Gratitude List:
1. The black arms of trees reaching up into a magenta sky
2. The white arms of the sycamores with the ginger ruff of autumn leaves against the deep grey of woods along the river
3. Al the many varieties of oak
4. The two triplet birch trees in front of my parents’ house
5. The rusty feathers of the larch and dawn redwoods
May we walk in Beauty!
Last night, we watched Spotlight. I recommend it, particularly at this moment in history. It is about the Boston Globe team that broke the Cardinal Law story. It’s sobering to be shown how we allow ourselves to be numbed and deadened to the open secrets that are everywhere around us, how we fail to investigate. It was also inspiring to see a good investigative team do its work, and bring truth into the light. It was disheartening in the extreme to realize at the end that, like the perpetrators he moved from diocese to diocese, Cardinal Law was simply moved to another post of high power in the church, where he continued to do damage in the form of fighting against women’s agency in the church.
How can we further commit ourselves in these days to being Namers, Truth-speakers, Light-shedders, so that people will stop listening to the voices of the powerful over the voices of their victims? We may need to see some institutions implode. We may need to help them to do so.
Gratitude List:
1. Jon put out suet cakes, and the woodpeckers have been coming in. This one seems to be a little mutated, with larger white patches on the back of its head. Perhaps a juvenile not quite at adult plumage. It does look a little like it doesn’t know how to comb its feathers.
2. Welcoming the season of Yule.
3. Lights and music and cookies and the smell of pine
4. Vacuumed floors
5. This one boy is always our holiday DJ, setting up his speakers behind or in the tree. Now he is dancing through the house as he plays Pentatonix.
May we walk and dance in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. I love writing poems in November, and I am always relieved when November is over.
2. Some days, you just let the students hijack the lesson and magic happens as they tell their own stories.
3. Morning mists and magenta sunrises
4. Trying again after you fail
5. The open spaces of a weekend
May we walk in Beauty!
Today’s Prompt is to write a “Back in the Day” poem.
Back in the Day
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Back in the morning
when I was young,
when youthful energy
gripped my limbs
and raised me up
to face the adventures ahead,
then I was a dancer.
Back in the day
when I met the Challengers
faced my fears,
and accepted my quests,
riding into battle
the dragons of ignorance,
then I was a warrior.
Back in the evening
when my eyes began
to feel the weight
of the day’s gravity,
and my legs ached
with weariness,
then I was a teacher.
Now at day’s close,
I am old and worn out,
waiting for the moment
when I will close my eyes
and enter the land of sleep,
to wake in the morning
young again.
Gratitude List:
1. Finishing and submitting the manuscript!
2. Sleep to come
3. Not being alone
4. Getting it out in a good, hard rant
5. Tomorrow is Friday.
May we walk in Beauty!
Today’s Prompt is to write a response poem. I’m tired and grouchy, so this might have to be it for tonight–more prose than poem. I have grading to do and a manuscript to edit.
Outrage
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Every day, another outrage,
a rage outside the norms.
And yet, it’s only what we expect
from a man who began
by race-baiting the Mexicans
and took it down from there.
Day by day, the rages get outer and outer.
You think that escalator couldn’t carry him
any lower, but it does,
and he’s jumping up and down
to make it go faster.
Can’t ignore it because it doesn’t go away.
Can’t respond because he begs attention.
Hate and outrage feed the monster,
but silence normalizes, so we’re caught
in this limbo of no right response.
Gratitude List:
1. Fairy Tales
2. Poetry
3. Songs
4. Awakenings
5. Revelation and revolution
May we walk in Beauty!
Today’s Prompt is to write a love and/or anti-love poem.
To Love the Monsters
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
I have been going on the assumption
that it is the calling of my soul
to love the ones I want to hate,
to find a way to live with heart so open
that I cannot help but part the veils
of rage and fury that encompass me
to see the tender shoots of something
human that lives within the monsters.
I have begun to doubt the truth of the call,
uncertain whether I possess the character
to turn calling to possibility.
Yet something deep within me knows
that this is the deeper truth:
that hate breeds hate and love breeds love,
and I get to choose which one to grow.
