The She Persisted Series

The words for this page appeared before I began creating it.

“And in the end, when the veil that separated life from death was lifted and she slipped through into the ever-after, all that she left behind were her prayers and the Love that carried her through her life into the eternal grace of God’s embrace.”

This is the final page of the altered book journal I’ve been creating for the past few months with the prayer cards my mother left behind.

When I first began this journey I thought it would be… effortless. Seamless. A traipse through memory sweeping the past clean and closing doors on remembered words and perceived hurts that haunted me in my mother’s silence.

It has been non of that and all of that and so much more.

This deep dive into the power of prayer and my ‘mother memories’ of the rights and the wrongs, the beauty and pain, has brought me face-to-face and heart-to-heart with the quintessential ‘mother wound‘.

Healing the mother wound has been a lifelong journey for me. While it might seem all about a woman’s relationship with her mother, it is bigger than that.

The archetypal mother wound is generational. It is the universal struggle to fit into a world that is constantly changing, yet struggling to transform. It is a world that does not make room for a woman’s exploration of her power and potential because the world itself is constructed by a patriarchal set of rules that do not acknowledge the power and potential of women. It is the fight against the ties that bind while holding onto the apron ties that taught us how to be women in a world constructed in man’s ways.

According to Dr. Oscar Serrallach in THIS ARTICLE on GOOP,

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“The mother wound reflects the challenges a woman faces as she goes through transformations in her life in a society where the patriarchy has denied us ongoing matrilineal knowledge and structures.”

“This agenda tells females not to shine, to remain small, and that if you are going to try to be successful, that you should be masculine about it.”

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I am still searching. Scouring mind and heart for the words that will describe this journey I am on. This journey of reckoning.

With my mother’s passing. The words unwinding. The deeds undoing. The messages deconstructing. The lessons unlearning.

It is a journey of Repatriation. Reclamation. Restoration. Rejuvenation. Of myself.

It is a journey not just through time and space and generational legacies and patriarchal ties that bind me to a way of being that does not fit my skin, my soul, my sense of who I have the right to be in this world. A world that does not know how to create space for the art of the feminine to rise up and be heard and seen and known with grace.

I have come to the final page of this journal I have been creating of my mother’s prayer cards.

I can no longer blame my mother or hold her hostage to my unrealized dreams. I can no longer pray for my freedom from the past, from all that has kept me tied with invisible threads of silence and shame to beliefs and ways of being that do not fit me.

I have come to the time when I must claim my right to be free or crumble beneath the sorrow and rage of a life not lived.

No 5. #ShePersisted Series Mixed Media 2017 Louise Gallagher “Rock the Boat”

My mother has taught me well. Through her silence and her belief it was better to not make waves, I have learned to rock the boat.

Through her insistence I walk with both feet firmly planted in obedience, chastity and faith, I have learned to peer into the darkest night of the soul and see the light within.

In showing me how to be a woman bound to man’s ways she has gifted me the freedom to be unbound. To run wild of heart and free of spirit.

And now it is time.

Time for me to dive into the rising tide full of the song of the soul rushing in to greet me on the shore where I stand in anticipation of life washing me clean of the past. Body arced, arms flung wide above my head, waves crashing over my feet, I dive deeper and deeper into the sacred waters of the Divine Feminine. Into the depths of the great mystery where magic flows free and life dances gloriously unbounded by the conventions of a way of being that is not mine.

It is time for me to hold onto only Love and say to the rest, “The hell with that. That ain’t my gig!”

Yup. It’s time to shine big and dance!

It’s not difficult to play it safe. To take the same old path, to stay the course of how it’s always been done.

It’s not difficult. But it can be numbing, tiring, maybe even heart-breaking.

Just for today, imagine there is no path. That every step you take you are creating as you go. That even though you ‘know the answer’, there are answers you don’t know.

Be curious.

Ask yourself, “Am I doing it this way because it’s the way I’ve always done it? I wonder what would happen if I changed it up?”

And when the critter, that negative little voice in your head who thinks he’s keeping you safe by holding you to the tried and true, pipes up with, “Why change it if it’s working?”, lovingly embrace his fears and tell him you aren’t changing what’s working, you’re exploring a new way to see what else works.

Changing things up isn’t about ‘throwing out the baby with the bath water’.

It’s about checking the temperature of the water to see if it’s gotten too cold because the baby’s been in it too long.

Start small.

Pick one thing you do every day that doesn’t need to change (technically), but has the possibility of change.

Like how you drive to work. Choose a different route.

Or, if you always match your handbag to your shoes, or never mix silver and gold jewellry, change it up. Do it. Wear mis-matched socks or earrings. Wear brown shoes with black pants. And if you’ve never cared about mis-matching, go for matching.

Do something unusual, not to create the discomfort of change, but instead, to explore your responses to change. Be curious about what it is that makes you feel uncomfortable in the change.

Be curious about yourself.

Always.

Give yourself permission to ‘do it my way’ and see what happens when you let go of your mindset that says, ‘why change it if it’s working?’

Be curious about what happens inside you when you step outside your comfort zone. Explore those feelings. Be an observer of yourself doing things differently.

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I am changing things up this morning.

For the past year, since starting to paint The #ShePersisted Series in late February 2017, I have told myself that when I get to 52 paintings in the Series, I will write a corresponding descriptor of what the piece means.

I’ve completed 47 paintings in the series but won’t have my studio completed until the fall.

So… rather than do it the way I planned, I’m going to start writing the descriptors for the one’s I’ve already painted – in random order. This is No. 19 of the Series.

It also means, 52 paintings may, or may not appear.

I’m curious to see how I’ll respond to the freedom of not having to reach the number 52. Maybe I’ll stop here. Maybe I’ll go higher!

I wonder what will happen when I start writing out the descriptors in no specific order….

Stay tuned.

I’m doin’ it my way.

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To read more about the #ShePersisted Series and to view the completed paintings, click HERE.