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]

Stone Shepherds

Only a short twenty mile drive north from Stonehenge (undoubtedly the most recognizable stone circle anywhere) stones silently march across the Wiltshire landscape at Avebury. I've visited this sacred English landscape several times--alone, with friends, with my son--and each time I leave thinking, "This place feels like a safe home."

One weekend, before the three large stones off to one side were circled with metal mesh, I sat under them munching a sandwich. Imagining. Who placed these huge stones, so precisely? Was their purpose to guard the night sky? I look at pictures of them now and wonder: What are they saying to us as we head into 2012?

Wherever they appear, stones so carefully positioned seem like shepherds out in their fields--the kinds of shepherds we hear about this time of year. The ones out watching over their flocks by night, waiting under the stars for important news.

More recent than the megalithic structures of Avebury, hundreds of "stone shepherds" made their way to the Polynesian island of Rapa Nui or Easter Island. They still stand there, guarding the island's perimeter, watching the night skies. Stéphanie Guisard has posted the most amazing collection of time lapse photography of the night sky--where the Milky Way dances! But it is her photos of these great "stone shepherds" that continue to stun me.

When I look at them, I hear angels singing, as they did that one Bethlehem star-filled night. "Fear not! Be of good cheer." And I revel in the mysteries, knowing that many shepherds stand watch over our planet.

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.

 

Squaring Circles; Finding Truths

Every truth has four corners. As a teacher, I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.  Confucius (551-479 BCE)

 

As your eyes move around from one image in this beautiful Kalachakra mandala, then to the next and the next, you eventually find yourself entering the middle—the Sacred Palace, the source of “All” through one of four gates or dorjes.  Once there, we’ve entered a “Timeless” and “Perfect, place. We become detached from all we thought was necessary. What's even more captivating about these intricate designs, often created from crushed colored sand, or colored chalk, is that once created they are swept away in order to show the impermanence of everything.

Rather like a flood.

In ancient Sanskrit mandala means “circle” These complex cultural symbols have intrigued me for years. I believe they carry deep meaning for anyone seeking healing and wholeness. Carl Jung and others have pointed out that the circle symbolizes eternity; the square, the earth--our senses. We are "both/and" beings.

Leonardo da Vinci filled up many notebooks with drawings of circles and squares, creating "heaven without end" and "four-squared boundaries of earth."

As we "go through" varous portals, we find ourself in a different space.

When people gather after Vermont’s devastation, we hear things like “People have been through so much.” And “I thought I was through the worst part, but not getting answers is worse. I don’t know what my insurance will give me. I thought FEMA would cover this.” Or “I just want to be through with all of this!” 

We try to square the circle; we just want normal.  But “normal’s” gone. Now there’s a new normal. It's filled with unknowns. And it's compounded for many of us with with survivor guilt. Even if we haven’t lost a loved one or a house or a farm or a business, we still feel loss. And it’s immense. Experts on disaster recovery call this “ambiguous loss.”  We’re seeing only one corner of the square, and we’re feeling diminished, somehow, by not knowing the truths of the other three corners.

Yet we know the truths are there—so we keep looking. And moving through.

 

Soul Work and Weed Control

My expert gardener friend will be visiting soon and I look at my own gardens and think: Darn! Where did all those weeds come from? I could get out there and frantically try to dig them out, but I’m in more of an August mind to just let them go. Who says they’re weeds, as another friend recently said to me. They have every right to live, too. If I dig them all out, she wisely pointed out, I’ll destroy the wildflowers that are also there. So, they stay. Uncontrolled. Mathew Fox, not the actor but the theologian, once said, “The opposite of control is celebration.” I decide to celebrate the weeds.

Thinking of weed-control leads me to another conversation I had recently—this time with my son. We were discussing what “control” means and why it’s popped into his consciousness at this time. Is it about “being controlled,” “controlling others,” or wanting to feel some “control” while being surrounded by chaos. I certainly don’t have any answers but I’ve collected some thoughts over the years. We’re living in a techno-controlled world—and we wonder who’s in control of all that information. Governments? The military? A hidden group of rich people with immense power? I read recently that the British learned all about fingerprinting from the Bengalis and then used it to control them—along with others. It’s a reality that GPS radio devices are implanted, not just in animals for ID purposes, but also in people. Lest we veer, here, into conspiracy-theory-land, suffice it to say I have it on “good authority.”

