Sophia Serve

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.

Winter Quiet

After a few extremely busy days, I yearn for a walk--if only to our mailbox a half mile straight down from our house. It's icy. I take my time.

I often walk back up again to a meditative rhythm. Sometimes it's the prayer of St. Francis: "Make me an instrument of your peace..." A step a word. But today my walking mantra wants to be just two words: re-lax, con-tent...re-lax, con-tent.

Once or twice I stop to listen. Nothing.

The sky takes on a deep lapis-lazuli blue the likes of which I see only on crisp winter days. It's about three o'clock so the sun aims its fiery path behind me toward the western mountains at a pretty fast clip. I'm facing a cloud-moon of light and dark, split exactly in half. It's strange to see the moon during the day. It's as if she's saying, "Whoops. I really don't belong here, but I wanted you to see me equally balanced like this. Later tonight I will be oh so bright against the white empty canvas of your yard, but right now I'm just a wispy-whispery thing sent to share a secret: it's important to be balanced...to keep extremes at bay."

Before my walk, I'd been reading the fourth book in Christopher Alexander's series called The Nature of Order. Now I'm observing the order of nature. Everything has a living center, says this wonderful architect-author. I notice that each shadow lives and falls precisely where it is ordered to fall.  Each tree stands in perfect living relationship to its neighbors and each branch seems expertly placed one to another.  The snow knows how to mold the rocks.

Again, I stop to listen. I hear not one sound. Not a grinding snow machine. Not a bird. Not a dog. Not even the dropping of a twig. But wait. Between heartbeats, I notice  a trickle of water running under the ice.  A tree groans from the cold.

"Who," Alexander asks, "has not had the feeling, listening to Mozart's  40th Symphony or to Bach's B minor Mass that something significant is happening, that in some inner sense, the heavens are opening, and that this structure of sound somehow reaches in and hits the heart?" Who, indeed.

Meister Eckhart, that 13th century spiritual teacher, said "We must learn to penetrate things and find God here."

For that brief walk, the sun, the moon, the trees, and the snow all quietly chorus-up to show me a universe of living beings. I am embraced by nothing I can measure, certainly nothing mechanical, but definitely groupings of living centers that form an unbroken whole surrounding me.

Something significant IS happening and it hits my heart.

 

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."

A Whale and an Ark

Not being someone who scoffs at synchronicity, I feel compelled to share with you some images that came to me from two different SophiaServe readers only minutes apart. What does a replica of Noah's ark made by a Dutch carpenter named Johan Huibers have in common with a bunch of scuba divers wielding curved knives? And why were they brought to my attention now?

Huibers, a present day Noah, and his son have been working on this three story ark two-thirds the size of a football field (and dimensionally accurate according to the Bible) since May of 2005.

The San Francisco Chronicle carried a story back in 2006 about a 50 ton female humpback whale caught near the Farallon Islands not far from the Golden Gate Bridge.  The whale's story goes like this.

Hundreds of pounds of crab traps and 20 ropes, each 240 feet long, held her hostage. The ropes cut into her flesh including around her mouth. A fisherman spotted her as she struggled to stay afloat and radioed a rescue team. 

Even though one little flick of her tail could have easily killed them, the divers worked for an hour cutting the lines away. The diver freeing her mouth said later her huge eye followed him as he cut. He thought he saw her wink once. Finally she was able to swim free. But instead of leaving right away, she swam in what they described as "joyous circles". Then she gently nudged and rubbed up against each of the divers as if to thank them. It was, a diver reported, "one of the most incredibly beautiful experiences of my life."

As the Christmas season of giving and receiving nudges up against us, perhaps these stories of Johan Huibers' replica of Noah's incredible gift along with the humpback's salvation story remind us that no task is too daunting and no situation too entangled.

And that we're here to protect all life.

Fast and Faster

Tea and juice for breakfast. I joined others around the globe for the 350.org fast today. Oh and there's the possibility of losing some weight. There's always that!

