Sophia Serve

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.

Salvaged

Next to hardware stores, my favorite collection of stuff is stashed into a  huge warehouse called "Vermont Salvage.”  Old wooden doors stand open on either end, so you have to be hardy to shop there in winter.

It’s THE place to go if you're looking for old door knobs or bathtubs. Green-bronzed horses or cast-iron radiators. Arches and architectural leftovers from the insides of abandoned churches. Stained glass windows line one whole wall, right behind rows and rows of sinks. And just across the aisle, about a hundred toilets line up like frosty choristers in this open cathedral of commodes.

G.K. Chesterton once said, “A paradox is a truth standing on its head waving its legs to attract attention.” There I stood, red-nosed, hands in my pockets and ears tingling from the cold, juxtaposed with these unlikely neighbors paradoxically waiting to be rescued once again and taken to some warmer place. Like Harry Potter, I had conjured up these magical foreign gadgets, this bizarre metal and glass menagerie mutely waving their legs at me.

I wandered the aisles, but kept returning to the stained glass lined up against the walls. These warehouse owners are far too savvy to have any Tiffany lurking around, I was quite sure, but some of them looked so lovely lounging there in ornate frames, dusty and smudged, but still intact. How can sand, salt and ash create something as beautiful as stained glass?

During both world wars, the people of Chartres saved their famous glass windows by burying them in mines or in the crypt itself. No small feat since the 116 glass windows cover the equivalent of an acre of space!

 

Eight  hundred years earlier, three stained glass masterpieces nearly met the rubbish heap. While most of Chartres Cathedral burned in 1194, the western wall was saved. Salvaged. One window hung there in the smoke like a giant jewel-encrusted brooch. It’s called “The Blue Virgin Window” because of the rich blues against a ruby-red background. Most early stained glass artists used copper for red, iron for yellow and cobalt for blue. But Chartres’ glaziers, alchemists in their own right, created a blue so intense, so rare, that no one has duplicated it.

This window is a testament to many things, not least of which to the artists themselves, for reds and blues were the most difficult glass colors to create. Stained glass artists worked at their benches often flashing up to forty coats of glazings just to get the right hue and luminosity. For these ruby reds they overlaid green, purple, brown and yellow. What made matters ever more challenging, they couldn’t view their work until it was actually hung.

But beyond the craft, this crowned “empress mother” and her child speak to the creativity of soul-salvaging.

The stained glass windows at the Vermont Salvage were simpler designs composed mostly of yellows, browns and greens. No rubies or lapis lazuli, but still, they were a welcome break from winter’s white. And my soul took note.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

Afghans and Haunted Houses

A young London-based Pakistani author with piercing brown eyes and a mop of curly hair won numerous prizes for his earlier books and now tells a story set in Afghanistan: The Wasted Vigil. Nadeem Aslam creates a young Russian woman named Lara, whose mind "is a haunted house."

If we could pull that image from Lara and stretch it a bit, we might find our own collective minds haunted as well. Haunted by failed attempts to "set the world right." Haunted by flawed decisions. Haunted by images of still more young people flying into a country where women can be beaten with a tire iron if they happen, as Lara did, to fall asleep with your feet pointing to Mecca.

Aslam (whose name reminds me of Narnia's Aslan and I take some comfort in that) says Afghanistan is "a hub of things moving from one point of the compass to another, religion and myth, works of art, caravans of bundled Chinese silk flowing past camels loaded with glass from ancient Rome or pearls from the Gulf." Now Comanche helicopters drop bottled water. Or worse. For good reason, it's often called a graveyard of empires.

We arrogantly thought we'd change everything by riding in on our white cowboy horses after 9/11. We failed, as Suan Faludi puts it in The Terror Dream, "to perceive the message in Jacob's story of strength and dependency, to fathom the distinction between wrestling with angels and slaying them."  Instead, we "balked," as she puts it, "and summoned John Wayne and his avenging brethren instead...we succumbed to the hauntings of a fabricated past." We threw tons of bombs into Talibaned Tora Bora, the labyrinth of caves in mountains 13,000 feet high. But heroin still bolsters their tippy economy. Bribes still grease the skids. Every man is still armed. We didn't change much and I've of a mind that we never will. That's not fatalistic, it's what I now think might be the truth.

