Sophia Serve

Poor Human Stuff

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to one another.”

                                Mother Teresa of Calcutta

I just finished reading Corban Addison’s compelling story of two young sisters, Ahalya and Sita, who survive the Indonesian tsunami only to be taken captive by another storm—the storm of sexual predators. A Walk Across the Sun (2012, Quercus Books) is fiction based on fact—the best kind.

Slavery and trafficing in human flesh is now bigger business than any former slave trade ever was. How can that be?  Today?   It’s a business bringing sex entrepreneurs over $30 billion a year in profits, that's how. And they’re not about to let all that money go.

Pimps can earn $300,000 a year from each girl in their clutches. Why sell drugs, one at a time, when you can force a young girl to have sex six or seven times a night and reap the benefits over and over until she overdoses from her depression and the drugs used to keep her in captivity, or they kill her because she tries to escape. Like any profitable business, they throw away any used up “product” that no longer brings in cash.

Even though there are data bases of kidnapped children, tracing these lost souls across the planet is extremely difficult. Their slave-owners are rich, smart, and know how to cover their tracks. They market and transport their sex products to where the buyers are. Thousands and thousands of underaged prostitutes get trucked and flown around every day.They're taken to any place men seek pleasure in young flesh. This wholesaling of flesh takes place openly in cultures where young boys think that love is sex and sex is rape. You'll find this trafficing outside military bases. At truck stops.  “Escort” services in any city. Sex tourism. A man is willing to buy them at higher prices if he doesn’t have to use a condom. You'll find them on Internet sites featuring younger and younger “exotic product.” It all takes place within a vicious network of corrupt police, incompetent judicial systems, and people willing to look the other way.

In India, whole towns are brothels. One person in Addison's book described the girls who live there as “Bedia girls. Women from their caste have been prostitutes for centuries…all of them gorgeous...Their parents groom them to become bar girls.” And poor street children go where they might be fed.

There are many young women traveling to other countries to be workers or nannies—or so they are told—and then their passports are confiscated and they are subsequently ordered to forget their old identiies and are forced into sex slavery. In Russia,they are simply lumped together and called Natashas. 

Or young girls go to New York to become models and actresses and find themselves crammed into back rooms or basements until their next “evening dates.” Many of them have run away from abusive households hoping against all hope to find something better. They rarely do.

And of course, the young women forced into prostitution make no money for themselves from these perverse transactions. Furthermore, most are kept in the poorest of slave conditions—no heat, little food, minimal health care, and they sleep on the floor or in a few beds all packed together. Many are forced into vans and driven around to parking lots where truckers hang out. These young women, their slave owners call “lot lizards.”

I find myself wondering where today’s underground railroad is for these poor young things. There are abolitionist groups, but they are not growing nearly as fast as the trafficking trade itself.  So I went to a government site to learn more about forced labor and sex trafficing. Then I checked out the Polaris Project and Shared Hope. I learned more from Janice Redmond and Donna Hughes' scholarly work on the sex industry. But rather than an industry, I prefer to call it slavery.

How will it end?  When men stop needing their flesh. It's a market economy, after all.

The first step in ending slavery as Harriet Tubman taught us in the 19^th century is to escape yourself, then make others aware of the escape routes. “I grew up like a neglected weed,” she said, “ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.” 

Or as Sojourner Truth put it, we women had better ban together to do something about this. “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.”  And “Religion without humanity is poor human stuff.”  Poor, indeed.

Blown Away by Winter Reading

“The snow had begun to descend in thick icy flakes…”  That’s how Peter Tremayne’s latest “Fidelma” book begins.  Life obviously does follow art.

I had no more than begun to read The Chalice of Blood, another story of how this brilliant nun-lawyer solves crimes, when ice began to form on all the trees around our house. Our birches, too, were now bending, heavy with possibilities of breaking. Ice slipped from our metal roof in sheets like giant rectangles of crystal glass waiting to shatter.

Storm-watching and weather-predicting are state sports in Vermont. No one who has a radio could not help but know this one was coming. We’d stocked up. More sand. More salt. More groceries. And of course, another stop at our favorite library. I had no more than walked in when Librarian Amy handed me 1222 by Anne Holt. “I think you’ll like this, but I’m a bit embarrassed at giving you the latest in what’s a series and so far the only one in English. Why don’t publishers translate these things in sequence?” she muttered as she went on shelving books.

I wasn’t fussy. I’ll read them “out of order.” I’d never heard of this author, but she was Norwegian, after all. My people!  How could I not like it?

