Sophia Serve

Rumsfeld, Sophia and Remembering Eden

Do you recall that speech Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once gave when he tried to justify our intelligence (or lack thereof) backing the decision to go into Iraq to get all those elusive weapons of mass destruction? It was that "what we know we know and what we don't know that we don't know" speech.

I had once published "Knowledge Management" books so I thought I knew what he was talking about. At a knowledge conference I had learned we might divide knowledge into "information" and "know how." The knowledge you get from reading memos and books versus what you pick up at the water cooler or over a beer. Explicit and tacit.

Think of all knowledge as falling into this four-part grid:

 

What we know we know.	What we know we don't know.
What we don’t know we know.	What we don’t know that we don’t know.

It's that last quadrant: "What we don't know that we don't know" that's apt to get us into trouble. 

MORE Kelsey Mountain Hats

O.K. I'm obsessed. My husband refers to my mountain of colorful materials in the corner of our library as "Hat Central." 

"Hat Central" has now posted another twenty or so hats for you to look at and share with your friends. Click on "Kelsey Mountain Hats" on my Home Page, scroll down to "More Kelsey Mountain Hats" or go directly to the "new"  hats just added. Have fun!  Be warm! 

My great thanks to Cara (shown here) and Tiffany for modeling and Amy for technical support--they  bartered their services for hats.

Collective Wisdom

No spoiler alert needed. I won’t be giving anything away to tell you Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol ends with a couple of pages that will most likely never make it into the movie, nor will they cross Tom Hanks’ lips.

Here’s a portion:

“Our physical bodies have evolved over the ages, but it was our minds that were created in the image of God…as soon as we humans begin to harness our true power, we will have enormous control over our world. We will be able to design reality rather than merely react to it…And (Kathryn says) if we as humans can honestly grasp this one simple truth…the world will change overnight…the power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.”

 Kathryn’s character is based, at least in part, on Lynne McTaggart, the author of The Field and The Intention Experiment.

After reading The Intention Experiment, I was again reminded that, indeed, we ARE all connected and we are now called to really pay attention to our thoughts, our intentions and our actions.

But there is another book I'd like to call your attention to. The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly. I admit I'm partial. It's written by some friends of mine:

Alan Briskin, Sheryl Erickson, John  Ott and Tom Callanan.

 As the title implies, it's more about group wisdom than about our individual attempts at being and acting intelligent. They quote Albert Einstein in their chapter called "Inhabiting a Different Worldview."

“A  human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself [she experiences herself] as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusions of his [her] consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.” [The brackets are mine.]

Now that Carl Jung’s heretofore unpublished Red Book (NYTimes Magazine today,  Sunday 20 September 2009) is about to be published, it’s interesting to read about Jung’s final days on page 83 and 84 of The Power of Collective Wisdom.  The authors tell us that Jung believed ideas lie outside the individual mind but can be discovered and rediscovered from different disciplines and different cultural backgrounds.  They say: “To inhabit a world view of such shared collective knowing, we need to be able to hold in our mind a larger canvas on which to see the cumulative accomplishments of consciousness. We need to understand ourselves as a human species evolving together.”

Together.  Not separately.

At the end, they quote Christopher Alexander: “People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness.”  It is indeed time we come together. That’s their last line.

It IS time we come together. We're wasting precious time being fractured and fractious. Miserable and misery-makers. Angry and anxious. We’re soooo much better than that.

 

The Lost Symbol

"To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books."
                The Secret Teachings of All Ages

That's how Dan Brown, aka The Da Vinci Code author, starts his latest book. Like his hero, Robert Langdon, I too have found that amazing things often hide in plain sight.

The other day I quit reading about all this Masonic lore long enough to visit some friends in Lexington, Mass. Before lunch we decided to take a walk over to the Heritage Center which, much to my amazement, contains a whole lot more than Revolutionary War books and Minute Man trivia. It's housed in the Massachusetts Masonic Center and I was suddenly surrounded by images of compasses and T squares, pyramids and all seeing eyes. 

And like the George Washington Masonic Memorial on a hill in Alexandria, VA (right) it, too, houses shelves of Masonic writings.

Besides learning more about D.C.'s monuments, some of which were crafted from Vermont White Granite, the quarry-source of which I can see from my upstairs window, I realized that the last time I stood in our Capitol Rotunda, I must not have looked up.

There it is--"The Apotheosis of George Washington." This 4,666 foot fresco created by Constantino Brumidi in 1865 forms a mystical circle whose title claims George Washington has "become God." Strange, isn't it, that we just recently learned that only 23% of Oklahoma's high school students even know he was our first president.

