Sophia Serve

Blown Away by Winter Reading

“The snow had begun to descend in thick icy flakes…”  That’s how Peter Tremayne’s latest “Fidelma” book begins.  Life obviously does follow art.

I had no more than begun to read The Chalice of Blood, another story of how this brilliant nun-lawyer solves crimes, when ice began to form on all the trees around our house. Our birches, too, were now bending, heavy with possibilities of breaking. Ice slipped from our metal roof in sheets like giant rectangles of crystal glass waiting to shatter.

Storm-watching and weather-predicting are state sports in Vermont. No one who has a radio could not help but know this one was coming. We’d stocked up. More sand. More salt. More groceries. And of course, another stop at our favorite library. I had no more than walked in when Librarian Amy handed me 1222 by Anne Holt. “I think you’ll like this, but I’m a bit embarrassed at giving you the latest in what’s a series and so far the only one in English. Why don’t publishers translate these things in sequence?” she muttered as she went on shelving books.

I wasn’t fussy. I’ll read them “out of order.” I’d never heard of this author, but she was Norwegian, after all. My people!  How could I not like it?

I did. I finished it and then filled the bathtub with water (for toilet flushing in case the power goes out—we all do this in Vermont. I learned early on how many buckets of melted snow even one flush takes. We keep talking about getting a generator, but so far that’s in the category of a really good plan.)

 Holt’s book is called “The Scandiavian Phenomenon.” Hyperbole?  No. Her wheel-chair confined retired police woman is a compelling character. The kind of woman you’d like to get to know better. The title comes from the name of a resort hotel called Finse 1,222 because it’s 1,222 meters above sea level. Why is it that I always read about storms when we’re headed into a major storm? I suppose it’s for the same perverse reason I once read The Night of the Grizzly out loud to our young sons as we drove through Glacier Park. 

Each of her twelve chapters is cleverly named after numbers 1-12 on the Beaufort Wind Scale which was developed by English Rear Admiral Francis Beaufort in 1805. The scale goes from calm to snowflakes falling vertically with a side-to-side motion a 1 m.p.h. to “The mountain is boiling. Lichen and branches from the trees are carried along by the wind. It is extremely difficult to ski,” at scale 8, 39-46 m.p.h. Oh, those hearty Norskes! And it progresses through 11 which Holt describes as “severe damage to forests” and finally to 12: Hurricane force with winds up to 83 m.p.h.  Her story escalates along with the wind and with similar velocity.

As I turned the last page I got an email photo from a friend who is in another Beaufort—but this one is a coastal paradise in South Carolina. Her sunny relaxed face framed against palmettos and a sandy beach contrasted sharply with the one I saw looking back at me from the mirror…pale, red eyes, rather sleepy looking.  Think bears hibernating.

Never mind. We like winter. So, on to Fidelma. She’ll perk me up with her brilliant, anti-establishment ways. It’s obvious I like my heroines, like Fidelma and Hanne Wilhelmsen, to be caring but callous when they have to be; smart, but not cocky; abrasive only when it’s definitely called for and empathetic to the downtrodden.  

And I like my author’s characters to say something profound every now and then. Something important. Something like Magnus Streng, the height-challenged doctor says to Hanne when he is describing what his father was like. He was of the old school, a zoology professor. Every night he read to young Magnus from his textbooks about animals. Ants. Elephants. Lions. Hyenas. “The message was clear enough: we are all needed. We are necessary here on earth. Small and large, fat and thin, ugly and beautiful. I was good enough. I am good enough.”

We don’t need a Beaufort Wind Scale to measure how good we are. We just have to remember that we already are!

Harry Potter Mysteries

The two biggest mysteries (to me) of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” were:

How does Harry keep his glasses on, even while swimming, or flying?

How does Ralph Fiennes (aka Lord Voldemort) breath without a nose?

My inner child wanted to go see the final chapter in this long, long saga of a boy, specially marked, because fantasy sheds light on my hidden places. I love the fact that J.K. Rowling studied the classics at Exeter and reveres language. Did you know, for example, that she got “quidditch” from the Latin “quidditas”—a word that means “giveness”?

And give, that fat series of marvelous books did. To generations of children. She “got” the entire plot while riding on a train one day, scribbled it down and the rest is history: 4200 pages and eight movies. I’ve read each page and sat through all 20 hours of the films. I was usually surrounded by kids but I noticed there were more adults wearing black 3-D glasses in the theater this week than children. Maybe the kids were off watching Winnie the Pooh. Maybe they’d all gone the first week it was showing. Maybe they were in denial about it all being over and just couldn’t face it. Or, like Daniel Radcliffe himself, perhaps they’ve all gone on to other things.

