Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Unfasten Your Seatbelt!

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Orion Nebula
This is the time to trust.

There is a great scene in the movie Contact that has been lingering with me lately. The movie is based on the novel by Carl Sagan and stars Jodie Foster playing the scientist Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway.

It opens with the story of a team of researchers who are using a huge satellite array to listen for signs of extraterrestrial life. One day they begin to pick up a signal that freaks them out: the televised broadcast of the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin—the first Games to be televised. Something or someone out in space received that signal and is sending it back to Earth, seemingly as a way to make contact with humans.

That someone or something then begins sending complex mathematical formulas that the team realizes are a blueprint for some sort of spherical capsule, possibly something to enable interstellar or time travel.Continue Reading

Solstice Song

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We sing because the song is in us.

It’s the winter solstice, and this morning I was awakened by a bird singing outside my window. This has been going on for awhile now, a couple of weeks at least. A lone bird in our neighborhood has been singing at dawn, and usually earlier, despite the fact that this isn’t the season for birdsong.

I’m used to a chorus of birdsong waking me before dawn in the springtime, when the birds are singing out to find their mates, build their nests, participate in the budding life of spring. They are so loud, in fact, that I have to use earplugs if I want to sleep any later than 3 AM.

But today is the winter solstice, and it’s not the season for birdsong.

When I first heard this lone bird singing its chirping and cascading song (not a song I am familiar with) I was disturbed. “There you go,” I thought. “Things are so messed up with the climate now that even the birds are confused about what season it is.”

But this morning as I lay in bed, having been stirred from a very interesting dream—something about a turn from the age old story of conflict to a new way of nonviolence—I wondered if perhaps this bird was here on a mission. Perhaps it had taken it upon itself to come into this city, into this season of darkness when things seem so despairing on the planet, and sing a song for the human heart. A song that could stir us into remembrance that the new life of spring is on its way, even though we can’t see it.

Maybe, I thought, this little bird was even an angel donning avian form. Since we humans haven’t, for the most part, gained the ability to detect the song of angels, this angel had chosen to take on a form familiar to us, to sing something we know how to hear to stir us awake with the sound of beauty in the darkest time of the year.

It can be hard sometimes to trust that the planet is turning toward the light of understanding, that we are in fact awakening when so many things seem to suggest the opposite is true. In those moments of doubt we need to hear a song of promise pouring through our window.

Yet it can also be a challenge being the one singing of hope and joy when the circumstances don’t seem to call for it. We may wonder at times if we’re confused, if we’re deluding ourselves, singing about something that seems to have so little evidence in the material world to support it.

But, like that bird outside my window, we sing our song of gladness and joy not because the circumstances warrant it but because the song is in us. The song is us, and to silence it would be to silence our very souls.

And now it is midday. The solstice has just occurred. And I wonder if perhaps it is our willingness to be the “crazy” bird singing in the darkness, embodying the spring on the cusp of winter, that turns the planet toward the Light.

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The Inner Bucket List

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skydiver in free fall
What’s on your bucket list?

Last week, waiting for a dentist appointment, I couldn’t help but overhear an 80 year old woman standing in front of the receptionist’s window of the medical building, loudly explaining that she needed a note from her doctor. She planned to go skydiving the next morning, but the skydiving company wouldn’t let her unless her doctor could confirm that she had no major medical issues.

It seems this woman had a bucket list. “I’ve already done the hot air balloon and the whitewater rafting,” she said. Now she was on to skydiving, and she made it a point to let the receptionist know that her priest was going along (maybe so he’d be on hand to administer Last Rites if needed?). She also said she’d be wearing a girdle, though I missed the reasoning behind that one.

After making her case, she walked out, and as the door closed behind her the woman sitting next to me, who had been holding her head in disbelief while listening to this conversation, looked up and said, “Good for her!”Continue Reading

The Taoist Lesson of My Handleless Coffee Mug

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handleless coffee mug
Are there areas of your life in which you need to let go of control?

I’ve been taking pottery classes this past year, and a few weeks ago, as I was finishing up a mug, I told my teacher I wasn’t going to put a handle on it.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

I didn’t explain my rationale to him, mostly because I thought it might seem too weird.

You see, I’ve been drinking my morning coffee from a handleless mug for over a decade now, ever since one of my winter retreats in New Mexico.

One evening I was sitting in my room reading a book of poetry by Rumi when, for no apparent reason, the books on the shelf over the fireplace shifted and knocked the mug I’d brought with me onto the floor. It was a sturdy mug and survived the fall, or so I thought. I went over to pick it up and when I lifted it by the handle, the handle broke off.

It felt like one of those waking dream moments when outer circumstances mirror inner realities, because on that retreat, which came at an especially tumultuous time in my life, I’d been doing some challenging inner work that had to do with letting go. I was being asked to release some things that were precious to me, things that felt core to my identity and essential to what I perceived as my reason for being. Letting go of them felt like a death.Continue Reading

The Parable of the Resilient Christmas Tree

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IMG_3255We’ve had construction going on at our house since October and our first floor living space was in disarray until well into December. Consequently, I wasn’t able to get our holiday decorations up until a few days before Christmas, and I decided to leave them up for awhile to make up for lost time.

This past weekend, though, it seemed like enough was enough and I was just getting ready to take everything down when I noticed something that astounded me. The Christmas tree was sprouting new growth. All over.

“How is this possible?!” I thought. The tree, although it had continued to drink water, had also begun to drop its needles. How could something that was dying also be putting forth new shoots?

Needless to say, although the other decorations came down, I didn’t have the heart to toss this brave, resilient tree out into the bleak midwinter.Continue Reading

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

Spread Your Wings

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What would your life be like if you spread your wings fully?

A few months ago, artist Sara Steele wrote a post for this blog, Pas de Deux, describing her experience of watching a hawk take flight from its perch on a tree branch. It spread its wings, fell onto the wind and soared away. After reading it, I had a realization that has stayed with me as an important teaching.

What I realized is that, in order for the hawk to be able to soar so effortlessly on the wind it has to spread its wings — fully. Otherwise, there is no way the wind can support it, and its flight becomes aerodynamically impossible.

It’s such an obvious point, but one I hadn’t ever thought about before.

The wind is often thought of as a metaphor for the divine Spirit, the invisible force that moves through our lives, and I happen to believe that the Spirit, the Divine, the Universe, God, whatever name you choose to give that Reality which is greater than ourselves, is a force that supports us as we seek to manifest our dreams and give expression to our soul’s purpose. It is like the wind that carries the hawk to its destination.

But in order for our dreams to be supported we have to to do our part.  We have to offer the fullness of our gifts and essence, in other words, we have to spread our wings wide.  If we hold back because we aren’t certain how we or our gifts will be received we are like the hawk stepping off the branch with its wings tucked in tight.  Playing it safe, we jeopardize our own success.

Since having this realization, I have become more aware of the ways in which I sometimes hold myself back, and as this new year begins I am more deeply committed to spreading my wings fully.

How about you? Are there areas in your life in which you are “playing it safe” by withholding your gifts and who you truly are? If so, feel for a moment what your life would be like if you spread your wings fully and gave yourself over to the spirit realm whose nature it is to support you and enable your dreams to take flight.