“Culture is the integration of the divine in every day life.”– John Edward Hurley
Meditation I — Willie Louise
I first rode down Highway 18 South in 1978 when I was twenty-seven, riding my bicycle across America through the Southern states. I came to visit Willie Louise, my second cousin, who lived in Bolivar, down the road from what is now my home in Hickory Valley, Tennessee.
Willie Louise had invited me when I saw her the year before at my father’s wedding to Stella at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in neighboring Jackson, Tennessee. (Stella was my “mama-ta”, a southern term of endearment invented by Stella as an alternative to that dreaded phrase, “step mother.”)
I had not seen Willie Louise since my Aunt Mary’s wedding at St. Luke’s where I had been a flower girl twenty four years earlier. The importance of the occasions and the length of time separating them spoke to the divide between the cousins who had stayed on the land and those who had gone to the cities.
Willie Louise’s white frame house sat at the intersection of Highway 18 and Highway 64 — where the flow of traffic has to decide whether to go south through the cotton and soybean fields and timber of Mississippi to New Orleans or west to Memphis and across the Mississippi river to Arkansas.
I parked my bicycle on the back porch and paused there for a summer week that July long ago. Willie Louise, one of our cousins and I crisscrossed Hardeman County, tracing the land that the Fitts clan had farmed for generations and the churches they had attended. We trekked through the county cemeteries, visiting the headstones that marked our ancestors’ passings. I heard the family stories, including how Elvis Presley had helped rescue Willie Louise from a bad car wreck. She said that Elvis had been her angel that night.
I spent hours sitting in her small blue and white kitchen, eating sugar cookies warm from the oven, while Willie Louise attended to my spiritual and cultural upbringing. These skills were undeveloped by an education that had me subscribing to “Foreign Affairs” magazine at the age of sixteen. Willie Louise told me that if I ever wore a pair of shoes out in Bolivar, that I would never leave. Somehow, even though I was headed for a job on Wall Street, I think she knew I would come to stay someday.
Sitting on Willie Louise’s refrigerator was a card called “One Solitary Life” that the cousins gave to me after Willie Louise died. It sits framed in my office today —
********** ONE SOLITARY LIFEHe was born in an obscure village.
He worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty.
He then became an itinerant preacher.
Nineteen centuries have come and gone,
and today he is the central figure
of the human race.
All the armies that have ever marched,
and all the navies that ever sailed,
all the parliaments that ever sat,
and all the kings that ever reigned
have not affected the life of man
on this earth as much as that…
one solitary life.**********
Sitting in that little kitchen — immersed in Willie Louise’s love for family and land — I meditated about Jesus and the power of having a heart that is in the heart of God.
Meditating about Jesus is one thing — talking about him on the trading desks of Wall Street or in the corridors of Washington is another. Indeed, the people who do talk about Jesus there often say one thing and do another. There was no way when it came to business, government or institutionalized religion to tell who was truly godful and who was not. So it was my nature for the next two decades to keep my spiritual meditations private as my investment banking career grew.
It was not until the mid-1990’s that I started to contemplate the possibility of the integration of the divine with every day life. I was driving down the George Washington Parkway outside of Washington, DC late at night listening to an audio introduction to quantum physics, The Dancing Wu Li Masters. The author described experiments that had demonstrated that two particles of light separated by a distance far greater than the speed of light or sound had acted in concert simultaneously evidencing the characteristic of shared intelligence.
I pulled my car over to the side of the road to contemplate the fact that my intuitive understanding of how the world worked had just been confirmed by modern science. The intelligence of all living things was connected. Our common intelligence transcended time and space. Those who listened to spirit and nature knew this. Now those who listened to mathematics and science would know this as well.
The meaning of the intimacy of distant light particles is something that bankers and investors would do well to mediate on with diligence.
Money folks have traditionally taken the blame for the fact that the popular vote has historically supported quick money over the divine. This puts our leaders in a prisoner’s dilemma. Those who resist the temptation to engage in piracy will have the rug pulled out from under them by the popular support of those who do. So long as the profits of piracy can be reinvested to affirm the legitimacy and prestige of the pirates, our financial system will be predicated on the theory that — as the Roman Emperor Vespasian said — “Pecunia non olet,” or “Money has no smell.”
If we made a map of how Americans spend our time, our money and our attention, it will describe a people who freely reject the covenant of grace. If we had a true map of how all the money worked, we would have a picture of how we are selling our health and wealth down the river for pennies on the dollar not to mention what we are allowing to be done in our name to others.
