Sophia Serve

Together Like Never Before

In her latest book, Alone Together, the MIT technology guru, Sherry Turkle, reminds us that we’re “tethered by technology.” She describes how teens today have grown up with parents who texted with one hand and pushed their swings with another. Their parents drove them to school while talking on the phone and they sat in the back seat watching Disney videos. One college freshman told her that her father read Harry Potter to her while often on his Blackberry. They grew up with parents physically close but whose attention was always “elsewhere.”

Floods bring one’s attention up close and personal. There is no “elsewhere” when you watch raging waters climb closer and closer. Everything becomes starkly present. And it’s coming right at you!

But thanks to cell phones and Facebook pages (where there actually was cell phone access and people could power up their computers) in three short weeks, communities came together in Vermont in ways our ancestors would have appreciated and found admirable. After all, Vermont has always been the hotbed of technology innovation—visit the St. Johnsbury museum if you don’t believe me.

Many of us remember talking to Howard Dean, our former Vermont governor and presidential hopeful, about how his young staffers were creating ways to reach individuals by using the Internet. He invented the ground-up campaign. Many of these young geeks are now millionaires—and some of them recently re-entered Vermont’s flood-plains to help. As a result, my neighboring village had a website up and running within hours of the flood and the next weekend, 1000 volunteers showed up with shovels. Blogs appeared faster than you could say “help us.” One comment that I’ll never forget was from a farm family: “We need pails. We have nothing to put our milk in.”

Independent Vermonters have always known how to use their technology, from sharing skidders in the woods to blowing conch shells from their front porches to call the neighbors to a party. Many Vermonters own heavy equipment; many just built their own roads. Some neighbors in another close-by ravaged area latched extension ladders together so people could climb up and out of a canyon that had trapped them. Others cut a hole in the freeway fence so they and their neighbors could get in and out. They didn’t wait for “them,” the uniformed helpers because "they" were either elsewhere or beyond calling. With one “Irene-strength fell swoop,” Them became Us.

“We,” like the stalwart volunteers of St. Paul’s Episcopal church in White River Junction, made well over 4,000 sandwiches and put them in lunch bags to go out all over our ravaged valley so volunteers had something eat. Some bags actually had little hand sanitzers!  “We” collected clothes. “We” cooked community dinners. “We” helped each other get back and forth when there really wasn’t a “back” or a “forth” for many. “We” shared chain saws and generators. "We" organized relief fund-raisers. “We,” like the folks who latched extension ladders together to get people out of a canyon where they had become trapped, became very creative. Some local technical college kids, for instance, quickly rigged up a solar powered battery for a trapped family without power.

But most of all, we’ve learned that walking from door to door and actually talking to people, is the best way of being a good neighbor. We've learned that when, like one man in our nearby town who reached an elderly woman whose house was gone, all we need do sometimes is set up a chair and say, "Here. This is your space now. All you have to do is sit here. We'll do the rest."

Now that the realities of FEMA have dawned on most people severely affected, they know that they will need to find new ways of coping. They might have to find new ways of building in new places, that may not completely replicate their old ones.

But like Emily Dickenson’s, a bird now perches in my heart singing songs of hope. I believe our new ways of being together will be smarter and in the long run, better for our planet. Some of us have now tasted the experience of being not “alone together” but “together!” And we won’t let that go.

Poetry or Computers? Poetry and Computers?

 

Ah! Ada,

What would you make of today's hactivists…WikiLeaks…stolen identities and Twitter pranks? It’s the world we now live in—but it’s a world I believe you foresaw.

Lord Byron’s daughter turned out to be a poet-analyst, a programmer long before the computer was actually available. Augusta “Ada” Byron or Lady Lovelace as she was presented to the young queen Victoria, was Charles Babbage’s muse. They met when she was seventeen and she fell in love with his mind and his “thinking machine.”  Babbage, like Ada--an original thinker, was obsessed with codes and sending messages and came up with an electric telegraph idea. He saw messages from the past encoded in tree rings; he standardized postal rates in England; he devised light house signals and created track signals for his beloved railroads.

Ada grew up believing she had a Divine Mission. "Heaven has alloted me some peculiar intellectal-moral mission to perform," she said. She had an uncanny ability to perceive hidden realities, an intuitive perception not many others shared. Coupled with her immense energy, she had reasoning faculties that bordered on genius.

