Sophia Serve

Poor Human Stuff

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to one another.”

                                Mother Teresa of Calcutta

I just finished reading Corban Addison’s compelling story of two young sisters, Ahalya and Sita, who survive the Indonesian tsunami only to be taken captive by another storm—the storm of sexual predators. A Walk Across the Sun (2012, Quercus Books) is fiction based on fact—the best kind.

Slavery and trafficing in human flesh is now bigger business than any former slave trade ever was. How can that be?  Today?   It’s a business bringing sex entrepreneurs over $30 billion a year in profits, that's how. And they’re not about to let all that money go.

Pimps can earn $300,000 a year from each girl in their clutches. Why sell drugs, one at a time, when you can force a young girl to have sex six or seven times a night and reap the benefits over and over until she overdoses from her depression and the drugs used to keep her in captivity, or they kill her because she tries to escape. Like any profitable business, they throw away any used up “product” that no longer brings in cash.

Even though there are data bases of kidnapped children, tracing these lost souls across the planet is extremely difficult. Their slave-owners are rich, smart, and know how to cover their tracks. They market and transport their sex products to where the buyers are. Thousands and thousands of underaged prostitutes get trucked and flown around every day.They're taken to any place men seek pleasure in young flesh. This wholesaling of flesh takes place openly in cultures where young boys think that love is sex and sex is rape. You'll find this trafficing outside military bases. At truck stops.  “Escort” services in any city. Sex tourism. A man is willing to buy them at higher prices if he doesn’t have to use a condom. You'll find them on Internet sites featuring younger and younger “exotic product.” It all takes place within a vicious network of corrupt police, incompetent judicial systems, and people willing to look the other way.

In India, whole towns are brothels. One person in Addison's book described the girls who live there as “Bedia girls. Women from their caste have been prostitutes for centuries…all of them gorgeous...Their parents groom them to become bar girls.” And poor street children go where they might be fed.

There are many young women traveling to other countries to be workers or nannies—or so they are told—and then their passports are confiscated and they are subsequently ordered to forget their old identiies and are forced into sex slavery. In Russia,they are simply lumped together and called Natashas. 

Or young girls go to New York to become models and actresses and find themselves crammed into back rooms or basements until their next “evening dates.” Many of them have run away from abusive households hoping against all hope to find something better. They rarely do.

And of course, the young women forced into prostitution make no money for themselves from these perverse transactions. Furthermore, most are kept in the poorest of slave conditions—no heat, little food, minimal health care, and they sleep on the floor or in a few beds all packed together. Many are forced into vans and driven around to parking lots where truckers hang out. These young women, their slave owners call “lot lizards.”

I find myself wondering where today’s underground railroad is for these poor young things. There are abolitionist groups, but they are not growing nearly as fast as the trafficking trade itself.  So I went to a government site to learn more about forced labor and sex trafficing. Then I checked out the Polaris Project and Shared Hope. I learned more from Janice Redmond and Donna Hughes' scholarly work on the sex industry. But rather than an industry, I prefer to call it slavery.

How will it end?  When men stop needing their flesh. It's a market economy, after all.

The first step in ending slavery as Harriet Tubman taught us in the 19^th century is to escape yourself, then make others aware of the escape routes. “I grew up like a neglected weed,” she said, “ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.” 

Or as Sojourner Truth put it, we women had better ban together to do something about this. “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.”  And “Religion without humanity is poor human stuff.”  Poor, indeed.

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!

 

 

 

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.

 

Ever Expanding Circles

  I know a man named Bob Stilger who has spent the last two months in Japan. He is there on behalf of The Berkana Institute, New Stories and the ALIA Institute. What's he doing there, likely exposing himself to excessive radiation?

He's expanding the circles.

Most recently, he invited sixty people to a three day gathering in a safe and beautiful place. His team has made numerous trips to Fukushima where, as he says, "land is life" and they don't know when the water will be drinkable and the soil safe for growing food. People tell Bob, if they hear the word gambare [gahm-bar-a] one more time they will go mad. Gambare means "do your best." A  half a million people from that northern area are either without jobs or homes or both.

When tornadoes dip down with crushing force and so many people in our midwest and southern states find themselves now without homes or jobs or both, the circle widens.

What a gift to read Bob's e-diary and his first hand account of how he gathered fifteen people from Fukushima--many youngsters--to join sixty Japanese people of all ages, for circle dialogues. 