Throughout the series I've been more aware of "magic" and "magus." Harry was one who could "hold power," which is what magus means. Reading Rowlings' books makes me more aware that we need not be Hogwarts' graduates to know that powerful wisdom is embedded everywhere.

I dropped my 3-D glasses into the recycle box, wondering if each one of us, like Harry, struggles over a similar complicated relationship with evil. Are we all intertwined with whatever that blunt-nosed “thing” is that wants to dominate and destroy? And on the other hand, is each of us also capable of a Harry-like love-wrapped sacrifice for our friends? I suspect it’s both, and.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thunder, Lightning and Crazy Horse

Shortly after moving to Vermont, I met Tom Powers in his bookstore, now turned food co-op, in South Royalton. He told me he was working on a book about Crazy Horse. I waited. I just finished reading it during a violent thunderstorm with lightning cracking all around.  It took Powers until page 337 to cover all the background history and well-researched minutiae about the Whites and the Indians involved with broken treaties and the Sioux wars, who was related to whom and how, but finally he got on with the mystery surrounding The Killing of Crazy Horse—his title.

In 1951, my Dad drove us in our new Kaiser to the Black Hills. It was three years after the Polish American sculptor Korczak Ziólkowski was invited by Chief Henry Standing Bear to carve that great Lakota warrior who defeated General Custer in the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. As a wide-eyed eleven year old, I watched dynamite explosions through the telescope, which we paid a nominal sum to sponsor, wondering if he and his horse would ever be released from that mountain.

 I’ve been back at least three times since and I can assure you, despite all its problems, it’s getting there. Seven of the sculptor's ten children work on this mammoth sculpture--so big that when completed, all four sixty foot high heads of Mt. Rushmore could fit inside the horse's head. Crazy Horse will be bare-chested, left arm extended, wearing his usual eagle feather and spears of grass in his hair. But, unlike other great chiefs, no photo was ever taken of him. He shunned meetings and spoke very little, preferring to be by himself in the wilderness. So Ziólkowski had to imagine. In his mock-up sculptures, he gave him a slightly Slavic face as he attempted to capture the spirit of Crazy Horse who carried the Sioux name of Curly Hair until he was ten. Then he was called Tasunka Witko which translates: “His Horse is Crazy—Delirious—Imbued with a Sacred Power Drawn from Formable Spiritual Sources or Thunder Beings.” Crazy Horse said he would not go with the other great Chiefs to Washington because there was no “great Father” between him and the Great Spirit. His Father, he explained, was always with him.

The Sioux remember this great stoic, strategic warrior, certainly not by that statue, but by the nearby Bear Butte where Lakota and Cheyenne still go to pray. Crazy Horse had a vision in 1868 in which a man on horseback came out of the lake and told him he shouldn’t wear a war bonnet or paint his face or tie up his horse’s tail as a sign of battle as others did. He wouldn’t be killed by a bullet but would meet his end by being held and stabbed. That vision made him a fearless warrior and his life ended as predicted, in a writhing, painful stabbing death in a Federal prison. As he died, he said, “Father, I want to see you” and sang the Sioux death song as his great heart finally stopped beating at midnight on September 5^th, 1877.

 “When I die,” he said, “I will come back as thunder and lightning.”

A SophiaServe reader recently sent me an article by Pam Montgomery in Danby, Vermont, in which she says lightening strikes earth about 8 million times a day. “And the resulting thunder travels at approximately 140,000 miles per hour and can heat up to 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit which is more that three times the temperature of the surface of the sun. Lightening is not just a sky phenomenon – it is actually a relational occurrence between Earth and Sky. The negative ions of Earth meet the positive ions of Sky that accumulate in clouds and a channel of ionized air is established between Earth and Sky. This ionization creates an electrostatic discharge known as lightening. The resulting thunder occurs from hot air expanding which gives rise to a supersonic shock wave that collapses into an acoustic wave which we hear as thunder.”  Pam explains how lightning produces ozone gas that helps protect us from over-exposure to the sun's radiation. Earth depends on lightening to recharge and maintain its negative electrical charge. Without it, Earth’s atmospheric balance would disappear in about five minutes.

It seems Crazy Horse lives. 

 

 

Yuks, Yoiking and Joik

Thanks to my active presence in a wonderful web offering called The Powers of Place Initiative and it’s interactive website I have read some of Kye Nelson’s new poetry form: joiku

They fill me with joy. Check them out. 

