Alexandra
Posted: August 8, 2025 Filed under: consciousness | Tags: Alexandra David Neel, Tibet 1 Comment
Imagine a woman, age 2, taken to view the Communards’ Wall at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the City of Light, where 147 soldiers of the French national guard plus 19 officers had been lined up and executed. The horrors of the modern world pressed upon her.
By the age of 18, she had visited England, Switzerland and Spain, and was studying with Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. She wrote a treatise on anarchism, and then at the age of 27 studied piano and singing and, to help support her family, took the position of first singer at the Hanoi Opera House, where she interpreted works of Verdi, Gounod, and Bizet.
Later she befriended Maharaj Kumar, the crown prince of Sikkim (in present day India) and began an exhaustive correspondence with the 13th Dalai Lama. She learned Tibetan, lived in an anchorite cave, was possibly the first Western person to enter Tibet, and met with the Panchen Lama, among the highest ranking officials of Buddhism. She was allowed to consult the scriptures and visit temples, was introduced to persons of rank, to the Lama’s professors, and to his Mother. She received the honorary titles of a Lama and a Doctor of Tibetan Buddhism having “experienced hours of great bliss.”
She was then exiled for violating the no-entry edict, and so during World War I traveled to Japan, Korea, China, Mongolia. Dressed as a beggar she hiked back to Lhasa, the Forbidden City, in 1924, staying for two months exploring that holy city and its surrounding monasteries. When her disguise was uncovered, she was denounced to the Governor of Lhasa, but quicker than the officials, she had already departed east, heading to Gyantse, where the British maintained a garrison for training Tibetan soldiers.
She opened up Tibet to the Western world.
Imagine a country during the same time period that for 144 years did not allow its women to vote. The 19th Amendment was eventually passed, granting women suffrage, but the governing white men still practiced discrimination and large segments of the female population – indigenous and women of color, primarily – remained disenfranchised.
It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was outlawed, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (60 years ago this week!) prohibited racial discrimination in voting. As Churchill said “history is written by the victors,” so then America exceptionalism seems best understood as a myth perpetuated by the governing men, passed down generations.
Alexandra David-Néel is an exemplar of the trailblazing woman, so far ahead of her times. Remarkably bold and adventurous, she was compassionate and given the name “Yeshe Tome” which translates to “Lamp of Wisdom.”
Her memoir My Journey to Lhasa was published in 1927, released simultaneously in Paris, London and New York but critics were dismissive, refusing to believe her stories of Tibetan practices, such as levitation and increasing the body’s temperature to withstand cold. Living in a cave at 13,000 foot altitude requires a higher consciousness. She published more than 30 books and her home in Digne-les-Bains, France is now a museum, listed among the “inventory of French historic monuments.”
Alexandra seems worthy of mention in the Pantheon of Wise Women.
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Credit where credit is due: David Vernon Purpur. The lead photograph was provided by Elena.
Samsara
Posted: August 1, 2025 Filed under: Art & Healing, consciousness | Tags: Bardo Thodol, buddhism, samsara, The Work That Reconnects 1 Comment
One bright light has passed, one wise woman who lived at the vanguard. “A wild love for the wild” she lived and saw this time as “a great unraveling toward a life-generating human society.”
An environmental activist, author and scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology, her husband was a Russian scholar and they worked with the CIA in post-war Cold War Germany and then moved to India, where her husband was leading the nascent Peace Corps at the time when the very young Dalai Lama arrived into exile. A life was lived!
As a practicing Buddhist, she understood that life inherently is filled with suffering, that suffering arises from attachment and desire, but suffering can be overcome. Her path to the end of suffering became her teaching, which she called, “the Work that Reconnects.”
She has passed, and in the Buddhist tradition, the Bardo Thodol is now her path: “liberation through hearing during the intermediate state.” Known as “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” this describes the experience of consciousness at the immediate moment of death and the stages to follow during the 49 days of samsara, the “wandering through” between death and rebirth.
She is now – as I write – at day 11, immersed in the light, while her words speak still to we who remain on planet Earth. In a recent interview she said:
“I’m 92 now. I am in this 10th decade of my life. When I follow with rapt attention what is happening with the climate catastrophe, and with the mass extinctions of our siblings of in the creation of this world. I feel that there is, within me a sense that read through Rilke, the translations, and also very much through the work that I have been blessed enough to do called The Work That Reconnects, and that has starts the spiral journey that it is with gratitude. So much gratitude that what’s in it is that we are never abandoned. There is something for us to behold and be part of.
“And to be there, a great moment is there for us to be present. To this incredible moment, we’ve got to realize, we will realize, that we belong to each other. That’s coming forward now. How could we not harvest that understanding in this moment?”
