Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Of Looting and Love

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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

Grief as a Portal for Our Awakening

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Humanity’s only future is that of the awakened mind and open heart.

Yesterday the front page of the New York Times listed the names of 1000 people who have died of COVID-19 and one sentence about each of them. They were only one percent of the 100,000 lives lost so far in the US, and there are no doubt tens of thousands more who have died as a result of this pandemic but who were never diagnosed.

Clara Louise Bennett, 91, Albany, GA, sang her grandchildren a song on the first day of school each year.

Valentina Blackhorse, 28, Kayenta, AZ, aspiring leader in the Navajo Nation.

Merrick Dowson, 67, San Francisco Bay Area, nothing delighted him more than picking up the bill.

Arthur Winthrop Barstow, 93, Hadley, MA, there is not a Louie L’Amour Western he had not read three times.

Ruth Skapinock, 85, Roseville, CA, backyard birds were known to eat from her hand.

I doubt it was coincidental that also yesterday morning, during my journaling time, I found myself weeping profusely. There is nothing happening in my own immediate life that would warrant such intense grief, and I don’t personally know anyone who has died from this pandemic. But the tears were nonetheless streaming down my cheeks, issuing forth from this reservoir of collective sorrow.Continue Reading

Donald Trump: Catalyst for Our Awakening

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The new world is ready to arise

Dear Mr. Trump,

At the risk of blowing your cover I want to express my deepest gratitude to you for the monumental challenge you took on in this lifetime to be a catalyst for our awakening.

You have been the asteroid that slammed into the world ego built, and your timing was impeccable because we had gotten so out of alignment with the balance of life on this planet that prior to your arrival our future was very much up in the air.

It was unfathomable to most of us that things could implode so quickly. We have been aghast to see just how fragile our social contract had become, how much our sense of responsibility for one another had unraveled, how shaky the girders were that held this country together. Seeing it all fall apart so quickly has been as shocking as seeing the World Trade Towers collapse into a storm of debris in a matter of hours on a bright September morning.Continue Reading

Our Moment of Clarity

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We are experiencing a moment of global clarity

Who would have guessed even four months ago that we would see the planetary changes that we have witnessed in recent weeks? For the first time in a generation people in India can see the Himalayas from hundreds of miles away. People in China can step out of their homes and see a blue sky for the first time in their memory. Turtles are storming the empty beaches to lay their eggs, lions are lazing in the deserted highways of South Africa, fish are frolicking in the clean canals of Venice.

With the cessation of human activity, the crust of the Earth has even grown quieter, and seismologists have a chance now to detect the Earth’s natural movements, like a doctor with a stethoscope finally able to hear the subtle nuances of a heartbeat.

A Moment of Clarity

We are experiencing, globally, a moment of clarity, and the clarity isn’t only what we are witnessing in the natural environment. We are also experiencing a growing clarity in the mind—clarity that we are interconnected in ways we can’t even begin to fathom, clarity about what is essential and what isn’t, clarity that we humans have been so consumed (consider the word) by the world we had fashioned that we had lost touch with who we really are or what we really desire.Continue Reading

A Pandemic’s Good Friday

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Without the benefit of hindsight, could anyone deem it “good”?

Today is Good Friday, and in my journaling this morning I was contemplating how strange and subversive the name given this day is:

Good Friday.

It’s hard to see how a cruel, torturous execution at the hands of imperial forces could be called “good.”

It’s easier, of course, with the benefit of resurrection hindsight. But without that, without the advantage of remembering this day from the other side of the tomb, could anyone ever have deemed it “good”?

I know all about the historic interpretations that Jesus’ crucifixion was the atoning sacrifice that reconciled humanity with our divine Source. But I don’t buy it. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is one of the greatest misconceptions ever told.

Why? Because Love is indivisible. Love is all there is. Humanity could never be alienated from our divine Source (aka Love) except in our own minds and fantasies. Nothing was ever broken, and no sacrifice was ever needed.Continue Reading

Ode to Trump and the GOP

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You have proven yourselves once again to be the party that liberates the enslaved.

Dear Mr. Trump and the GOP,

I want to thank you for all you have done in such a short period of time to help me come to clarity about the world I want to live in and for showing me that I don’t need to let any rule or precedent from the past stand in my way.

Your astounding ability to envision, claim and fashion the world you want has prompted me to ask myself: What does the world I want to live in look like? I don’t have the complete answer yet—it’s still coming into focus—but here’s what I can see so far:

The world I want to live in and help create is joyful and kind. It’s a world where everyone has the opportunity to express their unique genius and radiant Self. It’s a playful and creative place where all are flourishing together, celebrating one another, and living in constant wonder of the miraculous Now and of themselves as one-of-a-kind expressions of Existence itself. Mine is a world where the Earth is abundant and thriving, and we humans are fully aware of our oneness and interdependence with all Life on the planet.

In short, it’s a world where Love reigns.Continue Reading

Letter to the Frightened Self

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It is precisely in the tempest that your Peace and Love are most urgently needed.

Dear One,

I know you are troubled by what you see happening in the world, and how desperately you want to do something to help stop the madness. I know how you do not want to sit this out, that it is unconscionable to you to do nothing in the face of so much discord and the alarming rise in authoritarianism.

You compare this moment to historical events, and this adds to your anxiety. You have been troubled all your life about what happened in Germany, wondering both how it could have happened and how it could have been stopped. I know how desperately you want to know what to do, and how powerless you feel that, as a solitary person, you can do anything that will make a difference.

I see this unsettledness in you. Let’s name it for what it is. It is fear.

You are experiencing and witnessing the escalation of fear, fear that is amplified as you see the containment walls that might have checked this tide of hatred and abuse collapsing, fear that is, as you know, the inverse of Love, a contractive force, a divisive force, a desperate force.

Take a moment now and let yourself feel the fear. Do not try to push it away. Notice it. Feel it. Then hold it in the utmost compassion. Hold that frightened part of yourself in absolute Love and compassion and gentleness, as you would a frightened child. Cradle it. Console it. Cherish it.Continue Reading

Why Resistance Isn’t Radical Enough

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We_One

[This article was also published on the Huffington Post.]

The other day I was having coffee with a friend, and as we got to talking about what is going on in our political arena she asked me, “Do you ever say ‘no’?”

What she was asking was whether, in my way of seeing things, there a place for resistance, for saying “no.”

Her question got me thinking, because—as someone who has been arrested more than once for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience and who went to prison for doing so when the US invaded Iraq, and as someone who all my life has been haunted by the Holocaust and wondered how it could have been prevented—I am not a stranger to these questions.

And yet in recent years I have strongly sensed that at this juncture, given the political and environmental challenges we face, something far more radical than resistance is called for. We have reached a point where we need nothing less than an entirely new understanding of who we are and why we are here, because it is the stories we hold that generate the world we create.

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