Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

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

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.

 

 

It’s Just One Thing After Another

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paintbrush
The great task is nothing but a series of small acts.

At our house, construction has been going on since last fall. After two years of planning we finally took the leap and had a roof deck built, and due to several factors — among them the most severe winter in recent memory — the project, which was supposed to have taken two months, has taken nearly eight.

It’s been grueling living in a construction zone, dealing with the dust and the disruption, although the end product is turning out to be everything we’d hoped for.

Part of the project included gutting, insulating and sheet rocking our home office, as well as ripping out and replacing the bathroom ceiling, and since the contractors finished their part of the interior work several weeks ago I’ve been very busy reclaiming our inner space: spackling walls, sanding, painting rooms and doors, and vacuuming up the plaster dust that managed to float into every nook and cranny.

Fortunately, an out of town guest was coming to stay with us a couple of weeks ago, and I say fortunately because having a firm deadline did wonders to keep me focused. I didn’t have the luxury of indulging the temptation to become overwhelmed, throw up my hands and fall into the pit of paralysis.Continue Reading

Weeding the Garden of the Mind

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What's growing in your garden?
What’s growing in your garden?

My spouse, Kip, and I have a plot in a community garden. A few weeks ago one of our fellow gardeners asked me how we manage to keep the weeds under control. When I told Kip, his quick response was, “We weed!”

Easier said than done. Early this spring we had to dig up dozens of strawberry plants we’d planted last year, because over the winter, weeds had encroached into the patch. That’s actually putting it mildly. The weeds had invaded—and they had conquered.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to grow strawberries, but they’re a monster to weed, and I understand now why some ingenious and probably frustrated person came up with the idea of a strawberry jar. The plants propagate by sending out dozens of little runners that make using a hoe between them impossible.

After struggling to clear out the weeds by hand and getting nowhere, I realized it would be easier to dig up the whole strawberry patch, extricate the weeds, and transplant the strawberries all over again.

The experience of weeding our garden got me thinking. Which most everything does. Which brings me to my point.

My mind is a lot like a garden plot. Thoughts of all varieties can grow there, some of them fruitful and nourishing and some of them thorny and nettlesome. My job is to pay attention to what’s growing there and decide which sorts of thoughts are going to stay.

You’ve probably known people who, despite tremendous hardships in life, grow into their old age full of gratitude and generosity. You can usually tell them by the wrinkles around their eyes—they’ve made such a habit of smiling. You’ve probably also known people who have grown bitter over the years and whose chronic scowl has become etched in flesh.

Neither of those outcomes happen by accident. Sure, we’re probably genetically predisposed one way or the other, but blaming it all on genes I think is a cop out. I believe our disposition is due, to a large degree, on whether we have been good gardeners of our mind.

When it really comes down to it, I think tending the mind—choosing what sorts of thoughts we are going to allow to grow there—is the most important responsibility any of us have. The thoughts you cultivate will express themselves in every action you take. Our thoughts, quite literally, determine the shape of the world.

Sometimes people see see themselves as victims of their thoughts, and there may be instances—such as in cases of trauma or biochemical imbalances in the brain—where that’s the case. But for most of us, when our minds are overgrown with all manner of nastiness it’s just because we’ve been lazy. With attention, dedication, and practice, most any of us can cultivate the sort of mind we want to live in. After all, you’re the gardener. You have the power.

But how do we manage the mind? How do we keep the weeds from taking over? Well, that’s where spiritual practices like meditation come in. Meditation cultivates in us the ability to notice thoughts as they appear—like seeds floating by on the breeze—and then let them drift on by rather than landing in the fertile soil of our imagination.

But here’s the tricky thing. We’re all living in a community garden, so to speak. Unless you’re a hermit up on a mountainside (and if you’re reading this, you’re not) you are constantly exposed to what’s growing inside other people’s minds. Just like the solid mass of dandelions that were flourishing in the garden plot next to ours a couple years back, the unhelpful thoughts that have established themselves in someone else’s mind will launch their irksome seeds into the air and some of them are going to land in you. You may as well get used to it.

But here’s another thing. When that happens, you still get to make a choice. You can either resent them (the thoughts, the person) in which case you’re letting those seeds sprout and root inside you, or you can patiently, deliberately, and compassionately go to the garden shed, get the hoe, and start reclaiming the only mental territory you’re responsible for: your own.

I say patiently, deliberately, and compassionately because compassion really is the key. We need to be compassionate with ourselves, because we’re never going to do this perfectly—and that’s okay. And we need to be compassionate with one another because, as I try to remind myself, when someone is launching the seeds of anger, hostility, and judgmentalism it’s because that’s the plot they live in, the plot they themselves have to endure. What could be more unpleasant than that?

