Sophia Serve

Patterns and Metapatterns

Driving up Spain's Sierra Nevada mountains to Granada,all I could think of were patterns.  I watched patterns of mountains notch into valleys and fields, fallow and fertile, slip into one another. I saw olive and orange trees line up and the earth crease and fold around them as if firmly holding it all safe for my eyes alone.

Gregory Bateson once said in Mind and Nature, “What pattern connects the crab to the lobster, and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?...The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns."

Whether it’s the frost patterns on my Vermont windows this morning, or an intricate spider web pattern, I sense Her presence in all these mystical metapatterns.

After our side trip on a dirt road back into the alham--the "red earth of Granada," we visited the Alhambra itself where more patterns piled up on more patterns. Arches upon arches. Tiles upon tiles. Dark into light. And I thought, "This is Her work. This is Her visible code encouraging me to see how everything is connected, how everything fits so perfectly into everything else and how it’s all crucial to the workings of not just our planet, but of the galaxy and universes beyond. She is there, making sure the stitches of the world-tapestry hold together. And when we take the time to really look, we can see her radiance shining through the pinpricks,  sliding off the glazed tiles."

Before the Alhambra became a city state and filled this space with arches and symmetrical gardens, even before the Romans and Visigoths took up residence,  it was a place where The Mother was honored, high up there on Sabika hill where Her crystalline water poured from springs fed by snow-capped mountains and where her birds sang.

My Sophia Friend Julia Blackbourn graciously shared with me some of her sketches of another patterned site about 70 kilometers from Grandada where the famous cathedral of Cordoba welcomes people into her huge courtyard. Her watercolors capture the patterns in these massive arches better than any photos I took, so I'm happy, with her blessing, to share a couple with you.

I believe Sophia can be seen through arches and in all pattern overlays; She is present everywhere--in the beautiful as well as the dismal parts of our world.

 

[As a sidenote: an audio guide to Sophia: The Feminine Face of God,a 10 part series, is available for listening or downloading at:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/divineartsmedia/2012/01/11/sophia-feminine-face-of-god-10-series-w-karen-speerstra]

Stone Shepherds

Only a short twenty mile drive north from Stonehenge (undoubtedly the most recognizable stone circle anywhere) stones silently march across the Wiltshire landscape at Avebury. I've visited this sacred English landscape several times--alone, with friends, with my son--and each time I leave thinking, "This place feels like a safe home."

One weekend, before the three large stones off to one side were circled with metal mesh, I sat under them munching a sandwich. Imagining. Who placed these huge stones, so precisely? Was their purpose to guard the night sky? I look at pictures of them now and wonder: What are they saying to us as we head into 2012?

Wherever they appear, stones so carefully positioned seem like shepherds out in their fields--the kinds of shepherds we hear about this time of year. The ones out watching over their flocks by night, waiting under the stars for important news.

More recent than the megalithic structures of Avebury, hundreds of "stone shepherds" made their way to the Polynesian island of Rapa Nui or Easter Island. They still stand there, guarding the island's perimeter, watching the night skies. Stéphanie Guisard has posted the most amazing collection of time lapse photography of the night sky--where the Milky Way dances! But it is her photos of these great "stone shepherds" that continue to stun me.

When I look at them, I hear angels singing, as they did that one Bethlehem star-filled night. "Fear not! Be of good cheer." And I revel in the mysteries, knowing that many shepherds stand watch over our planet.

Autumn, the Profound Season

I hadn’t thought of autumn as being profound until I discovered Joseph Marshall's words: "Autumn is a very profound season."  He’s a Lakota teacher and author, who grew up, as I did, in the 50s—we're kids of the Atomic age. But his home was on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. His latest book, the one with this profund phrase, is called To You We Shall Return: Lessons About our Planet from the Lakotas.

His people go back in North America, 10,000 years. So do their stories. They were “born” from a hole in the earth in the Paha Sapa—Black Hills—from the cave now marked as Wind Cave.They knew the secret to survival was adapting. They didn't ever try to change or control anything on earth. One of their funeral prayers goes like this: "It is your embrace we feel when we return to you."

