Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Archives for December 2012

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.

 

 

Opening Our Veins for Newtown

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Who can fathom the “why”?

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, my spouse, Kip, pulled his high school letter jacket out of the closet and hung it on the back of his dining room chair. I think it was his quiet act of solidarity with the community he once lived in, and the school his little sister once attended. His blue and yellow jacket hanging in our dining room was a vivid symbol of how tragedy, even when it seems far away, ripples out to us all.

I cannot begin to fathom the immensity of the anguish the families of the children and educators who were killed in the shooting were experiencing. I cannot imagine the nightmare images that must have continued to haunt those who witnessed the massacre.

For me, the tragedy reawakened the shock and grief I felt in 1999 when a similar nightmare visited the halls and classrooms of Columbine High School, a place where I had taught briefly in the 1980’s after returning from the Peace Corps. It was so inconceivable that such an ordinary school where ordinary teenagers showed up every day and did what teenagers do — teased each other, went out for the football team, played in the band, griped about having to learn Spanish verbs conjugations — would become the scene of such senseless carnage, where SWAT teams converged, racing against time to stem the slaughter.

Given these personal connections, I have felt a desire to write about what happened last week, but I have been unable. The truth is, I don’t know what to say. I could talk about the horror of these tender, innocent lives being annihilated in such a meaningless, violent way, but there is no need for me to state the obvious. I could talk about the violent nature of our culture and the danger of free access to guns, but others are speaking about that more powerfully than I ever could. I could talk about the roots of fear that give rise to our need for guns, but that would be a book, not a blog. I could talk about our deep longing for safety which we seek in different ways, some people by arming themselves, other people by wanting to do away with arms.

I could talk about how safety is an illusion we cling to in this temporal life. And yet, on the spiritual plane, it is a given. To paraphrase the apostle Paul, there is nothing that can separate us from the Love from which we have arisen and to which we shall return. Nothing. Not even a mentally unstable person wielding an automatic weapon loaded with 30 rounds.

When these tragedies unfold I am always reminded of the phone conversation I had with my mother the night of the Columbine shooting. She was with some friends at a mall about a quarter of a mile from the school when it happened, and she described the sirens of police cars racing to the scene, and the din of helicopters circling overhead. “Now,” she said, “they’re asking the people of Denver to go to the blood banks.”

It was that last sentence that got me. When there is nothing more that can be done, we open our veins.

I don’t know what to say about what happened at Newtown or at Columbine. I can’t get my mind around the “why” of any of it. All I know is how I wept when I heard the news, how my heart felt so broken for the vibrant lives lost and the shattered lives of those who remain. All I know is that, in the end, what I really want from this life of mine is to find a way to stretch out my own arms and bare my own veins, to somehow offer myself for the healing of a broken, frightened world.