Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Gratitude: The Fuel of Creation

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Gratitude allows Love to express Itself in new ways.

This being the time of Thanksgiving here in the U.S. I thought I would share some recent experiences and reflections on gratitude.

I have come to see gratitude as the energy that fuels Creation. While judgment is the fuel of the ego mind and keeps its world spinning, gratitude is the fuel that enables Love to extend and amplify Itself in new and beautiful ways.

The Gratitude of the Spirit Realm

One morning not too long ago, while I was in the kitchen getting my breakfast ready, I suddenly felt a welling up of joy and gratitude within me. This is something I experience from time to time, but what was different that morning was that the gratitude I was experiencing was the gratitude the Spirit Realm has for me.

It was a potent energy that infused my whole being. As I opened myself to it and received it, I realized that I was closing the loop—closing the circuit for Creation’s current of gratitude to flow unhindered. I also realized how often I turn it away.

I suspect that most of us have gotten pretty good at deflecting gratitude, maybe as a way of preserving our precious belief that we don’t deserve it. Yet our willingness to receive gratitude is just as important as our willingness to offer it, because it is the unbroken loop of gratitude’s giving-receiving that keeps Creation blossoming in new ways.

Gratitude and the Great Transformation

Recently, while in a spiritual consultation session with a client, I felt such immense gratitude pouring through me, not just for him but for all of us humans who are here on the planet taking part in this Great Transformation. We are in the thick of it now as the fear, the traumas, the wounds of the past are all erupting to the surface so that they can be seen clearly, held lovingly, and released completely.

Most of us go through our days believing our lives are fairly inconsequential and completely oblivious to the magnitude of gratitude the Spirit Realm has for us. But every now and then we may get a glimpse of what is really happening here. We may begin to see that we are taking part in an epic moment on this planet as, in our big ways and small ways, we are choosing to orient ourselves toward Love.

Hastened by the intensity of the fear and division, we are choosing to let go of our own long-cherished stories of inadequacy. We are yielding to the unknown New that wants to arise. We are opening ourselves to the flow of gratitude that in this very moment is fueling the Beloved World that is emerging within us and among us.

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The Impulse to Be

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Is it time to let your awareness be rooted in the deep soil of your soul?

Recently I was talking with some women friends who have accompanied one another in our spiritual lives for nearly 20 years, and the conversation turned to something several of us are experiencing right now: the impulse to be, rather than to do.

I have noticed it in myself of late. It is as though something in me is putting the brakes on any sort of initiative. It is a season in which inner patterns are dissolving and even imagination seems to be taking a hiatus. I haven’t a clue what comes forth from it all. I am simply yielding to it and allowing it to be.

As I was noticing this impulse to not-do, an image arose in my mind of a tree, and I could feel how doing and action in our usual human sense of those words were foreign concepts for it. The tree was not going anywhere. It was becoming more deeply rooted in its own beingness.Continue Reading

Gratitude: Portal to Unitive Consciousness

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Gratitude acknowledges our interdependence with all Life.

I’ve been appreciating lately the uncanny power of gratitude to be a portal into unitive consciousness. I first became aware of the power of gratitude when it precipitated a kundalini awakening in me many years ago.

It’s an experience I write about in my memoir in much more detail, but suffice it to say that I sensed that some profound shifts I was undergoing at the time were due to my web of relationships. When I surrendered to what was happening and began to give thanks for the people in my life, the realization hit me like a lightning bolt: “I” am not a separate self.

With that, the energy chakras of my body opened, surges of energy cascaded through me, and when I came out of the intensity of the experience I saw a world I had never seen before, one in which everything is sentient, everything is interconnected, everything is Love.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the practice of the people of the Onondaga Nation of beginning each day acknowledging all the life forms and gifts of Mother Earth that sustain them in their bodily existence. As Kimmerer notes in her book, cultivating such gratitude and living within a culture of gratitude is revolutionary because it undermines the scarcity model upon which our capitalistic economic system is based.