"Three days later we had a deeply connected field of people who had stepped into a new relationship with themselves and each other.  It is always magical when this happens and it happens most of all because we yearn to be with each other.  In the evening of the first day one of the women from Fukushima said today was fun because we all cried together.  Another spoke of "listening so deeply that I, myself, almost disappeared." They talked about what comes next.They felt hope deep in their bones.

When I read Bob's diaries I think of Theodore Roethke's poem "I knew a woman...I, however, knew a man "who moved in circles and the circles moved."

 

 

"If I Ran the World"

No one ever asked me what I'd do if I ran the world...until Shelly Rachanow interviewed me about The Green Devotional. Shelly has written two books celebrating the wonderful things women do. You go, Shelly! Her blog features women around the world who are making a difference in their part of the planet. Her home page carries Anne Frank's quote: "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."  I'm humbled to be included in such company.

Good and Just and Beautiful

   He hadn’t played the trombone since university, but thirty-five years later, my husband’s arms longed to slide across those deep sounds again. So he bought a Yamaha. I was grateful it was the kind with no seat and wheels.

Next, he dreamed of playing in a band. We moved to a place in Vermont that was twelve miles from where the oldest town band in the state was still playing weekly on the village green. He was invited to join this slice of Americana attending weekly rehearsals in March and playing throughout the summer.

The band is led by Dick Ellis, Vermont’s original “Music Man” who has been teaching music, selling instruments and conducting free summer concerts around Vermont for sixty-five years. Trombonists come and go but many, like my husband, stay. We recognize familiar smiles as the fifty or so band members, because it's usually windy, clothes-pin their music onto black stands and play marches and jazz, show tunes and Dixie deep into the evening.

The Amtrak train following old tracks behind the bandstand predictably blends its rumbling bass notes into whatever they’re playing at 7:40 and kids march and dance and chase each other around the green. Young couples snuggle under blankets when the sun goes down and we grayer heads tap our feet from our lawn chairs. Each of their concerts ends with our national march, "Stars and Stripes Forever" followed by our national anthem, "The Star Spangled Banner."

That's when people stand up out of patriotic calling as well as to better hear the deep red trombone notes melded to the violet piccolo sounds and soak up the whole rainbow in between. A sensual spectrum.

Plato said music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul. Music gives us “a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything.” It happens every Thursday night on the green, where people innately know, as Plato said, “music leads to all that is good and just and beautiful.”

Come to think of it, that's an apt description of my favorite trombone player. 

Creativity Happens

“We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”  Maya Angelou

 

As I peeled vegetables for a sweet potato soup for some friends the other day,  I found myself thinking, “I love to make soup. It’s such a creative act.”  Peeling, dicing, adding, spicing, tasting. And when someone truly enjoys the final product, and it makes our bodies stronger, you’ve succeeded. When only the sticky stacked soup bowls are left on the sink counter, you realize your creative efforts—however ephemeral—were honored because someone saw, tasted, and enjoyed.

As Maya Angelou pointed out, we’re all creative.  Creative pursuits uplift. Creative endeavors please not only yourself, but others as well. Creative impulses are often sparked by something, leaving us to act upon them.  Something we’ve seen. Something we’ve heard or read. Something we’ve dreamed. Wherever it comes from, a deep dynamic desire to create surfaces and when it does, we experience an essential calming beauty in our hearts.

Take our patio furniture, for instance.  Creativity often means taking something and turning it into something else. But for that to happen, we have to ACT.  We have to DO something.  It’s not enough to just have a vision.  Our old wooden patio table and chairs had withstood (barely) the elements of all Vermont seasons. Their outer “skin” had turned black in places, peeled in others, and generally were in the need of some kind of uplift. We sanded and primed and suddenly…  

Creativity is like lining up dominoes. One thing leads to another to another to another. Take my recycled wool hats, for example. Or the unfinished Adirondack chairs we brought to the patio. Every time we look outside, we giggle. Every time we vie for the purple one, we smile.

One suggestion from her mother led our granddaughter's uncle and I to create this dollhouse.

     

Whether it's fabric scraps into furniture or popsicle sticks into flooring, words into poetry or pixels into art, creativity shows the divine spark in us all.

