Sophia Serve

Patterns and Metapatterns

Driving up Spain's Sierra Nevada mountains to Granada,all I could think of were patterns.  I watched patterns of mountains notch into valleys and fields, fallow and fertile, slip into one another. I saw olive and orange trees line up and the earth crease and fold around them as if firmly holding it all safe for my eyes alone.

Gregory Bateson once said in Mind and Nature, “What pattern connects the crab to the lobster, and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?...The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns."

Whether it’s the frost patterns on my Vermont windows this morning, or an intricate spider web pattern, I sense Her presence in all these mystical metapatterns.

After our side trip on a dirt road back into the alham--the "red earth of Granada," we visited the Alhambra itself where more patterns piled up on more patterns. Arches upon arches. Tiles upon tiles. Dark into light. And I thought, "This is Her work. This is Her visible code encouraging me to see how everything is connected, how everything fits so perfectly into everything else and how it’s all crucial to the workings of not just our planet, but of the galaxy and universes beyond. She is there, making sure the stitches of the world-tapestry hold together. And when we take the time to really look, we can see her radiance shining through the pinpricks,  sliding off the glazed tiles."

Before the Alhambra became a city state and filled this space with arches and symmetrical gardens, even before the Romans and Visigoths took up residence,  it was a place where The Mother was honored, high up there on Sabika hill where Her crystalline water poured from springs fed by snow-capped mountains and where her birds sang.

My Sophia Friend Julia Blackbourn graciously shared with me some of her sketches of another patterned site about 70 kilometers from Grandada where the famous cathedral of Cordoba welcomes people into her huge courtyard. Her watercolors capture the patterns in these massive arches better than any photos I took, so I'm happy, with her blessing, to share a couple with you.

I believe Sophia can be seen through arches and in all pattern overlays; She is present everywhere--in the beautiful as well as the dismal parts of our world.

 

[As a sidenote: an audio guide to Sophia: The Feminine Face of God,a 10 part series, is available for listening or downloading at:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/divineartsmedia/2012/01/11/sophia-feminine-face-of-god-10-series-w-karen-speerstra]

Soup Mantra for 2012

After several days in Barcelona, steeped in Antoni Gaudi’s colorful swirling architecture, including the extra-terrestrial spired  Sagrada Familia cathedral, the fairy-taled magical Park Güell, 

    

 

the Pedrera, an apartment building with no straight lines and a roof that offers the most amazing views of the city, and, of course, Casa Batilló’s dragon chimney, the more down to earth 1950’s Casa el Cherro invited us in to enjoy yet another face of Spain. 

We’d driven west along the Mediterranean coast toward Malaga for hours and the prospect of walking a few blocks to dinner, even past several abandoned store fronts laced with graffiti, was very inviting. Our stomachs demanded more than chocolate pastries and juicy oranges, as wonderful as they were. 

Casa el Cherro proved to be an intimate combination neighborhood deli, tapas bar, restaurant, taverna and meat market. I’d recommend it to you if I could describe how we actually found it in Murcia after navigating several roundabouts through narrow streets.

I don’t totally understand the Catalonian penchant for hanging dried Iberian “black” hams everywhere from roadside fast food cafeteria ceilings to  fancier eating establishments. But, by the time I entered Casa el Cherro’s, the long legged Jamon, like pork stalactites precariously swinging over my head, no longer surprised me. If my Spanish had been better, I could have read what was written on the little inverted plastic pyramids attached to their bottoms. Perhaps it quoted Animal Farm: some pigs may be more equal than others. Or these inverted funnels may have been designed to simply catch stray drips. I had over the course of the past several days quietly watched these wrapped and netted salty legs, but never caught a drip in the act. Unlike our plumped-up fatty, rounder hams, the need for drip-catching seemed unnecessary. These porkers had taken on more of the dense aura of beef jerky. But I wondered, what sort of pigs had legs like these? Obviously taller and skinnier than any I have ever known.

Our congenial host ushered us to a table away from still other rows of hanging meats and with a soft, ironed white linen napkin with a discreetly woven "Casa el Cherro" safely tucked in my lap, I pretended to read the menu. No pictures. No alternative English explanations. Every now and then a white-aproned grandfatherly or elderly uncle figure appeared from what must be the kitchen back there just behind a lighted curio cabinet sporting a glass-enclosed…you guessed it…super-huge pig leg.

