Month: September 2016

Parenting as a Spiritual Path

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

meow
I caught him in the middle of conversation. He always has quite a lot to say.

Remember that boy that I brought to tears the other day because of the homework? Last night he finished the project, and got most of the daily homework done, too. Trust the child to find his way, Mama.

It’s just that he reminds me so much of myself, I think. I have always struggled with deadlines, and the stress of the last minute. Still, it is partly the looming deadline itself that brings the fire of inspiration for me–why should it be different for him?

Parenting is a spiritual path, isn’t it? It requires self-awareness in spades.  Self-control. Patience. It brings deep love and gratitude at every step. I keep feeling like I am getting it wrong, begin to feel that shame of inadequacy (and what shame is worse than the shame of letting another human down?), and then suddenly grace appears, and mercy, and whole new rooms open up.

Gratitude List:
1. Pawpaws
2. Getting the work done
3. Last night was Back-to-School Night at school, where the parents walk through their students’ schedules. I think it was just too hot for lots of people, but I did get to have some wonderful conversations with many parents. I love to talk to the parents about their students.
4. The sunrises have been so beautiful. Magenta and violet, gentle and heart-opening.
5. Friday.

May we walk in Beauty!

Needing the Practice

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

treelabyrinth
The tree at the center of the labyrinth. Camp Hebron.

Today is one of the days that I really need to do the gratitude work.  I know this because it was hard to make the list today. I’m not falling apart and I am not depressed. I’m just huffy and grumpy and a little stressed out. When I go inside myself to seek the things that I am grateful about, and all I can find is little orts of shame and grumbliness, then I know I need to breathe into it.

I used to walk away from those uncomfortable feelings: “I shouldn’t be feeling shame. Brene Brown says that it is unhelpful! I don’t like grouchy people. Negativity brings us all down.” But they’re there. If I growl at them and walk away, they always grow.

So I’ll sit down a while with them, roll out a few marbles of gratitude that I find tucked in my pockets, and play a little while, see what happens.

As my wise mother tells me: “It doesn’t have to be either/or. It can be both/and.” I don’t have to be a calm and grateful person OR a grouchy bear. This morning, both apply. At least the grateful bit can help to tame the grouchy bear so she doesn’t go around mauling people.

Gratitude List:
1. Dragonflies. I don’t think I am being too whimsical when I say that I think they like to people watch.
2. Stroopies: Perfect little waffle snack with a sweet caramel center. A local company with a mission to hire refugees. May they grow and thrive.
3. Getting to try again. This one is a little shame-based, perhaps. I brought a child to tears last night with my program to get the homework and music practice done. I was a bit of a bully, even if I was trying to be friendly about it. I think he forgives me. I treated him like a problem to be solved. We’ll figure it out. We’ll try again, and I will go in next time with more self-awareness and compassion.
4. Growing into the roles.
5. Reaching the little goals.

May we walk in Beauty!

Crickets and Silence

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glass

This evening, a group of people from my church is going to the airport to welcome a family from Ethiopia and take them to their new home.  May this become a safe and welcoming place for them, a friendly place where the children may grow up in the knowledge that they are loved and treasured.

Gratitude List:
1. Crickets
2. Those moments when Silence is my companion
3. Finding energy
4. Cool mornings (I am trying so hard not to be whiny and fussy about the hot afternoons in my classroom. It helps if I focus on the coolness of the mornings and live into that.)
5. Good literature

May we walk in Beauty!

A Hole in the Fabric

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IMAG1844
And a blue true dream of sky

There’s been a change in my noticing, a small hole in the fabric of my attention. What used to be an alive and vibrant node in my awareness is now an empty expectancy.  I experienced a little zing every time I walked beneath the sycamore tree, even if I did not take the time to pause and look up, to find the tiny nest, to focus my aging eyes on the spot where two tiny birds were growing. Now the nest is only a shell, a remnant. It’s a wonderment all the same, that tiny house of cobweb, but it is empty.

Yes. Empty is a cutting word.

No, this is no grief akin to the great griefs. It’s just a little hole, a shift, an empty place where my attention and sense of wonderment flowed for weeks, but which is now an empty space like other empty spaces. There is other wonder to seek. There are other places for my deep attention to flow. The dog of my brain is sniffing the air for the next impossible beauty, the next whirring of wings, the next impossible thing that exists.