So who’s in control?  And do we choose to live, as Riane Eisler has put it, in a dominator culture with rigid hierarchies and punishments, or a partnership culture where all can flourish? Do we seek power “over” or power “with”?

In the book I’m reading right now by Carolyn Myss called Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul, tied to St. Teresa of Avila’s The Inner Castle, she talks about chaos and control and how it’s our “soul work” to recognize both. Disruptive behavior creates chaos by which people try to control others or try to control the world. She says, “Ultimately, every act of divine chaos is an attempt to affirm that there is actually a plan for us on Earth.” I’m not saying that earthquakes or hurricanes—or death—are “divine interventions” but I do believe that we live in a divine paradox. It may feel out of control, yet is held for us in such a way that weeds and flowers can grow up together—and both be beautiful. And valued.

Harry Potter Mysteries

The two biggest mysteries (to me) of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” were:

How does Harry keep his glasses on, even while swimming, or flying?

How does Ralph Fiennes (aka Lord Voldemort) breath without a nose?

My inner child wanted to go see the final chapter in this long, long saga of a boy, specially marked, because fantasy sheds light on my hidden places. I love the fact that J.K. Rowling studied the classics at Exeter and reveres language. Did you know, for example, that she got “quidditch” from the Latin “quidditas”—a word that means “giveness”?

And give, that fat series of marvelous books did. To generations of children. She “got” the entire plot while riding on a train one day, scribbled it down and the rest is history: 4200 pages and eight movies. I’ve read each page and sat through all 20 hours of the films. I was usually surrounded by kids but I noticed there were more adults wearing black 3-D glasses in the theater this week than children. Maybe the kids were off watching Winnie the Pooh. Maybe they’d all gone the first week it was showing. Maybe they were in denial about it all being over and just couldn’t face it. Or, like Daniel Radcliffe himself, perhaps they’ve all gone on to other things.

Throughout the series I've been more aware of "magic" and "magus." Harry was one who could "hold power," which is what magus means. Reading Rowlings' books makes me more aware that we need not be Hogwarts' graduates to know that powerful wisdom is embedded everywhere.

I dropped my 3-D glasses into the recycle box, wondering if each one of us, like Harry, struggles over a similar complicated relationship with evil. Are we all intertwined with whatever that blunt-nosed “thing” is that wants to dominate and destroy? And on the other hand, is each of us also capable of a Harry-like love-wrapped sacrifice for our friends? I suspect it’s both, and.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yuks, Yoiking and Joik

Thanks to my active presence in a wonderful web offering called The Powers of Place Initiative and it’s interactive website I have read some of Kye Nelson’s new poetry form: joiku

They fill me with joy. Check them out. 

Anyone following SophiaServe for long might remember that I’m quite enamored of ancestry.com’s ability to pull all kinds of people off the limbs of your tree and one of mine happens to be a Sami woman. They’re the reindeer people from the far north and I read every book about them I can get my hands on. Most celebrate their shamans. Some fight for their reindeer rights. Some just sing. From Leonova Carrington’s novel: The Healing Trumpet I learned of a Sami shaman, who sings and tells of tales of power. Lapland’s triple goddesses are called: Sar, Juks and Yuks. Aha!

She ends her book this way:
“If the old woman can’t go to Lapland, then Lapland must come to the old woman.”

As I approach  my 71^st birthday in a few days, I'm “yoiking.”

Another book I loved is Creation’s Heartbeat   Following in the Reindeer Spirit by Linda Schiere Leonard. A dream of running with pregnant reindeer inspired her book. For the Sami people the passageway to the “other world” is through what they call “Lapp Gate” in Northern Norway. Other names for this gate are Kiruura in Northern Sweden and Kautokeino in Finland.

The other day a fawn hopped across our driveway and I was reminded of my own fawn dream a few years back when one came to me and I cradled it, feeling its warm fur and large beating heart.I kept it safe. Every now and then, I attempt to “joik” it back to me.

