Sophia Serve

A Valentine 4 U

    Like penciling in a child’s growth-chart, I marked its height against the kitchen window panes. It grew so tall,  I had to move it to another room. What power lies curled up in any flower bulb, but especially in an amaryllis!

In writing that word, I was taken by the name of this four-fold flower: Amarylis…A Mary Lis…A Mary lily.

My favorite image of Mary and her son is this one—a Russian icon. Perhaps the oldest icon in existence. In fact, legend has it that before it went from Jerusalem, to Constantinople and finally to Russia, (copied several times) it was in the disciple Luke’s home, for he painted it on a table top.

 In this month of valentines , I turn again to Kathleen McGowen’s second book called, appropriately enough, The Book of Love.  I often sign my name to letters and e- mails with the phrase, “Loving thoughts.” I suppose it’s my way of saying, love is all around us, so let’s draw it into our consciousness.

McGowen reviews  six expressions of love,  and attaches a Greek name to each. I don’t speak or write Greek, but I love the sounds as they roll off my tongue. So I’ll include them here and you can roll them around a bit yourself.

Agape—This is the great joy we find in each other and in the world that feels like a spiritual expression—a sacred embrace.

Philia—This is profound friendship, full of respect. It’s what siblings often feel for one another. It’s true companionshp.

Charis—This is parental love defined by grace and devotion.  It’s the love we see coming right out of Luke’s painting of Mary and her son.

Eunoia—This is the love we have for one another out of deep compassion and commitment to service. We saw this love expressed in Haiti recently—it’s where community lies.

Storge—This is a pure love full of tenderness and caring. It’s profound empathy. It’s how we love children. And animals. And our world.

Eros—And finally we come to the cupid-arrow-shooting kind of "Valentine Love."  At a very deep level, it’s the love two people have for one another when their  souls come together in a profound union.

 

I was struck, not only by the intense redness of my “Mary Lily” but by the fact that it was four-fold. Four is a number that brings a deep feeling of peace and calm.  We’re comfortable with fours—four directions, four limbs on our bodies. Even our DNA, biologists tell us, is based on combinations of “four.” Pythagoras, that old, old source of number-meanings declared the four powers of the soul to be mind, science, opinion and sense.

 A friend sent me this image the other day to remind me that tomatoes have four chambers just like our hearts, and eating them can be very heart-beneficial.

I took it as a valentine 4 me! And now, 4 U.

 

 

When a body meets a body...

All the folks in Cornish, New Hampshire protected him from prying eyes and eager grad students. J.D. Salinger lived there peacefully until he died last week amid his papers and letters—none of which were published after his one and only foray into literary fame: The Catcher in the Rye. Apparently once a young man did get past the vigilant postmistress to ask Salinger about something he wanted to write about  (or maybe it was to make a film) and the old man’s response was: “Do your own book.”  The young man called out to Salinger’s retreating back, “Can we stay in touch?” to which he heard, “Whatever for?”

His famous title, one story goes, was based on a mis-hearing of the famous Scottish song. “Comin’ through the rye,” became “catcher in the rye.” When a body meets a body, there’s always room for misinterpretation. And when a body meets a book, well, anything can happen.

My friend Julia found a signed paperback of Updike’s in a local thrift shop once. She sold it on e-bay, but I’m guessing now that he’s dead, it’s worth a whole lot more than she got for it. It keeps me browsing thrift shops, I can assure you. (Julia also is one of the few people I know with her own copy of Jung’s Red Book. You can tell I’m envious in several ways.)

Our whole family has enjoyed reading the John Dunning series about Cliff Janeway’s rare book pursuits. And now Allison Hoover Bartlett’s written a great read called The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. (2009, Riverhead Books). Besides telling a compelling story about antiquarian thefts, you learn a lot from her chapter notes.

 

For instance:

In the early 19^th century a scholar went into a German fish shop only to find the shop keeper tearing out Bible pages to wrap fish in. A Guttenberg Bible.

The oldest and most famous rare book school is at the University of Virginia.

 Some collectors apparently don’t intend to read their prizes—the ones who collect books with uncut pages: virgo intacta.

 There’s a book that documents violence to books. Having a great interest in Alexandria’s libraries, I may have to find it. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Baez.

