Sophia Serve

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."

Advent Dark

Unless our motion censor floods our yard with light, or the moon peeks out, we live surrounded by deep dark this time of year. After spending more than an urban decade surrounded by sirens, car alarms and booming bass bellowing from pounding cars and rarely seeing stars, rural life pulls you back to another time. A slower time. A darker quieter time.

I spotted a Santa Advent Calendar in a store the other day and I wondered how a parent explains to a kid what "advent" means if their only frame of reference is a big guy with red cheeks holding a lumpy bag. But kids do get the "waiting" part of December. They hear "not now!" enough.

The countdown to Christmas comes in many forms. Hurried trips to the post office. Stressful trips to the grocery store. Manic trips to the mall. Trips. Tripping. Tripped up.

We pack so much anxiety and nostalgia into that "Santa bag." 

So, what IS Advent? I'm not a theologian so I can only tell you what it is for me.

The Maori people of New Zealand still chant their creation story by first calling it "a breathing space of immensity." That's what Advent is.

They speak of a time when the Universe was in darkness. No light at all. That's what Advent is.

They chant: "Darkness, become a light-possessing darkness."

After my last posting about the dolphin-killing ritual still performed in Denmark, my husband's only comment was, "Well, that was dark." I thought, "Welcome to Advent."

The Maori people unwind their unique cosmology story this way: "Light, become a darkness-possessing light." That's what Advent is.

They sing: "Let there be one Light above. Let their be one Light below...a  Dominion of Light...And now a bright light prevailed."

Shadow Work: Ironic, Isn't it?

A SophiaServe reader sent me some pictures the other day that are literally gut-wrenching. And they have provided me with new insights into "irony."

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.

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.

 

Friends of Friends

I just joined Facebook, which raises its demographic age just a bit.

I used to publish books on topics such as "Social Capital" but I still don't know why I joined. Well, I do. A friend invited me to. All I had to be was 13. No problem there.

Social networking started with "Friends" on TV, I believe. But it was hard to get to Boston and then find the right bar, so they did it online.

I looked up "social networks" on Wikipedia and I was nonplussed by how many there are. (I've always wanted to use that word, nonplussed, and I think this is the very first time.)

This is what social networking looks like. I got it from Wikipedia.  I think it's more like Indra's web with nodes hooking people-diamonds. All attached and connected. 

Facebook is larger than several major countries combined, proving that we no longer have geographical boundaries. Just common interests. (You can check out Netwiki if you're interested in the theory and science of all this stuff.)

One study discovered that happiness tends to be correlated to social networks. Makes sense. No one really likes to be alone. And if you're located in that solid blue sector, you're happiest of all, apparently.

As you can see, I lifted this cover image directly from Amazon. But I wanted you to see it. I just got this book yesterday from a friend who is a friend of Craig Barnes, the author. (See, that's really how books get sold. I don't trust "big numbers" sometimes. I suspect books are often bought by groups or even authors themselves who want to inflate a particular title--no names mentioned here but think Alaska and a word that means a stampeding killer elephant.)

Naturally, I love Barmes' cover image and I can't wait to explore its content. It's similar to the figure I once recreated in copper seen here.

Call her what you will. 

Hildegard of Bingen called her Sapientia--The Holy Spirit.

Then creation recognized its Creator in its own forms and appearances.

For in the beginning, when God said, "Let it be!" and it came to pass, the means and the Matrix of creation was Love,

because all creation was formed through Her as in the twinkling of an eye.

Regular readers will know that I call her Sophia.

My friend Ria Baeck lives her emergent feminine by exploring how the collective feminine appears in our lives, our communities and the earth. She's working on a book that will make clear distinctions about how we express our own collective feminine by finding accurate language and marking the steps in our Great Turning--the Big Transition time we find ourselves in right now. It will be about how we are heading towards a next step in the synergy of yin and yang on our way to a life-affirming co-creation.

When Ria's book is published, I'll buy it for friends. And when I do, I'll think of my copper Sophia and how her arms encompass all of us, for she is indeed the Friend of friends.

Rumsfeld, Sophia and Remembering Eden

Do you recall that speech Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once gave when he tried to justify our intelligence (or lack thereof) backing the decision to go into Iraq to get all those elusive weapons of mass destruction? It was that "what we know we know and what we don't know that we don't know" speech.

