Sophia Serve

Flowers of Venus

(Photo by Carol Frenier)

Yesterday my friend Carol e-mailed me this vibrant iris. She calls each by name. Her garden blooms for Venus—and, now, because of blogging, it blooms here. For all of us. Unlike Carol, I rarely remember plant names but I love them no less. Our more common purple and yellow varieties are spiked here and there by Siberian irises (well, I do know one) which the prior owner left as unfurling flag markers to remind us she was here.

For some reason, maybe because Venus and love are in the air, this June various friends have popped in with white ones and light blue ones. Last weekend I saw a froth of cinnamon mocha latte on a stem. Oh, and my friend Joe has a black iris. I admit, I sink into serious iris envy every time I visit him in June. I often trade iris-laden birthday gifts with Mary Ann, one of my dear and constant Wisconsin friends. Iris mugs, Monet’s iris bags, paintings, jewelry, crafted boxes. For us, irises are a special way of defining our friendship.

When she was able to enjoy them, I gave my friend Lori fat vases full of irises from my garden. She loved them. Lori’s mind and body now weaken and we who call her our friend know she prepares to leave us. She's actually told us so. "I'm going. I'm going."

Romans believed irises purify the air. Frank Waters said, "Breathing is an act of prayer." May Lori’s oxygen last as long as she cares to draw it in. And then, may we gently
     let 
          her 
                 go.

This illustration of three irises can be found on page 148 of Hunab Ku. They're drawn from a Minoan wall mural from around 2000 BC from Knossos, Crete.
Joel and I chose it because it's about "Breathing". We closed that essay with a Pueblo Prayer: "I add my breath to your breath, that our days may be long on the Earth."

Just as the early morning dew caresses the deep purple beard of Carol’s iris, the tears from Lori’s extended family lace our own “falls”—that’s what Carol calls the petals that droop. Grief IS a falling. A falling into a deep purple place. None of us knows how to land or even if we will land.  But I suspect each of us eventually will come to a petal-softened spot of our own choice and time.

In a few days, Carol’s fuzzy bearded flower friends will, like Lori, decide it's time to go. The blossoms of an iris shrink, become exceedingly moist and regardless of their original size or color, through some common telepathy sensed only by these flowers of Venus, they morph into peeled parchment cocoons. Like dripping candles, they all point up.

On Wings of Fire

Rising up out of its own ashes, every 500 years or so, the legendary phoenix imprints us with hope. It's a cross-cultural symbol for resurrection. Turkish texts claim the phoenix bears these words on its wings:

"Neither the earth produces me, nor the heavens, but only the wings of fire."

Chinese sources say the feng-huang originates in the sun and calls up the sun every morning with its perfect five-toned melody.

Now, as many Iranians face their own "flaming challenges," and each of us rises daily out of yesterday's "ashes," the phoenix points the way to our future days that can be scented, as its own nest is said to be, with frankincense, cinnamon and myrrh. May it be so!

From Hesiod to Harry Potter, the phoenix carries hope on its flaming wings. Suddenly one has appeared as a crop circle as well.

Photo by Oliver Morel

Lupines

Gardening is a competitive sport in Vermont. Maybe it’s because our growing season is so short (148 days) and because everyone spends long white winter months dreaming of color so when spring finally comes, spades fly.

Prior to moving to Vermont, the only association I had with lupines was from the Monty Python lines our sons continually spouted. Then I began to notice people's June gardens and I fell into serious lupine-envy.

So I bought a couple of various colored varieties, tenderly planted them, watered them, spoke to them. People told me to place the colors apart or they will eventually all become purple. I separated them. They grew.  I thought it was because of my burgeoning gardening skills. I carefully transplanted the babies them into what I call “Lupine Lane” in our south garden. (Next to "Lilac Alley"). This year they jumped the path and there's purple everywhere!

Lupines, I’ve now learned, are a Vermont native and our main highway 89 is lined with them at certain spots.  I have a friend who when she came to interview at our nearby law school, saw the wildflowers along the highway and decided this was the state for her.

You can’t get rid of lupines short of mowing them down, or sending in the goats. They’re drought tolerant and have been described as a self-seeding native. So much for my great gardening skills.

But I don’t care how easy they are to grow. They're magnificent! And they do make a lovely perennial border, as Tony Avent says in a Horticulture Magazine article I read on line today.

Tony calls them baptisia. He plants artemesia nearby to offset the blue with silver. Great idea.

Lupines stand tall to “baptize” us in color and Artemis reminds us to keep our eyes open. Beauty’s all around!

"T" People and Bird Houses

While most families get together on holidays to grill, drink beer, watch ballgames, snipe at each other and dredge up past grievances, our niece and her family sat down in the back yard to play with scraps of wood and bits of found treasures. The French word for this is bricolage--play with what's at hand.

Sophia, so aptly named for this blog, the youngest member of the family, lounged with the dog while all the adults made birdhouses.  Some more fanciful than others.

I wanted to share this birdhouse with you because I believe it’s a metaphor for what ...here he comes again...Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the transcendent self.  The “T” people. Imagine a family so creative, so loving, so thoughtful as to surround little Sophie with these concrete examples of complexity. Yes, complexity.

Mim and Memes

We live near a little town in Vermont made up of a bunch of houses, a post office and a general store—and a sweet, smiling, petite woman named Mim who writes a weekly column in the local newspaper. Somebody recently put up a colorful sign that says, "You are now leaving...( the name of the town) “Home of Mim.” If you ever visit someone and Mim spots your car, you’ll be listed as a visitor of so and so in the next week’s paper. She reports on who has planted lilies where.  She has written a book about the weather in her hometown. Mim is, I’ve decided, a meme for “This is who we are. So there!”

 

The biologist Richard Dawkin coined the word meme over 30 years ago to define a unit of cultural information. It comes from the Greek word mimesis or imitation. Memes get passed along and ingrained—operating a bit like genes and cells in the human body. They need a Petri dish or a bacteria field in which to grow and spread. (think talk shows and Internet blogs) And memes replicate, in ways we can’t predict. We might find some  memes very attractive when we first encounter them, so we adopt them. And then they take on a life of their own. Memes feed on our minds.