Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Christmas Cruelties and the Gift Economy

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Amazon-warehouse-with candle 610x406
True wealth increases when it’s shared.

Given that Christmas is a week away, I’d really love to be writing about good cheer, about love and joy, but recently I read a disturbing article in Mother Jones magazine, “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave“, that just won’t let me go.

The article described working conditions in a warehouse that stocks and ships merchandise for online commerce. I was horrified by what Mac McClelland, a journalist who took a job there as an undercover reporter, described. Not only were the demands placed on her as a worker physically exhausting and sometimes dangerous, but she and her co-workers were subjected to emotional abuse as well.

The article was published in the spring of 2012, so you could say it’s old news. Except it isn’t. Just last month an undercover reporter for the BBC took a job at an Amazon warehouse in England and secretly videotaped conditions there which have been described as brutal. And in Germany, Amazon workers have gone on strike because of the working conditions and wages.

I do most of my shopping online these days, so even though not every online merchandiser exploits their workers, I found the scenario MacClelland describes deeply disturbing. I don’t want to support cruel distribution systems any more than I want to support the sweatshop manufacturing economy. But as we all know, in this globally connected, interdependent economy it’s not easy to know which companies are acting responsibly and which aren’t, and it’s pretty much impossible to extract yourself entirely from the injustices of the system.Continue Reading

Scandalous Halos and the Incarnation

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Nativity icon
What a difference it would make if we asserted the sacredness of the entire cosmos.

A couple of years ago, while sitting in the balcony of a church waiting for a concert to begin, I was pondering a mural of the Nativity that was painted on the back wall of the chancel.

In the painting Joseph and Mary were kneeling beside the infant Jesus who was lying in the manger. Nearby were a donkey and a cow, and off to the right the magi. But more than the figures themselves, it was the halos that caught my attention, halos that only appeared around the heads of Mary, Joseph and Jesus.

“That’s exactly the problem,” I thought to myself. The mural, placed in the position of the holy of holies, was inadvertently broadcasting the very belief that has led to so much devastation and suffering on our planet: the belief that humans alone carry the divine light, and not just that, but only certain humans.

Christmas is the season in which Christians celebrate the Incarnation, the Divine breaking into our earthly existence, taking on human form and the fullness of human experience. Yet over the course of my life, as a result of my own spiritual explorations and experiences, I have come to believe that traditional Christian understandings of the Incarnation obscure its radical implications.

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Mandela: Liberator of the Future

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Thank you, Nelson, for showing us the way.
Thank you, Nelson, for showing us the way.

Thursday afternoon, while I was sitting in a coffee shop reading, for some reason Nelson Mandela crossed my mind. I wondered how he was doing after his hospitalization several months ago when it seemed he was on his deathbed. “Is he still alive?” I thought to myself, wondering if somehow I might have missed the news of his death.

An hour later I got in my car to head home and heard on the radio the breaking news that he had died.

On one level it’s surprising that I thought about him at that particular time even though I hadn’t heard the news yet, but on another level it isn’t surprising at all. When he crossed my mind, millions of people across the globe were finding out that one of our wisest leaders and greatest peacemakers had left us. Madiba was on a lot of people’s minds, and the information that was flooding the collective consciousness broke through into my thoughts as well.

And that in itself speaks to the wisdom that Nelson Mandela embodied: that humanity is one and that the artificial divisions we have erected between us must become a thing of the past.Continue Reading

Parable of the Renegade Squash

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Kip standing in the heart of abundance.
Kip standing in the heart of abundance.

Late last summer in Kip’s and my community garden plot a mystery plant sprouted from our compost pile, and curious to find out what it might be, we decided to let grow.

And grow it did! Within a few weeks it had spread out to cover almost the whole garden, and since most of the other plants had begun to die down by then we just let it have its way. Judging by the leaves we thought it might be a pumpkin, a suspicion that seemed to be confirmed when small round fruits began to form.

As it turned out, though, they weren’t pumpkins. They were some kind of squash we were unfamiliar with, the name of which I discovered quite by accident while visiting a botanical gardens recently: Sweet Dumpling Squash.Continue Reading

Dreaming of Earth’s Awakening

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I recently had a dream whose vivid imagery continues to linger in my mind. In the dream I and a few other people are witnessing an extraordinary phenomenon.

A huge spider web is being lifted up like a cloth by numerous butterflies of many colors and varieties. The web is composed of a multiplicity of hexagons, like a honeycomb, and inside each, made of the same filament as the rest of the web, is the outline of a burning candle. The web is breathtakingly beautiful and all of us know how amazing it is to be present to witness it.

The phenomenon we’re witnessing, I realize, has to do with the evolution of consciousness on the planet, a sign that it has reached a new level, and I find that I am now able to levitate, though I know it has nothing to do with me personally but is part of this cosmic unfolding. Continue Reading

Finding the Still Point

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Can you feel the still point within?
Can you feel the still point within?

Recently I’ve started taking pottery classes, something I did about 12 years ago and loved. For the first few months I focused on hand building, but this summer I’ve been throwing pots on the wheel.

For most people, especially beginners, the most challenging thing about working on the wheel is centering the clay. You start with a lump of clay which you’ve wedged, kneading it thoroughly to get all the air bubbles out, then you throw the lump down onto the center of the wheel and start the wheel spinning fast.

But the problem is when you throw the clay onto the wheel it’s never completely in the middle of the wheel, nor is it a perfectly shaped mound, both of which are essential or you’ll end up with a lopsided mess. So before you start to shape it into anything, a bowl, a mug, a jar, you must first wet the spinning clay and press against it with the palms of your hands to center it.Continue Reading

Tuning to Love: The Third Aspect of the Spiritual Life

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What aspects of your life need to be tuned to love?
What aspects of your life need to be tuned to love?

Last week I took a trip to the outskirts of Baltimore to visit an old friend, someone I first met in 1990 in Tucson where I was doing my internship at the church where she was a member. Since we both liked to sing, during that year I was in Tucson we got together now and then to practice duets, accompanying ourselves on our guitars and enjoying how well our voices blended.

So this past week I loaded up my guitar to take along with me, and during my visit she and I had a couple of singing sessions, trying our best to remember the songs and harmonies we used to sing and, even though we were both rusty, we had a blast.

Of course, before we started singing we had to tune our guitars, which is why I’m telling you all this.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve written about what I see as the essential aspects of the spiritual life. First I wrote about knowing oneself as foundational, then last week I spoke about opening to the Great Love and shared a watershed moment in my own spiritual life.

But it’s the third aspect in which it all comes together, when we bring our way of being into closer and closer alignment with what the first two aspects of the spiritual life have revealed to us. We can have all the depth of self-awareness and all the profound moments of awakening imaginable, but unless those things play out in our daily lives they are meaningless. Which brings me back to the guitars.Continue Reading

Opening to the Great Love: The Second Aspect of the Spiritual Life

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How do you open to the Great Love?
How do you open to the Great Love?

In last week’s blog, Knowing Yourself, I wrote about what I see as the first aspect of the spiritual life and I offered some practices to help us grow in self-awareness. This week I’d like to explore what I see as the next aspect of the spiritual life: opening to the Great Love, by which I mean the consciousness that animates the Universe and each of us, the Reality in which everything is being birthed, nurtured into its fullness, and received back again in complete acceptance. This second aspect of the spiritual journey is one in which we come to the real, experiential awareness that we are not living our lives as isolated individuals alone in the cosmos.Continue Reading