Twice her age, his mind and hers fit beautifully. Back when a woman couldn’t enter a scientific society, he provided her with a tutor and she soon flew past trigonometry. She immediately understood the beauty of his cogged gear-wheeled machine which she likened to a card punched Jacquard weaving machine capable of  “weaving algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” She rewrote his papers and forced Babbage to use clearer language to describe this “analytical machine” capable, she told him, of producing meaningful language—even music. This machine was, she knew, so much more than a “numbers/calculating” machine.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. called this machine a “Frankenstein monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder, which turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind out a thousand bushels of them!”  But then IBM created Watson. 

Ada’s mind, a perfectly balanced right and left machine of its own, easily moved from poetry to math and she actually programmed, in her mind, a machine that didn’t yet exist. She understood symbols and could foresee all the variables and possible contingencies for this machine—the probable and the improbable, as she put it, alike. Babbage and Ada laid the foundation for messaging, encoding and processing.

Before the Countess of Lovelace died at a very young age from cancer, she foresaw her beloved machines moving lockstep, marching, marching to some music she could just barely make out. She saw them harmoniously disciplined. How disciplined, we now ask. Will the next generation of computers actually begin to think and act like humans? And will that be a good thing?

Picasso once said “Computers are useless. They only give answers.” 

But when, as Ada foresaw, will they start asking questions? Will computers ever be able to ponder, as Ada's father did, "When coldness wraps this suffering clay, Ah! whither strays the immortal mind?"

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.

Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, Men Adore You

We join hundreds of other Sunday afternoon art lovers clamoring through long corridors and clumping up and down marble stairs to gawk at this Parisian monstrosity, this out of human scale U-shaped palace called the Louvre. By the time we reach the salon where Mona Lisa stares across hundreds of bobbing heads,my feet telegraph a message: it’s time to leave. But of course I can’t. Not without seeing her up close. Everyone since the Da Vinci Code has to, at least once in their life. Now’s my time.

Inching toward the rope, I eagerly anticipate this “newly-laid egg…beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh little cell by cell.” Instead, I’m served up a sporadic omelet of red flashes from tourists’ phones and cameras. Silly, silly tourists, who, in spite of all the signs with black camera icons with red slashes, insist on taking her photo. “Buy a post card,” I mumble as I jostle closer to the rope hoping to see her lacquer cracks.

Freud loved her. The painting trembles with sensuality he said, but he wasn’t surrounded by all these hellish red flashes. He saw contrasts between reserve and seduction—but then, didn’t he always?

I squint and imagine somewhere behind her protective glassy box, sits a 24 year old woman painted by a 51 year old Tuscan artist. A genius who’d been around. Now she smiles at me. It might be her wedding portrait. She is Madonna Lisa, “La Gioconda” the girl who at fifteen married the Marquese del Giocondo, a wealthy Florentine silk merchant. But this portrait apparently never hung in their swanky bedroom. Vasari, the sixteenth century author, tells us Leo worked on it for at least four years, some say ten, and he never really finished it. In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari follows the painting to France with Leo. And our very knowledgeable guide, Catherine Chamoux, assures us this is where it’s going to stay.

The flashes continue as my mind morphs back to a book I once read about Lisa di Antonie Gherardini: I, Mona Lisa by Jeanne Kalogridis. It was filled with Medici magic and Vatican intrigue. At the end of the book (spoiler alert) Leonardo tells Lisa he is her father, not Guiliano Medici. Now, there’s an interesting take on who she might be. But my eyes wander to her hands. Are they masculine? Hmm. And no eyebrows. She’s playing with us. No wonder the French call her La Jocande—the joker lady.

ML's lips continue to hold that enigmatic smile. Perhaps she's smiling because she knows that the resulting photos will contain only flashbacks bounced back from her protective glass. Or is she, as Kenneth Clark asks, “worldly, watchful and self-satisfied?” But may there may be something more sinister? She’s been described as “older than rocks…like  a vampire.” A Lady of the Lake, drawing men to their watery graves. Eve, after the apple incident.

Or is she an artist’s soul unveiled? Lillian Schwartz of Bell Labs computerized, flipped and merged Leo’s self-portrait computer image with Mona Lisa’s and she claims they match perfectly.

He painted the darks first and then built up the light areas.The rocky pinnacles, experts tell us, are as important as her face—and like all his landscapes, this one claims no specific geography. His rocks are the bones of the earth. Mist and clouds are droplets ready to return to rain and rivers. This is the man who once said “The earth is moved from its position by the weight of a tiny bird resting upon it.” Leonardo da Vinci, whom Kenneth Clark called relentlessly curious, also said, “Everything comes from everything and everything is made out of everything and everything returns into everything.”

