Sophia Serve

Thanksgiving for Imperfect Music

He spotted the ad in our local paper: Harpsichord for sale. Some tender loving care needed."

The price was right, so we wrestled it into our music room. My husband glued some of the wood strips back on; I oiled and polished the case. But the ad was right. Its "innards" did need some help.

Fortunately, the tuning wrench came with it. But like any "fixer-upper" this purchase needed more than TLC. Lucky for us, our older son, the actual musician in the family, had access to string and knew what to do with it.  And he taught us how to tune it.

So, now we can make music.

Sitting there with its lid up, it's a constant reminder that all instruments, including ourselves, are always in need of care. It's not enough that we get healthy food, reasonable exercise and solid sleep. Like these fragile harpsichord strings, our souls also need fine-tuning. Especially, like our harpsichord, in the upper registers. But like our copper and brass harpsichord wires, we too are attached to a larger Sounding Board. Even when one or two parts of us "snap," we're held. And we can still play.

Father Bede Griffiths, mentor of Andrew Harvey whose book I mentioned earlier but wish to recommend again (The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism) said,

"Imagine that God is a great musician and that you are a flute He wants to play the most glorious music on. If the stops of the flute are filled with mud, how can the music that is meant to be played through you sound at all?"

On this day of national thanks giving, I give thanks for the mud. I give thanks for strings that may break. I give thanks for the multiple ways we go out of tune. And I give thanks for all our fine tuning wrenches. Without them, we'd be just a few jarring pieces of wood with metal attached.

Fiery Action

This wonderful image of playful, fiery activism just landed in my in-box. It's from a friend who embodies the love of our earth in ways that have inspired me for several decades. Sharon's inner beauty shines as clearly as does her Jack-o-Lantern. But it is her willingness and innate ability to show others how to sparkle as well, that aligns her, in my mind at least, to Andrew Harvey.

Salt or TNT?

Wordsmithing has come easily to me ever since I learned which end of the pencil goes onto the paper.  For others, I know, the thought of writing is agony. But, no doubt, what they enjoy doing would cause the proverbial beads of blood to form on my forehead if I tried it. We all do what we have a passion and penchant for doing.

Writing  is, as Diane Ackerman says in Deep Play, “tilting tiny cogs and wheels into place.” And it’s the writer’s responsibility to know what those cogs might actually set into motion. Once released, they can’t be called back. Like cell phones that can trigger bombs, tiny cog-words can easily fit into other wheels that fit into other wheels and before you know it... 

Words DO have enormous power. The chemical term for what happens when two agents come together to produce something different is called hypergolic. Writers call it metaphor. You take two opposite images and meld them together. And just as two inert substances come together to produce table salt, for instance, or nitroglycerine, our language has the capability to do that as well.

I saw something on the news last night that chilled my bones and set my teeth on edge. Some people are hell-bent (and I use that term on purpose) to destroy Obama. Not just destroy our democratically elected president, but encourage an attack on his life. The Secret Service has in fact let it be known that threats to his life are now 400% higher than against any other president. Ever. And people are doing this by using words as lethally disguised as a knife in an ankle holster. Or as a harmless teddy bear.

These "calls to prayer" have appeared almost overnight on T Shirts, mugs, hats, pins--any surface that can hold words. And while they may seem innocuous and even rather nice, they are not! They are wolves in sheep's clothing. Or nitroglycerine masquerading as salt.

Psalm 109: 8 says, "May his days be few; may another seize his position."

Not being a Hebrew scholar, I cannot justify why these particular words appear in Psalm 109, nor any other of the horrific images one can find in the Old Testament, but I suspect they have something to do with the fact that Jews faced merciless enemies. Later these same verses were used by monks to attack Protestants. And now they're being dredged up to incite violence against our democratically elected president. I call this "white-supremacy-speak." And it's wrong!

It's certainly very like calls to jihad by other religious types.  

For $4.95 you can get this bumper sticker from zazzle.com by Megatudes. Or a pack of 50 for only $106.99.

Why does this upset me so? Well, let's look at the words.

