Sophia Serve

Welcome to Sophia Serve!

After the sort of career I’ve had, ten years of freelance writing and twenty years in book publishing, most people become literary agents or start their own small publishing enterprise. Instead, I decided to become a thought partner for people who need a little extra help pushing words around the page or across the screen. Sophia Serve is the name of my writing and publishing service.

SophiaServe.com is a place for you to read and think about writing as an expression of your deeper “you.”  And talk to other folks who share your passion. You’ll also find information here about the books I’ve written. Or co-written. Or wish I’d written.

Sophia, the Divine Feminine Wisdom, welcomes us as a mother, sister, friend.  We’re glad you’re here.

Lilacs and Liberty: Is Slavery Still With Us?

On a warm Vermont May evening, we sat under a tree sipping wine and iced tea, nibbling on sweet carrots and candied walnuts, bacon-wrapped dates and tiny quiche squares. A string trio played in the background, to the accompaniment of birds. The aroma of a hundred year old lilac tree in full bloom wrapped those of us who came together to support and learn more about a topic that couldn’t have been more oxymoronic to this bucolic setting:  Abuse. Domestic and sexual violence. Women and children in grave danger. Last year alone, in our little county, 833 women who contacted Safeline, Inc  and said, “Help me!  Please,” were helped. One in four women in the U.S. experience domestic violence some time in their lives and 74% of women experiencing domestic violence are harassed by their partner at work. Here's another staggering statistic: someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted in the time it will take you to read this. In fact, every two and a half minutes.

Astounding!

And what’s even more astounding is that few seem to recognize this as slavery—people exerting ultimate control over others. People who are forcibly held, afraid for their very lives. That is, until that cycle of control is broken by folks such as the professionals and volunteers of organizations such as Safeline, where people can turn for legal, economic, and medical advocacy.

Are we doomed, in this global economy, to have disposable people, as Kevin Bales points out?

We thought slavery was over after those legendary trans-Atlantic ships stopped making slave runs from West Africa to the Americas. 54,000 trips, actually, which brought more than eleven million slaves ashore. Four million of them wound up in Brazil. Others were taken to the Spanish colonies, to Mexico, Cuba, British and French Caribbean islands, and of course to our own southern shores  where the slave ships deposited 400,000 to 500,000 of our own black brothers and sisters. I thought the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in 1865. I thought Harriet Tubman and Eleanor Roosevelt had done their work.

Not so. Slavery is alive and well. Even in America! Young women and children are held captive by criminal rings and forced to perform sexual acts for people who realize that since they can sell them numerous times a night, they’re much more lucrative than drug trafficking. And when they’re used up, they’re just eliminated.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt is shown here holding up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United Nations produced the document in 1948. Article 4 provides: "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms. Image is in the public domain.

This is not something we care to contemplate so it’s easier to live in denial.But take a look at freetheslaves.net if you want to get a more global understanding of slavery today. Twenty seven million people on five continents are still bound by greedy industrialists and unfair economic practices. One in ten children in Haiti alone. And we who love to buy gold, diamonds, chocolate, coffee, cotton, fish, and use up anything that comes from mines are also partially to blame. 

There’s an interactive map on the site that you can click on to read what’s going on where. For instance, in the U.S. slaves come from 60 countries, about 15,000 annually, and have been found in 90 cities cleaning houses, working on farms and coerced into the sex industry. It’s a chilling map of deception and exploitation.

 

 

Still the aroma of hope that things could be different and people could again be free clings to us as surely as that lilac perfume. Nibble a candied walnut, take a deep sniff, and think about it.

 

 

Mothers, Mothered, Mothering

I was raised an only child by Midwest Lutheran parents. My mother had been one of eleven farm children and a twin. She knew the closeness of spooning in a cold bed at night with her sister. I slept alone.

It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I discovered my fondness for a divine presence with whom I could curl up and be protected.  She’s bigger and more inclusive than any of the names people have called her through the ages, but I like to call her Sophia. Wisdom. The Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman said call her anything you like. But call her!

Susan Cady, Marian Ronan and Hal Taussig introduced her to me in their now decades-old book: Wisdom’s Feast: Sophia in Study and Celebration. I studied their book. I studied “Her.” When I was finally able to turn off my inquisitive rational head, there she was where she’d been all along.  Lodged in my heart. And in the hearts of everything and everyone around me. She’s been here all along. Cady et al said, “She is strong and proud. She is creator and designer of all things. She promises to teach us about herself and earth.”  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called her the “Essential Feminine.” She calls to us from, as Thomas Merton put it, her “divine fecundity.”  She is coded into everything around us if we care to look.

After moving to Vermont, where artists and writers congregate like “peeper frogs” in springtime, I met a sculptor also named Karen. We both share, way back in our curling strands of  DNA, common Sami roots and those mysterious genes sometimes show up in Karen’s strong bronzed abstracts.

Karen’s work evokes deep maternal love within me. The kind of love that defies words. We have all seen images of the upright-sitting Isis holding her son Horus, and Mary with young Jesus in her lap. But in Karen’s work I sense even a more inclusive presence. Here is female divine wisdom, Sophia—the brooding spirit-dove—who holds each of us, caresses us, accepts us without judgment. Here is the “dove-like voice” that announced to keen ears at Jesus’ river baptism, “This is my beloved son.” This is the brooding “hen” watching over her chicks. It is her creative vision that keeps us moving, keeps us hoping. Who keeps us. We are mothered.

