Sophia Serve

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.

 

Great Gratitude

See all those apples on the ground? And the ones still hanging on the tree? This is my new visual image for "abundance."

Our four backyard apple trees have, up to now, produced primarily hard little green wormy Thanksgiving meals for the deer. We enjoy the blossoms in May but we usually buy our apples from growers who know what they’re doing. My husband and I admit we’re “orchard-challenged.” We wouldn't know a pruning hook from a button hook. But this year, for some reason, we have more apples than we have pie plates. We look out our window and say, OMG!

Ohhh!--An exhalation of seeing something as if for the first time.

My!—This is all ours!

God!—of course this all came from That Wonderful Source of ALL whom I call the Divine Feminine. Sophia. We certainy weren't responsible. We didn’t call in the bees to fertilize the blossoms. We didn’t create the rain at just the right time. And the sun comes up each morning with no help from us.

In the "Great Gratitude" department, besides Sophia, I'd like to list:

Roads: Of the 500 miles of roads and 200 bridges destroyed by Tropical Storm Irene, only two bridges and 9 miles of state road are left to be repaired. That, of course, doesn't mean ALL our roads are back to normal, but it does mean that people have worked so very hard over the past two months to accomplish this Herculean feat. And our creative Congressman Peter Welsch put together an "Irene Coalition" of Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives to help pay for the repairs. It's a template for how future bills might be created--together!

Food. What's better than sweet sweet potatoes and flakey pie crust? AND all those apples.

Clothes: I found a new scarf at our local thrift shop yesterday in "My Colors!" I love it.

Filmmakers: To all the filmmakers who bring images to life with such care and awe. Louie Schwartzberg, case in point. Check out his TED Talk on You Tube. He shows us a connection to the universe that truly celebrates life. He says "beauty and seduction are nature's tools--we fall in love with what we find beautiful."

Doctors and nurses and all the other medical staff: I'm going on my ninth year after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer and I wouldn't be here at my computer, writing this if it weren't for them.

Family: Spending time with our four year old granddaughter recently was a slice of heaven. Here she is with the man I am most thankful for in the whole world:

And you: My friends who take the time to read this blog. To you who send me wonderful images from time to time. To you who take the time to comment. To you who share books and ideas with me. To all or you who make my life worth living, my Great Gratitude!

 

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!

 

A Lapis Gift

In some places on his flooded farm, Irene’s stifling silt goes down five feet. And it’s as hard as cement. Still, one little patch of green showed through, near one of his few  standing buildings. My friend explained to me, “I’d just come to help 'muck out '"—a phrase Vermonters all understand these days, “and the farmer asked me, 'Do you like delphiniums?'”

She admitted to me she wasn’t too sure what they were, but to him, said, “Oh, yes.”  He took a little hoe and dug it up and handed it to her.

She planted it in her garden and next spring, she will probably look at that little patch of azure, mirroring the sky, and think, “Out of the silt came this surprising thing.”

 

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.

 

Swimming with a Black Swan

Throughout the aftermath of Irene, I’ve been reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by the Lebanese author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s a somewhat heady take on complexity and randomness, with many economic insights, and is filled with maxims such as: “People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.”  Or “ Do not give children dynamite sticks even if they come with a warning label.” And, “Make an omelet with the broken eggs.”

What’s a “black swan”? Something unpredictable but real (there actually are black swans, it turns out) that lies outside the realm of our regular expectations. An “outlier.”  (Take 9-11 for example.) Black swans carry an extreme impact and like Irene, we try to explain it after the fact, but we didn’t know it would occur. Black Swans carry massive consequences in their wake.

Who would have thought a tropical storm earlier masquerading as a hurricane, would hit the middle of Vermont with such vengeance? Highly Improbable! Still, that much rain can fall anywhere, any time, now that we realize (well most of use realize) that we’re in what many call not just climate change, but climate chaos.

A month later, we look at each other and say, “Now what?” Now that the flurry of volunteers with shovels have waded through, now that clothing donations pile up, now that most of the people have registered with FEMA and are waiting to hear from their insurance agencies, now that the “heroic” life saving stuff has been done, what now? Some of us have experienced community cohesion—“we were a community of strangers,” as one volunteer coordinator put it, “and now we’ve grown to know each other better,” but will it last? Empty promises pile up; the charlatans move in.  How do we deal with fatigue, disillusionment, anger and frustration?