The The Black Hills take on a heart shape (looking at it sort of sideways) in this NASA satellite image. "The Heart of all Things, The Center of Our World" Marshall says, is an outcropping duplicated no where else on our planet except in New Zealand. What makes it so special? It's made of granite and granite carries an electrical charge so it's a type of a battery and generator. It's the core of an extinct volcano rising up from a sea of prairie grass. A metallic cauldron filled with gold, silver, uranium, copper, lead, lithium, bentonite clay, limestone, basalt and sandstone. No wonder it's an alchemical sacred place, coveted by all.

Profound!

That word, by the way, means “Having intellectual depth and insight—difficult to fathom or understand.”  At least according to Webster. I look at my dead flowers and all the beige fields around us,and try to focus on their "intellectual depths." I talk to my son about the continuing dreadful radiation stories coming out of Japan. I think: fall/fall-out.

Maybe after I post this, I'll drum for awhile, just to hear Grandmother Earth's heartbeat again--to know it will all be all right. All be well. "The land," Marshall says, "gives birth to who and what we are."

Needing joy in my heart, I turn to another image which one of my Sophia Sisters sent me the other day. Who could not feel JOY by looking at this? Sorry, I don't know where it came from originally, but it IS profound!

 

Agora Hearts

As thousands upon thousands of Egyptians waved flags, sang and danced in Cairo's Tahrir Square, I watched, numb with the realization of how fast change can happen. For those camped out for eighteen days, it may not have felt like the blinking of an eye, but after thirty years of iron-fisted control, hearts finally brimmed to overflowing with hope. They can now believe in a different future. I was watching a love-fest organized by cell phones, Facebook and twitter.

Our own TV and radio talking heads, of course, immediately began to ask, “Why didn’t we know about this sooner and what now? Be afraid. Very afraid!” Some blamed the socialists and communists and even the “feminists” for what happened in Egypt and foretold Middle East disaster.

I switched to DVD mode and popped in my latest Netflix.

Rachel Weisz’s Hypatia of Alexandria took me back to another time in Egypt when blood did run red in Egypt’s market places. Alejandro Amenábar directed this wonderful epic film set at the end of the 300’s. As religions clashed and the Roman military fell to a new Christian emperor, the Jews were driven out. Agora is the story of how a new regime came to power in Egypt--by sheer people power, religious ideals, swords and stones.

Hypatia, the brilliant mathematician, astronomy and philosophy teacher became the focal point for an emerging culture hell-bent on silencing women. Clement of Alexandria claimed Jesus had warned, “I have come to destroy the works of the female.” Paul’s words were read to the masses. Suddenly, women’s wisdom meant nothing.

I’ve read enough to know how tragically this story would end, but thankfully instead of showing her flayed by deranged fanatical monks wielding oyster shells, she died looking up into her beloved heavens. It was she who figured out the elliptical movements of the planets, but it took 1200 years for Kepler and everyone else to catch on.

Tears came to my eyes as I watched the Library of Alexandria sacked and burned. Alexander, himself, had ordered it built and earlier Ptolemy rulers collected everything written up to that time. By the first century B.C., the “Mother” library held 700,000 books—rolls all arranged by category. It was a world-wide depository of learning. Isis' priestesses carried volumes around to outlying libraries. Mark Antony added to it by stealing the Pergamum library of 200,000 volumes as a gift for Cleopatra. Every ship that came into the harbor had to yield its library to be copied and stored there. Cookbooks, magic, natural history, drama, poetry, each scroll was written on both sides, and was about twenty feet long or equal to about sixty pages of our books today. Seventy-two Jewish scholars once translated a Hebrew Bible into Greek. Philo who was a star pupil of Moses and Plato, thought that philosophy was the way to search for the highest truths. Hypatia followed in his sandal-tracks.

A “Daughter” library, at the time this movie was set,held 42,800 rolls. The Christians broke in since it was housed in the temple of Serapis,and Theophilus allowed it all to be destroyed. Later, Caliph Omar would heat public baths with most of the remaining rolls. One in ten of the Greek classics survived.

I ejected the disk and went into my office lined with bookshelves. There I sat for a long time thinking about Hypatia, Egypt, books, and most importantly, about fragile beating hearts.

Advent and Rocamadour's Quiet Music

Black virgins pepper Europe with a soul-spiciness few can explain. I certainly can’t. I only know I’d go on those tours designed to visit as many as possible across Europe if I could manage it.

