Sophia Serve

Welcome to Sophia Serve!

After the sort of career I’ve had, ten years of freelance writing and twenty years in book publishing, most people become literary agents or start their own small publishing enterprise. Instead, I decided to become a thought partner for people who need a little extra help pushing words around the page or across the screen. Sophia Serve is the name of my writing and publishing service.

SophiaServe.com is a place for you to read and think about writing as an expression of your deeper “you.”  And talk to other folks who share your passion. You’ll also find information here about the books I’ve written. Or co-written. Or wish I’d written.

Sophia, the Divine Feminine Wisdom, welcomes us as a mother, sister, friend.  We’re glad you’re here.

Blown Away by Winter Reading

“The snow had begun to descend in thick icy flakes…”  That’s how Peter Tremayne’s latest “Fidelma” book begins.  Life obviously does follow art.

I had no more than begun to read The Chalice of Blood, another story of how this brilliant nun-lawyer solves crimes, when ice began to form on all the trees around our house. Our birches, too, were now bending, heavy with possibilities of breaking. Ice slipped from our metal roof in sheets like giant rectangles of crystal glass waiting to shatter.

Storm-watching and weather-predicting are state sports in Vermont. No one who has a radio could not help but know this one was coming. We’d stocked up. More sand. More salt. More groceries. And of course, another stop at our favorite library. I had no more than walked in when Librarian Amy handed me 1222 by Anne Holt. “I think you’ll like this, but I’m a bit embarrassed at giving you the latest in what’s a series and so far the only one in English. Why don’t publishers translate these things in sequence?” she muttered as she went on shelving books.

I wasn’t fussy. I’ll read them “out of order.” I’d never heard of this author, but she was Norwegian, after all. My people!  How could I not like it?

I did. I finished it and then filled the bathtub with water (for toilet flushing in case the power goes out—we all do this in Vermont. I learned early on how many buckets of melted snow even one flush takes. We keep talking about getting a generator, but so far that’s in the category of a really good plan.)

 Holt’s book is called “The Scandiavian Phenomenon.” Hyperbole?  No. Her wheel-chair confined retired police woman is a compelling character. The kind of woman you’d like to get to know better. The title comes from the name of a resort hotel called Finse 1,222 because it’s 1,222 meters above sea level. Why is it that I always read about storms when we’re headed into a major storm? I suppose it’s for the same perverse reason I once read The Night of the Grizzly out loud to our young sons as we drove through Glacier Park. 

Each of her twelve chapters is cleverly named after numbers 1-12 on the Beaufort Wind Scale which was developed by English Rear Admiral Francis Beaufort in 1805. The scale goes from calm to snowflakes falling vertically with a side-to-side motion a 1 m.p.h. to “The mountain is boiling. Lichen and branches from the trees are carried along by the wind. It is extremely difficult to ski,” at scale 8, 39-46 m.p.h. Oh, those hearty Norskes! And it progresses through 11 which Holt describes as “severe damage to forests” and finally to 12: Hurricane force with winds up to 83 m.p.h.  Her story escalates along with the wind and with similar velocity.

As I turned the last page I got an email photo from a friend who is in another Beaufort—but this one is a coastal paradise in South Carolina. Her sunny relaxed face framed against palmettos and a sandy beach contrasted sharply with the one I saw looking back at me from the mirror…pale, red eyes, rather sleepy looking.  Think bears hibernating.

Never mind. We like winter. So, on to Fidelma. She’ll perk me up with her brilliant, anti-establishment ways. It’s obvious I like my heroines, like Fidelma and Hanne Wilhelmsen, to be caring but callous when they have to be; smart, but not cocky; abrasive only when it’s definitely called for and empathetic to the downtrodden.  

And I like my author’s characters to say something profound every now and then. Something important. Something like Magnus Streng, the height-challenged doctor says to Hanne when he is describing what his father was like. He was of the old school, a zoology professor. Every night he read to young Magnus from his textbooks about animals. Ants. Elephants. Lions. Hyenas. “The message was clear enough: we are all needed. We are necessary here on earth. Small and large, fat and thin, ugly and beautiful. I was good enough. I am good enough.”

We don’t need a Beaufort Wind Scale to measure how good we are. We just have to remember that we already are!

