Lenten Adventurers Book Review: The Sisters of Sinai

The Sisters of Sinai: how two lady adventurers discovered the hidden gospels

by Janet Soskice, 2009

Review (c) by Garnette Arledge    February 26, 2016

Twin sisters born in 1843 in strict Presbyterian Scotland, during Victoria’s reign, travelled by ship, donkey, carriage and on foot against all sage advice by Cambridge male biblical scholars, to discover lost gospels.

They authenticated the earliest known written Christian gospel manuscripts to 90 ce and turned up staid scholarship of their time.

Sounds like fiction and it would be except they were fabulously wealthy, spoke and wrote a dozen pan-Eastern languages and were indomitable. Literally. Blocked from even attending college, much less teaching, they simply (ha!) equipped expeditions with camels, drivers, tea services, full china place settings, linen sheets, grand dresses and went to the Sinai peninsula. Before any other scholars notice, they were welcomed and most importantly, trusted with precious secret and sacred sheepskin documents almost two centuries old. The desert monks, cenobic men living in austerity guarded their hidden treasures with the same zealousy in which the sisters pursued them.

Perhaps that’s why the monks trusted the women. The sisters honored the secret hoardings (manuscripts tossed down into a deep locked room from upper balconies for hundreds of years). In no particular order. And the sisters persisted, had afternoon tea, brought out suddenly willing male scholars to work alongside, deciphering and cataloguing the treasures. Naturally these men tried to claim credit. But monks refused to deal with them. The sisters persisted.

It’s a rollicking good story, as true of any truth is. I see Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. I couldn’t put it down, 300 pages filled with magic, perseverance, derring-do in a Scots Presbyterian manner. Eventually, as they were barred from teaching at Cambridge, they built a Women’s College next door. They wrote books. They were consulted. They married, each in turn briefly but mostly it was just the two of them with paid desert guides who may or may not  have been reliable. Sand, horrible odors from both the old documents and the monks, as well as the pack animals.

Inspiring. Thoroughly researched. Well written. Although I did expect Lord Peter Wimsey and his founder Dorothy L. Sayers accompanied by Agatha Christie to come riding over the dawn-lit sands for breakfast - all five courses naturally. The only flaw is that I finished it too quickly.

Greenwillow review

Greenwillow

review © 2/23/2016

by Garnette Arledge

One gloomy Saturday in January my local library held their Book Sale. I ‘greatly admire’ local libraries sometimes even holding onto a book until it’s overdue just to give the fine. Of course I’m a member and contributor also. For there are treasures to found in village libraries, well worn books written in, perhaps a kinder age to readers’ psyches.

Like it was waiting for me, spring be praised, there was Greenwillow by B.J. Chute, published in 1956 by E.P. Dutton and Company before it was just Dutton. With line drawings of 19th Century English village life. Turns out it was a famous book on its own becoming a Broadway play with Anthony Hopkins. So it is in the genre of Friendly Persuasion by Jessamyn West. Perhaps even a bit of a Jane Austen-like.

Village life, rival clergy who have separate entrances, belief systems and service times into the one Anglican church. Pub. Old Ladies. Young Love, seemingly thwarted by tradition. Descriptive language so the reader can see the seasons, the flowers, the food, the hopes and dreams thanks to the author who was once president of Penwomen. Even a whimsy -- a mysterious call of the East that afflicts one family’s eldest son, a bit like Beau Geste by P.C. Wren. I could smell the tea cakes, root for the animals, love the folk. Reminds me of how Downton Abbey will be missed.

Greenwillow is a nostalgic reading treasure. It’s on Amazon, hold on, one copy for more than a thousand dollars. I’m thankful for bookstores but my heart belongs to the village library.

Dying Well, like Living Well, calls for companionship for the whole journey

Staying Sharp

Review by Garnette Arledge

Staying Sharp was never one of my goals: kindness, compassion, creativity, integrity, saying yes to life are. I can right off the top of my head imagine twenty, at least, attributes I hope to stay with me all my life. What appealed instantly in this book is it’s tag line: 9 Keys for a Youthful brain through modern science and ageless wisdom.