Anyone following SophiaServe for long might remember that I’m quite enamored of ancestry.com’s ability to pull all kinds of people off the limbs of your tree and one of mine happens to be a Sami woman. They’re the reindeer people from the far north and I read every book about them I can get my hands on. Most celebrate their shamans. Some fight for their reindeer rights. Some just sing. From Leonova Carrington’s novel: The Healing Trumpet I learned of a Sami shaman, who sings and tells of tales of power. Lapland’s triple goddesses are called: Sar, Juks and Yuks. Aha!

She ends her book this way:
“If the old woman can’t go to Lapland, then Lapland must come to the old woman.”

As I approach  my 71^st birthday in a few days, I'm “yoiking.”

Another book I loved is Creation’s Heartbeat   Following in the Reindeer Spirit by Linda Schiere Leonard. A dream of running with pregnant reindeer inspired her book. For the Sami people the passageway to the “other world” is through what they call “Lapp Gate” in Northern Norway. Other names for this gate are Kiruura in Northern Sweden and Kautokeino in Finland.

The other day a fawn hopped across our driveway and I was reminded of my own fawn dream a few years back when one came to me and I cradled it, feeling its warm fur and large beating heart.I kept it safe. Every now and then, I attempt to “joik” it back to me.

I describe my own encounter with the Sami Folk Minister in Stockholm a few years ago in Sophia: The Feminine Face of God (which by the way is about to publish by Divine Arts) or read about it here by clicking on its cover to the right.

By now, you can see why Kye Nelson’s joiku found a warm place in my heart.  She joins the precise line form of a haiku (5-7-5) or sometimes (5-6-5) with the Sami process of the Joik or Yoik—calling back to make physically present someone or something that might not be in your present physical reality. It celebrates their truth—their strengths and their frailties. It celebrates the essence of that person, place or thing in as few words as possible. Now when I contemplate an invocation, I’ll think: “in-yoik-ation.” Here’s a tribute to my mother, Kye, and thanks!

 

She baked rhubarb pies

from lush umbrellas of green

Dad watered and fed.

 

Some had crispy tops

Some shimmering meringues

All spoke of her love.

Electronic Readers "R" Us

Last year E-book sales represented 8.32% of the trade book market up from only 3% the year before. This is according to    Eco-Libris which is trying to determine how much “greener” e books are than paper books. (The jury’s still out.) They project e-books will be about 15% of all book sales this year. And by 2025, three out of every four books purchased will be electronic.

An iPad came into our lives at Christmas. Now I know its carbon fooprint. Apple provides for the first time the total lifecycle emissions of an iPad (Wifi and 3G model): 130kg CO2e. So what do these numbers mean?  The components of the iPad's carbon footprint are detailed in a graph which shows production accounts for well over half; consumer use 30% and transport,11% with recycling at 1%. But that doesn't really help my math-deficient brain. However, according to several combined studies, I learned that the iPad becomes environmentally friendly after you download your 18^th book.

The average number of books people read each year is between 3-10. If you’re an avid reader, then, the iPad seems to be a greener option. Of course we also need to consider the environmental conditions around which e-readers are manufactured. According to a recent article on Huffington Post by Tanya Miller, over half of our electronics are made at Foxconn in the Shenzhen district of China. Unfortunately, most labor laws don’t apply there and workers are “throw aways.” Apple touch screens need to be cleaned by toxic chemicals which create permanent nerve damage. One reporter recently worked undercover and reported quite a different story than the glossy one the PR people portray. “Foxconn City” has anywhere from 300,000 to 450,000 workers and includes 15 factories, a hospital (that’s good!) a bank, a grocery store and their own TV network: Foxconn TV.

She ends her article this way—and I echo it: “Yikes. Just the name alone is creepy -- it would be like having a McDonalds City with a population the size of Atlanta where all your hamburgers are made in forced 32-hour shifts and then shipped. Hey, maybe that day's coming. I can just hear the rationale -- you don't want the price of Happy Meals to go up, do you? That'll hurt the economy!”

I mention all of this because just today Random House released my son Joel's and my Kindle version of Hunab Ku. I confess. I bought it. I’m pleased with how it looks in color on an iPad and I’m trying not to think of all those people working at Foxconn. But they’re as embedded in my brain now as is the idea of electronic books complementing traditional publishing.

Moonwalking

It’s not enough that I live with a man who can compute people’s birthdates by correct day of the week—back to 700 A.D.   Now I’m Moonwalking with Einstein.  You wouldn’t think someone who can remember his gym locker combination from high school and the entire VIN security code for the car--a mere 17 digits--would need Joshua Foer’s book about the art and science of remembering everything. And why would I need to read the story of a U.S. Memory Champion. But there it is—perched on my desk. I suspect it's there because he hopes I’ll crack it. Since I have trouble remembering my phone number I suppose I should.

