Sophia Serve

Our "Fractaled" Congress

I think it's appropriate Washington D.C. was heavily snowed upon this week. Here's what it looked like from space. As senators stalled, debated, denigrated, shouted, weaseled around a health care reform bill, all I could think of were fractals.  

 Senator Broccoli, what do you have to say?

A fractal is an image that can be split into parts and each sort of looks like the whole. Think ferns, coastlines, snowflakes. They are branching, self-generating systems that have repeating patterns.

Congress has (often) been called a sausage-making machine from the ways it mixes, mashes, grinds and turns out a product that looks nothing like it did when it went in. I prefer the image of fractals.

I confess right up front, I'm math-challenged. Still I try to make sense of shapes. Including the shape of our future country.

In the late 70's a Cambridge, UK, mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot came up with this figure--perhaps the most famous fractal of all.

If you want to take two minutes, you can see a cool fractal "zooming."

Fractals are based on something they call "recursion." That's repeating the same thing over and over again to create a shape.  Take this triangle shaped fractal mathematicians call the Sierpinski triangle.

One of the things to remember about fractals is their self-similarity. (Think "Republican," "Democrat.")

Now think recursion--repeating the same thing over and over again.

Now think what happens if you change just a few coordinates:

Kids know how to "fractal" images. They can take a triangle

and change it into a snowflake. Too bad kids can't run for Congress.

See how.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

A Whale and an Ark

Not being someone who scoffs at synchronicity, I feel compelled to share with you some images that came to me from two different SophiaServe readers only minutes apart. What does a replica of Noah's ark made by a Dutch carpenter named Johan Huibers have in common with a bunch of scuba divers wielding curved knives? And why were they brought to my attention now?

Huibers, a present day Noah, and his son have been working on this three story ark two-thirds the size of a football field (and dimensionally accurate according to the Bible) since May of 2005.

The San Francisco Chronicle carried a story back in 2006 about a 50 ton female humpback whale caught near the Farallon Islands not far from the Golden Gate Bridge.  The whale's story goes like this.

Hundreds of pounds of crab traps and 20 ropes, each 240 feet long, held her hostage. The ropes cut into her flesh including around her mouth. A fisherman spotted her as she struggled to stay afloat and radioed a rescue team. 

Even though one little flick of her tail could have easily killed them, the divers worked for an hour cutting the lines away. The diver freeing her mouth said later her huge eye followed him as he cut. He thought he saw her wink once. Finally she was able to swim free. But instead of leaving right away, she swam in what they described as "joyous circles". Then she gently nudged and rubbed up against each of the divers as if to thank them. It was, a diver reported, "one of the most incredibly beautiful experiences of my life."

As the Christmas season of giving and receiving nudges up against us, perhaps these stories of Johan Huibers' replica of Noah's incredible gift along with the humpback's salvation story remind us that no task is too daunting and no situation too entangled.

And that we're here to protect all life.

Tell Me Why

A SophiaServe reader alerted me to this wonderful song composed and sung by

Declan Galbraith in 2006 when he was thirteen. It's worth hearing and watching.

 

Fast and Faster

Tea and juice for breakfast. I joined others around the globe for the 350.org fast today. Oh and there's the possibility of losing some weight. There's always that!

But mainly two things made me decide to fast today. Bill McKibben called for it so I checked out the red and green list of countries on the 350.org website showing how the world shakes out in Copenhagen right now. And an email from a Sophia Serve reader. 

He told me that at his church (Prince of Peace) in Minneapolis they plan to prepare over a million meals from January 27-31 in conjunction with Feed My Starving Children

I wonder if we can do this any faster.

The Writer's Prayer

Last night I was invited to our local library to host a conversation around the collection of quotations about writing that is now finally published. It's not been without its trials. Pulling 6,000 quotations together around twenty questions wasn't just time consuming. It was exasperating. Even though both my  husband and I proofed it--several times--errors crept in like little gnomes playing tricks on our eyes. I used to caution authors I worked with to steel themselves because no book is perfect. What made me think my books would be any different? But discovering them in front of strangers undresses you. There you are. Naked.