This man who could describe the tongue of a woodpecker and see infinity in knots, embraced ambiguity. I decide as I slip behind the wall supporting Mona Lisa, that he might even be able to see gentility in this jostling crowd.

Creativity Happens

“We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”  Maya Angelou

 

As I peeled vegetables for a sweet potato soup for some friends the other day,  I found myself thinking, “I love to make soup. It’s such a creative act.”  Peeling, dicing, adding, spicing, tasting. And when someone truly enjoys the final product, and it makes our bodies stronger, you’ve succeeded. When only the sticky stacked soup bowls are left on the sink counter, you realize your creative efforts—however ephemeral—were honored because someone saw, tasted, and enjoyed.

As Maya Angelou pointed out, we’re all creative.  Creative pursuits uplift. Creative endeavors please not only yourself, but others as well. Creative impulses are often sparked by something, leaving us to act upon them.  Something we’ve seen. Something we’ve heard or read. Something we’ve dreamed. Wherever it comes from, a deep dynamic desire to create surfaces and when it does, we experience an essential calming beauty in our hearts.

Take our patio furniture, for instance.  Creativity often means taking something and turning it into something else. But for that to happen, we have to ACT.  We have to DO something.  It’s not enough to just have a vision.  Our old wooden patio table and chairs had withstood (barely) the elements of all Vermont seasons. Their outer “skin” had turned black in places, peeled in others, and generally were in the need of some kind of uplift. We sanded and primed and suddenly…  

Creativity is like lining up dominoes. One thing leads to another to another to another. Take my recycled wool hats, for example. Or the unfinished Adirondack chairs we brought to the patio. Every time we look outside, we giggle. Every time we vie for the purple one, we smile.

One suggestion from her mother led our granddaughter's uncle and I to create this dollhouse.

     

Whether it's fabric scraps into furniture or popsicle sticks into flooring, words into poetry or pixels into art, creativity shows the divine spark in us all.

When I selected the wild palette colors for the patio furniture, I sort of had an idea of what I was doing. But it wasn't until the paint was dry and I sat down one evening to watch the stars with a cup of coffee and a couple of cookies on the "paddle arm" that I totally understood what we had created.   Ray Bradbury said, "Creativity is a continual surprise." You just never know how "something new" will feel until it's right there in front of you in 3-D. Like simmering soup, you have to taste it on your tongue. And you have to lean your head back and survey the heavens to know how wonderful a chair can be.

One creative impulse stirs more. Someone will eventually eat your soup, read your words, sit in your chair, play with your dollhouse, perform your music, view your art.  And rest assured, someone will, in turn, spin far-flung creative webs from whatever you have created.

A Concern in Trade

No doubt fortified by memories of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, I decided to post another 20 or so recycled wool hats under Kelsey Mountain Hats yesterday.  I am nearly as obsessed as he, but without the frizzy pinky-orange hair.

I’ve been hand-sewing hats for about a year, now. Since I don’t use toxins (as the earlier hatters did) I doubt that I’ll go mad but I sometimes catch my husband looking at the mound of sweaters I’ve amassed and I know he wonders.

At first they were all “my babies” and I hated to see them go away. Then they began to pile up and after making about 200 of them, including the 16 that recently were sold in a fund-raising project as “Hats for Haiti,” they begin to look a bit alike even though each is still quite unique. Just like children in large families, I suppose.

For Christmas, son Nate gave me A Concern in Trade: Hatting and the Bracebridges of Atherstone, 1612-1872. Just the title tells you a bit about him! He must have cruised the web for some time to find that book. Judy Vero wrote it and it was published by a small (quite small I’d guess) publisher in Warwick.  The only remaining hatting company that still survives happens to be Vero & Everett Ltd. 

Her family book tells all you ever need to know about the history of feltmaking (or planking which I tried by whacking wet wool with a rubber mallet to no avail…this made me decide if the wool wants to felt up in a hot washer and dryer it can; otherwise, I use it as is.)

Wool felting came to England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. I also learned that in 1732 Walpole, under George II, banned the import of beaver hats from America. Instead, we had to send over just the pelts so hats could be made in Britain. Another US industry down!