She continued…
“…this sense of opening to the reciprocity of life. It’s a living world. When we cannot be sure, or even have the trust, that complex life forms will endure beyond the next few decades, we’re seeing a huge shattering of life itself. And, and yet having been with Rilke, his trust in life is still with me. So I trust being with life, even though life, the web of life might crumble, but then I’m still with it. I’ll be with it anyway, even in the crumbling. The song is so deep in him.
“For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us. The utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. …As bees gather honey, so do we reap the sweetness from everything and build God.
“Well, it seems clear that we who are alive now are here for something and witnessing something for our planet that has not happened at any time before. And so, we who are alive now and who are called to, who feel called, those of us who feel called to love our world, to love our world has been at the core of every faith tradition, to be grateful for it, to teach ourselves how to see beauty, how to treasure it, how to celebrate, how, if it must disappear, if there’s dying, how to be grateful. Every funeral, every memorial service, is one where you give thanks for the beauty of that life or the quality of what. And so, there’s a need, some of us feel, I know I do, to what is, looks like it must disappear to say, thanks, you’re beautiful. Thank you, mountains. Thank you, rivers.
“And we’re learning, how do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy? And that goodbye has got to be in deep thanksgiving for having been here, for being part of it. I kind of sound like I’m crying, and I do cry, but I cry from gladness you know. I’m so glad to recognize each other. You can look in each other’s face. See how beautiful we are. It’s not too late to see that. We don’t want to die not knowing how beautiful this is.”
She translated Rilke, the German poet, who saw death as an integral part of the life cycle, as a transformative force that can lead to spiritual growth. Rilke said, “But we must accept our reality and all its immensity. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only courage required of us. The courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.”
The soul last known as Joanna Macy met life with an extraordinary courage, and encourages us to follow that path. She has moved onward, to the furthest yet.
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 Rainer Marie Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy
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Credit where credit is due: David Purpur opened the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of the Dead so many decades ago, and expanded the boundaries of my thought. An interview with Joanna Macy from the podcast On Being can be heard here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-being-with-krista-tippett/id150892556?i=1000661063451
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Garlic now hangs to cure, onions and potatoes have been harvested and turned into German Potato Salad, cucumbers into Bread & Butter or Caraway pickles, tomatoes into a delicious balsamic relish. Abundance reigns.
The Sybil
Posted: July 25, 2025 Filed under: consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: Cumaean Sibyl, Delphi, Heraclitus, Lucius Tarquinius, Shakespeare 1 Comment
In the pantheon of wise women, the Sibyl – mysterious messenger of truth – ranks high, towering overhead on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Who was she?
In the beginning, at Delphi, in the 11th Century BCE, there was but one, the Delphic Oracle herself. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, is the first known writer to comment, “The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperformed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice bye aid of the god.” The Greeks eventually came to count ten women truth tellers located in Greece, Italy, the Levant and Asia Minor; they were known not by their name, but by the location of the shrine where they spoke.
Meanwhile, across the Adriatic Sea, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus reigned as the seventh and last King of Rome, 534 to 509 BCE. A man so corrupt and vile, he gained the throne through multiple murders of family, and his tyranny came to justify the abolition of the monarchy. Following his death the Republic arose and thereafter the Empire, which are the stuff of legend. The one enduring virtue of Tarquinius was his foresight to purchase the Sibylline Books. Even there, he almost failed.
The apocryphal story is told of an old woman, possibly a Cumaean Sybil, who offered nine books of prophecies to Tarquinius at an exorbitant price; he declined to purchase and so she burned three then offered the remaining six at the original price. Again he refused and so she burned three more then asked the original price for the remaining three. Tarquinius consulted the Augurs, who deplored the loss of the six and urged purchase of the remaining three even at the full original price. Tarquinius had them preserved in a sacred vault beneath the Capitoline temple of Jupiter.
After the fall of the Kings, the Roman Senate kept tight control over the Sibylline Books. The men who governed held the women’s prophecies under lock and key. They entrusted care to two patricians, until in 367 BC, when the custodians were increased to five patricians and five plebeians. These ten, as directed by the Senate, consulted the Sibylline Books not for predictions of definite future events but the religious observances necessary to avert extraordinary calamities and to expiate ominous prodigies (comets and earthquakes, showers of stones, plague, and the like). The rites of expiation were communicated to the public, and not the oracles themselves. In the 4th century CE, The Sibylline Books were burned by order of the Roman General Flavius Stilicho.
About that time the Roman Empire came to its end, replaced by the Judeo-Christian world. The Sibylline Books were replaced by the Sibylline Oracles, a blending of classical mythology, early Gnostic, Hellenistic Jewish and Christian beliefs. The prophecies became increasingly apocalyptic, with even the Book of Revelations foreshadowed. There is something for everyone, it seems, in the Sibylline Oracles, and they came to reach ever wider circles. Over several millennia they have become more, not less, studied.
