Healing Archives - Patricia Pearce

The Mind’s Lone Star State

September 23, 2021 by Patricia Pearce

The idea of a “lone” anything is coming to an end.

I know many of us may be deeply troubled by what is happening in the state of Texas. I’d like remind us that this world is a form of dream, and if we look at these events from that understanding we can see how they can help us in our awakening if we are willing to allow it.

So let us do some dream work.

As you know, Texas calls itself the Lone Star State. Texas culture places a high value on autonomy and individualism, takes great pride in being big, and sees itself as set apart from the rest of the nation.

In a dream, all characters and all elements represent an aspect of the self. In this sense, “Texas” symbolizes an inner state, a state of mind, in which the self believes itself to be alone in this universe, able to set itself apart from the Reality of Union. This, of course, is an impossibility. Nonetheless, the mind has inhabited this illusion of separateness and created a world based upon it.Continue Reading

Becoming a Practicing Creative

June 4, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

clay revelation — What in you is paralyzed, longing to be set free?

Whether I was weeping outwardly I don’t recall. What I do know is that inwardly I was — from gratitude and a deep sense of relief for what the lump of clay in my hands was revealing to me.

I was at a workshop led by theologian Walter Wink and his wife June Keener-Wink, a potter. We had just been studying a biblical story about Jesus healing a paralytic whose friends had hauled him up onto the roof of a house, dug through it, and lowered their friend down on his mat to get him near Jesus, who was teaching in a crowded room below.

After we studied the text, we did a role play, and then June gave us each a lump of clay and instructed us to go find a quiet place and simply work the clay as we held the question: What in me is paralyzed?Continue Reading

Casting Love upon the Water

March 27, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

This week we had what will probably be the last trace of snow for the season here in Philadelphia, something a lot of people are happy about. Personally, I have mixed feelings. Sure, the spring is gorgeous, but I also love the winter and have especially enjoyed this one with all of the snow days it brought with it.

One sunny February morning, while I was out shoveling our front sidewalk after one of our big snow storms, I enjoyed watching a Dad and his two young children down the block gleefully piling snow into an enormous mound in front of their house.

Later that day I found out what they had been so excited about when I walked down the block and saw an enormous snow person in front of their house. With kale for hair, clementines for eyes, lemons for buttons, sporting a purple scarf around its neck and a street tree coming out of its head, it drew the admiration of parents and grandparents from all over the neighborhood who brought their little ones by to take a look.

The snow person, of course, is long gone. During the following week, when the weather warmed up, it joined the rest of the melting snow trickling down into the storm sewer, and by now it is surely wending its way across the Atlantic ocean.Continue Reading

The Ultimate Keystone Demonstration: Love

February 26, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

The question I find myself asking is: What are we demonstrating?

A few weeks ago I ventured out into a snowstorm to attend a demonstration concerning the Keystone XL Pipeline. The State Department had just issued its environmental report which said the pipeline would have a negligible effect on climate change, and now the ball’s in President Obama’s court to decide whether to approve the pipeline’s construction.

Contrary to the State Department’s report downplaying the environmental consequences, the pipeline has been described by some environmentalists as the “line in the sand” in terms of our energy policy because the greenhouse gasses that would result from refining and burning the tar sands oil “would tip the scales toward dire climate change”. Climate scientist James Hanson has gone as far as saying if the pipeline moves forward and the tar sands extraction continues, the “game’s over” in our efforts to avoid runaway global warming.

Those of us who braved the cold and the snow that day to express our concern about the pipeline huddled next to the Federal Building in Center City Philadelphia listening to a handful of speakers talk about the implications of the pipeline and about the pledge that thousands of people across the country are signing, committing themselves to civil disobedience should the pipeline be approved. The organizers then said they would lead us in a training in which we would role play getting arrested. Some of them would play the role of police and the rest of us would come forward in groups, simulating a blockade of the Federal Building doors, and be “arrested.”Continue Reading

Toxic Thought Remediation

February 12, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

What kind of thoughts are you spewing into the noosphere?

A vortex of plastic twice the size of Texas is floating in the North Pacific Ocean, and a similar one in the Atlantic. Because of the way the ocean currents converge, these locations have become the aquatic dumping grounds of all the plastics we toss onto our streets and into our streams that eventually find their way to the ocean. Over time those plastics, some of which break down into small polymers, are ingested by birds and aquatic life, becoming part of the food chain of the entire planet.

