Sophia Serve

Patterns and Metapatterns

Driving up Spain's Sierra Nevada mountains to Granada,all I could think of were patterns.  I watched patterns of mountains notch into valleys and fields, fallow and fertile, slip into one another. I saw olive and orange trees line up and the earth crease and fold around them as if firmly holding it all safe for my eyes alone.

Gregory Bateson once said in Mind and Nature, “What pattern connects the crab to the lobster, and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you?...The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns."

Whether it’s the frost patterns on my Vermont windows this morning, or an intricate spider web pattern, I sense Her presence in all these mystical metapatterns.

After our side trip on a dirt road back into the alham--the "red earth of Granada," we visited the Alhambra itself where more patterns piled up on more patterns. Arches upon arches. Tiles upon tiles. Dark into light. And I thought, "This is Her work. This is Her visible code encouraging me to see how everything is connected, how everything fits so perfectly into everything else and how it’s all crucial to the workings of not just our planet, but of the galaxy and universes beyond. She is there, making sure the stitches of the world-tapestry hold together. And when we take the time to really look, we can see her radiance shining through the pinpricks,  sliding off the glazed tiles."

Before the Alhambra became a city state and filled this space with arches and symmetrical gardens, even before the Romans and Visigoths took up residence,  it was a place where The Mother was honored, high up there on Sabika hill where Her crystalline water poured from springs fed by snow-capped mountains and where her birds sang.

My Sophia Friend Julia Blackbourn graciously shared with me some of her sketches of another patterned site about 70 kilometers from Grandada where the famous cathedral of Cordoba welcomes people into her huge courtyard. Her watercolors capture the patterns in these massive arches better than any photos I took, so I'm happy, with her blessing, to share a couple with you.

I believe Sophia can be seen through arches and in all pattern overlays; She is present everywhere--in the beautiful as well as the dismal parts of our world.

 

[As a sidenote: an audio guide to Sophia: The Feminine Face of God,a 10 part series, is available for listening or downloading at:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/divineartsmedia/2012/01/11/sophia-feminine-face-of-god-10-series-w-karen-speerstra]

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.

 

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.

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.

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. 

 

 

Sacred Space

When I think of sacred places this time of year a stable and manger come to mind. Or the little white Lutheran country church where I was baptized, confirmed and later married.  It's gone now--all except the cemetery and the old hand pump, left, I suppose, so people can water plants.

Or  I think of my labyrinth. And if I raise my sacred sights a bit, I think of Chartres Cathedral or Istanbul's Hagia Sophia.  Mayan temples, Jerusalem,  Mecca.

But I hadn't thought my refrigerator was. Until, that is, a web acquaintance of mine named Anthony Lawlor broadened my mind and my definition of sacred space. I just finished cleaning out our refrigerator, throwing away all those wonderful tidbits from several weeks ago that I couldn't bear to part with back then and as I scraped hardened bits of something orange and gooey, I thought, "Anthony would approve."

Anthony, an architect,  has written several books about the soulfulness of everyday architecture. In A Home for the Soul he says "the most immediate way of deepening soulfulness in a home is through cleaning and repair." He makes a connection I had not: the word cleaning has a spiritual connotation. The roots of that word suggest a ceremonial anointing with oil.  Mary Magdalene's cleaning Jesus' feet with expensive oil comes to mind. That act was done with great intention. You can't clean if you don't slow down. My husband vaccuums.  Slowly. And he pays attention. Slowing down and paying attention are also meditative tools.

As I scrubbed bits and pieces off my glass refrigerator shelves and threw out jars of who knows what, I went a bit Zen and decided to just clean while I cleaned. That was all. I turned off the radio's latest political wranglings and wrung out a warm sudsy cloth. Many times. Back and forth. Slowly, the way Indian women wash the steps of a ghat.  Or the way Dutch women used to scrub their thresholds.

The kitchen is the core of any home. The refrigerator and stove cool and heat, like alchemy. Fairy tales tell of stoves with a hidden meaning of burning away everything that is no longer needed.  I wouldn't go so far as to say my soul is purified every time I turn my gas burner to "On" but it's something to think about. 

