Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

The Inner Climate Change

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The butterfly emerges out of an experience of dissolution.

A few nights ago I had a dream that has lingered with me. I didn’t remember the whole dream, but in the part that I did remember I was looking through a window at a row of enormous butterfly bushes that were teeming with hundreds of butterflies large and small. Some had blue wings, some orange and black, others yellow and black, and several of them had markings I had never seen before. Somehow in the dream I knew that the cause of this explosive outbreak of butterflies was global warming.

Global warming has certainly been on my mind since, like much of the nation, we’ve been having a heat wave in Philadelphia. The daffodils and forsythia bloomed more than a month early, the azaleas are already opening and many of the flowering trees, including the magnolias, peaked before winter had even officially ended.

I know I’m not alone in my concern about the situation and what it forebodes about what’s to come. Shawn Lawrence Otto wrote in his March 19th Huffington Post article “Cherry Blossoms, Ice Boxes, BMWs and Climate Change” that this heat wave is “one of the most extreme meteorological events in US history.” Temperatures across much of the nation have been running 20 to 40 degrees above normal, and at the time when the article was released 2000 U.S. temperature records had already been broken this year.

With extreme weather becoming the new norm it’s becoming harder and harder to live in the illusion that climate change isn’t upon us. Those of us who have recognized for years that our policies and behaviors must change are probably not surprised by the disturbing way 2012 has begun, but even so it is unsettling to witness the predictions coming true. I suppose many of us are wondering if it’s already too late, if our species has dawdled so long, refusing out of greed or laziness or lack of imagination to make the radical changes necessary, that we have already passed Earth’s tipping point and life as we have known it is over.

One would think this heat wave, as well as the other climate catastrophes that we’ve been witnessing in recent years — droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, fires — would be a wake up call to our leaders, but sadly the political conversation in this election year has, if anything, turned even more toward rhetoric bolstering the status quo of our fossil fuel economy. This fact is sad, though not surprising since, as we are well aware, the political process is fueled by corporate interests. More and more, the government has no stake in leading us toward a viable future, but rather in simply amassing wealth for the wealthy. (A situation, I might add, which could be rectified if The People demand the passage of the Constitutional Amendment that has recently been introduced which states that corporations are not people.)

So if things are so dire, why in the world did my dream depict an explosion of butterflies resulting from global warming?

Over the last twenty years I have worked with my dreams and I have found them to be an extraordinary source of wisdom. They have often, in fact, provided me with information that has changed my life. Dreams, like mythology, use the language of symbol, and if we want to understand what they are trying to say to us we have to step out of our literalistic mindset. This dream that I had was not saying that there will be a literal explosion of butterflies upon the planet due to global warming. (In fact, it is far more likely that butterfly populations will plummet.) But the Butterfly as an archetypal symbol is one of the most potent symbols imaginable for radical transformation.

David Korten, in his book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, refers to the work of biologist Elisabet Sahtouris who explored the metamorphosis that the monarch caterpillar undergoes in becoming a butterfly. Korten writes:

The caterpillar is a voracious consumer that devotes its life to gorging itself on nature’s bounty. When it has had its fill, it fastens itself to a convenient twig and encloses itself in a chrysalis. Once snug inside, it undergoes a crisis as the structures of its cellular tissue begin to dissolve into an organic soup.

Yet guided by some deep inner wisdom, a number of organizer cells begin to rush around gathering other cells to form imaginal buds, initially independent multicellular structures that begin to give form to the organs of a new creature. Correctly perceiving a threat to the old order, but misdiagnosing the source, the caterpillars’ still intact immune system attributes the threat to the imaginal buds and attacks them as alien intruders.

The imaginal buds prevail by linking up with one another in a cooperative effort that brings forth a new being of great beauty, wondrous possibilities, and little identifiable resemblance to its progenitor. In its rebirth, the monarch butterfly lives lightly on Earth, serves the regeneration of life as a pollinator, and migrates thousands of miles to experience life’s possibilities in ways the earthbound caterpillar could not imagine. [p. 74-75]

I believe this is what the dream was wanting to convey: that global warming is bringing a transformation upon the planet just as radical as that of the caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly. The prevailing ego paradigm (Caterpillar) that currently governs the human world and which asserts a distorted understanding of “self-interest” is dissolving, and a new consciousness of oneness, of unity with the Earth, with all of Life (Butterfly) is emerging. It can be no other way, because once eco-systems begin to collapse the illusion that any of us are distinct individuals separate from the rest of the web of life collapses as well.