When I selected the wild palette colors for the patio furniture, I sort of had an idea of what I was doing. But it wasn't until the paint was dry and I sat down one evening to watch the stars with a cup of coffee and a couple of cookies on the "paddle arm" that I totally understood what we had created.   Ray Bradbury said, "Creativity is a continual surprise." You just never know how "something new" will feel until it's right there in front of you in 3-D. Like simmering soup, you have to taste it on your tongue. And you have to lean your head back and survey the heavens to know how wonderful a chair can be.

One creative impulse stirs more. Someone will eventually eat your soup, read your words, sit in your chair, play with your dollhouse, perform your music, view your art.  And rest assured, someone will, in turn, spin far-flung creative webs from whatever you have created.

A Resurrection Story

 I owe my life to you, Henrietta Lacks. Your cells are the most important thing that's happened in medicine--maybe ever! Thanks to you, drugs and vaccines have been developed for treating cancer, polio, influenza, Parkinson's disease and so much more.

You were only 31 when you were diagnosed with cervical cancer. You were treated (with pretty ghastly radium) at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore because they were one of the few hospitals that treated Blacks. You died in 1951 and your body was barely cool, lying down there in the basement drawer labeled "Colored," when parts of the dime sized piece of tissue your doctor had removed, were shared with the hospital lab. You see, they were trying to find cells that would stay alive long enough to experiment on and because a lab assistant named Mary put down her tuna fish sandwich, made her space sterile, labeled a vial HeLa after your name, you started traveling, girl! Tissue still can't legally be sold, but it can be shared for research purposes and believe me, you were shared!  People couldn't believe their eyes. Your cells multiplied faster than any other cells any researcher had ever worked with.

We don't know how many of your cells are still living around the world but we do know that "the gospel of HeLa" has been written about in thousands of medical articles. Your cells are still frozen and when they're thawed out, no matter when or where, they just keep multiplying.

In the years following your "death," cell factories began growing and sending you, quite literally, around the world and beyond. NASA even sent you into space. Some scientists fused you onto mouse cells and you taught them how genes work. The whole new field of gene therapy is thanks to you.

Rebecca Skloot, the artful and tenacious reporter who tracked down your family and tells your story, says one scientist thinks that even though cells weigh literally nothing, if all your cells could be stacked up on a gigantic scale, they'd weigh 50 metric tons! There's a lot of you going around, Henrietta.

In the mid 60s people discovered that cells float around and can land in other petri dishes, and if they're robust like yours, they contaminate other cultures.They called it the HeLa Bomb and you destroyed a lot of "pristine" research and caused millions of dollars of damage. But your family always did say you were the feisty one. Now they carefully isolate you from the other cultures.

When they found out about how no one had even asked them if they could share your Mom around like this, your family was naturally pretty upset. But of course we all sign consent forms when we enter hospitals and nobody really knows where their tissues go. It's just that yours are so much more valuable than anyone else's. Companies and foundations can charge for processing and storing your cells and as Skloot tells it, one vial of you is currently being sold for $250. That's more than your funeral cost. It must have been hard for your husband to understand how your cells (when the only cell he knew of at the time had bars on it) could still be living.

But you'll be happy to know your grandkids aren't planning to sue anybody. They don't want to stop your research. They just want people to remember who you were. And how much good you've created. Amen to that, Henrietta. You sure do know the meaning of resurrection.

 

Our Energy Bar

Our renewable energy bar seems to be set a bit lower today. People have been working on new types of fuel cells for years, but now two SophiaServe readers have sent me links to stories that point to real light at the end of our darkening tunnel.

If you watched "Sixty Minutes" the other night you may have seen K.R. Sridhar showing Lesley Stahl his little silver box--a slender silver "bullet" that could replace nuclear power plants. And as you can see, it has a very small footprint. At a moment in Vermont's history when our legislature is voting on whether or not to renew the license to operate Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant (which according to credible sources leaks very, VERY bad stuff) the "Bloom Box" seems like a gift from heaven. It's called that because Bloom Energy, with a heap of venture capital, is manufacturing it.

Holding it here, Sridhar explained to CBS viewers how he bakes sand and cuts it into little ceramic squares and then coats them with green and black paint that he secretly developed. Methane and other bio fuels from landfills or farms and oxygen goes in; it heats up and energy comes out. By putting 64 of his little squares together, he could power a whole Starbucks.  Twenty California companies currently are using it. Let's pray the adage, "As California goes, so goes our nation" is really true. I want one of these little boxes in my own organic flower garden. And I don't want to have to wait five or ten years. It will be cheaper than solar and wind if they can figure out how to mass produce it.