I did. I finished it and then filled the bathtub with water (for toilet flushing in case the power goes out—we all do this in Vermont. I learned early on how many buckets of melted snow even one flush takes. We keep talking about getting a generator, but so far that’s in the category of a really good plan.)

 Holt’s book is called “The Scandiavian Phenomenon.” Hyperbole?  No. Her wheel-chair confined retired police woman is a compelling character. The kind of woman you’d like to get to know better. The title comes from the name of a resort hotel called Finse 1,222 because it’s 1,222 meters above sea level. Why is it that I always read about storms when we’re headed into a major storm? I suppose it’s for the same perverse reason I once read The Night of the Grizzly out loud to our young sons as we drove through Glacier Park. 

Each of her twelve chapters is cleverly named after numbers 1-12 on the Beaufort Wind Scale which was developed by English Rear Admiral Francis Beaufort in 1805. The scale goes from calm to snowflakes falling vertically with a side-to-side motion a 1 m.p.h. to “The mountain is boiling. Lichen and branches from the trees are carried along by the wind. It is extremely difficult to ski,” at scale 8, 39-46 m.p.h. Oh, those hearty Norskes! And it progresses through 11 which Holt describes as “severe damage to forests” and finally to 12: Hurricane force with winds up to 83 m.p.h.  Her story escalates along with the wind and with similar velocity.

As I turned the last page I got an email photo from a friend who is in another Beaufort—but this one is a coastal paradise in South Carolina. Her sunny relaxed face framed against palmettos and a sandy beach contrasted sharply with the one I saw looking back at me from the mirror…pale, red eyes, rather sleepy looking.  Think bears hibernating.

Never mind. We like winter. So, on to Fidelma. She’ll perk me up with her brilliant, anti-establishment ways. It’s obvious I like my heroines, like Fidelma and Hanne Wilhelmsen, to be caring but callous when they have to be; smart, but not cocky; abrasive only when it’s definitely called for and empathetic to the downtrodden.  

And I like my author’s characters to say something profound every now and then. Something important. Something like Magnus Streng, the height-challenged doctor says to Hanne when he is describing what his father was like. He was of the old school, a zoology professor. Every night he read to young Magnus from his textbooks about animals. Ants. Elephants. Lions. Hyenas. “The message was clear enough: we are all needed. We are necessary here on earth. Small and large, fat and thin, ugly and beautiful. I was good enough. I am good enough.”

We don’t need a Beaufort Wind Scale to measure how good we are. We just have to remember that we already are!

Soup Mantra for 2012

After several days in Barcelona, steeped in Antoni Gaudi’s colorful swirling architecture, including the extra-terrestrial spired  Sagrada Familia cathedral, the fairy-taled magical Park Güell, 

    

 

the Pedrera, an apartment building with no straight lines and a roof that offers the most amazing views of the city, and, of course, Casa Batilló’s dragon chimney, the more down to earth 1950’s Casa el Cherro invited us in to enjoy yet another face of Spain. 

We’d driven west along the Mediterranean coast toward Malaga for hours and the prospect of walking a few blocks to dinner, even past several abandoned store fronts laced with graffiti, was very inviting. Our stomachs demanded more than chocolate pastries and juicy oranges, as wonderful as they were. 

Casa el Cherro proved to be an intimate combination neighborhood deli, tapas bar, restaurant, taverna and meat market. I’d recommend it to you if I could describe how we actually found it in Murcia after navigating several roundabouts through narrow streets.

I don’t totally understand the Catalonian penchant for hanging dried Iberian “black” hams everywhere from roadside fast food cafeteria ceilings to  fancier eating establishments. But, by the time I entered Casa el Cherro’s, the long legged Jamon, like pork stalactites precariously swinging over my head, no longer surprised me. If my Spanish had been better, I could have read what was written on the little inverted plastic pyramids attached to their bottoms. Perhaps it quoted Animal Farm: some pigs may be more equal than others. Or these inverted funnels may have been designed to simply catch stray drips. I had over the course of the past several days quietly watched these wrapped and netted salty legs, but never caught a drip in the act. Unlike our plumped-up fatty, rounder hams, the need for drip-catching seemed unnecessary. These porkers had taken on more of the dense aura of beef jerky. But I wondered, what sort of pigs had legs like these? Obviously taller and skinnier than any I have ever known.