In my halting Spanish, I asked what was the soup. Caliente, I hoped. Si. What’s in it?

“It is what it is.”  That’s what he said. I ordered it and I loved it, although I did share little hunks of what I determined was liver, to my liver-loving husband. 

So that’s how I got my new soup-mantra. And I feel it will apply to anything 2012 dishes up. I’ll look at it, recognize a few floating bits, be curious about what else lurks below the surface, but I’ll calmly enjoy it because… “It is what it is.”

 

Stone Shepherds

Only a short twenty mile drive north from Stonehenge (undoubtedly the most recognizable stone circle anywhere) stones silently march across the Wiltshire landscape at Avebury. I've visited this sacred English landscape several times--alone, with friends, with my son--and each time I leave thinking, "This place feels like a safe home."

One weekend, before the three large stones off to one side were circled with metal mesh, I sat under them munching a sandwich. Imagining. Who placed these huge stones, so precisely? Was their purpose to guard the night sky? I look at pictures of them now and wonder: What are they saying to us as we head into 2012?

Wherever they appear, stones so carefully positioned seem like shepherds out in their fields--the kinds of shepherds we hear about this time of year. The ones out watching over their flocks by night, waiting under the stars for important news.

More recent than the megalithic structures of Avebury, hundreds of "stone shepherds" made their way to the Polynesian island of Rapa Nui or Easter Island. They still stand there, guarding the island's perimeter, watching the night skies. Stéphanie Guisard has posted the most amazing collection of time lapse photography of the night sky--where the Milky Way dances! But it is her photos of these great "stone shepherds" that continue to stun me.

When I look at them, I hear angels singing, as they did that one Bethlehem star-filled night. "Fear not! Be of good cheer." And I revel in the mysteries, knowing that many shepherds stand watch over our planet.

The Art of Magnification

A friend sent me several photos by Professor Gary Greenberg who spends some of his time at the College of London photographing grains of sand. He magnifies them about 250 times. “It’s incredible,” he says, “when you’re walking on the beach, you are standing on these treasures.”

Incredible, indeed! There’s a treasure world in these grains of sand, as the poet Blake wrote in his “Auguries of Innocence.” And in them, we “hold infinity in the palm your hand/And eternity in an hour.”  That’s the same Blake who also said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man [sic] as it is, infinite.”

Clearing our “doors of perception” is a good thing to do as the year draws to a close. What have we seen? How did we see it? And a question I, and others like me who think about Sophia from time to time, ask: “How has the Divine Feminine shown up in our lives in 2011?”

When I look closely at all the crystals and spirals within these grains of sand, I can’t help but think of the tons—literally tons—of sand that washed over people’s land and lives in Vermont during the August tropical storm Irene. Sand that carried horrid toxins. Sand that turned to cement in a few days. Sand that washed away top soil. If I’d have had Dr. Greenberg’s magnifying camera, could I have seen these amazing designs in all that hurt?

Then I think of all the volunteers who flocked to Vermont's disaster areas--and are still working long hours to make sure that flood-damaged families will be warm and safe this winter.

The year has been filled with gifts as well as challenges. I heard Angela Waters from Oklahoma telling her story on NPR the other day. She is collecting photographs the tornado at Joplin blew hundreds of miles away last May. Thanks to Facebook and her passion, people have mailed her thousands of photos they have found. She scans them and posts them on her website hoping to find who they belong to and return them. Families who lost everything, sometimes including the person in the photo, can now get them back. The Divine Feminine prompted her to devote months to this gift of grace.

I think of Mike who went back to where his house once stood,in our nearby village, standing in the silt, raking the sand, raking the sand, raking the sand, until his wife said, “It’s time now to stop. We won’t find anything more.”  Just then his rake caught on a box—her jewelry box that contained her mother’s engagement ring which she has now given to her daughter. The Divine Feminine knew the box was there. And she knew the ring was a bit of “infinity” to be held in the young woman’s hand, reminding her of her grandmother. And the family who loves her.

 

Sophia's present in all the “grains of sand” around us, including the grit in our shoes, if we just practice the art of

 

magnification.

 

Autumn, the Profound Season

I hadn’t thought of autumn as being profound until I discovered Joseph Marshall's words: "Autumn is a very profound season."  He’s a Lakota teacher and author, who grew up, as I did, in the 50s—we're kids of the Atomic age. But his home was on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. His latest book, the one with this profund phrase, is called To You We Shall Return: Lessons About our Planet from the Lakotas.