A home has character and personality. But until we put our own stamp on a place, it could be a Holiday Inn room somewhere. You can shower and rest there, but it's not yours. And I have yet to enter a motel room that feels soul-full.

I belong to a group of women who meet monthly in each other's homes.  Each home carries the soul-prints of the people who live there. Like tracks in the snow, our books, lamps,  furniture,  textures, colors, valued pieces sitting here and there or hanging on the walls all mark our passage through this space. They say, "This is who I am. This is a peek into my soul."

This season and throughout the new year, may you find and truly care for those  sacred spaces where your soul thrives.

Advent and Rocamadour's Quiet Music

Black virgins pepper Europe with a soul-spiciness few can explain. I certainly can’t. I only know I’d go on those tours designed to visit as many as possible across Europe if I could manage it.

However, during this “Advent season," a season of watchful “Advent-ure” for Christians, I am grateful for having visited my second one. (The first was at Chartres many years ago.) Allow me to introduce you to the black virgin of Rocamadour.
She's hidden away in one of the chapels high on a limestone cliff overlooking the Alzou Valley in the Dordogne. 

From what I've read, statues called black virgins predate Christianity which means that she may be patterned after Isis and her son after Horus. Perhaps she is an homage to Coptic Christians. Others claim she is black simply because she is so old and the wood has darkened.The black queen. The dark mother. The Mysterious One. I saw Michelle Obama in her eyes--and all strong women over the ages, reflected back to me

Pausing for a moment on one of the 216 well-worn steps,I looked back up to where she quietly waits, surrounded there in the dark by candles. I found myself thinking of miracles and legends.  

Just being on those stairs brought me several steps closer to the people who left Palestine after Jesus was killed and made their way to the coast of France. Two such legendary figures were Veronica and her husband Zacheus later known as Amadour. They’d been with Jesus, wiped the sweat off his face, protected Mary, his mother.

After his wife’s death, the old hermit traveled to this particular valley and built a chapel in honor of Mary. Overlays of stories and miracles built up over the centuries still echo through the limestone layers that surround his burial place. His beloved rocks continue to call people. How her statue came to be there remains a mystery. But Francis Poulenc’s music may offer a clue—he experienced her profound presence in Rocamadour which resulted in his famous “Litanies of the Black Virgin.

Her voice through music may be the only way some of will ever actually hear her.

Vision of a New Normal

Her 12th-century Benedictine world came alive on the screen as Hildegard's music permeated the small art theater where the German film Vision was showing.  It stars Barbara Sukowa as the Rhineland woman who was "tithed" when she was nine--given to the church-- since she was her parents' tenth child.  Life in the cloistered monastary was to become her "new normal."

The nun, Jutta, her anorexic mentor and new "mother," taught her many things. But it was the brilliant visions she experienced since the age of three, that taught her the most. This film directed by Margarethe von Trotta does an admirable job of showing us her challenges as a woman of the time, of her music, her knowledge of herbs and stones. But the movie does not show us her paintings, such as this one called "Cultivating the Cosmic Tree."

Plate 7, Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen, Matthew Fox

Hildegard’s vision of all creatures being sparks from the radiation of God’s brilliance led her to paint a fiery world, a divine flame circling, ever rotating, ever changing. In this mandala, she captured moisture, air, fruit, seeds, trees in all stages of life. We see the essence of regeneration. Earth, air, fire, water. It’s all there. It’s all we have and all we have needed for generations. But things have changed in the 800 years since she lived.

I find myself wondering what Hildegard would have made of Bill McKibben’s new book, eaarth?  He spells it that way because our planet, the one Hildegard knew so well, and the one we have known all our lives, no longer exists. Hence a new spelling for a different planet presenting a new normal for all of us.

With the help of a small cadre of students, Bill launched a worldwide movement called 350.org to bring to our attention the limits of carbon dioxide per million in our air which presents the outermost limits of safety for this cosmic place on which we now stand. We've already exceeded it. He fully believes we are headed toward dispersed and localized societies that can somehow survive the damage to our “eaarth” which, sadly, we can now no longer prevent.