Our congenial host ushered us to a table away from still other rows of hanging meats and with a soft, ironed white linen napkin with a discreetly woven "Casa el Cherro" safely tucked in my lap, I pretended to read the menu. No pictures. No alternative English explanations. Every now and then a white-aproned grandfatherly or elderly uncle figure appeared from what must be the kitchen back there just behind a lighted curio cabinet sporting a glass-enclosed…you guessed it…super-huge pig leg.

In my halting Spanish, I asked what was the soup. Caliente, I hoped. Si. What’s in it?

“It is what it is.”  That’s what he said. I ordered it and I loved it, although I did share little hunks of what I determined was liver, to my liver-loving husband. 

So that’s how I got my new soup-mantra. And I feel it will apply to anything 2012 dishes up. I’ll look at it, recognize a few floating bits, be curious about what else lurks below the surface, but I’ll calmly enjoy it because… “It is what it is.”

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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?"

Ever Expanding Circles

  I know a man named Bob Stilger who has spent the last two months in Japan. He is there on behalf of The Berkana Institute, New Stories and the ALIA Institute. What's he doing there, likely exposing himself to excessive radiation?

He's expanding the circles.

Most recently, he invited sixty people to a three day gathering in a safe and beautiful place. His team has made numerous trips to Fukushima where, as he says, "land is life" and they don't know when the water will be drinkable and the soil safe for growing food. People tell Bob, if they hear the word gambare [gahm-bar-a] one more time they will go mad. Gambare means "do your best." A  half a million people from that northern area are either without jobs or homes or both.

When tornadoes dip down with crushing force and so many people in our midwest and southern states find themselves now without homes or jobs or both, the circle widens.

What a gift to read Bob's e-diary and his first hand account of how he gathered fifteen people from Fukushima--many youngsters--to join sixty Japanese people of all ages, for circle dialogues. 

"Three days later we had a deeply connected field of people who had stepped into a new relationship with themselves and each other.  It is always magical when this happens and it happens most of all because we yearn to be with each other.  In the evening of the first day one of the women from Fukushima said today was fun because we all cried together.  Another spoke of "listening so deeply that I, myself, almost disappeared." They talked about what comes next.They felt hope deep in their bones.

When I read Bob's diaries I think of Theodore Roethke's poem "I knew a woman...I, however, knew a man "who moved in circles and the circles moved."

 

 

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.

The Unready

Genealogy? No thanks. Not for me.  Tracing my family tree never appealed to me very much, until I fell for the "14 day free trial" on Ancestry.com and over the course of a year I’ve been clicking those little quivering green leaves to see if I can find the next set of parents. One leads you to the next hint and the next and the next and before I knew it I was hooked on my own family’s  “video game.”

“Karen, are you coming to bed soon?”

“No, I’m not quite ready. I’m in the tenth century now! It’s getting really exciting.”

“Ready or not, I’m turning out the light.”

Ready or not…960 and there he was. Aethelred. Aethelred the Unready. I’m related to that memorable Saxon king of the royal house of Wessex. It wasn’t easy sifting through all those Wulfriths and Aelfwyns, the Aethelflydas and Osburgas back, back from my maternal grandmother. But I made it.

Poor kid. He was nine when his dad, Edgar the Peaceable died. What a legacy to live up to. Then his step-brother, Edward soon known as the Martyr, took the crown.

I couldn’t go to bed without Googling “Aethelred” to learn more of his story. What's lurking behind my DNA?  Murder, as it turns out. Court intrigue. A conniving, jealous mother followed by bad counselors created a novice king who certainly botched things up.

Aethelred was about twelve and his brother'd been on the throne three years, when his mother--Edward's step-mother--threw a tea party and poisoned him. Naturally, Aethelred was not ready to deal with his step-brother's court factions including an influencial bishop who was, no doubt, the reason behind his step-brother getting the "martyr" nickname. Then the Vikings came. 

At one point, King Olaf Tryggvason, another of my family's many "Olafs," sailed over from Norway and handily defeated the English forces. Aethelred tried to buy the marauding Vikings off, but that didn’t keep them away from the east coast. As a result, he managed to pretty much lose all of England to people like Thorkell the Tall and later Sweyn Forkbeard. As luck would have it, Sweyn was also another relative of mine. (Who knew families could be so complicated?) So, it sort of all stayed in my family.  Aethelred escaped to Normandy and when Sweyn died, he came back, but by then his reputation was in tatters.

In all fairness, he was called “unraed” which really means “bad counseling.”  But we all remember him because he was so very unready.

