Merry Christmas, Joyous Solstice, Everyone -

All blessings. I hope this posting finds you well, and blessed with the callings of your hearts. I am so graced by each of you.

Usually I share a holiday blog or poetic essay at this time of year. This holiday season I'm inviting you to explore with me a book investigating one of humanity's greatest inventions: writing--and our imperiled alphabets and scripts, and the cultures from which they spring. This would be an amazing Christmas/Solstice gift for yourself or others—a deep dive invitation into what is human and humane:

Writing Beyond Writing - Lessons from Endangered Alphabets — Tim Brookes

At rallies for human rights, in church congregations, at meet-ups over coffee, human rights are touched upon as each person having enough to live in dignity and well-being--with food, shelter, warmth/cooling, safety and medical resources—or, often in prayer, as “the three”: wealth, health, and relationships.

In a church congregation where I felt safe to express myself, I shouted out, in response to the identified “three”: wealth, health, and relationships, “ . . . and, Creativity!” What I was hollering out is that freedom of creative expression, in mediums with which one is engaged and/or drawn to, is an oft overlooked, oft discounted human need and right, life-blood of the spirit, for which much human blood has been shed.

Tim Brookes, in his newly published book, Writing Beyond Writing—Lessons from Endangered Alphabets, – reveals that through colonization and language imperialism, we have repeatedly squelched, suffocated, tortured and killed creative expression—trashing unique views, and rich lenses, connections, interpretations, and curiosities in lieu of the aggressors/conquerors self-aggrandizement-- driven by a sense of greed and buried self-doubt. And, he demonstrates an alternative, through honoring and making visible the world's endangered alphabets.
Yes, our physical needs must be met—and, so, too, the callings of our hearts:

“If, of thy mortal goods, thou art bereft,
And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,
Sell one & from the dole,
Buy Hyacinths to feed the soul”

– Muslihuddin Sadi, 13th Century Persian Poet

Tim Brookes, on a carrier-wave of his passion for beautiful wood, and a distinctive set of circumstances calling upon his carving skills, found himself drawn deeply into the world's endangered scripts, with their unique garden-bed of each script's culture.

Unlike our strictly bound linear Latin alphabet, representing only sounds strung together to replicate words and their meanings into coherent thought patterns and concepts, or to narrate moods and sensations, Tim found in the world's endangered non-Latin alphabets articulated cultural norms, values, traditions and practices, inviting those able to read them into a vibrant living connection with their alphabets and panorama of their shared inner and outer landscapes.

When we haven't known about something, haven't felt it, been in connection with it, or its loss, later learning of the loss, it's easy to slip into feeling it is not important, that it doesn't particularly matter, it isn't tangible to us. . . “So it slipped away; what does it matter” . . . “If it was so valuable, it would have staying power.”

Thing is . . . vibrant, beautiful, rich alphabets don't just fade. They have purposely, been banished by, as Tim points out, “the winning team” in intentional diminishment, or well-meaning sharing/”gifting” of the perceived values of our Latin alphabet, which it does have, but done so in disregard, often incomprehension of the value of the alphabets being pushed aside.

So---what has estranged us to the curiosity, wonder; the magic of eye-contact, touch, and connection, the serpentine wafts of insight, cleverness, wisdom, and compassion; of Something Else, other than our own? Why have the alphabets of “not us” been trashed, tracked, and murdered? – ongoing: See Mongolian subjugated to Chinese, Tifinagh to Arabic and French. What is it, about 'other' –and all its riches, that terrifies us so, makes us immune to the sunset of an alphabet, and its people, from our self-styled Latin alphabet ivory towers?

The answer? Often inner colonization—initially by our families, communities, cultural-norms, someone who was a strong influencer in our lives—then carried on by us, as sovereign, yet often not fully informed, adults--long beyond our 'formative' years. Tim's deep noticing, and artistic interaction with the endangered alphabets, and the retrieval generated out of that . . . has created a living bridge of honor, respect, and support of artistic/creative expression, the right of voice, of speaking one's truth and vision, via writing in one's mother tongue and script—generating life-support rescue for the peoples of endangered alphabets, ourselves, and our creative fire.

Breathe it in, feel it, taste it, touch it—and feel the oxygen, the renewal, the arriving to the crossroads of dust, wood, water, air, sunlight--and that which leans back into the night and wonders at the stars; the patterns in the heavens, our minds, and the pens and paintbrushes at our finger tips—fully present and engaged in the livingness, the illumination of scripts—their sounds and visual movement, and the answering echoes in our minds and bodies that comes from reading and writing in those scripts.
They alter what we remember, how we perceive ourselves and those around us, how we feel, the insights and understandings we have, how we connect-the-dots—and the decisions we make and the actions we take based on our synthesis of that.
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Allow Tim's connection with wood and script to take you to some place new with an unimagined view. It will alter your inner and outer landscapes, your interior dialogue about how we are made, and where we are going. Read this book!

https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/

Our mission is to play an active role in preserving endangered cultures by using their writing systems to create artwork and educational materials.
. . . and join Tim and the Endangered Alphabets Project this January 23, 2024 for the first World Endangered Writing Day--”A day of talks, discussions, activities, awards and games in support of the world’s minority and indigenous scripts and their communities.”

https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/world-endangered.../

Warmly,
Indigo

DEEP WINTERING

WINTERING:

Luscious. I titled it in all caps. There is solace in the stilling of winter. Back behind the Salvation Army bells at store entrances and “sir-rishhhh” of tires in snow slush, there is organic permission to quiet, to go deep into moon-satined rivers deep within us, to curl up in the “tree-trunk” of our bodies, to touch ourselves, hold ourselves, to be animal, to be connected to the deeper rhythms, to relax into it . . .

Wintering: To “hear” what we see; to see what we taste . . . some kind of deep level synesthesia. Back to being "animal": alive, really, fully, with it--instead of just skimming it. I'm saying yes. I am giving myself permission to wallow in a year of soft gray and ivory, tawny tans, and deep shadow blues. 

. . . a year of cozy, of comfort, of nurture, of restoration and recovery from "too long, too much". I am going to literally soak in other people's words. What a vacation to take long drinks of other peoples' thoughts, contemplations, and flights of watercolor art delivering the spell-bound images of the word magic scrawled on the pages and the wonder of reading out loud again, the magic of voicing what is written. I'm going to read myself bedtime stories. Seed my dreams, stretch in the cozy warmth of my own body heat, peeking at the soft-footed arrival of the gray day, over the rumple of my bed covers, with a milky sun peering back at me through my window.

Wintering: having time to pause, to contemplate, to gaze, to mull over, consider . . . has become such a luxury in our time. I'm claiming a year of it. I'll be working, still, but only 36 hrs, instead of 40 per week, starting the day after Christmas—16 hours more per month that is mine.

I have several journal-format magazines, one of them that I'm working with now, Field Guide to Everyday Magic by Stampington, and stacks of books, such as Wintering by Katherine May, gorgeous books—images and words by Jackie Morris about Snow Leopard; another about a Gypsy-woman who rides a polar bear pulling a vardo wagon full of books who comes by in the night and leaves a book for you . . . Jackie's book about unwinding. 

This is the time of star boats that sail away into the rivers of stars. Then, there is the soothing of dark branches scratching the soft gray underbellies of the lowering clouds, pregnant with snow fluff, waiting to come down in soft flurries. I'm always amazed that our sensitive faces relish the nip of snowflakes, looking out from a ruff of fur. There is a quality to the voice in snow country that is a timbre like no other, held in a silence that you can hear. There is snowfall inside me, a stilling quiet, as those animal-self seeds slumber beneath the surface of winter white.