Goethe said, "It's easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it."

How do we search out the truth in such a tangle of war-knots and bomb-snarls? Maybe the answer lies in a metaphor a reader-friend recently suggested. "Why don't you write about the connection between Afghanistan and afghans?"

I tucked that thought away as I do many that now come in from SophiaServe readers, thinking, "Sure, maybe after I learn Pashto." But thanks to our quickie-Wiki-Pedia I now know that these lap blankets were, indeed, first made in Afghanistan.   

They are constructed in brilliant colors, geometric designs and holes built into the overall effect.  Like the one my Aunt Esther crocheted for me back in 1961 with waves of seasick oranges, yellow and browns. Afghans are always hand-stitched from yarn and if you don't have an Aunt Esther, you're not likely to ever have one. They're called "throws" because with so many holes, they easily fray and people soon just throw them away. Or because you throw them over cold toes this time of year. Take your pick.

If our snarled presence in Afghanistan could be compared to a dizzy afghan, perhaps what we need to throw away is our frayed and obviously astigmatic threadbare concept of how we deal with people willing to blow themselves up for a cause. We need not, in turn, bomb them. Instead we could learn how to spot their crazy design and invite them to drape themselves over some other chair.

 

The wood of a sandal tree, Aslam tell us, never smells like perfume until it's cut down. This leads me to wonder if we thought we'd sniff the fragrance of peace by wielding  axes. 

Islam defines the time when a muezzin begins to call people to the dawn prayer this way: it's when there is enough sunlight to distinguish, without artificial light, a black thread from a white thread.

I pray dawn comes before we all unravel.

Blue Moon Blessings

What does it mean to start a whole new decade off with a "blue moon?" Perhaps "once in a blue moon" we get a "do over." A fresh start.

Lao Tzu  wrote of a vision he had in which he traveled to the World's very beginning. There, he saw Yin. Female energy. If I could have gripped his silk jacket and floated with him into that dark space, what would I have seen? 

I imagine it may have looked something like this. One Vermont morning the fog settled in and my friend Bob Frenier took his camera out for a closer look. Out of nowhere crystals appeared on every surface of every branch of every tree.

Lao Tzu said everywhere he looked, the world was filled with "motionless grandeur."

Then Lao Tzu saw Yang--"rampant in its fiery vigor." As he put it, earth's quiet grandeur reached up to heaven's fire--maybe a blue moon kind of fire--and "the two penetrated one another, were inextricably-blended and from their union the things of the world were born."

A new year began with a blue moon in 1990 and a year won't start with a blue moon again until 2028. Because our solar calendar and our lunar calendar don't quite mesh, a solar year winds up with 11 extra days. Like Baba stacking up pretzels, they pile up until every two or three years we have an extra full moon. For some reason, we've taken to calling it "blue." Some think it's because when the volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the moon actually was blue for something like two years.

For whatever reason, blue moons are like that crystalline Vermont winter morning when the whole world became--at least until the sun burned it off--a fairy land of white potential.

We welcome our new decade, pulsing up out of the dark into the quiet saying,

"Make of me what you will."

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.

Fiery Action

This wonderful image of playful, fiery activism just landed in my in-box. It's from a friend who embodies the love of our earth in ways that have inspired me for several decades. Sharon's inner beauty shines as clearly as does her Jack-o-Lantern. But it is her willingness and innate ability to show others how to sparkle as well, that aligns her, in my mind at least, to Andrew Harvey.

Salt or TNT?

Wordsmithing has come easily to me ever since I learned which end of the pencil goes onto the paper.  For others, I know, the thought of writing is agony. But, no doubt, what they enjoy doing would cause the proverbial beads of blood to form on my forehead if I tried it. We all do what we have a passion and penchant for doing.