Just like weeding our garden, this mind-weeding work is never done. But look at it this way: life’s simple frustrations are simply giving us the chance to practice.

Here’s a case in point. I had just finished my final edits to this post and was just about to click the “Publish” button when WordPress wigged out on me. It lost the final draft. I was very unhappy. And then I got it.

It was just one more chance to practice, and in this case my hoe consisted of facing the facts of the situation and not trying to fight what was. Once I did that, I could return to my task with focus, patience, and serenity.

By the way, just this week I harvested the first of our strawberries. They’re red and juicy and sweet—and they’ve convinced me that all that weeding a few months ago was worth it.

 

Leading the Way

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What terrain do you know like the back of your hand?

A couple weeks ago Kip and I were headed home after having dinner at some friends’ house. As as we were driving along a curvy road that follows the bank of the Schuylkill River, a car ahead of us with Maryland plates was weaving all over the road.

It being Saturday night, we assumed the driver was drunk and kept our distance. When we pulled up alongside him at a red light, the driver honked and motioned to Kip to roll down his window.

“Can I get to 76 from here?” he called out.

It turns out he’d been swerving all over the road because he was lost. He was probably trying to find the route on his smart phone, or his car’s GPS, or who knows, maybe reaching for a map in the glove compartment.

“Yes. Follow us.”

We weren’t headed for I-76, but it wasn’t far out of our way, and it’s a very tricky ramp to find.

So we led him around the traffic circle in front of the Art Museum, onto the Ben Franklin Parkway for a couple of blocks, then took three more quick turns until we reached the inconspicuous, unmarked ramp onto the freeway he needed.

As Kip and I pulled off to head home our Maryland friend zoomed past us to merge onto the highway, and we honked and waved our goodbyes.

We were elated. It felt so good to help a visitor to our city find his way. It was definitely worth the detour.

One lesson of the experience hardly needs mentioning: it feels good to help other people. For me, though, it was more specific than that. It made me realize I don’t just like helping people. I like helping people who are lost.

I’ve been known to stop on many occasions to ask bewildered tourists standing on city sidewalks studying their maps if I can help them find the Liberty Bell, or Ben Franklin’s grave, or the Rodin museum, or whatever they might be looking for. Maybe I have a special place in my heart for people who are trying to find their way around because I’ve visited many unfamiliar places in my life. I know how confusing and overwhelming it can be.

But it’s not just helping people navigate city streets that I find enjoyable. I like helping people who are feeling inwardly lost. I’ve been exploring the inner terrain for most of my life and have come to know a thing or two about the lay of the land.

Just like that confusing route onto 76, I’ve had to navigate plenty of bewildering twists and turns along my spiritual journey—sometimes in the dark of night—until I finally discovered a hidden entrance to the “free” way.

I think, though, the most beautiful thing I took away from our encounter with the man from Maryland was that it reminded me that we all have some area of expertise in which we feel completely at home but that would be totally confusing and overwhelming to someone else. I wonder what that would be for you. What terrain has life taught you so well that you know it like the back of your hand? It doesn’t matter if it’s something that seems simple to you, because chances are it isn’t so simple to somebody else.

Whatever it is, I hope you’ll share it, not only because you’ll make someone else’s life easier, but because you’ll probably feel just as elated as we did when that driver from Maryland safely merged onto the highway, headed for home.

Are You Doing It, or Just Getting It Done?

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The way I come alive is to actually do what I’m doing.

I find one of the great things about To Do lists is being able to check things off when they’re finished. It gives me such a sense of satisfaction to know that I’ve actually accomplished something. My To Do list, with all of its checked off items, is proof of my productivity.

But lately I’ve become aware of something: To Do lists have a shadow side. They encourage me to get things done rather than actually do them. Let me explain.

When I’m doing something just to get it done, I’m not really doing it. I’m not stepping into the moment and relating to whatever I’m doing as I’m doing it. I am not in an I-Thou relationship with the people I’m with, or the objects I’m touching.

When I’m focused on checking things off my To Do list, I’m not living my day. I’m just getting it done.

I’ve noticed something else: when I’m trying to get something done, I start feeling agitated, irritated, bored. These feelings are signals for me to wake up, bring myself back to the moment, and actually do what I am doing.

Here’s an example.

Kip and I garden, and August is a month that demands a lot when you grow your own food. It’s the time of year when you’ve got pounds and pounds of potatoes, pounds and pounds of tomatoes, pounds and pounds of carrots, and you’ve got to do something with all that abundance. You’ve got to cook it, can it, freeze it, use it, or you’ll lose it.