People think Lewis Carroll invented the dust jacket. This is because his 1876 The Hunting of the Snark is one of the earliest books with jackets that still exists. But Bartlett says earlier books from the 1830s with jackets are still around.

No time for more. I have to get back to The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. Something’s coming through the rye! I just know it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

Empathy Neurons

Jeremy Rifkin who wrote a book called The Empathic Civilization stated in a recent blog that over the past 15 years evolutionary biologists and neurocognitive researchers have been chasing down empathy neurons—those little bits of our brains that allow us to feel and experience another’s situation as if it were our own. Our empathy neurons have been kicked into high gear by all the images and sounds from Haiti over the past agonizing days. The NPR reporter, for instance, whose tear-filled voice brought us a vivid account of one little girl shaking and dying before his eyes because there was no medical care for her. Or those sun-burned faces reporting to us that help is too slow, too removed from where it’s needed. Again we see Katrina faces calling for water. Begging for food.

US texting alone has sent at the time of this writing, $11 million in aid—never mind that credit card companies, obviously devoid of any empathic neurons, are charging a 3% fee for each of those transactions. When people hear the stories their hearts and wallets open.

I find myself wondering what might have happened seventy years ago if the victims of Nazi camps had been able to send tweets and videos. We may have heard first hand from German woman named Irena Sendler, a “plumbing-sewer specialist,” as she smuggled babies and children out of the Warsaw ghetto in her tool box. She knew that it was only a matter of time until they would all die, so she did what she could.

Every day, she brought her dog along in her truck and trained him to bark viciously when they passed through checkpoints. The dog discouraged the guards to check too closely  under the wraps. 

Irena the plumber saved 2500 Jewish children. Imagine how many of them have gone on to become empathic adults helping others as Irena helped them. Imagine how many young earthquake survivors may do the same.

After the supply trucks have finally made it through the Port-au-Prince rubble, after the power’s back on, after the dead have been buried, will our neurons continue to empathize with all the poor in Haiti?  Let's tattoo the numbers of the Hatian dead on our arms to remind us that our earth can crack anywhere. Any time. We could be the ones putting toothpaste under our noses to alleviate the stench of decomposing bodies.  

Irena was eventually caught, and the Nazi's broke both her legs and arms and beat her severely. But she survived. Being a German, she kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out, put them in a glass jar and buried it under a tree in her back yard.

After the war, she tried to locate any parents who may have survived in an effort to reunite the families. Sadly, most had been gassed. Still she worked to place many of her kids in foster family homes or with adoptive parents. Irena died recently at 98, her empathy neurons still intact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afghans and Haunted Houses

A young London-based Pakistani author with piercing brown eyes and a mop of curly hair won numerous prizes for his earlier books and now tells a story set in Afghanistan: The Wasted Vigil. Nadeem Aslam creates a young Russian woman named Lara, whose mind "is a haunted house."

If we could pull that image from Lara and stretch it a bit, we might find our own collective minds haunted as well. Haunted by failed attempts to "set the world right." Haunted by flawed decisions. Haunted by images of still more young people flying into a country where women can be beaten with a tire iron if they happen, as Lara did, to fall asleep with your feet pointing to Mecca.

Aslam (whose name reminds me of Narnia's Aslan and I take some comfort in that) says Afghanistan is "a hub of things moving from one point of the compass to another, religion and myth, works of art, caravans of bundled Chinese silk flowing past camels loaded with glass from ancient Rome or pearls from the Gulf." Now Comanche helicopters drop bottled water. Or worse. For good reason, it's often called a graveyard of empires.

We arrogantly thought we'd change everything by riding in on our white cowboy horses after 9/11. We failed, as Suan Faludi puts it in The Terror Dream, "to perceive the message in Jacob's story of strength and dependency, to fathom the distinction between wrestling with angels and slaying them."  Instead, we "balked," as she puts it, "and summoned John Wayne and his avenging brethren instead...we succumbed to the hauntings of a fabricated past." We threw tons of bombs into Talibaned Tora Bora, the labyrinth of caves in mountains 13,000 feet high. But heroin still bolsters their tippy economy. Bribes still grease the skids. Every man is still armed. We didn't change much and I've of a mind that we never will. That's not fatalistic, it's what I now think might be the truth.