I’m mentioning this because the plastic vortex floated through my mind in meditation recently, offering itself as a visible depiction of the effect of our thoughts.

Thoughts, like plastics, are energy, and thoughts are what we cast out into the ocean of consciousness encircling the planet, the noosphere as Teilhard de Chardin called it. When we generate thoughts that carry the toxicity of hatred and violence we are polluting the environment of Earth’s consciousness, which of course includes our own consciousness as well.

This toxicity of thought is extremely intense right now in the political sphere and becomes amplified in social media, and the disregard and disdain for the so-called “other” that we witness in our public sphere is the same disregard and disdain that is threatening the biosphere. Our thought pollution and the pollution that is choking the oceans are completely intertwined.

Helping Restore the Planet by Cleaning Up Your Mind

On this blog I often talk about our need to move beyond the prevailing consciousness which sees the world through the lens of separateness, the consciousness of the ego. I talk about this for a good reason, because the unprecedented challenges Earth faces right now can only be met if we humans undergo a radical shift in our consciousness. In fact, I believe this is the most essential task facing us in our day. If we are going to make it through this initiation into adulthood as a species we will have to move beyond the ego consciousness that has created the crises we now face. In other words, our future rests on what we do with our minds every bit as much as what we do with our plastics.

Like the biosphere, Earth’s noosphere has been polluted over centuries, and the thought legacy we’ve inherited of violence, oppression, prejudice and exploitation is something we all have a role in cleaning up, just as we each have a role to play in helping clean up the water, soil and air.

Obviously the most important thing each of us can do — and the one thing nobody can do for us — is to clean up our own mind, our own mental backyard so to speak, and the way we do that is by simply refusing to feed negative thoughts that float through our minds. We deny them the nutrients they need of attention (which can also come in the form of resistance), and by doing so we allow them to begin to dissipate.

Please notice that I didn’t say that we stop having negative thoughts. The truth is we all have them from time to time; they come to us quite unbidden. But when they come we have a choice whether we will indulge them with a good juicy story they can feed on.

One of those juicy stories, and the one that’s often the hardest to detect because on the surface it seems so righteous, is the story that says you’re a bad person for having negative thoughts. When you judge yourself (in the interest of improving yourself, of course) you’re actually generating more toxic thoughts, causing your and the planet’s suffering to continue.

Rather than practicing judgment we have the power to practice compassion, acceptance and forgiveness, which are the only things capable of dispelling the pollutants of violence and hatred that swirl within and around us. By practicing compassion, acceptance and forgiveness we begin to transcend the ego’s story of otherness and in so doing we begin to heal the fragmentation that lies at the heart of so much of the suffering on Earth.

So the next time you hear about something like a plastic vortex in the ocean, or politicians duking it out over ideological differences, or read a post on Facebook that vilifies or ridicules the “other”, see if you can hold the situation and all the players in your heart, encircling them all love. Because truthfully, their fragmentation is our fragmentation, just as the ocean’s pollution belongs to us all.

Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea

September 11, 2013 by Gwendolyn Morgan

I’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 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 Philadelphia Love Experiment: Bridging the Cultural Chasm

July 2, 2013 by Patricia Pearce

One Sunday I was getting hot under the collar reading an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about an ongoing budget battle in the Pennsylvania legislature. The article cited one state representative from rural PA who was talking about our mass transit system as a fiscal black hole. He said our buses don’t do a thing for his constituents.

Another representative from one of Philadelphia’s suburbs went on the counterattack, citing a study that shows that the Philadelphia region generates 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s revenue, even though we have only 32 percent of the population—and we receive only 27 percent of the transportation funds.

I looked up from the newspaper and said to Kip, “Philadelphia ought to secede from Pennsylvania!” It was not my most spiritually enlightened moment.

But the frustration was real. Our city’s public schools are on the verge of collapse. Our roads and bridges are deteriorating. We need gun control laws to keep illegal handguns off our streets. And without SEPTA—our mass transit system—the city would be paralyzed by gridlock. Thousands of people who don’t own cars would be stranded, unable to get to work to help generate that 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s revenue.

Yes, our buses do do something for rural constituents.