The scarcity model focuses our attention on what we believe is lacking in our life (or, more often, are told is lacking), and it is this focus on lack that has caused so much unhappiness in people and led to so much devastation to the Earth.

Gratitude is a powerful antidote to this mindset because it places our attention on the overwhelming abundance that is already present. Gratitude, in other words, not only holds the key to our personal happiness; it can open the way for the healing of the planet.

The other morning, before I began my journaling, I did a practice similar to the Onondaga. I began to express my thanks to the trees, the rivers, the birds, the air, the creatures, the clouds.

I didn’t get very far into my recitation before I was in tears, overcome by the gratitude it evoked in me.

Many times I keep gratitude at arm’s length for this very reason: I know its power to transport me into an awareness of unity and Love that is almost more than I can handle. And since I have laundry to do and bills to pay and a website to maintain, and I don’t yet know how to do all of that while in a state of bliss, I let the mind retreat into its distractions, stepping away from gratitude’s blazing portal into the infinite presence of Love.

Maybe someday I will learn to stand in that fire of Love and still manage to remember to take the car in for inspection, but for now I settle for stepping back and forth across the threshold.

I experience gratitude as the language of the Heart. It’s as though, when I am in a state of gratitude, the Heart has picked up the phone to a party line (remember those?) and is in direct communication with All That Is. I feel the Heart participating in the Communion of the Cosmos, which is unmistakably filled with joy and delight.

I suppose gratitude is such a powerful portal into unitive consciousness because it acknowledges our interdependence with all Life. It also, for me at least, contains a hint of humility in it because it recognizes that this existence we participate in, that we are all part of, is a gift that is freely given. There’s nothing we need to do or even could do to earn it.

How, then, could we be anything but thankful?

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Squandering Time: A Spiritual Practice

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pocket watch in sand
What does it really mean to squander time?

Benjamin Franklin once famously said, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” It’s not surprising, given such a philosophy, that Franklin accomplished an amazing amount during his lifetime. Inventor. Statesman. Author. Public Servant. Founding Father.

But as much as Franklin is revered here in Philadelphia where I live—the city Franklin also called home—and as grateful as I am for all of his contributions to our city and society, I’ve come to question his premise that time is the stuff life is made of. More and more I see that life is made of a kind of attention that takes us into a dimension where time doesn’t even exist.

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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

The Beauty Inside You

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Imagine if we were all taught to see the beauty within.
Imagine if we were all taught to see the beauty within.

This past Sunday I attended worship at a Quaker meeting. Quakers, who believe that the divine light is inside each of us and can be accessed by each of us without need of a mediator, usually don’t have a structured worship service, nor a clergy person who delivers a sermon. Instead, the community gathers and settles into a prolonged period of silence, and then, out of that silence, anyone who feels prompted by the Spirit will rise and speak what is on their heart.

Although it was a chilly morning outside, the meeting house was warm and made warmer by the crackling fire that was lit in the fireplace as worship began.

After a prolonged period of deep silence a few people began to rise and speak, and one of them delivered a message that moved me to tears.

She described how, when her son was three years old, they had a bedtime routine that included her reminding him, just as he was preparing to go to bed, to look for the beauty inside himself.

One night, unexpectedly, he changed the routine. Wide-eyed, he pressed his forehead against hers and reported the beauty he saw in her.  “It’s like diamonds, mama!”

I was overcome by the beauty of the whole scenario: by the beauty of such wise parenting that trains a child to see his inner beauty — and consequently nurtures his capacity to see beauty in others — and by the thought of what the world would be like if each of us had been taught to look for the beauty within.Continue Reading

Miss Leach and the Butterfly Effect

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Who changed the course of your life?

I went into the ministry and now live in Philadelphia because Miss Leach, my third grade teacher, loved the French Horn. The story has a lot of twists and turns, and it’s too long for me to tell you many details right now, but in general it went like this: I moved to Philadelphia 15 years ago because I took a call to serve as pastor of a church here. I went into the ministry because of some of the experiences I had as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador. I went into the Peace Corps because of the ways my horizons were expanded while I was an exchange student in West Germany. I was an exchange student in West Germany because of the influence of some of my fellow French Horn players in college. And I played French Horn because of an off-handed comment made one day by Miss Leach.

