Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

When Uncanny Coincidences Challenge Our Worldview

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A couple weeks ago I posted a blog about overhearing an 80-year-old woman talking in my dentist’s office about her plans to do the next thing on her bucket list the following day: go skydiving.

This week I’d like to share a delightful coincidence that occurred while I was writing that post.

I’d gotten my first draft done Monday morning and then stopped for lunch, and after I ate I stepped outside to get the mail. There, tucked between the bills and the fund-raising appeals, was a handwritten envelop, a rarity I always welcome.

I recognized the handwriting as my friend Susan’s, who was away on vacation, and when I opened the envelop and pulled out the card I laughed out loud. On the front of it was a picture of a well-dressed, dignified older woman posing for her mugshot.

I figured the reason Susan had sent me this card was that I was arrested once (well, okay, more than once) for doing nonviolent civil disobedience, and after one of those arrests Susan came to visit me while I was doing a week in jail.

But when I opened the card I laughed even harder. Inside it read: “Here’s to another check on the bucket list!”Continue Reading

Ferguson and Other Nightmares

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Like most people, I have found the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, deeply disturbing. One of the most troubling things I learned this morning didn’t have to do with the ongoing violence, looting and arrests. It was the results of a Pew survey that showed a wide disparity of opinion between whites and blacks about whether Mike Brown’s murder points to deep racial issues in our country.

I think part of the disparity of opinion is because many white people don’t understand the difference between racism and prejudice. Prejudice is holding negative stereotypes about others. Anybody can be prejudiced, and most of us are in some way or another.

Racism, though, is far more insidious because it couples prejudice with institutional power. It places people in the dominant group in the position of being able to carry out their prejudice through institutional systems.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t recall a time when an unarmed white youth was gunned down in similar fashion by a black member of a police force. The judicial system in this country is certainly racist as well. The evidence? Blacks are incarcerated at overwhelming rates and for far longer compared to whites for similar crimes.

Someone has said that racism is a disease white people catch, but black people die from. And black people are dying.

As a white person, therefore, it is incumbent on me not only to speak out about injustice, but just as important to heal myself of the disease of racism. It is a highly contagious disease that everyone in our society is exposed to from an early age. It landed on our shores with the arrival of slave ships unloading their emaciated cargo onto the auction blocks, and unlike so many diseases that our medical establishment has managed to banish, racism is one that continues to inflict us all, sometimes with deadly results. [Along those lines, let me recommend an excellent book: Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, by Joy DeGruy]

Every now and then in this blog I talk about this world we live in being a dream. That isn’t an abstract concept for me. It was something that I saw to be the case at the height of an intense awakening I experienced over a decade ago. We are literally living out a story based on our unconsciousness. At the root of this dream’s plot is a very simple, erroneous premise: that something called “separateness” exists.

Anyone who knows me well knows that dream work has been a central feature of my spiritual life. Some of the most important decisions of my life have been informed by dreams, and much of my own healing has come about because of the insights dreams have brought me.

While I was in seminary, when “big dreams” first started coming to me, I studied dream interpretation with Jeremy Taylor, author of several books on dream work, and one of Taylor’s central premises is that all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness. All dreams.

So let’s imagine for a moment that what’s happening in Ferguson is a dream, that it’s our dream. Better yet, look at it as your dream, because if separateness doesn’t exist, then it is your dream as much as it is mine, as much as it is the people’s on the embattled streets of Ferguson.

What does it mean in your dream that a white police officer has just gunned down an unarmed black teenager? What part of you is that officer? What is at the root of his hatred? What does he really fear?

And what part of you is that black teenager, despised, vilified as dangerous, the target for your psyche’s rage and fear?

How might the battle happening on the streets of Ferguson point to the same divisions that play out in your own psyche, and what must you do to reconcile those factions so that true peace can come? In other words, how can you bring the truth of Love (which is, simply put, the Reality of Oneness) to bear in this hostile, volatile situation?

These are not idle questions. The peace of the world rests on each of us doing this difficult work, of seeing the “other” as an aspect of ourselves no matter how hard it may be to accept. I, too, must embrace the unpleasant truth that inside of me is an armed racist policeman who needs healing, and a despised black teenager who needs respect.

What’s happening in Ferguson is a nightmare. What’s happening in Gaza is a nightmare. What’s happening in Syria and the Ukraine are nightmares. They are all extreme cases of the fallacy of otherness playing itself out in deadly fashion.

And nightmares, like all dreams, come in the interest of health and wholeness. They come in extreme form because the information they bring is important, and because the time has come for us to accept it. They are invitations to us to wake, finally, from our illusions.

 

The Inner Bucket List

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skydiver in free fall
What’s on your bucket list?

Last week, waiting for a dentist appointment, I couldn’t help but overhear an 80 year old woman standing in front of the receptionist’s window of the medical building, loudly explaining that she needed a note from her doctor. She planned to go skydiving the next morning, but the skydiving company wouldn’t let her unless her doctor could confirm that she had no major medical issues.

