Sophia Serve

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.

On Wings of Fire

Rising up out of its own ashes, every 500 years or so, the legendary phoenix imprints us with hope. It's a cross-cultural symbol for resurrection. Turkish texts claim the phoenix bears these words on its wings:

"Neither the earth produces me, nor the heavens, but only the wings of fire."

Chinese sources say the feng-huang originates in the sun and calls up the sun every morning with its perfect five-toned melody.

Now, as many Iranians face their own "flaming challenges," and each of us rises daily out of yesterday's "ashes," the phoenix points the way to our future days that can be scented, as its own nest is said to be, with frankincense, cinnamon and myrrh. May it be so!

From Hesiod to Harry Potter, the phoenix carries hope on its flaming wings. Suddenly one has appeared as a crop circle as well.

Photo by Oliver Morel

Sacred Geometry, Holy Math

 

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

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

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

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

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