Wisdom. Ah, most definitely yes. So I forgave the writers, Henry Emmons, MD, and David Alter, PhD, for the chilly title. Who wants to be like a knife or an axe, or even a spear? And yes I do recommend this for its seeming goal: to calm fears of Alzheimer’s with a non-toxic mix of science and wisdom. Each chapter highly recommends meditation for example. For calming the mind, emotions and definitely the body. Further I was interested in the varied medical research cited. Like:

“Many scientists have come to believe that while we sleep the space between our neurons expands, allowing a cranial sewage network—the glymphatic system—to flush the brain of waste products that might otherwise not only prevent memory formation but muck up our mental machinery and perhaps eventually lead to Alzheimer’s. Failing to get enough sleep is like throwing a party and then firing the cleanup crew.”

I did learn this in hatha yoga that a good night’s sleep is vital to brain health. May I add, vital to the mind's health as well. Let’s remember the mind is not us but a function that we can heal, caress and support through practice. Yoga is not only physical - but you know that. Qigong and Tai Chi, which the authors also recommend, smoothes out the mind’s brain waves as well of physical energy. Still there comes a time when the physical mind falters perhaps. Then with meditation practices, the Big Mind, the intuitive, soul friend, the observer may step forward. So practicing Qi cultivation, breathing consciously and going beyond the mechanical mind is encouraged. I’m relieved to see this teaching in a pop-medical self-help book. So I recommend it for a quick read.

That’s why as a companion/doula with the aging, I sign up for the whole journey until the last breath. Because I know that even when the mind has faltered, the whole person is still intact and worthy of companionship. As do you.

Wild Plums Salon - part one

Quote of the Day from Joseph Campbell, who was one of my first meta-physical teachers and quite kind to me on several occasions. 

      Sleeping Beauty. Used with permission from:  mydelineatedlife.blogspot.com

Metaphysical meaning reality beyond the five useful daily senses of sight, touch, taste, smell and sound. Meta meaning over, above, beyond those physical, although not infallible  senses. Phor meaning to carry, as in Greek amphora. 

Campbell said: "Apparently in every sphere of human search and experience the mystery of the ultimate nature of being breaks into oxymoronic paradox, and the best that can be said of it has to be taken simply as metaphor—whether as particles and waves or as Apollo and Dionysus, pleasure and pain. Both in science and in poetry, the principal of the anagogical metaphor is thus recognized today; it is only from the pulpit and the press that one hears of truths and virtues definable in fixed terms." - Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume IV: Creative Mythology, p. 190

OK, I looked up the complicated words: 

Oxymoronic –when contradictory terms combine.

Paradox – word, or event contradicting itself.

Anagogical - mystical having a secondary spiritual meaning: i.e. the Sabbath also signifies rest in heaven as well as Sunday or Friday night. 

Or ‘dem bums, also means a certain baseball team.

Scripta Divina also calls for loving dictionaries (especially on-line), words and double-entendres known as puns and multi-level wordplay. I read and ask myself: What does a word actually mean – besides what we think it means? What does a text, such as the Hebrew Bible, Christian Bible, actually mean? Is the Bhagavad Gita myth or actual? Well, my years in Seminary taught me lots of things I never knew as a churchgoer but one of the most important to a writer is that no text is set in stone. Something I can testify to from my years as a publisher and even as a journalist where the news changes in a daily show.

For that matter, and be very certain I’m not suggesting the Christian Testament is a fairy tale, although some do posit that theory, Fairy Tales have different levels of meaning also. Like the biblical stories, fairy tales are archetypal: wise women, beautiful princes, wicked rulers, magicians, dreams, omens, teaching stories and good versus evil.

For example, take Sleeping Beauty. Despite all those fairies bringing creative gifts (all archetypes: beauty, wit, grace, dance, song and ability with musical instruments.) The uninvited fairy, naturally I suppose, declares a complicated 'gift' also known as a curse. Yet, one last fairy has yet to give her gift and uses it to partially reverse the wicked fairy's curse proclaiming that the princess will die. To mitigate that curse, the last fairy deems that instead she fall into a deep sleep for 100 years to be awoken by a king's son. 

Just one fairy, why were they always women, couldn’t resist, bringing a curse because she wasn’t invited – maybe that’s why she wasn’t invited, because she was so mean-spirited at parties. But it ended well with The Prince of Peace, oops  a Prince coming, endowed with the magic power of love. If Beauty hadn't slept so long would she have aged out, thus missing true love?

On one level it’s a cautionary tale, always be nice to all the fairies, perhaps.

On another it’s a coming of age teaching story. Only when the sleeping beauty was ready could the strong aspect of herself merge.

In Nature, the fairy tale mimics warm weather rising again after winter. Think in Ice Age terms.