Our new planet demands new habits We’re in a “new normal” now —a fiery wheel which Hildegard reminds us needs our cultivation and our collective holy wisdom.

“Out of the original source of the true Love in whose knowledge the cosmic wheel rests, there shines forth an exceedingly precise order over all things. And this order which preserves and nourishes everything comes to light in a way that is ever new…”

                                                               Hildegard of Bingen

 

 

It's Watching You

Its silhouette is one of the most recognizable in the world. Floating there, surrounded by water and sheep-grazed salt flats, Mt. Tombe, as the founding monk Aubert called it back in the 8th century, still beckons pilgrims of every ilk. Three million every year.

What is it about this Norman village/castle/church that draws us to such a remote place perched in the sea between Brittany and Normandy? Perhaps it's the gold steepled statue of the Archangel Michael who watches over everyone. Perhaps it's the challenge of the climb. According to a friend's pedometer, it took 2,102 steps up the inner staricase to get to the upper cloisters and back.

Working our way through labyrinthine crypts, past ramparts, flying buttresses and pillars, we marveled at the gigantic wheeled winch that defied stones' gravity and brought building supplies up so precariously high. We breathed in the mystic air of this place once called by the Celts, Ynys Trebes. We paused in the scriptorium where monks once copied and illuminated manuscripts. Forty-two people presently live full time on the rock--merchants, prayers, chanters, administrators.

You enter Mt. St. Michel through the King's Gate and suddenly you're in a world apart. A stony world once home to Benedictines and then to prisoners during the French Revolution. And to miracles, some say.

Fritjof Capra's brother Bernt took his brother's Turning Point and made it into a movie called Mind Walk. At one point one of three people who accidentally meet there says, "You can feel the place watching you."

Indeed, you can.

I picked up a copy of a little prayer book in the bookstore. One strikes me as appropriate to our time, to our journey:

Here I am, watching and waiting.

With time to look at things.

With time to admire what I see.

Days to discover things,

days to enjoy

Life to the full.

Time to chew the cud,

to savor the good life.

 

 

Reproduced Authenticity

The Loire, at 500 miles, is the longest river in France and below it in the south-central Languedoc region we discovered  Cathar-country. They called themselves Good Christians—as opposed, one assumes from the others, led by the pope and his men who were killing them in the 11^th and 12^th centuries faster than you can say "heretic." The double-moated city of Carcassonne (if you wish to come close to the French pronunciation try CAK a SOWN), Toulousse, Albi—all were places where once “spiritual authenticity” was debated in the most deadly manner.

But today, peaceful plane trees line the long Canal du Midi and the only “battles” over authenticity seem to be what legitimately can carry the “AOC” label which means this product is authentically produced here. And don’t look for genetically modified food (which must be labeled) on any super market shelves.

Today you can’t go to the Perigord without running into geese and “AOC” foies-gras, specific regional wines and authentically registered cheeses which come from very geographically particular cows. Well over half of France is farmland even though only six per cent of the French call themselves farmers. Our expert bus driver, Lauren, drove us over narrow roads past fields of grapes, tobacco and sunflowers, into the forested Dordogne Valley. We passed under limestone cliffs where the Cro-Magnon people once lived. Cave in French means wine cellars and sometimes the caves as well as restaurants were in real caves which also contain houses of modern day “troglodytes.”

But no one ever lived in the sacred grotte we were about to visit. By late morning we meandered through the village of Montignac and several kilometers out into the woods to enter an underground nave called Lascaux II. The “authentic” Lascaux I was closed in 1962 when it became apparent a green virus from microbes brought in by tourists’ shoes and a corrosive white dot build up from carbon dioxide was destroying the ancient art. Like all other prehistoric painted caves in France Lascaux I is now only open to scholars and researchers.

My lungs gulped misty autumn air carrying hints of juniper as we climbed the path leading to the most exquisite museum of art I could ever imagine. The original cave was discovered by four teenaged boys and their dog Robot on another fall day in 1940. One of the boys, Jacques Marsal, described a “cavalcade of animals larger than life painted on the walls and ceiling of the cave; each animal seemed to be moving.” The paintings were brilliantly multicolored in reds, blacks, browns and ochres. The boys were standing in what is now called The Hall of the Bulls. They vowed to keep it a secret. That lasted two days.