No disaster is like any other disaster, but experts tell us it’s normal that now we’re entering into the predictable “loss of reliance and hope” phase. All those problems families used to have are compounded now if they’re living with friends and relatives who are thinking, “How much longer will this go on?”  Many people I talk to simply don’t know where they’ll be living come winter. So we’re all thinking, “What now?” Will we again become communities of strangers or have we learned an important lesson about how to rebuild? Can we vision new ways of building communities that might be sustainable?

The Black Swan author talks about the incompleteness of our knowledge and our systems that are built on ignorance. We watch, through the lenses of our hubris, and witness economies crumble around us. Politicians stick to pat answers and advocate ways forward they have always touted. And none of them seem to be working. Neither they, nor we, are willing or even able to look beneath the waters on which both the white swans and the black swans are paddling. We’re NOT in control!

Today I saw streams that leaped over their beds and carved new pathways to the ocean. Someone found one of our local propane tanks in the Long Island Sound. Flooding tentacles have a far reach. But so do stories of hope.  Black Swans will still appear—but so will all the graceful white ones.

"Sofly Gliding" from an original watercolor by Julia Blackbourn

Taleb ends his book with a reminder that the Roman teacher and writer, Seneca, always ended his essays with the word vale. It has the same root as “value” and “valor.”  It means “be strong. Be robust. Be worthy.”  Vale!

 

 

 

Together Like Never Before

In her latest book, Alone Together, the MIT technology guru, Sherry Turkle, reminds us that we’re “tethered by technology.” She describes how teens today have grown up with parents who texted with one hand and pushed their swings with another. Their parents drove them to school while talking on the phone and they sat in the back seat watching Disney videos. One college freshman told her that her father read Harry Potter to her while often on his Blackberry. They grew up with parents physically close but whose attention was always “elsewhere.”

Floods bring one’s attention up close and personal. There is no “elsewhere” when you watch raging waters climb closer and closer. Everything becomes starkly present. And it’s coming right at you!

But thanks to cell phones and Facebook pages (where there actually was cell phone access and people could power up their computers) in three short weeks, communities came together in Vermont in ways our ancestors would have appreciated and found admirable. After all, Vermont has always been the hotbed of technology innovation—visit the St. Johnsbury museum if you don’t believe me.

Many of us remember talking to Howard Dean, our former Vermont governor and presidential hopeful, about how his young staffers were creating ways to reach individuals by using the Internet. He invented the ground-up campaign. Many of these young geeks are now millionaires—and some of them recently re-entered Vermont’s flood-plains to help. As a result, my neighboring village had a website up and running within hours of the flood and the next weekend, 1000 volunteers showed up with shovels. Blogs appeared faster than you could say “help us.” One comment that I’ll never forget was from a farm family: “We need pails. We have nothing to put our milk in.”

Independent Vermonters have always known how to use their technology, from sharing skidders in the woods to blowing conch shells from their front porches to call the neighbors to a party. Many Vermonters own heavy equipment; many just built their own roads. Some neighbors in another close-by ravaged area latched extension ladders together so people could climb up and out of a canyon that had trapped them. Others cut a hole in the freeway fence so they and their neighbors could get in and out. They didn’t wait for “them,” the uniformed helpers because "they" were either elsewhere or beyond calling. With one “Irene-strength fell swoop,” Them became Us.

“We,” like the stalwart volunteers of St. Paul’s Episcopal church in White River Junction, made well over 4,000 sandwiches and put them in lunch bags to go out all over our ravaged valley so volunteers had something eat. Some bags actually had little hand sanitzers!  “We” collected clothes. “We” cooked community dinners. “We” helped each other get back and forth when there really wasn’t a “back” or a “forth” for many. “We” shared chain saws and generators. "We" organized relief fund-raisers. “We,” like the folks who latched extension ladders together to get people out of a canyon where they had become trapped, became very creative. Some local technical college kids, for instance, quickly rigged up a solar powered battery for a trapped family without power.

But most of all, we’ve learned that walking from door to door and actually talking to people, is the best way of being a good neighbor. We've learned that when, like one man in our nearby town who reached an elderly woman whose house was gone, all we need do sometimes is set up a chair and say, "Here. This is your space now. All you have to do is sit here. We'll do the rest."

