Sophia Serve

Sugaring Off

Dirt roads+melting snow=“mud season.” It’s here and it’s squishy.

But that’s what we Vermonters can expect every March along with our town meetings and lots of little tin buckets with pointy hats hanging off every maple tree around.  (The more serious sugar farmers up here run little white pipe lines from trees to holding tanks and evaporators. But it's the buckets that make March for me.)

There’s a saying in Vermont: It will sugar off.  That means you don’t have to worry about things too much because eventually, the sap boils off and you’ll have golden maple syrup. Things will settle down.  After all the collecting and the steam’s evaporated, the essence will appear.

I trust that will happen to our sappy steaming vat of national health care reform. What's sap and what's the real thing?  Maybe before Vermont’s sticky sugaring season is over, we’ll actually have something sweet to sink our teeth into. We've been wound up for a year now, listening to claims and counter-claims. I’ve decided to just stop thinking about it anymore.  It will all sugar off.

This morning I learned that meditating 12 minutes a day staves off aging. Excuse me. I'm off to be as still as one these buckets.

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.

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.

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.”

 

350 For the World

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

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

A small group of us joined them.

"T" People and Bird Houses

While most families get together on holidays to grill, drink beer, watch ballgames, snipe at each other and dredge up past grievances, our niece and her family sat down in the back yard to play with scraps of wood and bits of found treasures. The French word for this is bricolage--play with what's at hand.

Sophia, so aptly named for this blog, the youngest member of the family, lounged with the dog while all the adults made birdhouses.  Some more fanciful than others.

I wanted to share this birdhouse with you because I believe it’s a metaphor for what ...here he comes again...Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the transcendent self.  The “T” people. Imagine a family so creative, so loving, so thoughtful as to surround little Sophie with these concrete examples of complexity. Yes, complexity.

Mim and Memes

We live near a little town in Vermont made up of a bunch of houses, a post office and a general store—and a sweet, smiling, petite woman named Mim who writes a weekly column in the local newspaper. Somebody recently put up a colorful sign that says, "You are now leaving...( the name of the town) “Home of Mim.” If you ever visit someone and Mim spots your car, you’ll be listed as a visitor of so and so in the next week’s paper. She reports on who has planted lilies where.  She has written a book about the weather in her hometown. Mim is, I’ve decided, a meme for “This is who we are. So there!”

 

The biologist Richard Dawkin coined the word meme over 30 years ago to define a unit of cultural information. It comes from the Greek word mimesis or imitation. Memes get passed along and ingrained—operating a bit like genes and cells in the human body. They need a Petri dish or a bacteria field in which to grow and spread. (think talk shows and Internet blogs) And memes replicate, in ways we can’t predict. We might find some  memes very attractive when we first encounter them, so we adopt them. And then they take on a life of their own. Memes feed on our minds.

Icons for the Ears

In April 27th’s  New Yorker, Elif Batuman tells in “The Bells” (ohhh I hear an internal rhyme) how people in the Russian Orthodox faith believe bells are “aural icons” not mere musical instruments. In fact, Russian bells sound, as Father Roman, a famous bell ringer, put it, “deep, sonorous and clear, for how can the voice of God be otherwise?” 

    

Big Ben weighs 13 tons but one in Russia called Tsar Kolokol actually weighed in at 200 tons!

Batuman tells the fascinating story of how eighteen Dailov monastery bells (from 22 pounds to thirteen tons) made it to a tower in Lowell House in Harvard Square in 1930 and how, after 78 years, they were returned to Russia last September. Thanks to a generous philanthropist, Harvard got a new set so they can still ring out victories against Yale games.

A Peek into The Green Devotional

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

   Water

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

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