Michelangelo painted five sibyls on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: the Delphic, Libyan, Persian, Cumaean and Erythraean, while Shakespeare mentions them in Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and Troilus and Cressida. In contemporary culture, Sibyl was a 1976 film starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward about a musician diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. What was prophecy to the ancients is a crisis today.
But why are women the Sybils? Science tells us that the corpus callosum – the connective white matter that connects our left and right brain hemispheres – is more robust in women. A woman’s brain seems hard-wired to more rapidly access each hemisphere, integrating emotions and feelings with the logical functions of the left hemisphere.
Culturally women are encouraged to be receptive to inner thoughts and feelings, while men have been raised to focus on the external physical and rational worlds. Be that as it may, throughout the ages it is women who have been the Sibyls, towering figures of art, literature and history – mysterious messengers of truth – who stand tall within the pantheon of sage women.
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Credit where credit is due: David Purpur brought to my attention The Sibylline Oracles, J. L. Lightfoot, Oxford University Press (c) 2007.
The Queen Bee
Posted: July 18, 2025 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: beekeeping, bees, honeybees, Mother of All Living, nature, pollinators, royal jelly, the Shimmy, White Goddess Leave a comment
Honoring a good friend, who has a good friend passing; the ripples which cannot be denied that reinforce the web of our community, I write here of The Queen Bee.
The “bees knees” as slang means something excellent, of the highest quality. It arose during the “Roaring Twenties,” when flappers danced the Charleston, the Black Bottom and the Shimmy, their knees and elbows flailing wildly to the back beat of the jazzmans’ rhythms. It might be a corruption of “The Business,” 1920s street slang for something excellent, or perhaps it refers to pollen baskets on bees’ legs, the “good stuff” that worker bees carry back to their Queen.
In our quest for seven wise women, let us follow that “good stuff” back to the Queen Bee. In a colony of 20,000 to 80,000 bees she alone lays more than 1,500 eggs per day, an amount greater than her body weight. Coming of age at day 23 of life, her egg laying begins.
During incubation the Queens are fed protein rich royal jelly, secreted from the glands on the heads of young worker bees. Worker bees are fed a mixture of nectar and pollen – bee bread – but the Queen alone is fed the royal jelly, and as a result develops into the sexually mature female, the propagator of the colony. The colony’s future rests upon the fruit of her loins.
The Queen was selected by the worker bees, not through a democratic process, but through luck of the draw plus natural selection. The worker bees randomly choose a few larvae just days old, and begin feeding them the royal jelly. If multiple Queens emerge at the same time then they will fight to the death.
By genetics her stinger is not barbed, and so she is able to sting repeatedly. Sting she does, seeking out virgin queen rivals in her quest to kill. The Queen as nurturing mother sets firm limits; dominance is her key to control the colony. The Queen, to whom the worker bees bring “the good stuff” is the one and only; nature knows its rules and the colony falls in line behind its Queen.
The Queen’s hive is a model of efficiency and output. She weighs about 0.007 ounces, twice the weight of the worker bees, but their combined efforts produce 30-60 pounds of honey, or even upwards of 100 pounds or more, per year. Honey is half of the proverbial “land of milk and honey” which is an ancient symbol of abundance and prosperity. “Bread and honey” is slang for money, the coin of the realm. The Queen controls the honey, which is to say “the money” because she produces the abundance.
All things come to pass, and the Queen eventually matures into dominance. Some virgins escape the hive to avoid being killed, to seek out a new hive whereupon another fight to the death begins. If the prime swarm has both a virgin queen and an old queen, the old queen will continue laying eggs, until within a couple of weeks, she will die a natural death and the former virgin, mated, will assume the throne.
Natural selection is a biological imperative, but wisdom is an insight, something metaphysical, the source, perhaps, of that biological imperative. Our quest then leads back to the creator, God the Father in the current era, but the Queen of Heaven in older times. In the ancient Near Middle East, the Queen of Heaven embodied themes of love, war, fertility and motherhood, of which all the Queen Bee is a master.
About the Queen Bee, her celestial connectedness and her poetry, the Irish poet Robert Graves wrote, “…a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust – the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death.”
The Queen Bee, it seems, is one key to the wise woman.
Credit where credit is due: one wise woman suggested this topic; Master Electrician, Master Cabinetmaker & Humble Farmer Kirk provided the beekeeping photos and inspiration; the curly-haired Goddess with whom I live asked sage questions about natural selection.
It takes a village.
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In the garden now – thanks to pollinators – fruits form, vines reach ever higher; mid-summer is past and the dog days descend.