Deep breath. The first chapter is titled, “The Smartest Man is Hard to Find,” something most women have always known. In it, I learn that everyone can have a photographic memory with a little work.  Ah, there’s the rub.  Work.

Since I’m not the one in the family hoping to get on Jeopardy, I rely on Google if I need to know something. And post it notes. Or Wikipedia, although I realize that’s chancy in some areas.

Las Vegas will never have to worry about me counting cards. And I’ll never embarrass Watson, the computer-whiz kid. Punch lines from jokes? Forget it!

I record “stuff” in my journals—and then index them so I can find it again. You gasp. Annie Dillard indexes her journals.

Now where did I put my pen?

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.

Sweetness at the Bottom of my "To Read" Stack of Books

If you're still contemplating writing your first novel and you're thinking, "I'm too old for this!" don't despair. The Canadian author, Alan Bradley, did it last year it at 70. 

He was writing a detective novel when suddenly a  young girl appeared whom he later named Flavia de Luce. His old detective character was in a remote driveway and there she was...just sitting on a campstool with a pencil and notebook. He asked her, "What are you doing?" and she replied, "“Writing down license plate numbers.” He said, “Well, there can’t be many in such a place,” and she said, “Well, I have yours, don’t I?” 

Bradley says he had no idea who this cheeky girl was and where she’d come from. Characters do that to writers from time to time. Flavia turns out to be eleven with a passion for chemistry (mainly poisons) and solving mysteries. She first appeared  in Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and then in The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag.

She's a precocious little thing. And a philosopher to boot. Flavia was born around the same time I was so I can identify with many things including her first encounter with a fuzzy-screened black and white TV set. But I was long past eleven when I stumbled on her insights about such things as death. "It's a masquerade--and so morever is life," she says in in the second book. That's the book in which she also offers these insights into brain gender differences.

"Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by  heavy-footed dray  horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines.

But the female  mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger--even miles away--has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters. People who talk about this phenomenon, most of whom know nothing whatsoever about it, call it 'woman's intuition.'"

How can you not love Flavia de Luce? And Alan Bradley for birthing her. He describes Flavia as embodying “a kind of hotly burning flame of our young years: that time of our lives when we’re just starting out, when anything—absolutely anything!—is within our capabilities.”

The next one is set to be downloaded to my IPad, so don't call me on February 8th. Flavia and I will be much too busy to talk.

 

 

Words to Ashes

“Burning libraries is a profound form of murder, or if self-inflicted, suicide.”

Stewart Brand The Clock of the Long Now.

Destroying books is murder. I've believed this ever since I earned my very own first book in second grade. Pinnochio. I got it for reading the most books that year and it’s still here on my shelf. Intact. If someone had burned it, part of me would have gone up in those ashes.

But alas, far too many books are not safe, including those in Baghdad and throughout Iraq. A Baath party professor of medieval history said, “Our memory no longer exists. The cradle of civilization, writing and law have been burned. Only ashes remain.”

Our soldiers may not have deliberately torched Iraqi libraries, but we certainly didn’t protect them—and of course there were those bombs.

I learned a lot about how we humans have systematically destroyed books from Fernando Baez in A Universal History of the Destruction of Books From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq. The Romans had a process called “damnation of memory” and practiced “libricide” the destruction of written records of the people they subdued.

Every time someone thinks only his ideas are valid and only his culture is correct, books get stacked in public squares and torched. Or hung onto the people who wrote them and burned along with the author. Or burned and the ashes dumped into rivers.

Paul burned books in Ephesus. Vikings burned books at Lindisfarne. Ghengis Khan burned mosque libraries. Catholics burned Cordoba's library. The Dominican Savonarola burned Florentine books. Spaniards burned Mayan codices. Pope Leo burned Martin Luther's books. U.S. soldiers burned Toronto's parliament and legislative library. The British burned the Library of Congress. Anabaptists of Munster burned Catholic libraries. Joseph Goebbels organized the Nazi burnings in 1933. And some “strict-thinking” people today burn Harry Potter just as they burned Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath a few years ago.

Why? What is it about reducing memories to ashes that we as human beings find so compelling? The disturbed man who burned Artemis’ temple in Ephesus believed “He who destroys perseveres.” That’s one clue. But it goes more deeply than that. Baez offers this: “When man destroys with fire, he plays God. It reduces the spirit of the work to matter and ash.” Ray Bradbury vividly painted that concept in Fahrenheit 451.