It is worth meditating this Christmas on the divine patience required for Jesus, the King of Angels, and the heavenly hosts to watch over us as they do.
The last time the Western world experienced a transformation of information processing tools of the magnitude that we are currently experiencing was in the 1400’s as a result of the invention of the printing press. The resulting currency and accounting tools were part of revolutionizing banking and shifting power and knowledge out of the hands of the priests. This helped to finance the Renaissance — and ultimately — the rise of a merchant and middle class.
Upon learning about the Internet, it struck me that the same phenomenal increases in learning metabolism could create a similar exponential increase in wealth as that created by the printing press and the tools it spawned. In 1990, I started a company to do the necessary prototyping for the new investment model and to build the pricing databases and software tools. After $12 billion of transactions and $500 billion of portfolio strategy gave us a rich flow of pricings, I came full circle back to some fundamental truths.
Whether you believe it from the Buddha or the Bible, our intelligence is shared. When I first read Ruppert Sheldrake’s intuitions on morphogenic fields in Presence of the Past I was amazed to realize that his scientific inquiry fit exactly with what our financial pricings said about the ways intelligence worked as an economic matter.
Our bodies are information processors — that share and draw on invisible fields of knowledge through which we richly leverage each others’ intelligence. We are like the flock of birds that turns together at high speeds and anticipates the changes in the weather. As Joseph Campbell once said, “Memories come from the future.” Buddha said the same thing differently, “With your thoughts, you invent your world.”
Much higher learning metabolisms can create great wealth. But much higher learning metabolisms require much greater alignment between people in terms of mission and core values. Much higher metabolisms require much greater standards of integrity, competence and trustworthiness. The economic impact is that public and private investment must align the interests of the investor and shareholder with the wider ecosystem.
I once asked one of my brightest employees what happens traditionally when the learning metabolisms of living systems increase dramatically. He called a friend of his who was a physicist at Livermore National Laboratory and came back with the answer — “The rate of entropy increases.”
And so our lives were true to physics. The cost of one bad apple in the mix was rising. The corruption in the financial system kept increasing. Rather than wait for the tower of babel to fall with me in it, I decided to move to a place where I could be closer to my neighbors and mother nature. I was looking back in time for a culture that could create the future.
In 1999, I moved myself and my new company Solari to Tennessee to be near Willie Louise and Stella who had returned home after my father’s death. Like Jessica in Dune who drinks the spice and downloads the knowledge of all her female ancestors in compressed form, I was to learn lifetimes of deeper wisdom from Stella and Willie Louise in the few years before they passed from this world to the one that watches over us.
A few years ago, at Hickory Valley Women’s Club, we were discussing whether or not to use our old time fire truck in the Christmas parade. One of my cousins said we should put a banner on it that said,
“Hickory Valley….so far behind — we’re ahead”
Every time I drive home into Hickory Valley from my travels around the country and pass through the intersection of Highways 18 & 64, I smile thinking about what a good time Willie Louise is having hanging out with the angels who are watching over us.
After she died, one of my cousins moved Willie Louise’s white frame house out to Hickory Valley to a beautiful hillside on their farm for her son, Bob and his family. Every time I drive down the country road past Bob’s house, I can feel Willie Louise and a choir of angels overhead.
One of my favorite pastimes in Hickory Valley is riding my bike around the town commons where the railroad used to come through. There are two loops, like a figure eight, that are untrafficked, save for when the Hickory Valley Cotton Gin gets busy during harvest.
I had a bad biking spill one afternoon about a year after I came here. My cousin Bob picked me up and took me into Bolivar to the doctor. They said my shoulder was dislocated and I needed to go to the sports clinic in Jackson to get it fixed. Despite the press of his farm and trucking business, Bob drove me into Jackson. We took the back road where his pickup hit the train tracks a bit hard. I let out a yelp of pain on the bounce. The doctor at the sports clinic insisted that my shoulder was not dislocated.
Bob practices the kind of alternative medicine that we all need these days.
Despite Bob’s pickup-fix-me-up, I could barely walk for the next week. Every morning, noon and night, there would be a knock on the door and a member of the Hickory Valley Women’s Club or the Hickory Valley Baptist Church Women’s Bible Class would bring me another delicious hot meal. Slowly my shoulder recovered while my spirit learned what it means to live in a place where neighbors watch over each other with such care and attention.