Patterns and Metapatterns

Driving up Spain's Sierra Nevada mountains to Granada,all I could think of were patterns.  I watched patterns of mountains notch into valleys and fields, fallow and fertile, slip into one another. I saw olive and orange trees line up and the earth crease and fold around them as if firmly holding it all safe for my eyes alone.

Gregory Bateson once said in Mind and Nature, “What pattern connects the crab to the lobster, and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?...The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns."

Whether it’s the frost patterns on my Vermont windows this morning, or an intricate spider web pattern, I sense Her presence in all these mystical metapatterns.

After our side trip on a dirt road back into the alham--the "red earth of Granada," we visited the Alhambra itself where more patterns piled up on more patterns. Arches upon arches. Tiles upon tiles. Dark into light. And I thought, "This is Her work. This is Her visible code encouraging me to see how everything is connected, how everything fits so perfectly into everything else and how it’s all crucial to the workings of not just our planet, but of the galaxy and universes beyond. She is there, making sure the stitches of the world-tapestry hold together. And when we take the time to really look, we can see her radiance shining through the pinpricks,  sliding off the glazed tiles."

Before the Alhambra became a city state and filled this space with arches and symmetrical gardens, even before the Romans and Visigoths took up residence,  it was a place where The Mother was honored, high up there on Sabika hill where Her crystalline water poured from springs fed by snow-capped mountains and where her birds sang.

My Sophia Friend Julia Blackbourn graciously shared with me some of her sketches of another patterned site about 70 kilometers from Grandada where the famous cathedral of Cordoba welcomes people into her huge courtyard. Her watercolors capture the patterns in these massive arches better than any photos I took, so I'm happy, with her blessing, to share a couple with you.

I believe Sophia can be seen through arches and in all pattern overlays; She is present everywhere--in the beautiful as well as the dismal parts of our world.

 

[As a sidenote: an audio guide to Sophia: The Feminine Face of God,a 10 part series, is available for listening or downloading at:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/divineartsmedia/2012/01/11/sophia-feminine-face-of-god-10-series-w-karen-speerstra]

Soup Mantra for 2012

After several days in Barcelona, steeped in Antoni Gaudi’s colorful swirling architecture, including the extra-terrestrial spired  Sagrada Familia cathedral, the fairy-taled magical Park Güell, 

    

 

the Pedrera, an apartment building with no straight lines and a roof that offers the most amazing views of the city, and, of course, Casa Batilló’s dragon chimney, the more down to earth 1950’s Casa el Cherro invited us in to enjoy yet another face of Spain. 

We’d driven west along the Mediterranean coast toward Malaga for hours and the prospect of walking a few blocks to dinner, even past several abandoned store fronts laced with graffiti, was very inviting. Our stomachs demanded more than chocolate pastries and juicy oranges, as wonderful as they were. 

Casa el Cherro proved to be an intimate combination neighborhood deli, tapas bar, restaurant, taverna and meat market. I’d recommend it to you if I could describe how we actually found it in Murcia after navigating several roundabouts through narrow streets.

I don’t totally understand the Catalonian penchant for hanging dried Iberian “black” hams everywhere from roadside fast food cafeteria ceilings to  fancier eating establishments. But, by the time I entered Casa el Cherro’s, the long legged Jamon, like pork stalactites precariously swinging over my head, no longer surprised me. If my Spanish had been better, I could have read what was written on the little inverted plastic pyramids attached to their bottoms. Perhaps it quoted Animal Farm: some pigs may be more equal than others. Or these inverted funnels may have been designed to simply catch stray drips. I had over the course of the past several days quietly watched these wrapped and netted salty legs, but never caught a drip in the act. Unlike our plumped-up fatty, rounder hams, the need for drip-catching seemed unnecessary. These porkers had taken on more of the dense aura of beef jerky. But I wondered, what sort of pigs had legs like these? Obviously taller and skinnier than any I have ever known.

Our congenial host ushered us to a table away from still other rows of hanging meats and with a soft, ironed white linen napkin with a discreetly woven "Casa el Cherro" safely tucked in my lap, I pretended to read the menu. No pictures. No alternative English explanations. Every now and then a white-aproned grandfatherly or elderly uncle figure appeared from what must be the kitchen back there just behind a lighted curio cabinet sporting a glass-enclosed…you guessed it…super-huge pig leg.