The Sumerians believed in the supernatural origin of books. They came from the Goddess. Scribes prayed before and after inscribing words onto clay. Soon collections of clay tablets piled up in temples. Egyptian scribes went to the “House of Life”—the library—where they unrolled what the Divine had to say. Book burning, just as cutting down Her sacred groves, may very well be an intentioned attempt to rape and eliminate all aspects of Her.

Thanks to Baez, I now have a new heroine. Her name is Wiborada. In 926 she was living in a Swiss monastery appropriately enough called St. Gall. One night she had a dream that her beloved library burned. She buried the books, the Huns came, she was killed and mutilated but her body was later found spread out over a mound. The mound was excavated and her precious books were found. Whole and safe.

Clay, stone, wood, papyrus, parchment, paper, computer bytes. We put our words down to capture who we are and what we believe and until those words turn to ashes or a hacker erases them, we know who we are.

And it behooves us to remember, as Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821:

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”

Snicker-Snack

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the momeraths outgrabe…”

I’m guessing a lot of folks are digging out their old beaten-up copies of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass as I did, just to see how Tim Burton melded the two. After seeing the movie, I spotted glimmers of Harry Potter and Glinda the good witch as well. All in all, though, I thought his movie was…well, “twas brillig!”

Mia Wasikowska makes a wonderful Alice but I had looked forward to meeting the Walrus and Carpenter, and the Mock Turtle and see a bit of the chess game. But not even Burton can do everything! Just his croquet scene with bubble-headed Helena Bonham Carter swinging a flamingo mallet into a hedgehog is the worth the price of your ticket.

Alice, now 19, slips away from her toothy suitor, Hamish, and careens down the rabbit hole again only to return to Underland—a place where she went when she was six. But now she can’t pinch herself awake and must fulfill her quest: find the Vorpal Sword and kill the Jabberwocky in order to free her friends from the wrathful Red Queen.

We are Alice Everywoman/man. That is, if we take to heart what the scientific-mystic David Spangler writes about in Subtle Worlds: An Explorer’s Field Notes. Forgive me Lewis Carroll and David Spangler, but maybe I saw similarities because  I was so deeply immersed in Subtle Worlds before falling with Alice down the rabbit  hole.

Like Alice, we also need helpers and partners on our journey. And we, too, inhabit more than just our physical world.

Nearly every night we explore dream worlds and with careful training, we can enter many other zones.

Like each of us, Alice must take responsibility for her life. She need not always do what others expect of her, but she does need to follow her soul—even if it leads to encounters with Bandersnatch claws! It proves that what and who you meet in the “underworlds” or “overworlds” or “subtle worlds” may not always be what you think at first. 

Spangler, says, “Every thought and emotion has an energetic shape.” And like Alice who grows and shrinks by what she nibbles or drinks, our own energy fields also change. “Anything you do that stimulates and heightens your powers of imagination, whether it's of the creative or the conceptual variety, will help you in engaging with subtle worlds."

Seeing Alice in Wonderland definitely exercises the imagination.

What a treat, just to be in the company of the darling Dormouse and the loveable Tarrant Hightopp/Johnny Depp aka the addle-brained Mad Hatter with the price tag, 10/6--ten shillings, six pence--still on his magical hat.  And who wouldn't fall in love with the March Hare!  What a fabulous tea party!

Stephen Fry’s voice matches perfectly the antics of the Cheshire Cat.  But Alan Rickman as Absolem the Blue Caterpillar, puffing on his hookah, was my absolute favorite because he asks the most important question anyone could ever ask in this world or in any other:

“Who are you?…What size do you want to be?”

There was nothing subtle about Absolem or about any part of Alice's Wonderland. Still I couldn't help making more and more connections to Spangler's Subtle Worlds as I dropped my 3-D glasses into the waiting box. 

"Our task," he says, "is to bring forth a time when we will experience the earth not as two worlds, one physical and one non-physical, but as one united planet of sacred life and consciousness, singing a song of wholeness to the stars and taking its place as a radiance of love and blessing for all the universe." 

What could be more brillig?

The Joy of Reading

Our granddaughter, approaching three, sits on the kitchen floor and turns pages of the Joy of Cooking as she “reads” Dr. Seuss books out loud. She can repeat those magical word-rhymes and luscious alliterations all by heart, and she knows those squiggle-marks on the page mean something. So why not connect them, proving once again that all children are linguistic geniuses.

I can’t remember exactly when I cracked that code. I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t read.