Gratitude List:
1. Putting together a chapbook
2. Making little booklets with the staff of Silhouette today
3. The monsters do not define us
4. Compassion
5. Reading The Phantom Tollbooth with Joss
May we walk in Beauty!
Today’s Prompt is similar to an earlier one, with a single letter change: ______ of _____
Guardian of Dreams
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
She rises from the shadows
when you wander in the dreamscape.
She stands above the doorway
and awaits your greeting.
She gives you the gift of her name
and stands aside that you may pass inward.
Gratitude List:
1. Enough leftovers for supper. What an odd, delightful mashup it was: Valerie’s lentil and collard soup as the base, with the leftover chicken curry and rice and some leftover noodles. Injera and oatmeal bread.
2. Dreams with messages.
3. Catching my breath. A little.
4. That pink cloud this morning. Breath-taking.
5. Rivers of crows in the sky.
May we walk in Beauty!
Last Night’s Gripping Dream:
We’ve moved to a new house, set on a hill above the barn. From the house, a small row of bushes obscures all but the top of the barn. As we explore the new barn, we’re a little overwhelmed by all the rusty junk and hay bales and mess. Cobwebs are everywhere, and it’s dark and dingy. We hear people walking around upstairs, but we’re too scared to go up there, so I yell, “Get out of our barn!” We go back up to the house.
A little while later, it has snowed, and we see that someone has shoveled all around the barn. We decide we have to confront the squatters. We get in the big red truck and race down the hill, right through the shoveled area and plow into a snowbank.
As we walk up to the barn door, we see a woman crouching in the bushes on the roof area above the barn door. She’s enormous. Heavy, sumo-style, and maybe eight or ten feet tall. She has a Renaissance-style hairdo with a pink rose, and she is completely naked. Her skin is a mocha color and she has enormous and compelling eyes. I ask her her name. She says it’s Panella. (Or Panadella.) I do not feel threatened or anxious about her–I feel like she is sort of a guardian.
Inside, we are utterly astounded. Someone has, in an incredibly short period of time, completely cleaned the barn. The junk is gone. The hay bales and cobwebs are gone. There’s fresh plaster on the walls, neatly placed between barn beams. It’s gently lit, all over, upstairs and down. There must be fifty or sixty people in the barn. One woman is wearing silver body paint, head to foot. She and the others we first encounter seem a little startling, and not particularly friendly, but not threatening. The others we meet are friendlier, eager to show us around, to talk. It’s definitely my kind of party, no loud noises, sort of hushed conversations, but people everywhere, threading themselves through the space.
It is furnished like a house, and downstairs there is an enormous walk-in fireplace with a sort of ditch in front of the fire, and water running through the ditch. In front of that are lit candles. I am aware of how carefully people have placed the candles within the fireplace area, in order to be safe. They take us outside to show us the incredible compost pile they’ve created. They point up the hill to the other neighbors’ house. “Those are the hippie neighbors,” they say. The hippie neighbors’ house is a pavilion-style despite the frigid weather, and the hippie neighbors have their feet up on a low all, and they’re drinking and smoking.
Actually, the ones who’ve created this space aren’t here. They’ve gone out and left their friends there to have a party. There’s a young woman–I think her name is Elise–who used to go to the Waldorf School. A young man is a graduate of LMS. And there’s a third.
I feel incredibly drawn to this dream. There in my inner world, a space I tend to neglect in the rush of the daily, where I thought there would be clutter and ruin, are inviting rooms filled with energy and innovation. Jon pointed out that two of the Creators are from schools where I have taught, so I am wondering if the third might be a BCCC student. After a challenging morning conversation about some of the issues some of our students are experiencing, I spent a good part of yesterday worrying about my students, wondering if I have been doing enough to educate my students about racism and misogyny, about recognizing their entitlement and privilege. I feel like this dream was a message from my deeper self that I need to trust that the daily work bears its fruit, that these people will have the creativity and resilience to create healthy lives. And Panella? I think She is my Guardian.
Today’s Prompt is to write a “Shine” Poem. I have been thinking about writing this short story about the tree shadows that grab my attention.
Once was a girl fell in love with the Sun.
Loved his shine, she did. Loved his flash and glory.
Once was a girl tried to reach her lover in his sky.
Tried to find the twisting pathway that led to her love.