I describe my own encounter with the Sami Folk Minister in Stockholm a few years ago in Sophia: The Feminine Face of God (which by the way is about to publish by Divine Arts) or read about it here by clicking on its cover to the right.

By now, you can see why Kye Nelson’s joiku found a warm place in my heart.  She joins the precise line form of a haiku (5-7-5) or sometimes (5-6-5) with the Sami process of the Joik or Yoik—calling back to make physically present someone or something that might not be in your present physical reality. It celebrates their truth—their strengths and their frailties. It celebrates the essence of that person, place or thing in as few words as possible. Now when I contemplate an invocation, I’ll think: “in-yoik-ation.” Here’s a tribute to my mother, Kye, and thanks!

 

She baked rhubarb pies

from lush umbrellas of green

Dad watered and fed.

 

Some had crispy tops

Some shimmering meringues

All spoke of her love.

I Cloud, Eye Cloud, Aye! Cloud

  I just read a Fast Company article called “How Apple Will Draft Everyone Into the Cloud. Or Else” and I’m smiling as I wonder how Icloud and Steve Jobs will now affect my Apple stock.

Oh, sure, Google and Amazon and others are storing music and all kinds of files on “cloudy servers somewhere up there” but Apple promises so much more and so much faster and so much more intuitively…but haven’t they always? They promise that "all my stuff” will be where I want it—instantly on any of my Apple devices. When Jobs introduced it earlier this week, he admitted that he had to rewrite their synching devices “from the ground up.” But isn’t that always how clouds are formed? From water rising from the earth?

When I was an undergraduate at U. Wis. Eau Claire I studiously avoided taking math classes by enrolling in Zoology for Pre Med Majors (a stretch!) and Geography (a breeze!). One assignment for that class I remember was the "difficult" task of checking a campus outdoor thermometer every day for a semester in order to determine that indeed daily temperatures do peak at 4 p.m. The other thing I learned was how to identify clouds and memorize their Latinate names. Of course our four year old grandaughter could now do this in about two minutes with the help of Google. Nimbus, cirrus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus…

Hoping to learn something new about knowledge and wisdom, I turned this past week to The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (who also inspired me with his Chaos). Gleick ends his tome by reminding us that we’re all patrons of the Library of Babel now…and we’re all librarians. Still we keep wondering what it is we know because in cyberspace everything lies in shadows. Cloudy shadows. Jobs and others are just trying to help solve (or exacerbate, I don’t know which) our information overload fatigue.

Information anxiety can co-exist with boredom—an ironic twist. If  you're like me, you feel as if you're drowning in this “Total Noise” as David Foster Wallace put it in 2007. “A tsunami of available fact, context and perspective.” Our main strategy for coping, Gleick advises, is filter and search. But who will search and who will filter? Bloggers wonder: are their too many mouths or too many ears? Clouds of data/information/knowledge and dare we hope, wisdom, “loom over us,” Gleick says, “not quite visible, not quite tangible, but awfully real. [I place emphasis on “awfully.”]…amorphous, spectral, hovering nearby, yet not situated in any one place. Heaven must once have felt this way to the faithful. People talk about shifting their lives to the cloud—their informational lives at least…All traditional ideas of privacy, based on doors and locks, physical remoteness and invisibility, are upended in the cloud.” (p. 396)

If not an analogy to heaven, surely one to “noosphere” as my favorite Jesuit philospher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, explained it. “Does it not seem as though a great body is in the process of being born…its interdependence with and responsibility for a whole in evolution?”

It hurts my head to think about all this, so I’ll just lie on the lawn and watch cloud pictures forming and morphing across a brilliant blue Vermont sky and trust to all the rest.

Poetry or Computers? Poetry and Computers?

 

Ah! Ada,

What would you make of today's hactivists…WikiLeaks…stolen identities and Twitter pranks? It’s the world we now live in—but it’s a world I believe you foresaw.