So one day not too long ago I pulled out the heavy bag of carrots I’d harvested, and I started to make a big pot of spiced carrot soup. I figured we’d eat some of it right away, and the rest I’d freeze for one of those winter days when I don’t want to cook.

So I began chopping and sauteing onions, peeling and chopping carrots, tossing all of it and the spices into a big pot, along with some stock, and I let it simmer for a while. When it was ready, I pulled out my hand blender and started pureeing.

And that’s when I noticed it. I wasn’t enjoying making the soup. I was just getting it done—and feeling irritated that I had to do it.

That was my wake-up call. I started doing what I was doing. I let myself drop into the timelessness of the moment, and I beheld the most amazing thing.

The blender, its blades whirring just beneath the surface, was creating a  vortex of the most astounding patterns. The chunks of carrots and onion got smaller and smaller, until they had combined into a velvety, gurgling current swirling gracefully within the shiny stainless steel pot.

It was magical. I was filled with wonder at such physical marvels and overcome with gratitude for Earth’s plenty.

Can you believe I almost missed it?

I know this: when I actually do what I’m doing, when I sink into the pure experience of it, when I let myself truly relate to the moment at hand, I come alive.

I’m no longer an automaton going about her daily tasks. My “tasks” become spiritual portals—blessed opportunities to delight in life’s simple mysteries.

I enter what Buddhists call beginner’s mind, that state of awareness and engagement that is filled with the wonder of experiencing life anew in each moment.

What I’d like to do is let my To Do list become an aid, rather than a hindrance, to my spiritual practice. I’d like to use it as a tool to help me stay awake to my life by posing the question, whenever I check something off the list, did I actually do this thing? Or did I settle for just getting it done?

It might be one of the most important questions any of us can ask, because there’s a huge difference between the two. It’s the difference between missing our experiences or living them. Just between you and me, I’d rather not get to the end of my days and have the painful realization that I didn’t actually live my life. I just got it done.

 

Sweet Pea

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How shall I live?

1.
My cat is named, Sweet Pea.
Inappropriately.

2.
She was outside for the first time in a while recently
(we’re trying to spare the song birds)

But once in a while
Under careful supervision
We let her out to feel the sunshine unpaned by glass,
Free to tap her inner lion by nibbling on green grass.

3.
Suddenly, a strong breeze kicked up,
but she had forgotten what it was like to feel the wind.

Can you imagine?Continue Reading

WYNT: Station of Possibilities

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What’s your default setting?

Recently I woke up with negative thoughts on my mind. It was as if a radio in my brain had tuned into a station of negativity. I knew it wasn’t how I wanted to start my day, so I asked myself—if my mind were a radio, what station would I want it tuned to?

I decided I wanted to tune my mind to WYNT-–“Why Not?” I imagined an upbeat d.j. announcing, “Good morning! You’re tuned to WYNT—the Radio Station of Possibilities!”

I discovered it’s a really great station. Whenever a new possibility floats through my mind, the upbeat announcer proclaims, “Why not?!” Tuned into WYNT I feel energized, enthused.

It’s so much nicer than KNNT—the alternative station where nothing is possible. Tuned into KNNT, life seems like one big futile effort.  The KNNT announcer is a real downer. He goes on and on about how the future is doomed, life is pointless. He instantly shoots down any new idea.

As unpleasant as KNNT is though, I discovered it’s useful in its own bizarre way. It gives me one more chance to practice mindfulness and self-compassion.

It’s really no different than meditation. By noticing what energy I’m tuning into, I’m able to exercise my power not to buy into the negative thoughts that want to take root in my mind. I can patiently and compassionately bring my mind back to the here and now where peace is found.

It’s definitely a practice, and some days I’m better at it than others. But I’m committed to stick with it because I think it’s one of the most important things I can learn in life.

Still, if I had my choice (and actually I do) I’d really prefer to hang out listening to WYNT. It’s just so much more fun.  The horizon becomes wide-open. Life feels like an exciting adventure.

It’s the playfulness of WYNT I like the best.  Why Not invites me into the sand box of possibilities where I feel like a kid again—open, adaptable, willing to take risks and explore new things. I get to hang out in beginner’s mind where the arteries of my imagination haven’t been hardened by cynicism or certainty.

When I’m tuned into WYNT I don’t know what the future holds, and that feels exciting rather than anxiety-provoking. The destination isn’t the point anyway.  The point is about being alive and open to the moment itself.

How about you?  Which station is your default?  If you don’t care too much for it, you might want to start playing with the dial. I mean, it’s your radio, so why not?