But mainly two things made me decide to fast today. Bill McKibben called for it so I checked out the red and green list of countries on the 350.org website showing how the world shakes out in Copenhagen right now. And an email from a Sophia Serve reader. 

He told me that at his church (Prince of Peace) in Minneapolis they plan to prepare over a million meals from January 27-31 in conjunction with Feed My Starving Children

I wonder if we can do this any faster.

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."

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.

Hummingbirds and Nazca Lines

I thought of this image we included in Hunab Ku as I listened to Maya Lin on NPR the other day. You may remember her for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. which she designed as a 21 year old Yale student.

Maya was talking about her latest memorial : What Is Missing?, a multi-sited work incorporating video and sounds of birds and animals now threatened. She builds her art on facts and we can emotionally draw from those facts what we care to take away.

One in three amphibians, one in four mammals and one in eight birds is now threatened and in danger of forever dying because of habitat loss. (And 70% of our plants!)

The Nazca story is a compelling one and a sophiaserve reader recently sent me an update that may interest you as much as it interests me.

350 For the World

Of the 16,000 or so images now posted on www.350.org this one from a beach in Australia really gets our attention.

In April I wrote a post called "Icons for the Ears" and talked about "change ringing." Well, on Saturday October 24 people from 181 countries rang "change" bells, made "350" formations, banners, signs, danced, sang, bungee jumped and held 5,200 events to bring attention to our need to actively tackle climate change.

A small group of us joined them.

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. 

Place-Shifting: A Rural Renaissance

Ever since the 1920’s people began to move from farms to cities and right now 80% of Americans are urban dwellers. But there’s a reversal afoot, at least for baby boomers and other retirees. When my husband and I moved to the country ten years ago, I didn’t realize we were part of a rural renaissance movement. We left a city thoroughfare with its car alarms, it’s bright street lights, fire engines and ambulances for a house at the end of a country lane about the width of a prostrate refrigerator lit at night only by the moon.

It was so quiet I could hear chickadees chewing.

Bill Bishop writes about this place-shifting in America. He quotes a recent report from the Economic Research Services (part of the Dept. of Agriculture). Apparently over the next decade or so people nearing retirement will be leaving larger cities, as we did, for the "chickadee chewing" parts of our country. If you like graphs, you might be interested in reading the whole report.

The rate of rural population growth has tripled in the last decade and the numbers continue to rise. I’m not sure how I feel about being labeled “an older migrant” but in fact, that’s exactly what we are. We are, in Vermontese, “flatlanders, from away.” While my husband and I are a few years older than baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) we fit the pattern. We knew after retirement, we couldn’t afford to continue to live in our expensive Cambridge, MA townhouse so we headed north. To Vermont. And so have numerous others in search of what the Economic Research people call “High amenities”:’mountains, lakes, sunshine and rivers.

The map above shows those counties with the most scenic amenities (in green) and those with the fewest (in brown). That little green spot in the middle of Vermont is where we live. Mountains, lakes and rivers—and sunshine…but not all the time. I confess, I have counted Vermont “sky-greys” ranging from pinkish, violet greys to the blacker varieties. But having grown up in Wisconsin (have you been to Door County? Do have any idea how beautiful it is?) I find this map terribly skewed. Granted, the Midwest has no mountains but the bluffs along the Mississippi River are spectacular. I know. I lived on them for over a decade. And the Midwest certainly has lakes, (Great Ones and Minnesota's ten thousand), rivers and sunshine. AND water, although water tables in the Midwest have become polluted from farming practices over the years.

I believe places with plenty of drinkable water will be what the next “where to move” maps will be pointing out. And there are other amenities to map--amenities we have discovered in Vermont:

Good neighbors
Small town governance
Nearby farmers markets
Great cooperative food stores
Specialty local cheeses
Local breweries
Maple syrup
Excellent universities and technical schools
Covered bridges
Skiing
Hiking and biking trails
Broadband access
Theater and opera
Pottery and glassblowing
Town bands
Wonderful choral groups
Small churches
Good libraries
Great independent bookstores
Equidistant from Montreal and Boston.

