Month: January 2021

Getting Back to Work

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In the dream: I am working in an office. It seems like it’s a fairly new business, or else a lot of the employees are new, because people are trying to figure out what is the best way to make things run efficiently and equitably. There’s a general discussion about whether a couple should be allowed to do their work while snuggling together on one chair, as one couple is doing.

It’s a very open office plan, with many work stations set up on tables, and cubicles that are more like library carrels, and the walls between rooms are glass. People are bustling about, doing their work. One guy, dressed in a green shirt and a tie with wide black and white stripes, is trying to hand out Christmas cards, but he doesn’t know who is who, so a group of us is pointing out people for him. Everyone is dressed very formally, but playfully so, with bright colors and prints.

My friend works as an administrative assistant, and is having terrible luck getting people to sign documents for her. People aren’t answering their phones or returning her emails. I start to ask whether her husband, who is also an admin assistant in the company, manages to get people to respond, and she snaps, “Of course they respond to him. He’s a man.”

Retelling this dream exhausts me. It puts me on edge much more than it seems it should from the surface. Perhaps it’s a dream about getting back to school tomorrow, getting the work done, even when it seems like no one is really listening and responding.

Mid-day edit: I just accidentally opened my camera on the selfie side and it brought back some troubling images from a dream fragment. I look in a mirror, and my face looks kind of red, and a few moments later I look again, and my face is covered in a raised rash. My chin and cheeks are swelling. I don’t remember what happened after that.

Gratitudes:
1. A good long walk at High Point yesterday.
2. Sorting through the ideas to prioritize projects and create plans for how to finish some of them.
3. Ham and bean soup. Leftover Christmas ham in leftover black-eyed peas from New Years, with leftover roasted roots from another meal. The beets turned the soup a beautiful borschty red.
4. The trees of Goldfinch farm: sycamore and walnut, locust and willow and oak, maple, and the poplar stump, who is so incredibly alive.
5. The sounds of birds outside. We haven’t even opened the curtains, but the wren and the nuthatch have been chattering on the balcony where Jon put up a thistle feeder and a suet feeder.

May we walk in Beauty!

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”
—T.S. Eliot

“Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God’s will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff’s office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar.” —Barbara Brown Taylor

“He said the wicked know that if the evil they do is of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have only stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.”
—Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing.

“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”
―Parker J. Palmer

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
―T. S. Eliot

We need for the earth to sing
Through our pores and our eyes.
The body will again become restless
Until your soul paints all its beauty
Upon the sky.
—Hafiz (Ladinsky)

“Perhaps the uprising of women around the world is the earth’s own immune system kicking in.”
—Nina Simons, Bioneers

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
—Terry Pratchett

Deep Sleep

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I can’t draw the dreams back from last night’s wanderings. After several nights of twisting-turning, last night was a sleep-like-a-rock night, so I have no dream images to work with today. Even the cats were quiet last night. I must remember to praise them for that.

Today, I begin my walk from Time Out of Time. I MUST get some work done. I need to put aside some of the dreaminess so I can focus.

I realize that I am living with a fair amount of anxiety about January 6, and Inauguration Day. So much has been destroyed, even when it seemed like goodness and reason simply had to prevail, that I am not sure I want to believe that we’re actually on our way out of this mess.

Gratitudes:
1. Zoom calls with friends and family. The shining faces of beloveds. Telling memory-stories, updating, speaking hope.
2. That cardinal, a drop of scarlet in the grey of morning, how the greens are richer and more satisfying after rain.
3. Practicing something until you can feel, can SEE, the improvement. My first attempts at a woven visible mend were pretty poor and puckery, but by last evening, I was catching my stride, and my fingers were learning what to do.
4. Sharing dreams and omens with friends.
5. And now the morning is no longer grey. The sun has topped the eastern ridge and caught the leathery leaves of the little oak on the bluff out the window, and the world is a-sparkle.

May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!

There is a deeper world than this
That you don’t understand
There is a deeper world that this
Tugging at your hand
—Sting

“The Work. I am learning, slowly and in tiny little ways, to stop asking myself what I can get from each moment, but instead what my Work is here in the moment. And realizing, ever so dimly, that when I am really doing my Work (really doing my Work), I am also receiving what I need.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” —Peter Drucker

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly.” —Margaret Fuller

“Brew me a cup for a winter’s night.
For the wind howls loud and the furies fight;
Spice it with love and stir it with care,
And I’ll toast our bright eyes,
my sweetheart fair.”
—Minna Thomas Antrim

“How do we go on living, when every day our hearts break anew? Whether your beloved are red-legged frogs, coho salmon, black terns, Sumatran tigers, or fat Guam partulas, or entire forests, mountains, rivers, lakes, or oceans, or the entire planet, the story is the same, the story of the murder of one’s beloved, the murder of one’s beloved, the murder of one’s beloved.” ―Derrick Jensen, Dreams

Convoluted Dreamways

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

In the middle of the night I woke up just as someone was giving me a message. It was like I was a student in a classroom, and the teacher was writing these things on the board:

Living By Their Rules:
1. You will only succeed if you push down the others around you.
2. There is not enough for everyone.

I’m sort of glad I woke up at that point. I don’t think I want to see that play out. Don’t want to try to fit in to that system.

More dreams about forgetting my mask and being among others who simply don’t care. Trying to pull my shirt collar up above my nose to protect myself and others.

Also, I heard a bird call, loudly, while I was in a large room, like a mall (I think the sound was the real world entering my dream), and saw, instead of the singer, two tiny green hummingbirds, no larger than bumble bees, circling around each other by a red wall in an elaborate aerial dance.

Gratitudes:
1. Tabula Rasa
2. My wonderful mother, who was born 80 years ago today.
3. Squirrels, how they stand with their hands on their hearts. I love the white spots behind their ears, the pensive look on their faces when they are looking up at the feeders–and yes, they’re a pain at the feeders, but they belong here, too.
4. Color and texture. I’m an eccentric in my sartorial choices because I like to mix colors and prints and textures. Might look funny, but it makes me oddly happy.
5. How small acts can be rituals, like mending torn clothing focuses the mind on Mending.

May we walk this year in Beauty!

Honoring Kwanzaa with those who celebrate it: The word for this last day of Kwanzaa is Imani, or Faith. Believe that your dreams have the power to create change in the world. May it be so for you and for me and for all who long for and work for justice in the coming year.

“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Courage, Dear Heart.” —the Albatross (Aslan) to Lucy, C. S. Lewis

“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering ‘it will be happier.’” —Alfred Tennyson

“Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.” ―Joan Chittister

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.” —T. S. Eliot

“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”
—William Blake

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.”
―Mary Oliver