Living around Bob and his dad has changed me. I do not see them every day. Yet, they are a powerful presence that watches over all of us in Hickory Valley — that we count on and look up to. They are quiet men — farmers –who speak with thousands of continuous actions and set an unspoken and powerful example of faith.
I was driving down the road one day and saw a huge tree that had fallen that was now pulled off to the side of the road. I saw a friend who farms here later in the day and commented on it. She said that Bob had pulled it off the road after the storm had brought it down across Highway 18. He had said we could not wait for the county — wasn’t it just like Bob to take it upon himself — that Bob and his father were angels watching over us.
I came out of the house one day and found Bob changing the tail light on my car. He said that his cousin Squeaky had been behind me the other night and seen that my tail light was out. Bob said the local troopers would give me a big ticket and he knew I could not afford it. So he had stopped in Bolivar to pick up some parts and swung by to see if he could not fix it.
During some of the toughest times, Bob’s truck broke down and the estimate for repairs was high. Bob went out and found a book that taught the complete mechanical workings of the truck. It was truly the most complex textbook that I had ever seen. Bob digested it and fixed the truck himself. And then he took the time to use a bit of his savings to fix my tail light.
The famous Casey Jones used to drive his train on the route through Hickory Valley. He had an understanding with the town mothers that he would stop the train at the edge of town and walk it through by hand so the children and animals would be safe. As he took the time to walk the train through, he would have passed right by the old shop building on which our town mural is painted. It is a cotton field with a hunting dog and our motto from Corinthians —
“Whatever you do, do it for the glory of God.”–Corinthians 10:31
Christmas is a special time of year in Hickory Valley. I can’t imagine being any place else for Christmas. The Women’s Club decorates the City Hall and the sassafras mill with lights. The town puts up Christmas decorations along Highway 18 and around the town commons.
Many of the houses that ring the commons have Christmas lights and decorations outdoors. There are nativity scenes with statues of Joseph, Mary, the Shepherd’s and the Wise Men around baby Jesus in the manger and Angels watching over them. Hickory Valley Baptist Church has a pageant the weekend before Christmas, where the kids put on the nativity scene.
When I came home last week, I found a tiny Christmas tree in my living room ringed with tiny, merry lights that Summer, my next door neighbor, had put up to welcome me home. My dog Forest had just had a bath and was dancing around the room. James, one of the farmers who helps Bob, had stopped by to see to her and left the porch and house lights on so I would have no trouble finding my way home late at night. The wind was up — and wind chimes were playing their songs on my back porch. You could smell the last of the wood burning fires as the stars twinkled overhead in the cold winter night.
Whatever corruption is in the world, it is here too. Times are hard and getting harder. I try to not pay it any mind. Many years of tutelage by the wise women in my family has taught me that what grows is that to which you give your attention. We are our intention. We attract that upon which we dwell. Plan for the worst, but hope for the best. The Bible says, “there is life and death in the power of the tongue.”
If you want to understand the power of this lesson, go to the website for the Hado Institute in Japan, find your local distributor and order a two-volume book called Messages From Water. Then spend some time meditating on the message in the pictures.
Water crystals improve remarkably in their beauty and intelligence after they have been prayed for, after they have been exposed to beautiful pictures or listen to beautiful music. The human body consists mostly of water. My grandfather used to incessantly quote Keats, “truth is beauty, beauty truth. That’s all ye know in life, and all ye need to know.” Hado Institute backs Keats up with concrete evidence.
After being back for two days, I was struggling over my bills. There was a knock on the door and there was Summer with a mug of hot cider and a cinnamon candy stick. Her two beautiful girls came running in to give me a hug. Summer is one of those people who attract life. Plants love her. Her cats and children follow her everywhere. When she helps me wrap presents, they look like they are from the finest shops in New York.
There is nothing harder in this world then bringing up children and trying to keep them straight. Last night all the children in our church played out the nativity scene. The church overflowed with members of the congregation and community come to watch their children tell the story of the birth of Jesus. Summer’s eldest daughter played Mary. Summer stood in the back praying and clapping for the kids and to be there when they were done and ready to go in the back for fellowship and Christmas potluck.
The church was filled with poinsettias and Christmas greens and candles and glowed with the love of the parents and families for their young. Our pastor closed the ceremony by asking for the angels to watch over these children all the days of their lives.