"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.

Oh, Mama!

Through the woods, past enormous Vermont boulders. It had been raining earlier so my feet, cushioned by the moss and wet leaves, made not a sound. I could hear a faint wind chime as the path opened out to a field. A mowed path led to a newly planted tree holding the little music-maker that called me here, a huge rock, an obvious grave and a framed picture against the rock of a white-haired grandfatherly man. I had reached Thomas Berry's final resting place on the grounds of the Green Mountain Monastery near Greensboro, Vermont. I spent a few quiet moments with this theologian whom ecologists--and many of the rest of us--revere.

In an essay called "The Viable Human" he once wrote: "To be viable, the human community must move from its present anthropocentric norm to a geocentric norm of reality and value...the universe reflects on and celebrates itself in conscious self-awareness, and finds a unique fulfillment."

But now there are so many of of us, we're squeezing every last drop out of our planet. I spent the better part of that Saturday at Green Mountain Monastery trying to figure out why. What now? Who, me? 

In the mid 90s a group of North Americans visited a remote area of Ecuador and met some folks from the Amazonian Achuar tribe who realized their home--and ultimately our home--was being destroyed. Their wise elders asked their partners to the north to help save Pachamama: Mother Earth. Our Universe. The Pachamama Alliance was born. As a result many of us can now raise our awareness by asking these questions together: Where are we now?  How did we get here?  What's possible in the future?  Where do we go from here? 

Anybody can attend, as I did at Green Mt. Monastery, a symposium run by volunteers called "Awakening the Dreamer Changing the Dream."

The future doesn't need to continue as it's going right now. We've changed the game many times in the past--we can do it again. (Remember when we thought people were "property" and women couldn't vote? Remember the Berlin wall?) But we need to take off our dark glasses and come to grips with what's happening to Pachamama. And we need to do it quickly.

Take a look at how some creative folks are helping us to "see" more clearly.

In March, 4YG Four Years.Go was launched. Join Annie Leonard to learn about the Story of Stuff. Or better yet, attend one of the symposia happening in 30 countries, facilitated by over 2700 volunteers. Together we can bring forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just human presence on this planet. It can be the guiding principle of our times.

I think Thomas Berry would be pleased to know you've read this. And that you're willing to take a few more steps. We can keep the good and reject the bad. Together we can tell a different story. Berry said, "To tell the story of something you have to tell the story of everything."

It's ALL connected.  We're all connected. This is the only home we've got--we can't throw things away any longer because there is no "away." This is it. We're it. And as Van Jones, author of the Green Collar Economy says in one of the videos that form the symposium, "If you see a place where you wouldn't want to live, that means we've got work to do."

Oh, Mama. We love you. And we know we've got work to do!

Snicker-Snack

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the momeraths outgrabe…”

I’m guessing a lot of folks are digging out their old beaten-up copies of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass as I did, just to see how Tim Burton melded the two. After seeing the movie, I spotted glimmers of Harry Potter and Glinda the good witch as well. All in all, though, I thought his movie was…well, “twas brillig!”

Mia Wasikowska makes a wonderful Alice but I had looked forward to meeting the Walrus and Carpenter, and the Mock Turtle and see a bit of the chess game. But not even Burton can do everything! Just his croquet scene with bubble-headed Helena Bonham Carter swinging a flamingo mallet into a hedgehog is the worth the price of your ticket.

Alice, now 19, slips away from her toothy suitor, Hamish, and careens down the rabbit hole again only to return to Underland—a place where she went when she was six. But now she can’t pinch herself awake and must fulfill her quest: find the Vorpal Sword and kill the Jabberwocky in order to free her friends from the wrathful Red Queen.

We are Alice Everywoman/man. That is, if we take to heart what the scientific-mystic David Spangler writes about in Subtle Worlds: An Explorer’s Field Notes. Forgive me Lewis Carroll and David Spangler, but maybe I saw similarities because  I was so deeply immersed in Subtle Worlds before falling with Alice down the rabbit  hole.

