Month: July 2014

A Sense of Place

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Here is an exercise that I haven’t done in a while, one that helps me to put myself in the perspective of the world.  It helps me to remember how small I am in such a vast world, but it also makes me feel special, here in my own particular spot in that vast world.  Anyone can do it.  Just start where you are, and work outward, including anything you think is important.  Sometimes I sort of backtrack, in order to make sure I have all the geographical features that are important to me.  Most of these places do actually have unofficial names, but you can name things whatever you like, eh?

Here I am, in Grandma’s recliner, in the living room of Arbor House, under the poplar and sycamore trees, on Goldfinch Farm, by Cabin Creek, on Schmuck Road, in Skunk Hollow, between two wings of Mount Pisgah, in Lower Windsor Township, along the Susquehanna River, in York County, in southeastern Pennsylvania, in the northeastern United States, in North America, in the western hemisphere, on Planet Earth, Terra, in the system of the star Sol, in the Milky Way Galaxy, in a small corner of the Universe, of the Multiverse.

There.  Now I know where I am.  Whew.

Gratitude List:
1.  Even more of the Tiny Bright Folk: praying mantis, katydid
2.  Thermal delight.  Sometimes it feels as though I could always find something to complain about regarding the weather.  Not this week.  This is weather that makes me feel alive and crisp and wakeful.
3.  Fred the Cat is much better now.  He was looking pretty miserable, and I wasn’t sure I could handle losing two cats in a season.  Changing flea control methods has worked wonders.
4.  The glowy golden orange color of the Orange Blossom tomatoes
5.  Getting projects completed before I open up the new world of my new job in less than a month

May we walk in Beauty!

Bright Wings

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:

1.  More Bright Wings: black and tiger swallowtails, a sphinx moth
2.  Hard physical labor
3.  Cool summer mornings–have I said that yet?
4.  Days of quiet mind
5.  The Goldfinch Farm Crew

May we walk in Beauty!

Step Away from the Gates

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Yesterday was perhaps a bit of a let-down day after the high of Luna Moth Day, full of barely maskable crabbiness and low-grade anxiety.  Sigh.  I suppose we can’t always live in the realm of the sublime.  The mundane has lessons aplenty.

Worn out by the anxieties and slog of the day, I lay back in the recliner for an evening catnap, and the first part of this just sort of fluttered into my head.

Don’t sit so close to the gates of Despair, sister.
I don’t need to to tell you how the gates open inward,
suddenly drawing the shuffling masses inside the yawning arches.
I don’t need to tell you how easy it is to be carried along in the wave,
or worse, trampled by feet of those who are eager
to prove their dark visions and those who cannot
relinquish their lifelong addiction to fear.
You know them too well, these shadows.
You’ve been in that land.

Roll up your mat, gather your books,
pick up your bucketful of bright yellow flowers,
and walk twenty paces east of the gateway
to the place where a sapling grows patiently
out of the moss-covered pavements.

From this spot you will hear the faint whisper
of breezes, from faraway places
where courage is dawning.

From this breathable vantage point,
you will hear the distant shushing
of waves on the beaches
where hope will awaken.

I know why you choose your perch,
there, on the doorstep.
I know why you watch them so carefully,
tending the crowd like a garden,
why you believe yourself safe,
you, with your books and your flowers.

I know, too, how you belong there,
in that waiting crowd of restless people,
how some days your flowers turn lifeless and ashen,
how the words in your volumes, on grayest of days,
run down the pages like ink-bled tears.

Pick up your mat, I say, now before the gates open.
Turn your back on that archway.
Follow the pathway of bright white pebbles
that I laid there myself one gray day.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The way words come together to make meaning
2. The holiness of the everyday
3. Tomato sandwiches
4. Cool summer morning breezes (“. . .blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”
5. This web that we belong to.  And I don’t just mean the www, though that one has its contribution.  Can you feel how the strands connect us, how the energy runs between us?

May we walk in Beauty!

