that are greater than ourselves shape us across time, that we are made other by the furnaces of life and our engagement with the archetypal powers. That it is only in the risking of love and loss, that we become a vessel useful to the world.

Clay has taught me to risk mattering, to learn what it means to care, to lose, to transmute loss into a deeper purpose. It has taught me. It has humbled me to know I am at the mercy of formidably agential and alchemical forces, and that I must risk dancing with them, at the risk of being burnt in order to become more than I had ever imagined I could be, transmuted by otherness, enriched and incarnated by reciprocal relationship with earth, with air, water and fire. Clay has taught me to risk mattering, to learn what it means to care, to lose, to transmute loss into a deeper purpose. It has taught me. It has humbled me to know I am at the mercy of formidably agential and alchemical forces, and that I must risk dancing with them, at the risk of being burnt in order to become more than I had ever imagined I could be, transmuted by otherness, enriched and incarnated by reciprocal relationship with earth, with air, water and fire.

Bone Crunching Grief

2023-11-12T10:09:00.000+11:00

About a month ago I had a dream that I had lost my child. It was conveyed to me that he had died, but I felt nothing, it was as though I was split off from what that meant and it was just words. Then all of a sudden, the full knowing of what had happened, of what I had lost landed in my body, slammed into my being like a freight train, shook my very bones. In the dream I sunk to my knees and wailed, “He has gone, he has left us, he is gone!” In the dream my hands slammed into the rocky earth until they bled. I woke choked and terrorised, tears on my face, my heart pounding, my throat clenched with grief, to lie stunned and terrified in the thin dawn light, slowly finding my way back to breath and the knowing that my son was safe in his bed.

In the days since this dream, since the troubles in Israel and Gaza began, I have been swept into a maelstrom of busyness, my days mightily consumed by the fulsome work of my life, raising children, trying to do my own small part in an aggrieved and conspicuously wounding world, trying always to keep my head above water in a culture of safety and privilege, that is never the less shrouded in the brutally patriarchal and capitalistic culture that has colonised humanity.

And then there it is, the bone-crunching, gut-wrenching knowing of what it is to lose a child, one beloved child, even if only in a dream. How many mothers are left childless now, in those lands so far from my own? How many motherless, fatherless, on this beautiful planet that we seem not to know how to treasure and share. How many aggrieved bodies are being wracked right now by those bone crunching sobs of loss and horror at the stolen life, the treasured gifts of heart and soul and spirit, of blood and bone and care, unfathomable care, desecrated by the blindness of violence and war.

Mother, grant me the grace to be big enough, alive enough, to grieve these children, all of these children as I would grieve my own. Help me to embody the knowledge that all the children are sacred, they are each a cherished arising, a holy unfurling from the umbilicus of our shared world, of our beautiful earth. They are each and every one, the sacred body that Earth bestows unto herself, that she may know herself as the love that she is, the unfathomably tender love that she is. How far we have come from that love. May I know in my bones how precious each life is, how unfathomable each loss. May we stop killing our children, may we cherish the lives of all of our children, may we find another way forward.

Image: After the Fire 2010

HearthFire- An Imbolc Offering

2023-08-01T09:07:00.004+10:00

An Antidote to Shame

2023-04-17T09:46:00.005+10:00

This is a love poem to a way of witnessing that is an antidote to shame.

You come like a quenching rain

on ground so dry its brittleness is a harsh bark,

a ragged ache,

an ugly wrenching.

You come from beyond time,

from the place before the pain gripped

and cut across the expanse of life,

as though it were there right from the very beginning,

crippling,

all there ever was.

You come like generosity at last,

like tenderness and permission

and a leaning in,

towards what is small

and screaming inside.

You come like a thousand arms hugging

the split off atrocities

I house in my bones and in my blood.

They all sing now in the warmth of this regard,

their unsung songs of forgotten power

and formidable beauty.

I tremble and quake in the strength of them

stretching inside of me.

The fullness of me,

awkward and teetering on the edge

of a deeper wholeness

than I had known was possible before.

What will I do now, with all this budding grist?

How will I move now, that I am walking closer to myself?

You come like a mirror of care,

teaching me to expand and to receive

that which shame made small and forbidden.

You come like a dark matter of love

filling all the spaces between

the obtuse injuries.

Healing scar tissue,

recalibrating cellular potential,

to an orientation of fiercely embedded belonging.

Interiority blooms in the wake of this witness.

My voice resounds inside now

with the intonation of this teaching,

of this gracious humour of cherishing,

this profundity of kindness.

Thank you

Deepest gratitude to David Bedrick’s profound work on Unshaming. 🌿🙏🏼🌿

Wool and Bloom

2023-03-03T09:33:00.014+11:00

Today not much is making sense.

The way I am made seems unfit for this world,

even for this life,

this, my very own life.

And my heart hurts

in ways it has not yet found words for

or meaning from,

and the hurt is a river that rises to my eyes.

Over and over again the heart-hurt

arising to my eyes,

tenaciously arresting

the impulse to distract.

And there it flows like a river,

a trickle, a stream

and I am trying not to make this wrong,

the pain of the not fitting,

the not understanding how to rise

and reach and meet

the ask of my days

and the ask of all the souls

that have woven their way

into my warp and weft,

how to meet them all

and still have something left for me?

Still have this day,

that pulls me in a thousand ways and yet,

the only thing that makes sense

is to ball the skein of worsted wool,

the deep earth tone a nourishing,

it sings somehow between womb and heart,

and my hands circle the ball over and over

and the long loops are gathered in

to come to rest

as cohesive handful.

The gum blossoms are here with me also,

as ally,

fugitively gathered from the roadside,

in yesterday’s harrowing.

The gum blossoms gather in

the tears of the bruised heart

to their own honeyed bosoms

as I wind the wool.

Their honeyed bosoms,

so effulgent and kind,

so silvered green,

so generous in their witness.

And the clouds are a blanket on the world,

concentrating melancholy like a muted prayer,

like my heart is muffled

by the blanket of it’s ineffable grief,

an autumnal titration,

heavy and tenaciously indwelling.

And through the river of tears,

through the honeyed blossom,

through the warmth of wool

and the work of hands,

through the muffled cloud

I seek to find my way,

not knowing,

just gently loving

and seeking the simple balm

of beauty

and tears.

Rue

2023-02-02T09:22:00.003+11:00

My little family is traversing a very tender threshold as we seek to deeply listen, with our treasured four legged friend, to come to an understanding of when just the right time might be to say the long goodbye, as an aggressive and largely untreatable osteo-sarcoma grows behind her eye, making her increasingly uncomfortable.

Despite her conspicuous unfriendliness towards small people and other dogs, to her human friends Rue has been so fiercely loving, loyal and constant. She is supremely fond of a good belly rub and in only the recent past, has been passionate in her pursuit of any hurtled sticks that came her way. She has however had a propensity to bury whole, expensive blocks of organic butter in the vegetable garden if the butter was left unattended on the kitchen bench outside of human eyesight.

As a dog with a history of early trauma, some of our wounding’s delivered by the same hand, it is an ineffable mystery to me, the way that her unwavering presence, her steady breathing and warm pressure by my side at night, has performed such a gentle and slow miracle on my fraught nervous system. So many times over the years, her tenacious love, and longing for connection and care, would restore to me a simple and wholesome sense of compassionship and belonging, in my own sometimes dysregulated states, over the sometimes troubled decade we have shared our lives together, side by side. That was supposed to read companionship, but I have chosen to hold to the misspelling of compassionship, because I like it, and maybe that’s actually also an accurate description of what was happening. Together we made a boat of compassion to sail the stormy waters in, together. The rhythms and the pulsing tides of our shared breathing, our synchronised heartbeats, a healing space of sorts.

