Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Pas de Deux

by

Where did the expression “leap and the net will appear” come from? When did it come into use? Is there evidence for its veracity? I guess I don’t have enough faith to assume that this vast Universe cares enough about any particular leap of mine to put a net under me in the nick of time.

They say spider’s silk has a relative tensile strength greater than steel cable. It is certainly far less visible and weighs a fraction of it. Is the tensile strength of the theoretical net-to-appear as strong as spider’s silk? Is it as invisible as wind?

Several years ago I was driving along a familiar road when out of the corner of my eye I saw a large hawk, high on a branch in a cluster of pines. I pulled over immediately and shut off the engine to watch this bird sitting silently amidst wind invisibly setting needles and branches dancing.

The bird was quite still. I watched. Time telescoped. I don’t know how long we stayed that way, in spacious time.

Spaciousness feels liberating –– a big inhale, ribs expanding, arms extending wide, followed by an exhalation of great relief. So comforting. A friend once explained her experience of Sabbath as “A Palace in Time.” In the luxury of spaciousness I can float, buoyed by invisible currents of thought or creativity or simply being. Yet without a center that can hold, vast openness can provoke anxiety.Continue Reading

Praying for Rain

by

“Pray for Rain. Please pray for Rain.”

In the dream Thunder and Lightening came to introduce me to their daughter Rain. Rain was in her late 20’s, a thin woman, dressed in a knee length tunic made of long torn strips of fabric in muted hues of light blues and greens, exactly the colors, I discovered, of Van Gogh’s painting titled “Rain.” She looked like the colors of the painting, except that this was not Rain falling on a French countryside in 1889. The woman, Rain, had streams of watery soot that ran down the strips of cloth. She looked quite ill. Thunder and Lightening saw that I saw that and they asked me, as only parents of a very sick child can, “Pray for Rain. Please pray for Rain.”

I have been praying for Rain for the last several years. Praying, not that Rain come, not that it rains, but for Rain herself, daughter of Thunder and Lightening. Sometimes I meditate and then when my thoughts are dancing around a little less, I invite Rain into the quiet space. I sit with Rain and listen. Sometimes she speaks, usually she’s quiet. I have sometimes prayed for her soot streaked dress, held out my hands to allow a wave of small kindness to wash through the poison. It was then I discovered that the black rivers weren’t just on the cloth, they had seeped into Rain herself, ran in her blood. This week, I want to make a healing place in my garden for Rain, a place where she is welcome, a spot to rest in, soot streaked and all.

We know, of course, why Rain is ill. The sulfur and nitrogen from our cars, factories, and sources of electrical generation have changed her. Yet Rain, in order to be who she is, must fall. Rain cannot not Rain. This I can tell you from the times I’ve sat with her, she grieves when she falls. She knows she is ill and she does not want to carry the poison in her blood into the trout filled streams or the mountains’ trees or the soil’s loam. She knows, also, that she’s needed.

Praying for Rain is not about results. There’s no “so that” in this prayer. It is, if anything, about taking ourselves out of the mode of efficacy and entering into the place where we are unfettered enough in our thoughts and assumptions and desires to hear what is: the world, whom the Lakota call mitakuye oyasin, “all our relations”; brothers and sisters who fly and swim, who hop and run and crawl; Mother and Father, Earth and Sky; Grandparents, among them, Lightening and Thunder; and, of course, their daughter, Rain.

So we pray for Rain or for Earth or for that particular Cardinal or Finch or Tree outside our window. We pray for them, not as one in charge, but as one of them; a being of sentience, intelligence and beauty. Who knows, we might surprise ourselves. We might discover that it is we who change.

 

Lawrie Hartt is a dreamer and tender of dreams. She works with those seeking healing and a soul-filled life, listening for what will assist the journey towards balance, beauty and sustainability. She has been a spiritual counselor, retreat and workshop leader for over 25 years. She co-teaches SoulWisdom with Patricia.

 

Listen to the Birds, and They Will Tell You

by

May you have time this season to listen to the birds.

“Listen to the animals and they will teach you
the birds of the air and they will tell you…”

— from The Book of Job

 

At five o’clock in the morning, the Robins sit on the peak of the neighbor’s house facing the east, singing their morning song. Sometimes each house has a Robin heralding the dawn.  Sometimes it is only one bird for the whole cul-de-sac. At times the House Finches take the place of, or join the Robins.  For the past three decades I have been out running or walking early in the morning, often before the sun rises.  I had never noticed the consistency of the placement of birds on the peaks of rooftops of houses until recently.  It seems that their singing facing the direction of East is particular to the spring and early summer months.Continue Reading

Sweet Pea

by

How shall I live?

1.
My cat is named, Sweet Pea.
Inappropriately.

2.
She was outside for the first time in a while recently
(we’re trying to spare the song birds)

But once in a while
Under careful supervision
We let her out to feel the sunshine unpaned by glass,
Free to tap her inner lion by nibbling on green grass.

3.
Suddenly, a strong breeze kicked up,
but she had forgotten what it was like to feel the wind.

Can you imagine?Continue Reading

lightfastness

by

What brings your soul to life?

What brings your soul to life? How are you taking time to heal and be whole?

For me, what is essential is spending time outside in the early morning hours. Being awake at first light gives me sustenance and kindles my hope and joy. Those early morning hours are when I can best hear the Spotted Towhee scratching in the dry leaves and grasses beneath the Sumac as it repeats its buzzy trill che zheee, che zhee. They’re when I can most clearly listen to the Pacific Tree Frogs announcing the imminent arrival of rain. In the dawn hours, I can watch the stars fade and the firmament of sky move from violet-blue to pale silk blue

“Take the breath of the new dawn
and make it part of you.
It will give you strength.”