His people go back in North America, 10,000 years. So do their stories. They were “born” from a hole in the earth in the Paha Sapa—Black Hills—from the cave now marked as Wind Cave.They knew the secret to survival was adapting. They didn't ever try to change or control anything on earth. One of their funeral prayers goes like this: "It is your embrace we feel when we return to you."

The The Black Hills take on a heart shape (looking at it sort of sideways) in this NASA satellite image. "The Heart of all Things, The Center of Our World" Marshall says, is an outcropping duplicated no where else on our planet except in New Zealand. What makes it so special? It's made of granite and granite carries an electrical charge so it's a type of a battery and generator. It's the core of an extinct volcano rising up from a sea of prairie grass. A metallic cauldron filled with gold, silver, uranium, copper, lead, lithium, bentonite clay, limestone, basalt and sandstone. No wonder it's an alchemical sacred place, coveted by all.

Profound!

That word, by the way, means “Having intellectual depth and insight—difficult to fathom or understand.”  At least according to Webster. I look at my dead flowers and all the beige fields around us,and try to focus on their "intellectual depths." I talk to my son about the continuing dreadful radiation stories coming out of Japan. I think: fall/fall-out.

Maybe after I post this, I'll drum for awhile, just to hear Grandmother Earth's heartbeat again--to know it will all be all right. All be well. "The land," Marshall says, "gives birth to who and what we are."

Needing joy in my heart, I turn to another image which one of my Sophia Sisters sent me the other day. Who could not feel JOY by looking at this? Sorry, I don't know where it came from originally, but it IS profound!

 

Squaring Circles; Finding Truths

Every truth has four corners. As a teacher, I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.  Confucius (551-479 BCE)

 

As your eyes move around from one image in this beautiful Kalachakra mandala, then to the next and the next, you eventually find yourself entering the middle—the Sacred Palace, the source of “All” through one of four gates or dorjes.  Once there, we’ve entered a “Timeless” and “Perfect, place. We become detached from all we thought was necessary. What's even more captivating about these intricate designs, often created from crushed colored sand, or colored chalk, is that once created they are swept away in order to show the impermanence of everything.

Rather like a flood.

In ancient Sanskrit mandala means “circle” These complex cultural symbols have intrigued me for years. I believe they carry deep meaning for anyone seeking healing and wholeness. Carl Jung and others have pointed out that the circle symbolizes eternity; the square, the earth--our senses. We are "both/and" beings.

Leonardo da Vinci filled up many notebooks with drawings of circles and squares, creating "heaven without end" and "four-squared boundaries of earth."

As we "go through" varous portals, we find ourself in a different space.

When people gather after Vermont’s devastation, we hear things like “People have been through so much.” And “I thought I was through the worst part, but not getting answers is worse. I don’t know what my insurance will give me. I thought FEMA would cover this.” Or “I just want to be through with all of this!” 

We try to square the circle; we just want normal.  But “normal’s” gone. Now there’s a new normal. It's filled with unknowns. And it's compounded for many of us with with survivor guilt. Even if we haven’t lost a loved one or a house or a farm or a business, we still feel loss. And it’s immense. Experts on disaster recovery call this “ambiguous loss.”  We’re seeing only one corner of the square, and we’re feeling diminished, somehow, by not knowing the truths of the other three corners.

Yet we know the truths are there—so we keep looking. And moving through.

 

Soul Work and Weed Control

My expert gardener friend will be visiting soon and I look at my own gardens and think: Darn! Where did all those weeds come from? I could get out there and frantically try to dig them out, but I’m in more of an August mind to just let them go. Who says they’re weeds, as another friend recently said to me. They have every right to live, too. If I dig them all out, she wisely pointed out, I’ll destroy the wildflowers that are also there. So, they stay. Uncontrolled. Mathew Fox, not the actor but the theologian, once said, “The opposite of control is celebration.” I decide to celebrate the weeds.