Lord Byron’s daughter turned out to be a poet-analyst, a programmer long before the computer was actually available. Augusta “Ada” Byron or Lady Lovelace as she was presented to the young queen Victoria, was Charles Babbage’s muse. They met when she was seventeen and she fell in love with his mind and his “thinking machine.”  Babbage, like Ada--an original thinker, was obsessed with codes and sending messages and came up with an electric telegraph idea. He saw messages from the past encoded in tree rings; he standardized postal rates in England; he devised light house signals and created track signals for his beloved railroads.

Ada grew up believing she had a Divine Mission. "Heaven has alloted me some peculiar intellectal-moral mission to perform," she said. She had an uncanny ability to perceive hidden realities, an intuitive perception not many others shared. Coupled with her immense energy, she had reasoning faculties that bordered on genius.

Twice her age, his mind and hers fit beautifully. Back when a woman couldn’t enter a scientific society, he provided her with a tutor and she soon flew past trigonometry. She immediately understood the beauty of his cogged gear-wheeled machine which she likened to a card punched Jacquard weaving machine capable of  “weaving algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” She rewrote his papers and forced Babbage to use clearer language to describe this “analytical machine” capable, she told him, of producing meaningful language—even music. This machine was, she knew, so much more than a “numbers/calculating” machine.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. called this machine a “Frankenstein monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder, which turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind out a thousand bushels of them!”  But then IBM created Watson. 

Ada’s mind, a perfectly balanced right and left machine of its own, easily moved from poetry to math and she actually programmed, in her mind, a machine that didn’t yet exist. She understood symbols and could foresee all the variables and possible contingencies for this machine—the probable and the improbable, as she put it, alike. Babbage and Ada laid the foundation for messaging, encoding and processing.

Before the Countess of Lovelace died at a very young age from cancer, she foresaw her beloved machines moving lockstep, marching, marching to some music she could just barely make out. She saw them harmoniously disciplined. How disciplined, we now ask. Will the next generation of computers actually begin to think and act like humans? And will that be a good thing?

Picasso once said “Computers are useless. They only give answers.” 

But when, as Ada foresaw, will they start asking questions? Will computers ever be able to ponder, as Ada's father did, "When coldness wraps this suffering clay, Ah! whither strays the immortal mind?"

My Compliments to the Complements

In one of the many letters Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, he said: “The laws of colors are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental.”

Whether my friend Sharon, the gardener, planned this duet of violets to pop up on cue in front of her yellow irises, or whether Mother Earth simply provided it, either way, it wasn’t accidental. Spring makes me realize how it complements autumn when our trees turn orange against the bluest of blue skies. Conservatives complement progressives. Tall complements short. Elders complement children. And as Leonardo da Vinci proved, ugliness complements beauty.

What could be more spring-like than yellow and purple? Complementary colors (you know, the ones opposite each other on the color wheel) do amazing things to the eye as well as the soul. It’s why we put red and green together for Christmas. And why Gauguin brushed verdant jungles behind red skin and Jan van Eyck painted his famous fifteenth century Arnolfini Marriage couple with her in a massive green gown against a red paneled wall.  When your eye catches combinations like this it’s what nineteenth century artists called “moral harmonies.”

It took Matisse until the end of his life to realize you don’t control colors. He said it’s the relationships that take charge.

It may take us until the end of our lives to truly value our relationships. We need life-experiences to help us realize that harmony comes from compliments as well as complements—our ability to value the differences in each other and not try to control them or change them. And above all, we begin to catch on to the fact that these “moral harmonies” are never accidental.

Dirt Roads and Humility

 
 After a recent trip through the glorious red bud, azealea, dogwood territory of the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah Valley, we turned by our mailbox only to find our upper road blocked by stone, broken culverts and about sixty feet of washouts. Our neighbor down the road kindly offered to let us park a car in her drive. The damage was caused by only about fifteen minutes of very hard rain. And our town crews can't repair it until the road hardens enough to get heavy equipment in.

But we are lucky. We have two cars, so once we park and walk back across the chasm, we can get to “civilization” in the other car.