Day of the Luna Moth

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Some of my favorite moments of poetic creation have been when I take seemingly unrelated images and ideas and pack them together into the same poem to create a new thing.  It’s like the satisfaction of making a really good collage or a quilt–when you put together things that don’t seem to have any relationship to each other, and suddenly when they come together, a kind of alchemy occurs.  A shiny new layer of meaning is created.

Yesterday was a collage of a day, a quilt of a day, a poem of a day for me.  In the morning, as I was cleaning out the market room and setting up bins of vegetables and bustling about in the morning work of the day, I kept getting that feeling you get when you know someone is looking over your shoulder, or watching you from a distance.  I actually turned around–several times–to see who was there, but everyone was still up in the fields harvesting.  At one point when I turned around, I thought I saw someone slip behind the sycamore tree, but when I looked in the reflection of the shop window behind the tree, no one was there.

A few hours later, when the harvest rush was over, my children came running to tell me that they had discovered a “milkweed moth” on the swing set.  (Last year, we had seen a Luna Moth resting on a milkweed plant–it made quite an impression on the boys.)  They showed me, and there she was, fresh as the beginning of the world, wings still unfurling.  We watched her over the course of the next couple of hours as her wings filled out to their full glory and she opened them up.  She was still there, in the rain, when we went to bed last night, but this morning she is gone.

Luna1 Luna2 Luna3 Luna4Luna

Gratitude List:
1.  Luna
2.  Magic and wonder
3.  Presence
4.  Listening deeply
5.  Meaning

May we walk in Beauty!

Bless the Rains

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Rain
2.  Drizzle
3.  Mist and fog
4.  Creek and River
5.  Growth

May we walk in Beauty!

Waiting for Rain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Smell it in the air,
feeling of impendingness,
a sense of silence,
broken moments of birdsong.
Everything is listening.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Yesterday’s music
2.  Smell of rain in the air
3.  A clean house
4.  Solutions
5.  Words, gestures, language

May we walk in Beauty!

The Revision

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

This is the poem/fish I wrote about yesterday, the one that just jumped out of the water and into my net, but then needed some serious wrangling to get it to shore. Perhaps it still needs some tweaking, but I need to let it cook a bit now.

When the story has been revised
the ending will read:
We won.

We were the liberators,
it will read above the (overstrike) conquerors.

We
(the revision will read)
were noble.

In the revision:
(notice now my use of the future perfect tense, negative):
There will have been no starving children.
There will have been no raped women.
There will have been no collateral damage with a name
that sounds like your sister’s.

Mission
(you will say)
Accomplished.
(Notice, there, the use of the simple past.)
Done.
Full stop.

Your president
(shifting now to a simple future)
will appear in warrior’s garb declaring victory.
Your president will make it clear that all the strikes were surgical.
Your president will announce that the man killed by that last drone bomb
was The Terrorist in Question,
and not somebody’s gentle Uncle Abdul,
the one with the laughing eyes.

When the revision is complete,
there will no longer be desperate refugee children
seeking safety at your borders.
Instead, you will be protecting your boundaries from ravaging illegals.

When the revision is complete,
your enemies will have committed brutal murders,
while your own side will have taken just revenge.

The words invasion and genocide will have left your lexicon,
replaced by freedom fighters and patriots.

When the revision is complete,
you will sit alone on your little island
and sing your victory songs

to a moon who has turned her face away,
to stars that no longer understand your language.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Mullein tapers and dogbane on the roadsides.
2.  The idea of rain.  The hint of it in the air.  The weather report for tomorrow (80% chance),
3.  Summertime dinners always have fresh vegetables.
4.  Visiting with old friends.
5.  Envisioning.

May we walk in Beauty!

Fishing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

I don’t fish in the actual sense, but I have been thinking about poetry and fishing for the last few days, and this morning I read something about how poetry is both art and craft, both inspiration and work.  Sometimes, it’s like the fish are just jumping out of the water, waiting for me to hold out my net and catch them.  I love it when that happens.  Sometimes I have to have two nets available to be catching them all as they rain past.  It’s important not to get too attached to every fish I catch in this manner.  Some are real stinkers, but occasionally I can catch a nice rainbow trout this way.