“We were never born to read.” That’s how Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts childhood development professor, begins her book with the unlikely title: Proust and the Squid. It is, as her subtitle states, the story of science and the reading brain.  The title comes from the reading insights we gain from Proust (reading as a kind of intellectual sanctuary) and the squid (reading by making neuron connections).

We were never born to read; we were born to tell stories and keep oral histories going. Reading came late in our human development and “folks in the know” at various times said—don’t do it! It will destroy your memory. Socrates didn’t write because he believed books could short-circuit the work of critical understanding. In India during the 5^th century BCE Sanskrit scholars decried the written language (as did the Druids in another part of the world) because they thought oral traditions made for intellectual and spiritual growth.  But I tend to agree more with Menander who said, “Those who can read see twice as well.”

Now that everybody (but me it seems) twitters, we find ourselves substituting our rich written language for one that’s more tweety and syllable and icon-ripe. Why, after all, shouldn’t we spell “wine”  Yn? 

It seems a waste, though, to use only 144 characters when we all know so many more.

If we are using more than one written language, it's not the first time. The Sumerians, for instance, had a dialect called “fine tongue” which women used, as opposed to “the princely tongue” used by everyone. Kids spent long years in "tablet school" learning to read and write both. One old Chinese writing system used only by women was based on phonetic translations of word sounds and was called “female writing.” The Japanese have their kana syllabary used especially for foreign words, names of cities, people and newer words along with the their older Chinese-influenced logographic script called kanji.

Our granddaughter continues to separate out cat and kitty and meow and Riley, the cat’s name, and one day soon Josie's fertile brain will have figured out how to read in milliseconds all those words she's stuffing into her ever-expanding cranial word-cupboard. And, like Proust, she’ll then have access to untold realities she'll discover between the covers of books.

When a body meets a body...

All the folks in Cornish, New Hampshire protected him from prying eyes and eager grad students. J.D. Salinger lived there peacefully until he died last week amid his papers and letters—none of which were published after his one and only foray into literary fame: The Catcher in the Rye. Apparently once a young man did get past the vigilant postmistress to ask Salinger about something he wanted to write about  (or maybe it was to make a film) and the old man’s response was: “Do your own book.”  The young man called out to Salinger’s retreating back, “Can we stay in touch?” to which he heard, “Whatever for?”

His famous title, one story goes, was based on a mis-hearing of the famous Scottish song. “Comin’ through the rye,” became “catcher in the rye.” When a body meets a body, there’s always room for misinterpretation. And when a body meets a book, well, anything can happen.

My friend Julia found a signed paperback of Updike’s in a local thrift shop once. She sold it on e-bay, but I’m guessing now that he’s dead, it’s worth a whole lot more than she got for it. It keeps me browsing thrift shops, I can assure you. (Julia also is one of the few people I know with her own copy of Jung’s Red Book. You can tell I’m envious in several ways.)

Our whole family has enjoyed reading the John Dunning series about Cliff Janeway’s rare book pursuits. And now Allison Hoover Bartlett’s written a great read called The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. (2009, Riverhead Books). Besides telling a compelling story about antiquarian thefts, you learn a lot from her chapter notes.

 

For instance:

In the early 19^th century a scholar went into a German fish shop only to find the shop keeper tearing out Bible pages to wrap fish in. A Guttenberg Bible.

The oldest and most famous rare book school is at the University of Virginia.

 Some collectors apparently don’t intend to read their prizes—the ones who collect books with uncut pages: virgo intacta.

 There’s a book that documents violence to books. Having a great interest in Alexandria’s libraries, I may have to find it. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Baez.

People think Lewis Carroll invented the dust jacket. This is because his 1876 The Hunting of the Snark is one of the earliest books with jackets that still exists. But Bartlett says earlier books from the 1830s with jackets are still around.

No time for more. I have to get back to The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. Something’s coming through the rye! I just know it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afghans and Haunted Houses

A young London-based Pakistani author with piercing brown eyes and a mop of curly hair won numerous prizes for his earlier books and now tells a story set in Afghanistan: The Wasted Vigil. Nadeem Aslam creates a young Russian woman named Lara, whose mind "is a haunted house."

If we could pull that image from Lara and stretch it a bit, we might find our own collective minds haunted as well. Haunted by failed attempts to "set the world right." Haunted by flawed decisions. Haunted by images of still more young people flying into a country where women can be beaten with a tire iron if they happen, as Lara did, to fall asleep with your feet pointing to Mecca.