Wisdom Is…
Posted: July 11, 2025 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: Axial Age, Diotima of Mantinea, Goddess of Heaven, Jeremiah 7:18, White Goddess 4 Comments
By coincidence, I happened last Monday to go into our dark dingy basement and was struck by an amaryllis bulb in full bloom. The bulb has a long history: we gave it as a gift to a friend years ago, but when she moved to NOLA, she gave it back. It bloomed for us last autumn, then in December was put into storage where it was forgotten. With neither soil, nor water, nor light it pushed up again into its full gorgeous flower.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” With the flowering amaryllis as a miraculous symbol, we now search for seven wise women, and shall begin with Wisdom, itself.
In the beginning is the question, “Whence, wherefore and whither Wisdom?” “Whence” is an archaic word meaning “from where” which leads us to the “Goddess of Heaven.” At the beginning of civilization, throughout the Fertile Crescent – the Near Middle East – the Goddess of Heaven embodied themes of love, war, fertility and motherhood. Circa 4,000 BCE she was “Inanna” to the Sumerians, “Ishtar” in Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian cultures, “Astarte/Ashtoreth” to the Canaanites, later she was “Hera/Juno” to the Greek and Romans, “Nut” to the Egyptians. A Babylonian cunieform circa 1850 BCE references Venus as the “bright Queen of Heaven.”
Robert Graves, in his oracular masterpiece, “The White Goddess” writes, “…the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honor of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry – ‘true’ in the nostalgic modern sense of ’the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute.”
Taking the form of the Goddess of Heaven in the Near Middle East or the Moon Goddess in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe, Wisdom was a celestial woman, worshipped. But then Abraham appeared circa 2100 to 1900 BCE and brought transformational change, slowly over millennia.
Karen Armstrong, the scholar of comparative religion, calls this “the Great Transformation” so that by the 9th century BCE the religious and philosophical traditions of our present day were laid down: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece.
Robert Graves had this to say, “The [poetic] language was tampered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilineal of matrilineal institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes. Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called Classical) was elaborated in honor of their patron Apollo….”
The Old Testament, Book of Jeremiah 7:18 condemns the Goddess of Heaven: “The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger” (KJV). Hellfire and brimstone has had it in for women since the beginning. Armstrong describes the epochal change as the Axial Age, when the monotheistic male deity arose and the Queen of Heaven and Moon Goddess recede.
Wisdom is not gender specific, so let us consider “wherefore” which means “an explanation.” What then is wisdom? Webster’s Dictionary, Second Edition, (c) 1947 provides this definition, n, 1. quality of being wise; ability to judge soundly and deal sagaciously with facts, esp. as they relate to life and conduct; knowledge, with the capacity to make due use of it; perception to the best ends and the best means; discernment and judgement; discretion, sagacity. 2. scientific or philosophical knowledge; erudition; learning; as, the wisdom of the Egyptians, 5. a person embodying wisdom; — used as a title of honor or respect. Archaic.
Wisdom is insight, not knowledge; understanding, not facts; nuanced, not either/or. Albert Einstein said, “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” Bertrand Russell said “To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” Socrates said, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
Socrates, the paragon of Greek rational thought, was taught by a woman. Aspasia of Miletus taught him rhetoric and the art of dialectic, and her intellectual salons, frequented by Plato, Socrates and Pericles, are believed to have shaped his thinking. In Plato’s Symposium Socrates says that he was taught the “philosophy of love” by a woman.
Diotima of Mantinea taught that love drives the individual to seek beauty, first in beautiful bodies – earthly beauty – then as one grows in wisdom, to seek spiritual beauty. Diotima taught that the correct use of physical love is to direct one’s mind to the love of wisdom, which is philosophy.
The path to wisdom seems shaped by women. And so we come to “whither,” which is “to where” does the path of wisdom lead? Ralph Waldo Emerson said simply, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” Rumi was simpler still: “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
In the coming weeks we will tell stories of wise women. An ambitious goal, a list of 7, but more likely 7 times 7, or even 77 wise women. They are more numerous than the stars in the sky. The queens of heaven, indeed.
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At our Art Farm, the lavender, coneflower and echinacea exclaim, a celestial harmony our eyes behold.
1/2 = whole
Posted: July 4, 2025 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, What is an Art Farm | Tags: law of attraction, portland cement, rumi, Zeno of Elea 1 Comment
Last October I was in Solitary Confinement, working in our Farmhouse crawlspace to stabilize the floor system of the Ell; a grueling but necessary task. This week I encountered Zeno’s Paradox as I began work on the foundation wall. The floor having been stabilized, I will now remove the entire perimeter wall and then rebuild from the ground up, while working below the house. “Pick your poison” as the saying goes.
Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher and mathematician. He was a student of Parmenides who taught monism – essentially, that all life is one – and as such duality and plurality are illusions of the senses. Zeno, a thinker of profound proportion, created logical paradoxes to demonstrate the absurd consequences of common assumptions about motion, change and plurality. The paradoxes of motion, considered his strongest and most famous, were summarized by Aristotle as follows, “That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.”