Goethe said, "It's easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it."

How do we search out the truth in such a tangle of war-knots and bomb-snarls? Maybe the answer lies in a metaphor a reader-friend recently suggested. "Why don't you write about the connection between Afghanistan and afghans?"

I tucked that thought away as I do many that now come in from SophiaServe readers, thinking, "Sure, maybe after I learn Pashto." But thanks to our quickie-Wiki-Pedia I now know that these lap blankets were, indeed, first made in Afghanistan.   

They are constructed in brilliant colors, geometric designs and holes built into the overall effect.  Like the one my Aunt Esther crocheted for me back in 1961 with waves of seasick oranges, yellow and browns. Afghans are always hand-stitched from yarn and if you don't have an Aunt Esther, you're not likely to ever have one. They're called "throws" because with so many holes, they easily fray and people soon just throw them away. Or because you throw them over cold toes this time of year. Take your pick.

If our snarled presence in Afghanistan could be compared to a dizzy afghan, perhaps what we need to throw away is our frayed and obviously astigmatic threadbare concept of how we deal with people willing to blow themselves up for a cause. We need not, in turn, bomb them. Instead we could learn how to spot their crazy design and invite them to drape themselves over some other chair.

 

The wood of a sandal tree, Aslam tell us, never smells like perfume until it's cut down. This leads me to wonder if we thought we'd sniff the fragrance of peace by wielding  axes. 

Islam defines the time when a muezzin begins to call people to the dawn prayer this way: it's when there is enough sunlight to distinguish, without artificial light, a black thread from a white thread.

I pray dawn comes before we all unravel.

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."

Our "Fractaled" Congress

I think it's appropriate Washington D.C. was heavily snowed upon this week. Here's what it looked like from space. As senators stalled, debated, denigrated, shouted, weaseled around a health care reform bill, all I could think of were fractals.  

 Senator Broccoli, what do you have to say?

A fractal is an image that can be split into parts and each sort of looks like the whole. Think ferns, coastlines, snowflakes. They are branching, self-generating systems that have repeating patterns.

Congress has (often) been called a sausage-making machine from the ways it mixes, mashes, grinds and turns out a product that looks nothing like it did when it went in. I prefer the image of fractals.

I confess right up front, I'm math-challenged. Still I try to make sense of shapes. Including the shape of our future country.

In the late 70's a Cambridge, UK, mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot came up with this figure--perhaps the most famous fractal of all.

If you want to take two minutes, you can see a cool fractal "zooming."

Fractals are based on something they call "recursion." That's repeating the same thing over and over again to create a shape.  Take this triangle shaped fractal mathematicians call the Sierpinski triangle.

One of the things to remember about fractals is their self-similarity. (Think "Republican," "Democrat.")

Now think recursion--repeating the same thing over and over again.

Now think what happens if you change just a few coordinates:

Kids know how to "fractal" images. They can take a triangle

and change it into a snowflake. Too bad kids can't run for Congress.

See how.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

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.

Tell Me Why

A SophiaServe reader alerted me to this wonderful song composed and sung by

Declan Galbraith in 2006 when he was thirteen. It's worth hearing and watching.

 

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.

The Writer's Prayer

Last night I was invited to our local library to host a conversation around the collection of quotations about writing that is now finally published. It's not been without its trials. Pulling 6,000 quotations together around twenty questions wasn't just time consuming. It was exasperating. Even though both my  husband and I proofed it--several times--errors crept in like little gnomes playing tricks on our eyes. I used to caution authors I worked with to steel themselves because no book is perfect. What made me think my books would be any different? But discovering them in front of strangers undresses you. There you are. Naked.

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.

Thanksgiving for Imperfect Music

He spotted the ad in our local paper: Harpsichord for sale. Some tender loving care needed."

The price was right, so we wrestled it into our music room. My husband glued some of the wood strips back on; I oiled and polished the case. But the ad was right. Its "innards" did need some help.

Fortunately, the tuning wrench came with it. But like any "fixer-upper" this purchase needed more than TLC. Lucky for us, our older son, the actual musician in the family, had access to string and knew what to do with it.  And he taught us how to tune it.

