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.
I was cleaning out my closet the other day thinking, “Why have I kept these clothes around so long since I obviously haven’t worn them for years.” It prompted several trips to thrift shops and some selective give-aways to friends. It also made me re-evaluate how I buy clothing and why.
Some of us are now becoming as aware of the ethical clothing movement as we are of the new ideas a few years ago around bio-ethics in food. USA Today just pointed out, given the recent Bangladesh building collapse that destroyed five clothing factories and killed more than six-hundred underpaid clothing manufacturing workers, that when we buy cheap T-shirts and underwear, someone pays, even if it’s not us. And someone is making a huge profit. (Bangladesh has a 20 billion dollar garment industry.)
Clothing supply chains are as convoluted as some of the hidden seams in the
clothing we buy today. So it’s hard to trace, even given labels, where items originate. Only about 1% of the clothing we purchase in the US has that familiar black, white and green “Fair Trade” stamp so we can’t be sure what we buy is “fairly” manufactured. Nor do we often care. It’s a bargain. We buy it even though we may wear it only a few times and then feel righteous about giving it away to thrift shops. The Salvation Army keeps clothing in the stores only about a week before baling it up and sending it on to….where?
Most likely, back to Third World Countries where they probably came from in the first place. And those clothing items are often sold back to them for someone else’s profit, even though when, as I did, we lug big garbage bags full of clothing to our local thrift store, we think we’re doing somebody a great charitable favor.
So now I’m thinking about the larger picture when I’m tempted to buy a new pair of jeans or pull-over. Do I need it? Will I wear it more than a half dozen times? Who benefits from my purchase? Is there something comparable being made closer to home? When I’m “done” with this item, what will I do with it?
I admit I’m a clothes hoarder. I keep thinking, I'll fit into it later. Or I may need this for a party some day. Or even though I haven't worn this since 1999, I like it too much to give it up.
I read The Hoarder in You by Dr. Robin Zasio, the psychologist on the reality TV show, “The Hoarders” and I’m sure that’s what prompted my closet clean-out. We all fall on that “cluttering” spectrum somewhere. Our drawers overflow. Our closets get crammed. Our basements and attics have boxes filled with “things” that we no longer need—probably never did need. Still, we are conditioned to buy more and more and more. We probably should all sign up for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It's clear, we need to “pluck and purge” even if it’s only one closet at a time. And truly rethink what we buy and why. Our planet (and closets) will thank us.
It's fitting for Saturday's May 4th's World Labyrinth Day to honor ours.
It was my 60th birthday present from my family. Ringed with thyme, stretched out there across our south meadow, it reminds me I "have plenty of 'time'."
We started ours with help from Lauren Artress' book,Walking a Sacred Path, and a lot of string.
A friend later encouraged me to register it on the National Labyrinth Locator. So I did. You can find it here, if you're wondering how this works.
One day I got a call from a wonderful woman named Twyla Alexander who, with her friend, was visiting as many states with labyrinths as possible. She found us in the national registry and decided to choose ours for Vermont.
Twyla told me she's writing a book about her labyrinth-journeys and shared with me a poem she wrote after visiting her first one called "The Merciful Love Labyrinth" near Juneau, Alaska. Here's how she begins her poetric description:
A labyrinth is not a maze.
Its twists and turns are not meant to
discombobulate, discourage, dead-end
like a riddle whose answer is forever out of reach...
Auden likened a labyrinth to the Universe in miniature and ends his poem with these words: "I have no reason to despair/ Because I am already there."
Twyla and I have kept in touch since her visit. She recently sent me this photo which she graciously said I could use here. It's in South Carolina at the Springbank Retreat Center where Sue Monk Kidd wrote of her life-changing experience there in the Circle of Trees in Dance of the Dissonant Daughter.
Another labyrinth gift is this "walking blessing" from a woman named Jan Richardson.
In Hunab Ku, Joel and I wrote about the Chartres labyrinth (the one we chose as a pattern for our model). When people couldn't travel all way to Jerusalem on pilgrimmage, they walked, danced and even crawled over the Chartres' labyrinth on their knees to the center. And back again.
Built in the early thirteenth century, this stone ring was also a lunar calendar with twenty-eight cusps or points on each quadrant. Like ours, it measures forty-two feet in diameter, nearly filling the nave.
Walking a labyrinth to the center and then out again fills one with wonder and awe. Death and rebirth. Sacred and profane. Labyrinths are paradoxes of power and prayer.
The old Celts who worshipped in Northern France where this labyrinth was later constructed, called that place the sanctuary of sanctuaries.
Whether it's the seven circuit labyrinth of ancient Crete or this one, a petroglyph, from the Hopi people, labyrinth's can be code language for how we imagine we got to this earth (according to the Hopi, through an underground kiva or passageway leading up from the underworld.) The hole in the kiva floor, the sipapuni, is the place of emergence from the other world. The Hopi still hold that the earth's own sipapuni is their sacred Grand Canyon. Some see in this image a womb and birth canal. Or it's a symbol of initiation into a new phase of our lives.
Labyrinths offer us threshold spaces where we can connect with other, often forgotten, aspects of ourselves. Liminal places of praise and thanksgiving for a life filled with mystery and hope.
When I wrote Sophia: The Feminine Face of God, winning a national book award was the furtherest thing from my mind. I was concentrating on those darned page proofs and getting the art in the right place. But I've since learned She winks! "She" has just won a gold medal in the 2013 Nautilus Book Award competition in the category of 'Religion and Spirituality/Other." Last year's winner in that category was Desmond Tutu so I am reeling, to say the least.