Suppose a Greek peripatetic Philosopher wished to walk to the end of a path. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before arriving halfway, he must get a quarter of the way. Before traveling a quarter, one-eighth; before one-eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on. Thus one must complete an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno maintains is an impossibility given that time is finite. I trust the reader will understand why beginning an Ell foundation rebuild seems like an infinite task.
In 1830 when our farmhouse was built, the carpenter/farmers foraged for materials. Using horse or oxen they would have gone out into the fields to pull boulders back to the job site. Heavy lifting, then a hole was dug (by hand) into which the rocks and boulders were stacked one on top of the other. Mortar and concrete were not used on the foundation, just “dry stack” of large stones in a hole. This is referred to as a “rubble foundation,” which Frank Lloyd Wright used extensively throughout his career.
On top of the rubble a course of bricks were laid, upon which the post and beam structure was built. Mortar in the 1830s was different from concrete today. In 1824 Joseph Aspdin, a British bricklayer, invented Portland Cement by heating clay and limestone at high temperatures to form a strong hydraulic cement. He named his discovery in honor of the stones of the Isle of Portland, in the English Channel, just off the County of Dorset. But South Portland, Maine was a long way from the Isle of Portland, and the makers of this home did not use Portland Cement on their bricks; the mortar they used has disintegrated over these 200 years. And so my challenge of tasks seems to expand, endlessly.
Two and a half millennia after Zeno of Elea posed his paradoxes, their essential truth still challenges the rational mind. It is noteworthy that they were resolved – dare I say – by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, more commonly known as Rumi. Essentially he was a monist, seeing the interconnectedness of all beings and the unity of existence. He embraced humanity – all humanity – and believed empathy can foster harmony and inclusion.
He currently ranks among the highest selling poets in the USA, and is revered around the globe; in a time so divisive, this is noteworthy. Consider this poem:
When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of distress and anxiety;
If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without any pain.
From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me.
There is a great secret in this for anyone who can grasp it.
More commonly this is described as “The Law of Attraction,” which states “the good you seek is seeking you; you only need go halfway.”
And so we can resolve Zeno’s paradox through the mystical insight of the poet, and my foundational task becomes easier. I have hired a journeyman philosopher/carpenter far wiser than I, and hope to hire a crew of workers far stronger than I, so that as a team we shall overcome.
Seven Sages
Posted: June 27, 2025 Filed under: consciousness, Little Green Thumbs, What is an Art Farm | Tags: akpallu, Hammurabai, hokmah, kwan yin, saptarishi, Solon 1 Comment
The tradition of the Seven Sages is common to ancient China, India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. The sages, although different to each culture, always are the enlightened souls who brought wisdom.
To the Chinese, they were the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,” a group of scholars, writers and musicians of the 3rd century CE. In India, the “Saptarishi” are seven of semi-immortal status, the seers extolled in the Vedas, the sacred texts “not of a man, superhuman…authorless,” revelations of sacred sounds and texts heard by ancient sages after intense yogic meditation. To the Hindu, the seven stars of the Big Dipper represent these seven sages; the Dipper’s handle points to the North Star by which countless wise men have traveled the globe.
The “Apkallu” were the sages of Mesopotamia, the primordial beings, demigods, part man and part fish or bird, associated with human wisdom. In the 7th century BCE Greece, the seven were the philosophers, statesmen, poets and lawgivers renowned for their wisdom. Solon of Athens, a statesman and poet, is honored for his legal reforms, which shaped democracy. Pittacus of Mytilene governed Lesbos where he reduced the power of the nobility, to govern with the support of the common people. Thales of Miletus was a mathematician and astronomer, credited with predicting a solar eclipse, is said to have coined the aphorism “Know thyself,” which was engraved on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi.
The “Seven Wise Masters” is a cycle of stories of Sanskrit, Persian or Hebrew origins, which through the “Seven Sages of Rome” was passed down to German, English, French and Spanish in the form of popular street literature published throughout early modern Europe.
A modern version of this tradition resides above the doors of the House Chamber in the U.S. Capital, known as the “Relief Portrait Plaques of Lawgivers.” Seven (sic) sculptors carved bas relief plaques, using white Vermont marble, to honor 23 governing figures across world culture: Hammurabi, Justinian, Solon, Suleiman, Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson rank among these lawmakers, while Moses holds center court.
Of note, across all of these cultures, all of the sages are men.
In my experience, women rank among the sages who have helped shape my path. It is rather stunning to pause and consider the inherent bias, among world cultures, over millennia, that males alone are the sages. Wisdom, as an abstract concept, would be considered gender-neutral. But grammatically, the word “wisdom” – “hokmah” in Hebrew and “Sophia” in Greek – is feminine. Personified in literature, such as in the Book of Proverbs, wisdom is depicted as a female, referred to as “She” and “Lady Wisdom.
