Patricia Pearce

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How History Repents

July 7, 2020 by Patricia Pearce

We have the power to set the future free

This 4th of July was strangely quiet here in Philadelphia. Normally the holiday is a very big deal in this city. People flock to our neighborhood in droves to attend a massive, booming, concert on the Parkway, followed by a spectacular, equally booming, fireworks display over the Art Museum. But because of the pandemic, neither happened this year.

Sitting on my roof deck that afternoon, the quiet made it feel like we were a city and a nation deep in introspection, as indeed we need to be. These last weeks and months have brought to light so much that is crying out for healing in our nation, so many erroneous beliefs that need to be let go, so many injustices that need to be dismantled.

Every year on the 4th of July, the Declaration of Independence is read aloud in front of Independence Hall in Old City Philadelphia—a yearly ritual which I suppose took place virtually this year—and I have to say that despite all the injustices and flaws of our nation, I still believe in the words put forth in that Declaration. Just because they have never been enacted doesn’t minimize for me the importance of the vision they set forth.Continue Reading

Bringing in the Light

June 10, 2020 by Patricia Pearce

This is the time for new patterns to become anchored in form.

Last Tuesday morning I was meditating, holding in the energy of Love all that has been happening here in Philadelphia in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, all the anger, the pain, the public outcry for justice, and as I sat I wondered what it would be like to be able to join with other energy workers in Philadelphia to hold this collectively on behalf of our city.

As soon as I was finished meditating I texted my friend Zoana, a gifted energy worker, and asked if she knew of any local groups that are joining together with this intention. She didn’t, but said she would be happy to help organize something.

So we wrote an email that same day letting people know that we would be tuning in three times each day, and we sent it out to energy workers we knew inviting them to join us, and asked them to forward the invitation to others.

Clearing the Way

The next day when we were tuning in, the energy that Zoana and I both sensed coming through felt extremely intense. I wouldn’t describe it as angry. I would describe it as fierce, a Kali energy come to clear out old patterns so that the new can arise.Continue Reading

Of Looting and Love

June 1, 2020 by Patricia Pearce

Beneath it all, racism is a denial of Love

It’s early Sunday morning and I’m sitting on my roof deck. It’s a beautiful morning, cool, sunny. The flowers in the pots lining the edge of the deck are starting to come into bloom: bright yellows, reds, purples. The birds are singing. A gentle breeze is blowing.

Over Center City Philadelphia, about a mile and a half to the south, a helicopter is hovering, only one. Last night, when I could see the smoke coming from the building the protestors had set on fire, there were half a dozen.

To loot (v): to rob especially on a large scale and usually by violence or corruption.

1619: The first ship bringing human beings abducted from the continent of Africa arrives in Point Comfort, in the colony of Virginia.

Last night an old friend of mine, Tyrone, emailed me from Denver to say he was thinking of me. He’d seen the news coverage from Philadelphia, and he told me and Kip, my husband, to stay put and stay safe.

Tyrone and I first met in high school when mandatory bussing in Denver started. He had to get up hours before dawn to catch the school bus that took him across town so he could get to our white suburban school and integrate it before the first bell rang.Continue Reading

Ferguson and Other Nightmares

August 20, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

#453619428 / gettyimages.com

Like most people, I have found the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, deeply disturbing. One of the most troubling things I learned this morning didn’t have to do with the ongoing violence, looting and arrests. It was the results of a Pew survey that showed a wide disparity of opinion between whites and blacks about whether Mike Brown’s murder points to deep racial issues in our country.

I think part of the disparity of opinion is because many white people don’t understand the difference between racism and prejudice. Prejudice is holding negative stereotypes about others. Anybody can be prejudiced, and most of us are in some way or another.

Racism, though, is far more insidious because it couples prejudice with institutional power. It places people in the dominant group in the position of being able to carry out their prejudice through institutional systems.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t recall a time when an unarmed white youth was gunned down in similar fashion by a black member of a police force. The judicial system in this country is certainly racist as well. The evidence? Blacks are incarcerated at overwhelming rates and for far longer compared to whites for similar crimes.

Someone has said that racism is a disease white people catch, but black people die from. And black people are dying.