Not always an easy dog, there have been a few times over the years when I wondered if I could hold to her. Her fear-aggression has been a sometimes mortifyingly problematic affliction, that has blessedly been nullified by the fact that we could offer her 60 acres of bush to roam upon, without the risk of her attacking someone else’s unassuming hound. But even this, became a deep soul lesson for me, a continuous confrontation with my own intrapsychic fear of aggression, of animal instinct, and the sometimes misguided impulse to protect and defend when we are afraid and uncertain, stirring an unavoidable inquiry of what it means to be an angry and hurt female. Of how trauma shapes us, leaves us irrevocably changed. Of how we can adapt and appease some of these injuries with our presence and love and careful attunement. And at the very least, how we can hold to each other in the places that are challenged and fraught, maybe even broken within. Each to each, we have done this for each other, profoundly.

Her fathomless love, despite sometimes seeming burdensome, has been such a healing and generative force of ballast and strength and tender restoration to my mind body system through many very difficult years. And now watching my three children grieve so beautifully for her, seeing the love they carry, bone deep, for this canine creature of our hearts, kin and kith, ally and protector, is so exquisitely sad and beautiful. To witness the depth of their sorrow, and so poignantly, the depth of their love, and the sense that Rue has come to embody something, to carry something for, or of, each of us in our time here together. My son in particular has resurrected Rue with his exuberant love and claiming.

We are all doing such a good job of feeling it all, as we say goodbye, to fathom what it might be to release her from suffering when the time arrives.

I imagine her chasing that one last stick up into the vast blue expanse of sky. I wonder whimsically if she is going to join my childhood companion Clover, up there in the big muddy paddock in the sky, in some other mysterious realm where dogs frolic and howl and chase and scratch and eat and jump and lick and have their bellies rubbed forever, in a timeless place? But if this is all there is, this one precious life, then I can assuredly say, that Lady Queen Ruesophine has been profoundly loved and cherished by her human kin, and that the shape of her sable liveliness, her dark velvet ears, her hazelnut eyes, the lovely thick ruff at the nape of her neck, are indelibly etched in our hearts forever. So grateful are we for the doggy beauty of her in our lives.

And so we are here praying to the great mystery and all the gods and goddesses of the inbetween.

Artisan's Week

2022-11-01T21:14:00.002+11:00

Artisan's Week

We are nestled here between mountains. Our valley nestled like a bowl, a vessel, between mountains. The vessel of our valley is full of goodness, clean air and water, fertile earth, all the growing things, all the living beings that feed from the growing things. Deeper down beneath us there nestles the clay and minerals and oxides and further down still, the fire that lives inside our precious Earth. Above us during the day there shines the fire of our life-giving sun and at night the glow of our moon, the mysterious twinkle of the stars. The rain gently falling, or fervently falling, filling the river that flows past us, carrying our stories to the sea. Mists rise, as springtime birds suckle nectar from the rich blooms that abound. All these elements coalesce around us, pulling forth the seed, furling forth the plants, the leaf, stem, pod, flower, that feed the animals, that give the fibre, that feed and nourish the human, that make the medicines to tend the ailments of body, that craft the paper and dye the yarn, that become the wood that is crafted into precious objects of utility and beauty, the wood that fuels the forge, that feeds the fire, that sinters the clay, the clay dug from the deep, the metal refined by the hand from the minerals deep beneath. Earth made anew, transformed by the maker.

This week we have been blessed to journey with our elders of craft and amidst all the making there were threads of story, weaving through the loom. The work making meaning in the heart and restoring wholeness to the spirit. We spoke of the colour of stars and the colour of flames, the mythological underpinnings of the origins of Iron, it’s great gift to life and also our need to be vigilant to it’s potential for harm. We sensed the imperative of a deepening responsibility, to offer ballast to the technologies we grow in our evolving capacity to craft complexity from raw matter. Our need for greatest care and attention, and allowing the thing between our hands to matter enormously for a moment, even in the risk of its breaking. We spoke of the moving from what is known, through to what is imagined but feared, to the new place of knowing and integrating embodied wisdom, the work of our hands leading the way, the limitations of the material providing the framework, the bounds of our imaginations offering the scope.

I could feel such goodness in these people, young and old. How we have been crafted ourselves by place and by earth and the hard work of the hands, to become humans who bare gifts for our tribe, humble gifts of understanding and transmutation, of purpose and nourishment, of presence and patience and perseverance. The wood workers bending together with gentle humour as they work, coaxing the material towards a new wholeness, a new goodness in the shape of a stool. Heads bowed together at the loom, reimagining the warp and the weft of our patterning. The synchronised striking of hammer to copper & iron, the music made by this shared making. This music serenading the fierce concentration required in finding centre, within the malleable clay at the potters wheel. The quiet toil of the binding of books, creating worlds in which future words and images will unfurl our future. The nourishing sustenance of food, alchemised to please and satiate the taste buds, the eyes, the belly, the wholeness of being.

Materials coalesce in cross pollinations of modality. Copper hammered to form vessel, copper in the rich green of the glaze that seals the rough rawness of clay, refining. Alumina as mordant to dye red cabbage yarn, Alumina fusing with Silica to sinter the clay that it may hold water and bear food, foods rich in minerals, drawn from the earth by water through roots. The pots smouldering in sawdust, wood shavings, from wood sculpted, drawn, whittled, carved. Wood burnt to hone charcoal for the fierce heat that will melt the metal, fruits grown from wood harvested for feasting, artfully prepared and tastefully seasoned, paper crafted from wood, made vessel for meaning, wood grown from Earth. Metal extracted from Earth, Iron in the fire in the forge, Iron in the clay, pinky-red between the potters hands, iron in the pigments that paint the leaf and blossom that cover the books that tell the stories of our makings, Iron as mordant for dying yarn, the plantain rich in Iron to nourish our blood. Metal as the Potters wheel, wood as the spinners wheel, wooden and metal tools, needle, hammer, tong, axe, pan, knife, block, cup. Our hands as the tool of Earth, the living tool transmuting itself into ever more various forms.

The materials of the earth offer themselves up and are braided together by our song of creation. The wood of the wheel that spins the wool, the metal of the shears forged in fire, that harvest the fleece of sheep, the sheep grown fat from spring grasses and weeds grown of earth, as we are nourished by her gentle harvest. Earth that is dug and turns the bowl to hold the food that feeds the folk. Earth that refined becomes the Iron that shears the sheep. It cycles around, again and again, this great spiralling reciprocity, this noble generative force of our living. This earth that feeds us in every way, that nourishes us and offers us this bountiful array of ways in which we may ennoble ourselves with hand and heart, ensouling matter.

Within this lies the alchemizing ingredients of disappointment and heartbreak. The broken pot, the burnt finger, the splintered wood, the arduous grappling with the sometimes unfathomable distance that lies between the imagined outcome and the thwarted reality. But I see the goodness that this questing has grown in us, has forged in us as makers. The way these materials have shaped us and made us a worthy instrument of this living celebration of life, that we may be bent by an unseen hand to transform and transmute raw matter, into useful tool with which to purposefully toil, into structures, fragrant with beeswax and linseed oil, that offer comfort and shelter for our weary bones, into humble vessels with which to contain our nourishment and quenching, into cloth with which to cover and warm and adorn the vulnerability of our bodies, the food that feeds both body and soul, the balms and tinctures that heal and cure when care is called for, the paper and tomes that carry the words of praise, the accumulated wisdoms of this grand adventure that is life upon this land. That is life within this bowl, this vessel of a valley encircled by mountains.