I should like to undertake a summer project to compile a list of the “Seven Women Sages.” It seems a Herculean task to select only seven, but such could be a worthy first pass at this project.
I should like to invite my readers to weigh in on this topic. Over coming weeks I shall endeavor to find stories of great women who have walked among us. Some may be a grandmother, or school nurse, others may be dominant figures of their times, but all shall be told as a counterpoint to the conventional wisdom of the Seven Sages.
In these chaotic times we do well to restore balance.
Note: Thanks go out to David Purpur who helped with information on the Vedic rishis.
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Our garden pushes ever higher: the Cuke climbs its trellis, fruit forms on the vine, pole beans push tendrils ever higher, greens come daily, grapes reach outward, lavendar is lush, potatoes have been hilled.
It Came to Pass
Posted: June 20, 2025 Filed under: Art & Healing, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness | Tags: CG Jung, hanged man, Isaac Newton, Ryder-Waite, saint paul of the cross, tarot 1 Comment
We ended our homeschool science class with the study of tarot. Some may say this is heresy, that tarot is not science, but I defy that line of reasoning. Consider these facts:
- The word “science” is derived from the Latin word “scio” which means “to know” or “to understand.” My son shall be raised to have broad, not narrow, understanding.
- Sir Isaac Newton, the paragon of the rational scientific method, was a lifelong alchemist. The Renaissance alchemists pursued rigorous empirical observation and experimentation; the notion of “active principles” that repel and attract arguably contributed to the theory of universal gravitation.
- Carl Jung, founder of “analytical psychology,” developed the concept of the collective unconscious, which resonates clearly with the tarot’s imagery. At the C.G. Jung Institute, he supervised research on the importance of tarot.
Such then, when I asked my son to pull one card from the Ryder-Waite deck, the “Hanged Man” emerged. At the age of 12, my son pulled card 12 from the deck. Jung referred to this as a synchronicity; events that coincide in time and appear meaningfully related, yet lack a discoverable causal connection. “Causal” speaks to the rational mind, but we were plumbing the subconscious.
At the age of 12 my son comes of age, which is a physical bodily experience as well as a deeply emotional and psychological transformation. Card #12 deals with beliefs that are stored in the subconscious mind, what is handed down. The Hanged Man represents a breaking away from that tradition. As my son comes of age, he becomes his own man.
Carl Jung believed that the archetypes are deeply embedded in the human psyche, and have emerged in the form of religious narratives. Saint Peter, the “Rock” upon which the Catholic church has been built, reportedly was hung upside down, by the Roman Emperor Nero. The hanging took place near the “Circus of Nero” close to the present day Saint Peter’s Basilica. The Cross of Saint Peter, an inverted cross, remains a central image in the arms of the Holy See and the Vatican City.
Let us consider this symbol more deeply. In “Tarot” Paul Foster Case writes, reversal in Hanged Man is “a reversal of thought, a point-of-view which is just the opposite to the accepted by most persons. In this scientific age we know that everything is an expression of the working of the law of cause and effect. …Practical psychology shows the potency of ideas. It demonstrates conclusively the truth that thoughts are the seeds of speech and action, that interpretations are the patterns for experience, that what happens to us is what we have selected, whether the selection be conscious and intentional, or unconscious and unpremeditated.
“The central theme of the hanged man…is that every human personality is completely dependent upon the All, here symbolized by the tree. As soon as this truth is realized, the only logical and sensible course of conduct is a complete surrender. This surrender begins in the mind. It is the submission of the personal consciousness to the direction of the Universal Mind. That submission is foreshadowed even in the picture of the Magician, who derives all his power from above. Until we know that of ourselves we can do nothing, we shall never attain the adeptship. The greater the adept, the more complete his personal self-surrender.”
Saint Peter of the Cross, in founding the Church during the Roman Empire, most definitely followed “a reversal of thought, a point-of-view which is just the opposite to the accepted by most persons.” To pursue this further we drove to Western Maine, to sit with a Reiki Energy Master, a White Witch, and talk about the tarot. This Master, as a child, lived in Morocco, Athens and Cairo; living now in the Lakes Region she is not provincial but broad in her understanding.
She explained that tarot is the journey to wisdom. The journey begins at 0, when you know nothing, and then you go through life. The Fool is ready to jump off the cliff. #1 the Magician has tools to become grounded, spiritual. #2 the High Priestess has intuition. #12 the Hanged Man is saying “take your time, there is no rush.”