I loved Miss Leach. She was one of those teachers a child is very lucky to have. She taught us well. In her class we made colored pencil drawings of grasshoppers, labeling all the parts of their anatomy, in our spiral notebooks; we drew cross-sections of the Earth, learning the names of all its layers; we learned about fulcrums and levers, resistance and strength.

But I loved her not because of what she taught us, but how. I still remember the day she started teaching us how to write in cursive. She told all the left-handed kids to cover their ears for a moment while she explained to the right-handed kids how to position our paper and how to hold our pencils. Then she had the right-handed kids cover our ears while she instructed the left-handed kids how they needed to do it. She taught us about much more than handwriting that day; she demonstrated to us that she understood and valued our differences.

Most of all I remember a day when we were playing Password. The classroom was divided into two teams. One person from each team would come up front and Miss Leach would show them the word they were to help their teams guess by giving one word clues. When it was my turn, I went up and she showed me and the girl from the other team our word, which was carefully written out in black magic marker lettering on a strip of tag board. Then, taking turns, the other girl and I began giving our clues.

I don’t remember whether the word we were given was “headache” or “hedge”. All I know is that I misread it, thinking it was the other, and, as you can imagine, began giving my team bizarre clues. It wasn’t long before the other team guessed the correct word, whereupon all the kids in the class started mocking and ridiculing me for the absurd clues I’d been giving.  Shame descended upon me.

That’s when Miss Leach, bless her soul, came to my rescue. She admonished my peers, telling them that I may have understood something they didn’t. She was insinuating that perhaps my clues were so sophisticated that nobody else was comprehending them, which instantly quieted everybody in the class. Because of her brilliant intervention I was able to return to my desk with my head held high and my delicate 8 year-old ego still intact.

Maybe you can understand, then, why I was so devoted to her and why my life changed one day when a girl in the class asked Miss Leach what her favorite instrument was and she said the French Horn. Since Miss Leach was so wonderful, I concluded that the French Horn (which I’d never heard of) must also be wonderful, and so that spring, when we had the chance to sign up to learn to play instruments for the band, I chose the French Horn.

There’s a lot of talk these days about the butterfly effect, which describes the uncanny way whole systems can be altered as a consequence of one small event. A butterfly flapping its wings in China, for instance, can cause a storm on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. I wonder, though, if we ever really think about and marvel at the wondrous influence we have on one another, how, for instance, one off-handed comment made by a third grade teacher we love and admire can alter the trajectory of a lifetime.

I googled Miss Leach yesterday and found out she died January 5, 2000 at the age of 84. The short obituary in the newspaper said she had no survivors, but it was mistaken. She survives in the lives of all the students she touched, including my own. She is alive in the words I write and the things I teach, because all of it is an outgrowth of the influence she had on my life.

I know the effect Miss Leach had on me, though she never did, just as you may not know about the lives you have altered. But if you think back, you just might be able to remember a moment when someone you loved and admired did or said something that caused an ever-so-slight alteration in your life’s path that, in the end, changed everything.

 

 

Precious Gifts

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What are your greatest treasures?

One of the ironies of the human condition is that oftentimes the more we have, the less grateful we become. When I lived as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a village high in the Andes of Ecuador, among the Quichua people who lived in earthen huts, had no running water and little access to medical care, I saw how for them nothing was taken for granted. Food was precious. Health was precious. The thatched roof over their heads was precious. A child who survived infancy was precious.

In our country, as we approach Thanksgiving, the holiday catalogs are already beginning to pour in, inundating us with glossy pictures of all the things we can buy. But before the Christmas deluge I want to step back and take stock of all the things that I already have that are the true treasures in my life: friends and loved ones, food to eat, a place to call home, my beating heart, the sound of the rain falling outside my window, the air that fills my lungs, the ability to wake each morning to live the miracle of another day. For all of these precious gifts and more, I say, “Thank you.”