Sophia Serve

Our Energy Bar

Our renewable energy bar seems to be set a bit lower today. People have been working on new types of fuel cells for years, but now two SophiaServe readers have sent me links to stories that point to real light at the end of our darkening tunnel.

If you watched "Sixty Minutes" the other night you may have seen K.R. Sridhar showing Lesley Stahl his little silver box--a slender silver "bullet" that could replace nuclear power plants. And as you can see, it has a very small footprint. At a moment in Vermont's history when our legislature is voting on whether or not to renew the license to operate Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant (which according to credible sources leaks very, VERY bad stuff) the "Bloom Box" seems like a gift from heaven. It's called that because Bloom Energy, with a heap of venture capital, is manufacturing it.

Holding it here, Sridhar explained to CBS viewers how he bakes sand and cuts it into little ceramic squares and then coats them with green and black paint that he secretly developed. Methane and other bio fuels from landfills or farms and oxygen goes in; it heats up and energy comes out. By putting 64 of his little squares together, he could power a whole Starbucks.  Twenty California companies currently are using it. Let's pray the adage, "As California goes, so goes our nation" is really true. I want one of these little boxes in my own organic flower garden. And I don't want to have to wait five or ten years. It will be cheaper than solar and wind if they can figure out how to mass produce it.

This is an energy bar many of us could hurdle.

Winter Quiet

After a few extremely busy days, I yearn for a walk--if only to our mailbox a half mile straight down from our house. It's icy. I take my time.

I often walk back up again to a meditative rhythm. Sometimes it's the prayer of St. Francis: "Make me an instrument of your peace..." A step a word. But today my walking mantra wants to be just two words: re-lax, con-tent...re-lax, con-tent.

Once or twice I stop to listen. Nothing.

The sky takes on a deep lapis-lazuli blue the likes of which I see only on crisp winter days. It's about three o'clock so the sun aims its fiery path behind me toward the western mountains at a pretty fast clip. I'm facing a cloud-moon of light and dark, split exactly in half. It's strange to see the moon during the day. It's as if she's saying, "Whoops. I really don't belong here, but I wanted you to see me equally balanced like this. Later tonight I will be oh so bright against the white empty canvas of your yard, but right now I'm just a wispy-whispery thing sent to share a secret: it's important to be balanced...to keep extremes at bay."

Before my walk, I'd been reading the fourth book in Christopher Alexander's series called The Nature of Order. Now I'm observing the order of nature. Everything has a living center, says this wonderful architect-author. I notice that each shadow lives and falls precisely where it is ordered to fall.  Each tree stands in perfect living relationship to its neighbors and each branch seems expertly placed one to another.  The snow knows how to mold the rocks.

Again, I stop to listen. I hear not one sound. Not a grinding snow machine. Not a bird. Not a dog. Not even the dropping of a twig. But wait. Between heartbeats, I notice  a trickle of water running under the ice.  A tree groans from the cold.

"Who," Alexander asks, "has not had the feeling, listening to Mozart's  40th Symphony or to Bach's B minor Mass that something significant is happening, that in some inner sense, the heavens are opening, and that this structure of sound somehow reaches in and hits the heart?" Who, indeed.

Meister Eckhart, that 13th century spiritual teacher, said "We must learn to penetrate things and find God here."

For that brief walk, the sun, the moon, the trees, and the snow all quietly chorus-up to show me a universe of living beings. I am embraced by nothing I can measure, certainly nothing mechanical, but definitely groupings of living centers that form an unbroken whole surrounding me.

Something significant IS happening and it hits my heart.

 

Empathy Neurons

Jeremy Rifkin who wrote a book called The Empathic Civilization stated in a recent blog that over the past 15 years evolutionary biologists and neurocognitive researchers have been chasing down empathy neurons—those little bits of our brains that allow us to feel and experience another’s situation as if it were our own. Our empathy neurons have been kicked into high gear by all the images and sounds from Haiti over the past agonizing days. The NPR reporter, for instance, whose tear-filled voice brought us a vivid account of one little girl shaking and dying before his eyes because there was no medical care for her. Or those sun-burned faces reporting to us that help is too slow, too removed from where it’s needed. Again we see Katrina faces calling for water. Begging for food.