Tried to find a way to get his attention.
She learned how to shine herownself, she did.
She shined all day long and all night
’til her own light was fading, she shone so.
And the people. The people, they loved her.
They loved her with fierceness for all her shining.
They loved her with tenderness for her fading.
‘Cause she passed that shine around,
’cause she was not afraid to show her longing,
’cause she wept and laughed at her own fading.
Came a day when she was old and worn and faded.
She walked in her garden under her Sun,
and she smiled for her love and she smiled for her longing.
She smiled for her long days of wisdom.
She smiled for her long nights of folly.
Saw a tree, tall and reaching its arms upward,
right into sunlight, basking in the tender arms of the Sun.
Her heart, like a shadow, almost stopped its beating.
She leaned into light, like the tree, arms raised upward.
She leaned into sunlight, she rested on sunbeams,
felt his hands on her face, his arms ’round her shoulders.
And in that moment she saw them, the pathways of shadow
that lead to her lover. Never looked backward.
No, she never looked backward, but followed the shadows
outward and upward, into the arms of the Sun.
Gratitude List:
1. Doors opening. Opening Doors. Reframing the question: Instead of “How do we seek progress? Asking “How do we open doors for change?”
2. The wise people who help to reframe the questions.
3. Family times.
4. My father’s bluebirds
5. Hard conversations, especially when they bring clarity.
May we walk in Beauty!
Today’s Prompt is to create a Remix of a poem from earlier in the month. I had already planned to re-work my construction/deconstruction poem, so this gives me a little more incentive to give that one a little creative attention. I wrote an initial stanza and then ran it through a Whisper-Down-the-Lane series of Google translations.
Re-De-Construction
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Every day, I am remade,
every day, I’m reconstructing,
every day, I’m rebuilding,
reborn from the husk,
retrieved from the waters,
regenerated from the shell
of yesterday’s creature,
from the body of tomorrow.
I’ll give you another day.
I did another one of these the other day, using a form of the last line of my Day of Reckoning Poem: Now we must reckon with women.
Now we must reckon with women.
Now we must count on women.
Now we must trust women.
Now we must rely on women.
Now we have to believe in women.
So, we must believe in women.
Therefore, we believe that women should be.
Therefore, we believe there should be women.
That is why we believe that there should be a woman.
We should have women to think.
Gratitude List:
1. Such a stack of grading I completed this weekend!
2. Elderberry syrup
3. Fire cider
4. Crafty afternoon with the kiddos listening to Ellen Nesbit’s dragon short stories
5. My children love old-fashioned stories with old-fashioned diction. I’m proudly raising them to be nerdy.
May we walk in Beauty!
Today’s prompt is to write a “How I’ll be remembered” poem.
How I’ll Be Remembered
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Forget my tendency to pedantry,
the grammatical dogmas,
the adherence to form.
Remember the need for grace,
and the giving of it in return.
Remember the wildness, the laughter,
remember the deconstructed rules.
Remember the earnest Mennonite face, yes,
but hold also the image
of the wild creature on the hillside,
resisting capture in a closed box.
Remember the flakiness, too,
the tendency to butterfly
from one idea to the next,
and the ease with which delight arose.
Remember the fire of my rages,
and let them fuel your own workings.
Remember the flawed and the broken,
remember the one who walked
outside the walls of the City of Despair.
Remember the late bloom,
the long gestation.
Oak is supreme in late November. Maples and willows and sycamore and poplar have lost their leaves, while oak still holds its leathery leaves–golden, brown, burgundy, red–shining in the slant of November afternoon sun. In a few short week, oak will lose its kingly mien and holly will take the place of honor. Holly and pine. For now, oak draws my heart upward.
Gratitude List:
1. Chicken curry and injera leftovers for supper
2. Making progress–slow but steady
3. The ache of muscles after good, healthy, hard work
4. Such a variety of leaves! I think of us as poplar, maple, and sycamore here. I know there are some oaks, but when we rake leaves in autumn, I always find at least three different varieties. I need to walk the property more. Of course, we’re in the hollow, so anything higher on the ridge will eventually drift down to us.
5. Fire Cider/Dragon’s Breath/Rosemary Gladstar
May we walk in Health and Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 