Writing  is, as Diane Ackerman says in Deep Play, “tilting tiny cogs and wheels into place.” And it’s the writer’s responsibility to know what those cogs might actually set into motion. Once released, they can’t be called back. Like cell phones that can trigger bombs, tiny cog-words can easily fit into other wheels that fit into other wheels and before you know it... 

Words DO have enormous power. The chemical term for what happens when two agents come together to produce something different is called hypergolic. Writers call it metaphor. You take two opposite images and meld them together. And just as two inert substances come together to produce table salt, for instance, or nitroglycerine, our language has the capability to do that as well.

I saw something on the news last night that chilled my bones and set my teeth on edge. Some people are hell-bent (and I use that term on purpose) to destroy Obama. Not just destroy our democratically elected president, but encourage an attack on his life. The Secret Service has in fact let it be known that threats to his life are now 400% higher than against any other president. Ever. And people are doing this by using words as lethally disguised as a knife in an ankle holster. Or as a harmless teddy bear.

These "calls to prayer" have appeared almost overnight on T Shirts, mugs, hats, pins--any surface that can hold words. And while they may seem innocuous and even rather nice, they are not! They are wolves in sheep's clothing. Or nitroglycerine masquerading as salt.

Psalm 109: 8 says, "May his days be few; may another seize his position."

Not being a Hebrew scholar, I cannot justify why these particular words appear in Psalm 109, nor any other of the horrific images one can find in the Old Testament, but I suspect they have something to do with the fact that Jews faced merciless enemies. Later these same verses were used by monks to attack Protestants. And now they're being dredged up to incite violence against our democratically elected president. I call this "white-supremacy-speak." And it's wrong!

It's certainly very like calls to jihad by other religious types.  

For $4.95 you can get this bumper sticker from zazzle.com by Megatudes. Or a pack of 50 for only $106.99.

Why does this upset me so? Well, let's look at the words.

Defenders of all this “cute stuff" argue, “Oh, this is only our way of calling for a one-term presidency. Besides it's free speech!" (Not any more than yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.)

Bibliolaters--people who worship the bible and use it any way they wish--know the code. Here's what’s in the very next verse:

“May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow.” 

What this really means is:  “Somebody (please) make Michelle a widow and Sasha and Malia orphans.”     Now you know why my bones chill and my heart aches.

Nor is this simply a blatant call for assassination. (Glen Beck on Fox News also recently called for Nancy Pellosi to be found floating in the Boston Harbor!) I'm hearing a clarion call for hateful destruction and murder and it's time we name what's going on in America.

In a verse a bit later in Psalm 109 I find a smidgen of comfort:

Verse 31: “For he (The Lord) stands at the right hand of the needy, to save them from

those who would condemn them to death.”

 

Hummingbirds and Nazca Lines

I thought of this image we included in Hunab Ku as I listened to Maya Lin on NPR the other day. You may remember her for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. which she designed as a 21 year old Yale student.

Maya was talking about her latest memorial : What Is Missing?, a multi-sited work incorporating video and sounds of birds and animals now threatened. She builds her art on facts and we can emotionally draw from those facts what we care to take away.

One in three amphibians, one in four mammals and one in eight birds is now threatened and in danger of forever dying because of habitat loss. (And 70% of our plants!)

The Nazca story is a compelling one and a sophiaserve reader recently sent me an update that may interest you as much as it interests me.

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.

Artemis/Ursula

Twilight. Past our garage, around the bend, and like Artemis, her namesake, she disappeared.

All I saw was her lumbering broad brown backside. Ursula, I call her. Little Bear. By the overturned rocks, it appeared she’d been visiting my flower beds, looking for ant eggs and grubs.

The Catholic church designated October 21st as the feast day of a young girl named after a goddess and a bear and who was surrounded by a legend of no small proportions.