Because I know you’re dying to know, I’ll tell you that Samuel Butler in 1655 established his feltmaking shop and Samuel Bracebridge was working as a haberdasher of hats. This all took place during Cromwell’s commonwealth period. Feltmaking soon became a way for local wool to be put to good “common-wealth” activities. Especially for the Bracebridge family. Vero painstakingly lists all the people who first made hats, including appropriately enough, Joseph Hatton! But it was the Bracebridges of Atherstone who truly did it! Bracebridge owned property in Athens and participated in their revolt against the Turks. Then war broke out in the Crimea. Wars need hats so Bracebridge's coffers grew even larger. The Bracebridges, as it turns out, were friends of Florence Nightingale. (That was just a sidebar)

I gather Atherstone is no longer a great hatting center, but they do still make wool felt hoods, apparently.  I’m not sure who wears wool felt hoods after Robin Hood's gang. But after a few craft shows and farmers markets, I do know who buys my hats. And who doesn’t. The “Who Doesn’t” category includes women who take one look and say, “I like these, but I can’t wear hats.”  And the ones who say, “I love them, but I’m allergic to wool.” And most men. Although I’ve had several male customers fall in love with some and foist them on their female companions.

The  “Who Does” category includes my family and friends, of course. But they supported me during my “Let’s make waste paper baskets our of big ice cream containers,” phase, too, so I probably shouldn’t count them. Others include pre-teen girls who love to see themselves in the mirror which I always provide. Teens who gravitate to the hats with attitude.  Twenty-somethings who are making enough money to buy a hat for “fashion” reasons. Thirties through Fifties who say: “Wow. Are these all recycled?” And grandmothers who are looking for cute kids’ hats, forgetting that a toddler loses hats about as fast as Johnny Depp lost his train of thought in  “Alice in Wonderland.” Or the one grandmother who bought one recently. When I saw  her at our March Townmeeting and asked her how she was enjoying it, she said, “I don’t know. My granddaughter put it on and she won’t take it off!”

Hatting in Atherstone is a lost art. Hatting in my house is a found one—and I’m loving every minute.

Lenten Dining

With all the snow we’ve had lately, it’s difficult to remember that “Lent” means “spring.” Early snowdrops will have to really push.

Through forty snowy days, Christians contemplate all the events that lead up to Easter. I have a friend who always gives up chocolate through Lent. I, on the other hand, think Lent, like most seasons, is a fine time to eat rather than to fast.  We need to keep up our strength and push through to tulip time. After all, that’s what Jesus himself did. Look at all those empty plates.

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.

Salvaged

Next to hardware stores, my favorite collection of stuff is stashed into a  huge warehouse called "Vermont Salvage.”  Old wooden doors stand open on either end, so you have to be hardy to shop there in winter.

It’s THE place to go if you're looking for old door knobs or bathtubs. Green-bronzed horses or cast-iron radiators. Arches and architectural leftovers from the insides of abandoned churches. Stained glass windows line one whole wall, right behind rows and rows of sinks. And just across the aisle, about a hundred toilets line up like frosty choristers in this open cathedral of commodes.

G.K. Chesterton once said, “A paradox is a truth standing on its head waving its legs to attract attention.” There I stood, red-nosed, hands in my pockets and ears tingling from the cold, juxtaposed with these unlikely neighbors paradoxically waiting to be rescued once again and taken to some warmer place. Like Harry Potter, I had conjured up these magical foreign gadgets, this bizarre metal and glass menagerie mutely waving their legs at me.

I wandered the aisles, but kept returning to the stained glass lined up against the walls. These warehouse owners are far too savvy to have any Tiffany lurking around, I was quite sure, but some of them looked so lovely lounging there in ornate frames, dusty and smudged, but still intact. How can sand, salt and ash create something as beautiful as stained glass?

During both world wars, the people of Chartres saved their famous glass windows by burying them in mines or in the crypt itself. No small feat since the 116 glass windows cover the equivalent of an acre of space!

 

Eight  hundred years earlier, three stained glass masterpieces nearly met the rubbish heap. While most of Chartres Cathedral burned in 1194, the western wall was saved. Salvaged. One window hung there in the smoke like a giant jewel-encrusted brooch. It’s called “The Blue Virgin Window” because of the rich blues against a ruby-red background. Most early stained glass artists used copper for red, iron for yellow and cobalt for blue. But Chartres’ glaziers, alchemists in their own right, created a blue so intense, so rare, that no one has duplicated it.