 

 

Everything You Have Seen...

I'm not a student of the Cabala, but because of my esoteric reading habits, every now and then I run across bits of wisdom that make me wish I were. For instance:

"Everything you have seen, every flower, every bird, every rock will pass away and turn to dust, but that you have seen them will not pass away."

I've never seen a pheasant in flight, but thanks to a friend, now I have:
I've never been to the frozen lakes of Savoie in France to actually see Simon Beck's geometric patterns in snow, but thanks to another friend, here they are. Inspired by crop circles, this artist from England creates these magnificent designs with his snowshoes. They are as ephemeral as a pheasant in flight. His website describes how he was inspired to create snow art from the gardens in the temples of Kyoto, where sand is raked in patterns. He uses a handheld orienteering compass clothesline attached to his design's center. Sometimes he spends up to nine hours a day on his snowshoes.

 

What connects us to these patterns?  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."

A pattern of patterns is worthy of the Cabala--or physics.

When the patterns around us that we have grown to depend on begin to change, we are tempted to think all is chaos. But there is a pattern of patterns—an order behind all patterns…if we just look hard and long enough. And bringing it together is what physicists call a “strange attractor” –bifurcations in systems—coined by a Belgian physicist-mathematician, David Ruelle and the Dutch mathematician, Floris Takens. Together, they founded a new theory of dynamic turbulence.

Thanks to imaging techniques that I couldn't begin to understand, we can see patterns of turbulence, and patterns of collisions of charged particles directed by Earth's magnetic field in northern night skies.

And some of us are lucky enough to have caught pheasants in flight. 

 

And that we have seen it, will not pass away.

 

I Can't Imagine...

“I cannot imagine any condition which could cause this ship to flounder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to the vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.”  

                              Owner of the Titanic    

But here we are, one hundred years later. Now we can imagine it.

Dr. Robert Ballard, the explorer who discovered the Titanic wreckage in 1985  says he found it by accident. He was hired by the military to find two lost submarines (one with nuclear weapons on board) which were on either side of it. Imagine that!

I have trouble imagining a country so careless or clueless as to lose bombs capable of blowing up the planet. But according to Rachel Maddow’s new book, Drift, we have now admitted to losing eleven!

Come to think of it, I can’t imagine MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow publishing a book that Roger Ailes (head of Fox News) endorsed—but he did.  Check out Drift to learn how we are going broke outsourcing our wars. In 2011 we had 45,000 U.S. soldiers still in Iraq and 65,000 big-bucks private contract workers on our payroll there. I can’t even begin to imagine the pile of cash we've spent in the last ten years on guns and bombs, tanks and planes. Nor the lives we've wasted. For instance, can you imagine spending  $108 million on a giant unwanted wastewater treatment plant that still doesn’t work? But we did, in Fallujah.

Over a decade later, I still have trouble imagining how two planes could bring down the World Trade Towers. 

And I have trouble imagining why it is that whistleblowers are punished for telling the truth.

Nor can I imagine a time when women are denied contraceptives.

When I was living my corporate publishing life, we had to downsize--fire people. It was one of the hardest things I've done. I tried to imagine how the folks we had to let go felt. Would they find other, even more fulfilling, jobs? I consoled myself with horror stories of how other companies had "done the deed." Surely we were more humane than the company in England who, when they decided to fire people, staged a firedrill, locked the doors and threw everything that belonged to their "former" employees out the window. Or imagine the employees (and this happened not far from our company) who left the building one Friday evening only to find pink slips under the windshield wipers of their cars. Surely we can collectively imagine more compassionate work places!

I can't image being raped. Nor can I imagine being raped and then going through a three hour inquiry only to have your rape kit thrown into a police station storage closet because it costs between $1,200 and $1,500 to process them. Apparently we don't have budgets for catching rapists!  Imagine!  But that’s what Abigail Pesta reported in “To Catch a Predator" April, 9, 2012 Newsweek. And it happens thousands and thousands of times all over America.

On the other hand, what we CAN imagine is also very possible. Imagining is, as Lauren Bacall once said, the highest kite we can fly. It's the truth within us.

 

Rest a Spell

We just received a wonderful “new to us” chair and ottoman from some dear friends who are moving to a smaller space.  I will treasure looking at it, because it will remind me of them. I will look forward to sitting in it when my husband isn’t—he refers to it as “his chair” now. We may have to “take a number.”

I recently painstakingly covered a small chair which I enjoy in my office. I love the color. Since I found the fabric at Ikea, I, of course, think "Sweden."  I did it with a curved needle—stitch by stitch. It taught me to “go slow,” and I’ll never think of chairs again as just furniture.

When I discovered Gaudi's wonderful "two in one" chairs--and then actually sat in one--it was an ergonomic experience that would be difficult to duplicate.

 

 

        Who knew that chairs could be such amazing things!  And they can be made of anything, it seems.

 

 

Here's one by Charles Kaisin made from cut paper.

It might not be as pleasing to sit on as Gaudi's was, but it IS an interesting chair

Then then there was the summer we decided our deck really needed Adirondack chairs. In multiple colors.

Chairs are amazing things. But a chair is just sculpture—until you sit on it. You work hard and then chairs invite you to rest a spell. To make a chair, you first have to imagine.  I guess you make friends the same way.