She spoke of card #13 Death. She asked my son what he thought of death and he paused, then replied, “I think death is not good, it is bad.” She explained that death can be seen as a change, that all things must pass and transform. In that sense death is not bad, it is just change; it can be hard, very hard, but it is part of life. “The old self of the Hanged Man is changing. This is the death of the old way. Your Dad’s belief system will die off and you will choose your own.” She spoke about spirituality. My son explained that he had no religious practice. She encouraged a nature based approach. As my son comes of age, he will make many choices, his own.
Many cards had been lain on the table. As we cleaned up, the last card picked up was #13 Death. Again, synchronous, the Master commented, “You are all going through a transition.”
And so our season of homeschooling has ended.
No Room at the Inn
Posted: June 13, 2025 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, Farming off the Farm, What is an Art Farm | Tags: Epirus, Greco-Roman, molloxssian hounds, pitbulls 3 Comments
Our Art Farm resembles Noah’s Ark: two adults, two children, two rescue cats, and two rescue dogs all live here. Recently a Mother Raccoon moved into the ceiling above our porch, and with four kits, that became too much.
Her tenacity was remarkable. To gain access she gnawed through the fascia boards and the asphalt shingles. Last autumn I tried to discourage her by covering the access points with lead flashing, but she persisted and then chewed through the ceiling boards and more shingles. Neighbors stopped to tell me about our four-footed squatter. She would lean against the asphalt shingles, stare at my son through his bedroom window, like Mae West daring him to come and get her. I knew we had a problem but it rose to a climax when, at 3:30am last Thursday, our pitbull puppy needed to go out and, given the commotion above, refused to come back inside.
Our pitbull puppy is an animal of the most remarkable agility and athleticism. To see her on the prowl is to marvel at the animal kingdom. Pitbulls get a bad rap, but intensely loyal and loving to their owner, they are descended from the Mollossian hounds, the ancient dogs of war. The Greek kingdom of Epirus trained the hounds for war and herding. Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Marc Anthony’s line, “Cry havoc, let slip the dogs of war” is historically accurate. In Greek mythology, the goddess Artemis gave to Procris a dog that never failed to catch its prey. In the predawn light our puppy exhibited her heritage, racing across our front porch and back yard in search of her prey.
Our puppy was rescued from the streets of Webster Parish in Louisiana, and is 60% Pitbull, 27% Rottweiler, and 13% “Supermutt.” The Rottweiler breed evolved when the German barbarians bred sheep dogs with the mastiff-type dogs used by the Roman army on its military campaign through ancient Europe in the 1st century AD. Our loyal puppy is of Greco-Roman descent, proud to protect us at all hours of the day and night.
By mid-morning I began to rip out the ceiling boards. They were in quite bad shape and needed either to be repainted or removed. In fact, we plan to remove the entire front porch – it is not original to the house – so my task was both a step in that direction as well as a means to encourage the raccoons to move out.
The job was messy. Our puppy stayed inside while I laid out a tarp to catch the debris and the paint chips, which most likely were lead paint. I wore a mask and detritus rained down upon me. Animals have been living in that space for many years. Decades ago, word must have gotten around the town. Pre-covid, House Sparrows made their home there. It was awful. There in the corner cowered a raccoon. I stayed clear, and continued removing other boards. I needed to open up the entire front section of the porch ceiling.
I reached out to an animal rescue service, and the news became bad. Raccoons carry several parasites, including roundworm. A cornered mother can be vicious. No one was available to come trap and remove them, so the plan was to let them make their exit on their own time. Eventually the kits scurried about on the beams overhead. While their Mother went off in search of a new home, our puppy could hear the kits crying on the porch and stirred up great havoc, inside our house. Our puppy’s true nature was on full display. She could not be let out into the yard.
Throughout the afternoon the Mother worked her magic, carrying the kits – no longer so small – one-at-a-time by the scruff of their necks down our lilac bushes. We do not know where she went. One kit remained, and wailed for mama, but eventually Mama returned and then quiet filled the air. Later that evening, I took our puppy on a leash out into the backyard. She sniffed the air, and looked all around, even overhead, but nothing was turned up.
Quiet has returned to our front porch. My 4:00 am outings are less agitated. The Mother and kits have moved on. We wish them well and meant no harm, but there simply was no room at our inn.
Concrete π
Posted: June 6, 2025 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, What is an Art Farm | Tags: archimedes, concrete, habeas corpus, pi 2 Comments
This week’s homeschool question was “How many US Presidents have suspended Habeas Corpus?” The answer, of course, is 7:
- Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, by his sole order declared martial law (he was the commanding General, not yet the 7th USA President)
- Abraham Lincoln, by Executive Order, to rein in the “Cooperheads” a/k/a the Peace Democrats
- Ulysses S Grant, by Congressional act, suspended in nine counties in South Carolina
- Theodore Roosevelt, 1902, by Congressional Act, suppressed civil unrest in the Philippines
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1941, by means of the Hawaiian Organic Act authorized suspension of habeas following the attack on Pearl Harbor, but in 1942, by Executive Order allowed a military tribunal to try and convict eight German saboteurs
- Bill Clinton, following the Oklahoma City bombing, signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996
- George W. Bush, in 2001, by the Presidential Military Order authorized enemy combatants to be held indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay. But in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) the U.S. Supreme Court re-confirmed the right of every American citizen to access habeas corpus even when declared to be an enemy combatant.