Advent Dark

Unless our motion censor floods our yard with light, or the moon peeks out, we live surrounded by deep dark this time of year. After spending more than an urban decade surrounded by sirens, car alarms and booming bass bellowing from pounding cars and rarely seeing stars, rural life pulls you back to another time. A slower time. A darker quieter time.

I spotted a Santa Advent Calendar in a store the other day and I wondered how a parent explains to a kid what "advent" means if their only frame of reference is a big guy with red cheeks holding a lumpy bag. But kids do get the "waiting" part of December. They hear "not now!" enough.

The countdown to Christmas comes in many forms. Hurried trips to the post office. Stressful trips to the grocery store. Manic trips to the mall. Trips. Tripping. Tripped up.

We pack so much anxiety and nostalgia into that "Santa bag." 

So, what IS Advent? I'm not a theologian so I can only tell you what it is for me.

The Maori people of New Zealand still chant their creation story by first calling it "a breathing space of immensity." That's what Advent is.

They speak of a time when the Universe was in darkness. No light at all. That's what Advent is.

They chant: "Darkness, become a light-possessing darkness."

After my last posting about the dolphin-killing ritual still performed in Denmark, my husband's only comment was, "Well, that was dark." I thought, "Welcome to Advent."

The Maori people unwind their unique cosmology story this way: "Light, become a darkness-possessing light." That's what Advent is.

They sing: "Let there be one Light above. Let their be one Light below...a  Dominion of Light...And now a bright light prevailed."

Shadow Work: Ironic, Isn't it?

A SophiaServe reader sent me some pictures the other day that are literally gut-wrenching. And they have provided me with new insights into "irony."

Snow Words

We had our first snowfall last night. This morning memories of snow-angels, wet wool mufflers and little mittens catching flakes wash over me as I look out over the oh so white yard. By March, this white magic will have worn off a bit but right now it's perfect in every way.

Wilson A. Bentley, a Jericho, VT photographer spent years in a cold studio photographing snow crystals with his bulky view camera. The Meteorological Society published it in 1931 with its incredible 71 plates filled with unique flake designs and now Dover's reprinted it so we can all enjoy them.

Like lacy atoms that spin and can point simultaneously up, down or sideways, our present Vermont snowflakes look the same as they did when Bentley captured them on film. Poor Venus, with her 900 degree atmosphere; she'll never know how beautiful they are. The physicist David Hume once said, "God so loved the earth that He put the earth just right from the sun."

The snow that fell last night is now aput as the Inuits would say. It's just lying on the ground. But as it was falling, it was gana and if it were light enough and the wind strong enough to pile it into drifts, it would be plqsirpoq.

We live in ski country so we say pack and powder a lot. I've  heard that the Yup'ik people in Alaska use at least 15 different words. A snowflake, for instance, is qunuk and a snowbank qengaruk. Imagine, all these words for snow, yet no word for war.

Most of us have vocabularies of upwards of 100,000 words. My husband whom we lovingly call "Mr. Language Person" no doubt has more. I probably use only 10,000 of them. Shakespeare used 15,000. I don't know how many Cormac McCarthy uses, but he does know how to put them together. In The Road, now a motion picture, he paints a bleak picture of what he poses as a not too distant possible future. He describes "a blackness to hurt your ears with listening." And in the "cold autistic dark" he gives us a snowflake that could not be more opposed to the ones Bentley brought us.

"a single gray flake drifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom."

I am so grateful that falling snow paints for me a "just right" picture. 

My universe still feels friendly. Freeman Dyson, another physicist, said "It's as if the universe knew we were coming." I live in a home-world that still sends crystalline images to remind me how unique I am as well--and that I'm softly cushioned when I fall.