Others are not so fortunate. Eight hundred million people live each day on our planet without adequate roads, water, sanitation or food. What’s a little inconvenience, I asked myself, as I carried several bags of groceries, (thankful that we do have food and water) and our luggage across rivulets of water and up the hill. After all, I reminded myself, people come to Vermont to experience independence! Rural living offers different options. New learning experiences. Fresh eggs and maple syrup fresh from the trees. What’s a little walk? I smiled and heard myself say to no one within earshot, “Well, this is certainly an adventure!”

The hard-fighting, hard-drinking, fast-shooting Green Mountain boys made all this possible—and I’m grateful. Vermont was an independent Republic from 1763 to 1791. We coined our own money, printed our own stamps, conducted foreign policy and even elected a president: Thomas Chittendon.  We also, I am proud to say, outlawed slavery. It was a Vermonter who got the very first US patent. It was signed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and was for making potash. From reading The Vermont Papers, I realize to do all this, Ethan Allen’s boys didn’t even have to kill any British soldiers because the Brits had the flu during the crucial battle.  Irony tosses her pretty head in Vermont. I remembered the authors of that book said Vermont is physically in the past but technologically in the future.  Amen to that, I thought, as I dodged another washout.

This is the sacred week which I always use for introspection. I’ve been reading Parker Palmer’s little book, Let Your Life Speak. Like Palmer, I left teaching but we both remain learners and educators at heart. This is also the week I rake and uncover a few tender plants. Following sunshine, we got hail and cold rain and I realized, as Palmer points out, how close to “humus” is the word “humility.” We proudly think it’s spring and then it’s not. We get mud on our shoes. But that’s how people and gardens grow.

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.

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

 

 

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.

Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, Men Adore You

We join hundreds of other Sunday afternoon art lovers clamoring through long corridors and clumping up and down marble stairs to gawk at this Parisian monstrosity, this out of human scale U-shaped palace called the Louvre. By the time we reach the salon where Mona Lisa stares across hundreds of bobbing heads,my feet telegraph a message: it’s time to leave. But of course I can’t. Not without seeing her up close. Everyone since the Da Vinci Code has to, at least once in their life. Now’s my time.

Inching toward the rope, I eagerly anticipate this “newly-laid egg…beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh little cell by cell.” Instead, I’m served up a sporadic omelet of red flashes from tourists’ phones and cameras. Silly, silly tourists, who, in spite of all the signs with black camera icons with red slashes, insist on taking her photo. “Buy a post card,” I mumble as I jostle closer to the rope hoping to see her lacquer cracks.

Freud loved her. The painting trembles with sensuality he said, but he wasn’t surrounded by all these hellish red flashes. He saw contrasts between reserve and seduction—but then, didn’t he always?

I squint and imagine somewhere behind her protective glassy box, sits a 24 year old woman painted by a 51 year old Tuscan artist. A genius who’d been around. Now she smiles at me. It might be her wedding portrait. She is Madonna Lisa, “La Gioconda” the girl who at fifteen married the Marquese del Giocondo, a wealthy Florentine silk merchant. But this portrait apparently never hung in their swanky bedroom. Vasari, the sixteenth century author, tells us Leo worked on it for at least four years, some say ten, and he never really finished it. In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari follows the painting to France with Leo. And our very knowledgeable guide, Catherine Chamoux, assures us this is where it’s going to stay.

The flashes continue as my mind morphs back to a book I once read about Lisa di Antonie Gherardini: I, Mona Lisa by Jeanne Kalogridis. It was filled with Medici magic and Vatican intrigue. At the end of the book (spoiler alert) Leonardo tells Lisa he is her father, not Guiliano Medici. Now, there’s an interesting take on who she might be. But my eyes wander to her hands. Are they masculine? Hmm. And no eyebrows. She’s playing with us. No wonder the French call her La Jocande—the joker lady.

ML's lips continue to hold that enigmatic smile. Perhaps she's smiling because she knows that the resulting photos will contain only flashbacks bounced back from her protective glass. Or is she, as Kenneth Clark asks, “worldly, watchful and self-satisfied?” But may there may be something more sinister? She’s been described as “older than rocks…like  a vampire.” A Lady of the Lake, drawing men to their watery graves. Eve, after the apple incident.