All of these were in times of a crisis, and several of them included martial law. Given the dense history, my son’s Cousin, the Professor, zoomed in for a chat. The Professor has been published in the Stanford Law Review, where he argued that habeas is “a tool for We the People to insist that when our agents in government exercise our delegated penal powers, they remain faithful to our sovereign will.”
He went on to explain, “Given widespread consensus that English history should and does drive American habeas jurisprudence, and that the sovereigntist account of that history should now be treated as authoritative, it is puzzling that American courts and scholars have continued to cling to libertarian frameworks. Meanwhile, American habeas law is in crisis, with an ideologically cross-cutting array of scholars and jurists criticizing it as intellectually incoherent, practically ineffectual, and extravagantly wasteful. Over the Supreme Court’s past three Terms, Justice Neil Gorsuch has led a charge to hollow out federal postconviction habeas almost entirely, arguing that habeas courts should ask only whether the sentencing court was one of general criminal jurisdiction—and not whether it violated federal constitutional law en route to entering the petitioner’s judgment of conviction.”
My son and the Professor discussed all of this, at length. They compared the crisis of the Civil War to the current immigration brouhaha. My son reasoned that Mr. S Miller, “wants it to be really simple, immigrants get picked up, and locked up.” The Professor concurred, describing a “logistical simplicity.” My son continued, “There are many immigrants, some are illegal, but it is not like Abe Lincoln at the Civil War, now [suspension of habeas] is not really necessary. Suspending habeas should be a last resort. I don’t know what problems – it is about people’s free will – but on a large level it would fill up the jails.” The Professor concluded by speaking of Aristotle’s concept of the good.
As a counterbalance to these abstractions, we poured concrete. The front entry of a friend’s home was demolished when his neighbor drove her car backwards, at a very high speed, into the front of his home. Remarkably, the driver avoided the house but smashed the stairs. Insurance paid little – no surprise there – so our marching orders are to be frugal. We are making it work, and my son is part of the crew. Child labor laws do not pertain in our homeschooling.
The new entry will have a platform about 4’ high, with four steps to it. This is applied geometry and we discussed the area of a rectangle [width x length], the area of a triangle [1/2(width x length)] and the volume of a column [V=π r2 * h]. We needed to calculate the volume to know how much concrete to buy. To place the footings, we located two points at right angles and parallel to the house. Pythagorus solved that question. We used the 3,4,5 triangle; given a2 + b2 = c2 then 9 + 16 = 25 marked the exact locations where we would dig.
Like construction, learning requires a solid foundation. We began at the bottom and dug holes. We discussed the history of “Pi”, and its application to our task. “Pi” is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The Babylonians approximated Pi at 3. The Egyptians refined it to 3.1605, and then Archimedes of Syracuse hit the mark by using the Pythagorean Theorem. He drew a circle and two boxes; one box fit inside the circle and one circumscribed the exterior. He reasoned the area of the circle was between the area of the polygons and thus Pi would be between 3.1408 and 3.14285. The Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi took a different route, performing lengthy calculations with hundreds of square roots to calculate the ratio at 355/113, which is 3.14159292035. Centuries later, in 1706, the Englishman William Jones decided to name the ratio “π” which is the first letter of the Greek word “perimetros”, which means “circumference”.
Our project’s head carpenter is a journeyman Master Carpenter, who has built homes on the islands of Maine for decades. Building on an island requires the ultimate resourcefulness; everything used is carried by boat to the job site and so waste is minimal. A calm and wise teacher, he explained use of a sight level, how to square the platform, how to measure and cut stair risers. The platform he built is remarkably strong and the client is pleased. My son hopes to handle the landscaping that follows.
Driving to and from the job site, my son spoke of the satisfaction of helping people using practical problem solving. My son also commented that jobs based upon information pay higher than jobs in physical labor. I will not sugar coat that truth: the annual salary of an average Professor of Law is $173,000 while the most skilled carpenter earns around $80,000 per year. Such are the values of this society (although AI looms large). My son’s path is unknown and we expose him to the yin and the yang, the full range of ideas and labor, as he comes of age.
About that volume, my son correctly calculated that each column was 2.8 cubic feet, which required 480 pounds of concrete. A heavy load, I was thankful for a young assistant.
an Art Farm 