Month: January 2014

Clearing, Culture, and Civilization

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

A little sun, a slight shift up the thermometer, and I catch my stride again, find my way back into my life.  I’m glad we got all those boxes of Giveaway ready earlier in the week.  I know that packing boxes would not have helped to lift me out of the puddle of winter blues–it requires too much psychic attention.  But carrying them out of the house and putting them in the trunk, taking them to Reuzit–that was a definite pick-me-up.  Now the energy flows through the house with a little more grace.

Beth’s Personal Remedies for Winter Blues:
(not guaranteed to work for everyone, but it might be worth a shot)
1.  Make Gratitude Lists
2.  Notice the shadows and footprints on the snow
3.  Do yoga tree poses.  Lots of tree poses.  And king dancer poses.  And warrior poses.  Laugh when you fall.  Keep trying.
4.  Get rid of Stuff.  Being a Manager of Stuff is energy-sapping at the best of times, but in Winter, it’s numbing.
5.  Sometimes: Give in to it.  Wrap up in a blanket on the recliner, read a book, and drink lots of tea.

Speaking of getting rid of stuff, I found this great little list at the Pachamama Alliance:

Not Shopping List     I posted it on my Facebook site, and people began to add to it:

Recycle
Dumpster dive
Joyfully do without
Wildharvest
Re-vamp, re-fashion, create

So many good ideas.
What would you add?
How can we support each other in community
to do these things rather than settling for the easy path of buying more
plastic junk that won’t last and that we don’t really need, and probably don’t
really want, if we’re really honest with ourselves?


Gratitude List:
1.  A good tutor.  I feel much more confident about my computer savvy after just an hour of good help.
2.  Fish tacos
3.  Conversations about grief, sharing stories, opening hearts.  I have such wise, compassionate friends.
4.  Conversations about Culture and Civilization–more good semantic distinctions to be made.  Civilization has gotten us into a peck of trouble, has it not?  How does it differ from culture?  What do we pass on to our children–what culture do we share with them?  I have such wonderful, thoughtful friends.
5.  The light within us all.  I don’t know how to write this one, because it comes out of a really challenging conversation about why people harm other people, even when they know better, about why people engage in bullying behavior.  I recognize too, that I have shadows myself, some unhealthy shadows.  That’s crunchy.  But liberating.

May we walk in Beauty.

Winter Wall

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Today was the day for me.  I hit the winter wall.  I have been able to remain positive and relatively not-whiny so far, but today did me in.  I want to stay inside and sleep.  I had to do an awful lot of self-talk just to get myself out the door to go check on the chickens.

I don’t write this to be whiny or to beg for pity, but to place in context again the fact that sometimes I desperately need to find my way to gratitude.  And having practiced during the easy times definitely helps me to use the muscle in the days when it doesn’t come so easily.

Oh, but there’s always Beauty to find, even when I’m all curled up and cringing inside.

Gratitude List:
1.  Blue shadows on a white field.
2.  Bird footsteps and wing prints like hieroglyphic writing in the snow.
3.  Slippers and layers and the knee socks that I have turned into an extra pair of sleeves (these do an amazing job of keeping me warm).
4.  My many wise friends.  Wise and compassionate.  You.
5.  The sun is returning.  The sun is returning.  The sun is returning.

May we walk in Beauty.

Editing and Not Editing

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Gratitude List:
1.  Synchronicity
2. Boundaries.  Good old boundaries.
3. Not editing
4. Editing
5. When the ideas come fast and furious, in a blur, and you can hardly find time to grab a pen to write them down.

May we walk in Beauty.

Bad Mama and an IT Expert

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Bad Mama Award for the day: Carrying the mousetrap full of dead mouse through the house without thinking.  We’ve been reading Brambly Hedge, for Pete’s sake!  “Why do you have to kill them?”  Many, many tears.  Shame.  I am so tired of finding mouse poop in my drawers.

Gratitude List:
1.  Heron hunched in the pond.  Here’s the picture: the pond is frozen over, and atop the ice is a fluffy layer of snow.  Except for the corner closest to the hillside, where the biggest spring empties into the pond.  There, in just one corner, is a spot free of ice where the great blue heron crouches for fishing in winter.  I love when it flies low over the house on its way to hunting.  I love the way it crouches expectantly in its pond-corner, like my own heart waiting for spring.
2.  That orange glow that filled the holler at sunset this evening
3.  Our 7-year-old IT guy.  I couldn’t figure out how to save things from the big PC to the cloud so that I can access them on the Chromebook.  “Oh, that’s easy, Mom.”  And he did it.  My seven-year-old has more computer savvy than I do.  As Jon says, he’s tapped into the technological noosphere.
4.  The outpouring of affection and compassion that seems to be bubbling all around.
5.  Finding time for the projects.

May we walk in Beauty.

Prepositions and Polarities

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Gratitude List:
1. So many faerie diamonds a-dazzle in the sunlight on the ice on the River in the morning.
2. Prepositions
3. Holding the polarities
4. Valuing my work
5. This poem by Rilke:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

May we walk in Beauty.

Last year, I read something by Rob Brezsny, in which he challenged people to look at that Rilke poem and use it as a template for their own poem.  Here’s mine for today:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across time and space.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around the Mystery, around that ancient tor.
I have been circling all my many lives
and I still don’t know: am I a the dancer,
the crone, or the ineffable fool?