“I’m coming. I’m ready! Well, Unready. Just wait till I tell you...” I signed off for the night, knowing there would be more intrigue in the morning.

Moonwalking

It’s not enough that I live with a man who can compute people’s birthdates by correct day of the week—back to 700 A.D.   Now I’m Moonwalking with Einstein.  You wouldn’t think someone who can remember his gym locker combination from high school and the entire VIN security code for the car--a mere 17 digits--would need Joshua Foer’s book about the art and science of remembering everything. And why would I need to read the story of a U.S. Memory Champion. But there it is—perched on my desk. I suspect it's there because he hopes I’ll crack it. Since I have trouble remembering my phone number I suppose I should.

Deep breath. The first chapter is titled, “The Smartest Man is Hard to Find,” something most women have always known. In it, I learn that everyone can have a photographic memory with a little work.  Ah, there’s the rub.  Work.

Since I’m not the one in the family hoping to get on Jeopardy, I rely on Google if I need to know something. And post it notes. Or Wikipedia, although I realize that’s chancy in some areas.

Las Vegas will never have to worry about me counting cards. And I’ll never embarrass Watson, the computer-whiz kid. Punch lines from jokes? Forget it!

I record “stuff” in my journals—and then index them so I can find it again. You gasp. Annie Dillard indexes her journals.

Now where did I put my pen?

Yellow's Glad Brightness

Caught in a snow-globe, I watch flakes fly crossways just beyond my window pane. Soon the snow will wear an eerie morning yellow. I wait for it, very still as my window's vertical bars measure morning creeping across the eastern ridge. One yellow point in a sea of azure moves west at an amazing clip. I blink and Venus has traveled another quarter inch. With all this morning movement, how can I spend the day upright in such a carousel world?

My chrysanthemum greets me as I enter the kitchen and I begin to count all the yellows I value:  candle flames, and grapefruits, pineapple, honeycombs and daffodils; chickpeas, saffron and corn. And, of course, lemons and bananas. And how could I forget the plate I'd stuffed into basement storage? I went downstairs to retrieve it--this gift from the only college professor we'd invited to our wedding. A theater is named after him on my college campus. During one of many late night rehearsals, this time of J.B. he  told me, Job's wife, that if he'd ever had a daughter he'd have wanted her to be like me. I've never received a more touching compliment nor do I ever hope to.

That night, as yellow flames leaped up behind the glass of our Hearthstone wood stove, I suggested we have Bananas Foster. In only a few minutes, my husband and I were licking the remaining ice cream off our spoons still sticky with an after- glow of cinnamon and brown sugar, butter and lemon and bananas heated in Crème de Banana—a gourmandery of yellow. I thanked the universe for yellow and my old college theater friend for being there when our marriage began, banana and blueberry gift-wrapped plate in hand.

As I write this, I recall being in London, oblivious to time as I so often am, climbing the steps of the British National Gallery. The guard said, “We’re closing in five minutes, Madam,” and I replied, “Then I guess I’d better hurry!”  It was my first visit and since London’s museums don’t charge for admittance I didn’t pause for a moment to think “what a waste of time and money for only five minutes.”  I entered, walked a few steps, turned to the right and this is what greeted me.

Van Gogh’s singular work was the only thing I saw that day and I spent my full five minutes absorbing yellow, one of our three holy trinity of colors, “casting glad brightness” as John O’Donohue put it, into my heart. Like our wedding gift plate, that feeling has lasted all these years, a testament to yellow’s faithfulness.

 

Wondering about Winter Wonderland

I hear from my friends who are wintering in warm places and I think, “Why are we still shoveling?”  But then, I look out and I realize this place calls to me in all seasons and when I see the snow hanging in the pine trees like great globs of divinity fudge, I know winters in Vermont are pretty wonderful. Our blue-grey tiled hearthstone wood stove warms the entire house and baking in the kitchen is lots more fun now than in July. Best of all, our neighbor, Farmer Steve, keeps our driveway open.
There is a website and interactive Ning site I’ve been involved with for some time now, which is called The Powers of Place Initiative. Over four hundred people gather there in their spare time to view gorgeous photos, enjoy inspring videos and talk to other people also interested in "place."  This initiative was my friend Sheryl Erickson’s inspired vision and was beautifully designed by a very talented woman in California, Amy Lenzo, who also designed this Sophia Serve site. You'll find there conversations around such questions as: How do we educate for sustainability? How do we embody Christopher Alexander’s ideas about place? How do we listen to the land? What are community spaces that matter? Can the energy in the land be shifted? What is eco-psychology and terra culture?