Now that the realities of FEMA have dawned on most people severely affected, they know that they will need to find new ways of coping. They might have to find new ways of building in new places, that may not completely replicate their old ones.

But like Emily Dickenson’s, a bird now perches in my heart singing songs of hope. I believe our new ways of being together will be smarter and in the long run, better for our planet. Some of us have now tasted the experience of being not “alone together” but “together!” And we won’t let that go.

Rooster Resiliency

Our friend Jon Bindrum created this metal masterpiece for us. If you look closely, you may see "rooster" in various languages.  We smile every time we look out our window and when the sun catches his wonderful tail feathers, he glints--as if to say: Wake up and be happy!

Amidst all the gray silt and sadness following Irene's visit, autumn color begins to slip over our hills and into our valleys bringing with it a sense of normalcy and peace. When I walked into the local disaster center one day recently, the first thing I saw amidst FEMA flyers and hand sanitizer give-aways, was a large bouquet of brilliant zinnias. Someone knew our spirits needed reminding that color will return and we will be all right.

I posted some personal disaster account to "friends" on one of my social media outlets and have received back two comments I wish to share with you. These are from very thoughtful people who know we need to plan ahead and think beyond the present emergencies.  Here is one from Alaska:

"It is wonderful to again hear of the help offered by volunteers. It is sad to again hear of the lack of support after the headline news passes.

Here in Alaska we had serious spring flooding. However, over the past two decades we have experienced more flooding and storm damage than previously. Global warming is taking place and we can see it all around us.  While Irene is a time limited disaster form which there is then a recovery phase, what is being seen in Alaska has been called by the indigenous peoples "a slow moving disaster."  The concern being that with a disaster there can be a "declaration" and government funds are provided and assistance is offered. There is no such event for a declaration in a slow moving disaster, it just continues to slowly erode community lands, and eventually the spirits of the impacted residents.

I am glad to hear of your bands [I told him about the music happening on town greens all around us] and blossoms as your community embraces volunteers and rebuilds. You have had a loss of place but not heart. I hope you keep posting about the healing process through full recovery."

And this today from another voice speaking of resiliency...

"I am so sorry for the devastation you have experienced in your beloved homeland. Thank you for sharing your important messages with us about community, networks and preparedness. Not long ago I attended a conference on climate change where Thomas Homer Dixon told us that our ability to adapt to forthcoming change is all about developing methods of resiliency. Sustainability will no longer be a valid approach as the predictable patterns in nature we build our lives around will disappear.

I admire your courage and your ability to see the beauty amidst the pain."

So I look at my new rooster and think: resiliency. That's the key. Resilient enough to not break when we're forced to bend; resilient enough to stand up to whatever comes; resilient enough to patiently wait for that voice that will call up the sun and morning will dawn once again.

4,000 Socks (and some red underwear)

I wrote a message on the white board at the local disaster relief center the other day: "We're into abundance, not scarcity." I'm not sure who will read that or what they'll think it means--I'm not sure I know myself, although I suspect it's connected to warm socks and new underwear.

Anyone handling donated clothing right now in the Vermont flood areas knows the feeling.  “Here comes another bag full. Where are we going to put it? Who’s going to sort it?”

Everyone means well, but the disaster relief center I’m most familiar with has now limited their intake to “New underwear, new socks, towels, bedding.”  I’m sure jackets and warm winter wear will be also accepted…but no more big bags of those discarded jeans and tops and kids' clothes everyone seems to suddenly want to part with.

One woman who lost their house had time to grab a few things from their closets. But the other day, she actually come in with a bag or two, saying, “I really don’t need this much anymore.”  Having to leave everything behind makes you suddenly realize how much in our lives really is superfluous. We don't need many socks, but we need some socks.

The other day, I spoke to my friend Mickie who used to work for the Cabot Hosiery Mills in Northfield, Vermont about the need for new socks and guess what? She made one call and her former company generously donated 4,000 pairs of socks to the Vermont Food Bank. Soon Mickie’s socks will be dancing all over the state. Now that’s something      to celebrate!               

Another friend who faithfully reads my blogs and shares them with her friends from Boston said, “Karen I’m going out to buy some new women’s underwear for your clothing relief center. Some will be red because when our women went to Haiti after the earthquake, someone had said, “When you wearin' red underwear, things can’t be too bad.”