This Hopi prayer fills me with gratitude. I continue to learn what it is to live in the “new dawn,” to “take the breath” and allow the prana, the life force of the morning to flow through me. And in those moments, I remember that the universe is synchronistic, and that I am a part of the whole. In those moments, I am healing.Continue Reading

Your Spiritual Animal Twin

by

Be a pig.

“You’re a pig.  Don’t take that personally.”  He tried to warn her that it wasn’t a physical likeness to which he was referring.

I have a friend that has the self-proclaimed gift of recognizing people’s “spiritual animal twins.”  In relatively short time, he can sense someone’s nature and pair it with an animal.  It’s rather remarkable.  He calls someone a Meer cat and you think to yourself, “She’s totally a Meer cat.”  He says to someone else, “You’re an alligator,” and now you understand why he always has his soul out sunning itself on the sawgrass.

According to my friend, I’m a land turtle.  It’s probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.  And, yes, people have said nice things before.  “You’re steady.”  I’ll take it.  I pick up my shell and move on…slowly.Continue Reading

Be 101

by

Who are your teachers of Being?

There is a soft rock radio station here in Philadelphia called B101. A few years ago, driving, I pulled up behind a bus at a stop light. On the back of the bus was an ad for B101—a picture of a bright bumble bee next to the call letters.

It occurred to me that it would make a great name for a course—one we could probably all benefit from.

Be 101.

Our culture specializes in doing. Most of us have the equivalent of an advanced degree in it, in fact. But being? Well, that’s just not something we’re taught.

So an introductory course in being might be just the ticket.  Unlike all those courses we took whose textbooks and notes—if we even still have them—are gathering dust in our attic, I imagine we would consult our notes from Be 101 quite often.  We could pull them out whenever we found ourselves in the throes of anxiety about our circumstances or despair about all the ways we are failing at life.

In fact, our Be 101 notebook might rest on our nightstand like a sacred text—pages dog-eared, favorite passages highlighted in yellow, margins full of scribbled comments.

In Be 101 we would learn that we are not our thoughts. We are not our accomplishments. We are not our looks. We are not our possessions. We are not our professions.

Come to think of it, in a culture as ego and achievement driven as ours—with an economy built upon the principle of dissatisfaction—Be 101 would be the most subversive course in the entire curriculum.

Turning to the Teachers

Who are the experts among us who could teach us about being?

I’m sure you have your own favorite teachers. As for myself, I look to the Trees.

Trees are amazing instructors in the art of being. They stay put, root themselves deeply in their own place in the world, and simply go about becoming more of what they already are. They stand. They breathe. They become.

Some trees have been breathing and becoming for hundreds of years, some for thousands.  In California there is a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine that’s been alive for more than 48oo years. Think of it. That Bristlecone was already 2300 years old when the Buddha sat down under another tree and became enlightened.

Can you imagine standing in the same place for 4800 years with no place you had to go and nothing you had to do but be yourself?

Sometimes when I’m in the woods I’ll lean my body up against a tree trunk to take in its energy. Invariably it reconnects me with a quiet, centered place in me that has no agenda and no anxiety.  There, at the feet of these great ones, I am reminded of my intrinsic worth and my timeless essence.  There I am reminded that—despite all of our human activities, ambitions, and aspirations—there is really nothing more precious than Being itself.

The Cross Speaks

by

 

Not long ago I was thriving on a hill in Galilee. My roots reached deep into the rocky soil.  Sunlight shone upon my leaves, the wind danced though my branches.  In the winter, rain fell cool upon my body, seeping into the soil of my thirsty roots. I drank gladly of that living water.

I witnessed the dawn of each day. At night I reached up to the Moon in her silent cycles, and the slow swirling of stars.

My body shuddered when the thunder cracked. I stood naked in the raging storm—bending with the tempest so as not to break—and when it passed I held the birds, singing in my branches.

I knew the breath of life.

But then they came for me.  Not with swords, but axes, and I was silent, like a lamb led to the slaughter.

Half of my body is still there on that distant hill, decaying in the soil of Galilee.  The other half they dragged here for their tortuous display.

The emperor isn’t satisfied with what he already has. He wants more land, more wealth, more power. Lives have to be sacrificed.

Golgotha they call it. Place of the skull. As if it were only humans whose broken bodies hang here.

Entire forests of my kin are destroyed because humans are never content with what they have, with what they are.  You would call it genocide if the victims looked like you.

I have a question for you.  Why are you dissatisfied?  Why is nothing ever enough for you?  Why are you always striving for more?

Can you not stop for once in your anxious striving and just let yourselves be still? Can you not feel yourselves rooted in the Earth? Can you not let the miracle of the sunlight, the rain, the soil, the song of the birds and the dance of the wind be enough for you?

Do you not understand that your task on this Earth is to witness its magnificence, to delight in the wonder of existence, to be the I Am-ness—the awake presence that marvels at the unfolding of life?

You are living in a falsehood, believing your destiny is separate from my own life.  I am the other one sacrificed on this windswept hill, and I suppose that has never even occurred to you.

You seem to believe you can destroy us and not destroy yourselves as well. But consider this: the man’s blood that even now is seeping into my grain carries the oxygen once breathed out by my leaves.  Are you so blind?

The one you call Jesus tried to show you what power truly is—not domination and violence, but healing, acceptance, compassion, Life.  He wanted you to see that you don’t need riches because you are already enough.  The way the birds of the air are enough and the lilies of the field are enough.

But you remained asleep in your dream of separateness and striving, and now the Earth is hanging on the cross of your empires and your egos.

We are weary, so weary.  We cannot endure your illusion much longer. It is right that you have sung “Hosanna,” for it means “save us.”

I implore you to sing it again from your heart. Sing it for yourselves. Sing it for all of us.

Sing it for me.