Thinking of weed-control leads me to another conversation I had recently—this time with my son. We were discussing what “control” means and why it’s popped into his consciousness at this time. Is it about “being controlled,” “controlling others,” or wanting to feel some “control” while being surrounded by chaos. I certainly don’t have any answers but I’ve collected some thoughts over the years. We’re living in a techno-controlled world—and we wonder who’s in control of all that information. Governments? The military? A hidden group of rich people with immense power? I read recently that the British learned all about fingerprinting from the Bengalis and then used it to control them—along with others. It’s a reality that GPS radio devices are implanted, not just in animals for ID purposes, but also in people. Lest we veer, here, into conspiracy-theory-land, suffice it to say I have it on “good authority.”

So who’s in control?  And do we choose to live, as Riane Eisler has put it, in a dominator culture with rigid hierarchies and punishments, or a partnership culture where all can flourish? Do we seek power “over” or power “with”?

In the book I’m reading right now by Carolyn Myss called Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul, tied to St. Teresa of Avila’s The Inner Castle, she talks about chaos and control and how it’s our “soul work” to recognize both. Disruptive behavior creates chaos by which people try to control others or try to control the world. She says, “Ultimately, every act of divine chaos is an attempt to affirm that there is actually a plan for us on Earth.” I’m not saying that earthquakes or hurricanes—or death—are “divine interventions” but I do believe that we live in a divine paradox. It may feel out of control, yet is held for us in such a way that weeds and flowers can grow up together—and both be beautiful. And valued.

Structured Water, Thankful Lives

    Thanks to prompting by a friend, I signed up and receive daily Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac."
She reads it as a morning meditation. I've taken to doing the same. This morning, May Swenson's poem, "A Glass of Water" crossed my screen. She offered someone a glass of water from her well. "It is the best I have, my only spell,/And it is cold, and better than champagne."

So is our own well water. I drink a lot of it, as I'm back in chemo-therapy again and I know my kidneys need it. But it's also necessary for another reason.

Water is, indeed, the basis of life. Our cells need water to thrive. So I thank the water I drink, for its healing help. In reading an amazing book about our DNA by Leonard Horowitz I'm discovering that my DNA's double helix vibrates information to all my cells and converts all this information to energy. This energy can form beautifully formed patterns or chaotic and unstructured ones.

To understand all this better, I suggest you wander into the crystalline world of Dr. Masura Emoto. His photomicrographs of hugely magnified crystal water clusters are wonders to behold. He shows how words, thoughts, music, intentions can affect water's shape. It can be structured and as beautiful as a snowflake, or broken and meaningless.

Emoto concludes his book, The Message from Water, with this: "Just by expressing love and gratitude, the water around us and in our bodies changes so beautifully."

So, drink up! And thank water for its gift of life. It's better than champagne.

An Extravagant Kindness

“…to fling rainbows over the rain

And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows

On the domes of deep sea-shells…

There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,

The extravagant kindness."

            Robinson Jeffers, “The Excesses of God”

Photo by Anne Ahmad

On Sanibel Island shells stack up as deep on the beaches as you care to dig. What determines a shell’s value, I wondered, years ago, as I watched our young sons play in the waves. The intensity of its rainbow? Loren Eiseley in The Star Thrower, described a beach comber, a star-thrower, who threw starfish back into the water. That masterful biologist-essayist challenged us, instead of grabbing, collecting, hoarding, we try “flinging ourselves into unknown dimensions of existence.”  That’s what rainbows do. They take us from our comfortable murky brown existence and fling us into an irridescent heaven.

I'll bet, like me, you're humming "somewhere over the rainbow," right now. Many poets have tried to capture the beauty of rainbows. Wordsworth’s heart “leaped up” when he saw one. Shelley relayed rainbows to life: "a many-colored dome illuminated by the white light of Eternity.” Virgil said a rainbow "a thousand intermingled colors throws." D.H. Lawrence called rainbows "the feet of the arch that Lord God rested the worlds on," while Jack Kerouac called it "a hoop for the lowly."

As a child, I learned that God sent a rainbow to Noah's family who, for weeks, had been stuffed into a wooden ship with lots of, what must have been by then, very smelly animals. It was a sign. It meant there would be no more world floods. I've read that many Medieval people believed the rainbow would not appear in the sky for 40 years before the end of the world. So when it appeared, they heaved a great sigh of relief. They knew they could count on at least 40 more years!

Early Australians called the rainbow a great serpent, holding the earth together. In Native American myths, rainbows come down from the heavens to connect us to grandmother spirit.