We have laboured long and hard and strong at this work. We have made beauty and purpose. We have been humbled by our limitations of capacity and material, we have been wearied in the most satisfying of ways. We have been forged in the fire, shaped at the wheel, woven on the loom, whittled by the maker, hammer, shuttle, bowl, knife, tong, needle, drill, wheel, anvil, spoon, spindle, blade, flame, air, water, earth, ether.

Images and Text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022

When Grief Grows Roots

2022-08-29T12:30:00.021+10:00

When the Ungreived for Past Beseiges The Now

When we have been parentified, emotionally or energetically from a very young age, caring and attuning and being of service can come to feel like our super power. Good girl, they praise us and we know what is being asked. It becomes entwined with our self-perception, entangled in our identity in ways that we may never fully understand or disentangle. The self has only ever known how to accomodate and perpetuate cycles of co-dependence and sacrifice. Sometimes before our sense of seperate self has had a chance to emerge from the enmeshed dyadic union of infancy, we are entrained to hold space, to surrogate, to carry for other. Some of us are still trying to engender a sense of self-as-seperate-to-other well into the fullness of our adult lives.

Then the time may come when we must grapple with the shadows of this archetypal compulsion to care, that has entangled in its roots our very quest to survive, our imperative to adapt in order to receive the life giving thread that would hold us to life, that would allow our soul to have a centre through which to live, a purpose in which to coalesce. The way we have learnt to care has been formed in the urgent imperative of survival, as understood by a very helpless and immature psyche and at it’s heart this impulse is a self protective force. In a sense our care becomes the shield with which we defend ourselves against unbearable rupture, our care becomes the weapon with which we assure our life-or-death dependence on relationship.

I am coming to understand that this way of contractual giving, this captive way of loving, can have a weaponisation encoded in it’s heart. As we grow and form adult intimate relationships, this adaptive way of relating is not always received by others as love, as care. It might in truth be more about control. Relationships may die in it’s wake, or perpetuate in stagnation. It can be a life long pattern of relating that holds us entrapped within the isolating defences of our original abandonment. Self perpetuating cycles of rejection and betrayal, because in spite of all our attending, we are unable to foster the true intimacy we long for. All our caring and centring of other does not equate to the reciprocal exchange of energy which we deeply hunger for. All our sacrifice does not bring us closer to the unconditional acceptance that we crave from other. Rather it pushes love further away and leaves us perpetually triggered, by the original trauma of unmet need and insecure attachment.

We may have a deep instinct for love, yet the time of such selfless care has missed its generative activation, it’s origin most fittingly placed in that oxytocin drenched, immersive field of the newly born mother and babe, intoxicating love pouring through in a one directional imperative to care and attend at the alter of this heaven lit dyad, with the otherworldly visitor at the breast. When this primal alter of motherhood is supported and held as the sacred threshold that it is, we learn unequivocally what it is to be loved and to have our needs met unapologetically by other, the nascent narcissism of our own helplessness instilling a deep intuitive knowing of safety and connection and merging, as well as eventually, boundary and cohesive selfhood, healthy separateness.

When this paradisiacal coalescence of love is absent however, or hindered, or made conditional, at any stage along the journey from infancy to maturity, we must make something happen in it’s place, we intelligently find or craft or create something that feels near enough, close enough to love. A subversion of the natural order, in the absence of loving capacity, we take complicit responsibility for the default, in ways subtle or overt, we become carer to the care-giver. We form belief systems about how safe a thing love is, how surrendered we should be in the receiving of it or how deeply we must protect ourselves from it. We form beliefs around what it means about us, about who we are, our value and worth, when love is showered in abundance, or when it is weaponised, absent or made dependant upon particular ways of relating and behaving. We grow our personality, our identity, our careers, our family structures around the ways we either heartfully received or desperately protected ourselves from this primary experience of love or it’s absence, depending on its capacity or lack as it moved towards us, depending on its purity or toxicity, it’s availability or it’s entanglement in the ancestral weave of inter-generational trauma. We raise our children from inside these beliefs, from within these adaptive survival strategies, these self protective shields from the unbearable affects of our own infancies, as we in turn were raised.

This subconscious imperative to habitually attend to the need of others is often seeded in the excruciating paralysis of a chronic freeze response or the ingratiating tyranny of a fawn response, the reactivity of a chronically over-burdened and under nourished nervous system. However beneath the placid facade of this placatory, pleasing, accomodating, self-sacrificing conditioning, there may often lurk profound abyss’s of grief and despair, torrential uprisings of rage, hatred, disgust. Whilst these are a natural and understandable response to the reality of one’s less than ideal circumstance of the bereft absence, the terrifying transgression.These feelings, we learnt early were not acceptable, and we may also cultivate substrata’s of shame and humiliation, that may thrive in the underworld of our experience, when we are not relationally titrated and co-regulated by a kind and loving enough other. When this rage and grief is split off from our conscious awareness, it becomes the toxic undercurrent of our loving, the shadow of our relating to other and self, often sabotaging our equilibrium with it’s volatile surfacing, when the pressure becomes too great, damaging our relationships and compromising our own sense of integrity and cohesive self awareness.

And so the day may come when we realise that what we thought was our super power, our gift to the world, the thing we were groomed for, trained in, indoctrinated to perpetuate; our deep capacity to relate and attune and to connect and to serve, has all along been perpetuating the primal injury of our own incapacity to receive, a way of protecting ourselves from true intimacy and connection, love and unity, because at the time when we were born into the field of love, raised in the innate expectation of care, we came to understand it as a dangerous thing, subtly or overt. A dangerous thing because of what was there that was not love, that may have been violent or cruel, the inflicting of pain, the transgressions, the crimes of commission. Or perhaps a dangerous thing because of what was supposed to come towards us that did not come, the absence, the lack, the invisibility, the diminishment, the crimes of omission.

In order to survive, one may have been asked to deny themselves a full spectrum of emotional expression. The dark emotions are relegated to the shadow lands of the inexpressible, our bodies may become uninhabitable, the imaginal and dissociative realms a tender respite, addictive behaviours a blessed relief from the fraught tension of holding the forbidden libidinal and enlivening energies at bay. Forever abiding the unconscious imperative of suppression of one’s own true self- emergence. Denying the internal impulse to awaken, we abide the entrained loyalty to the oppressor of our actualisation, the internalised abuser. The poignant longings for our own fruitful becoming, perpetually sabotaged and submerged by the overarching necessitation of our own subjugation.

When we come to understand that our isolation and disconnection is a result of our own instinctive and intrinsic defence against connection, even when our entire identity has been shaped by the imperative to attend to other, there is a deep reckoning that must be contended with. A retraction of the propensity to blame the Others in our lives for the long and repeating tales of lack and abandonment and disappointment and betrayal. Until we can come to bear the full weight of our part in this story, we will never receive what we most deeply long for. The grief of knowing that after a life of caring in order to be cared for, the debt will never be repaid, the gifting never returned, the care will never be reciprocated, in those relationships with which we have grappled in the shadows, not in the way that we would have wanted it, from that terrified child’s adaptive perception of what love might look like, this perception often forged in its absence. That the other that you love will never be able to be nourished by that version of care, that desperate, extractive seeking of safety and relational security, the daemonic imperative to survive by bonding with those who hold our lives in their ill-equipped hands. The only people who will ever be drawn to this way of loving are those with their own unrealised attachment wounds, their own perversely compatible defensive behaviours and attachment complexes.