Still another take, every gift of every fairy serves Beauty’s purpose in the story line. I mean, in reaching a happy ending, an integrated whole person – which was of course, a beginning of another story. 

How to live in creation as an actualized, contributing member, useful life to society and to Self. Sleeping Beauty evolved into good news about life.

So Joseph Campbell, a Sarah Lawrence professor teaching women; fascinater of Bill Moyers on that well-known PBS series the Power of Myth, 1988, and as deep expert on global myth systems, talks about the power of metaphor. What's your metaphor for today?

Garnette Arledge (c)           More: http://www.garnettearledge.com/

Easiest Path to Enlightenment

Poem a Day Project

July 30, 2013

Garnette Arledge ©

Easiest Path to Enlightenment: hearing the stories of the saints and being in their company, p. 60-62, Sai Chitarita of Shirdi Sai Baba

Why? When the world is spinning the other way to stories of disaster, horror and ugly fantasy? For simply, we are like a glass bottle thrown into the sea of Earthly life. Open it for the message yet automatically inhale the aroma-residue of the liquid it once contained.

So I choose to fill my body bottle and my time with what I love. I am free. Therefore I choose to imagine spinning a gossamer web, each thread shining with Light. That’s what happens inside me when I write. Listening to the muse in my fingers and heart, passing over rocks, Steering the Craft as Ursula LeGuin said. Sailing on the ocean – that fabric of light, wind, spirit blowing the plot along whist it will.

Manifest goodness and glory, dancing on the head of a pin with all the angels. In my case, the pin is a laptop. Knowing I’m in the lap of Creativity in the straight chair, at my mother’s desk, with five coffee table books for ergonomics holding up the world which is the IBM ThinkPad.

Romp! Yes. Effort, of course. Getting the translation exact later with commas, semicolons and spelling steadies the course. And miracles can unfold word by word for readers, partakers, friends who later come on board for the publsihed voyage into the stars within.

Hearing the stories of saints not difficult. Once one remembers every living being is a saint come marching in.

Writing what I hear in the story of saints, mind fills like a billowing sail, swiftly flying across the sea of Samsara. Worldly existence in English. We know it as a boon to the spiritual journey. The body is for writing, living, loving, breathing. Stalwart the body-boat – Avast me beauties! Calls the Admiral, steer forth, skim by the storms. Waves may buffet: just more ballast for the tale. Write on, write on, there’s treasure inside, all sparkly and dancing, plethora to share. Make each word ecstatic like exultation. Inhale glory, exhale joy, color it with pain, and anchor it with fear. Plot your course as you go, or chart it ahead, no matter. Sail on.

Re-hearing, re-reading, writing the stories of the ‘saints’ is keeping their company. Increase non-attachment to later marketing and responses. Be indifferent to pleasure and pain – some of your best writing is awful in the modern sense. Some will be awe-some but don’t critique yet – just write with the flow of the tides.

Writing a bit after meditation in the morning leads onward – always more stories come to the uncluttered mind.

Take refuge in a quiet cove today inside yourself, take refuge whole-heartedly. It will carry you safely across the white sea of paper. And the ocean of time.

No ocean, you live in the mountains? You get to adjust the metaphors, babe. Stories are like baths. They wash away your cares and woes, enmeshed in the story. And you will want to do another the next morning. So it is with meditation. Or a walk in the woods. So it is with writing following meditation, walking or sitting meditation.

Visualize your (wor)ship giving you grace after meditation. Then, now, run, run to your pen or keyboard without censure, just write.

Thank you for listening, hope you didn’t drown in all the metaphors. I’ll tone it down from bliss for the blog. Or maybe not, be true to your self in writing, in life. Love, Garnette

A Spiritual Journey

If GR had ten stars I would put them all in Lavinia’s crown. Because I love to read, I’ve read some fairly inept as well as amazingly ept books. I’m sure, if I thought about it really hard, I could come up with another that equals Lavinia – but right now I just cannot.

And the only other Le Guin book I treasure is Steering the Craft, a handbook for writers.  Early on, when I was too callow, I decided I didn’t like science fiction or fantasy genres. I just couldn’t keep track of the names of places and planets I suppose so I never was one who knew Le Guin’s major epics. I did read a biography or perhaps it was an autobiography and was respectful of her life.

Is this a review? Here’s an interview from 2008 when the book came out that says it: http://inkwellreview.blogspot.com/2008/06/sing-muse-of-woman-unsung.html. Hope you can read Le Guin’s comments there.

