Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Our Make-Believe World

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We built a whole world on one wildly imaginative idea.

The other day I was out for a walk in our neighborhood, enjoying the extroverted exuberance of the daffodils and pausing now and then to breathe in the mind-altering fragrance of a grape hyacinth. Along the way, I passed by a man and his young daughter who were headed in the opposite direction. As we passed one another, I heard the little girl telling her father about the things that were falling from the sky of Middle Earth.

My immediate response was delight at the imaginative capacity of children. They can create whole worlds in their minds, and their spirits haven’t yet been straightjacketed by the realities we adults have to manage.

But in the next instant I almost burst out laughing as I recognized that we adults dwell in our own fantasy world, one that we take so seriously that we have brought it forth in the dimension of form—and perhaps ours is the greater imagination, because we are utterly convinced that our fantasy is the “real world.”Continue Reading

Living by Heart

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The Heart creates from the limitless possibilities of uncertainty.

I’m recently back from retreat, and once again I am convinced that taking time away from the incessant noise of our society is good for my soul. I can hear myself so much more clearly when I’m unplugged than when I am constantly navigating and responding to external communications and distractions. I can tune in more completely to the wisdom of my heart that perceives possibilities that my analytical mind is simply unable to access.

While on retreat I always do a drawing or two by heart — meaning, I let my intuition guide the process — something I wrote about in a previous post, The Life of a Heartist. This year on retreat I again immersed myself in the fluid ways of intuitive knowing, and in the process I saw more clearly that when we live guided by the heart, we must by definition live in the field of uncertainty.

Our society values certainty. We live in a very left-brained culture that believes that in order to accomplish anything you must have a clearly laid out plan and you must focus your attention on numbers, statistics and “proven” strategies. All of that has its place, but only if it is in service to the heart’s desires and the heart’s guidance. To live a life in alignment with our deepest values and soul purpose, the heart must be in the driver’s seat.

I suspect one reason we prefer to live out of the analytical left-brain is that we feel more secure. If we can head out the door knowing exactly where we’re going and how we’re going to get there, we feel safe.

To live by heart is to live very differently. When we live by heart we center our lives not in certainty, but in trust. We don’t know ahead of time what the outcome of our actions nor the destination of our path will be. We simply follow the step-by-step leading of our intuition.Continue Reading

Instinct

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a pair of Vibrams lying on wood chips
We are born instinctively knowing a lot of stuff.

When I lived with my wife in small-town Missouri in the 90’s, I tended a big garden where I grew edible yummies:  snap peas, string beans, tomatoes, onions, southwestern chilies and Silver Queen corn – the works.  I loved picking the corn and running it straight indoors to the boiling kettle on the stove.  During one of my periodic telephone garden reports to my Pop, he once kidded me that he had half-expected me to say that I had taken the boiling kettle outside to the garden so as to reduce the ‘pick-to-pot’ time so that the sugars of corn ears wouldn’t turn as quickly to starch.  As a meticulous gardener, over the years I amended the soil with gypsum, sand and compost, ogling the tilth like John Deere himself and fretting over slugs, cucumber beetles and aphids.

The small town gardener has only one potential problem associated with tending lovely  soil:  feral cats love to shit in it.  After doing so they then scratch up the soil surface  — along with recently planted seeds and seedlings – entire rows of carrots, destroyed.  Have you ever planted a carrot seed?  It’s no more than a fleck of dust under a thin film of sifted soil. One cat swipe buries those tiny seeds too deep for the sprouts to ever surface.Continue Reading

Imagination: Our Super Power

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How are you using your super power?

I had a dream once in which I was attending a conference where a couple of speakers had connections with Fanta. One had established a Fanta distribution center as a form of ministry. The other was the chemist who developed Fanta and understood its molecular structure.

Sitting on a table next to the podium where they were speaking was a bottle of Fanta. Its label read: Renewing Energy.

It felt like an important dream, so I spent some time working on it. Fanta implied the word “fantasy,” which led me to investigate the etymology of that word. It comes from a Greek word meaning: to cause to appear, make visible, expose to view, show.

Fantasy, often disparaged as being “out of touch with reality,” is actually the imaginative impulse out of which all that we create—all that we make visible—arises.

I believe, as human beings, our imagination is perhaps our greatest super power. Some would say it is the divine image in us. It is what has enabled us vulnerable weaklings without tooth or claw to survive on this earth.

Human history is really the story of the human imagination. How it has built empires, created vaccines, invented language, and calculus, composed symphonies, penned poems. Human history is the story of our collective fantasy—our power to cause to appear that which has never before existed.

Many who have left their mark on human civilization and culture have extolled the power of the imagination:

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. ~ Albert Einstein

Imagination rules the world. ~Napoleon Bonaparte

It is through imagination that we transcend understanding and travel into the world of possibilities. ~Danielle Pierre

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.  ~John Dewey

Live out of your imagination, not your history. ~Stephen Covey

This super power will shape our future, and if there’s anything the future needs of us now it’s that we engage our imaginations in positive, life-enhancing fantasy. It’s the only way we can break out of the gravity of an old story that is leading us to destruction.

