Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Being the Light in the Darkness

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Perhaps we need the Darkness in order to know our Light.

I have never really had a bucket list. No experiences I think I need to have, or places I feel I must visit, or accomplishments I think I ought to achieve to make my life complete. Of course there are things I’ve never done that I might enjoy, but for the most part I am pretty content with my life as it is.

But recently I was reading the news reports of the stunning Northern Lights that have been occurring due to all the solar activity that’s been going on, and I felt a strong desire take shape within me: I’d like to see the Northern Lights before I die.

I’ve seen them only once, back in my college days in Boulder, Colorado, where they appeared as a red glow in the northern sky. It is extremely unusual for them to appear so far south and most people had no idea what was happening. Since it was during the Cold War, many people’s thoughts went to the worst possible scenario: we were seeing the glow of a far off nuclear attack. Eventually the radio announcers found out what was going on and filled us all in, quieting the community’s fears.

Looking back, that was a vivid example of how good we humans are at creating catastrophic narratives. When something occurs that is outside our normal experience, our go-to explanation is that it must be a grave threat, perhaps even the end of the world. Maybe it’s time we started questioning our dystopian assumptions.Continue Reading

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

The Return to the Feminine

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Our return to the Feminine holds the key to our healing.

Each February I take about ten days away to go on spiritual retreat. It is a time when I step away from the daily routine to listen more deeply. I never go with an agenda; I allow whatever wants to arise to do so. I have been doing this annually for almost twenty years, and I am always amazed at what unfolds. Often my time is guided by dreams, and always by intuition.

This year I had been immersing myself in a book I had just received, Mirari: The Way of the Marys, which recounts a prolonged dialogue between Mother Mary and Mari Perron, who also channeled A Course of Love.

As soon as I began reading Mirari in the days before leaving on retreat I felt a deep sense of relief, and of homecoming. Having grown up in mainstream Protestantism, in which the Divine Feminine is completely absent, it was like arriving at a spring of life-giving water. My thirsty spirit was being quenched.

Decades ago, when I was in seminary, I had to grapple with how the Feminine had not only been suppressed, but demonized in the religious tradition that formed me. This exile and vilification of the Feminine had profound implications for how I saw myself and my worth as a woman.

This is a struggle that I know many, if not most, women have had to deal with, and, because all of us, no matter our gender identity or biological sex, have both the Feminine and Masculine within us, the repression of the Feminine has had devastating effects on men as well.

Thankfully, that is beginning to change. The patriarchal beliefs of the past are crumbling, the Feminine is rising, and the balance between the Masculine and Feminine is being restored.

In this moment of return and re-balancing, we are coming back into the awareness of our intrinsic, reverent relationship with all Life, including ourselves. This understanding of the inherent truth of relationship is at the core of the Feminine, and it holds the key to the healing of our species and our planet.

While I was on my retreat, I felt Mary’s presence profoundly, which was a new experience for me. I felt her guiding me, encouraging me, holding me in the gentle embrace of the Mother. Since I was already experiencing her presence so keenly, it isn’t surprising that she was also referenced in a dream I had.

I’m riding on horseback with a few other people through an open, expansive landscape of scrub brush and rolling hills when we come to a place overlooking a village. Down in the village, the people, who are also on horseback, are riding out in a procession to honor Our Lady of Guadalupe. One of the riders is carrying a large banner of her on a tall, upright pole. As I watch the processional, my own horse drops her head, and when she does her bridle falls off.

One of the most intriguing things about this dream for me is the horse dropping her head, causing her bridle to fall off.

A horse’s bridle is the means by which a horse is placed in service to a human, directed by something besides her own will. As a friend of mine noted, Horse, in the I Ching, is a feminine symbol, and bridle sounds exactly like bridal (my dreams often use word plays). In traditional patriarchal culture, bridal indicates the ownership of a woman by her husband.

Mother Mary, by contrast, is often referred to as Virgin Mary, and the deeper meaning of virgin is a woman unto herself, a woman who is her own person, not owned or controlled by another.