It feels that there is a fundamental self responsibility that must be realised,

that while our primal wounding was beyond our control, that it was an abuse of power, or an expression of lack, undoubtedly honed by layer upon layer of inter- generational trauma, there is something about our psychic necessity to control the consequences of that wounding, that have perpetuated its constellation within our lives. Perhaps we have allowed ourselves to orbit too long around the imperative to not feel the seemingly unbearable affects that might truly have annihilated us as infants or small children, but which we now have the opportunity to forebear and transmute in our fierce capacity to experience and atone and embody the dissonances of our energetic, emotional, physical, psychological, somatic inheritances, of all that came to pass that was anything other than the intended birthright of attuned care and secure attachment.

It is one thing to realise the double-binded catch 22, the bewildering impossibility of this dynamic within the psyche, to awaken to the loss of life that has been left in its wake, and it is another to reeducate the heart, to retrain the brain, to regulate the nervous system to understand what true reciprocal relating might look like. This is the journey that I want to take, once the cold knot of my grief grows roots that sink deep enough through the bedrock to the earth’s ecstatic core and are nourished by the eternal fire that dwells there. Once the tongues of my rage have unfurled out as far as the furthest galaxies and been cooled there by the star light of a cosmic belonging and the remembering of a unity more eternal than blood. When I have turned towards my own self in the darkest of nights and in the deepest of pain and said yes, yes to love and risk and trust, yes to all of me, with the fierce heart of a mother’s claiming. Then I will begin to know what it is to root myself in the unequivocal force of my own worthiness of love, my own unconditional entitlement to care, that I might find, finally, an acceptance of my own body, an embracing of my own existence, a receptivity to support and prosperity, an actualisation of my own gentle power and co-creative capacity, an availability to love and connection that is founded in safety, in tender co-regulation and the reciprocity of deep and natural and self-actualised care.

Words and image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022

Women's Work

2022-08-23T12:02:00.005+10:00

All around me I see women, other gentle humans as well, and many, many women, holding the world together in unseen and unpaid ways. Like the dark matter between particles, their love lubricates the space between sharp and jagged structures, offering flow and cushioning and agency, repair and insight to the disparate jarring of linear processes. Many of us cannot choose whether we do that unseen, unpaid work, because it is the very fabric of our being, it is the true work that we are on this Earth to do, to tend, to weave, to stitch and bind, to sooth and offer balm and remedy to the liminal spaces that our extractive, monetised systems fall short in accomodating. They fall short deliberately. The system cultivates our invisibility, it is dependant on our unconscious sublimation.

We live in a world that invalidates this kind of tending, keeps it in unconscious shadow, because it can’t afford to have us named and made visible. It can’t afford our labour and we would break the system if we all demanded our due. Can you imagine what would happen if we withdrew this labour? I am put in mind of Aristophane’s Lysistrata. How can we broker our true worth, illuminate our true value? How can we make the inequity conscious? What if our economic worth was made overt and it's true value remunerated? Would it in fact break capitalism? Could we end the war, of extractive brutality, to Earth and soul and human? Can we stop bodily absorbing the brunt of the disparity? It is making us sick and draining us of our true inheritance.

So much of that deep primal intelligence, instinctive emergence, co-creative capacity is held dormant and tethered in the unlived lives of exhausted women whose labour and soul is unsustainably farmed by the state. For some of us it takes everything to just survive inside a brutalising economy. If that energy were valued for what it is and given space to unfurl, if it were cultivated and honed and supported, if it unleashed itself on the world, unbridled, so much of what we know ourselves and the world to be would be irrevocably changed. Can we give back the responsibility of atonement to those structures that are complicit in our exploitation?

The system is dependant on us believing the story of our own worthlessness. The system shames us, so that it is free to harvest our gifts, that we cannot help but give, that we see as unimportant within a culture of patriarchal values. We have to invite each other to recognise the importance of what we are, of how we weave the world together with our words and touch and cohesive attending and generative repair. How do we centre the liminal? Shine light on the underneath and in-between? How do we withdraw our complicity and unequivocally claim the deep value and true worth and creative emergence of our own magnificent gifting to the great tapestry of life that holds us in its weave.

May our giving be rightfully reciprocated. May we be known for what we bring. May it be utilised to dismantle and transform the world. May it be used to rebuild and heal the world.

Words & Image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022

She Who Holds

2022-07-29T12:00:00.001+10:00

Beautiful Anna

2022-06-07T11:58:00.004+10:00

In so many ways Anna was everything that I am not. Where I feel slow and sluggish, Anna blazed forth with a fiery sword. Where I feel procrastination and reluctance, Anna knew what she wanted, and seized it with purpose and forthrightness. Where I am so deeply reticent and ambivalent about this whole incarnating on the earth in a human body thing, Anna was getting on with it, tending the micro biome, saving seeds, creating food forests.

Despite these disparities of nature, my friendship with Anna was such a rich source of nourishment and balm to me. Maybe my mistletoe liminality, was lent ballast from Anna’s deep roots, succour from her groundedness.

Honest and real, and always grounded in the practically manifest, I was infinitely impressed with her capacity to wield a chainsaw, providing wood for both of our hearths, as the children and I, dogs underfoot, lugged and hauled the cut logs. I recall homemade sourdough pizza and kiwi fruit wine, music and laughter, the children’s raucous play, as I tucked in amongst the drying calendula in a corner of her kitchen and poured my heart out to the deep receptacle of her space holding. The steep climb up the flanks of Mount Little Joe, flaunting our locked-down 5km limit to celebrate Anna’s birthday. Flourless orange cake with a view, wildflowers abounding. Anna and Nelly climbed that mountain religiously and often for a while there.

And just this summer gone, long days swimming in the river or the dam, escaping the heat, hot chips and gravy for dinner as the sun set and the air began to cool a little, the children’s capacity to stay in the wet never ceasing. Simple, easy, safe, nourishing beingness. Life with Anna.

When I see her now, in my minds eye, it is a visage of joy that I see, with a dash of mischief and a lavish dose of compassionate warmth. It was infectious that joy of hers. My melancholic nature was always enlivened vicariously by her company. I became more when I was in her presence. I was made more radiant in her reflection. Life with Anna always felt so full of precious possibility.

Anna did not wait for permission, she threw herself at life. One day when I visited her after she had received her diagnosis and our conversation veered toward the possibility of her death, she spoke to me of how she wondered if she had lived so intensely precisely because a part of her had known it would not be for long.

She birthed her beautiful children young and as she raised them she studied her passion of herbalism, building and growing gardens and also calling forth her extraordinary business of Community Supported Herbalism. Back to Earth Medicine not only bestowed us with her hand crafted remedies, but also taught us, her community, how to make those remedies ourselves.

She was a grower, a maker, an educator, a healer, a guide, passionately reinforcing the need to consistently integrate and reliably practice the healing interface between human and plant world. Advocating for it’s capacity to heal and enliven us, as we cultivate a more embodied and actualised relationship with the bountiful Apothacary of nature’s gifts. Putting our roots down, growing the medicine that would heal the whole world.

The natural world was Anna’s playground, gathering herbs and weeds from the wild, gleening apples from the roadside, foraging fungi in the forest. She was a true weedwife, her kitchen always full of fermenting vats and drying racks of herbs, plant matter strung from the rafters and concoctions, brews and potions in various recepticals adorning every surface. Nature’s abundance and medicinal potency permeated every corner of her life. Kombucha, sourdough, fruit wine, mead, herbal teas, tinctures, decoctions, ferments. She was alive with burgeoning becoming.

And within all of this, so often close by her side, her precious children, equally wild and wise, cheeky and loving. Miraculous in their capacity to identify edible plants, to find and tend to animals of all kind, to build what was needed to create containment and structures through which their wild life could perpetually bloom and multiply, chickens, quail, guinea pigs, goats. Always laughter, always fun, a little chaotic at times, but always life giving, bestowing all who walked in their wake with that vibrant glow of the grace of being alive. My daughter loved her time in the garden with Anna, she’d always come home green-stained and full of new wisdoms.