However, during this “Advent season," a season of watchful “Advent-ure” for Christians, I am grateful for having visited my second one. (The first was at Chartres many years ago.) Allow me to introduce you to the black virgin of Rocamadour.
She's hidden away in one of the chapels high on a limestone cliff overlooking the Alzou Valley in the Dordogne. 

From what I've read, statues called black virgins predate Christianity which means that she may be patterned after Isis and her son after Horus. Perhaps she is an homage to Coptic Christians. Others claim she is black simply because she is so old and the wood has darkened.The black queen. The dark mother. The Mysterious One. I saw Michelle Obama in her eyes--and all strong women over the ages, reflected back to me

Pausing for a moment on one of the 216 well-worn steps,I looked back up to where she quietly waits, surrounded there in the dark by candles. I found myself thinking of miracles and legends.  

Just being on those stairs brought me several steps closer to the people who left Palestine after Jesus was killed and made their way to the coast of France. Two such legendary figures were Veronica and her husband Zacheus later known as Amadour. They’d been with Jesus, wiped the sweat off his face, protected Mary, his mother.

After his wife’s death, the old hermit traveled to this particular valley and built a chapel in honor of Mary. Overlays of stories and miracles built up over the centuries still echo through the limestone layers that surround his burial place. His beloved rocks continue to call people. How her statue came to be there remains a mystery. But Francis Poulenc’s music may offer a clue—he experienced her profound presence in Rocamadour which resulted in his famous “Litanies of the Black Virgin.

Her voice through music may be the only way some of will ever actually hear her.

Queen Matilda's Tapestry

When is a tapestry not a tapestry?

When it’s a 230 foot long embroidered linen panel stitched in eight shades of wool thread depicting the Battle of Hastings of 1066. Latin inscriptions describe how Harold Godwinson of Wessex rowed over to Normandy to fight Count Guy, only to be taken captive.  Duke William demands his release (I’m sure there’s a back story here) and Harold says “I’m sorry—I swear fealty to you. Honest.” Harold returns to England and after Edward’s death becomes King Harold II and immediately breaks his oath and starts planning for another invasion of William's territory.

Now we all know histories are written by the victors and this embroidered account was likely designed and commissioned by William’s half-brother Odo, Earl of Kent and Bishop of Bayeux. It was embroidered by William's wife Matilda and her nun friends—or by stitchers in Canterbury. Either way, the embroidery does not glorify the English side of things.

There was a big fight;  Harold’s killed. Wm. The Conqueror becomes King of England and Normandy/Brittany.

 

We visited Bayeux in the morning and spent the afternoon in several of Normandy’s ten World War II cemeteries and climbed around Allied landing beaches, now ringed by golf courses. We visited Ste. Mere-Eglise where an American paratrooper named Jim Steel still hangs in effigy from the church steeple. We also visited the famous Peace Museum in Caen, learning all the gruesome details of World War II. It made for a very full day of war.

In 1066, if Matilda’s handiwork can be believed, William launched 42 Viking ships against England.  And a mere 878 years later, 7,000 ships crossed the Channel from the other direction in a matter of hours. Not to mention numerous boxy wooden gliders and 12,000 airplanes.

Matilda’s “Roll”was likely completed in 1077 just in time to fit around the nave of the new Bayeux Cathedral .

The tapestry depicts a total of 623 people—only seven are women and only three can be identified. One is believed to be Edith, the wife of Edward the Confessor and King Harold’s sister. One is shown either trapped inside, or fleeing from, a burning building at Hastings. And a third woman referred to as “The Mysterious Lady” who has been referred to as Aelfgyva, which was a common Saxon name of the era.

After viewing the carefully lit and protected work of embroidery, I ventured into the cathedral itself. There I met this Mysterious Lady. A dove hovers--the Holy Spirit whom I call Sophia.

The dove is most likely whispering, "Mary, you're going to have a baby." But I think I heard, very faintly, the words:

No more wars. Please. No more wars!

 

 

It's Watching You

Its silhouette is one of the most recognizable in the world. Floating there, surrounded by water and sheep-grazed salt flats, Mt. Tombe, as the founding monk Aubert called it back in the 8th century, still beckons pilgrims of every ilk. Three million every year.

