Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Walking Away From the Game

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Let me begin by saying two things. First, I’m not really into sports. Second, my spouse, Kip, is a soccer aficianado, and because of that I sometimes learn about the inspiring things that can happen in the world of sports, one of which took place a couple weeks ago at a soccer match in Italy.

The game was being played by two Italian teams, and on the visiting team from Milan was a player, Kevin-Prince Boateng, who is a German-Ghanian. Whenever he got the ball, some of the fans in the stands would start making racist taunts. Finally, Boateng had had enough. He threw the ball into the stands at the hecklers, pulled off his jersey and walked off the field.

That alone would have made for an inspiring tale of personal courage, but it wasn’t the end of the story. Soon all his teammates followed him off the field, then the players on the home team did as well.Continue Reading

We the Poets

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How long will it be until you call me sister?

It’s a typical afternoon at Al Aqsa Academy in South Kensington, Philadelphia. Back from recess, 30 third-graders burst into the classroom, carrying stories, alliances, and scuffles that began in the playground. Calmly, their teacher reminds them that it’s time for poetry, and we begin. I tape up a poster of N. Scott Momaday’s The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee, which uses metaphor to capture the poet’s self-awareness and relationship to the world outside himself.

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain. . .

Its powerful repetitions are very pleasing. Students tap their feet to the rhythm of each line. Thinking of Walt Whitman, as well as my own Hebrew Sabbath prayers, I wonder if the children are reminded of Islamic prayers. Walking around the classroom, I glance at first drafts as students compose. Two wonderful poems stand out, written Zubair and Zayd. These thoughtful twins have written poetry for three years, since I begin lessons in first grade at this large Islamic day school.  When asked about the title of his poem, Zubair says that this is the poem of his life. His brother, Zayd, is quite concerned with the environment and what he can do to care for it.Continue Reading

Hoodies, Menorahs and Rainbow Flags

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Have you ever experienced the power of solidarity?

Since the news about the senseless murder of Trayvon Martin has erupted into our collective consciousness, several people of all races and genders have taken to wearing hoodies as a symbolic act of solidarity with young black men who are violently attacked and even killed simply because of their gender and race. Although the donning of hoodies will not make racism go away overnight, and in fact will do little to address the insidious forms systemic racism can take, I see it as a meaningful gesture if it is an authentic expression that people are not willing to stand by and allow minority groups to continue to be the target of ruthless attacks.

Solidarity as a means of nonviolent resistance goes way back. Jesus’ table solidarity with the marginalized people in his society — eating with tax collectors and “sinners” (those too poor to participate in their religion’s sacrificial requirements) — was one of the things that led to his crucifixion. Gandhi, although a well-educated lawyer who could have lived a life of comfort and privilege, chose instead to practice solidarity with the poor and untouchables of India, living a life of simplicity, wearing a loincloth, and ultimately paying with his life for his stance of solidarity with the Muslim minority in what had become a divided India. Julia Butterfly practiced solidarity when she lived for more than two years 180 feet off the ground in the branches of Luna, a 1500 year old giant redwood tree, to save the redwood forest from being clear cut. And, of course, there is the story about King Christian X and the people of Denmark foiling the Nazis’ attempts to round up the Jews in their country by collectively wearing the Star of David.

The latter example, by the way, never happened. Not in a literal sense that is. Neither the Danish Jews nor the Danish King ever wore the Star of David, but even though the story isn’t factually true, it is metaphorically true in that most of the Jews in Denmark were spared because the majority of Danes protected them, demonstrating that when enough people practice nonviolent solidarity, oppressive forces become powerless.

The story about King Christian, even though not factual, helped stem anti-Semitic violence in Billings, Montana in 1993 when a white supremacist threw a cinder block through the window of a Jewish family that was displaying a menorah during Chanukah. Margaret McDonald, executive director of the Montana Association of Churches, was inspired by the story of King Christian and launched a movement that resulted in thousands of non-Jewish residents of Billings displaying menorahs in their windows in defense of their Jewish neighbors. For a while the bigotry intensified. White supremacist vandals broke windows and threatened some of the people who had taken up the cause, but in the end the violence and intimidation ceased.

I was in turn inspired by the example of the people of Billings when we had a similar experience in our neighborhood in 1999. In that case it was a gay man who was being singled out. The rainbow flag he had flying outside his home was repeatedly ripped down by college students who lived in the area who were also taunting him with homophobic slurs. When he told me what was going on, I asked our landlady if we could fly a rainbow flag outside our apartment as well. She took the idea to the neighborhood association and soon there were dozens of rainbow flags hanging outside homes in our neighborhood, and the homophobic attacks subsided.

Practicing solidarity is always uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous because we place ourselves alongside those being targeted, coming to understand more deeply the fear, discrimination and hatred that many have to deal with on a daily basis.  That’s why a white man walking down the street wearing a hoodie isn’t really doing much to challenge racist attitudes, but if he’s wearing a hoodie walking alongside a black man wearing a hoodie and they’re walking through a gated community, well, that’s another story.

All bigots and oppressive systems depend first and foremost on one thing: that people in the majority group who are not being targeted will sit quietly by while others are. The whole system of oppression expects that people will put their own safety first rather than risking their well being to ally themselves with the oppressed. When enough people in the majority group are willing to stand alongside those who are being singled out, however, the cycles of violence grind to a halt.

Solidarity gains its power because at its heart it erodes the fundamental belief that underlies all bigotry and oppression: that separateness is real. In that sense, practicing solidarity is a profoundly spiritual act because it overtly enacts the underlying truth that all life originates from and is an expression of the same Source.

Yet if we believe that the only goal of nonviolent solidarity is to protect the vulnerable we miss what is perhaps the most potent potential outcome: the healing of the bigot. The bigot is someone who is trapped in the illusion of separateness. When faced with acts of solidarity, his worldview is challenged and sometimes even overturned. This is why, if solidarity is to be effective, it must be nonviolent, for to engage in violence against the oppressor is to buy into the same falsehood that he himself is caught in, that of otherness.

The word solidarity itself conveys the essential reality that in the end we cannot be divided along lines of race, gender, class, orientation, or any other category because these divisions are simply the product of our minds’ illusion.  Solidarity is based in the knowing that when one of us bleeds, we all bleed.

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.

 

Occupy the New Mind

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Which operating system are you feeding?

Suppose just for a moment that we are all living in a false reality, an illusion that has been generated by a collective misconception, very much like a program that’s running on a holodeck on one of the ships on Star Trek. This false reality is the creation of the human mind out of touch with our true nature as timeless, divine beings. Everything that you witness in the world around you that constricts or annihilates the ongoing creativity and diversity of Life is the mind’s illusion taking on manifested form.

Let’s call this false reality the emperor’s world. The emperor’s world constructs systems that benefit a small minority by dominating, conquering or enslaving others. In the emperor’s world, nature is understood as a commodity to be exploited, and the goal of life is to accumulate power and wealth.

The misconception at the root of this false reality — the operating system, if you will, running beneath the emperor’s world program — is that there exists in this Universe something called “separateness”: “separateness” between people, “separateness” between humans and other species, between humans and the Earth, “separateness” between the physical dimension and the non-physical.Continue Reading