So, now we can make music.

Sitting there with its lid up, it's a constant reminder that all instruments, including ourselves, are always in need of care. It's not enough that we get healthy food, reasonable exercise and solid sleep. Like these fragile harpsichord strings, our souls also need fine-tuning. Especially, like our harpsichord, in the upper registers. But like our copper and brass harpsichord wires, we too are attached to a larger Sounding Board. Even when one or two parts of us "snap," we're held. And we can still play.

Father Bede Griffiths, mentor of Andrew Harvey whose book I mentioned earlier but wish to recommend again (The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism) said,

"Imagine that God is a great musician and that you are a flute He wants to play the most glorious music on. If the stops of the flute are filled with mud, how can the music that is meant to be played through you sound at all?"

On this day of national thanks giving, I give thanks for the mud. I give thanks for strings that may break. I give thanks for the multiple ways we go out of tune. And I give thanks for all our fine tuning wrenches. Without them, we'd be just a few jarring pieces of wood with metal attached.

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.

Salt or TNT?

Wordsmithing has come easily to me ever since I learned which end of the pencil goes onto the paper.  For others, I know, the thought of writing is agony. But, no doubt, what they enjoy doing would cause the proverbial beads of blood to form on my forehead if I tried it. We all do what we have a passion and penchant for doing.

Writing  is, as Diane Ackerman says in Deep Play, “tilting tiny cogs and wheels into place.” And it’s the writer’s responsibility to know what those cogs might actually set into motion. Once released, they can’t be called back. Like cell phones that can trigger bombs, tiny cog-words can easily fit into other wheels that fit into other wheels and before you know it... 

Words DO have enormous power. The chemical term for what happens when two agents come together to produce something different is called hypergolic. Writers call it metaphor. You take two opposite images and meld them together. And just as two inert substances come together to produce table salt, for instance, or nitroglycerine, our language has the capability to do that as well.

I saw something on the news last night that chilled my bones and set my teeth on edge. Some people are hell-bent (and I use that term on purpose) to destroy Obama. Not just destroy our democratically elected president, but encourage an attack on his life. The Secret Service has in fact let it be known that threats to his life are now 400% higher than against any other president. Ever. And people are doing this by using words as lethally disguised as a knife in an ankle holster. Or as a harmless teddy bear.

These "calls to prayer" have appeared almost overnight on T Shirts, mugs, hats, pins--any surface that can hold words. And while they may seem innocuous and even rather nice, they are not! They are wolves in sheep's clothing. Or nitroglycerine masquerading as salt.

Psalm 109: 8 says, "May his days be few; may another seize his position."

Not being a Hebrew scholar, I cannot justify why these particular words appear in Psalm 109, nor any other of the horrific images one can find in the Old Testament, but I suspect they have something to do with the fact that Jews faced merciless enemies. Later these same verses were used by monks to attack Protestants. And now they're being dredged up to incite violence against our democratically elected president. I call this "white-supremacy-speak." And it's wrong!

It's certainly very like calls to jihad by other religious types.  

For $4.95 you can get this bumper sticker from zazzle.com by Megatudes. Or a pack of 50 for only $106.99.

Why does this upset me so? Well, let's look at the words.

Defenders of all this “cute stuff" argue, “Oh, this is only our way of calling for a one-term presidency. Besides it's free speech!" (Not any more than yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.)

Bibliolaters--people who worship the bible and use it any way they wish--know the code. Here's what’s in the very next verse:

“May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow.” 

What this really means is:  “Somebody (please) make Michelle a widow and Sasha and Malia orphans.”     Now you know why my bones chill and my heart aches.

Nor is this simply a blatant call for assassination. (Glen Beck on Fox News also recently called for Nancy Pellosi to be found floating in the Boston Harbor!) I'm hearing a clarion call for hateful destruction and murder and it's time we name what's going on in America.

In a verse a bit later in Psalm 109 I find a smidgen of comfort:

Verse 31: “For he (The Lord) stands at the right hand of the needy, to save them from

those who would condemn them to death.”

 

Real Toads

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Music + Sardines = Peace

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

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

 

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

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

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.