Fantasy is not to be taken lightly, and the collective leap of imagination into the new world we must create together begins with each of us. Just as we go to the gym to build up our physical strength, we need to exercise the muscles of our—perhaps flabby—imagination if we hope to meet the global challenges before us.

It isn’t enough to just sit around expecting someone else to step in and save the day. We are that someone. As Madeleine L’Engle said, “It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called on to believe what to many people is impossible.”

My Fanta dream helped me see that part of my calling is to help people discover and unleash the power of their imaginations. It showed me that fantasy is Renewing Energy—the capacity to make new. If that isn’t a super power, I don’t know what is.

 

 

Crossing the Sea

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Which shore do you see yourself on?

Several years ago an artist friend of mine was looking across a field and suddenly the field appeared to him as a red sea. Bo sensed the vision was intended for me, so he painted a water color wash of what he had seen and gave it to me.

When I contemplated the painting, the sea looked like an enormous, unsurmountable obstacle, as the Red Sea must have appeared to the Hebrews in the mythic story of the Exodus. Fleeing Pharaoh’s army, horses and chariots bearing down on them, the Hebrews’ situation appeared absolutely hopeless.

One day as I meditated on the painting, something extraordinary happened. I saw the sea as something that was behind me. I was on the other side of it, looking back. I had left behind the life of bondage. I was in the land of freedom.

What I experienced in that moment was a quantum leap of perception, and I realized how, when one’s perception changes, so does one’s inner reality.Continue Reading

Dream. Then Do.

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In some Native American circles, Lizard represents the capacity to dream.

One of our local colleges has launched a new ad campaign which I first noticed a few weeks ago while riding the bus. In the front of the bus behind the driver there is a plexiglass panel which is where they often display ad posters. That day there was a poster with a picture of a young woman, dreamily gazing upward, smiling, and next to her the words: “Don’t Dream. Do.”

While I understand the intent of the campaign — to encourage people to get off their duffs and do what needs doing to activate their potential — I think they are making a tremendous mistake in telling people not to dream.

A lot of us are actually pretty good at doing, the problem is that so often our doing isn’t in accord with our true selves or highest good. We may just be living out the expectations others have of us rather than really exploring what it is we want for ourselves. If I were designing the college’s ad campaign it would say: “Dream. Then Do.”

It’s essential for us, after all, to engage our dreaming capacity because it is the first step in manifesting the future we want, and actually the picture on the ad is instructive in one way: it shows that the young woman, as she dreams, is smiling. That, my friends, is the key because it is our joy that leads us to our true path. It is like an exuberant, tail-wagging dog that is taking us for a walk, leading us with its own gleeful nose to our truest treasures.

Rather than squelching our capacity to dream we need to cultivate it. When we are stepping into a new life for ourselves we need a vigorous and bold imagination to help catapult us beyond the restrictive boundaries imposed by self or society; only in that way can we begin to live into our fullest potential.

Then, yes, doing becomes essential. Taking the dream and translating it into actions, no matter how small, is the way we honor it and begin to prepare the way for it to come forth. When we’ve taken time to dream in order to get in touch with our own inner wisdom and true direction, then our doing will be in the service of manifesting our own life purpose, rather than settling for the life others have told us to live.

2012: More Than a New Year

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If the leaders won’t lead, then it’s up to the people.

Well, here we are, embarking on the auspicious year of 2012, the year in which the current cycle (baktun) of the Long Count of the Mayan calendar comes to its conclusion. A lot of people have been speculating for some time about what that means, including some in Hollywood who have cashed in with their own special effects movie about a 2012 apocalypse. (The ancient Mayans would probably get a kick out of that Judeo-Christian overlay onto their tracking of long cycles of time, and our culture’s curious love of End Times scenarios. The Mayan calendar has, after all, gone through a dozen of these cycles before and the world is still here.)

Mayan calendar or not, I think it is true that we are reaching the culmination of a cycle and that the beginning of something new is at hand. Far from dreading it, though, we ought to be popping the champagne bottles and dancing our welcome to the changes on the horizon because, quite frankly, it’s about time. As we come to grips with the consequences of several centuries of exploitation — including devastating exploitation of the Earth — most everyone recognizes that we won’t be doing “business as usual” for much longer if we want to have a life-supporting planet to live on.Continue Reading

Jumping to New Year’s Conclusions

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What future do you want to imagine?

I am not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions even though I am a firm believer in the power of setting intentions and visions for the future. That’s why my practice, when the year rolls to a close, is not to make a list of “shoulds” for the upcoming year, but to jump ahead and imagine what it is I want to be celebrating a year from now.

I take out a pen and paper and write a letter of thanks to the Universe for all that has come to pass in the year ahead, as though the coming year were not commencing, but concluding. The more I write, the more I can feel myself entering into the reality that I am envisioning. Then, when the new year begins, I feel as though my dreams have already come to pass and all I have to do is cooperate and do my part to let them express themselves.

My New Year’s practice draws on the wisdom of Jesus, that great guru of imagination and intention, who said that whenever we pray for something, we should believe we have already received it and it will be ours. It is our willingness to receive what we ask for, without reservation or resistance, that makes all the difference.Continue Reading