The way I see it though, once this new consciousness emerges, possibilities will present themselves that we are, at this point, unable to imagine. I believe that, like the caterpillar, we have encoded into us a destiny quite extraordinary that will only come into being when the old self dies.

As extreme as the climate change happening on the planet may be, there is an equally extreme shift happening within the climate of the human mind and the consciousness through which we perceive ourselves and the world. The two climate changes are not distinct from one another. They are intricately intertwined, and one of the most potent ways each of us can contribute to the transformation on Earth is to attend to the transformation within, surrendering our ego attachments, releasing our us/them ways of thinking, and trusting that there are far greater forces at work here than just the human will, forces which are helping to birth a new reality on this planet.

 

Into the Quiet

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In the quiet I can listen.

I spent the better part of the last two weeks on retreat at Ghost Ranch in the high desert of northern New Mexico, where the land is spacious and quiet, where often the only sound is that of the echoing caw of ravens flying along the cliff face of the surrounding mesas, where the night sky, unobscured by city lights, displays thousands upon thousands of stars and the soft whisper of the Milky Way can be seen stretching from horizon to horizon.

I have been going there for a couple of weeks most winters for the past 11 years, and I would not be overstating the case to say that those times of retreat have been a lifeline to my soul. While I’m there I hike, do dream work and make art, walk the labyrinth and listen for its wisdom for me.

A couple of nights after I arrived was the night of the full moon. After the sun went down and the land began to grow darker, I left my room and hiked to the labyrinth that sits in front of the cliff of a high mesa. In the dimming light I walked its slow, winding path which is always a powerful symbol for me of the journey of life that wends this way this way and that. I finally reached the labyrinth’s center and there I waited. The edge of moonlight was making its way slowly across the landscape from the west as the moon rose higher and higher, first illuminating the far hills and rock formations in the distance with an ethereal silver light that gradually made its way toward me. The light gathered, brighter and brighter, behind the rim of the mesa in front of me, until finally a sliver of moon slid above the cliff, piercing my eyes with its brilliance, and I stood there weeping with amazement and gratitude.

My time of retreat reminded me, as it always does, of how cluttered my life can become. How, like the artificial lights of the city that drown out the mystery of the night, my culture’s priorities on productivity, activity, and being constantly plugged-in crowd out the wisdom of my own heart and soul. I think it’s a common dilemma; most of us live our lives deluged by external messages and demands, rarely making time or space to quiet and replenish ourselves at the well of our own Being.

The challenge, as always, in returning from a time of retreat is to find ways to weave its lessons and wisdom into my daily life. Since I’ve been back, one thing I’ve been doing is limiting my time on-line to 30 minutes a day. (I even set the timer!) I’m looking at it as a spiritual practice, a pre-Lenten fast if you will, which I intend to continue. What I am discovering is that it allows me to stay in touch more consistently with the calm clarity that resides in my core.

On retreat, whenever I step out into the night to stargaze I have to let my eyes adjust for a while to the darkness before I can take in the wonder of what is overhead. That process is a metaphor for me of what is required if I want to connect with my soul. I have to remove myself from the onslaught of all the “artificial lights” that surround me, the values and messages that bombard me with shallow understandings of what’s important, worthy, and most of all, real. Only then, when I let myself stand in the mystery of the inner quiet and abide in the darkness of Unknowing can I begin to perceive the true, numinous light of my existence. Only then can I gaze out from the center of my timeless self upon a cosmos from which I have come and with which I am completely and forever one.

Getting to the Roots

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Without its roots the tree will die.

Christmastide is ending today, the twelfth day of Christmas, and this weekend our Christmas tree will be coming down to be recycled. Surprisingly, even though it’s been up for almost three weeks, it is still drinking water and hasn’t yet begun dropping its needles. I know, though, if I left it long enough it would eventually lose the capacity to pull up the moisture it needs to remain supple and green and would begin to turn brittle and brown.

