Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Crow Feathers, Red Ochre, Green Tea

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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

Living by Heart

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The Heart creates from the limitless possibilities of uncertainty.

I’m recently back from retreat, and once again I am convinced that taking time away from the incessant noise of our society is good for my soul. I can hear myself so much more clearly when I’m unplugged than when I am constantly navigating and responding to external communications and distractions. I can tune in more completely to the wisdom of my heart that perceives possibilities that my analytical mind is simply unable to access.

While on retreat I always do a drawing or two by heart — meaning, I let my intuition guide the process — something I wrote about in a previous post, The Life of a Heartist. This year on retreat I again immersed myself in the fluid ways of intuitive knowing, and in the process I saw more clearly that when we live guided by the heart, we must by definition live in the field of uncertainty.

Our society values certainty. We live in a very left-brained culture that believes that in order to accomplish anything you must have a clearly laid out plan and you must focus your attention on numbers, statistics and “proven” strategies. All of that has its place, but only if it is in service to the heart’s desires and the heart’s guidance. To live a life in alignment with our deepest values and soul purpose, the heart must be in the driver’s seat.

I suspect one reason we prefer to live out of the analytical left-brain is that we feel more secure. If we can head out the door knowing exactly where we’re going and how we’re going to get there, we feel safe.

To live by heart is to live very differently. When we live by heart we center our lives not in certainty, but in trust. We don’t know ahead of time what the outcome of our actions nor the destination of our path will be. We simply follow the step-by-step leading of our intuition.Continue Reading

Unplugged

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Information and wisdom are two different things.

Each year in early February I take time out for a spiritual retreat. It’s a time when I unplug from just about all the external sources of information — news, Internet, email, phone — so that I can plug into the inner sources of wisdom that come from journaling, meditation, prayer, dream work and other spiritual practices, and the rejuvenation that comes from walks in nature.

So much of our life is spent responding to external stimuli, and when we’re constantly attending to what’s coming at us we can’t really listen to what’s already in us.

The plugged-in world is a fabulous source of information, and I learn a lot from what it has to offer. But information and wisdom are two different things, and I know I have to get in touch with my internal bearings on a regular basis so that I can be selective about what I take in from other sources.  Otherwise it’s just too easy to get lost in the deluge of trivia that, in spite of its fascination, may not benefit my own development or nurture my own spirit.

How, you might ask, am I posting a blog while I’m unplugged? Well, I wrote it before my retreat and scheduled it to be published automatically. It’s a wonder, isn’t it, what we are able to do these days?

So, during this time of winter, when nature invites us to hibernate and go inward, I wish for you moments when you too can unplug so that you can tap into your inner wisdom, the wisdom of your soul.


Enough Already

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Do you still think you’re inadequate?

If I had to characterize the dominant belief that orchestrates our society it would be: Not Enough Yet. If you think about it, this basic belief drives just about everything we do. In fact, it forms the foundation of our entire economy. Stock prices aren’t high enough yet. Profits haven’t been maximized enough yet. Jobs haven’t been outsourced enough yet. The Gross National Product isn’t high enough yet.

The belief shows up in our individual lives too. Our income isn’t big enough yet. Our house isn’t elegant enough yet. Our car isn’t sophisticated enough yet. Our clothes aren’t stylish enough yet. Our computer isn’t fast enough yet.

The harm this belief causes is obvious. In our frantic efforts to reach that elusive state of enoughness, we raze more forests to build new tracts of bigger houses, displace more workers to maximize corporate profits, lead more stressed out lives trying to keep up with the bills and the Joneses.

Imagine what would happen if we all stopped buying into the myth of Not Enough Yet. We would only buy clothes when we actually needed them. We would be content with a simple home. We would no longer demand that the corporations we hold stock in exploit workers and the environment in order to give us a slightly higher return. We would enjoy the local fruits of the season rather than going to the grocery store expecting to find fresh asparagus in November shipped in from Chile. We, and the Earth, would be far healthier and happier.

This belief in Not Enough Yet is something that spiritual teachers have been trying to help people get beyond for a very long time. The Tao te Ching teaches, “If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.” Jesus said, “Don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”

I think we’re missing the point, though, if we think all of this is about believing we don’t have enough yet. I think the real issue is that we believe we aren’t enough yet. Our drive to acquire more is often a coverup for our desire to be more. We haven’t yet accepted that the sheer miracle of our existence is enough in itself.

Let me put the question to you: How do you think you aren’t enough? Do you think you aren’t successful enough? Not popular enough? Not confident enough? Not smart enough? Not strong enough? Not talented enough? Not pretty enough? Not happy enough?

Or how about this: Not spiritual enough? Not enlightened enough? Not evolved enough yet?

Pause for just a moment, if you would, and really think about how you would complete the sentence, “I believe I’m not _______________ enough yet.”

Now, let’s set that aside for one moment while I ask you a few more questions.

Has it ever occurred to you that the cells in your body, yes, the cells in your optic nerves that are sending the images of these words to your brain, are made of material that originated in stars that went supernova and spewed their matter out into the cosmos billions of years ago?

Has it ever occurred to you that the water in your body—which makes up most of your material form—has been traveling the world for eons? It has flowed countless times through the Amazon jungle, fallen as snow on the Himalayas, been breathed out by redwoods on the California coast, poured down as rain on the Great Plains, drifted across the sky as thunderclouds, descended into the oceans’ deep?