As a white person, therefore, it is incumbent on me not only to speak out about injustice, but just as important to heal myself of the disease of racism. It is a highly contagious disease that everyone in our society is exposed to from an early age. It landed on our shores with the arrival of slave ships unloading their emaciated cargo onto the auction blocks, and unlike so many diseases that our medical establishment has managed to banish, racism is one that continues to inflict us all, sometimes with deadly results. [Along those lines, let me recommend an excellent book: Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, by Joy DeGruy]

Every now and then in this blog I talk about this world we live in being a dream. That isn’t an abstract concept for me. It was something that I saw to be the case at the height of an intense awakening I experienced over a decade ago. We are literally living out a story based on our unconsciousness. At the root of this dream’s plot is a very simple, erroneous premise: that something called “separateness” exists.

Anyone who knows me well knows that dream work has been a central feature of my spiritual life. Some of the most important decisions of my life have been informed by dreams, and much of my own healing has come about because of the insights dreams have brought me.

While I was in seminary, when “big dreams” first started coming to me, I studied dream interpretation with Jeremy Taylor, author of several books on dream work, and one of Taylor’s central premises is that all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness. All dreams.

So let’s imagine for a moment that what’s happening in Ferguson is a dream, that it’s our dream. Better yet, look at it as your dream, because if separateness doesn’t exist, then it is your dream as much as it is mine, as much as it is the people’s on the embattled streets of Ferguson.

What does it mean in your dream that a white police officer has just gunned down an unarmed black teenager? What part of you is that officer? What is at the root of his hatred? What does he really fear?

And what part of you is that black teenager, despised, vilified as dangerous, the target for your psyche’s rage and fear?

How might the battle happening on the streets of Ferguson point to the same divisions that play out in your own psyche, and what must you do to reconcile those factions so that true peace can come? In other words, how can you bring the truth of Love (which is, simply put, the Reality of Oneness) to bear in this hostile, volatile situation?

These are not idle questions. The peace of the world rests on each of us doing this difficult work, of seeing the “other” as an aspect of ourselves no matter how hard it may be to accept. I, too, must embrace the unpleasant truth that inside of me is an armed racist policeman who needs healing, and a despised black teenager who needs respect.

What’s happening in Ferguson is a nightmare. What’s happening in Gaza is a nightmare. What’s happening in Syria and the Ukraine are nightmares. They are all extreme cases of the fallacy of otherness playing itself out in deadly fashion.

And nightmares, like all dreams, come in the interest of health and wholeness. They come in extreme form because the information they bring is important, and because the time has come for us to accept it. They are invitations to us to wake, finally, from our illusions.

 

The Sacrament of Civil Disobedience

March 5, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

Handcuffs_on_table
There are two types of civil disobedience. One originates with the ego, the other with the soul.

In response to a reader’s comment on last week’s blog post,  The Ultimate Keystone Demonstration: Love, I said I often use the word “sacramental” to describe some of my experiences of engaging in civil disobedience. In that post I talked about what seem to me to be limitations of conventional civil disobedience, and yet over these past days I’ve also been thinking more about those moments when c.d. felt sacramental to me and why.

I think of a sacrament as a visible action using tangible elements that touches upon an intangible truth. A sacrament has the power to transcend the action and objects themselves, opening a portal to a Reality that is beyond our ordinary consciousness, and it always has at its heart the understanding that we are one with something much greater than ourselves.

As I’ve thought more about why certain moments of civil disobedience have felt sacramental to me, I realized that it wasn’t because of the actions in and of themselves: crossing the property line of a military base singing Amazing Grace or sitting in front of the doors to a Federal Building reading the Beatitudes. Rather it was because I and those I was with were choosing to abide within the understanding that we were one with each other, with those arresting us, and with a Reality that transcends us all.Continue Reading

Christmas Cruelties and the Gift Economy

December 18, 2013 by Patricia Pearce

Amazon-warehouse-with candle 610x406
True wealth increases when it’s shared.

Given that Christmas is a week away, I’d really love to be writing about good cheer, about love and joy, but recently I read a disturbing article in Mother Jones magazine, “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave“, that just won’t let me go.

The article described working conditions in a warehouse that stocks and ships merchandise for online commerce. I was horrified by what Mac McClelland, a journalist who took a job there as an undercover reporter, described. Not only were the demands placed on her as a worker physically exhausting and sometimes dangerous, but she and her co-workers were subjected to emotional abuse as well.

The article was published in the spring of 2012, so you could say it’s old news. Except it isn’t. Just last month an undercover reporter for the BBC took a job at an Amazon warehouse in England and secretly videotaped conditions there which have been described as brutal. And in Germany, Amazon workers have gone on strike because of the working conditions and wages.