Defenders of all this “cute stuff" argue, “Oh, this is only our way of calling for a one-term presidency. Besides it's free speech!" (Not any more than yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.)

Bibliolaters--people who worship the bible and use it any way they wish--know the code. Here's what’s in the very next verse:

“May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow.” 

What this really means is:  “Somebody (please) make Michelle a widow and Sasha and Malia orphans.”     Now you know why my bones chill and my heart aches.

Nor is this simply a blatant call for assassination. (Glen Beck on Fox News also recently called for Nancy Pellosi to be found floating in the Boston Harbor!) I'm hearing a clarion call for hateful destruction and murder and it's time we name what's going on in America.

In a verse a bit later in Psalm 109 I find a smidgen of comfort:

Verse 31: “For he (The Lord) stands at the right hand of the needy, to save them from

those who would condemn them to death.”

 

Real Toads

At one of my several favorite libraries yesterday a book called 100 Essential Modern Poems by Women fell into my hands—as many books seem to do.  Essential poems?

 

I thought essential meant “stuff to keep me alive” like food, water, air, love, friendship. Ah, friendship. Poems are friends. I get it.

 

Over the years I’ve come to call “friends” many of the earlier women, like Emily Dickinson and Elinor Wylie also included in this anthology. Today I skip to the end to see who my new friends might be.  Louise Erdrich, Rita Dove, Caroyn Forché, Heather McHugh, Jane Kenyon, Kay Ryan, Eavan Boland, Ellen Bryant Voight, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, Marilyn Hacker, Mary Oliver of course.

 

I have a chapter in Questions Writers Ask called “Can I Write Poetry?” It contains hundreds of comments about the craft of writing it. Marianne Moore’s famous quip pops out. “Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.”

 

Since my real gardens have turned into unappealing grey November stick figure shadows of their former selves, I turn to the imaginary ones “planted” by the editors of 100 Essential…Joseph Parisi and Kathleen Welton.  The poems they selected are essential, they say “because they deal with the most fundamental issues everyone eventually faces and express in unforgettable ways the deepest experiences that make us human: love, friendship, family (bonds and friction), longing and loss, dreams and disappointments, anxiety, suffering, joy and our relation to nature.” 

 

So, I am reminded once again, it is the deepest experiences that make us essential humans, including friction, disappointments and anxiety.

 

They’re all mine. The grey gardens along side the pink primrosed ones.

 

I'll leave you with what one of my essential friends,  Jane Kenyon, said in “Happiness,” (which according to this prolific New Hampshire woman no longer with us, "there is no accounting for.") “It comes even to the boulder/in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,/to rain falling on the open sea,/ to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Music + Sardines = Peace

When people in England were standing up stones at Avebury and in other megalithic circles, people southeast of Lima and 20 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean were busy constructing complex cities.

We know this because of Ruth Shady's work. Since 1994 she has painstakingly been uncovering a city--Caral--that's close to 5000 years  old. Early on, she enlisted the Peruvian army to help remove tons of sand, rubble and stones. For many years archeologists thought all those piles of sand were hills. Nope, Shady said. They're too symmetrical.

 

It turns out they are six huge stone pyramids older than Egypt’s.  Each has a base the size of four football fields and the largest is five stories tall.  Around them are a large central amphitheater, three sunken plazas, six large platform mounds, a furnace designed to burn an eternal flame, apartment-style housing and other dwellings that occupy an area of some 160 acres.

  Of the eighteen recorded preceramic sites in the Supe Valley, ten are more than 60 acres in size.

Hummingbirds and Nazca Lines

I thought of this image we included in Hunab Ku as I listened to Maya Lin on NPR the other day. You may remember her for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. which she designed as a 21 year old Yale student.

Maya was talking about her latest memorial : What Is Missing?, a multi-sited work incorporating video and sounds of birds and animals now threatened. She builds her art on facts and we can emotionally draw from those facts what we care to take away.

One in three amphibians, one in four mammals and one in eight birds is now threatened and in danger of forever dying because of habitat loss. (And 70% of our plants!)

The Nazca story is a compelling one and a sophiaserve reader recently sent me an update that may interest you as much as it interests me.