Aslam (whose name reminds me of Narnia's Aslan and I take some comfort in that) says Afghanistan is "a hub of things moving from one point of the compass to another, religion and myth, works of art, caravans of bundled Chinese silk flowing past camels loaded with glass from ancient Rome or pearls from the Gulf." Now Comanche helicopters drop bottled water. Or worse. For good reason, it's often called a graveyard of empires.

We arrogantly thought we'd change everything by riding in on our white cowboy horses after 9/11. We failed, as Suan Faludi puts it in The Terror Dream, "to perceive the message in Jacob's story of strength and dependency, to fathom the distinction between wrestling with angels and slaying them."  Instead, we "balked," as she puts it, "and summoned John Wayne and his avenging brethren instead...we succumbed to the hauntings of a fabricated past." We threw tons of bombs into Talibaned Tora Bora, the labyrinth of caves in mountains 13,000 feet high. But heroin still bolsters their tippy economy. Bribes still grease the skids. Every man is still armed. We didn't change much and I've of a mind that we never will. That's not fatalistic, it's what I now think might be the truth.

Goethe said, "It's easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it."

How do we search out the truth in such a tangle of war-knots and bomb-snarls? Maybe the answer lies in a metaphor a reader-friend recently suggested. "Why don't you write about the connection between Afghanistan and afghans?"

I tucked that thought away as I do many that now come in from SophiaServe readers, thinking, "Sure, maybe after I learn Pashto." But thanks to our quickie-Wiki-Pedia I now know that these lap blankets were, indeed, first made in Afghanistan.   

They are constructed in brilliant colors, geometric designs and holes built into the overall effect.  Like the one my Aunt Esther crocheted for me back in 1961 with waves of seasick oranges, yellow and browns. Afghans are always hand-stitched from yarn and if you don't have an Aunt Esther, you're not likely to ever have one. They're called "throws" because with so many holes, they easily fray and people soon just throw them away. Or because you throw them over cold toes this time of year. Take your pick.

If our snarled presence in Afghanistan could be compared to a dizzy afghan, perhaps what we need to throw away is our frayed and obviously astigmatic threadbare concept of how we deal with people willing to blow themselves up for a cause. We need not, in turn, bomb them. Instead we could learn how to spot their crazy design and invite them to drape themselves over some other chair.

 

The wood of a sandal tree, Aslam tell us, never smells like perfume until it's cut down. This leads me to wonder if we thought we'd sniff the fragrance of peace by wielding  axes. 

Islam defines the time when a muezzin begins to call people to the dawn prayer this way: it's when there is enough sunlight to distinguish, without artificial light, a black thread from a white thread.

I pray dawn comes before we all unravel.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Artemis/Ursula

Twilight. Past our garage, around the bend, and like Artemis, her namesake, she disappeared.

All I saw was her lumbering broad brown backside. Ursula, I call her. Little Bear. By the overturned rocks, it appeared she’d been visiting my flower beds, looking for ant eggs and grubs.

The Catholic church designated October 21st as the feast day of a young girl named after a goddess and a bear and who was surrounded by a legend of no small proportions.

A teenage Cornwall princess betrothed to a guy in Brittany, she begged not to be married until she’d traveled Europe. Ursula convinced her father to let her travel with her friends for three years. So she picked up, not her backpack and a Eurail Pass, but 11,000 of her girlfriends--her handmaidens--and took off.  Eleven Thousand???  That’s  four big cruise ships full. In the fourth century? Come on!

As the story goes, a storm blew her into the Rhine River and down to Cologne (filled with bad guys called Huns). She refused to marry their chief, was shot with a bow, and all her virgin army were beheaded. A bloody mess, but not the first or, unfortunately, the last time a woman dies trying to get away from a man wielding a weapon over "lost love."

Like most legends, this one may have been founded on a scrap of historical truth. Thousands of women were, at one time, sent from England to Brittany to help populate their newly conquered territory. But Ursula's story took more of its shape from the Moon Goddess surrounded by thousands of her stars.

(from panel paintings  of St. Ursula by Hans Memling)

Someone posted her story on the blog of that day--a wall inscription on a church in Cologne where some young girls had been killed. Two. Five. Eight. Eleven. The number varies. Like most urban legends and internet stories, the inscription was interpreted in many ways. One account says the girl was named Ursula and she was eleven years old. Another called her Undecimilla. You know how confusing those Roman numerals can be. A monk later translated that as 11,000.

But the exact details don't really matter. The point was women were killed and the goddess Artemis whose temple that had been when people called her Ursel, was replaced by a cathedral hosting thousands of bone relics--dug up from a local burial ground. The little bear rounded the bend.