Like Alice, we also need helpers and partners on our journey. And we, too, inhabit more than just our physical world.

Nearly every night we explore dream worlds and with careful training, we can enter many other zones.

Like each of us, Alice must take responsibility for her life. She need not always do what others expect of her, but she does need to follow her soul—even if it leads to encounters with Bandersnatch claws! It proves that what and who you meet in the “underworlds” or “overworlds” or “subtle worlds” may not always be what you think at first. 

Spangler, says, “Every thought and emotion has an energetic shape.” And like Alice who grows and shrinks by what she nibbles or drinks, our own energy fields also change. “Anything you do that stimulates and heightens your powers of imagination, whether it's of the creative or the conceptual variety, will help you in engaging with subtle worlds."

Seeing Alice in Wonderland definitely exercises the imagination.

What a treat, just to be in the company of the darling Dormouse and the loveable Tarrant Hightopp/Johnny Depp aka the addle-brained Mad Hatter with the price tag, 10/6--ten shillings, six pence--still on his magical hat.  And who wouldn't fall in love with the March Hare!  What a fabulous tea party!

Stephen Fry’s voice matches perfectly the antics of the Cheshire Cat.  But Alan Rickman as Absolem the Blue Caterpillar, puffing on his hookah, was my absolute favorite because he asks the most important question anyone could ever ask in this world or in any other:

“Who are you?…What size do you want to be?”

There was nothing subtle about Absolem or about any part of Alice's Wonderland. Still I couldn't help making more and more connections to Spangler's Subtle Worlds as I dropped my 3-D glasses into the waiting box. 

"Our task," he says, "is to bring forth a time when we will experience the earth not as two worlds, one physical and one non-physical, but as one united planet of sacred life and consciousness, singing a song of wholeness to the stars and taking its place as a radiance of love and blessing for all the universe." 

What could be more brillig?

Lenten Dining

With all the snow we’ve had lately, it’s difficult to remember that “Lent” means “spring.” Early snowdrops will have to really push.

Through forty snowy days, Christians contemplate all the events that lead up to Easter. I have a friend who always gives up chocolate through Lent. I, on the other hand, think Lent, like most seasons, is a fine time to eat rather than to fast.  We need to keep up our strength and push through to tulip time. After all, that’s what Jesus himself did. Look at all those empty plates.

A Valentine 4 U

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

Winter Quiet

After a few extremely busy days, I yearn for a walk--if only to our mailbox a half mile straight down from our house. It's icy. I take my time.

I often walk back up again to a meditative rhythm. Sometimes it's the prayer of St. Francis: "Make me an instrument of your peace..." A step a word. But today my walking mantra wants to be just two words: re-lax, con-tent...re-lax, con-tent.

Once or twice I stop to listen. Nothing.

The sky takes on a deep lapis-lazuli blue the likes of which I see only on crisp winter days. It's about three o'clock so the sun aims its fiery path behind me toward the western mountains at a pretty fast clip. I'm facing a cloud-moon of light and dark, split exactly in half. It's strange to see the moon during the day. It's as if she's saying, "Whoops. I really don't belong here, but I wanted you to see me equally balanced like this. Later tonight I will be oh so bright against the white empty canvas of your yard, but right now I'm just a wispy-whispery thing sent to share a secret: it's important to be balanced...to keep extremes at bay."

Before my walk, I'd been reading the fourth book in Christopher Alexander's series called The Nature of Order. Now I'm observing the order of nature. Everything has a living center, says this wonderful architect-author. I notice that each shadow lives and falls precisely where it is ordered to fall.  Each tree stands in perfect living relationship to its neighbors and each branch seems expertly placed one to another.  The snow knows how to mold the rocks.

Again, I stop to listen. I hear not one sound. Not a grinding snow machine. Not a bird. Not a dog. Not even the dropping of a twig. But wait. Between heartbeats, I notice  a trickle of water running under the ice.  A tree groans from the cold.