Nick Thompson, an Apache man, once said, "The land looks after us. The land keeps the badness away."

 With all this pristine Vermont-white around today it’s hard to imagine a lot of “badness,” but of course we read newspapers, visit news sites, listen to the radio and some of us still watch television so we’re very aware that badness exists. We should name it, but we don’t have to dwell there. There are far too many more wonderful “places” to anchor our hearts.

Ah, Sweden!

Our luggage spit out three weeks' worth of wrinkled laundry and several bags still lie collapsed in the hallway, empty, sunken and looking as if they couldn’t take one more security scan. But, if asked, even they would have to admit that spending Winter Solstice, Christmas, New Year’s and Epiphany in Sweden adds up to a most amazing way to end one year and to start another. 2011 docked, like Göteborg’s numerous ferries, bearing a cargo-calendar filled with fresh, light-lengthened days bursting with hope and good cheer.

When I think of Sweden, I think of white on white. Snow clings like bulky bleached muslin to all the trees and rocky outcroppings. White orchids in fat white pots line most windowsills.  White paper stars, Ikea-white candles, white cheeses on white table cloths. It’s where there are, indeed, many brunettes with long black eyelashes, but mostly you see blondes bouncing around with such gorgeous skin that you know it will remain wrinkle-free for years thanks to limited harsh sunlight.

Trams slowly ding their way down miniature tracks  and every now and then doors open and people exit to view light shows, attend concerts, visit favorite restaurants and shops. And, of course, to enter candle-filled churches with limited seating during Advent when Swedes all come together to...to what? To wait together, to remember...and, of course, to hear wonderful music.  During the rest of the year, some still observe the old Lutheran church holy-days, but most people rarely attend worship services. Churches in Sweden, like everything else in our world, are going through transition times.  (One of the best articles on “the transition movement” by the way, is by Michael Brownlee. Do check it out. Even "transition" is "transitioning.")

In Sweden country trains still stop at villages so small you have to flip the RR crossing sign yourself. Sweden is where polite automobile drivers usually patiently wait at least three seconds after the light has turned green to enter the intersection.  It’s where you can hop on ferries without paying because they’re just extensions of the roads. It’s where Jul boards feature fifty different kinds of herring. It’s where intricate glass designs delicately score your heart with sparkling beauty.  Candles in every window. Ruddy-cheeked children out in all sorts of weather. Umlauts and coffee. Heart-shaped Peppercokker and a cappela choirs. Hi Hi, Hey Hey, tak sa mikka, Sweden.   

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.

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.

Words, Words, Non-Words

It's not easy being married to "Mr. Language Person," as my sons and I call my husband, John. (Especially if you're as word-challenged as I am.) Crossword puzzles are his meat and potatoes. He eats Jeopardy for dessert. My cousin and I have never forgiven him for trying to score with "nexor" at Scrabble. Challenge!

Thanks to a friend who just sent me an article from UK's Tribune, I can now counter with some non-words of my own. Well, not exactly mine.

Who knew? Ever since J.R.R. Tolkein was editor of the Oxford English Dictionary around 1918, they've been keeping "non-words" in a vault. Actually it's fifty dusty file cabinets. You see, once a word gets into the OED they can't really get it out again, so they're careful. Nevertheless, non-words have leaked out and I'm about to share some with you so unfold your Scrabble boards. I discovered my husband nearly "wibbled" when an officer caught him "pregreening" once. And isn't "locavor" a real word? See what you think of a these OED's vaulted candidates:

Accordionated – being able to drive and refold a road map at the same time

Asphinxiation – being sick to death of unanswerable puzzles or riddles

Blogish – a variety of English that uses a large number of initialisms, frequently used on blogs

Dringle – the watermark left on wood caused by a glass of liquid.

Dunandunate – the overuse of a word or phrase that has recently been added to your own vocabulary

Earworm – a catchy tune that frequently gets stuck in your head

Espacular – something especially spectacular

Freegan – someone who rejects consumerism, usually by eating discarded food

Fumb – your large toe

Furgle – to feel in a pocket or bag for a small object such as a coin or key

Glocalization – running a business according to both local and global considerations

Griefer – someone who spends their online time harassing others

Headset jockey – a telephone call centre worker

Lexpionage – the sleuthing of words and phrases

Locavor – a person who tries to eat only locally grown or produced food

Museum head – feeling mentally exhausted and no longer able to take in information; Usually following a trip to a museum

