Bridgette Hickey
Bridgette (Bird) is a heart and shadows scientist. Alive with grief and seeking life through beauty rituals. Bridgette is guided by old oak trees and the wind, her desire to re-member herself and others who have been, through communal connection and familial archiving.
They are an herbalist, poet, and care worker currently developing their skills in clinical practice, a student of craniosacral therapy, quilting, and loom weaving.
She has been led here through a remembering of her Grandmother and Great grandmother’s hoodoo roots. Bridgette has an affinity for embodying the living arts of their grandmother’s lineages.
Her research is in devotion to accessing portals through practices of repetition, stimming, attunement to those slow ancient paced parts of the earth and the fire of prayer. Bird has a background in medical anthropology focusing on chronic illness and a deep nerdy love for the magic of relational neuroscience and somatics: the ways our sinew hold stories of joy, pain, love, and guidance for the beyond.
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Some more simple things that I worked on the summer of the residency was making flower and environmental essences with write ups that went out solely to Black community in Portland. I will include a sample of one below:
“Things you must be aware of right now--
A year seems like a lot of time now at this end--it isn’t…
Don’t lose your sense of urgency on the one hand,
on the other, don’t be too hard on yourself--or expect too much.
Beware the terror of not producing.
Beware the urge to justify your decision.
Watch out for the kitchen sink and the plumbing
and that painting that always needed being done.
But remember the body needs to create too.
Beware feeling you’re not good enough to
deserve it
Beware feeling you’re too good to need it
Beware all the hatred you’ve stored up inside
you, and the locks on your tender places”
(Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989).
I lay malachite cross my throat
I pray to the clearing,
a flood of courage shapes the voice
I memorize citrines self cleansing sun fire
How the knowledge pools in each crevice of our being
It does not require pressurized searching
No further than our very own flesh,
“Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. The dark, dark liver--love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air” (Beloved, 105).
All within, turn and die and dive in faith that you will set free a witness,
I am reminded and set again in coordination between accessibility to spirit and our artful practice of living,
Our birthright,
A memory of hearts expression without excruciating effort, without endurance,
This is a prayer, a lay-it-all-down to ease
Baby Suggs resting into the galaxy of the multicolored quilt
pearly gates of worthiness,
“More than your life-holidng womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize” (Beloved, 105).
This essence was made with solar and lunar infusion. I collected the flowers on a venus day, I used a silver and gold singing bowl as the container, I filled with spring water and played the bowl encouraging the release and imprinting of the vibrational fingerprint of the cauldron (surrender to forgiveness) flowers accompanied by albizia (grief support by joyful tendrils) and california lilac (reorientation to higher guidance) with cleansing malachite. Preserved with organic vegetable glycerine. Instructions: trust yourself, take as little or as much throughout the day, add drops to tongue, a stone on your altar, your bath, add to tea. Made on land belonging to Clackamas, Cowlitz, Kalapuya people.
The Clearing
[[And in every moment love found you
I am patient for the memory of being retrieved
Taking the quiet passageways while the loud ones cackle a witness
And if they are not but transforming themselves into a more pungent substance to be recognized]]