Gratitude List:
1. New ideas that keep the mind alive
2. The people who are welcoming the refugees
3. The people who stand up for justice
4. The voices of my friends the owls, calling from the bamboo forest
5. You. How we hold the world together, together. How our hands are joined across time and distance to form webs that carry and comfort, that heal and make whole.

Blessings on the Work!

Migration

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featherleaf

As I think about constructing haiku, I think that perhaps the contemplative act of writing such a poem must include mulling throughout the day on the cutting word and the season word. If a poem hinges on two words, I think great care must be taken in the choosing of the words, like the process of creating a gratitude list–it becomes part of the day’s work: finding the gratitudes, finding the cutting and season words.  Distance is today’s cutting word, and migrating is for the season.

delicate orange wings
float across vast distance–
monarchs are migrating.

Gratitude List:
1. Boy doing spelling homework, putting the words in ABC order: “This is FUN!”
2. The satisfying glurg in the sink drain after I stuffed the baking soda down, poured in the vinegar, and capped the drain with a jar lid. Unclogged.
3. Yesterday’s sermon: quilting stories together with words. Find your stranger and tell your stories. Identify your commonalities and begin from there. Entertaining angels unawares.
4. Cool mornings. Have I mentioned how much I love cool mornings? How they invigorate and energize me?
5. Butterflies. Have you been seeing lots of monarchs too?  A couple weeks ago at the church picnic, they seemed to think that the children zooming down the water slide were flowers–one or two kept flitting around the action. There were several up at camp this past weekend as well.

May we walk in Beauty!

Gaga Ball

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mushroom1
Woodland treasure

I want to keep practicing haiku, keeping in mind the concepts of the kigo  and kireji in the poem. It really shifts the brainwork and pondering to begin to imagine the poem more in terms of the two words or phrases that hold the “cutting” and the seasonality. Here is a helpful description, if you want to explore it, too.

a wren breaks the silence–
then returns to stillness
in the morning chill

Gratitude List:
1. Gaga Ball: Every muscle on my body aches today, but it was totally worth it. Between Gaga Ball, hiking, and swimming in really cold water with a kiddo who is just learning, I got a LOT of exercise yesterday. Gaga Ball is a great kids and adults game–surprisingly simple, but challenging. The adults have the advantage of strength, and the kids have the advantage of agility, so it plays to everyone’s strengths.
2. The fleecy patterns of clouds against blue sky last night just before the sun went down. Like a dream of a sky.
3. Thermal delight. I know it’s going to get hot again. I know it’s going to get cold. This weekend, however, has been just what a day should feel like–a little chilly around the edges and warm in the middle without going to any extremes.
4. Opportunities to practice. I have been spending time at the internet site “Abbey of the Arts,” and pondering their idea of being a monk in the world–living with that sort of intention. One of their principles is based on a Benedictine idea that I have been exploring this summer: Radical Hospitality. The more I explore the idea, the more I realize that it isn’t just about being with people, but about being with oneself as well, about welcoming in all the guests, as Rumi says–even the awkwardness, even the meanness. I kind of roared at the kids last night as they were escalating a conflict over back seat territory–how do I welcome that part of myself without judging it? ( I want to change that about myself, but I do think I need to welcome that part of me inside with joy and hospitality before I can really make a change.) I have a long way to go until I feel like this all comes easily for me, but every moment offers up an opportunity to practice.
5. My messy house. Yes, I get frustrated and ashamed about it. But looking around right now, I see so many centers of play and imagination where my children spend their time. Yes, we’ll clean and tidy the slate for them to start all over again–they need that, too. For now, though, I bless the messy spaces that hold their busy minds and hearts.

May we walk in Beauty!

Haiku: kigo and kireji

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

star
Reprising an old photo. 

Scholars of the old Japanese form of haiku seem to place less emphasis on exact syllable counts and more on the word-choice. I was reading this morning about kigo and kireji–the season word and the cutting word.

the little bowl is empty–
someone new is sipping
the August flowers

I think that the kireji is perhaps not supposed to be as obvious as the actual month name, but it seemed to add the the poignancy for me, though perhaps the name of the August flower would be appropriate.  Are there any flowers that bloom only in the late season? Somehow empty feels like an appropriate cutting word.