But at every turn, when Philadelphia tries to move legislation to address our urban problems and improve the quality of life here, we are thwarted by legislators in Harrisburg who see the city as nothing but a cesspool of welfare leeches, drug addicts, and morally corrupt hedonists.

Not surprisingly, most of us who live here see things differently. We see the brokenness and challenges of the city, sure, and sometimes it breaks our hearts. But we also love the vibrant tapestry of cultures and traditions here. We love the spunky innovations, the world-class orchestra, theaters and art museums, historic Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell that people travel from around the world to see. We love the visionary steps our city is taking to make Philadelphia a green, sustainable city. The list could go on and on.

Just think, if we seceded, we could keep that 40 percent of revenue to ourselves, and we’d be golden.

Deep down though, even as I said it, I knew that seceding wasn’t the answer, even if it were legally possible. There’s enough division already in this country, and the way forward isn’t to create more, but to find ways to bridge the chasm that divides us.

Loving Enemies

Yesterday morning, as I was reflecting on this sad state in Pennsylvania I wondered, what is the answer? We seem so locked into this us-them frame of mind. How can we stand down? Soften the lines in the sand? Lay down our swords and shields and find some common ground?

I feel a sense of urgency about this because I know these divisions aren’t just plaguing our region. They are the greatest obstacle to our nation meeting the many formidable challenges before us.

It doesn’t help that our differences have been christened “The Culture Wars.” (Does everything have to be a war for us? War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Women?) And yet I don’t think I’m overstating it to say that many people in rural America and many people in urban America see each other as enemies.

Kip and I co-pastored for nearly five years behind “enemy” lines in a small, rural Missouri town, 65 miles south of Kansas City. One of our parishioners laughingly told us a story of when she was a child growing up during WWII. One Sunday the pastor asked one of the church elders to pray for their enemies. The elder got up and prayed, “Dear God, please remove our enemies from the face of the earth.”

I don’t think that’s what the pastor meant, but I bet a lot of us would pray pretty much the same way given the chance. Life would be so much simpler if our enemies just, oh, I don’t know, got raptured up one day.

Living in that small town was a cross-cultural experience, and like all the other cross-cultural experiences I’ve had I’m very glad I had it. I got to see up close, through the eyes of people who had lived there all their lives, the struggles they were facing:

Farms that had been in families for generations were being foreclosed on because small farmers couldn’t compete with corporate agriculture.
With the influx of corporate retail stores, family businesses were going under.
Job opportunities were scarce, and mostly minimum wage.
Towns throughout the region were decaying because their young people, seeing no future for themselves, were moving away never to return.

People were feeling powerless before cultural and global forces they couldn’t control. They were watching a cherished way of life slowly dying. And yet in the midst of it all they kept the faith, kept taking care of each other, kept holding potlucks, and kept trying to think of ways to protect and resurrect what they once had.

When you know what other people are dealing with, it’s really not hard to pray for them. Love them even.

All of this got me thinking about our current situation here in the commonwealth. (By the way, I love that Pennsylvania is a commonwealth. It just kinda says it all.) What if people in Philadelphia started praying for people in rural PA? Not because we want to guilt-trip them into being nice to us, nor show them that we can take the moral high ground, but because we have listened to their struggles. We sincerely want the best for them, as much as we do for ourselves.

I can’t help but believe such a movement would help repair our relationships and open a path forward in a way politics never will. We are Philadelphia, after all, the City of Brotherly/Sisterly Love, and brotherhood and sisterhood don’t stop at municipal boundaries.

Can you imagine if congregations all over the city started a prayer movement for our rural siblings? Maybe it could be called The Philadelphia Love Experiment. Maybe we could make animosities vanish into thin air.

Somebody has to take the first step—refuse to participate in the warmongering anymore and reach out the hand of friendship. Why not us?

I also think about how Pennsylvania is known as the Keystone State. Take that in for a moment. A keystone, that one crucial stone at the top of an arch that keeps the whole structure from collapsing in on itself. It sure seems to me this tottering, torn country could use something like that.

A very famous declaration came out of Philadelphia once that completely rocked the world. We could do it again if we wanted to, but this time we wouldn’t be declaring independence. We would be honoring the reality that we are all, like it or not, interdependent.

Let’s we the people just do it.