I have lived in places where my neighbors were evil and wished me harm. Now I live next to Summer who brings me cider and spice and near a pastor who prays for the protection of Summer’s beautiful children.
Every October we have a Community Day outside the Hickory Valley City Hall. Local artisans sell their crafts and local musicians play and sing. At the last community day I discovered that Kathy, one of the members of my church who is a leader in the Hickory Valley Women’s Club, was making little glass angels. It occurred to me that I needed angelic reinforcements. I bought one of Kathy’s angels and took it on the road with me as I headed North for the next round of litigation.
I discovered that having Kathy’s angel with me made an enormous difference in reminding me to keep my mind in sync with the angels watching over us. Which is to say, not to let my mind wander into a sewer of evil, anger, lies and mean spiritedness of so much of what my day to day work entails. If your thinking vibrates with the angels, they can help you. If it does not, you are more or less on your own. Being on my own in Federal District Court is not a good place to be.
I asked Kathy to make me lots of angels in purple glass so that I could give them to others as I travelled about. Everyone fell in love with them. Kathy made up a pocket size one in green glass so I could have one that fit in my briefcase.
Lots of people are getting Kathy’s purple glass angels for Christmas. Kathy and I are thinking that after everyone has a purple glass angel, we can start on another color. The angels watching over us are glad for the little glass intermediaries that help us all to keep in tune with them.
I came home from doing my chores this afternoon and found a Christmas present from my other neighbors hanging on my door. On the card, they had written their Christmas prayer for me:
“Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God;
and everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”– I John 4: 7-8
Noon time is when the fire station siren sounds. That is how we all know to stop what we are doing and head over to the Hickory Valley Meat Market for Elaine’s hot plate lunch. I know what I am going to have each day. Friday mornings I know I will have catfish because Friday is fish day.
About a year ago, I figured out the best way to shop for food is to give Elaine a list and then pick it up at Hickory Valley Meat Market. The only disadvantage is that I do not have the discipline to get in and out without getting some key lime or pecan pie — two of the specialties of the house. Unless I am headed out on the road, I get Elaine to make up big jars of home made soup and greens for me.
Next to the Meat Market is the barbecue pit, where Elaine’s husband Gerald will cook the barbecue. The smell of the peaty wood and the slow simmering chicken and beef barbecue is one of the smells that defines Hickory Valley. Sometimes, Elaine’s daughter Sherry and Gerald will round up some friends and sing country music and gospel outside the store after hours. These are some of the finest concerts you will ever want to attend.
Hickory Valley is a place where lots of people sing and play instruments and love to listen to each other rather than to CDs. This is Elvis country. When returning from Europe where he served in the Army, Elvis was asked by the reporters what he missed about this part of the country to which he answered, “Everything.” No one here is surprised that Elvis had had more #1 hits in London than the Beatles. Or that people travel from all over the world to visit Elvis home Graceland. Or that Elvis’ gospel album is doing well.
Elaine and I are always praying for each other. When I am up in Washington for depositions or a trial, she will call and make sure of the exact times. Or I will call home just to hear her voice — ready to remember a world where I feel safe.
When I got back from my travels last week, Elaine had the flu. She was worried about how to fill all the Christmas orders for pies and porterhouses if she was this sick — let alone shop for kids and grandkids. I went over to prayer service that night and asked Brother Keith to add Elaine to the prayer list. The next morning I picked up a red rose at Shelton’s to leave at the Meat Market underneath the Christmas cow bells that hang over the cold cut cooler. I also left some Eucalyptus oil to help clear her sinuses. Alas, it ate through the plastic cup and her daughter, Sherry, said it smelled the place up something fierce. This weekend, Elaine said she felt much better.
I stopped by today for lunch and Elaine saw that I was coming down with a cold. She called me over to the Meat Market at the end of the day to give me a big jar of her finest soup for my birthday, which is tomorrow. She said she told her husband Gerald no matter how busy they were for Christmas, she needed to make me some soup right away so I got rid of that cold.
I just heard a sermon by one of my favorite preachers, T.D. Jakes. It was about Jesus healing the man on a stretcher who had been brought to him, carried by his four friends. To reach Jesus, they had brought him by stretcher through a hole in the roof . Jesus forgave him of us sins and healed his palsy because he was so moved by the faith of his friends.
There is something to be said for how many angels a concentration of faithful people can attract and the power of the intention they generate.
