Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

The Forest: Our Wisdom Teacher

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Life is an interdependent whole.

Recently, a criminal cyber organization called DarkSide, based in Eastern Europe, hacked into Colonial Pipeline’s computer system and installed ransomware. As a result, the pipeline, which serves many areas on the East Coast, was shut down.

After they hacked Colonial Pipeline, DarkSide apologized for inconveniencing U.S. citizens. They claimed they only ever wanted money and never intended to disrupt the lives of ordinary people. After pressure was put on them by the U.S. government, DarkSide supposedly disbanded their operations.

What I find especially interesting is that DarkSide (who comes up with these names anyway?) had so perfected their ransomware that they had established a franchise, sharing their ransomware code with other hackers in exchange for a portion of their proceeds.

That the Internet, which now connects people globally, is being used to extort wealth may be inevitable in a capitalist economy that is all about taking. The whole idea in vogue now is to amass as much wealth as possible and share as little as you can get away with.

It may be that DarkSide is just bringing out of the shadows the dysfunctional priorities of the global economy. The only difference is that in their case the law doesn’t support the way they go about it. But then, laws, too, can be criminal.Continue Reading

Chrysalis Wisdom in a Time of Polarization

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Metamorphosis happens.
In this moment of global transition it seems as if we are witnessing the divergence of two realities. One expresses the idea of separateness, which gives rise to all manner of exploitation, fear and domination, and the other embraces interconnection and interdependence, which prepares the way for a world based in mutuality and reciprocity. Watching these realities diverge into increasing polarization can be disheartening. And yet I am always reminded of what occurs in the chrysalis as the caterpillar undergoes its metamorphosis into a butterfly. As you probably know, in the chrysalis stage, the structure of the caterpillar completely dissolves, and then, from the soup of its former self, its previously latent DNA, which carries the encoding to bring forth a butterfly, becomes activated. Once activated, this DNA causes imaginal, or organizer, cells to arise, and these imaginal cells begin to find each other, coalescing into what are called imaginal buds, the nascent organs of the butterfly. But an interesting thing happens as these cells begin to emerge and imaginal buds begin to form. Enough of the caterpillar’s old immune system is still intact to be able to respond to this emergence, and, determining that these new cells and buds are alien intruders, it seeks to destroy them.Continue Reading

Love’s Idiots

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May you be who you are here to be.

It’s been a fascinating experience for me these past four years as I have occasionally ventured into the whirlwind of our political controversies. I’m not the sort of person who relishes conflict, so I wasn’t eager to do it, yet I felt drawn to share my own take on things.

When I wrote about Donald Trump as someone who portrays the ego mind and who is here to help us recognize and release those patterns in ourselves, I found myself in an interesting borderland. Since I haven’t seen him as evil incarnate, nor as a savior figure—both of which I believe are just egoic projections—I have stood outside the polarized perspectives about him that gained such currency in the culture.

Some people were irked that I wasn’t getting on board with the Trump-the-Savior/Trump-the-Demon dualism. One person went so far as to tell me I was an idiot for not seeing him as a lightworker.

His choice of words got me thinking, and I realized he was right. I am an idiot.

The word idiot comes from the Greek, and it originally referred to someone who goes their own way. Those of us who are supporting this global awakening are going our own way. We are walking away from the norms of an ego-oriented world, which is based in judgment, division, and attack, and we are choosing to live into something New, something more revolutionary than the planet has ever seen.

We are the idiots who we have the audacity to stand in the very real possibility of a world that depicts the truth of Love, the truth of our inherent interconnectedness, a world founded upon mutual respect and reciprocity and which celebrates our oneness with all of Life.

Why? Because we feel that world within us, and we simply can’t ignore it. We sense it stirring in our cells and claiming our imagination, even though we may not be able to see it clearly yet.

Of course we have our days when the ways of the old draw us in and we get caught up in the hoopla. But at some level of our being we have made a choice to support this planetary awakening, attuning ourselves to the frequency and the vision of a transformed world and allowing it to gain a foothold in our consciousness, in our cells, in our lives, in our world.