Groundswell

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Gratitude List:
1.  The way the kids tucked into the alecha and injera this evening at supper.  It’s gratifying to see them enjoying interesting food.  No matter that the yellow peas never got soft enough to make the chana dahl.  I must not have kept the heat on them enough.  They’ll feed the chickens tomorrow.  The rest of the supper was good.
2.  Watching my second grader get lost reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to himself.  I had to stop myself from stopping him: I wanted us to read them together!  Ah, but he was overcome by the magic.
3.  Graces to be found in the challenging times.
4.  How sometimes the network works.  You put it out there and people grab it, and suddenly there’s a groundswell and momentum.
5.  Sleep.

May we walk in Beauty.

Winter Balances

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A quick little poem.
I am of two minds about winter.

One moment:
Enough, I say!  Enough
of the suffocating darkness,
of the cold that drives me
into my bed, a-quiver.
Enough of the river
frozen halfway to stone.
Enough of the bone-chilling
mind-numbing ache of it.

Then, sun on the snow,
a-sparkle, a-dazzle,
glinting ferociously:
Here is your light!
Bathe in it, draw it in,
into your marrow,
carry it deep in your heart,
in the depths, in the shadows.

Gratitude List:
1.  The way the winter sun sparkles through the bathroom window at Radiance and hits the Mary Oliver poem about summer.
2.  Talking it over
3.  The gift of vulnerability.  I want to be always strong, strong like you.  And then you open your heart and show me: “Here is the way.  Here are the places that are fearful to look upon.”  I have so much to learn.
4.  Healing energy like that bright winter sun, shimmering all around.
5.  Assessing and tweaking

May we walk in Beauty.

Presence

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I have been seeing a lot on the internet lately about compassion and empathy, about empathy and sympathy.  That makes me happy.  I’ve been reading Judy Cannato’s Field of Compassion, which posits that these times we are living in are marked by a new upwelling of compassion energy.  And that makes me happy, too.

Today I looked again at that little cartoon video that accompanies Brene Brown’s TED talk on empathy and sympathy.  I love in-depth semantic discussions, the sharp and precise clarification of terms, and part of what I like so much about Brene Brown’s work is that she gives us precise language for feelings.  It’s like those feelings charts that people sometimes use for helping children understand their emotions, but on an adult scale.

So I do not intend to critique Brown’s view of empathy and sympathy here, really.  Nor yours, either.  But it struck me that part of what is moving about the presence of the Bear in the video (go up there and click that link and watch it now, please) is just that: his Presence.  He witnessed the Little Rabbit’s pain, and when the Rabbit fell in the hole, he climbed right down in there with her.  Aside from the label of his approach as empathetic rather than sympathetic, he was Present.  He gave her the gift of witnessing her pain.

I haven’t had much experience in my life of terrible pain and trauma, but in the places and times when I have been hurting, I know that empathy was a great help when it was genuine.  “I know how you feel,” can feel like a great comfort, or a violation: How dare you presume to know how I feel?  “When I went through this. . . ” can be a relief to hear (You walked this road and you survived!) or it can be patronizing.  Sometimes a sympathetic “That must be so hard” is as refreshingly Present as an empathetic “I know how it is.”

I wish I could say I get it right all the time, this business of being Present, being a Compassionate Witness.  It’s hard to be awake enough to one’s self and the Universe to know how to muddle through this bog of the heart.  It’s a challenge to be present when the Little Rabbit is lashing out in her sadness.  I love that the meta-conversations lead us into the discussion.  I’m grateful for the people, like Brown, who are working at the semantics, drawing us all to a deeper understanding of the compassionate heart.

Gratitude List:
1. The sweet, soft brush marks of wings on the snow
2.  Satisfying mechanical tools: my apple peeler corer slicer, for example; an efficient non-electric tool that does its job well.
3.  The way Jon hums to himself all day as he’s doing his daily tasks
4.  Two people whom I love a great deal were in an ice-related traffic accident this morning, and emerged mostly unharmed.  I am so grateful that injuries were relatively minor, and hope for a speedy and complete recovery from the aches.
5.  Napping.  This afternoon, as I was dozing off for a much-needed nap, a small person of the house came and snuggled up beside me and fell asleep too.

May we walk in Beauty.

Getting UnStuck

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Solomon Shandy
I think I know this gnome.

Gratitude List:

1.  Foxes in the bosque.  Though I fear for the hens, I loved the frolicsome footprints in the bright snow this morning.
2.  Brambly Hedge, children’s books by Jill Barklem, magical world of field mice
3.  Legos.  On a frigid snow day, I am particularly grateful for this incredible invention.
4.  Asking for help.  Getting help.
5.  The domino effect of getting unstuck.  When one person gets unstuck, it shifts the energy clog so that more people can get free.  I don’t quite know how else to say it.

Bridges

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In Honor of Ruby Bridges, Who Walked a Gauntlet and Turned it Into a Bridge

She did not click her ruby heels
and walk across that bridge of rainbow
home to Kansas. No, this one had the ruby
in her heart, and set her black patent leathers
schoolward, with federal marshals
at her corners, like framing a house.

She made a bridge, this one.
She might have quaked–
who wouldn’t, with the vitriol
of a nation tossed her way
like the tomatoes on the wall
in the Rockwell version?–but
she walked her pathway daily,
built that bridge with daily walking.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Ruby Bridges
2.  Martin Luther King, Jr.
3.  Rosa Parks
4.  All those who fought and marches and sang and endured to bring about civil rights in our country.
5.  People still doing the work to confront and transform racist thinking in self, community, nation

May we walk in Beauty.