In my halting Spanish, I asked what was the soup. Caliente, I hoped. Si. What’s in it?

“It is what it is.”  That’s what he said. I ordered it and I loved it, although I did share little hunks of what I determined was liver, to my liver-loving husband. 

So that’s how I got my new soup-mantra. And I feel it will apply to anything 2012 dishes up. I’ll look at it, recognize a few floating bits, be curious about what else lurks below the surface, but I’ll calmly enjoy it because… “It is what it is.”

 

Stone Shepherds

Only a short twenty mile drive north from Stonehenge (undoubtedly the most recognizable stone circle anywhere) stones silently march across the Wiltshire landscape at Avebury. I've visited this sacred English landscape several times--alone, with friends, with my son--and each time I leave thinking, "This place feels like a safe home."

One weekend, before the three large stones off to one side were circled with metal mesh, I sat under them munching a sandwich. Imagining. Who placed these huge stones, so precisely? Was their purpose to guard the night sky? I look at pictures of them now and wonder: What are they saying to us as we head into 2012?

Wherever they appear, stones so carefully positioned seem like shepherds out in their fields--the kinds of shepherds we hear about this time of year. The ones out watching over their flocks by night, waiting under the stars for important news.

More recent than the megalithic structures of Avebury, hundreds of "stone shepherds" made their way to the Polynesian island of Rapa Nui or Easter Island. They still stand there, guarding the island's perimeter, watching the night skies. Stéphanie Guisard has posted the most amazing collection of time lapse photography of the night sky--where the Milky Way dances! But it is her photos of these great "stone shepherds" that continue to stun me.

When I look at them, I hear angels singing, as they did that one Bethlehem star-filled night. "Fear not! Be of good cheer." And I revel in the mysteries, knowing that many shepherds stand watch over our planet.

The Art of Magnification

A friend sent me several photos by Professor Gary Greenberg who spends some of his time at the College of London photographing grains of sand. He magnifies them about 250 times. “It’s incredible,” he says, “when you’re walking on the beach, you are standing on these treasures.”

Incredible, indeed! There’s a treasure world in these grains of sand, as the poet Blake wrote in his “Auguries of Innocence.” And in them, we “hold infinity in the palm your hand/And eternity in an hour.”  That’s the same Blake who also said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man [sic] as it is, infinite.”

Clearing our “doors of perception” is a good thing to do as the year draws to a close. What have we seen? How did we see it? And a question I, and others like me who think about Sophia from time to time, ask: “How has the Divine Feminine shown up in our lives in 2011?”

When I look closely at all the crystals and spirals within these grains of sand, I can’t help but think of the tons—literally tons—of sand that washed over people’s land and lives in Vermont during the August tropical storm Irene. Sand that carried horrid toxins. Sand that turned to cement in a few days. Sand that washed away top soil. If I’d have had Dr. Greenberg’s magnifying camera, could I have seen these amazing designs in all that hurt?

Then I think of all the volunteers who flocked to Vermont's disaster areas--and are still working long hours to make sure that flood-damaged families will be warm and safe this winter.

The year has been filled with gifts as well as challenges. I heard Angela Waters from Oklahoma telling her story on NPR the other day. She is collecting photographs the tornado at Joplin blew hundreds of miles away last May. Thanks to Facebook and her passion, people have mailed her thousands of photos they have found. She scans them and posts them on her website hoping to find who they belong to and return them. Families who lost everything, sometimes including the person in the photo, can now get them back. The Divine Feminine prompted her to devote months to this gift of grace.

I think of Mike who went back to where his house once stood,in our nearby village, standing in the silt, raking the sand, raking the sand, raking the sand, until his wife said, “It’s time now to stop. We won’t find anything more.”  Just then his rake caught on a box—her jewelry box that contained her mother’s engagement ring which she has now given to her daughter. The Divine Feminine knew the box was there. And she knew the ring was a bit of “infinity” to be held in the young woman’s hand, reminding her of her grandmother. And the family who loves her.

 

Sophia's present in all the “grains of sand” around us, including the grit in our shoes, if we just practice the art of

 

magnification.