I had once published "Knowledge Management" books so I thought I knew what he was talking about. At a knowledge conference I had learned we might divide knowledge into "information" and "know how." The knowledge you get from reading memos and books versus what you pick up at the water cooler or over a beer. Explicit and tacit.

Think of all knowledge as falling into this four-part grid:

 

What we know we know.	What we know we don't know.
What we don’t know we know.	What we don’t know that we don’t know.

It's that last quadrant: "What we don't know that we don't know" that's apt to get us into trouble. 

Collective Wisdom

No spoiler alert needed. I won’t be giving anything away to tell you Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol ends with a couple of pages that will most likely never make it into the movie, nor will they cross Tom Hanks’ lips.

Here’s a portion:

“Our physical bodies have evolved over the ages, but it was our minds that were created in the image of God…as soon as we humans begin to harness our true power, we will have enormous control over our world. We will be able to design reality rather than merely react to it…And (Kathryn says) if we as humans can honestly grasp this one simple truth…the world will change overnight…the power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.”

 Kathryn’s character is based, at least in part, on Lynne McTaggart, the author of The Field and The Intention Experiment.

After reading The Intention Experiment, I was again reminded that, indeed, we ARE all connected and we are now called to really pay attention to our thoughts, our intentions and our actions.

But there is another book I'd like to call your attention to. The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly. I admit I'm partial. It's written by some friends of mine:

Alan Briskin, Sheryl Erickson, John  Ott and Tom Callanan.

 As the title implies, it's more about group wisdom than about our individual attempts at being and acting intelligent. They quote Albert Einstein in their chapter called "Inhabiting a Different Worldview."

“A  human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself [she experiences herself] as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusions of his [her] consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.” [The brackets are mine.]

Now that Carl Jung’s heretofore unpublished Red Book (NYTimes Magazine today,  Sunday 20 September 2009) is about to be published, it’s interesting to read about Jung’s final days on page 83 and 84 of The Power of Collective Wisdom.  The authors tell us that Jung believed ideas lie outside the individual mind but can be discovered and rediscovered from different disciplines and different cultural backgrounds.  They say: “To inhabit a world view of such shared collective knowing, we need to be able to hold in our mind a larger canvas on which to see the cumulative accomplishments of consciousness. We need to understand ourselves as a human species evolving together.”

Together.  Not separately.

At the end, they quote Christopher Alexander: “People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness.”  It is indeed time we come together. That’s their last line.

It IS time we come together. We're wasting precious time being fractured and fractious. Miserable and misery-makers. Angry and anxious. We’re soooo much better than that.

 

Rings of Synchronicities

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

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

Celtic Healing Sounds

Yesterday a new chemical greeted my body. Red, this time, like Cherry Kool-Aid, it  slowly dripped through my IV tube carrying with it all sorts of "drinking the kool-aid" metaphors. It's real name is Doxorubicin Liposomal-affectionately known as doxol.

I leaned back in my infusion recliner thinking about all the dire possible side-effects: mouth, hand and foot sores. My PA put the fear of the Lord in me about them and made me swear on her stack of "Information for Patients Provided by your Health Care Team at Dartmouth- Hitchcock Medical Center" flyers to heed them for the next five days. Nothing over 75 degrees dare pass my lips or touch my skin--and sun? Well forget it! Fortunately rain's in the near forecast. And if it does appear, my sweet family in Colorado sent me a Mother's Day UV protection embedded long sleeved shirt. Images form: Ice tea. Ice coffee. Gazpacho!

Just then "Margaret the Harp Lady," as she refers to  herself, came smiling through the double doors, carrying her Celtic oblation. Margaret Stevens and I are old friends by now so she immediately sat down, cradling her wonderful lever lap harp. No more worrying about mouth sores for me!

Hand-held offering gifts come in many forms. Donah Drewett, another volunteer Reiki friend once teamed up with Margaret and presented me with the holy gift of 15 minutes of bliss. And another pastor-friend, Diane Root wrote me an e mail last night saying she would be holding a prayer-drumming session for me. I thought I could feel the vibrations miles away.