This is an energy bar many of us could hurdle.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Whale and an Ark

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that we're here to protect all life.

Fast and Faster

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

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

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

I wonder if we can do this any faster.

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.

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.

So Many Injustices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celtic Healing Sounds

Yesterday a new chemical greeted my body. Red, this time, like Cherry Kool-Aid, it  slowly dripped through my IV tube carrying with it all sorts of "drinking the kool-aid" metaphors. It's real name is Doxorubicin Liposomal-affectionately known as doxol.

I leaned back in my infusion recliner thinking about all the dire possible side-effects: mouth, hand and foot sores. My PA put the fear of the Lord in me about them and made me swear on her stack of "Information for Patients Provided by your Health Care Team at Dartmouth- Hitchcock Medical Center" flyers to heed them for the next five days. Nothing over 75 degrees dare pass my lips or touch my skin--and sun? Well forget it! Fortunately rain's in the near forecast. And if it does appear, my sweet family in Colorado sent me a Mother's Day UV protection embedded long sleeved shirt. Images form: Ice tea. Ice coffee. Gazpacho!

Just then "Margaret the Harp Lady," as she refers to  herself, came smiling through the double doors, carrying her Celtic oblation. Margaret Stevens and I are old friends by now so she immediately sat down, cradling her wonderful lever lap harp. No more worrying about mouth sores for me!

Hand-held offering gifts come in many forms. Donah Drewett, another volunteer Reiki friend once teamed up with Margaret and presented me with the holy gift of 15 minutes of bliss. And another pastor-friend, Diane Root wrote me an e mail last night saying she would be holding a prayer-drumming session for me. I thought I could feel the vibrations miles away.

In between bathing me in Bach and washing me with the still waters of "Shenandoah," Margaret and I talked of Iona. We both think it's part of the otherworld. In fact, I read about a legend of St. Oren for whom this chapel is named.Columba, the Irish ex Druid, settled Iona, bringing Christianity to Scotland. Later one of his comrade monks died and was buried where St. Oren's chapel is now. After three days, the monks thought they heard something and dug him up. He was alive and screaming,"The Otherworld is Nothing like you imagined!" Then he collapsed. Being practical monks, they buried him again.

The words of Frank MacEown came back to me. In The Mist-Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers and Seekers he said, "May you taste resurrection without the need of dying for it.  

  Music offers "sound resurrection." Margaret's harp anchored me as surely as if a Celtic cross had been driven through the footrest of my recliner.

How powerful is your magic sound?
~Mozart, The Magic Flute

Music. Muse. Don Campbell who wrote The Mozart Effect—all about tapping into the creative power of music to heal the body and strengthen the mind—says music warms up the brain. I say, “bring it on!” 

But why does Campbell recommend Mozart rather than other music?  All music can be good, when listened to intentionally. But, apparently, Mozart’s and Hayden’s pulses and patterns hit the brain with a clarity and elegance that can improve concentration, memory and spatial perception. Some monks in Brittany monasteries play music to their cows (as do some farmers in Vermont) but the monks claim Mozart gives more milk. Playing Mozart in some Immigration English classes tends to speed up learning. In Edmonton, Canada, Mozart’s string quartets have been proven to calm pedestrian traffic an reduce drug deals. And in Japan, the Ohara Brewery finds that Mozart makes the best sake—something about the density of yeast!

On p. 79 he shows how other kinds of music affects us. Interesting stuff!

I don't know about cows or yeast; I can only speak to Margaret's music. I had been sitting there thinking about how my new red “Kool Aid” might be affecting me in a couple of days.  Possible mouth sores and pressure point problems so I shouldn't put put my elbows on the table. Hmmm. They didn't say anything about fingers on the keyboard. I know, even if I could, I wouldn't be able to play the harp!

I kept watching the blood-red drips. And then everything shifted with Margaret's arrival.  My stress melted down, deep down through my cushy chair, through the floor, into the ground. And that feeling is still with me as I write this morning. Music IS powerful! And there’s something about Celtic music paired with prayer that is perhaps most powerful of all.

In The Book of Love Kathleen McGowan took some liberties with St. Patrick’s famous prayer. They fit so beautifully with Margaret’s Celtic harp music:

God’s hand to guard on me
God’s wisdom to guide me
God’s ear to hear me.
God’s eye to look before me
God’s might to uphold me
God’s word to speak through me.
God’s love to sustain me,
God’s shield to protect me.

May it be so.

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.