This window is a testament to many things, not least of which to the artists themselves, for reds and blues were the most difficult glass colors to create. Stained glass artists worked at their benches often flashing up to forty coats of glazings just to get the right hue and luminosity. For these ruby reds they overlaid green, purple, brown and yellow. What made matters ever more challenging, they couldn’t view their work until it was actually hung.

But beyond the craft, this crowned “empress mother” and her child speak to the creativity of soul-salvaging.

The stained glass windows at the Vermont Salvage were simpler designs composed mostly of yellows, browns and greens. No rubies or lapis lazuli, but still, they were a welcome break from winter’s white. And my soul took note.

 

 

 

 

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."

Real Toads

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Music + Sardines = Peace

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

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

 

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

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

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. 

MORE Kelsey Mountain Hats

O.K. I'm obsessed. My husband refers to my mountain of colorful materials in the corner of our library as "Hat Central." 

"Hat Central" has now posted another twenty or so hats for you to look at and share with your friends. Click on "Kelsey Mountain Hats" on my Home Page, scroll down to "More Kelsey Mountain Hats" or go directly to the "new"  hats just added. Have fun!  Be warm! 

My great thanks to Cara (shown here) and Tiffany for modeling and Amy for technical support--they  bartered their services for hats.

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.

And Speaking of Love-mongering

Take Body Art to a whole new (old) level by giving yourself a creative treat. Or just search on You Tube for The Omo People. They're perhaps from the Mursi or Suri tribes, who live near the Omo River in Ethiopia's Great Rift Valley. I can't share any of these pictures with you. As my harpist friend Margaret told me yesterday, "I can't tell you about this. You HAVE to experience it."

She is absolutely right.Thank you, Margaret.

The photographer is Hans Sylvester who spent six years photographing these beautiful, beautiful people. Their bodies are their canvases. Their media, earth pigments, fruit, flowers. The "pea pod" hat especially intrigues this "Mad Hatter!"

The Omo People never forgot what children once knew. They know bricolage...how to play with what's at hand. And they show us how to be true. As Ursula LeGuin said, " Truth in art is not imitation, but reincarnation."

Mad as a Hatter

I’ve become a hatter in my spare time. A Green Hatter. A Sophia-Hatter. Not really a Mad Hatter since I don’t use mercury in any of my hats as they did in 19th century hat making. People who wear my hats don’t suffer from mercury poisoning and wide mood swings as they did back then. At least, not that I know of. 

    

Like quilters who make quilts from bits  and pieces, I’m a hatter who does the same thing. All of my hand-stitched hats are made from recycled wool (which I wash in really really hot water hoping to “felt” it up.)  Most are “blinged up” with beads or buttons for women, some for children and a few for men. I love hearing friends say, "Oh, that's my sweater!"

"T" People and Bird Houses

While most families get together on holidays to grill, drink beer, watch ballgames, snipe at each other and dredge up past grievances, our niece and her family sat down in the back yard to play with scraps of wood and bits of found treasures. The French word for this is bricolage--play with what's at hand.

Sophia, so aptly named for this blog, the youngest member of the family, lounged with the dog while all the adults made birdhouses.  Some more fanciful than others.

I wanted to share this birdhouse with you because I believe it’s a metaphor for what ...here he comes again...Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the transcendent self.  The “T” people. Imagine a family so creative, so loving, so thoughtful as to surround little Sophie with these concrete examples of complexity. Yes, complexity.

Circles of Wisdom

Rilke said, "There is nothing so wise as a circle." Click here to read my latest word-weavings about how I became a part of three women's circles. It ends with a poem to Sophia. See you there.

Happenstance and Geomancy

If I’m granted another lifetime, I may come back as a geomancer. Earth is alive and she’s talking to us and I’d like to learn how to listen even more closely to what she's saying.

What’s geomancy, you ask? 

Geomancy is commonly known as the “art of harmonious placement,” for it has been used to find the right time and place for all human activities.
~Richard Feather Anderson, The Power of Place

Before we built our labyrinth in the south meadow, our friend Laura and I dowsed to find its center. Just as medieval cathedral builders placed a pole in the earth to determine its altar placement and then built out from there, our labyrinth grew from its center pole.

  

(Illustration by Joel Speerstra

Hunab Ku,  p. 128.)

When the earth seems particularly aligned, when we sense wonderful energy flowing, each of us can, quite naturally, practice the ancient art of Earth magic. The Chinese called it Feng Shui—wind and fire. The chi, the dragon-energy under and around the earth, moves just right and creates harmony in all things. Since I was born in the Chinese year of the dragon, I take notice.