In Thom Hartmann's new book, Threshold, he points out four of our big mistakes. One of them is "the belief that men should run the world and women are their property."

Ursula's story continues to be played out. She is raped in Darfur. Burned in rural India where it's less trouble than divorce. Murdered if she "dishonors" the male members of family. Beaten, stabbed, shot by men she trusts.

The mystic Elisabeth of Schönau saw Ursula and the girls in a vision she wrote about in Revelations Concerning the Sacred Army of Virgins of Cologne. It was followed by another 13th century collection called The Golden Legend, and then in the 15th century, my favorite: Legends of Hooly Wummen.

Various sailors, no doubt heated by the thought of all those lonely virgins, named far-away places after them. Christopher Columbus happened upon a lot of islands in the Caribbean and called them The Virgin Islands. Ferdinand Magellan, sailing through "his strait" on October 21, 1521, named the cape, Cape Virgenes.

And, of course, in the 12th century, Hildegard of Bingen who kept many of Her stories alive, wrote The Symphonia--a liturgical cycle of 77 poems with monophonic music for her nuns to sing. Unlike Elisabeth who got her visions in dreams, Hildegard claimed she was wide awake. "The words in this vision are not like words uttered by the mouth of man, but like a shimmering flame, or a cloud floating in a clear sky."

A dripping honeycomb was the virgin Ursula, who longed to embrace the lamb of God, milk and honey under her tongue; because  like a fruit-laden garden and splendor of flowers, she gathered a throng of virgins about her...

And...

Blood's crimson Flowing from a height Touched by God.You are a blossom which the winter of the serpent's breath did not harm.

I like to think Hildegard’s songs for Ursula are for all young women everywhere, from every time, who are abused, beaten, bruised, killed, or who die from unwanted pregnancies in childbirth—just because they are female.

In 1506 a brave women named Angela Merici gathered 28 women around her (for those of us intrigued by numbers, that’s the number of the moon—days of a woman’s cycle) and said: "Let’s teach young girls."  It took forty years for the church fathers to sanction what they were doing, but finally The Ursalines became the teaching nuns.  Those She-Bears made and still make a difference.

More and more people are catching on to the fact that when young girls are educated, families become empowered. And whole nations benefit.

Honeycombs drip.

 

Raku: Kingdoms of Fire and Smoke

    On the Eastern Seaboard where the grey Atlantic first kisses the deep blue of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a natural harbor surrounds the tiny Quebec village of La Baie. Two thousand people live there now with many more in its sister city of Saguenay. It's easy to imagine back when birch-bark canoes floated noiselessly across those waters edging what the Iroquois called "The Kingdom."

Now that mills have closed the riches of this "kingdom" in the Lac-Saint-Jean region lie more in its natural beauty and from its talented crafts people.

"Craft" comes from the German word, Kraft meaning power or strength. In her book, Centering, the poet-potter M.C. Richards says centering means to feel whole in every part. Experienced potters know how to center clay on the wheel so it doesn't wobble or fold in on itself. Soon a form opens up. A new shape appears.

Hoping to find some hot apple cider on a cold October morning, my husband and I left via Deck 7 of our cruise ship, walked past a small wood fire by a tepee and headed toward a little church steeple where we found a modest craft fair with live fiddle music. Winding our way past tables overflowing with crocheted dollies and lace doilies, we happened upon Kathlyn Bergeron Potiére and her Raku pottery. Teapots with unadorned wooden handles. Bowls poised for a ceremony.

Raku pottery comes from 16th century Kyoto and is fired in an extremely hot kiln--980-some degrees F.-- for only an hour or two. Then the potter places it in a metal container with combustible materials such as sawdust, straw, or newspapers which burns away the oxygen in the pot as well as in the glaze. How the cooled piece looks is always a surprise.

Kathlyn, a tall beautiful woman, held her five month old baby--a Quebecois Madonna and child--as we talked about her work in fractured French and broken English. I bought one of her exquisite teapots, thinking of M.C. Richards and how she writes about pottery as metaphysics. Richards has said that she believes the Kingdom of Heaven will come when we are not afraid to be penetrated by bliss.

Richards calls us to be as centered as the pot itself. When we aren't, our spirits crack. "The inner soul withdraws, goes underground, splits off from the part that keeps walking around. Vitality ebbs. Psychic disturbance is acute." (p. 60)

How like this little teapot we are, I thought, as we retraced our steps back to the ship and home. We're all crackled and crazed and unexpectedly blessed by beauty in ways we, like a Raku potter, can never predict. We are "crafted." Powerful. And sometimes our hidden iridescence comes from smoke and fire.