We remember the time when Anna was constantly followed by the wild duckling named Fifi, that recognised her as mother for a time. There are many images of her snuggled in close to a chicken beloved, and her bond with Nelly, her rescue dog, was a match made in heaven. Anna’s vocal tone, rising to pitches of the most abiding Motherese, as she bestowed an endless stream of endearments, entoning praise and reassurance upon her beloved animal familiar.

Anna loved deeply and passionately, with a generative tension between the impulse to fiercely follow her own independent path and direction, and her deep capacity for relational succour and transformative connection. The part of Anna that was a huntress of truth, often drove her down pathways that were not always the easy route, but which were steeped in deep enquiry and a wild instinct for integrity and sacred thresholds of becoming.

In friendship Anna was voluminous, it seems now that she maybe had 101 best friends, each of us coveting our closeness as a precious gem, only to find there were so many of us that held her close in this way. Age was no barrier to her friendship’s, she loved us all, just as she found us. We, as the kith that mattered to her, were nourished so deeply at her hearth and privileged to offer her heart shelter and tending in her own turn. Because she was fierce in her living, but she was also courageous in her capacity for vulnerability. She was good at asking when she had need, she could rest into arms of comfort and weep in her hours of pain, just as she could set the world alight with the twinkle of mischief in her effervescent laughter. She effortlessly called in such profoundly devoted service from her beloveds in the last months of her life.

I have heard others speak of her tendency towards the brutally blunt. It is true she did not dilute her truth very readily, and yet, she was always gentle with me. Perhaps she also understood the fragility that living inside the constellations of our woundedness, the kind that do not heal, can afford us. We shared that root, and offered salve to each other, when those energies rose and entangled our vitality.

One of the last times I saw Anna, she asked me to brush her hair, which had matted and locked from lying so long, and as I ran the brush through that auburn glow, deep, thick hair, vibrant with health, it seemed such a strange and incomprehensible paradox, to know of the potential imminence of her physical decline, the profundity of her pain and yet to simultaneously behold her vitality and beauty, the warm olive of her skin, the potent vitality of her hair, the thrumming life force of her sleek and potentised body, the purity of her seeking heart, the natural way she inhabited her skin, even in her pain.

And still a strange liminality lingers, even as her body has passed from this world, yet we are tending our cracked lips with her lemon myrtle balm and administering hawthorn elixir for our broken hearts. All the remedies that were so lovingly crafted by her hand are what we reach for when our bodies have need of healing. She is tending to us yet from her place in the beyond. We have all been left behind, to mourn her loss as she blazes on to her next grand adventure.

I loved Anna, I still do, I always will. She made my life more alive and connected. I am so honoured that she chose me to be numbered as one of her many friends. I want her legacy to embed itself into my days, I want her to shine out to me from the hedgerow, as berry and fruit and leaf and stem and root. I want her to entangle me, to trip me again and again into this connection to the mystery through relationship with nature, through mushroom, moss and lichen, fur and claw, ferment and compost, tooth and bone. I want to drink deep of her moonshine and get drunk on her love for the wild. Her wild love.

We are all in our own and varied ways profoundly grieved, but also undoubtedly enriched and blessed and privileged to have been amongst those she knew and loved. I know we will all watch her shining out forever, shining out as nature’s offerings, through her exquisite children, and as we, her star struck kin and kith, share our memories of her around the tender hearthfires of our love.

I offer my deepest prayers of solace and peace to her family, to her children, and her inner circle who she treasured so deeply. The loss is unfathomable, to all of us, who will always miss a world that had Anna shining inside of it.

Words copyright Lucy Pierce 2022

Pottery & Poetry, Simultaneously

2022-03-06T11:52:00.012+11:00

Poetry and Pottery, Similtaneously

It’s like that sometimes, move the hands and you move the mind.

I make a cup of Earth,

She will carry all the mystery or water.

It feels to me that many of us in this ‘modern’ world would do well to learn a craft. There is nothing more humbling than becoming servant to transmutable matter and it is the greatest teacher I know, other than being a parent, of how it is that we may truly learn to care, learn to take care.

It teaches us unrelentingly that we are not the master, but the humble servant. That the master is and always will be, the life force behind the matter. That with time we may slowly learn the right mix of elemental fusion, to allow the material to be given life between our hands, to show us it’s capacity of form and eloquence of being, but that this will only happen when we lay aside our brute force and learn that anything worth doing is always, utterly, an expression of our love and an utterance of our care. It is a happenstance of mystery and contains our forebearance for the way life will be made and unmade between the hands of human forever, and what a precious blessing it is, to be made and unmade and made again by the forces that lie beneath and between and within and all around us.

There is a forging of instinct that happens and a honing of will, our animal intelligence is asked of us. Our capacity to learn the invisible threads that weave a thing into being and hold it in place. The way that all of life makes a thing so. The way it is a relationship. Every thing, a relationship.

It teaches us that every single gesture matters, every single gesture either makes a thing less tenable or more beautiful, makes the world less secure, or more comforting. That this is how we can come to matter, in our capacity to nurture life into form, spirit into matter. Such a profound and humbling privilege, it undoes us from the inside out, and makes us anew.

The person who can take a raw material and make a thing of beauty, knows these things in their bones.

Words and image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022

The Frontline

2021-10-20T08:52:00.001+11:00

I just want to say that the frontline looks different for each and every one of us. In between the gulf of anti and pro, there is a universe of complexity, a plethora of nuance. I want to validate those of us with particular neurological and psychological herstories whose survival response at the moment is to camouflage, or to sink our energies deep into our roots, to still and listen and deflect the gaze of obtuse scrutiny. For some of us it is the wise and possibly the only option. It does not mean we are complacent or complicit, it is just that our work is happening in a different place to the visible and overt.

It will take many folk, many weavers, many strands and many ways to bring in, to birth forth, a resonantly attuned, intelligently integral and holistically responsive path forward for Earth and the chaotic and catalytic expression of Her human tribe at this time.

We are all inside a collective transmutation and for some of us that has triggered formidable internal pathways that hold us and our behaviours in their grips from previous traumas that we are still constellating within the inner worlds of our psyches, within the cosmologies of our embodied beings. I want to honour those of us wrestling particularly with the freeze and fawn responses because the despair in them is often amplified by the invisibility that also resides there.

Whatever we are gripped by there is an opportunity to deepen our understanding and broaden our compassion, lend ballast to our roots, bolster our insight into the diversity of our individual and collective ecosystems to find the way to connect and to make safe and to gentle the nervous system and to find kindness for self and other, even as we stand bravely in the ferocities of our own emergences.

Today I offer gentle blessing to all those who find themselves in the inbetween and the liminal places of the as yet becoming, of the not yet known, of the tenderly emergent, of the uncomfortably newborn immanence of transmutational change.

Text copyright Lucy Pierce 2021

Inside Out

2021-09-22T08:48:00.001+10:00

Inside Out

There is a part of me that believes

that because my body is untameable

it is also shameful.

A part that believes the lies,

that looks with envy in the eyes,

betraying the soft and mountainous

isness of me.

I am not an itty bitty thing.

I am not strung taut and lean.

I am a big Mumma

making the world.

Like a planet my surface has survived

meteoric barrage.

I am battle scarred.

There are holes in my soul so big

it takes a harvest to fill them.

Like the ocean’s surface my flesh

ripples with a thousand stories.

I cannot be shrunk to size.

My body flows out like a feast

or a font

or a furnace

of love and holding,

of fear and withholding.

So far past pretty

I have become an ancient creature

of crevice and moss,

blemish and scar,

my flesh chooses it’s abundance uncontained.