But more often than not, I just have to show up at the river, day after day, with my fishing rod, and sit there in the hot sun or under a shady tree, and wait and wait and wait.  Lots of times, I’ll hook an old boot or funny piece of wood.  Most of these things I’ll toss back, but some of them I can use.  It’s particularly rewarding to catch a beautiful fish this way–the wait and the work of it makes it especially satisfying.

When I first started writing poetry as a teenager, I didn’t have time for revising or perfecting.  I ended up throwing away most of that stuff when I reached my twenties.  Then I got into a phase where I didn’t believe anything was truly good until it had been worked over and wrangled repeatedly.  I sucked the life out of many a good poem that way.

I think sometimes really good poems do just drop out of the sky with little need for change.  Most of the poems I write need a little more tweaking, though.  During those times when they’re just jumping out of the lake, I need to just write it down like dictation without thinking about whether this is the perfect word, or whether the sounds work together or the rhythm is compelling.  Then, when the rush and whoosh is done, I can go back and see what I have, and organize it into a more complete form.

The other night, half a poem jumped out at me that way.  Had I not been on my way to an appointment, perhaps it would be complete, but now that I’ve lost the moment, I need to go back and sit by the river with this one, wait for inspiration to strike on the next line.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Milkweed everywhere
2.  Quiet mornings
3.  Super moon, though it does cause some sleeping difficulty
4.  How inspiration strikes
5.  Crafting

May we walk in Beauty!

Power

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

After nearly two full days without electricity, I want to make all five point on my Gratitude List something about the wonders of electricity and how grateful I am for running water and lights at the flip of a switch.  Part of me, however, is a little embarrassed, a little chagrined with myself, for my dependence on this wonder of the modern world.  Why is it so hard to manage?  Of course, there’s always the anxiety over spoiled food–because we’re so dependent on electricity, we end up with quite a lot of time and money invested in the contents of our refrigerators.  I have a friend who has made the transition away from the use of a refrigerator.  I’m not entirely sure how exactly she manages it, but it does seem like a good choice.  Refrigerators and freezers are real energy hogs.

But aside from the fridge, why does loss of power throw me for such a loop?  I go to bed at dark, instead of staying up later than my body thinks I should.  That’s not a bad thing.  We carried buckets of water from the kiddie pool up to the bathroom so we could flush the toilet.  We had filled the kiddie pool the day before the power died–how lucky was that?  The buckets were heavy.  And it took a lot of trips over the two days we were without power.  So who am I to grumble about carrying water upstairs to my bathroom when women in many places of the world are walking often a mile or more, perhaps twice a day, likely with a baby on their backs or children at their ankles, to get the small amount of water that their family will use for the day.

So now the power is back on.  I am back to wasting electricity and water.  One of the privileges of living in a wealthy nation is that we take our waste for granted and forget that we are wasting.  Perhaps I can use this experience to give me practice, to help me live more mindfully, with more awareness, so that I can be more conservative of Earth’s precious resources, so that next time the power goes out it will be a minor inconvenience rather than a serious frustration.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Those clouds in the evenings after the storms, bunches hanging low into the magenta of the sunset.
2.  The way the shining, fresh-washed blue sky shone out between those clouds, like Mary’s robe.
3.  The Ganesha cloud I saw yesterday morning, looking for all the world like the jolly elephant god riding the winds across the sky.
4.  A day of really moving in to my classroom, beginning to feel myself in the space.
5.  All the power available to me, in so many ways.  May I not take it for granted.

May we walk in Beauty!

Big Hearts

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:

1.  Collegiality.  Sharing ideas.
2.  Snail Mail
3.  Is that a rain cloud?
4.  A cool morning for harvest
5.  Your good heart.  You know, we may be in completely different worlds when it comes to politics or to religion.  We might find very little to agree on when it comes to the issues that are thrown to us to fight about.  But when it comes down to it, I believe in your good heart.  I trust your essential connection to love and goodness.  I want to be worthy of your trust as well.

May we walk in Beauty.