I do most of my shopping online these days, so even though not every online merchandiser exploits their workers, I found the scenario MacClelland describes deeply disturbing. I don’t want to support cruel distribution systems any more than I want to support the sweatshop manufacturing economy. But as we all know, in this globally connected, interdependent economy it’s not easy to know which companies are acting responsibly and which aren’t, and it’s pretty much impossible to extract yourself entirely from the injustices of the system.Continue Reading

Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea

September 11, 2013 by Gwendolyn Morgan

Crow FeathersI’m excited to let my “tribe” know about the publishing of a book of poetry by one of the guest bloggers on this site. Gwendolyn Morgan was one of two winners of the 2013 Wild Earth Poetry Prize,  and her book Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea is being published by Hiraeth Press.

There are so many wonderful poems in the collection that I had a hard time deciding which ones to share with you. “Window, Winter” spoke to me deeply, especially on this anniversary of 9/11 and in light of the current situation in Syria. I’m guessing many of us are feeling the tug of tragedy on our hearts.

“The Way the Soul Crosses” touched me with its mingling of the tangible and temporal with the mysterious and eternal.

I hope you enjoy these poems, and I encourage you to visit the Hiraeth Press website to read more about Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea and the glowing reviews it is receiving, of which this is one:

“Reading these poems is like taking a dip in a cool moun­tain stream. We are refreshed by the poet’s sen­si­tivity to the move­ments and rhythms of soul. Gwen is able to embrace a wide expanse of life, pulling in the wild sur­rounds of nature as well as tender moments of loss and sorrow. These poems sat­isfy a thirst for some­thing real and sub­stan­tial. A rare gift indeed.” —Francis Weller, author of Entering the Healing Ground: Grief, Ritual and the Soul of the World.

 

Window, Winter

Each day I wander through the landscape of spirit: this evening painting
dry bamboo, watercolor blocks, four months in my studio, restless,
thoughts lengthening with the shadows.

Body, stalk, limb, weary with winter.
Together with the OBGYNs, I witness three babies die,
one SIDS death with the Midwives, then, a man my age of cancer,

a nine year old child unnecessarily killed when towed
on a wooden sleigh behind a sap green SUV; she was not pulled
by the Fjord ponies who neigh at my window, waiting for grain.

Our neighbor’s twenty-three year old grandson
comes home from Iraq, Afghanistan,
back to Stumptown with a stump (not a leg)
and a wheelchair (not a cobalt skateboard)
Seven colors of paint on my palette.
How many years have we been at war now?

Another neighbor chops down a row of apple and pear trees
I stare at the lovely rounds of wood in disbelief
they were dead,” he says. I shake my head, “no, they needed pruning.”

The kestrel, robins, chickadees, juncos
the hummingbirds, raccoons and dragonflies
all shared the canopy of these trees as their homes.

Compassion fatigue: intuitive grief, instrumental grief,
no. 2 sable brush.

 

The Way the Soul Crosses

St. Mary’s, Alaska

Look, the moon is pure light.
It swells, translucent.
That’s how it will always be
held in your belly.

We cross the tundra,
kneel on moss and lichen,
pray wild roses, red berries.
Questions rise dense as mosquitoes.

There are so many things we can’t change,
so many things that change anyway.
Transfiguration: the grain becomes
bread, the berries become wine.

The way the soul
crosses over the Yukon River
in a small aluminum dinghy.
The way the seal gut
is painted with red ochre.

The way we remember
one another when faith is
stretched like skin on a drum.
The way we remember
the taste of light, wine, bread.

 

 

Gwendolyn MorganGwendolyn Morgan learned the names of birds and wild­flowers and inher­ited paint brushes and boxes from her grand­mothers.  With a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College, and a M.Div. from San Francisco Theological Seminary, she has been a recip­ient of writing res­i­den­cies at Artsmith, Caldera and Soapstone. Her poems appear in: Calyx, Dakotah, Kalliope,  Kinesis,  Manzanita Quarterly,  Mudfish,  Tributaries: a Journal of Nature  Writing,  VoiceCatcher, Written River as well as antholo­gies and other lit­erary jour­nals.  She is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Community Ministries and is a board cer­ti­fied chap­lain with the Association of Professional Chaplains.  She serves as the man­ager of inter­faith Spiritual Care at Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center.  Gwendolyn and Judy A. Rose, her partner, share their home with Abbey Skye, a res­cued Pembroke Welsh Corgi. | Photo by Kim Campbell-​​Salgado

Walking Away From the Game

January 17, 2013 by Patricia Pearce

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

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