Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Believing Mirrors

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Winging it home

In a recent conversation, the concept of “believing mirrors” came up. It is a term coined by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Cameron talks about the importance of artists having people in our lives who believe in us and in our creative work. These are the people who can reflect back to us what we are capable of even when we may not be able to see it ourselves.

I appreciate Cameron’s insight, because I know what a huge difference it makes when I hear back from someone that they have been touched or helped by something I have put out into the world. But when the subject of believing mirrors came up again recently, I realized that in my core I feel like I am a believing mirror for humanity. In my heart of hearts I know we have it in us to get through this awakening process, turbulent though it is.Continue Reading

A Song for Winter

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The winter whispers of life at its core

I know winter can be a difficult season for many people, but there is something about its spareness that speaks to me. I love seeing the bare trees silhouetted against the winter sky, and I feel winter’s invitation to go into the quiet, into the interior spaces to allow the Unknown to gestate in the season’s darkness.

Here’s a song I wrote and recorded many years ago about this introspective time of year.

Winter

I stand alone in the darkness of night,
In the deep silence that won’t let me go.
The mighty moon draws me into her light
And leaves my shadow on shimmering snow.

The winter trees reaching up to the sky,
Bare branches laden with wisdom untold.
Their hidden roots giving strength to defy
The biting wind and the bleak winter cold.

The winter whispers of life at its core,
Of a stark beauty with nothing to hide.
The winter whispers of life that is more
Than all that’s born and beyond all that’s died.

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

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

Setting Aside Our Human-Centricity

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The haze of our ignorance is beginning to lift.

There was a brown-gray haze cloaking the city skyline, and the sun was rising red when I went up to our roof deck early this morning to do my morning journaling. I had already seen on my weather app that the air quality was “Unhealthy,” but I decided to go up anyway. After all, all I was going to do was sit and write. Nothing strenuous.

But when I saw with my own eyes what “unhealthy” air quality looks like, I thought, “I can’t be up here today.” Much as I love to start my day outside. Much as I enjoy being surrounded by the flowers that are blooming spectacularly right now in the pots lining the deck.

So I gathered up my journal and my pot of tea and was just about to go back inside when I noticed the chimney swifts flying overhead.

“They have no place to go,” I thought. No indoors they can retreat to. No N-95 masks they can don. They have to endure the smoke that is pouring down from the wildfires in Canada. They live their lives completely vulnerable to what we humans do or don’t do in response to the climate emergency.Continue Reading

My Teachers, the Birds

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The other morning, as I was on our roof deck doing my morning journaling, I noticed a pair of birds land in one of the planter boxes where we grow vegetables. While I watched the leaves of the bok choi and Swiss chard tremble as the birds made their way among them, I wondered what they were up to. Were they finding bugs for their morning breakfast? Were they sampling the tender leaves of the cilantro and parsley?

I soon had my answer when one of them, then the other, flew off with a beak full of twigs and dried leaves. They made several trips from wherever they were building their nest, each time carrying off ample nesting material. I felt so happy that our roof deck garden was providing them with what they needed for the home they were building for their young ones, and I had such a deep appreciation for how they made use of what nature readily offers.

Birds have my deepest respect for the risks they take in learning to fly, and the truth is that not all of them make it. During fledgling season, while on my walks through the neighborhood, I sometimes see dead baby birds on the sidewalk, little birds who didn’t quite get the knack of flying, though far more often, tiny baby birds who were blown out of the nest even before they had a chance to try. That, I guess, is the nature of nature that one just has to accept. Lives end. Life goes on.Continue Reading

A Prayer for the Trees

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This morning the heavy machinery is out in front of the house again, digging up the street and sidewalk to put in new valves for the gas line. It is so assaulting. The whole house shakes when that huge jackhammer starts pounding. What I’m most concerned about is the sycamore out in front of our house, a towering street tree that has been there for a hundred years.

It is such a violent thing, pounding the earth like that and ripping up whatever is in the way, roots included. And yes, I appreciate the hot water. I appreciate the warmth in the winter. But there has got to be a better way.

I long for the day when we are in tune with nature, when we take a lesson from the trees. They open themselves up to receive the energy nature freely offers. They don’t go blowing up mountains for coal, or drilling into the ocean bed for oil, or fracking the land and poisoning the water to extract every last pocket of gas.

I want humans to become more like trees. I want us to sit at the base of their trunks and listen. I want us to let them teach us how to live on this planet. How to root ourselves in this fertile, abundant Earth. How to reach out and open ourselves to the Light and turn it into a living thing. How to stand there, just stand there, being what we are, becoming what we are, expressing what we are.Continue Reading

Solstice Song

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We sing because the song is in us.

It’s the winter solstice, and this morning I was awakened by a bird singing outside my window. This has been going on for awhile now, a couple of weeks at least. A lone bird in our neighborhood has been singing at dawn, and usually earlier, despite the fact that this isn’t the season for birdsong.

I’m used to a chorus of birdsong waking me before dawn in the springtime, when the birds are singing out to find their mates, build their nests, participate in the budding life of spring. They are so loud, in fact, that I have to use earplugs if I want to sleep any later than 3 AM.

But today is the winter solstice, and it’s not the season for birdsong.

When I first heard this lone bird singing its chirping and cascading song (not a song I am familiar with) I was disturbed. “There you go,” I thought. “Things are so messed up with the climate now that even the birds are confused about what season it is.”

But this morning as I lay in bed, having been stirred from a very interesting dream—something about a turn from the age old story of conflict to a new way of nonviolence—I wondered if perhaps this bird was here on a mission. Perhaps it had taken it upon itself to come into this city, into this season of darkness when things seem so despairing on the planet, and sing a song for the human heart. A song that could stir us into remembrance that the new life of spring is on its way, even though we can’t see it.

Maybe, I thought, this little bird was even an angel donning avian form. Since we humans haven’t, for the most part, gained the ability to detect the song of angels, this angel had chosen to take on a form familiar to us, to sing something we know how to hear to stir us awake with the sound of beauty in the darkest time of the year.

It can be hard sometimes to trust that the planet is turning toward the light of understanding, that we are in fact awakening when so many things seem to suggest the opposite is true. In those moments of doubt we need to hear a song of promise pouring through our window.

Yet it can also be a challenge being the one singing of hope and joy when the circumstances don’t seem to call for it. We may wonder at times if we’re confused, if we’re deluding ourselves, singing about something that seems to have so little evidence in the material world to support it.

But, like that bird outside my window, we sing our song of gladness and joy not because the circumstances warrant it but because the song is in us. The song is us, and to silence it would be to silence our very souls.

And now it is midday. The solstice has just occurred. And I wonder if perhaps it is our willingness to be the “crazy” bird singing in the darkness, embodying the spring on the cusp of winter, that turns the planet toward the Light.

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