I can't wait to get them and start giving them out--to selected women.    

I'd have rushed out to buy some myself but our local Penny's, my favorite underwear and sock store, is now closed due to flooding. They have no plans to reopen.

Oh, the Flood Stories!

Everyone has one. Or more.

Since raising my hand and becoming involved with coordinating volunteer donations and efforts in our post-Irene central Vermont White River Valley, stories have been piling up in my overburdened brain. In between emails and phone calls, I grab my iPAD and read Ann Patchett’s wonderful little book about writing. In The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life, she says, “Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.”  That’s what I face daily. How can I possibly describe in my weak and disappointing words the stories I’m hearing.

“I think the beach the river left around my property is beautiful. All that sand!”  Right. Until you discover how toxic that sand/river silt is. Hasn’t she heard about all the propane tanks broken loose and spilling into our rivers? And all the topsoil Irene ruined?

“It’s safe to drink the water,” says one local small town’s manager in the town where I’ve done some phone answering as a volunteer. But I know better from people’s stories. Take the woman who said, “No way! Even if you boil it there’s scummy stuff floating on it.”  Or the man leaning on the doorway, obviously totally exhausted, saying, “Our water smells like gasoline—even when I boil it.” And then later a FEMA guy with some chemistry background reacted to that account by saying, “Get the EPA here now! That water contains (followed by a lot of four syllable chemical terms totally new to me!) and boiling makes it worse—it could explode.” However, I think the EPA's busy--and underfunded. Or maybe cut altogether by now. This guy has to solve this on his own.

I heard another heartbreaker while volunteering in the local food pantry the other day:  “I need bottled water.” We’ve got a lot of it—help yourself, I tell her as I volunteer to play Grandma while she shops.

“My baby had very bad diarrhea until I started making her formula with bottled water.”  “We’ve got lots of water for you. Please use it—for everyone in your family.” The Red Cross has delivered mountains of water (not to mention all the other federal sources of water lately) but getting it to where the baby’s formula is being made is a whole other challenge, given that many are trapped in unpassable roads. Nor do people want to leave what little they have left to get out to see what’s available to them. Thankfully we haven’t heard about much looting, but lots of people are taking pictures! Also, we live in a very independent culture where few care to ask for help. Oh, just so you know. I saw the baby, smiling and happy several days later.

One of my favorite stories appeared just yesterday: “Karen, my neighbor needs a yurt-he can use what’s left of his house if he dries out the lumber over the winter to rebuild, but he wants to live on site.”  Ever tried to find a used yurt? I did hear about one from a friend who knows the area very well and he told me “But it’s gone now.” Then last night a young woman told me about a group of great teenagers from our nearby Sharon Academy who are headed to Maine next weekend to learn how to build yurts. They’ll bring back their knowledge and muscle to help. Problem potentially solved.

But we continue to scour the area for temporary places for people to live. We know there are vacation homes all around and we know people are eager to help, but coordinating all that seems to be beyond anyone’s expertise, time or energy right now.

During the hot weather following the flood, a friend of mine had to abandon her car, walk several miles, and became very dehydrated. She spent the day with an IV hookup in one of the truly wonderful makeshift clinics that sprang up immediately (thanks to area hospitals and medical disaster experts.) She’s in Massachusetts now wondering how to get her car back.

“Can you get our volunteers and road crews Gatorade? All people have is water to drink—that’s great, but they’re getting sick of it.” "Can you get us some juice?"

Fortunately we have a system in place through our Episcopal churches in Vermont and the “angels” in White River Junction can fill our requests as fast as we can send them.  My learning curve on what people really need (gas cards!! or even a car!) and what will be nice to have later (furniture when they have a place to put it) has spiked this week.

This morning I got an e mail asking for water testing kits!

I’d heard from my new “best friends” at a huge Feed Supply outlet that those kits which are usually just given out, are in very short supply. So I wrote to my new contact at Dartmouth Medical who immediately wrote back, “Where do you get water testing kits? To which I responded. “Beats me. Do you know any chemists? Or plumbers?” She wrote back: “Okey dokey.” And I suspect, knowing Mary as little as I do, I’ll hear of some water testing kits coming our way soon. Towns that even have health officers might not have them.