All day long the e-mail and mail comes in from my network of colleagues and associates through the Solari website. My communications with friends in hundreds of towns and cities in California, Montana, New Zealand , Pennsylvania, Mexico, England, New Hampshire and Norway are interwoven between trips to the Meat Market and bike rides around the commons and visits from James and Summer as they come flying through on some errand or mission of mercy.
My friend Rick from Minnesota who has pulled me out of numerous scrapes with his wise words and money orders that helped to pay Elaine to feed me for another week sends his Christmas card —
“Because you’re my Friend…
I want Christmas to come to you softly,
like snow falling on the branches of a pine.
I want Christmas to sing to you sweetly,
like carolers just outside your door.
I want Christmas to be rich with golden memories
and silver dreams.
And I want Christmas to fill your heart with wonder and joy,
WONDER AND JOY.”
Chris calls. And just as I pick up the phone, a beautiful blue bird comes to rest on the porch through the picture window in front of my desk. Which reminds me of the story from Jung that Chris told at his last conference in London.
Apparently, Jung had a patient who came to see him after a nervous breakdown. She had, as a young woman, fallen in love with her best friends husband. To resolve the tension, she had murdered her best friend and married the husband. It seems she got away with it. She reported to Jung, however, that from the time she killed her friend on, the birds stopped singing wherever she was. She told Jung, “the birds knew.”
As I think of the story while Chris is talking, the blue bird sings and the glass angels twinkle.
I was in California on a speaking tour when Stella died. I had a feeling she waited until I was there to go — as if that way she — then an invalid –could come watch over me. I remember one of the last things she said to me before she moved into assisted living. She looked at me one night with the powerful eerie look she would sometimes get and said, “God has a purpose for your life.” It was as if she was telling me that my work had paused so I could come for a time of training with her — and that time was nearly done.
While in California, I met with a group of Buddhists to do a taping. The fellow handling the equipment was a member of the transcendental mediation movement. He said that after many years of trying to help governments move towards peace, they realized that working with governments was pointless.
The question, then, was what investment of the transcendental meditation community time and resources would be effective in bringing about world peace. After much study, they determined that a system could be moved if 1% of 1% of the people in the system changed. They decided to raise enough money to fund 44,000 people to pray full time for peace. To date, he said, they had raised $150 million and had recruited 10,000 people who were going to pray for peace. They were building a city in India.
Imagine what would happen if the 44,000 people praying for world peace were joined in faith and prayer by our ancestors, the angels who watch over us and the rest of us 6 billion folks. As the birds would know, imagine if we were joined by the birds — and all living things.
My good friend Kelly calls. She is a famous reporter who has courageously covered stories of the worst evil on the planet, ignoring black helicopters and tapped phones and the myriad forms of interference sent by the dark side. I smile as I think of the bumper sticker on her car. I shall use it as my motto for this Christmas as I sit in my little country home surrounded by angels in all forms and in all places–
“May there be peace on earth and may it start with me.”
When I was experiencing 24 hour surveillance in Washington, my pastor set me straight. He said we had a much more serious problems than ill intended strangers. God and the angels, he said, had us under 24 hour surveillance since birth. It was a sobering thought.
The Bible says that all things work together for the good of them that love the Lord and are called according to his purpose. Question is, do we love the Lord and are we acting according to his purpose?
When I was in on the speaking tour in California, I visited a Chinese herbalist and acupuncturist. He prayed before treating me. He said that I was surrounded by a band of Christian warrior angels with flaming swords. It sounded to me like the spirits of the Knights Templars who protected the gold centuries ago.
As I celebrate my birthday and the birthday of Jesus, my prayers are that I may be worthy of such an escort.
Tomorrow, my cousins and I will take branches of holly and greens to lay on Mildred and Willie Louise’s grave. My cousins will tell me about their grandmother, Mildred and Willie Louise’s mother, who my father called Aunt Alma, and all the grandchildren called “Big Mama.” Big Mama would scold my grandfather Will for turning too much towards science. Big Mama and Will’s mother, Octavia, had prayed for him to know the Lord. Big Mama had warned him about the power with which he was dealing. Big Mama told my grandfather Will, “Mama’s prayers will not go unanswered.”
Octavia’s gaze looks out at me from her picture on my mantle. I can feel her prayers for our lives this fine cold Tennessee winter evening as I sit in candlelight looking out over the Hickory Valley town commons twinkling under starlight. I can feel her and my wise women ancestors gather with the angels watching over us.
“And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them,and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them,Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.”—Luke 2: 9-11