US texting alone has sent at the time of this writing, $11 million in aid—never mind that credit card companies, obviously devoid of any empathic neurons, are charging a 3% fee for each of those transactions. When people hear the stories their hearts and wallets open.

I find myself wondering what might have happened seventy years ago if the victims of Nazi camps had been able to send tweets and videos. We may have heard first hand from German woman named Irena Sendler, a “plumbing-sewer specialist,” as she smuggled babies and children out of the Warsaw ghetto in her tool box. She knew that it was only a matter of time until they would all die, so she did what she could.

Every day, she brought her dog along in her truck and trained him to bark viciously when they passed through checkpoints. The dog discouraged the guards to check too closely  under the wraps. 

Irena the plumber saved 2500 Jewish children. Imagine how many of them have gone on to become empathic adults helping others as Irena helped them. Imagine how many young earthquake survivors may do the same.

After the supply trucks have finally made it through the Port-au-Prince rubble, after the power’s back on, after the dead have been buried, will our neurons continue to empathize with all the poor in Haiti?  Let's tattoo the numbers of the Hatian dead on our arms to remind us that our earth can crack anywhere. Any time. We could be the ones putting toothpaste under our noses to alleviate the stench of decomposing bodies.  

Irena was eventually caught, and the Nazi's broke both her legs and arms and beat her severely. But she survived. Being a German, she kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out, put them in a glass jar and buried it under a tree in her back yard.

After the war, she tried to locate any parents who may have survived in an effort to reunite the families. Sadly, most had been gassed. Still she worked to place many of her kids in foster family homes or with adoptive parents. Irena died recently at 98, her empathy neurons still intact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blue Moon Blessings

What does it mean to start a whole new decade off with a "blue moon?" Perhaps "once in a blue moon" we get a "do over." A fresh start.

Lao Tzu  wrote of a vision he had in which he traveled to the World's very beginning. There, he saw Yin. Female energy. If I could have gripped his silk jacket and floated with him into that dark space, what would I have seen? 

I imagine it may have looked something like this. One Vermont morning the fog settled in and my friend Bob Frenier took his camera out for a closer look. Out of nowhere crystals appeared on every surface of every branch of every tree.

Lao Tzu said everywhere he looked, the world was filled with "motionless grandeur."

Then Lao Tzu saw Yang--"rampant in its fiery vigor." As he put it, earth's quiet grandeur reached up to heaven's fire--maybe a blue moon kind of fire--and "the two penetrated one another, were inextricably-blended and from their union the things of the world were born."

A new year began with a blue moon in 1990 and a year won't start with a blue moon again until 2028. Because our solar calendar and our lunar calendar don't quite mesh, a solar year winds up with 11 extra days. Like Baba stacking up pretzels, they pile up until every two or three years we have an extra full moon. For some reason, we've taken to calling it "blue." Some think it's because when the volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the moon actually was blue for something like two years.

For whatever reason, blue moons are like that crystalline Vermont winter morning when the whole world became--at least until the sun burned it off--a fairy land of white potential.

We welcome our new decade, pulsing up out of the dark into the quiet saying,

"Make of me what you will."

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.

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.

Thread and Abundance

Yesterday I finished sewing another hat and was about to throw the empty spool of thread away when I took another look. It was a small wooden spool, as opposed to most which are plastic. The blue and gold label said: “J.P. Coats  Mercerized  U.S.A.”  Imagine that. Thread that’s not made in China. I tucked the empty wooden spool into my desk drawer for safe keeping. At least for a while.

