Month: March 2014

Rain and Snow and Sleet

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2014 February 085

Gratitude List:
1. For making it safely home tonight in that–Holy Snowsquall, Batman!  What in the world WAS that?  Okay, so this is supposed to be a gratitude, and I am grateful to be home safely, and the words that I want to use for that stuff out there I don’t want my mother to read on my blog.
2. For my five-years-old-today boy who steals my heart every single day, whose journey here was no less perilous than the evening’s icy drive.
3. For the midwife and doulas and friends and sister and Jon and nurses and finally the surgeon who helped get him here safely on that day so long ago, not so long ago.
4. For the rain on my river this morning as we crossed the bridge.  My river, remember, like you are my friends: it’s not about domination and ownership, but about a statement of relationship.  Then what am I to her?  I am her daughter?  Her admirer?  Her acolyte, her friend, her dreamer, her observer, her watcher.
5. Simply for this day.  I will never see it again.  It’s gone now and we have all grown up that much more, and my memory that swears to remember every sweet moment–the tiny voice of a boy counting to thirty in hide-and-seek, the bright eyes, the rich conversations, the singing (oh, the singing)–that memory cannot encompass it all and hold it forever.  So I will swear to hold the Beauty even when my feeble memory lets it trickle into the haze.

May we walk in Beauty!  May you find something, each day, to love and treasure, amid whatever pain and challenge your life hands you.  May a bright yellow flower call your name, may a stranger offer you an open smile, may the breeze kiss your cheek.  Walk in Beauty.

Gulls, Crows and Wild Geese

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Cover 3

 

Gratitude List:
1.  The life and influence of Grace Lefever, herbalist, peace and justice advocate, wise woman, compassionate heart, teacher
2.  Wild chamomile feathering up through the brown grass and dead leaves
3.  Hundreds of wild geese flying over the farm in the mist this morning: “You do not have to be good.”
And crows and gulls flying and calling through the rain above the farm this afternoon: “Be here.  Let your wild self fly free.”
4.  The faerie worlds and magic that my friend Heather sees and offers in her photographs
5.  Rainy day art projects: “Hey Mom, can we do that thing that we do?  Where we draw and then trade?”

May we walk in Beauty!

The Dream Keeper

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This one, by Langston Hughes, keeps wrapping itself around my heart these days, keeps wiggling into my brain-space.

Dream Keeper

Gratitude List:

1.  Collaborative art
2.  A fresh novel to read
3.  Free public libraries–what a concept
4.  Words, spoken and sung (today it was Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote)
5.  Featherbed

May we walk in Beauty!

Because a crow

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

because there was a crow
there was a crow that morning
that morning in the snow
in the snow where the crocus were blooming
where the crocus had cupped their violet bowls
just yesterday around the pollen-padded bees

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Reiki
2.  Reading
3.  Rest
4.  Flow
5.  Belonging

May we walk in Beauty!

Wanton

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

For instance, the crocus and anemone
have leaked past the bricks
that line the edge of the bed.

For instance, the wind.

For instance, those people
blew in through the door,
climbed all those flights of stairs,
and sat down to tell me their stories.

For instance, it has taken me
three days to clear my yard of branches.

For instance, this joy
wanders into the house
even when the doors are closed
against the last blast of winter.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Sometimes it seems like you have to get attached to Plan B in order for the tricksy Universe to commit to making Plan A happen.  I am grateful for today’s full schedule (Plan A), and a project to do another day (Plan B).  I don’t mean to disparage the Universe by this–it keeps one on one’s toes, eh?
2.  Crocus and anemone leaking all over the yard.
3.  Hey, that snow was pretty!  No, I never thought I would use those two words in a sentence again, either.  At least not this soon.
4.  Reiki tomorrow
5.  The web of interconnection.  How the cards you draw have messages for me, too.

May we walk in Beauty!

Found Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I found this poem on page 40 of the September 2004 issue of Sojourners Magazine.  In an article by Danny Duncan Collum about Michael Moore’s then-new movie Fahrenheit 911, I circled some words and blacked out the rest.  Here is the result.  It’s a little more disjointed than I want it to be, but it’s really about playing around, seeing what sense I can make out of seeming nonsense, what happens when half-random words and phrases are created and strung together, what meaning is suggested.