A teenage Cornwall princess betrothed to a guy in Brittany, she begged not to be married until she’d traveled Europe. Ursula convinced her father to let her travel with her friends for three years. So she picked up, not her backpack and a Eurail Pass, but 11,000 of her girlfriends--her handmaidens--and took off.  Eleven Thousand???  That’s  four big cruise ships full. In the fourth century? Come on!

As the story goes, a storm blew her into the Rhine River and down to Cologne (filled with bad guys called Huns). She refused to marry their chief, was shot with a bow, and all her virgin army were beheaded. A bloody mess, but not the first or, unfortunately, the last time a woman dies trying to get away from a man wielding a weapon over "lost love."

Like most legends, this one may have been founded on a scrap of historical truth. Thousands of women were, at one time, sent from England to Brittany to help populate their newly conquered territory. But Ursula's story took more of its shape from the Moon Goddess surrounded by thousands of her stars.

(from panel paintings  of St. Ursula by Hans Memling)

Someone posted her story on the blog of that day--a wall inscription on a church in Cologne where some young girls had been killed. Two. Five. Eight. Eleven. The number varies. Like most urban legends and internet stories, the inscription was interpreted in many ways. One account says the girl was named Ursula and she was eleven years old. Another called her Undecimilla. You know how confusing those Roman numerals can be. A monk later translated that as 11,000.

But the exact details don't really matter. The point was women were killed and the goddess Artemis whose temple that had been when people called her Ursel, was replaced by a cathedral hosting thousands of bone relics--dug up from a local burial ground. The little bear rounded the bend.

In Thom Hartmann's new book, Threshold, he points out four of our big mistakes. One of them is "the belief that men should run the world and women are their property."

Ursula's story continues to be played out. She is raped in Darfur. Burned in rural India where it's less trouble than divorce. Murdered if she "dishonors" the male members of family. Beaten, stabbed, shot by men she trusts.

The mystic Elisabeth of Schönau saw Ursula and the girls in a vision she wrote about in Revelations Concerning the Sacred Army of Virgins of Cologne. It was followed by another 13th century collection called The Golden Legend, and then in the 15th century, my favorite: Legends of Hooly Wummen.

Various sailors, no doubt heated by the thought of all those lonely virgins, named far-away places after them. Christopher Columbus happened upon a lot of islands in the Caribbean and called them The Virgin Islands. Ferdinand Magellan, sailing through "his strait" on October 21, 1521, named the cape, Cape Virgenes.

And, of course, in the 12th century, Hildegard of Bingen who kept many of Her stories alive, wrote The Symphonia--a liturgical cycle of 77 poems with monophonic music for her nuns to sing. Unlike Elisabeth who got her visions in dreams, Hildegard claimed she was wide awake. "The words in this vision are not like words uttered by the mouth of man, but like a shimmering flame, or a cloud floating in a clear sky."

A dripping honeycomb was the virgin Ursula, who longed to embrace the lamb of God, milk and honey under her tongue; because  like a fruit-laden garden and splendor of flowers, she gathered a throng of virgins about her...

And...

Blood's crimson Flowing from a height Touched by God.You are a blossom which the winter of the serpent's breath did not harm.

I like to think Hildegard’s songs for Ursula are for all young women everywhere, from every time, who are abused, beaten, bruised, killed, or who die from unwanted pregnancies in childbirth—just because they are female.

In 1506 a brave women named Angela Merici gathered 28 women around her (for those of us intrigued by numbers, that’s the number of the moon—days of a woman’s cycle) and said: "Let’s teach young girls."  It took forty years for the church fathers to sanction what they were doing, but finally The Ursalines became the teaching nuns.  Those She-Bears made and still make a difference.

More and more people are catching on to the fact that when young girls are educated, families become empowered. And whole nations benefit.

Honeycombs drip.

 

Raku: Kingdoms of Fire and Smoke

    On the Eastern Seaboard where the grey Atlantic first kisses the deep blue of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a natural harbor surrounds the tiny Quebec village of La Baie. Two thousand people live there now with many more in its sister city of Saguenay. It's easy to imagine back when birch-bark canoes floated noiselessly across those waters edging what the Iroquois called "The Kingdom."