A few years ago, early one Sunday morning in December, I was parking my car near a place in our neighborhood where they sell Christmas trees just as the workers were unloading the trees from their truck and setting them up on the sidewalk to sell. As I watched them, I had a visceral feeling of repulsion. I saw Christmas trees in a way I never had before: as living beings whose bodies had been cut in half. Suddenly this yuletide practice seemed brutal and irrational to me, that we should slaughter trees by amputating them from their roots in order to celebrate a spiritual holiday.

And yet, in spite of my ambivalence about it, we have continued to buy a tree each year not only because we love the beauty of a decorated Christmas tree, but because it helps support the tree farmers in our region who would otherwise be selling their land off to developers. In an ironic way, the slaughter of trees helps save the land. Realizing this strange paradox, I feel enormous gratitude for the tree that stands in our living room, and in my heart I thank it for its sacrifice.

I think we are more like trees than we know. We have an outer, visible aspect of ourselves that everyone can see, the aspect that interacts with the external world and is engaged in activities, and, just like we do with our Christmas trees, we usually take great care to attend to its appearance. But there’s also the inward, hidden part of us that is just as essential to our well being but from which too many of us are cut off. It is the aspect of ourselves that taps into mystery, the unseen dimension out of which the outer being arises. Jungians would speak of it in terms of the unconscious that has access to the archetypal energies that fuel our psyches.

Ours is an externally oriented culture, and seems to be more so than ever now that we have technologies that keep us plugged into the external world 24/7. Trying to live constantly attentive to the external world, though, is like trying to live like a tree cut off from its roots. We lose our connection with something vital and life-giving and, over time, we begin to wither and die.

Some cultures are much wiser than ours about staying connected with their roots. In some cultures, for instance, people wouldn’t dream of starting their day before they’d gathered to talk about the dreams that had visited them at night. They understand that it is the unseen realm of mystery that offers them the wisdom they need to live well, and that only by being rooted in and nourished by that dark, unseen realm can the external self thrive.

People in the Western world might be wising up, though, to the fact that having to be at the beck and call of the external world round the clock is simply unsustainable. Last week, the Volkswagon company made a landmark agreement with their workers’ union that the company’s email servers would shut down after the work day so that workers will no longer receive work messages on their BlackBerries when they are off-duty. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a trend.

They say that a tree’s roots underground are as extensive as the trunk and branches that are visible above ground. Can you imagine how much healthier, happier and stable we would be — individually and collectively — if we lived our lives as balanced as trees do in their natural state, tending to growing our roots as much as we do our outer selves?

 

Returning Light

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Do you ever doubt that the light will return?

Some years back we had a lot of rewiring done in our house, which was a huge project. For days on end, the house was crawling with electricians pulling wires through walls, and installing outlets and switches. The basement ceiling looked like a rat’s nest of conduit and copper. To a layperson’s eye it looked like complete chaos, and the work just seemed to go on and on.

One day, just as I was beginning to wonder if this would ever end, our electrician comforted us by saying, “It always looks the worst right before it’s done.” And sure enough, in a couple of days the chaos settled into an orderly array that magically lit up the house with the flip of a switch.

That experience came to my mind probably because tonight is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year for us in the northern hemisphere. Although I love the long nights, I realize that a lot of people don’t. The season seems bleak and depressing to them and they long for the return of the light.Continue Reading

Autumn’s Wisdom

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May the autumn trees be our spiritual teachers.

I love the season of autumn, the brilliance of the sunlight, the golden trees that blaze so gloriously before the onset of winter, the graceful dance of leaves riding the wind. Every year this season reminds me to trust in nature’s cycles, not to hold onto what is ready to pass away but to let the necessary shedding occur so that emptiness can hold the space for something new to emerge. Continue Reading

All Big Things

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What is one tiny seed you could plant today?

We’ve been harvesting chilis from our garden and so far have canned 34 jars and the plants are still producing. We started the plants last winter from small seeds, no more than a quarter of an inch across, but now, from those few tiny seeds, we have chilis to last us for at least the next couple of years, and plenty to share.

Is there something you envision for your life, but you feel immobilized because it seems too big and you don’t know where to begin? Or is there some shift in the world you long to see, but because the status quo is so entrenched there just seems no possibility of it ever becoming a reality? If so, take a lesson from the seed: all big things start small.

Let me repeat that, because it’s so easy to forget. All big things start small.