Divine Arts Media (who published Sophia and will publish Color: The Language of Light at the end of August) has four winners in this year's Nautilus competition. Besides Sophia's gold, they won three silver medals:
The Shaman and Ayahuasca
by Don José Campos
A Heart Blown Open by Keith Martin-Smith
The Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas by Glenn H. Mullin
As
Oliver Wendell Holmes said in his poem, “The Chambered Nautilus,” one day we
will all be leaving our outgrown shell for ” a dome more vast.” Until
then, we’ll keep reading good books, a few of us will write them, and some
prescient publishers such as Divine Arts Media will publish them. For
that we are all truly grateful. As the Nautilus Book Award site puts it:
”
Since ancient times, storytellers and scribes worldwide have gathered and
shared the culture’s words and ideas in ways that encourage its people to
think, feel, and improve the lives of upcoming generations. For centuries, the
world’s great philosophers and leaders have used books to inspire the masses
and affect their attitudes and emotions – not always for the better.
With mass global communication, political upheaval, depletion and
destruction of our natural resources along with religious and secular
fanaticism all growing at an alarming rate, the need for books that promote
viable options for positive social change is vast, and the phrase,
“Changing the World One Book at a Time” is more meaningful than ever before.
Authors and publishers and their books CAN and ARE making a difference.”
I remember saying “You can read me a story, if you wanna,”
to my Aunt Edna as I snuggled down between sheets so cold and flat it felt
like sleeping between crisp sheets of white paper. I should note that everyone
ironed sheets back in those days—and did not heat upstairs bedrooms. Edna was
my unmarried aunt and I loved staying with her on my father’s family farm when
my parents needed a little break from a busy, very verbal three year old.
Edna had no children, but she had lots of buttons. We’d
string buttons into fancy necklaces. She taught me how to do cat’s cradle. She
gave me thread and a dishtowel to embroider for my mother and we spent long
afternoon hours having “tea” in tiny cups and nibbling Edna’s homemade sugar cookies.
Sometimes she’d play me records on the Victrola. And we’d look at magic
pictures through the stereopticon.
But it was at night that I’d ask her to read
to me. She had few, if any, children’s books, so she’d read children’s stories
from the weekly farm paper. I didn’t care what the stories were. I wasn’t
seeking plots. Or even characters. I was seeking her undivided attention. The
main thing was that she was reading—to me. I loved hearing the sound of her
voice.
Today I read about a man named Juan Murdock, an Idaho father
with six kids and apparently, little time to read to them. So he invented “smart
pajamas”—PJ’s coded with dot patterns a kid can scan with a smart phone and the
pajamas can take the kid to an app with a story.
If those kids are anything like I was, they’ll soon discover
that it’s not the story they want as much as a real human lying down next to
them with a voice that’s aimed directly (and only) to them! Aunt Edna would be mortified to think dots
could be scanned for a story. But then,
so am I.
Finally some spring breezes began wafting over
our little Vermont mountain and I pulled my gardening gloves out from the dark
closet.
Cleaning out a couple of flower beds was so uplifting after what seems
like an endless month in front of the TV set watching people coping with tragedy
in the Boston area. My heart was with my good friend, Sharon Bauer and her
husband David as I kept squinting at Watertown street signs floating past the screen, wondering if I’d
see “Pearl.” I now know they were about a half mile from the major shoot out
and a mile and a half from the final "hiding in the boat" scene.
As I dug out some old weeds, I kept seeing
Sharon’s magic urban garden in my mind. I sat in that spring garden last April so I knew what it might look like…if she could get outside to see
it. “Shelter Inside.” What a phrase for a woman who finds her “shelter” digging
in the dirt.
An enterprising Des Moines Register writer, Jason Noble,
searched the University of Iowa alumae/alumni records to see who might be
living in Watertown, and called her. I'm hoping Jason won't mind if I quote a bit from his blog:
“University of Iowa alumna Sharon Bauer went into Boston on
Thursday with her husband. They walked as close as they could get to the
marathon finish line, she said, to “pay their respects.”
They
returned home to Watertown, Mass., in the evening, feeling anguished but
unthreatened.
“We
came home with no sense of ongoing danger,” said Bauer, 70, a psychotherapist
who graduated from Iowa in 1964. “Everybody here has been grieving for what
happened on Monday, but I don’t think any of us thought, ‘Oh, there could be
more.’”
And of course there was. A lot more! Last night I was astounded to hear that 9,000 police, special
forces, experts had descended on Watertown taking precautions like no one has
seen on our shores—ever. And they were all after one wounded nineteen year old whose ideology and big
brotherly allegiances seemed to have caused such havoc and fear. Sharon says the only words she can find to
explain it were “bizarre” and “surreal.” “Like a movie set for a bad action
movie.”
I’m sure Sharon’s been viewing much of this through her perceptive psychotherapist
eyes. She said her greatest sadness was for the marathon, and the potential end
of the ideal that the Boston Marathon represents. In the blog, she recalled the
incredible trust and goodwill that accompanies the race – the trust the runners
put into the crowd and the race volunteers to provide them water or catch them
if they fall – and the camaraderie and generosity and openness that the event
engenders.
“To have that violated, to think that next year there will be bomb-sniffing
dogs and police checking out backpacks it’s just that’s …” she trailed off. “I
don’t feel scared for myself right now, I just feel scared for everybody that
we have to be so mistrustful.”
That’s
a mouthful for my friend who loves to trust. She trusts the soil and Mother
Earth. She trusts her friends and family and neighbors—just as she wants that
trust to be a part of everyone’s “Goddess-given” life. Thank you for being so present through all of
this, Sharon. It’s time to put your gardening gloves back on now.
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