What is it about this Norman village/castle/church that draws us to such a remote place perched in the sea between Brittany and Normandy? Perhaps it's the gold steepled statue of the Archangel Michael who watches over everyone. Perhaps it's the challenge of the climb. According to a friend's pedometer, it took 2,102 steps up the inner staricase to get to the upper cloisters and back.

Working our way through labyrinthine crypts, past ramparts, flying buttresses and pillars, we marveled at the gigantic wheeled winch that defied stones' gravity and brought building supplies up so precariously high. We breathed in the mystic air of this place once called by the Celts, Ynys Trebes. We paused in the scriptorium where monks once copied and illuminated manuscripts. Forty-two people presently live full time on the rock--merchants, prayers, chanters, administrators.

You enter Mt. St. Michel through the King's Gate and suddenly you're in a world apart. A stony world once home to Benedictines and then to prisoners during the French Revolution. And to miracles, some say.

Fritjof Capra's brother Bernt took his brother's Turning Point and made it into a movie called Mind Walk. At one point one of three people who accidentally meet there says, "You can feel the place watching you."

Indeed, you can.

I picked up a copy of a little prayer book in the bookstore. One strikes me as appropriate to our time, to our journey:

Here I am, watching and waiting.

With time to look at things.

With time to admire what I see.

Days to discover things,

days to enjoy

Life to the full.

Time to chew the cud,

to savor the good life.

 

 

Reproduced Authenticity

The Loire, at 500 miles, is the longest river in France and below it in the south-central Languedoc region we discovered  Cathar-country. They called themselves Good Christians—as opposed, one assumes from the others, led by the pope and his men who were killing them in the 11^th and 12^th centuries faster than you can say "heretic." The double-moated city of Carcassonne (if you wish to come close to the French pronunciation try CAK a SOWN), Toulousse, Albi—all were places where once “spiritual authenticity” was debated in the most deadly manner.

But today, peaceful plane trees line the long Canal du Midi and the only “battles” over authenticity seem to be what legitimately can carry the “AOC” label which means this product is authentically produced here. And don’t look for genetically modified food (which must be labeled) on any super market shelves.

Today you can’t go to the Perigord without running into geese and “AOC” foies-gras, specific regional wines and authentically registered cheeses which come from very geographically particular cows. Well over half of France is farmland even though only six per cent of the French call themselves farmers. Our expert bus driver, Lauren, drove us over narrow roads past fields of grapes, tobacco and sunflowers, into the forested Dordogne Valley. We passed under limestone cliffs where the Cro-Magnon people once lived. Cave in French means wine cellars and sometimes the caves as well as restaurants were in real caves which also contain houses of modern day “troglodytes.”

But no one ever lived in the sacred grotte we were about to visit. By late morning we meandered through the village of Montignac and several kilometers out into the woods to enter an underground nave called Lascaux II. The “authentic” Lascaux I was closed in 1962 when it became apparent a green virus from microbes brought in by tourists’ shoes and a corrosive white dot build up from carbon dioxide was destroying the ancient art. Like all other prehistoric painted caves in France Lascaux I is now only open to scholars and researchers.

My lungs gulped misty autumn air carrying hints of juniper as we climbed the path leading to the most exquisite museum of art I could ever imagine. The original cave was discovered by four teenaged boys and their dog Robot on another fall day in 1940. One of the boys, Jacques Marsal, described a “cavalcade of animals larger than life painted on the walls and ceiling of the cave; each animal seemed to be moving.” The paintings were brilliantly multicolored in reds, blacks, browns and ochres. The boys were standing in what is now called The Hall of the Bulls. They vowed to keep it a secret. That lasted two days.

Thundering Water

My husband and I are on a road trip enroute to Colorado and we decided to spend a night at Niagara Falls--we'd been there before, but never stayed. We lucked out and got a corner room on the 5th floor of a Comfort Inn that had a window that opened!!! So instead of air conditioning sounds all night we went to sleep with the roar of the falls. Thundering.

At various overlooks, we watched 750 gallons of water PER SECOND spill down creating the most energizing negative mist-ions I have ever experienced. Or ever hope to.

The power of the earth simply cannot be ignored here--and maybe negative ions really do make you feel happier because I've never seen so many people smiling in public places before. 