I remember Vergil, from Dante, and vaguely from The Aeneid in high school. But this is the great mature work of an incredible master of the craft who decides in her seventies to re-learn Latin, take all her skills of making a story sing, adds magical effects and leaves us flying like a white owl through the woods enlightened.

Not once do cheap emotional writerly tricks torture the reader. We could smell and taste the daily life of pre-Rome/Etruscans. Le Guin calls it ‘making the story thick.” We know those women, although they lived in a poet’s vision of thirteenth century BCE. We feel the texture of their clothes, the married love, sun light on a real hero’s chest as he holds his baby.

LeGuin’s whole novel springs from one slight  mention: Lavinia, second wife of Aeneus who escaped the physical destruction of Troy.

Do you get it that the authoring awes me? By the concept of the book? By the book itself? It has been respectfully designed and published. It’s a thorough treasure. A strong woman touching us comes across the ages. Highly recommend. Now to read it again.

What is the author's relationship with readers?

The air is as pure now as that of County Galway’s Kylemore Abbey when I was last in Connemara. I wanted to write that sentence for a long time.

But not being Irish, only Celtic, never had a reason to, really. What is it about Ireland besides W.B. Yeats and AE that I wish to be Irish? P. L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins, told me she had it too when I interviewed her. Well, for a month I was. Yet still cannot understand why I’m not.

You may ask how do I know I was exactly at Kylemore at 17:23 06/06/99? Because I purchased a CD in the gift shop tucking that bit of paper into a sketchbook I haven’t opened since then.

Ah, but it’s a lovely day. Only far above a spume follows a jet. The news is grim, forebodingly so, but the air is pure in the Hudson River Valley across from Poughkeepsie. Out early, I just couldn’t go back inside to my writer’s desk. Yet I still remember that the divorce decades ago unlocked the artist inside. Now I happen to paint in words mostly, still carrying the Irish sketchbook and pen in my car basket just in case. This is the case.

I turned right instead of left into the driveway and the desk for the high bluff, looking down on a pond, circled by the Marlborough Mountains. Happy to hold the sketchbook, even to write this blog, outside, in the light wind, delighting in dragonfly loops as I did in Connemara in another life before the 21^st century.

My inspiration for the next Scripta Divina, carefully noted in my writer’s diary when it came to me one midnight clear, is to ask my readers a question.

What is the author’s relationship with her readers?

Margaret Atwood once commissioned a remote control pen so she could do virtual book tours and still keep on writing at home. I don’t have her problem: K and K and K of readers (K being the thousand mark). Friends read my books. Not necessarily family. Friends. And I am blessed with so many from the different geographies, milieux, interests, and stages of life.

Here is one novel, One Hundred Thousand Lights: a love song to India. I was moved to take part in the scribing, publishing and launching of the good ship book. It came from one brief period when I went to India for four months and took notes. The novel is not that story, that’s private. All the characters are fiction except the historical ones. It’s true I did rise in love with Mike (especially) and Grace, Sushil, the Patels, Leela, Saras even the ayurvedic/hatha yogi. But they are fiction. The theme of giving up irrational nationalistic hatred is fictional but alas true in the world this moment. The theme that old fear can destroy a new life is fiction, also sadly true albeit. The dreams and meditations are mine – that is, mine of twenty years ago when I was a completely different person.

A novel it is. Friends have paid for it. Why can’t we give books away? They order, they receive and I don’t know if the book works for them. It takes time out to read a novel.

Somebody said to me, just sell; don’t worry. Another said, once it’s out, none of your business. Yet it is – because I love my friends and even future unknown readers. Sharing the experience, as you now share the Connemara breeze with the Hudson River and me.

I’m thinking a book is like a calling card. It’s an introduction not an end. A book starts a conversation, over latte or Irish Breakfast tea. Publishing a book is part of the journey – not the end. Mike and Gracie are still yammering away, they say you cannot abandon us; we’re not over. Tell us some more about us.  Then, zing. I see another chapter ahead. I wonder if they would be content being inserted in the novel I wrote in 2000. It tells me, it is next.

Meanwhile there’s this hand basket, we call Mother Earth, full of travail to pray whole.

So let’s make a plan to talk soon. I have Skype and email and a webpage and Facebook but cannot bring myself to add Twitter yet. We can continue the conversation. Don’t you have questions?

May the gentle wind always be at your back~