Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

October Walk

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This life remains a mystery, a riddle whispered by the leaves.

 

Autumn is my favorite season. The light this time of year seems to penetrate the veil between the worlds of the seen and the unseen, and the trees, turning red and gold before letting go into winter, speak to me of the beauty and impermanence of life. It’s no wonder this is the season when so many people observe Samhain, the Day of the Dead, All Souls Day, and All Saints Day.

To honor this mystical season I wanted to share with you this song I wrote and recorded many years ago.

October Walk

I took a walk one late October
the geese were honking as they flew,
and I came upon a graveyard
full of names I never knew.

As I walked among the headstones
with autumn’s pungence in the air
how I longed to know their stories
their hopes, their fears, their quiet prayers.

But their lives remained a mystery,
the granite offering up no clue,
and their stories had long vanished
save a cryptic line or two.

And the golden leaves were falling
as the autumn wind began to blow
and they danced their swirling circles
then came to rest against the stones.

There I lingered for a moment
then I headed on my way
and October’s sun was shining
and warmed me in its slanting rays.

And this life remains a mystery,
a riddle whispered by the leaves
that shimmer in the sunlight
then sail away upon the breeze.

Music, lyrics, vocals, guitar and tin whistle by Patricia Pearce
Keyboard by Kip Leitner

Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea

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Crow FeathersI’m excited to let my “tribe” know about the publishing of a book of poetry by one of the guest bloggers on this site. Gwendolyn Morgan was one of two winners of the 2013 Wild Earth Poetry Prize,  and her book Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea is being published by Hiraeth Press.

There are so many wonderful poems in the collection that I had a hard time deciding which ones to share with you. “Window, Winter” spoke to me deeply, especially on this anniversary of 9/11 and in light of the current situation in Syria. I’m guessing many of us are feeling the tug of tragedy on our hearts.

“The Way the Soul Crosses” touched me with its mingling of the tangible and temporal with the mysterious and eternal.

I hope you enjoy these poems, and I encourage you to visit the Hiraeth Press website to read more about Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea and the glowing reviews it is receiving, of which this is one:

“Reading these poems is like taking a dip in a cool moun­tain stream. We are refreshed by the poet’s sen­si­tivity to the move­ments and rhythms of soul. Gwen is able to embrace a wide expanse of life, pulling in the wild sur­rounds of nature as well as tender moments of loss and sorrow. These poems sat­isfy a thirst for some­thing real and sub­stan­tial. A rare gift indeed.” —Francis Weller, author of Entering the Healing Ground: Grief, Ritual and the Soul of the World.

 

Window, Winter

Each day I wander through the landscape of spirit: this evening painting
dry bamboo, watercolor blocks, four months in my studio, restless,
thoughts lengthening with the shadows.

Body, stalk, limb, weary with winter.
Together with the OBGYNs, I witness three babies die,
one SIDS death with the Midwives, then, a man my age of cancer,

a nine year old child unnecessarily killed when towed
on a wooden sleigh behind a sap green SUV; she was not pulled
by the Fjord ponies who neigh at my window, waiting for grain.

Our neighbor’s twenty-three year old grandson
comes home from Iraq, Afghanistan,
back to Stumptown with a stump (not a leg)
and a wheelchair (not a cobalt skateboard)
Seven colors of paint on my palette.
How many years have we been at war now?

Another neighbor chops down a row of apple and pear trees
I stare at the lovely rounds of wood in disbelief
they were dead,” he says. I shake my head, “no, they needed pruning.”

The kestrel, robins, chickadees, juncos
the hummingbirds, raccoons and dragonflies
all shared the canopy of these trees as their homes.

Compassion fatigue: intuitive grief, instrumental grief,
no. 2 sable brush.

 

The Way the Soul Crosses

St. Mary’s, Alaska

Look, the moon is pure light.
It swells, translucent.
That’s how it will always be
held in your belly.

We cross the tundra,
kneel on moss and lichen,
pray wild roses, red berries.
Questions rise dense as mosquitoes.

There are so many things we can’t change,
so many things that change anyway.
Transfiguration: the grain becomes
bread, the berries become wine.

The way the soul
crosses over the Yukon River
in a small aluminum dinghy.
The way the seal gut
is painted with red ochre.

The way we remember
one another when faith is
stretched like skin on a drum.
The way we remember
the taste of light, wine, bread.

 

 

Gwendolyn MorganGwendolyn Morgan learned the names of birds and wild­flowers and inher­ited paint brushes and boxes from her grand­mothers.  With a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and a M.Div. from San Francisco Theological Seminary, she has been a recip­ient of writing res­i­den­cies at Artsmith, Caldera and Soapstone. Her poems appear in: Calyx, Dakotah, Kalliope,  Kinesis,  Manzanita Quarterly,  Mudfish,  Tributaries: a Journal of Nature  Writing,  VoiceCatcher, Written River as well as antholo­gies and other lit­erary jour­nals.  She is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Community Ministries and is a board cer­ti­fied chap­lain with the Association of Professional Chaplains.  She serves as the man­ager of inter­faith Spiritual Care at Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center.  Gwendolyn and Judy A. Rose, her partner, share their home with Abbey Skye, a res­cued Pembroke Welsh Corgi. | Photo by Kim Campbell-​​Salgado

The Silent Tomb

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All I heard was silence.

Last week, in observance of Good Friday, I posted a blog titled The Cross Speaks, listening to the story of the tree that was destroyed in order to make a cross. This week, in observance of Easter, I considered writing one titled The Tomb Speaks. I found myself wondering what the empty tomb in the Christian resurrection story might have to say to us.

So I allowed myself to go there. In my imagination I entered a dark, empty chamber hewn out of the side of a hill. It was cool. I was alone. I sat down on the ground to listen for the words that the tomb might want to speak, but all I heard was silence. The silence was deep, and it was filled with wisdom that was beyond words. It’s wisdom was of a mystery, of an unfathomable transformation. It was not a chamber of endings, as we usually believe it to be, but a container for profound metamorphosis.

I realized then how hard we try to ward off the tomb’s silence with our trumpet voluntaries and fill its emptiness with our certainties and dogmas. But Mystery cannot be defined, its nature cannot be grasped.

This past Easter Sunday, I was taking an afternoon walk in the woods with some friends along Ridley Creek outside of Philadelphia, and towards the end of our walk I stopped for a moment, standing next to the creek as the brilliant late-day sunlight slanted through the trees. I soon found myself opening to that state of Oneness in which there is no barrier between myself and the All, between the “living” and the “dead”. I felt the presence of dear ones who have left this world — the familiar energy signatures of their love — and felt myself one with the trees, the creek, the birds, the sunlight reflecting off the water. The beauty of it moved me to tears.

It was a moment in which I perceived the mysterious truth that the empty tomb in its silence taught. In resurrection it isn’t death that is vanquished, for death is the natural culmination of life, but rather it is our fear of death, our misunderstanding of death that is overcome. This, I believe, is what the early Christians meant when they said that death had lost its sting.

May that incomprehensible Mystery that is beyond the reach of all our words hold you in its gentle, beautiful, silent truth.