Now that mills have closed the riches of this "kingdom" in the Lac-Saint-Jean region lie more in its natural beauty and from its talented crafts people.

"Craft" comes from the German word, Kraft meaning power or strength. In her book, Centering, the poet-potter M.C. Richards says centering means to feel whole in every part. Experienced potters know how to center clay on the wheel so it doesn't wobble or fold in on itself. Soon a form opens up. A new shape appears.

Hoping to find some hot apple cider on a cold October morning, my husband and I left via Deck 7 of our cruise ship, walked past a small wood fire by a tepee and headed toward a little church steeple where we found a modest craft fair with live fiddle music. Winding our way past tables overflowing with crocheted dollies and lace doilies, we happened upon Kathlyn Bergeron Potiére and her Raku pottery. Teapots with unadorned wooden handles. Bowls poised for a ceremony.

Raku pottery comes from 16th century Kyoto and is fired in an extremely hot kiln--980-some degrees F.-- for only an hour or two. Then the potter places it in a metal container with combustible materials such as sawdust, straw, or newspapers which burns away the oxygen in the pot as well as in the glaze. How the cooled piece looks is always a surprise.

Kathlyn, a tall beautiful woman, held her five month old baby--a Quebecois Madonna and child--as we talked about her work in fractured French and broken English. I bought one of her exquisite teapots, thinking of M.C. Richards and how she writes about pottery as metaphysics. Richards has said that she believes the Kingdom of Heaven will come when we are not afraid to be penetrated by bliss.

Richards calls us to be as centered as the pot itself. When we aren't, our spirits crack. "The inner soul withdraws, goes underground, splits off from the part that keeps walking around. Vitality ebbs. Psychic disturbance is acute." (p. 60)

How like this little teapot we are, I thought, as we retraced our steps back to the ship and home. We're all crackled and crazed and unexpectedly blessed by beauty in ways we, like a Raku potter, can never predict. We are "crafted." Powerful. And sometimes our hidden iridescence comes from smoke and fire. 

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.

The Lost Symbol

"To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books."
                The Secret Teachings of All Ages

That's how Dan Brown, aka The Da Vinci Code author, starts his latest book. Like his hero, Robert Langdon, I too have found that amazing things often hide in plain sight.

The other day I quit reading about all this Masonic lore long enough to visit some friends in Lexington, Mass. Before lunch we decided to take a walk over to the Heritage Center which, much to my amazement, contains a whole lot more than Revolutionary War books and Minute Man trivia. It's housed in the Massachusetts Masonic Center and I was suddenly surrounded by images of compasses and T squares, pyramids and all seeing eyes. 

And like the George Washington Masonic Memorial on a hill in Alexandria, VA (right) it, too, houses shelves of Masonic writings.

Besides learning more about D.C.'s monuments, some of which were crafted from Vermont White Granite, the quarry-source of which I can see from my upstairs window, I realized that the last time I stood in our Capitol Rotunda, I must not have looked up.

There it is--"The Apotheosis of George Washington." This 4,666 foot fresco created by Constantino Brumidi in 1865 forms a mystical circle whose title claims George Washington has "become God." Strange, isn't it, that we just recently learned that only 23% of Oklahoma's high school students even know he was our first president.

Besides intriguing me with magic squares and tatooed bad guys, The Lost Symbol inspired me to reread Exodus 34. That's the account of Moses, holding the two stone tablets, fresh back from his mountain-top conversation with God. Everybody says, "Look! The skin of his face is shining." But apparently the root word in Hebrew for shining skin could be read as either "horn" or "ray." When the Roman Catholic Church asked St. Jerome to translate the Hebrew into Latin, it came out "Moses' face was horned."

 

Michelangelo sculpted him that way. Other artists also turned Moses into a Pan or Hermes because of this mistake by Jerome, including this stained glass window in a Welsh church.

Language can be very slippery.  Horns? Rays of light?