Besides intriguing me with magic squares and tatooed bad guys, The Lost Symbol inspired me to reread Exodus 34. That's the account of Moses, holding the two stone tablets, fresh back from his mountain-top conversation with God. Everybody says, "Look! The skin of his face is shining." But apparently the root word in Hebrew for shining skin could be read as either "horn" or "ray." When the Roman Catholic Church asked St. Jerome to translate the Hebrew into Latin, it came out "Moses' face was horned."

 

Michelangelo sculpted him that way. Other artists also turned Moses into a Pan or Hermes because of this mistake by Jerome, including this stained glass window in a Welsh church.

Language can be very slippery.  Horns? Rays of light?

I was amused by an account of a translation made in the 4th century which I learned about from Bart Ehrman in his book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. In the first part of the book of Hebrews (1:3) we read "Christ bears all things by the word of his power." The original scribe (and keep in mind that some of them couldn't even read but just copied lines; most did this intricate work by flickering candle light) used a verb that sounded similar in Greek: "Christ manifests all things by the word of his power." A couple hundred years later, a second scribe decided to change "manifests" to the more common reading "bears."  A couple of hundred years after that another scribe erased "bears" and put "manifest" back. And he added a note in the margin: "Fool and Knave! Leave the old reading, don't change it!" I notice in my version of that passage, it's neither "bears" or "manifests," but "sustains."  I think I like "manifests" better.

To manifest means to bring into being. To make evident. To be easily understood and readily perceived.

I suspect by his latest novel, Dan Brown will be manifesting increased tourism to Washington D.C., new interest in old mysteries, a deeper understanding of Masons and how they influenced our American history and architecture, an introduction (or for some of us, a re-introduction) to Noetics and lots of red-rimmed eyes for those of us who just couldn't put it down.

Where Have All (my) Flowers Gone?

While my gardens, admittedly neglected this summer, have morphed mainly to daisy-yellows and a plethora of pink malvas, the flowers from my friend Sharon's garden in Watertown, Massachusetts still flourish. But you should know that Sharon speaks with earth spirits and they obviously help.

A Writer's Organized Clutter

When my son Joel suggested building some new bookshelves in my office, I suspected he worried about the way I had things stacked up. One day they would cause me major pain when (when not if) they fell over on me, depositing about 1500 books on my head. So, with only one trip to the hardware store, he transformed my entire north wall…

 

Writers need to be able to find things. I always prided myself on my “organized clutter.”

Even though I thought I knew where I had put “stuff,” the ugly truth is I usually spend more time looking for things, than I do writing about it once I find the research. Of course I also rationalize by using the “serendipity factor” which is: while you’re looking for what you think you’re looking for, you’ll find something that is much more wonderful—just by accident.

Take the little booklet my cousin Maxine gave me once about the history of Sand Creek, Wisconsin grade school. I remember flipping  through it at the time and then shelving it. But it turned up again as I reorganized my books onto my lovely new shelves, and this time I actually sat down with it. There were two pictures of my dad I don’t think I’d ever seen before. What a gift! (And a picture of one of my goofy uncles in drag playing a role in a local production that I know I never saw before because if I had, it would have been imprinted on my brain.)

When we lived in our townhouse row in Cambridge one of our neighbors was afflicted with her “organized clutter” to the point it became a fire hazard. In her mind, she knew why she couldn’t throw anything away. Anything! Use your imagination. Everything had a future purpose. But the result was a form of chaos that eventually brought fire inspectors to her house and resulted in mandatory cleanouts.  She brought the Collyer brothers to mind. Pack rats par excellence!

 E.L. Doctorow’s new book, Homer & Langley documents their obsessive story in a book out this month with amazing pictures of their New York stash back in Harlem, 1947.  There was so much stuff in their apartment that it took the police two weeks just to find the brothers’ corpses in 100 tons of rubbish including 14 pianos and an entire Model T Ford. The neighbors smelled the stench.

Well, thank goodness, my son saved me from all that and my office is bright, airy, colorful and free of musical instruments or automobiles.  Now, if I could just find…

 

 

 

 

Place-Shifting: A Rural Renaissance

Ever since the 1920’s people began to move from farms to cities and right now 80% of Americans are urban dwellers. But there’s a reversal afoot, at least for baby boomers and other retirees. When my husband and I moved to the country ten years ago, I didn’t realize we were part of a rural renaissance movement. We left a city thoroughfare with its car alarms, it’s bright street lights, fire engines and ambulances for a house at the end of a country lane about the width of a prostrate refrigerator lit at night only by the moon.