Crystallizing Love

Recently I was sitting in our glassed in porch watching a beautiful snowfall, big clumps of flakes floating silently from the sky. I sat there for hours, mesmerized.

Snow always blows my mind when I consider that every snowflake is unique, even though every snowflake is the same thing: water. Just as we are each unique, even though we are each the same thing: Love. And I believe this is what we are here to do: to crystallize Love in a way that is uniquely our own.

The other thing that amazes me about snow is that each snowflake, by itself, is quite unsubstantial. And yet, as I watched from our porch that morning I could see what was happening. Each unique snowflake was joined by countless other unique snowflakes, and together they blanketed the landscape with beauty and brought a hushed peace to the city.

So my wish for you is that you allow your essential Love nature to crystallize and express itself in your life in a way that is uniquely your own.

And always remember that you are not alone. There is a Love blizzard underway that you are part of. So keep the faith and be who you are here to be, no matter how strange it may seem to others.

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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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Tree Wisdom

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As I listened, I began to sense what the Tree knew.

Last week Kip and I were on vacation in the Adirondacks where we had rented a small cabin next to a fork of the Moose River. Every morning I would get up early, make myself a mug of tea and take my journal down by the river bank to journal and watch the morning mist rise from the water. Most evenings Kip and I would see a beaver swimming up or down the river, and once we saw a mink scurrying along the bank.

During the day we hiked through forests along trails that led to sparkling blue lakes and, finding a log or boulder to sit on, would settle in to have our picnic lunch.

One of the most memorable moments for me, though, was a visit to a small stand of old growth forest, one of the few remaining areas of old growth that had escaped the clear cutting that had taken place throughout the region over a century and a half ago.

In this remaining pocket of old growth forest the energy was noticeably different from the areas that had been reforested. The moment I stepped onto the trail I could feel the presence of the trees that had stood there for hundreds of years—the serenity was palpable.Continue Reading

Our Moment of Clarity

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We are experiencing a moment of global clarity

Who would have guessed even four months ago that we would see the planetary changes that we have witnessed in recent weeks? For the first time in a generation people in India can see the Himalayas from hundreds of miles away. People in China can step out of their homes and see a blue sky for the first time in their memory. Turtles are storming the empty beaches to lay their eggs, lions are lazing in the deserted highways of South Africa, fish are frolicking in the clean canals of Venice.

With the cessation of human activity, the crust of the Earth has even grown quieter, and seismologists have a chance now to detect the Earth’s natural movements, like a doctor with a stethoscope finally able to hear the subtle nuances of a heartbeat.

A Moment of Clarity

We are experiencing, globally, a moment of clarity, and the clarity isn’t only what we are witnessing in the natural environment. We are also experiencing a growing clarity in the mind—clarity that we are interconnected in ways we can’t even begin to fathom, clarity about what is essential and what isn’t, clarity that we humans have been so consumed (consider the word) by the world we had fashioned that we had lost touch with who we really are or what we really desire.Continue Reading

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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My Teacher, the Peace Lily

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peace lily
Sometimes giving up opens the way.

I knew something was wrong with my beloved peace lily when its leaves began to droop. It had been thriving in its little corner of the living room for years, getting just the right amount of reflected light coming down the stairwell from the skylight in the hallway upstairs.

The plant meant a lot to me and I didn’t want to lose it: it had been a gift given to me under poignant circumstances by someone dear to me (though perhaps that’s a story for another day). I had always appreciated how it graced the space with its presence, being the first thing I saw whenever I walked in the front door.

So I did my best to nurse it back to health. I set it out on our enclosed porch where it could get a bit more light and could be in the company of several other plants — I believe community is important when it comes to healing — and I took care not to water it too much or too little.

But my efforts were to no avail. It continued to languish until it became obvious it was never going to bounce back.

Reluctantly, I accepted that that it was time to let it go, so I set it outside our back door until I could get around to taking it over to the community garden and add it to the compost pile.Continue Reading