If these were the amenities charted, Vermont would certainly live up to its name: Ver-mont: Green Mountains, and be the very greenest of greens on any amenities map.

So Many Injustices

Images of Ted Kennedy, his family, his legacy, his state of Massachusetts (our home for 13 years) still wash through my brain. During his time in the Senate, he dealt with so many injustices, but there are so many left over for the rest of us to deal with after his passing.

I am reminded of what St. Basil the Great who lived in the 4th century wrote:

The bread which you do not use
    is the bread of the hungry.
The garment hanging in your wardrobe
    is the garment of one who is naked.
The shoes that you do not wear
    are the shoes of one who is barefoot.
The money you keep locked away
    is the money of the poor.
The acts of charity you do not perform
    are so many injustices you commit.

Small actions do make a difference. When Shannon Daley-Harris and Jeffrey Keenan joined me in writing Our Day to End Poverty, we decided to place a section at the end of each chapter called "Actions Make a Difference"--stories of what various people have done that had wide-ranging implications.

One by one. It's always how things are accomplished. Perhaps even saving the planet!

As one of the four co-founders of the blog-web site Our Luminous Ground  Ria Baeck recently suggested I check out the site on eco-tipping points. I did. And you might wish to as well.  It's filled with stories about how people--ordinary people like you and me--are making a difference.

"So many injustices"...but the good news is, there are so many of us to attend to them.

Handing off the Future

       I went to an organizational learning workshop a few years back led by John Dicus. At onepoint, John asked us to contemplate the question: “What do I need to steward my own future?" 

John passed around a  little crystal ball so we could “gaze into it” and see what came to us. Doubting (as I often do) the efficacy of these sorts of exercises, I sat there waiting for the ball to come my way. When I felt the cool weight of it in my left palm, I dutifully repeated the question to myself, and looked down. All I could see was my left hand. Then it hit me. Of course! My future depends on how I use my hands!

Since that exercise, I've left corporate publishing and have spent a great deal of time at the keyboard writing and helping others write--a "handy exercise." Two books will publish late this year/early next and over the past couple of days I've been handling the page proofs for both, thinking about the various hands I hope will soon hold a bound copy. One of the books, The Green Devotional, leads me ask: "What will we hand off to our children and grandchildren?" The book carries many messages of planetary plight as well as global hope.

And what did our ancestors hand off to us? I mean the ones way, way, way back.

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.  

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."

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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"Bee-ing" There

The other night a bear broke through the barbed wire surrounding their hives and ate 30 pounds of our friend’s honey.  As that winter-starved “Pooh” scooped up all that golden goodness, he probably didn’t pause to ponder how all that “hunny” would improve his immune system, kill any harmful bacteria and promote healthy tissue growth. When he had had his fill, he turned his sticky snout toward the bird feeders.

Some people see sacred geometry in bee work. Each cell is an exact 60˚hexagon perfectly positioned. Like snowflakes and Stars  of David. When we burn candles made of bees wax, we may, as people long before us did, sense something cosmic melting. The bees have shared with us, as Sue Monk Kidd put it, a portion of their secret life.

A Peek into The Green Devotional

Although it won't be on the bookshelves, or available from Conari Press or Amazon until later this year, I wanted to share with you one of the eight chapters. The book is a collection of prayer-quotations arranged this way: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Time, Space, Essence and Closing Prayers.

   Water

In early spring our little creek marks the edge of our property with a ferocity that each year surprises me. Before the topography maps were crafted, someone gave it a name, no doubt for the trees that grow farther down its path: Apple Creek. We’ve become fast friends. I sit on a rocky outcropping above the brook, and watch water leap and froth, like buckets of crazed Fresca.

In winter, the ice piles up in blue layers and I can see, just below its glacial framework, energetic movement. It presses on past downed logs, around slate outcroppings and eventually reaches our branch of the White River. Which reaches the Connecticut. Which reaches the Atlantic Ocean.