I was amused by an account of a translation made in the 4th century which I learned about from Bart Ehrman in his book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. In the first part of the book of Hebrews (1:3) we read "Christ bears all things by the word of his power." The original scribe (and keep in mind that some of them couldn't even read but just copied lines; most did this intricate work by flickering candle light) used a verb that sounded similar in Greek: "Christ manifests all things by the word of his power." A couple hundred years later, a second scribe decided to change "manifests" to the more common reading "bears."  A couple of hundred years after that another scribe erased "bears" and put "manifest" back. And he added a note in the margin: "Fool and Knave! Leave the old reading, don't change it!" I notice in my version of that passage, it's neither "bears" or "manifests," but "sustains."  I think I like "manifests" better.

To manifest means to bring into being. To make evident. To be easily understood and readily perceived.

I suspect by his latest novel, Dan Brown will be manifesting increased tourism to Washington D.C., new interest in old mysteries, a deeper understanding of Masons and how they influenced our American history and architecture, an introduction (or for some of us, a re-introduction) to Noetics and lots of red-rimmed eyes for those of us who just couldn't put it down.

Handing off the Future

       I went to an organizational learning workshop a few years back led by John Dicus. At onepoint, John asked us to contemplate the question: “What do I need to steward my own future?" 

John passed around a  little crystal ball so we could “gaze into it” and see what came to us. Doubting (as I often do) the efficacy of these sorts of exercises, I sat there waiting for the ball to come my way. When I felt the cool weight of it in my left palm, I dutifully repeated the question to myself, and looked down. All I could see was my left hand. Then it hit me. Of course! My future depends on how I use my hands!

Since that exercise, I've left corporate publishing and have spent a great deal of time at the keyboard writing and helping others write--a "handy exercise." Two books will publish late this year/early next and over the past couple of days I've been handling the page proofs for both, thinking about the various hands I hope will soon hold a bound copy. One of the books, The Green Devotional, leads me ask: "What will we hand off to our children and grandchildren?" The book carries many messages of planetary plight as well as global hope.

And what did our ancestors hand off to us? I mean the ones way, way, way back.

Rings of Synchronicities

The author Daniel Pinchback (a Mayan calendar expert) said on public radio the other day that as we near 2012 we will all be experiencing more and more synchronicities. You know, those things that happen that shouldn’t happen because they have nothing to do with cause and effect.

My son Joel and I wrote about them in Hubab Ku in connection with archetypal symbols and the Mayan’s belief in harmonic resonance. Many people have told me that when they open Hunab Ku or Divine Sparks for some sort of inspiration, they are often amazed at how “right” for them at that very moment the page they "accidentally" turned to seems to be.  

In Velvet Shoes

 For weeks Lori’s friends have been at her bedside. Some read to her. Bits and pieces of short stories, poetry, Psalms, Celtic prayers,of course, one of her favorites: Jane Austen.

Her brain was assaulted a few months ago by one of those nasty crabby growths that reached in and plucked out her left lobe’s ability to say what she so wanted to say. Her word center has been deleted. Ironic, this turn of the screw, as her whole life has been one of word-reveling. Instead she’s reduced to “salad speech” originating somewhere deep within a morphine haze. She was a master English teacher and brought words to her students in ways many of them must still be reeling.

On Wings of Fire

Rising up out of its own ashes, every 500 years or so, the legendary phoenix imprints us with hope. It's a cross-cultural symbol for resurrection. Turkish texts claim the phoenix bears these words on its wings:

"Neither the earth produces me, nor the heavens, but only the wings of fire."

Chinese sources say the feng-huang originates in the sun and calls up the sun every morning with its perfect five-toned melody.

Now, as many Iranians face their own "flaming challenges," and each of us rises daily out of yesterday's "ashes," the phoenix points the way to our future days that can be scented, as its own nest is said to be, with frankincense, cinnamon and myrrh. May it be so!

From Hesiod to Harry Potter, the phoenix carries hope on its flaming wings. Suddenly one has appeared as a crop circle as well.

Photo by Oliver Morel

"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.