Or is she an artist’s soul unveiled? Lillian Schwartz of Bell Labs computerized, flipped and merged Leo’s self-portrait computer image with Mona Lisa’s and she claims they match perfectly.

He painted the darks first and then built up the light areas.The rocky pinnacles, experts tell us, are as important as her face—and like all his landscapes, this one claims no specific geography. His rocks are the bones of the earth. Mist and clouds are droplets ready to return to rain and rivers. This is the man who once said “The earth is moved from its position by the weight of a tiny bird resting upon it.” Leonardo da Vinci, whom Kenneth Clark called relentlessly curious, also said, “Everything comes from everything and everything is made out of everything and everything returns into everything.”

This man who could describe the tongue of a woodpecker and see infinity in knots, embraced ambiguity. I decide as I slip behind the wall supporting Mona Lisa, that he might even be able to see gentility in this jostling crowd.

Wild Turkeys

Eleven wild turkeys bob and quietly chirp their way across our lawn as rusty leaves flutter down around their skinny legs. "You could have been our 'eagles' if Franklin had had his way," I tell them. "Eagles and turkeys are both bald. You both fly, but, of course, you don’t exactly soar. Americans like soaring."

Ben wrote a letter to his daughter saying turkeys are respectable birds and worthy of being our national emblem. He thought they were much more moral than eagles who just wait around and steal fish from other birds. Old Ben had quite a sense of humor so he may have just been kidding. But if he’d have had his way, we’d have them on our flags and we'd sing songs about turkeys from shore to shore. (Except for Alaska--no turkeys there.)  But now they're  just flighty remnants of early Thanksgiving myths.

Seeing the flock up close and personal is a rare treat. Nearby corn fields would be pretty attractive, so the fact that these turkeys think it’s neat to hang around our yard fills my heart with gratitude. I love how seriously they take their job of community building. They forage together. They really work for those nuts and seeds—a constant head-bobbling process that must be difficult since they're all a little cross-eyed. While they sometimes nip at each other and have their little spats, it’s clear they do look out for each other. Heads up!  Danger! Any one of them can assume crossing-guard duty.  I’ve seen them walking around our neighbor's fields with the day care crowd—dozens of little chicks that the aunties pool and watch over together.

Unless someone shoots them in the next month, most will likely live three or four years. But the hens will continue to struggle with “sexual dimorphism.” That means no matter how many nuts and berries the hens eat, they'll always be smaller and their feathers will remain a duller grey than the iridescent purple, green, copper and bronzed bearded Toms among them who will continue to fan their imaginations each time they strut their stuff and shake those red wattles. You can hear them a mile away.  Especially in the spring. The hens had better not be jealous. Those males are randy dandies. And they won't hang around to help with the kids. 

"We almost lost you, you know." I tell them. "Seriously. You were down to about 30,000. But thanks to concerted efforts in the 1940s, you’re back now.  You and your eastern relatives probably number about five million. So if you care to head north, we can spare a few of you to help to repopulate Canada.  If you have any trouble at the border, tell them Ben Franklin sent you."

Thomas Berry, the eco-theologian whom many of us revere, once said of his meadow: Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive.

 Eleven turkeys. That simple. That pervasive.

Good and Just and Beautiful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Stony Place

Early this morning, I look out over our misty hills across trees veiled in soft light and mouth the words of a favorite Celtic prayer:

God bless to me the new day

Never vouched safe to me before

Bless thou to me mine eye

May mine eye bless all it sees

Spring in Vermont reminds me of one April in Ireland, visiting ancient sites with our older son.
We had driven through miles of gorse and grass only to find ourselves on a promontory south of Galway Bay called An Boirenn. The Burren, aptly named, means "A stony place." It's cushioned on one side by Kerry and on the other by the purple Connemara mountains. We both said, "We're on the moon!"

As my husband would readily tell you, I collect stones from places I visit. So, yes, I picked up a rock from this bare and lonely ten mile long, ten mile wide Ireland. Nature carved my bit of the Burren's austere limestone landscape with angular "clints" and "grykes." Ice once sheeted this western corner of the Emerald Isle and left it all looking like an over-sized unreclaimed terraced mining site. It's where much of the gold and silver that formed their intricately patterned brooches and torcs came from. The terrain is pocked with shafts and caves from all that smashing, hammering and melting.