As I listen to this dream I see that it is depicting a movement underway in which the Feminine is being honored (the processional) and released from the legacy of patriarchal control (the falling away of the bridle/bridal).

But the symbolism of the horse dropping her head goes deeper still. To drop the head is to be released not only from being controlled, but from the need to control.

For so long, western civilization has exalted the head, has sought to control the world through the intellect: dissecting, categorizing, compartmentalizing, seeking certainty and dominance over all things. In the process, we have alienated ourselves from Mystery, and from the direct knowing of the Heart and unmediated wisdom of the Intuition.

Yet, as Mary says in Mirari, The New that is now arising emerges from the Unknown. It is not something the intellect can plan, or strategize for, or make happen. The New gestates within us, is nurtured by us, is birthed through us. It is an act of creation, not fabrication.

As we return to Feminine ways of knowing and of being, we drop the head. We release our need for certainty; the old thought patterns of domination and control fall away; we experience our reverent relationship with All That Is; we bow before Mystery.

This is Women’s History Month, a time when we acknowledge the countless contributions women have made throughout history. But at this moment of global transformation, what interests me even more than women’s history is the contribution the Feminine is bringing, even now, to our future and our mutual survival on this beautiful planet.

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Ode to Darkness

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As a culture we are starved for Mystery.

I love this time of year. I love the long quiet nights, the candles, the turning inward. For me, the winter solstice, when the days begin to grow longer, always comes too soon. I want more time to immerse myself in the darkness.

I know this is a difficult season for many people, when the lengthening nights seem to evoke feelings of despair and dread. Yet I find the darkness beautiful. I experience it as the Mystery, the Unknown, the Numinous that is so much vaster than my conscious awareness can fathom.

This morning I got up early, before the first daylight. The crescent moon cradled itself toward the eastern horizon and the morning star gleamed in the pre-dawn sky—and it was the darkness that bestowed upon them their beauty.

I am awed by the fact that the universe is comprised mostly of dark matter. It is overwhelmingly made up of something that is hidden to us, undetectable to us, and yet unmistakably present.

That’s the way I experience the darkness. There is a Presence in it that transcends the reach of my ordinary senses. In the darkness I perceive the limitations of my knowing. I bow before the Mystery.

I suppose it is our fear of the unknown that makes us fear the darkness and want to drive it away, dispel it with whatever feeble torches we can fashion. We are so afraid of not knowing.

And yet turning toward the Mystery is so essential. To apprehend that there is so much we do not know is the beginning of wisdom, the portal to awe.

I had a dream once, years ago, in which I am out in the wilderness, in the mountains, staying at a lodge. It is night, and I step out onto a balcony and look up. When I see the canopy of the Milky Way overhead, a deep relief washes over me, and I realize that, having lived for so long in the city, I have been suffering from star-vation.

As a culture we are starved for Mystery, starved for the awe that comes when we accept our inability to comprehend the vastness of our existence, starved for the parts of ourselves that linger beyond the light of our awareness.

In the winter months, we sometimes don’t get enough sunlight to meet our body’s need for vitamin D. But in our contemporary society, in which we go to such great lengths to banish the night, there is another sort of deficiency that inflicts our spirits: darkness deprivation.

This alienation from the Unknown, this estrangement from Mystery, is making this planetary time so much more difficult than it needs to be.

We find ourselves collectively in a time of darkness, of unknowing. Having watched in shock the sunset of our certainties, we no longer know what to expect, and we cannot see what is before us.

And yet Love encompasses All. It is as present in the darkness as it is in the light.

In this season, many of us celebrate the incarnation of Christ-consciousness. And while traditionally that consciousness has been ascribed to a single individual, it is a consciousness that lies within us all. Dormant perhaps, as the seed lies dormant in the dark soil, but present nonetheless.

Christ-consciousness has been described as the awareness of existing in relationship with All That Is, which means being aware of existing in relationship with the darkness as well as the light, the unknown as well as the known. This is the awareness that flowers into trust, into faith.

May this season of the long nights bestow upon you the blessing of the darkness. May you experience awe in the face of the unknown, and bow before the Mystery of your existence with All That Is.

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