It seems this woman had a bucket list. “I’ve already done the hot air balloon and the whitewater rafting,” she said. Now she was on to skydiving, and she made it a point to let the receptionist know that her priest was going along (maybe so he’d be on hand to administer Last Rites if needed?). She also said she’d be wearing a girdle, though I missed the reasoning behind that one.

After making her case, she walked out, and as the door closed behind her the woman sitting next to me, who had been holding her head in disbelief while listening to this conversation, looked up and said, “Good for her!”Continue Reading

Spiritual Teachings From the Garden: The Purslane Parable

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My spouse and I have a plot in a nearby community garden that a number of weeds would like to call their home — dandelions, thistles, morning glory — and keeping them in check is a never-ending task.

There’s also another weed whose name I’ve never known that grows like crazy. Like most weeds, it’s hardy. It doesn’t seem to mind heat waves or dry spells, nor torrential rains for that matter, and try as we may to pull it all one week, the next week it’s always back, spreading its long red stems, with their shiny oblong leaves, low to the ground.

So you can imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I saw bundles of this weed for sale at our local farmer’s market. “You’re kidding me,” I thought. “This stuff that I’ve been tossing onto our compost pile for years sells for $2.50 a bunch?!”

The vendor, an Asian man who apparently didn’t feel compelled to follow American rules about what is a weed and what is a vegetable, knew that purslane (such a dignified name!) is loaded with vitamin A and C, and is delicious in salads and stir fry. He recommended sautéing it with garlic and a pinch of chili powder.

Sometimes Life Challenges Our Norms

Life is always challenging us with parables like that, isn’t it? It plops down right in front of us things that upset our assumptions and insist we shift our perspective. Purslane’s presence in our plot (forgive me for having a bit of alliterative fun here) has been a parable I’ve been parsing now for weeks.

First of all, it’s challenging any vestiges in me of the assumption that life is all about effort, and than nothing good comes to us except through hard work. This vitamin-loaded plant grows all on its own, thank you very much, without our fussing over it in the least. Heck, we didn’t even need to send away for any seed packets, nor, I’d lay bets, is Monsanto’s research team in their lab trying to figure out how to genetically modify and patent it, at least not yet.

Now according to Arla, an Ag teacher we knew in Missouri, a weed is any plant growing where you don’t want it to grow, and the purslane episode has also gotten me thinking about things in my life that I might see as weeds — unwanted and irritating — that might in fact be offering something quite useful if I would only stop rejecting them.

Sometimes life circumstances can be like that. Experiences we judge to be unpleasant often turn out to be the very things that enrich our growth. They’re loaded with all sorts of spiritual nutrients that grow our capacity to do very healthy things, like practicing acceptance and letting go.

From the Chopping Block to the Cutting Board

One of the most fertile fields this purslane parable invites me to explore isn’t necessarily what’s outside of me, but what’s right here inside of me. In the inner field I encounter a whole host of qualities, some of which I like and some I don’t, and the ones I don’t I often try to reject or resist.

And here’s the crazy thing: oftentimes it’s the very act of resisting them that causes them to thrive. My brother-in-law, Tim, recently told me that if you try to pull a thistle out by the roots, not only will you not succeed in getting all the roots, but you’ll trigger the thistle’s growth response and you’ll end up with more of them than you had before.

When it comes to our inner qualities, resistance simply doesn’t work. What does work is acceptance.

It’s the difference between trying to use the chopping block and the cutting board. The things we put on the chopping block are things we want to get rid of. The things we put on the cutting board are things we intend to take in, welcome, metabolize, absorb, knowing it will make us whole.

Needless to say, the next time I went to the garden after my farmer’s market discovery, I didn’t throw the purslane onto the compost pile after I pulled it. I brought it home, washed it up, and fixed it for dinner. The Asian farmer was right. It was delicious.

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Sabbath-Keeping: Nurturing the Spirit

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When was the last time you stepped back?
When was the last time you stepped back?

This past weekend my spouse, Kip, and I agreed to observe Sabbath by not doing anything that felt like work on Sunday. We’ve been very busy lately completing some household projects and it just seems like there’s never an end to it. The weekend comes and goes, Monday arrives and we’ve had no time to rest.

When I was a pastor — which I was for 17 years — I was much more committed to Sabbath-keeping. Pastoring, like many occupations, is a job that’s never done, and recognizing the dangers of burnout (which pastors suffer from in large numbers) I was diligent about taking a day off.

In the Christian world, Sunday is the Sabbath, but for pastors of course Sunday is a work day. So I decided Friday would be my Sabbath. On Fridays I would do nothing work related. No email. No sermon preparation. No planning. No phone calls. The only exceptions were the rare pastoral emergencies or wedding rehearsals.

After I left the pastorate I became more lax about my Sabbath-keeping, in part because I felt the weight of trying to figure out what was next for me and building a container for my new vocational work. There was too much to learn and too much to do, and I no longer felt entitled to take time off.

And yet, deep down I knew that was a foolish and counterproductive way to live.

The Counterintuitive Wisdom of Sabbath-Keeping

Many years ago I heard a lecture by Marva Dawn, author of Keeping the Sabbath Wholly, and during the lecture she told an account she’d come upon in her research of a group of pioneers who set out for the Pacific Northwest on the Oregon Trail. They were a religious bunch, and each Saturday, when it was time to stop their traveling for the night, they would unhitch the mules from the covered wagons, set up camp and stay put until Monday.