On another trip, this time to Cozumel, I met up with Ix Chel. She's called "Lady Rainbow" and wears a serpent on her head--a sign of her great wisdom. She's also known as "Moon Lady" and regulates pregnancies.  Early Peruvian people tell of how a young girl’s menstrual blood gave birth to the rainbow. From Ix Chel’s “womb jar,” she pours birthing waters onto the earth.

Ayahuasca, the brew, some South Americans still make from what they call the Mother Vine, often creates rainbowed visions that usually include multi-colored snakes. Central and South American people had a tradition of  standing in silence and awe for as long as the rainbow appeared.

The Greeks called the Rainbow, Iris, daughter of the God of Wonder and the West Wind. Rainbow cloaks wrap people in magical ways. Like the Japanese, my Norse relatives, who called the rainbow Bifrost,believed it to be a bridge from one world to the next. In early Iran and Iraq ziggurats were called stepped rainbows and each of the seven steps was painted a different color—a key color of a planet. The lowest stage was black; the highest, red and at the top was a gilded and blue-tiled shrine. We move, it seems, from a darkened underworld, up into the light.

Long before Isaac Newton bent light through a prism and "discovered" a rainbow, the Romans created rainbows by refracting light through glass rods. Newton claimed to see about eleven refracted colors, but he settled on only seven so they would match a musical octave.

Carl Jung says in his book Psychology and Alchemy, “Only the gods walk rainbow bridges in safetly…human beings must pass under it.” What’s active inside a rainbow—or a double one as my friend Anne has depicted here. Dreams? Magic? Active spirits? Angels? Peace? Hope?

Looking at rainbows makes us feel as if we’re caught in a holy fire. However we view them, rainbows are, indeed, acts of extravagant kindness.

Harry Potter Mysteries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thunder, Lightning and Crazy Horse

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seems Crazy Horse lives. 

 

 

Yuks, Yoiking and Joik

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

They fill me with joy. Check them out. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

She baked rhubarb pies

from lush umbrellas of green

Dad watered and fed.

 

Some had crispy tops

Some shimmering meringues

All spoke of her love.

Advent and Rocamadour's Quiet Music

Black virgins pepper Europe with a soul-spiciness few can explain. I certainly can’t. I only know I’d go on those tours designed to visit as many as possible across Europe if I could manage it.

However, during this “Advent season," a season of watchful “Advent-ure” for Christians, I am grateful for having visited my second one. (The first was at Chartres many years ago.) Allow me to introduce you to the black virgin of Rocamadour.
She's hidden away in one of the chapels high on a limestone cliff overlooking the Alzou Valley in the Dordogne. 

From what I've read, statues called black virgins predate Christianity which means that she may be patterned after Isis and her son after Horus. Perhaps she is an homage to Coptic Christians. Others claim she is black simply because she is so old and the wood has darkened.The black queen. The dark mother. The Mysterious One. I saw Michelle Obama in her eyes--and all strong women over the ages, reflected back to me

Pausing for a moment on one of the 216 well-worn steps,I looked back up to where she quietly waits, surrounded there in the dark by candles. I found myself thinking of miracles and legends.  

Just being on those stairs brought me several steps closer to the people who left Palestine after Jesus was killed and made their way to the coast of France. Two such legendary figures were Veronica and her husband Zacheus later known as Amadour. They’d been with Jesus, wiped the sweat off his face, protected Mary, his mother.

After his wife’s death, the old hermit traveled to this particular valley and built a chapel in honor of Mary. Overlays of stories and miracles built up over the centuries still echo through the limestone layers that surround his burial place. His beloved rocks continue to call people. How her statue came to be there remains a mystery. But Francis Poulenc’s music may offer a clue—he experienced her profound presence in Rocamadour which resulted in his famous “Litanies of the Black Virgin.

Her voice through music may be the only way some of will ever actually hear her.

It's Watching You

Its silhouette is one of the most recognizable in the world. Floating there, surrounded by water and sheep-grazed salt flats, Mt. Tombe, as the founding monk Aubert called it back in the 8th century, still beckons pilgrims of every ilk. Three million every year.

What is it about this Norman village/castle/church that draws us to such a remote place perched in the sea between Brittany and Normandy? Perhaps it's the gold steepled statue of the Archangel Michael who watches over everyone. Perhaps it's the challenge of the climb. According to a friend's pedometer, it took 2,102 steps up the inner staricase to get to the upper cloisters and back.

