A week ago, I returned from a trip to the town of my early childhood–Shirati, Tanzania–and several days in game parks. One of my words for the trip, and for the current phase of my life, is INTEGRATION.
How do I integrate the layers of my life: the past, present, future selves?
How do I integrate the sense of myself in a safe and loving childhood in a beautiful and tender community, with the awareness of how mission and religion has been an agent of colonialism in the world?
How do I integrate my deep connection to the Jesus story with my adoration of his mother, with my universalism and witchiness?
How do I integrate the activism and the contemplation, the magic and the prayer, the wildness of spirit with the deepening wisdom of middle age?
Within a day of our return, I received word that a beloved friend, a former student, had died. Now, how to integrate the bliss of my Tanzania Trip with the deep welling grief of losing someone I loved and admired? How to integrate my own grief with that of the many circles of community who loved him?
I’ve been going back through some of our text and message threads to find the poems and songs and kind thoughts Ash sent me over the years, revisiting some of the writings we shared with each other, the ideas we hatched, integrating those with the memories people have been posting to his Facebook page.
Before I went to Tanzania, I created a journal for the trip, an altered book made from an old copy of Birds of East Africa. True to Bethie form, I ended up taking notes not only in the journal, but in two of the Poetry journals I had taken along, and in the Notes app on my phone. This week, I hope to spend my Spring Break making sense of the various notes, sorting through photos, and integrating the sense experience with memories and scraps of poetry that have been filtering through. Somehow even the fact that I must weave together the various threads of my note-taking feels like part of the bigger process of sorting and integrating joy and grief and memory.
Ash was one of the editors of the literary magazine I directed at the high school where I used to teach. The magazine’s symbol was the flamingo, and I had promised Ash I would send him pictures of flamingos when I returned. I never had the chance. Here, Ash, are some flamingo pictures for you.
Check in on your beloveds. Remind them they are loved. And when hope seems far away, hold on for one more day. The morning, as they say, is wiser than the evening.
Gratitude List:
1. The beautiful journey. Return, belonging, joy, wildness, friendship, beauty
2. The privilege of knowing Ashton Clatterbuck, whose life touched so many, whose activism will continue to inspire and light the way, whose sense of justice will push me to stand up and speak out, whose courage knew no bounds
3. The birds of Goldfinch Farm and Skunk Hollow
4. The house lions: Erebus, Thor, and Sachs
5. The process of integrating heart and mind, memory and sense, grief and bliss, dream and reality
May we walk in Beauty!
“Our capacity to create must overwhelm their capacity to destroy.” —Occupy Movement Quote
“Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough. and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey. ” —Lemony Snicket
“Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.” —Emma Donoghue
“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.” —August Wilson
“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” —Rumi
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” —William Faulkner
“For one human being to love another is the most difficult task, the ultimate, the last test and proof. It’s the work for which all other work is mere preparation.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
Teilhard de Chardin said: “Some day after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered fire.”
Emma Goldman: “The most vital right is the right to love and be loved.”
“Everything I understand, I understand only because I love.” —Leo Tolstoy
“If you do not love too much, you do not love enough.” —Blaise Pascal
“Who I was meant to be was a breaker of some stories and a maker of others.” —Rebecca Solnit
“You are not required to set yourself on fire in order to keep other people warm.” —Anonymous
“The job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.” —Dani Shapiro
“Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” —Parker Palmer
“For education among all kinds of [people] always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.” ―W.E.B DuBois
“The phoenix must burn to emerge.” —Janet Fitch
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” —Ken Robinson
“When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.” —Ellen DeGeneres
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” —Thomas A. Edison
“Geometry draws the soul towards truth.” —Plato
“In which of the fairy tales does this wandering stream appear? Perhaps a golden trout swims through here every morning at dawn, or the three riders who pass Baba Yaga’s courtyard stop here to water their horses. A frog beneath that brightest mossy rock awaits your kiss. Just beyond your vision, through those trees, is a little cottage made of gingerbread and candy. An old man appears each day at dusk to sit on the tallest rock and ask you for a favor when you approach the stream for a drink.” –Beth Weaver-Kreider
Of Love
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
(after Mary Oliver)
It’s a process repeated everywhere you look:
the way the beech tree catches and holds the wind in her hair,
the way the meadow grasses gather around the tentative feet of the fox,
the way the hands of the clay hold and guide the flow of waters.
What is attention, but a kind of loving?
Living in awareness is a constant tumble into loves.
The way your eyes twinkle when you tell a story.
The way your listening hands reach outward.
The way a new thought is born in your eyes.
The hearty abandon of your laughter,
the caress of your voice,
the shine that surrounds you.
Mockingbird Chronicles 