The stories just keep piling up. Some don’t actually shatter my heart. I’ll leave you with two. A friend still stuck on Stony Brook Road, the worst road in Stockbridge, is one of the few who has internet access. So every day he prints out the latest news/town directives and posts them on his barn for neighbors to read as they walk by.  A 90 year old woman needed medical attention so the neighbors put her in a sidecar of an ATV and bounced her several miles to their town green for a helicopter to medivac her to the closest hospital. She was heard to say, “I’ve never had so much fun in my entire life.” 

I hold her close to my “living beauty of imagination.”  Just as I hold Gabriel who had to leave his lost pet bunny when the family ran to safety in Bethel. After the flood, they pushed the kitchen door open and there was Gabriel’s bunny perched on the topmost kitchen counter. Who knew bunnies had such faith? Or that they could swim to safety? I later tearfully watched as Gabriel’s house was hauled away. But I smile when I remember his bunny.

 

MRE's and a Hundred Pounds of Cole Slaw

Having no military training, I never thought I’d be holding a flat brown cardboard box of Meals Ready to Eat. But here it is: “Chicken Pulled with Buffalo Style Sauce.” Packed in South Carolina, it weighs 8 oz and the grey-green plastic packet is filled with something that looks a lot like what I’d get if I put celery through a blender with about a cup of water—thinner than baby food consistency. I can't vouch for how it tastes because there's no way I'd actually open it. I read the standard instructions, thinking they don’t apply since this one is just goo, but at the bottom of the slim cardboard  it says: “Eat some of each component to get a balance of nutrients. Eat the high carbohydrate items first. Save the dry snack items to eat when you’re on the move.”

That’s what many people who were stranded in several of the villages around us after Irene slammed into central Vermont, ate...MRE’s and water flown in by helicopter.  When a network of us from the Episcopal churches around Vermont started finding out who to contact (once the phones were operable) we learned: “Yes! They could use lunches for their volunteers.  Could they please get some Gatorade, too, "because everyone’s a little sick of just water.” (There were so many stacks of bottled water around that one woman said, “We could create another flood with it.”)

But that’s good because you can’t drink the water in Bethel, our nearest village. Even boiling it creates white film on top. Still, some people haven’t gotten that word and we’re now hearing of families who are getting sick. Organization and communication varies a great deal, town by town. Unfortunately, in places, people's “needs assessments” are secondary to “road repairs” and traffic control at the moment--or Fema registrations.

I have a friend in one town over the mountain who prints out daily e-mails from the town and posts them on his barn. People on his isolated road, walk by and read. Trying to keep our good humor alive, he also told me of one of his neighbors, a 90 year old woman who needed medical attention. Stuffed into a side-car of an  ATV, hauled to the village green and into a helicopter, she was heard to say, “This is the most fun I’ve had in my entire life!”

But it’s far from fun for most of the people I talk to. Volunteers who are so tired, they are ready to drop. Volunteers frustrated and angry over inadequate town planning.  Crystal from Bethel, for instance, who single-handedly has stacked up in the town hall, donated clothes by size over what must be about a hundred tables. She neatly stacks bedding on the stage floor. "We have a lot of donations here, but we need new socks and new underswear." She has a few new boots but they only go up to size seven.

Volunteers also need gas cards, because they’re driving around so much and it’s becoming very expensive. There are no laundry facilities for flood victims—a load of laundry at the local Laundromat costs $4.25 and they have no money. But even if we arranged to provide money for it, laundromats around are now saying—“No Flood Clothes.” It gums up their machines. So people are told, you really have to throw your old clothes away.

But it's the food that has kept up hopping this week. Communitiy dinners. Food shelves. On Labor Day, we moblized our forces and sent hundreds of sack lunches, delivered by a few brave drivers, up over the mountain. They wended their way past heavy road equpment--some from Maine, Kansas, and South Carolina. Sack lunches became our road tolls. "OK we'll let you through, even though the road is closed, if you care to give our workers lunches. They work all day without stopping."

Yesterday we handed out lunches with fresh fruit to some National Guard guys working on a bridge. (Vermont is a land of streams, and about 90 bridges have been destroyed.) The bridge workers didn't have to rely on their MRE's and were very grateful.