It was so quiet I could hear chickadees chewing.

Bill Bishop writes about this place-shifting in America. He quotes a recent report from the Economic Research Services (part of the Dept. of Agriculture). Apparently over the next decade or so people nearing retirement will be leaving larger cities, as we did, for the "chickadee chewing" parts of our country. If you like graphs, you might be interested in reading the whole report.

The rate of rural population growth has tripled in the last decade and the numbers continue to rise. I’m not sure how I feel about being labeled “an older migrant” but in fact, that’s exactly what we are. We are, in Vermontese, “flatlanders, from away.” While my husband and I are a few years older than baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) we fit the pattern. We knew after retirement, we couldn’t afford to continue to live in our expensive Cambridge, MA townhouse so we headed north. To Vermont. And so have numerous others in search of what the Economic Research people call “High amenities”:’mountains, lakes, sunshine and rivers.

The map above shows those counties with the most scenic amenities (in green) and those with the fewest (in brown). That little green spot in the middle of Vermont is where we live. Mountains, lakes and rivers—and sunshine…but not all the time. I confess, I have counted Vermont “sky-greys” ranging from pinkish, violet greys to the blacker varieties. But having grown up in Wisconsin (have you been to Door County? Do have any idea how beautiful it is?) I find this map terribly skewed. Granted, the Midwest has no mountains but the bluffs along the Mississippi River are spectacular. I know. I lived on them for over a decade. And the Midwest certainly has lakes, (Great Ones and Minnesota's ten thousand), rivers and sunshine. AND water, although water tables in the Midwest have become polluted from farming practices over the years.

I believe places with plenty of drinkable water will be what the next “where to move” maps will be pointing out. And there are other amenities to map--amenities we have discovered in Vermont:

Good neighbors
Small town governance
Nearby farmers markets
Great cooperative food stores
Specialty local cheeses
Local breweries
Maple syrup
Excellent universities and technical schools
Covered bridges
Skiing
Hiking and biking trails
Broadband access
Theater and opera
Pottery and glassblowing
Town bands
Wonderful choral groups
Small churches
Good libraries
Great independent bookstores
Equidistant from Montreal and Boston.

If these were the amenities charted, Vermont would certainly live up to its name: Ver-mont: Green Mountains, and be the very greenest of greens on any amenities map.

So Many Injustices

Images of Ted Kennedy, his family, his legacy, his state of Massachusetts (our home for 13 years) still wash through my brain. During his time in the Senate, he dealt with so many injustices, but there are so many left over for the rest of us to deal with after his passing.

I am reminded of what St. Basil the Great who lived in the 4th century wrote:

The bread which you do not use
    is the bread of the hungry.
The garment hanging in your wardrobe
    is the garment of one who is naked.
The shoes that you do not wear
    are the shoes of one who is barefoot.
The money you keep locked away
    is the money of the poor.
The acts of charity you do not perform
    are so many injustices you commit.

Small actions do make a difference. When Shannon Daley-Harris and Jeffrey Keenan joined me in writing Our Day to End Poverty, we decided to place a section at the end of each chapter called "Actions Make a Difference"--stories of what various people have done that had wide-ranging implications.

One by one. It's always how things are accomplished. Perhaps even saving the planet!

As one of the four co-founders of the blog-web site Our Luminous Ground  Ria Baeck recently suggested I check out the site on eco-tipping points. I did. And you might wish to as well.  It's filled with stories about how people--ordinary people like you and me--are making a difference.

"So many injustices"...but the good news is, there are so many of us to attend to them.

Rice Paddy Art

 I’ll never boil rice again without thinking  I’m destroying a work of art!

A friend recently sent me these pictures and I subsequently scoped out other “paddy art” and thought perhaps you’d enjoy them as well.

Imagine planting teeny rice seeds (with the help of a computer in many cases) and then waiting a whole growing season for a mural to appear.

Volunteers and villagers from the small village called Inakadate, 600 miles north of Tokyo, started planting four different varieties of rice in late May to form this  Sengoku warrior on horseback.

Villagers have been creating this form of crop art, including this portrait of Napoleon which can be seen from space, since 1993.

They started out as small village projects, but in 2005 agreements between landowners and artists launched art across 15,000 square miles of paddy fields.

Like Crop Circles and ancient earth effigy mounds, these massive intricate works of art can only seen from above…a wonderful metaphor for taking the long view. The high view. The cooperative view.