 

One of my earliest memories takes me back to sitting on the floor playing with a spool of thread. Like a kitten mesmerized by anything that rolls,  I followed it until it disappeared under a wooden rocking chair. I remember my baby fingers were very small in contrast to the “long dangerous” things which went up and down and could hurt me if I wasn’t careful. I also remember my mother saying, “Karen. Give me that thread. It’s rationed, you know.”  Rationed.  A word not in my baby vocabulary but one that stuck, nevertheless.  I knew it had something to do with the booklet of coupons my mother kept in her purse. And the way she sometimes scowled in the grocery store.

I grew up in a time of scarcity-thinking, Ball jar lids and precious wooden spools of thread. Sixty some years later, most of us think we still need to hold on to things, block things from moving around, stockpile them for another time.

I’ve read that 90% of the world’s wealth is now owned by 3% of us.  Whether we’re in the 3% or the 97% most of us never think we have “enough stuff.” We nestle down in our “sense of lack” and look around, wondering who’s got more of the goodies.

 

Thanks to Netflix, my husband and I are now enjoying episode after episode of “Lost.”

Like many aspects of pop culture, we missed it the first time around, although I remember people talking about it and thinking: What’s this silly series? A cross between voting people off an island and Tom Hanks making friends with a volley ball?

On the contrary. We love it. The characters in “Lost” are now like old friends and the other night Hurley (the big guy) tells Jack (the doctor) that he’s not going to protect and ration out the cache of food they’ve just discovered. Instead, every one of their group gets to feast. It’s a loving, beautiful scene of sharing. Rather than living under the “meme” of scarcity, they opted for abundance. At least for a while.

 

  It reminded me of that line in the book of John (10:10) where Jesus explains why he came:

“I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

 
 

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.

Sticky Abundance

One of the best things—well three of the best things—about living in Cambridge for thirteen years was that (1.) I could walk to Harvard Square in fifteen minutes—twenty on those days when I paused in front of certain store windows. Once I got there, (2. and 3.) I could  visit my favorite bookstore and cross the street into Brigham's afterwards. Both are now gone.

Brigham's was the closest thing Harvard Square in the 90’s had to an old fashioned ice cream parlor—the kind that gave you metal containers filled with extra milk shake and they used real, tall sundae glasses served with long spoons so you could reach every crevice.  I always suspected they made their own hot fudge.

A Peek into The Green Devotional

Although it won't be on the bookshelves, or available from Conari Press or Amazon until later this year, I wanted to share with you one of the eight chapters. The book is a collection of prayer-quotations arranged this way: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Time, Space, Essence and Closing Prayers.

   Water

In early spring our little creek marks the edge of our property with a ferocity that each year surprises me. Before the topography maps were crafted, someone gave it a name, no doubt for the trees that grow farther down its path: Apple Creek. We’ve become fast friends. I sit on a rocky outcropping above the brook, and watch water leap and froth, like buckets of crazed Fresca.

In winter, the ice piles up in blue layers and I can see, just below its glacial framework, energetic movement. It presses on past downed logs, around slate outcroppings and eventually reaches our branch of the White River. Which reaches the Connecticut. Which reaches the Atlantic Ocean.

Hearths and Motherboards

When our furnace hiccoughed last week, we turned to our little efficient hearthstone wood stove to keep us warm—a good backup to propane for Vermont winters.

Having just finished reading The Mist-Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers and Seekers, the words of Frank MacEowen filled my head. My favorites were the ones at the end of his poem, “Return”:
                May you taste resurrection
                        Without the need of dying for it.

                I love that concept.

I learned that most Celtic spiritual practices are rooted in peace. 

Nothing could have been more peaceful last week than sitting inside a snow-globe with a crackling fire, coals glowing bright red-orange. It almost  erased my concerns about how much a new motherboard would cost us—for that’s what the furnace-guy’s diagnosis proved to be. Motherboard. She who keeps our house warm and our water heated. Motherboard, akin to the Matrix, She who watches out for our safety while we sleep. Our new-fangled hearth.