Sophia Serve

Friends of Friends

I just joined Facebook, which raises its demographic age just a bit.

I used to publish books on topics such as "Social Capital" but I still don't know why I joined. Well, I do. A friend invited me to. All I had to be was 13. No problem there.

Social networking started with "Friends" on TV, I believe. But it was hard to get to Boston and then find the right bar, so they did it online.

I looked up "social networks" on Wikipedia and I was nonplussed by how many there are. (I've always wanted to use that word, nonplussed, and I think this is the very first time.)

This is what social networking looks like. I got it from Wikipedia.  I think it's more like Indra's web with nodes hooking people-diamonds. All attached and connected. 

Facebook is larger than several major countries combined, proving that we no longer have geographical boundaries. Just common interests. (You can check out Netwiki if you're interested in the theory and science of all this stuff.)

One study discovered that happiness tends to be correlated to social networks. Makes sense. No one really likes to be alone. And if you're located in that solid blue sector, you're happiest of all, apparently.

As you can see, I lifted this cover image directly from Amazon. But I wanted you to see it. I just got this book yesterday from a friend who is a friend of Craig Barnes, the author. (See, that's really how books get sold. I don't trust "big numbers" sometimes. I suspect books are often bought by groups or even authors themselves who want to inflate a particular title--no names mentioned here but think Alaska and a word that means a stampeding killer elephant.)

Naturally, I love Barmes' cover image and I can't wait to explore its content. It's similar to the figure I once recreated in copper seen here.

Call her what you will. 

Hildegard of Bingen called her Sapientia--The Holy Spirit.

Then creation recognized its Creator in its own forms and appearances.

For in the beginning, when God said, "Let it be!" and it came to pass, the means and the Matrix of creation was Love,

because all creation was formed through Her as in the twinkling of an eye.

Regular readers will know that I call her Sophia.

My friend Ria Baeck lives her emergent feminine by exploring how the collective feminine appears in our lives, our communities and the earth. She's working on a book that will make clear distinctions about how we express our own collective feminine by finding accurate language and marking the steps in our Great Turning--the Big Transition time we find ourselves in right now. It will be about how we are heading towards a next step in the synergy of yin and yang on our way to a life-affirming co-creation.

When Ria's book is published, I'll buy it for friends. And when I do, I'll think of my copper Sophia and how her arms encompass all of us, for she is indeed the Friend of friends.

Rumsfeld, Sophia and Remembering Eden

Do you recall that speech Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once gave when he tried to justify our intelligence (or lack thereof) backing the decision to go into Iraq to get all those elusive weapons of mass destruction? It was that "what we know we know and what we don't know that we don't know" speech.

I had once published "Knowledge Management" books so I thought I knew what he was talking about. At a knowledge conference I had learned we might divide knowledge into "information" and "know how." The knowledge you get from reading memos and books versus what you pick up at the water cooler or over a beer. Explicit and tacit.

Think of all knowledge as falling into this four-part grid:

 

What we know we know.	What we know we don't know.
What we don’t know we know.	What we don’t know that we don’t know.

It's that last quadrant: "What we don't know that we don't know" that's apt to get us into trouble. 

Mad as a Hatter

I’ve become a hatter in my spare time. A Green Hatter. A Sophia-Hatter. Not really a Mad Hatter since I don’t use mercury in any of my hats as they did in 19th century hat making. People who wear my hats don’t suffer from mercury poisoning and wide mood swings as they did back then. At least, not that I know of. 

    

Like quilters who make quilts from bits  and pieces, I’m a hatter who does the same thing. All of my hand-stitched hats are made from recycled wool (which I wash in really really hot water hoping to “felt” it up.)  Most are “blinged up” with beads or buttons for women, some for children and a few for men. I love hearing friends say, "Oh, that's my sweater!"

"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.

"Bee-ing" There

The other night a bear broke through the barbed wire surrounding their hives and ate 30 pounds of our friend’s honey.  As that winter-starved “Pooh” scooped up all that golden goodness, he probably didn’t pause to ponder how all that “hunny” would improve his immune system, kill any harmful bacteria and promote healthy tissue growth. When he had had his fill, he turned his sticky snout toward the bird feeders.

Some people see sacred geometry in bee work. Each cell is an exact 60˚hexagon perfectly positioned. Like snowflakes and Stars  of David. When we burn candles made of bees wax, we may, as people long before us did, sense something cosmic melting. The bees have shared with us, as Sue Monk Kidd put it, a portion of their secret life.

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.

The Book of Love

For anyone who devours books about Mary Magdalene—and I suspect
we’re a growing number since The Da Vinci Code movie and Brown’s prequel, the upcoming Angels and Demons have introduced more people to the Magdelene“heresy”—Kathleen McGowan is someone you need to know.

Ever since reading The Expected One, I’ve been eagerly awaiting her second—The Book of Love. She’s not an author who disappoints. Like her heroine, Maureen Paschal, it’s obvious Kathleen's mission is to uncover stories of extraordinary women who dared to challenge the world. History often either misrepresents these women or denigrates them—often actually killing them. Matilda the 11th century countess of Tuscany, heroine of The Book of Love, is one such woman. As it turns out, she is the only woman buried in St. Peter’s basilica and when you read the book, you’ll learn why.

But it’s her coverage of the origins and importance of the labyrinth, information about Chartres and the Cathars as well as the way McGowan

  introduces Sophia that captivates me. She reminds us that the Gnostics believed the Holy Spirit was female, in the guise of Sophia--sometimes depicted as a dove.

 
She quotes from the Gnostic Gospel of Philip: “Some say that Mary was impregnated by the grace of the Holy Spirit. But they do not know what they say. How can the feminine impregnate the feminine?” (p. 375) 

And she introduces readers to the Genesis verses that tell us God said, “Let us make man in our image…”  and “The Lord God said, ‘Behold, man has become as of of us, to know good and evil…”  The “us” indicates “The equal, female face of God, if you will. The feminine half that completes the male half of God.” (p. 376)

Sophia.  Our Lady.  Our sweet dove. She's far from a new idea, of course. In fact the mystical Lutheran shoemaker and writer, Jacob Boehme wrote about her as the third part of the Trinity way back in 1620. But now Sophia appears in what will undoubtedly become McGowan’s second New York Time’s best selling book. And many more people will discover Sophia, as well as that legendary lost manuscript, The Book of Love.

From Bakelite to Being Light

Every Saturday morning, I held my little beige Motorola in my eight year old lap and my inner world magically connected to the world beyond Sand Creek, Wisconsin.

I plunked "froggie with its magic twinger" with Buster Brown and his Dog Tige. I can hear, still, Ramar of the Jungle's elephant! I flew with Sky King and the Royal Mounties and I traveled with Uncle Ted to the land of  “Let’s Pretend.” 

My mother usually allowed me to take a few slices of sausage and some crackers into the onto the living room sofa with me

and I stacked them on top of the radio which automatically heated them up. Heating and seeping early plastic into food now seems like a very dangerous past time. Good thing I did it just once a week. I savored every sound and saved every crumb.

Circles of Wisdom

Rilke said, "There is nothing so wise as a circle." Click here to read my latest word-weavings about how I became a part of three women's circles. It ends with a poem to Sophia. See you there.