The Iroquois word for this “strait” is Onguiaahra.That's how Niagara got it's name. It’s the outflow from four of our five Great Lakes which hold one fifth of the world’s fresh water. Scientists call the water falling here, fossil water—left over from the ice sheets that started to melt here about 12,000 years ago. Typically of how we approach our Great Mother, we build hydro-electric dams and plants and try to “control” her—fortunately, we can’t.

A rainbow over the rising mist greeted us the following morning. Half an arc. It seemed to say: You go out there now and create the other half.

A Stony Place

Early this morning, I look out over our misty hills across trees veiled in soft light and mouth the words of a favorite Celtic prayer:

God bless to me the new day

Never vouched safe to me before

Bless thou to me mine eye

May mine eye bless all it sees

Spring in Vermont reminds me of one April in Ireland, visiting ancient sites with our older son.
We had driven through miles of gorse and grass only to find ourselves on a promontory south of Galway Bay called An Boirenn. The Burren, aptly named, means "A stony place." It's cushioned on one side by Kerry and on the other by the purple Connemara mountains. We both said, "We're on the moon!"

As my husband would readily tell you, I collect stones from places I visit. So, yes, I picked up a rock from this bare and lonely ten mile long, ten mile wide Ireland. Nature carved my bit of the Burren's austere limestone landscape with angular "clints" and "grykes." Ice once sheeted this western corner of the Emerald Isle and left it all looking like an over-sized unreclaimed terraced mining site. It's where much of the gold and silver that formed their intricately patterned brooches and torcs came from. The terrain is pocked with shafts and caves from all that smashing, hammering and melting.

The people who once lived here among  the numerous stone forts and galley graves followed Brehon law--not the laws of the English which later became our own.

People were paid for their labors in flax and wool, in weighed-out silver, and in milk cows. A "set" of treasure was valued as half an ounce of silver and one milk cow equaled one ounce of silver. They clearly defined who should and who should not be given loans. They couldn't have imagined a time when people put their treasure in misty derivatives and futures.

They called legal seven kinds of marriages and didn't waste their time disputing loving unions.

They fined people who committed crimes and paid honor prices to those injured; they had no need for prisons. If harm of any kind was caused--a fine was paid.

They held their judges to very high standards--judges who spent decades studying law. They believed  three things can cause a kingdom's ruin: a judge who takes bribes, an unlearned judge and an unjust judge.

They believed someone who steals a needle from a poor embroidery woman had to pay a higher fine than it if it had been a queen's needle that was stolen.

And, most importantly, perhaps, they believed words matter. Even satire. Words can maim. The penalty for unjust satire or mockery was equivalent of a person's honor price. It was as if that person had been killed.

It 's obvious they weren't burdened by greedy lobby groups, hate media, or fear-mongering.

The sun was going down and we were still driving around The Burren looking for a particular dolmen. When we found it, we paused for a few quiet moments to bless the people who once lived so very carefully on this austere land.

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.

Rings of Synchronicities

The author Daniel Pinchback (a Mayan calendar expert) said on public radio the other day that as we near 2012 we will all be experiencing more and more synchronicities. You know, those things that happen that shouldn’t happen because they have nothing to do with cause and effect.

My son Joel and I wrote about them in Hubab Ku in connection with archetypal symbols and the Mayan’s belief in harmonic resonance. Many people have told me that when they open Hunab Ku or Divine Sparks for some sort of inspiration, they are often amazed at how “right” for them at that very moment the page they "accidentally" turned to seems to be.  

Sacred Geometry, Holy Math

 

What’s under and behind some places of power? And what makes certain pieces of art or the unfolding structures of plants and trees suddenly show us their hidden order? We see and hear beautiful patterns, ratios and repetitions in nature and music.   

The huge array of different crystals are all formed by only seven simple geometric forms. And at the core of life spins a double helix always rotating around a consistent DNA pattern that consistently forms a double pentagon. How can this be?

  It's called sacred geometry. Holy            measuring. A mysterious unfolding.

We recognize Geo-metrics…measurements of the earth. But how can we measure the sacred? And we certainly can’t “form” it or “contain” it—with numbers and shapes, squares and cubes and triangles, circles and dodecahedrons. And if, as Walt Whitman believed, spirit and soul are sacred, might the “spirit and soul of the earth” also be sacred? And can it somehow be measured?  Can we rationalize the irrational?

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