We've been filtering requests such as "We really need soy-based baby formula for two of our families." Or "We could use salt and pepper, matches, cooking oil, vinegar."  "A man needs size 12 boots--he has no shoes.) I realize the first wave of supplies that hit a disaster village are bleach, rubber gloves, heavy duty contracter bags for debris, masks. Then it's all the "other stuff." Look around your house, especially your kitchen and imagine it all gone.

I call my source in White River Junction at St. Paul's Episcopal Church and she says, "Done!" She and her team of angels get it to us and it's in our next "Over the Mountain Relay." And they' are doing this for many other flood-stricken towns as well.

Yesterday on a run for some school supplies, and a few new socks and underwear for Crystal, I stopped by the school to speak with the secretary there. Unlike some other trapped villages, they can offer their kids lunch, but when I mentioned that my White River Angel had 100 pounds of cole slaw she was looking to give somebody, she said, "Oh yes! I know our school cook could use that."

Who ever would have guessed that in Vermont, land of organic vegetables (many fields now silted over and ruined for years by polluted river) and largesse, we would be reduced to MRE’s and Gatorade or water or gifted PB and J sandwiches? Or for one of our neighbors to have a toothbrush, but no toothpaste. Or to simply ask for a hairbrush.

It’s a world I never thought I’d be a part of. But here we are. All of us. We're learning up close and personal what's truly important.

I rely, now, on words such as as Andrew Harvey has written in his book  The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism “We are supported by networks of grace…this limitless wine of grace is pouring down incessantly, in and through every event, through pain as well as joy…through ordeal as well as happiness, terror as well as calm.”

Amen to that.

 

 

Did Gaia Cross the Yellow Line?

When cows go floating down a brown engorged river, when people's houses tip and fall into the river, when our elderly wonder how they will get their meds when all roads in and out have disappeared, we might ask: What's Mother Earth up to?

Or should we be asking, how have we contributed to increasing the temperatures, not to mention the levels, of our planet's oceans? Our own Middlebury College's Bill McKibben said recently, "Irene's middle name is Global Warming."

My husband and I are safe. Our neighbors are fine. Having to deal with a washed out driveway and a few hours of blackout time, is nothing compared to what we are witnessing first hand, listening to on the radio and watching on TV.

Vermont is hurting. Vermont's people, like many on the East Coast right now, are stressed, scared, angry and demoralized. How can all this damage (as the people in Joplin and Alabama and around the country are also asking) be put "right" again--assuming we even know what's "right." Where will the funding come from? What's next?

In a time when some political figures say all this destruction is God's will, I find myself asking, "What is our planet thinking right now?" I'm reading David Spangler's latest book Apprenticed to Spirit and in it he speaks of a "Gaian paradigm"--a way of tuning in to our planet, thinking like our planet, appreciating our interconnectedness and beginning to see whole patterns.  "When your intelligence becomes aligned with the deep primal intelligence that creates wholes and connections, then you are thinking like a planet."

When I remind myself that the cosmos intends us to be whole, I am able to put fractured roads and broken yellow lines in perspective. There is much, much more afoot here and we're fortunate to be a part of the healing that will come of all of heartache. It will lead, I am most certain, to a deeper understanding of what is truly important. 

On page 253 Spangler says, "Through love, God takes the form you most need in the moment for your well-being and your growth. God can be as personal as the most intimate lover or the most trusted and helpful friend and as vast and distant as the most impersonal blowing, like wind through the corridors of the stars."

Or as helpful as Sherry, the waitress at our local diner (close enough to the main freeway to still get supplies) who, over the past several days, has listened to people coming in who have lost everything and is able to say, "I'm sorry." She can give them a cup of hot coffee but she can't fix their lives. Only they can do that, perhaps with some help from the Red Cross, FEMA or their neighbors.

When we're as broken as this Vermont highway with the fractured yellow line, we need to remember there's a larger force than a tropical storm at work--one bigger and more loving and more solid than anything we can imagine.

 

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.

Upgrade!

When I alphabetized more than 500 topic areas and organized thousands of quotations, gathered over many years,into a Volume called Divine Sparks the first entry is: “Abundance.” And the first quotation is one by Lao Tzu: “When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”

Our friends who live in a darling cottage next to a busy brook will not, most likely, trade their home for a  multi-million dollar mansion, but they’ve adopted a new mantra for this, our mutual decade of our 70’s and it is: “upgrade.”