Just for this moment, consider the places, experiences, substances, beings that the matter in your body has seen and been.

Or how about the DNA that right now is replicating itself in your cells, carrying information that is the creative masterpiece of millions of years of evolution?

And that’s just your physical body. We haven’t even gotten started on the miracle of your consciousness and that this physical matter that was generated in the stars can think and create and love and weep and laugh.

Do you understand that you are nothing less than the miracle of rivers and stars and eons of years now taking on human form that can breathe, dance, write poetry, cook a meal, read a blog?

The miraculous nature of our being was on my mind a few years ago when I was taking a day trip on a gorgeous spring day to Cape May, New Jersey. Come noontime I stopped at a restaurant to get some lunch and sat down on the sunny patio. When the waitress walked up I saw her in her essence—a child of the Universe in every way—and when she began reciting the specials for the day it was all I could do not to bust out laughing.

There was something so wonderfully comical about the moment, that this being in front of me who was living, walking, talking star dust was telling me about the Reuben sandwich and the soup du jour, completely unaware of the fact that she was the Universe in microcosm, a miracle beyond comprehension.

The same goes for you, of course. You are an expression of this Life, this Universe, this Reality that has been expanding and evolving for billions of years. There is no part of you that is not part of that most amazing whole. The sheer fact that you are is beyond amazing.

So. Tell me again. How is it that you’re not enough yet?

The Life of a Heartist

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For many years I have done drawings, usually when I’m on retreat, that help me tune into my intuitive knowing.  We get plenty of practice in our culture tuning into the analytical aspects of ourselves, but rarely are we taught how to listen to other ways of knowing, and that concerns me because there is much our analytical minds cannot do.  They cannot tell us what we really value, what our life’s purpose really is, what our soul really desires.  The analytical mind can dissect information, but it can never provide us with true wisdom.

In this drawing practice, which is a spiritual practice more than an artistic one, I begin by drawing a circle on a piece of paper, then I lay out all of my colored pencils before me.  When they are all spread out in front of me I scan them, letting my eye rest on each one in turn, and as I do I listen inwardly for an intuitive prompting, a nudge that says yes, this one.  Or no, not that one.  I pull out each of the yes pencils as I am being guided and then put the other pencils away.

Then I begin.  I look at the colors and listen for which of them wants to be picked up first, then I pick the pencil up, put its point to the paper and begin to draw, continually listening inwardly, sensing which direction the line wants to go and when it wants to stop.  Then I set it down, and look again at the colors, asking which one wants to go next.  As the image continues to evolve I listen for where the growing edge is as well, and that is where I focus next.  The image itself isn’t intended to depict anything, but the practice is a potent way for me of accessing my deeper Self and listening to my heart.

When I was on retreat last month I was contemplating what it means to live a life like that, guided by the heart, to be a heartist.  It can be frightening for the ego and the analytical mind to let go and let the heart lead, because when the heart leads, you never know where it is all headed.  The path, just as the drawing’s pattern, isn’t nicely laid out ahead of time.  It is only revealed as you follow the inner guidance, one step at a time.

There is an interesting thing that has happened to me in the last few years.  Somewhere along the line I started to experience what I call Heart Glow.  I have a sensation in my heart chakra that I can only describe as a sensation of glowing that comes in response to certain ideas that float into my mind or certain encounters I have.  My heart has become a divining rod for me telling me when I’m on track with something that is true to my core, true to my deeper Self.  And as I move forward with my life path I am listening for that Heart Glow to tell me what the next step is, trusting my heart’s wisdom even though I cannot see the full picture.

Follow your heart.

I find that when I let go of the ego anxieties and the analytical mind’s priorities and listen to my heart, I am led.  All that is asked of me is that I listen and trust, and take the next step.

Listen and trust, and take the next step.

Listen and trust, and take the next step.

And suddenly, unexpectedly, when I step back and look at things from a different angle, something quite surprising is revealed that had been emerging all along, even though I didn’t consciously realize it.

The startling teaching that my retreat drawing gave me this time was just how trustworthy my heart is as a guide and that, in fact, it can create far more beauty than I ever could have knowingly planned.

 

 

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.

Feeding the Soul In No Time

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It takes no more time to experience life than not to experience it.

So often we don’t attend to our souls because think we don’t have the time. But here’s the thing: the soul doesn’t need time so much as it needs No Time.

You have undoubtedly experienced No Time. It’s where you are when you are so completely, mindfully present that time itself drops away. It’s not the same as losing yourself in an engrossing activity that causes you to lose track of time. Stepping through the portal into No Time requires awareness, and when it happens you find yourself in the presence of something eternal which exists beyond the confines of your small self. Continue Reading

You Are Not an Indentured Servant

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irisDo you ever have a secret dread that you are going to die without ever having fulfilled your life purpose? Your soul will rise up from your expired body saying, “Dang! I blew it! That collection of choral works I was supposed to write never happened!” Or, “That breakthrough in cancer research that I was supposed to bring into the world somehow got lost in the shuffle of paperwork.” Or, “I was too busy surfing the Web checking out what everybody else was writing to ever get my own poems down on paper.” Continue Reading