DREAM

I saw Che Guevara on a day filled with omens
we went to lunch there, on the big screen
he won’t go back

I am troubling the dead
I won’t tell you this again

that didn’t happen
today he is lucky to be rooted
in this great global anthem

I pulled a few interesting quotations directly out of the article:
“The war is not meant to be won.  It is meant to be continuous.”  George Orwell
“If you let the world change you, you can change the world.”  from The Motorcycle Diaries

Gratitude List:
1.  Hearing the story through the voices of young people and children
2.  Visual Poetry
3.  Songs of journey, songs of water–“Wade in the water, children”
4.  Gentle guides through the liminal spaces
5.  Community support for unpacking uncomfortable, anxious and difficult questions, powerful questions

May we walk in Beauty!

Healing Song and Story

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  The way that sharing stories opens the heart to healing.
2.  Songs that hold stories.
3.  Vulnerability and strength together.
4.  Clearing the yard of dead branches in the cool evening as the sun set below the rim of the hollow.
5.  Eggs.  For all the potential they hold, all the mystery, the warmth, the way they settle into your palm.  I once had a postcard of an icon of Mary Magdalene holding an egg.

May we walk in Beauty!

Rock Star

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I am a rock star.  I came down out of the fields today and one of my groupies caught sight of me.  “Book?” she asked.  Another head shot up from behind the compost pile.  “Clook!” she yelled.  And then they were rushing me, “Lookee!  Lookee!  Lookee!”  Little feathery bodies racing toward me, wings akimbo.

If you ever feel down about yourself, get some hens.  You too can be a rock star.

Gratitude List:
1.  The community Potato Pitching Party.  Three and a half tons of potatoes, all de-trucked and sorted and re-packed into waiting pick-ups and cars.  By hand.  Woohoo!
2.  Being a rock star to chickens.  Book!  Clook?
3.  Coconut macaroons, no matter how they look.
4.  Working in the windy fields with spring sunshine slanting down.
5.  Quartzite and shale and the way all the field rocks sparkle and twinkle in the sunlight.

May we walk in beauty!

Calling the Elements

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Prayer Bundle

Dream bundle, prayer packet, seeds of vision:
Now fire of sun
feed the fire of my energy
to do my work
to create my life.
Gentle rain
remind me of the grace
to flow with the changes
that I am calling into being.
Fierce winds and teasing breezes
carry my dreams outward
like milkweed seeds
to fall into fertile soil.
Solid stone and earth
ground me and steady me
to make my vision real.

Gratitude List:
1.  Persistence
2. Perspicacity
3. Perspective
4. Purple
5.  im-Perfections

May we walk in Beauty!

Equinox

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Jet Star

I spent my earliest years in East Africa, just a few degrees south of the wide belt of this big round ball, in a comfortable climate where the sun rose every morning at seven o’clock and set again at seven every evening, all year long.  Our seasons were marked by the coming of rains and their going away again.  The days were often hot, but the evenings brought cool breezes off of Lake Victoria, and roiling Michaelangelo clouds sailed in across the plains from the lake.

Here, where the sun slips off to the south for a season, where the days get shorter and then longer again, this moment when the day and night reach equilibrium brings me closer to that sense of rightness and balance, though the cold of winter still lingers in my bones.  While I find the cold time, the dark time, still to be a challenge, I have come to love the seasons, to revel in the feel of the shifting, whirling tilting planet we live on, the reassurance that one state of being will inevitably give way to the next.

Tomorrow we come to that place, one of the quarter points we notice in Terra’s dance with Sol.  Equinox.  My head today is full of these complicated E-words: Equinox, Equator, Equilibrium, in-Evitable.  At these equal points of spring and fall, we are ever so much slightly closer to our star than we are on the outward fling of the Solstices.  Do-si-do, Sun.  Swing your partner.  Welcome, Spring, oh welcome, Spring.

Gratitude List:
1. Inevitability and choice
2. Intention and destiny
3. Fate and chance
4. Fortune and opportunity
5. Blueberry pancakes

May we walk in Beauty!

 

 

 

 

Prayer Bundle:  Tonight I am finishing up gathering the items for my bundle.  I don’t have a direct symbolic link for each thing–I included some things because they are shiny or colorful and caught my magpie’s eye.  There is a piece of cloth to wrap it all together, and cord and wire for tying, a broken necklace with sparkly dangles for brightening it up.  I will take pictures tomorrow in a good light, wrap it all up, and then at about quarter to five, I’ll take it outside as the Equinox arrives.  I want it to rest on the earth, to be touched by the fire of the sun, by wind, by rain.  I want all the elements to work on it.  And I’ll place it somewhere where I won’t mow over it six weeks from now, and where it will be safe from curious children.