My son says

you are the most comfortable place, Mumma.

And I know there is more to give than a sleek facade.

My mountains and valleys give life,

they are not wrong.

Because of this dissonance inside,

it’s scorn and scathing,

I am less alive.

I avoid mirror and reflection,

my mind skims quickly

the quagmires of shame

that ask me to become less of me

and more pleasing

to the impossible strangers

who fill my eyes each day,

each glance taking me further away

from what I am.

From the rugged terrain,

the untameable universe,

the myriad wildnesses

of my very own body.

Be still, gaze of my father,

voice of the world

that says I am wrong and less and flawed

to be the very shape of me,

the very tone and texture

of me.

There can be a nuanced comfort

that defies appearance.

A heart inside that pulses

with a limitless love,

like an ancient tide.

It is enough to be here,

deep feeling of body

spirit made flesh,

a miracle.

Be still, hungry ghost.

I am a big Mumma

making the world,

I am not less,

I am just more.

This life is a mission

of mammoth proportions

and I cannot house a traitor in my skin.

With Ariadne’s thread I turn inside

to hunt the deserted paths,

and track the source of pain,

the harrowing beast of my shame,

her monstrous hatred

of my wild.

My heart was born to love her home

it knows what must be done.

My heart has done this a thousand times,

the redemptive wooing of the broken,

the vast and patient succour

of a Mumma’s love,

making the world

safe,

from the inside out.

Image and text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021

Hinge & Pivot

2021-08-19T08:32:00.002+10:00

It feels as though I stand within a hinge or a pivot, the threshold between one imperative and another. I am strung taut, poised between the irreconcilable disparity between the needs of the culture and the needs of my nervous system.

All my life I have asked what was wrong with me? Why can I not keep up? Why am I so incompetent and lacking in capacity to meet the ask of this world? I am so bone-weary of this question. I have journeyed long enough, deeply enough, to know I am the way I am for many reasons, many of which are the intergenerational repercussions of living inside a brutalising commodification of humankind, of all sentient life, an extractive exploitation of animate resource and desecration of the sacred web of interconnectedness that is our true birthright. It has unfurled amongst our kind with heartless disregard for impact and consequence to the living soul of life. We are reaping the harvest of this now like never before. I cannot pretend this is not so any more.

I feel strung upon a wire, the precarious tension between playing the part of maintaining a viable identity in a world that grows dark by it’s own hand, and honouring the true needs of my soul, the neglected warmth of my own humanity, my innate embeddedness in a larger matrix. There is a bone deep ache to redirect my navigational course, my guiding compass, from outer orientation to inner. To stop asking how can I heal? How can I grow in order to survive and belong? To stop asking what is wrong with me and begin to notice what is actually sensitively responsive and intelligently attuned? To start asking how do I support the needs of the specific nervous system that I have, with all its gift and challenge, it’s capacity and limitation? How do I hold to that, unequivocally? How do I strengthen and nurture and protect my exquisite capacity to feel and know through the body as well as the mind? How do I support my mind-body system to attend to the grief and the rage, the despair and loss that I rightfully feel, so that it does not overwhelm me, so that I can swim those deep and turbulent currents with ballast and resource and kindness? How do I also let in the love and pleasure and joy that is my deepest need, beyond independence and autonomy? How do I stop asking myself to do what is actually impossible for me to do, when the cost of trying is to exist in perpetual hyperarrousal and dysregulation? I am not an economically viable commodity. I have nothing to sell. I am a feeling, sensing, reciprocating part of the pulsing ecosystem of earth and cosmos. It is this beingness that I seek to become loyal to.

All my life I have been trained to ask how can I serve others, how can I attend to the expectation of what it is to be a woman in this world, whilst being exciled from my own capacity to inhabit need, desire, authority. It has not worked for me, I am strung so thin I could snap.

I want to find the courage within to change the questions, to change the imperative, to let go and trust that there is something far more nourishing and sustainable and reciprocal that awaits, beneath the thrashings of a desperate world. This world lives inside of me, desperately driving me forward. It is my struggle to survive in a system that does not love what I love, and I feel it dying. I am dying with it.

But my nature is there also, underneath, half-sensed, waiting, birthing itself through grinding apertures of stone and starlight. My essence and the gift of my incarnated love, vast and permeable, eternal and true. From this place all that previously made me disposable and ineffective, becomes what makes me perceptive and intelligent. My need to rest and bond and attend and listen becomes adaptive, ecological. My capacity to feel and sense, instead of a too-muchness, becomes my ally and the way I become connected and responsive and receptive to all that I am that lives within and also beyond this animal body and it’s longing and hunger and need.

I cannot keep walking the road of brutality that the dominator paradigm has laid out for me. It does not fit, and yet I must trust there is time to feel the impulse fully land within, to sniff it out, to track it’s pawprints in the neglected wilderness inside. I know it has more to do with being and less with doing, so I sit here amongst the shadows in the gloaming. I will wait. I know not what it will take to make a different choice, but I am here, alive and listening, dreaming inside, paying attention, with eyes soft focused and seeking to know what it will take to make my animal body safe, safe enough to be this profound love that I know glistens beneath the world as we know it? How can I give the dying world even less of me? How can I drink more deeply from the well that lives inside my own precious temple, soft and deep feeling, sometimes weeping, sometimes trembling with rage, sometimes attending to the fear, tracking pleasure, deepening breath, saying yes to more of me. How can I become safe enough now to know there is nothing wrong with me? I am a human being, shaped by my experience.

Inside, the transmutation unfurls, like a snake or a song, it flutters like moth’s wings for the ancient moon, it keens and sighs, it is enough, just to breathe.

As I sit in this place I am remembering that I am also something primordial and ancient, unfathomable. That the minerals of my body are the minerals of the earth recycled through incalculable cycles of decay and formation. That the air I breathe is the breath of giants, rooted and listening, that I am unfathomably indebted to, that which would ask nothing of me, but my breath in return. May I have the courage to stay listening, to stay soft and embodied, to keep feeling into the unformed becoming, the archaic remembering, the unborn immanence. May I wrestle the invitation nested inside the maelstrom of these days.

Image and text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021

The Sundew and The Star

2021-07-27T07:43:00.002+10:00

Image credit Sirion Pierce @nativefocusphotography

The Sundew and the Star

The cacophonous roar of brutal truths,

clashing in the airwaves

like disembodied necessities for certainty.

Blunt and blind and colliding through flesh,

sacrificing soul,

a barbed penetration of subtle emergence,

a lambasting of nuanced sensing,

a desecration of co-creative immanence.

Inside, I feel the urgent imperative to find the dial,

that would diminish the volume

of viral self-righteousness.

My desensitised ear pressing instead

into the humus of understory,

I notice the Sundews there,

emissaries in the wintering cold,

heralding their trumpeted listening,

gathering dew and nectar and spore,

communicating in the silent night with the stars.

Their stems are hair fine,

and themselves covered in filamented receptivity,

poised to imbibe the news of insect’s feet.

Here too from beneath the decaying leaves,

the fungi,

blooming their varied hue,

their perplexity of texture

luminous translucence,

amniotic gloss,

feathered underside.

Themselves the blooming, fruited moment

of the vast mycelium that thrives beneath,

the voluminous mythic underpinning of creation,

the transmuting multiplicity,

the connective tissue of the universe,

responding,

in unfathomable sensitivity.

The earth,

always so gracious in her capacity

to accomodate polarities,

to make space for complexity,

to house the unknown and the unknowable.

Every inch of her deep skin

a eulogy to the dying,

a murmurating coo to the newborn,

a sustenance to everything that lies between.