Nonversation – a worthless conversation, wherein nothing is explained or otherwise Elaborated upon

Nudenda – an unhidden agenda

Oninate – to overwhelm with post-dining breath

Optotoxical – a look that could kill, normally from a parent or spouse

Parrotise – a haven for exotic birds especially green ones

Peppier – a waiter whose sole job is to offer diners ground pepper, usually from a large pepper mill

Percuperate – to prepare for the possibility of being ill

Pharming – the practice of creating a dummy website for phishing data

Polkadodge – the dance that occurs when two people attempt to pass each other but move in the same direction

Pregreening – to creep forwards while waiting for a red light to change

Quackmire – the muddy edges of a duck pond

Scrax – the waxy coating that is scratched off an instant lottery ticket

Smushables – items that must be pack at the top of a bag to avoid being squashed

Spatulate – removing cake mixture from the side of a bowl with a spatula

Sprog – to go faster then a jog but slower then a sprint

Sprummer – when summer and spring time can't decide which is to come first, usually hot one day then cold the next

Stealth-geek – someone who hides their nerdy interests while maintaining a normal outward appearance

Vidiot – someone who is inept at the act of programming video recording equipment

Whinese – a term for the language spoken by children on lengthy trips

Wibble – the trembling of the lower lip just shy of actually crying

Wurfing – the act of surfing the Internet while at work

Wikism – a piece of information that claims to be true but is wildly inaccurate

Xenolexica – a grave confusion when faced with unusual words

Feel smarter now?

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. 

Words to Ashes

“Burning libraries is a profound form of murder, or if self-inflicted, suicide.”

Stewart Brand The Clock of the Long Now.

Destroying books is murder. I've believed this ever since I earned my very own first book in second grade. Pinnochio. I got it for reading the most books that year and it’s still here on my shelf. Intact. If someone had burned it, part of me would have gone up in those ashes.

But alas, far too many books are not safe, including those in Baghdad and throughout Iraq. A Baath party professor of medieval history said, “Our memory no longer exists. The cradle of civilization, writing and law have been burned. Only ashes remain.”

Our soldiers may not have deliberately torched Iraqi libraries, but we certainly didn’t protect them—and of course there were those bombs.

I learned a lot about how we humans have systematically destroyed books from Fernando Baez in A Universal History of the Destruction of Books From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq. The Romans had a process called “damnation of memory” and practiced “libricide” the destruction of written records of the people they subdued.

Every time someone thinks only his ideas are valid and only his culture is correct, books get stacked in public squares and torched. Or hung onto the people who wrote them and burned along with the author. Or burned and the ashes dumped into rivers.

Paul burned books in Ephesus. Vikings burned books at Lindisfarne. Ghengis Khan burned mosque libraries. Catholics burned Cordoba's library. The Dominican Savonarola burned Florentine books. Spaniards burned Mayan codices. Pope Leo burned Martin Luther's books. U.S. soldiers burned Toronto's parliament and legislative library. The British burned the Library of Congress. Anabaptists of Munster burned Catholic libraries. Joseph Goebbels organized the Nazi burnings in 1933. And some “strict-thinking” people today burn Harry Potter just as they burned Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath a few years ago.

Why? What is it about reducing memories to ashes that we as human beings find so compelling? The disturbed man who burned Artemis’ temple in Ephesus believed “He who destroys perseveres.” That’s one clue. But it goes more deeply than that. Baez offers this: “When man destroys with fire, he plays God. It reduces the spirit of the work to matter and ash.” Ray Bradbury vividly painted that concept in Fahrenheit 451.

The Sumerians believed in the supernatural origin of books. They came from the Goddess. Scribes prayed before and after inscribing words onto clay. Soon collections of clay tablets piled up in temples. Egyptian scribes went to the “House of Life”—the library—where they unrolled what the Divine had to say. Book burning, just as cutting down Her sacred groves, may very well be an intentioned attempt to rape and eliminate all aspects of Her.

Thanks to Baez, I now have a new heroine. Her name is Wiborada. In 926 she was living in a Swiss monastery appropriately enough called St. Gall. One night she had a dream that her beloved library burned. She buried the books, the Huns came, she was killed and mutilated but her body was later found spread out over a mound. The mound was excavated and her precious books were found. Whole and safe.

Clay, stone, wood, papyrus, parchment, paper, computer bytes. We put our words down to capture who we are and what we believe and until those words turn to ashes or a hacker erases them, we know who we are.

And it behooves us to remember, as Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821:

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”