In between bathing me in Bach and washing me with the still waters of "Shenandoah," Margaret and I talked of Iona. We both think it's part of the otherworld. In fact, I read about a legend of St. Oren for whom this chapel is named.Columba, the Irish ex Druid, settled Iona, bringing Christianity to Scotland. Later one of his comrade monks died and was buried where St. Oren's chapel is now. After three days, the monks thought they heard something and dug him up. He was alive and screaming,"The Otherworld is Nothing like you imagined!" Then he collapsed. Being practical monks, they buried him again.

The words of Frank MacEown came back to me. In The Mist-Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers and Seekers he said, "May you taste resurrection without the need of dying for it.  

  Music offers "sound resurrection." Margaret's harp anchored me as surely as if a Celtic cross had been driven through the footrest of my recliner.

How powerful is your magic sound?
~Mozart, The Magic Flute

Music. Muse. Don Campbell who wrote The Mozart Effect—all about tapping into the creative power of music to heal the body and strengthen the mind—says music warms up the brain. I say, “bring it on!” 

But why does Campbell recommend Mozart rather than other music?  All music can be good, when listened to intentionally. But, apparently, Mozart’s and Hayden’s pulses and patterns hit the brain with a clarity and elegance that can improve concentration, memory and spatial perception. Some monks in Brittany monasteries play music to their cows (as do some farmers in Vermont) but the monks claim Mozart gives more milk. Playing Mozart in some Immigration English classes tends to speed up learning. In Edmonton, Canada, Mozart’s string quartets have been proven to calm pedestrian traffic an reduce drug deals. And in Japan, the Ohara Brewery finds that Mozart makes the best sake—something about the density of yeast!

On p. 79 he shows how other kinds of music affects us. Interesting stuff!

I don't know about cows or yeast; I can only speak to Margaret's music. I had been sitting there thinking about how my new red “Kool Aid” might be affecting me in a couple of days.  Possible mouth sores and pressure point problems so I shouldn't put put my elbows on the table. Hmmm. They didn't say anything about fingers on the keyboard. I know, even if I could, I wouldn't be able to play the harp!

I kept watching the blood-red drips. And then everything shifted with Margaret's arrival.  My stress melted down, deep down through my cushy chair, through the floor, into the ground. And that feeling is still with me as I write this morning. Music IS powerful! And there’s something about Celtic music paired with prayer that is perhaps most powerful of all.

In The Book of Love Kathleen McGowan took some liberties with St. Patrick’s famous prayer. They fit so beautifully with Margaret’s Celtic harp music:

God’s hand to guard on me
God’s wisdom to guide me
God’s ear to hear me.
God’s eye to look before me
God’s might to uphold me
God’s word to speak through me.
God’s love to sustain me,
God’s shield to protect me.

May it be so.

From Bakelite to Being Light

Every Saturday morning, I held my little beige Motorola in my eight year old lap and my inner world magically connected to the world beyond Sand Creek, Wisconsin.

I plunked "froggie with its magic twinger" with Buster Brown and his Dog Tige. I can hear, still, Ramar of the Jungle's elephant! I flew with Sky King and the Royal Mounties and I traveled with Uncle Ted to the land of  “Let’s Pretend.” 

My mother usually allowed me to take a few slices of sausage and some crackers into the onto the living room sofa with me

and I stacked them on top of the radio which automatically heated them up. Heating and seeping early plastic into food now seems like a very dangerous past time. Good thing I did it just once a week. I savored every sound and saved every crumb.

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.

Hearths and Motherboards

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

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

                I love that concept.

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

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

TED

My Wisconsin friend Genevieve turned me onto TED--not the man, the site. It stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. TED started as a conference in 1984 and has been going strong ever since.

Innovative thinkers are invited to "give the talk of your lifetime, but it has to be no longer than 18 minutes."

Welcome to Sophia Serve!

After the sort of career I’ve had, ten years of freelance writing and twenty years in book publishing, most people become literary agents or start their own small publishing enterprise. Instead, I decided to become a thought partner for people who need a little extra help pushing words around the page or across the screen. Sophia Serve is the name of my writing and publishing service.

SophiaServe.com is a place for you to read and think about writing as an expression of your deeper “you.”  And talk to other folks who share your passion. You’ll also find information here about the books I’ve written. Or co-written. Or wish I’d written.

Sophia, the Divine Feminine Wisdom, welcomes us as a mother, sister, friend.  We’re glad you’re here.