So generously she harbours the ungamely

and the as yet not fully formed,

carving refuges for uncertainty and contradiction,

for the myriad stories of her fruitfulness,

creating a cohesive weave of kindness and care.

Listen, can you hear it,

the resonant song of sundew and star.

They have been conversing for millenia,

and still they seek not

the limitations of a fixed

and uniformed certainty?

Could the star define the sundew,

Or the sundew, the star?

There is a secret language

written like brail across the surface of the universe.

May we grow the fineness of feeling

in our sacred fingertips,

sensitive like a moths feeling for the moon,

to decipher the hidden meaning

of the rich multiplicity

of our layered existence.

Always Held

2021-07-05T06:51:00.024+10:00

Always Held by Lucy Pierce

I see this as one woman, moving through her life, from crib to grave, from the bedrock of her ancestry. Across the stretch of time that she lives and breathes, she is made rich by her experience, precious in her fortitude and breadth. She contains within her all the long journeyings of her life, and perhaps it is even so, that her younger incarnations are given ballast, outside of the weave of linear time, by the one she will eventually become. She reaches back through time with the capacity that has grown within her, with her ageing, to hold and cherish her younger self, at times when that capacity and wisdom had not yet fully grown within her. In a way this image arrises from the tenuousness of the grasp I have had on my own life at times, the pain and struggle that we can feel as human beings, to find meaning and purpose amidst suffering. Yet the older I get, the more I intuit a deeper understanding. I find myself reaching back across the stretches of time, with compassion and the perspective of what the struggle to live meant, encompassing and lending energy to my younger incarnations.

It is perhaps also a prayer that I will stay here, on this precious earth, long enough to know myself as an old woman, to watch my children grow to adulthood, maybe to hold my grandchildren in my arms and to know the whole journey. It is a nod to a life lived full and long, and not prematurely left as I have sometimes longed for.

Also it is a bow to the ancestors, from whom we arise and to whom we return, and an embrace of death as a force that walks with us all the days of our life, as a friend who lends life, who reminds us to cherish the magnificent birthright of who we are, wherever we are, in the journey of our lives.

And then there’s something else again, which Iâ€™m not certain of and only sometimes begin to glimpse, which is that even when the wounding has been deep, there’s a chance we may yet be able to grow within our own selves a love that is deep enough to hold all of who we are, a love that might become a vessel vast and holy enough to come to land inside, fully born, knowing our worth, upright inside our challenge, cherishing our wholeness, bestowing our gift. And that it is not in spite of our pain and grief and longing, but because of it, that this love can grow. My prayer is that I may one day grow into a safe enough harbour for all of the orphaned parts to find their way home to.

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Bless

Already Given

2021-05-17T06:42:00.005+10:00

Already Given

We tend a world of smoke and mirrors

that hold us back from the real.

So tenaciously we attend to personas through which

we will never meet the true self.

What parades as culture is a torture,

keeping us from sleep,

prodding us with tools of pain,

and unattainable ideals,

twisting our minds,

deceiving our bodies.

We are relentless in our chasing

of the bells and the whistles,

our heart beats pounding,

faltering, breaking,

as we keep the wheels turning,

grinding away at the soul,

the soul of the self,

the soul of the world,

the soul of the earth.

Bewildered,

in pain,

afraid.

All of us slaves in our way,

to a false and deceitful master.

Beneath it all the earth breathes,

deep and slow.

She unfurls the dawn mist

as the intricate design of a moth's wings,

flutter on my night dress,

to the serenade of water

falling through the sky,

collecting to slake our thirst

and draw up life.

She gives her gifts for free

and they actually nourish,

they are all we could ever need.

We must remember ourselves as her,

we must let her be enough again.

We must come to remember anew

the miracle that each of us are,

as we quake and tremble in our cells

at this miracle called life,

thrumming, resplendent

in the mere mundanity of our existing.

What might it mean to be generous,

with our breath,

our love,

our care,

our pleasure,

our embodied attendance,

our attuned listening.

Just to breathe and to hold,

to sing and to sustain,

to dance our barefooted rhythms

on the sacred ground.

To listen at the threshold

of Earth's eternal chorus of becoming.

To know ourselves inside

and to share that with each other.

Enough.

More, in fact,

than we could ever dream of wanting.

As though it is the eyes through which we see

that must evolve and eclipse,

so that they are able to behold

what has already been given.

May we break from the trance.

May we grow the eyes to see Her.

May we tend the heartgarden that can know

what it is we truly are.

Already given.

Turn from the smoke screen and slow.

Rip the shackles and fall deep,

deep, deep down,

into the arms

of our true mother.

Liminal Becoming

2021-05-13T13:38:00.014+10:00

Belonging by Lucy Pierce

I am really struggling to know myself right now. Struggling to locate myself in the world, to meet its insatiable ask. I feel like I want to curl inside a cocoon and wait until I know who I really am, what I really have to give, how it matters that I give that, how to be known for who I am, how to ever be enough. I want to sleep and dream and become something truer, but the asks of mothering and working and of having a personhood, feel daunting and relentless. I am struggling to meet the upside, outside world.

It is not a broken place I find myself in, though I've known my share of those. The felt sense is one of gloaming, where the sensing of what is lost and past is still more pregnant, than that of what is yet to come. There is a tension sometimes, in holding to the unknown spaces, the in between places, that speak of mystery and disintegration and rebirth, in a culture that can so often cling to the known and the certain. It is a practice, to keep letting ourselves die, when it is death that is being asked.

I want to remember a slower, more expressive self, that felt she had something to offer, of image to the void, of word to the silence, of heartfullness to the darkness. But I cannot turn back to her, I must move forward into the unknown of me, however uncomfortable the ask. Right now I feel empty and lost, and unable to belong to a world that is oblivious to the nuances of our time and in that oblivion, feels dangerous, but I remain unknowing of what it might mean to belong in a way that feels true and nourishing to something greater, something that is more fitting and embodied and sustainable and real.

Sometimes it'
s hard to trust what we thought was growth, when it is in the deathing stage and all the trees have been stripped of their fertile leaves. Hard to trust the journey when it leads us into the brittle, frozen lands of the psyche, trusting that the enlivening thaw will happen, however painful the cold, however slow the turning of that wheel, watching for the drip of the melting ice, trusting that spring will return, that dawn will come again for us, one day. I have lost a layer of false protection and am yet to grow a reciprocal response to the new aliveness that feels almost unbearable, raw and newborn and laid bare to the elements.

With you as my witness, I invite breath and stillness and courage and deep succour to this inbetween self, that knows not what it means to matter to this world as it stands, what it looks like to live a life that can make a difference, that is a fitting response to the real experience of this life at this time. Not knowing whether to rise or to fall, to fight or to surrender, to cling or to let go, I poise here, softly listening, heartbeat as timekeeper, in breath and out breath as wayshower.

Clay

2020-11-18T21:16:00.010+11:00

Clay

Forged of densest matter,

body of earth.

Meticulous care to navigate the form making,

we precipitate the limitations of material,

element, time and space.

In patient tending we follow the way,

the ask of tenacious will

and mindful purpose.

Attending at the threshold

of the not yet manifest,

we come to embody the form.

The way is sometimes easeful

and the making good.

Sometimes the way is hard.

Sometimes there is fruition.

Sometimes there is pain in the breaking,

the thing we cared for and laboured with,

not what we’d hoped it would become.

Sometimes things are made more beautiful

in their brokenness,

in their survival at such odds.

The gold in the cracks.

But always we return,

our hands to the clay,

remembering ourselves as earth,

and fire,

and water,

and also air,

and the wild, untameable spirit of creation.

In creating vessel we make containment.

We form an empty space,

a receptive place,

a place to receive,

the harvest of nourishing food,

rejuvenating fluid.