The people who once lived here among  the numerous stone forts and galley graves followed Brehon law--not the laws of the English which later became our own.

People were paid for their labors in flax and wool, in weighed-out silver, and in milk cows. A "set" of treasure was valued as half an ounce of silver and one milk cow equaled one ounce of silver. They clearly defined who should and who should not be given loans. They couldn't have imagined a time when people put their treasure in misty derivatives and futures.

They called legal seven kinds of marriages and didn't waste their time disputing loving unions.

They fined people who committed crimes and paid honor prices to those injured; they had no need for prisons. If harm of any kind was caused--a fine was paid.

They held their judges to very high standards--judges who spent decades studying law. They believed  three things can cause a kingdom's ruin: a judge who takes bribes, an unlearned judge and an unjust judge.

They believed someone who steals a needle from a poor embroidery woman had to pay a higher fine than it if it had been a queen's needle that was stolen.

And, most importantly, perhaps, they believed words matter. Even satire. Words can maim. The penalty for unjust satire or mockery was equivalent of a person's honor price. It was as if that person had been killed.

It 's obvious they weren't burdened by greedy lobby groups, hate media, or fear-mongering.

The sun was going down and we were still driving around The Burren looking for a particular dolmen. When we found it, we paused for a few quiet moments to bless the people who once lived so very carefully on this austere land.

Red Gold with Gems

"But Volund sat alone in Wolfdale,

He set red gold closely with gems..."

Poetic Edda, "Lay of Volund"

 

The unpronounceable Eyjafjallajökull volcano had been sleeping for 2000 years. Some handsome prince must have kissed her because she’s certainly awake now. And she’s spewing ash—well, not really ash but tiny jagged particles of rock and glass.  I’ve stood on the edge of Kilauea’s crater, I’ve watched Stromboli erupt at night and I’ve seen Etna smoking and marveled at what’s left over from the long-ago Vesuvian tragedy.  Like airline pilots, I have great respect for Gaia as she burps and spits.

Whether it’s Krakatoa, Pinatubo, Mt. St Helens or any number of hot mountains around the world, all volcanoes bear Vulcan’s imprint. The Greek god of fire was described as lame, deformed and ugly. How Hephaestus, as he was also called, became lame is a disputed matter. Some say Zeus threw him out of heaven and he landed badly. Or Hera (his mother) may have harmed him.  However it happened, he quickly became the friend of us mortals because of his knack for smithing. Homer tells us how he crafted exquisite armor and jewelry. He even forged some handmaidens of gold to help him. (Some say he walked around on gold high-heeled shoes, but that may just be a rumor.) He set up shop beneath certain mountains where he forged thunderbolts for the gods. The Odyssey claims he married the lovely Aphrodite, proving once again women can look beyond obvious blemishes and see a man who is sensitive and appreciates the arts.

Hawaiians believe the beautiful volcano goddess Pele needs to be placated every now and again by tossing her a suckling pig (or bottle of gin.) The coastal people of British Columbia tell how the trickster Raven brought humans fire from the nearest volcano. The Scandinavians call the volcano woman Hel and the Japanese, Fiji.

Metalurgy has long been linked with magic. Deep in the Berkshire Hills of England near the White Horse of Uffington you can visit Wayland, the Smith's forge. If you bring your horse there at night, they say, by morning he will have shoed it for you. Blacksmiths can bend metal and forge amazing things. They were powerful figures, so before long the church called smithing "the devil's work." Because Gypsies often ply the craft, they are often suspect--old prejudices die hard.

I look at the pictures coming from Iceland and wonder what gold might be pounded from this smithing. Is the eruption a visual metaphor for the pent-up anger so many seem to be feeling right now? Is it a "sign" of end-times? Or is it a way for Gaia to tell us we can't control everything, nor will our technology solve all our problems.

Perhaps what's emerging from Volund's burning Icelandic cauldron is a new respect for our Earth.

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?