"Who," Alexander asks, "has not had the feeling, listening to Mozart's  40th Symphony or to Bach's B minor Mass that something significant is happening, that in some inner sense, the heavens are opening, and that this structure of sound somehow reaches in and hits the heart?" Who, indeed.

Meister Eckhart, that 13th century spiritual teacher, said "We must learn to penetrate things and find God here."

For that brief walk, the sun, the moon, the trees, and the snow all quietly chorus-up to show me a universe of living beings. I am embraced by nothing I can measure, certainly nothing mechanical, but definitely groupings of living centers that form an unbroken whole surrounding me.

Something significant IS happening and it hits my heart.

 

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.

The Writer's Prayer

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

Advent Dark

Unless our motion censor floods our yard with light, or the moon peeks out, we live surrounded by deep dark this time of year. After spending more than an urban decade surrounded by sirens, car alarms and booming bass bellowing from pounding cars and rarely seeing stars, rural life pulls you back to another time. A slower time. A darker quieter time.

I spotted a Santa Advent Calendar in a store the other day and I wondered how a parent explains to a kid what "advent" means if their only frame of reference is a big guy with red cheeks holding a lumpy bag. But kids do get the "waiting" part of December. They hear "not now!" enough.

The countdown to Christmas comes in many forms. Hurried trips to the post office. Stressful trips to the grocery store. Manic trips to the mall. Trips. Tripping. Tripped up.

We pack so much anxiety and nostalgia into that "Santa bag." 

So, what IS Advent? I'm not a theologian so I can only tell you what it is for me.

The Maori people of New Zealand still chant their creation story by first calling it "a breathing space of immensity." That's what Advent is.

They speak of a time when the Universe was in darkness. No light at all. That's what Advent is.

They chant: "Darkness, become a light-possessing darkness."

After my last posting about the dolphin-killing ritual still performed in Denmark, my husband's only comment was, "Well, that was dark." I thought, "Welcome to Advent."

The Maori people unwind their unique cosmology story this way: "Light, become a darkness-possessing light." That's what Advent is.

They sing: "Let there be one Light above. Let their be one Light below...a  Dominion of Light...And now a bright light prevailed."

Snow Words

We had our first snowfall last night. This morning memories of snow-angels, wet wool mufflers and little mittens catching flakes wash over me as I look out over the oh so white yard. By March, this white magic will have worn off a bit but right now it's perfect in every way.

Wilson A. Bentley, a Jericho, VT photographer spent years in a cold studio photographing snow crystals with his bulky view camera. The Meteorological Society published it in 1931 with its incredible 71 plates filled with unique flake designs and now Dover's reprinted it so we can all enjoy them.

Like lacy atoms that spin and can point simultaneously up, down or sideways, our present Vermont snowflakes look the same as they did when Bentley captured them on film. Poor Venus, with her 900 degree atmosphere; she'll never know how beautiful they are. The physicist David Hume once said, "God so loved the earth that He put the earth just right from the sun."

The snow that fell last night is now aput as the Inuits would say. It's just lying on the ground. But as it was falling, it was gana and if it were light enough and the wind strong enough to pile it into drifts, it would be plqsirpoq.

We live in ski country so we say pack and powder a lot. I've  heard that the Yup'ik people in Alaska use at least 15 different words. A snowflake, for instance, is qunuk and a snowbank qengaruk. Imagine, all these words for snow, yet no word for war.

Most of us have vocabularies of upwards of 100,000 words. My husband whom we lovingly call "Mr. Language Person" no doubt has more. I probably use only 10,000 of them. Shakespeare used 15,000. I don't know how many Cormac McCarthy uses, but he does know how to put them together. In The Road, now a motion picture, he paints a bleak picture of what he poses as a not too distant possible future. He describes "a blackness to hurt your ears with listening." And in the "cold autistic dark" he gives us a snowflake that could not be more opposed to the ones Bentley brought us.

"a single gray flake drifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom."

I am so grateful that falling snow paints for me a "just right" picture. 

My universe still feels friendly. Freeman Dyson, another physicist, said "It's as if the universe knew we were coming." I live in a home-world that still sends crystalline images to remind me how unique I am as well--and that I'm softly cushioned when I fall.