Or the harvest of emptiness,

of stillness,

of waiting to be filled again.

The emptying and the filling.

The beautiful, cyclic nature,

grappling with matter,

holding space for source.

Made of the earth,

we become the vessel,

clay, earth, body,

source, vessel, harvest,

loss, grief, joy,

labour, rythmn, care,

contentment.

The broken and the whole.

Beautiful.

Making the space,

the empty place,

inside the silent body

and also through the hands into being,

that will nourish the world.

An Emissary of Love Between The Worlds

2020-10-15T13:38:00.002+11:00

An Emissary of Love Between The Worlds

By Lucy Pierce

So strange to have completed this image without realising it is a day of remembrance for pregnancy loss and infant death. So many have braved the raw journey of having a babe come and then pass back to the other side again, before they could set foot upon the earth. I made this image for those families who have navigated this passage between the worlds, where life and death are held in the balance and sometimes we are asked to let go of the embodied love that has grown so tenderly within, rocking the world, to let go of what is most precious and yet only to be shared a short while.

More and more I have a sense for the ways we are held so intricately and so lovingly by the unseen forces of the spaces beyond this known existence, as well as the human and other than human allies. Contact is made with astonishing care, not to diminish the pain of life, but to hold us while it tempers us, breaks us and makes us anew, holding us so we can feel the heartbreak or the tenuous hope and yet still take breath, still arise to face the dawn of what is yet to come. Ourselves born anew, made deep and holy by what we have loved and lost.

Refleshing The Bones

2020-09-23T12:36:00.010+10:00

Some describe the emergence of Coronavirus as being an inevitable expression of an out of balance microbiome, a natural response arising from within an increasingly toxicified ecosystem, subsumed with pollution and ravaged by monocultural over-use, I wonder too if the powerful emergence of overly simplistic, divisive narratives at this time in our collective discourses is a similar expression of the loss of healthy habitat and indeed the desecration, of our psychological and mythic underpinnings.

Just as the ecology of our planet has been colonised and transgressed by a paradigm of domination, so our cultural narratives have become desperately degraded. Akin to the way the Coronavirus is toxic to the human body so too perhaps are our cultural narratives toxic to the human psyche. Simplistic and binary, obscenely outcome-oriented, good vs bad, hierachical, proliferating violence and domination, ensnaring us in the victim/perpetrator polarity, us/them, bereft of creative nuance or mythic ambiguity, they are banally happy-ever-after.

I sometimes wonder whether as a culture at large, or at least for many amongst us, we suffer from collective attachment trauma, in utero, birth, first years of life, childhood, adolescence. The unbearable affect that can present within the undifferentiated psyche of the child causing the authentic self to defend itself against feeling in order to survive its own existence, in the face of a lack of good enough co-regulation from care givers, in the presence of abuse/intergenerational trauma and/or the annihilating absence of care and soulful presence.

I believe the dominant overculture perpetuates an institutionalisation of birth violence and attachment trauma, it’s economic imperatives disinherit us from our profound capacity to attune and to devote ourselves to the non-profitable task of caring and tending, of fusing the soul to its earth-home, weaving a tapestry of integrated sensitivity through gentle presence, impeccable nurturance and timely nourishment, supported by a family, community, society that prioritises attunement and care, deep listening, depth and breadth, wisdom and embodied power. The Mamatoto of wholistic becoming.

Conversely our modern human world institutionalises care and compassion. There is a cultural somatics of loss. This becomes an intergenerational legacy of psychic dissonance, a breeding ground for mental health disturbance, addiction, suicidality, despair, dislocation, avoidance, aggression/abuse, dissociation from emotional pain. For many there is a ravenous dirth of belonging and connection to authentic self, dare I say it is a pandemic.

Just as the earth has been traumatised with the unrealistic demands of a ravenous consumerism, so the psyche has been violated and transgressed by a hollow and brutalising cultural legacy, of capitalism, consumerism, suppression of feeling, violence, economic inequality, systemic racism/sexism/ableism, all the ways we dismantle diversity of being, shaming “otherness” in terms of sexuality, identity, belief. This tyrannical and narrowing system impinges on mind, body and soul.

In a toxically imbalanced ecosystem viruses emerge and thrive, ultimately I’m sure as a deeper expression of intelligence within an ecosystem attempting to right itself. Is the burgeoning of these over simplistic conspiratorial theories an expression of the same thing? A transmitted virus of the psyche, a virulent expression of the toxicity of our psychic landscape, an inevitable consequence of the profound trauma of colonisation, as people are stripped of their ancestral roots of localised language and lore, story and medicine, connection to country and healing practices, birthing traditions and collective child-rearing, intergenerational cohabitation. Almost annihilated in the current cultural narratives is a mythological underpinning of meaning and morality, that binds a person in context and place, connects us to our ancestral inheritance, plants us deeply and with nuance into the fertile soil of community, earth and cosmos. Disease thrives in the psychic landscape of dislocation and emotional pain, that have been epigenetically instilled by the absence of a biodiversity of ecologically embedded selfhood.

In the absence of a cultural code of care for the soul, of a complex and nuanced relationship to the psyche, to emotions and the deep feeling body, of the immanence of spirit through deep ecological relationship to self and place, we can be tempted to cling to the narratives our brutalising culture offers us.

As we are force-fed movies of horror and violence, so we overlay and underpin these narratives of meaning and sensemaking upon a world in crisis. We are existing in a monocultural apocalypse of the mythic. The obtuse narratives of conspiracy theory are perhaps an expression of this dire lack of subtlety and nuance, of emotional intelligence and depth of feeling, tenderness and tolerance, of complexity and biodiversity that our psychically malnourished muscle for sense-making and myth-making has been acculturated to.

Those of us who are held in the grips of developmental woundings that inhibit our capacity to feel safe and embedded in a primal matrix of belonging, are in essence already and always in the grip of mythic and annihilatingly archetypal forces. Unable to meaningfully bridge self to other to culture to earth we are forced to draw on the archetypal forces for sense making and connection. It is our enormous task to tame the archetypal and the mythic so that it can be a life enhancing, enriching force, rather than a weaponised mechanism for justifying our severance from our own authentic self and truest nature, from the unity of human experience, the dislocation from the reciprocity of attuned human and ecological co-regulation. For those of us who are mythically wounded, archetypally defended, I wonder whether part of the remedy must also, by necessity, come from or through this numinous realm, this chthonic threshold, this mythic interface?

I sense that many of us alive today, disenfranchised by the ancient war against indigenosity, need to tend to the battered roots of our stories, our personal myths, repopulate the world with tender and generative, fertile and fecund tales of reclamation, mobilising the mycelium of complex reciprocity that is the true inheritance of life on this planet, complex and diverse, symbiotic and sustainable. How do we even begin to do this, from the tenuous brink, the barren wasteland, of a human world in such deep healing crisis?

Can we be akin to Psyche, tirelessly engaging the multitudinous tasks required of her, that she might at last arrive embedded within her own divine nature? Can we be like unto Isis, tenaciously retrieving, re-membering the severed pieces of her beloved Osiris, building temples across the land of our own grief and love?

Do we, as the fisherfolk, dare to dangle a dubious fishing line over the edge of our battered and scarred dinghy, into the deep waters of our timeless, collective origins, hoping, even as we dread, to hook ourselves to, inexorably entangle ourselves with, the plight of Skeleton Woman? So that even as we flee and hide from her in horror, we may begin the potent work, in the deep of night, by the glow of the ancient fire light, to reflesh the bones, restore the blood and muscle, enliven the sinew and ligament, drum back the heart, of a sensuously embodied existence, a permaculture of the soul.