Working our way through labyrinthine crypts, past ramparts, flying buttresses and pillars, we marveled at the gigantic wheeled winch that defied stones' gravity and brought building supplies up so precariously high. We breathed in the mystic air of this place once called by the Celts, Ynys Trebes. We paused in the scriptorium where monks once copied and illuminated manuscripts. Forty-two people presently live full time on the rock--merchants, prayers, chanters, administrators.

You enter Mt. St. Michel through the King's Gate and suddenly you're in a world apart. A stony world once home to Benedictines and then to prisoners during the French Revolution. And to miracles, some say.

Fritjof Capra's brother Bernt took his brother's Turning Point and made it into a movie called Mind Walk. At one point one of three people who accidentally meet there says, "You can feel the place watching you."

Indeed, you can.

I picked up a copy of a little prayer book in the bookstore. One strikes me as appropriate to our time, to our journey:

Here I am, watching and waiting.

With time to look at things.

With time to admire what I see.

Days to discover things,

days to enjoy

Life to the full.

Time to chew the cud,

to savor the good life.

 

 

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.

Snicker-Snack

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the momeraths outgrabe…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeing Alice in Wonderland definitely exercises the imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

What could be more brillig?

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.

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.

The Lost Symbol

"To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books."
                The Secret Teachings of All Ages

That's how Dan Brown, aka The Da Vinci Code author, starts his latest book. Like his hero, Robert Langdon, I too have found that amazing things often hide in plain sight.

The other day I quit reading about all this Masonic lore long enough to visit some friends in Lexington, Mass. Before lunch we decided to take a walk over to the Heritage Center which, much to my amazement, contains a whole lot more than Revolutionary War books and Minute Man trivia. It's housed in the Massachusetts Masonic Center and I was suddenly surrounded by images of compasses and T squares, pyramids and all seeing eyes. 

And like the George Washington Masonic Memorial on a hill in Alexandria, VA (right) it, too, houses shelves of Masonic writings.

Besides learning more about D.C.'s monuments, some of which were crafted from Vermont White Granite, the quarry-source of which I can see from my upstairs window, I realized that the last time I stood in our Capitol Rotunda, I must not have looked up.

There it is--"The Apotheosis of George Washington." This 4,666 foot fresco created by Constantino Brumidi in 1865 forms a mystical circle whose title claims George Washington has "become God." Strange, isn't it, that we just recently learned that only 23% of Oklahoma's high school students even know he was our first president.

Besides intriguing me with magic squares and tatooed bad guys, The Lost Symbol inspired me to reread Exodus 34. That's the account of Moses, holding the two stone tablets, fresh back from his mountain-top conversation with God. Everybody says, "Look! The skin of his face is shining." But apparently the root word in Hebrew for shining skin could be read as either "horn" or "ray." When the Roman Catholic Church asked St. Jerome to translate the Hebrew into Latin, it came out "Moses' face was horned."

 

Michelangelo sculpted him that way. Other artists also turned Moses into a Pan or Hermes because of this mistake by Jerome, including this stained glass window in a Welsh church.

Language can be very slippery.  Horns? Rays of light?

I was amused by an account of a translation made in the 4th century which I learned about from Bart Ehrman in his book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. In the first part of the book of Hebrews (1:3) we read "Christ bears all things by the word of his power." The original scribe (and keep in mind that some of them couldn't even read but just copied lines; most did this intricate work by flickering candle light) used a verb that sounded similar in Greek: "Christ manifests all things by the word of his power." A couple hundred years later, a second scribe decided to change "manifests" to the more common reading "bears."  A couple of hundred years after that another scribe erased "bears" and put "manifest" back. And he added a note in the margin: "Fool and Knave! Leave the old reading, don't change it!" I notice in my version of that passage, it's neither "bears" or "manifests," but "sustains."  I think I like "manifests" better.

To manifest means to bring into being. To make evident. To be easily understood and readily perceived.

I suspect by his latest novel, Dan Brown will be manifesting increased tourism to Washington D.C., new interest in old mysteries, a deeper understanding of Masons and how they influenced our American history and architecture, an introduction (or for some of us, a re-introduction) to Noetics and lots of red-rimmed eyes for those of us who just couldn't put it down.

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.