I assure you these people are not stingy and self-indulgent. Instead, they’re caring, giving people who support many others with their gifts. But they’ve decided, like Lao Tzu, that nothing is lacking right now so why not “upgrade” when you can. It might mean more leg room for his long legs when they fly. It might mean going to a restaurant instead of eating left-overs at home. But more deeply, it means we have choices in this life. Why settle for down-grades? Instead, ride the updrafts and live!

“Abundance” and "scarcity" are concepts that have haunted me over the past few years. In fact I’ve added "abundance" to the subtitle to my new book coming in another month. I tell a story there about growing up in a post-depression era of rationing. “Upgrade” wasn’t in my parents’ vocabulary. “Make do” was. I learned to darn socks over a light bulb. I learned every canning jar was sacred. It’s too bad that wonderful Ed Asner movie, Up hadn’t been filmed yet because I think they would have loved to learn about risk and soaring instead of always opting for the "safe" alternative.

When we select life's downgrades, we’re apt to hang on rather than let go. We dam up the flow. The flow of money, the flow of energy, the flow of life itself. 

Martia Nelson in her book, Coming Home, says “You do not create abundance. You do not go out and get abundance. Abundance simply is.”  So, as our friends say, why not upgrade?  What do we have to lose other than a clingy debiliating mindset of scarcity and stinginess?

The “pie” may be larger than we realize and, as a result, “our slice” has never stopped growing. Never will.

 

 

 

 

I Cloud, Eye Cloud, Aye! Cloud

  I just read a Fast Company article called “How Apple Will Draft Everyone Into the Cloud. Or Else” and I’m smiling as I wonder how Icloud and Steve Jobs will now affect my Apple stock.

Oh, sure, Google and Amazon and others are storing music and all kinds of files on “cloudy servers somewhere up there” but Apple promises so much more and so much faster and so much more intuitively…but haven’t they always? They promise that "all my stuff” will be where I want it—instantly on any of my Apple devices. When Jobs introduced it earlier this week, he admitted that he had to rewrite their synching devices “from the ground up.” But isn’t that always how clouds are formed? From water rising from the earth?

When I was an undergraduate at U. Wis. Eau Claire I studiously avoided taking math classes by enrolling in Zoology for Pre Med Majors (a stretch!) and Geography (a breeze!). One assignment for that class I remember was the "difficult" task of checking a campus outdoor thermometer every day for a semester in order to determine that indeed daily temperatures do peak at 4 p.m. The other thing I learned was how to identify clouds and memorize their Latinate names. Of course our four year old grandaughter could now do this in about two minutes with the help of Google. Nimbus, cirrus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus…

Hoping to learn something new about knowledge and wisdom, I turned this past week to The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (who also inspired me with his Chaos). Gleick ends his tome by reminding us that we’re all patrons of the Library of Babel now…and we’re all librarians. Still we keep wondering what it is we know because in cyberspace everything lies in shadows. Cloudy shadows. Jobs and others are just trying to help solve (or exacerbate, I don’t know which) our information overload fatigue.

Information anxiety can co-exist with boredom—an ironic twist. If  you're like me, you feel as if you're drowning in this “Total Noise” as David Foster Wallace put it in 2007. “A tsunami of available fact, context and perspective.” Our main strategy for coping, Gleick advises, is filter and search. But who will search and who will filter? Bloggers wonder: are their too many mouths or too many ears? Clouds of data/information/knowledge and dare we hope, wisdom, “loom over us,” Gleick says, “not quite visible, not quite tangible, but awfully real. [I place emphasis on “awfully.”]…amorphous, spectral, hovering nearby, yet not situated in any one place. Heaven must once have felt this way to the faithful. People talk about shifting their lives to the cloud—their informational lives at least…All traditional ideas of privacy, based on doors and locks, physical remoteness and invisibility, are upended in the cloud.” (p. 396)

If not an analogy to heaven, surely one to “noosphere” as my favorite Jesuit philospher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, explained it. “Does it not seem as though a great body is in the process of being born…its interdependence with and responsibility for a whole in evolution?”

It hurts my head to think about all this, so I’ll just lie on the lawn and watch cloud pictures forming and morphing across a brilliant blue Vermont sky and trust to all the rest.