Gratitude List:
1. She made her first flight, although I did not witness. When I left for school meetings yesterday morning, Smallest Bird was sitting on the tiny twig right next to the nest, preening herself and looking proud and very brave. I stood a while and watched, but I was already later than I wanted to be, and I didn’t know if she was planning to take another minute or another two hours getting herself ready to fly. Safe journeys, Bright Bird!
2. Kyla made it through heart surgery without any apparent complications. She now has a Ventricular Assist Device which will help her heart to do its work. May her new heart come soon.
3. Yesterday’s anxieties look so much smaller in the light of a new day.
4. Little Cabin in the Woods with part of my beloved community.
5. I am going to go seek the labyrinth in the woods today.

May we walk in Beauty!

Meet Me at the Bridge

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

bridge
This photo of this bridge feels like a place of meeting between worlds. I come to it when I am holding people I love, and two of my Beloveds are in the hospital today. If you, too, are holding someone tenderly in the nest of you, meet me here today, and we will spread such a web of care and love that the strands will sparkle around our Beloveds.

I have been thinking. . .
(I think I should rename my blog I Have Been Thinking. . .  So many of my posts include the phrase.)

I have been thinking about how caring for our bodies is a holy task: Feeding and nourishing. Washing and tending. Stretching the spine and walking and exercising. I have been thinking about how this body I inhabit, familiar and creaky as it seems to me, is no less a miracle or wonder than the body of the tiny hummingbird in the nest of cobweb out there on the sycamore branch. How the rhythm of heartbeat, the vast deltas of the lungs, the moving and shifting of muscle, how all of this is miracle.

If I believe–and I do–that my own body is part of the body of Earth, and so is part of all bodies that inhabit the Earth, then each act of self-care–each shower, each stretch, each bite of food–is an act of tending to the whole, caring for this one part of the larger whole that is all of us.  And so self-care can be a prayer. I see to the needs of my own body, and send out energy for bodies in distress.

Gratitude List:
1. Yellow walnut leaves spiraling down breezes, down sunbeams.
2. Doing the thing when the time is right. Second Hummingbird still has not taken flight, more than a day after First Hummingbird flew up a sunbeam. She sits on the rim of the nest, holding on with her claws, and tests her wings, like she’s planning to carry nest and branch and tree away with her. Then she settles back into her cobweb pillows. Not time yet. Today. Perhaps today.
3. Holding the bowl. Casting the web. Chanting and rocking and praying and sending energy and holding the Beloveds in the light. Whatever name it goes by, it is a privilege to one of many people on a web.
4. Staff Development Day. Is that weird? It’s still a work day, but a shift of rhythm, and a chance to be with colleagues.  We spend so much of our time in our rooms with our students (as it should be) or skating past each other in the halls with a quick greeting. It’s nice to have a day every once in a while when we do something different, even if the work ahead seems hard or confusing.
5. Those hours when the boys get so involved in an imaginary game that they can’t stop telling each other the story of it, even when they come to the table for supper.  I want them to enjoy each other’s company, to be gathering these memories for the future.

May we walk in Beauty!

Making a Circle to Hold a Heart

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

heartstone
A safe circle for a heart.

Is it cold in the house of the hummingbird,
when raindrops patter softly on the sycamore leaf-roof,

when one small bird has dared the day,
flown upward through sunbeams,
trusting to wings insubstantial as mist?

The other no longer sits more quiet than breath,
but turns her head to the thunder,
hunkers deep into her mattress of cobweb,
waits for her moment to fledge.

Gratitude List:
1. One small hummingbird has dared the day and taken first flight. Safe journeys!
2. Anticipating a weekend and time with friends
3. My wise and earnest colleagues
4. A fine collection of Maine island stones, each with a single white line across, each one a little message about pathways, direction, and destiny, about joining up and making a way where none seems to be
5. English grammar. I happened upon a really fun sentence modeling exercise, which I did with a couple of classes yesterday. One student, who struggles to understand the structure of a complete simple sentence, read out the sentence he’d built, which included carefully placed adverbs and adjectives, two prepositional phrases, an appositive phrase, a subordinate clause, and three absolute phrases. He sounded so elegant and well-spoken, but most delightfully, he sounded proud of himself.  Here is an example of a sentence using all of those pieces: In the classroom, one laid-back teenager, a young man who often has no time for grammar, proudly read an elegant sentence from his writing journal as his delighted teacher listened, the words flowing like water, the ideas sparkling in the air, the class electrified by language.

May we walk in Beauty!