Sophia Serve

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.

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?

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.

Flowers of Venus

(Photo by Carol Frenier)

Yesterday my friend Carol e-mailed me this vibrant iris. She calls each by name. Her garden blooms for Venus—and, now, because of blogging, it blooms here. For all of us. Unlike Carol, I rarely remember plant names but I love them no less. Our more common purple and yellow varieties are spiked here and there by Siberian irises (well, I do know one) which the prior owner left as unfurling flag markers to remind us she was here.

For some reason, maybe because Venus and love are in the air, this June various friends have popped in with white ones and light blue ones. Last weekend I saw a froth of cinnamon mocha latte on a stem. Oh, and my friend Joe has a black iris. I admit, I sink into serious iris envy every time I visit him in June. I often trade iris-laden birthday gifts with Mary Ann, one of my dear and constant Wisconsin friends. Iris mugs, Monet’s iris bags, paintings, jewelry, crafted boxes. For us, irises are a special way of defining our friendship.

When she was able to enjoy them, I gave my friend Lori fat vases full of irises from my garden. She loved them. Lori’s mind and body now weaken and we who call her our friend know she prepares to leave us. She's actually told us so. "I'm going. I'm going."

Romans believed irises purify the air. Frank Waters said, "Breathing is an act of prayer." May Lori’s oxygen last as long as she cares to draw it in. And then, may we gently
     let 
          her 
                 go.

This illustration of three irises can be found on page 148 of Hunab Ku. They're drawn from a Minoan wall mural from around 2000 BC from Knossos, Crete.
Joel and I chose it because it's about "Breathing". We closed that essay with a Pueblo Prayer: "I add my breath to your breath, that our days may be long on the Earth."

Just as the early morning dew caresses the deep purple beard of Carol’s iris, the tears from Lori’s extended family lace our own “falls”—that’s what Carol calls the petals that droop. Grief IS a falling. A falling into a deep purple place. None of us knows how to land or even if we will land.  But I suspect each of us eventually will come to a petal-softened spot of our own choice and time.

In a few days, Carol’s fuzzy bearded flower friends will, like Lori, decide it's time to go. The blossoms of an iris shrink, become exceedingly moist and regardless of their original size or color, through some common telepathy sensed only by these flowers of Venus, they morph into peeled parchment cocoons. Like dripping candles, they all point up.

From Bakelite to Being Light

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

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

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

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