We Burn Through
Over the centuries they have tried to scrub us out, this isn’t new - but our pattern will always burn through.
At the beginning of 2025, as the rapid rollback of EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) swept across the United States and beyond through the western world, I felt the erasure deeply. Women in STEM like myself—and people of all diversities—were being pushed out of view, scrubbed from existence as though we were never acceptable or of value. The experience stirred quiet a few emotions that couldn’t be captured in a single image. Instead, I found myself expressing it through four women drawn from my own ancient lineage—perhaps as a way to summon their strength again.
Women in STEM, and those who forge their own paths outside the patriarchal binaries of “Boss Women” or “Trad Wives,” move through the world with a quiet authority. They embody an archetype that has existed for eons - women who define their worth on their own terms.
Boudicca - Approaching Watling
Emotions: Hurt, Anger, Betrayal, Grit, Ferocity, Resignation.
Mebd - Queen Maeve
Emotions: Stoic, tired, steadfast
My husband says it looks like Tracy has has a terrible day at Greggs, and now its raining and blowing a gale at the bus stops and her tiara is on fire….I said yep, that’s pretty much the feeling, now your getting it!
Gráinne O'Malley - Grace O’Malley, Pirate Queen
Emotions: Wry, Knowing, Cunning, focused, irreverent
Scáthach - Warrior and teacher
Emotions: Strength, skill, knowledge, revolt
Poem that went with them
Protective rage
I’ll protect you. The forester who speaks softly to the sapling.
A louring whisper, too close to the ear
Too close
A grip of malevolent coppiced obedience on the arm.
The shear deep blistering heat of a generated rage from; a singular, incendiary; converse; notion.
Protection. Protectorate
It generates enough thermodynamics to engulf a forest and all its inhabitants in cathartic glowing embers.
Grow, but only so far, only till the point where utility of growth can be controlled, directed, commodified,
easily
cut.
It’s a warning
Our roots have grown too deep, rippling the compacted ground in a vast array of thick strong veins,
unrelenting expanses of us.
We have met her again. Kept small and shallow for so long to keep us apart.
Our swelling trunk splintering in deep thick valleys of dark barked armour. A landscape in our body of beauty and intricate traumas.
There is a pulsing
PULsing around roots, at the palm of our feet stretched compass. We speak.
Such simple cymatics run resonance through our bodies.
It beats us, pulses us higher, fractal rhythm feeding our own inconvenient sinuous thick wild shape.
Rooted down to glance up and grasp out to the furthest reaches of resisting existence.
Skyward leaves dancing with gusts between stars and swirls of fresh atmosphere.
Moon reflected luminescence’s tapped and trickles down our veins.
Lunalight dances in the heartwood again.
Fruit harvesters, bask in the joy of the great trees.
Where the strength and the uniqueness of growth delivers the most eccentric, complex sugars,
the most valuable of fruit.
It nourishes all.
Fruit harvesters reject the labour, servitude and limited monochrome rewards of the forester life and timber.
The pulse is in the fruit harvesters, calls to them, walking barefoot through the wilderness, feet gripping to damp moss. breathing in the sky
There is far less incendiary protection required between the great trees and great fruit harvesters
Only reciprocal anneal, spiralling as both tree and fruit harvester.
When timber feels like insanity.