But as summer waned, the days began getting shorter and the weather cooler and they started to worry that they weren’t going to make it to Oregon before the snow. Wrestling with what to do, they wondered if they should continue observing the Sabbath or just push ahead in hopes of beating the winter.Continue Reading

Mindfulness and Facebook’s Emotion Experiment

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emoticon face wearing headphones
Maybe the takeaway from Facebook’s experiment isn’t what we think it is.

There has been lots of press in the last week about the recent experiment conducted on Facebook in which 700,000 people, unbeknownst to them, were assigned to groups in which they received either negative or positive posts in their newsfeed. The purpose of the experiment was to see what effect that would have on the things they themselves shared in their Facebook updates.

Not surprisingly, the study found that people who were exposed to negative news were more likely to share negative news, and those who were exposed to positive stories shared more upbeat postings.

People have understandably been outraged that the subjects for the study weren’t notified ahead of time, nor obviously had anyone given their consent. It seems it isn’t so much that we mind being guinea pigs; it’s that we mind not being asked if we’d mind being guinea pigs.

There are a few helpful lessons to be learned in all of this, although I don’t think one of them is that we are affected by the emotional content we’re subjected to. If you’ve ever been in the company of someone who chronically focuses on the negative (and who among us hasn’t), you know how difficult it is not to be affected.

I’m also not sure it serves us to come away from this incident with the simplistic lesson that Facebook is a corporate villain not to be trusted. The truth is we are being emotionally manipulated all the time, though not usually in such a scientific way. Many, if not most, media outlets, as well as many corporations and politicians engage in this behavior on a regular basis.

For me the important lessons have to do with our responsibility for what we do with our own minds.Continue Reading

The Mind Game We’re Playing

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woman's face painted with American flag
What game are we really playing?

This past Tuesday, sitting with my spouse, Kip, in a packed sports bar watching the World Cup soccer match between the U.S.A. and Belgium, I was delighting in the comedy of the situation.

The gathering, mostly young people, many of them decked out in red, white and blue, beers in hand, crowded around the large flatscreen televisions, cheering and groaning together as though they were many bodies ruled by one mind.

The excitement was palpable. Maybe, just maybe the U.S. could pull off an upset and defeat the Belgian team to move on to the next round. Anything seemed possible in this World Cup that has already seen the dethroning of some of the world’s soccer powerhouses.

Thanks in large part to the extraordinary performance of their goal keeper, Tim Howard, the U.S. team managed to hold their own through the 90 minutes of play, and when the whistle sounded to end regular play the game was tied 0-0. During the break before overtime, we all took a breather. The T.V. volume was turned down, the bass-heavy music turned up, people mingled and, in the case of several of us women, stood in line for the restroom.

Not long after the 30 minutes of extra time began, Belgium scored its first goal, and the mood of the crowd instantly plummeted from excitement to disappointment, and then to resignation when Belgium scored yet again. A man behind me, angry, began using expletives more liberally and another young man within ear shot, clinging to the possibility of victory, said, “You gotta believe!”Continue Reading

Simply Noticing — A Path to Mindfulness

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shadow on wall
Do you see what there is to see?

Each morning I begin my day reading a poem by Mary Oliver. Yesterday morning I read “Humpback,” from her book American Primitive. The poem brought me to tears.

Oliver has a unique gift of opening herself to Reality—the Reality so many of us spend our days asleep to—and of finding words to convey it such that its radiance can pierce our own minds.

It got me thinking about how the poet’s foremost job is to be awake to life, to notice things that most of us don’t. Only by being awake does the poet have anything to say. Only after her raw encounter with Reality does she turn her attention to the difficult work of finding the words to describe what she has witnessed, words that have the power to stir her readers into our own wakefulness.

All of this made me think of Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, who for over 35 years has been researching the effects of mindfulness on health and happiness.

Langer takes a different approach to mindfulness than most of us are accustomed to. For her, mindfulness doesn’t require a rigorous practice of meditation or yoga. And in her opinion admonitions such as “Be present” are useless, because when we aren’t present, we aren’t present to know we aren’t present.

For Langer mindfulness is quite simple. It’s simply noticing, setting the intention to go about our day noticing things we’ve never noticed before. This practice pulls us out of the sleepwalker’s life in which our body is on automatic pilot while our mind wanders through the maze of its own fictions.

Later on yesterday I was walking home, following Langer’s advice to notice things. As I walked by a flowerbed near our house I noticed the shadow that the cap stone cast on the stuccoed wall. Its dance of light and shadow looked like an inverted mountain range.

I had walked by that flowerbed countless times. But this time, having set my intention to notice, I saw something beautiful I’d never seen before.

Langer is right. Noticing is a path to mindfulness, one that doesn’t demand we squeeze yet one more thing into our crowded schedule. After all, it takes just as long to walk home mindlessly as it does mindfully.

This simple practice can help us live more like poets—awake to the radiant Reality that is always present when we let ourselves see.