Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Walking Into the Dark

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This week, weaning myself from the keyboard, I jumped back into my handwritten journal-book, with pens and colored pencils, and the slower, reflective pacing of handwriting.

I have been dreaming and writing dreams, feeling the shadows of dreams flitting around my head even when the images and plotlines escape me. Vultures and daughters, bees and small children–the dream-symbols have been feeding me as I walk into the darkness of winter.

During the years when we were both farming full-time, when winter was truly a resting time, I think I had my most satisfying winters. I was able then to hibernate, to draw myself inward, to slow way down. Now in these years, when the days are so busy, and the evenings hold lists of necessary tasks, I lose myself a bit in winter. I struggle to focus in the outer world, but I don’t have the inner space to really slow down. Not really.

And so I am taking a bit of an Advent Break, shifting up my morning and evening routines, letting myself drift out of the social media spheres. It has been a good thing to take this break, to shift my habits. In the coming weeks between now and Epiphany, I will continue to make occasional forays onto this page, occasional steps into the world of Facebook, but I am going to breathe and rest and meditate and dream as I need to in these days, and hold myself to as few schedules as possible..

Blessings on your own Advent, your Dark Time, your Inward Journey. May your dreams be fruitful, and your visions be keen.

Much love.

Gratitude List:
1. Shadows and darkness
2. Dreams and visions
3. Rest and Quiet
4. Joy and Peace
5. Waiting and Anticipation

May we walk in Beauty!

The Mockingbird Goes On Break

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

I’m not flying south for the whole winter,
not disappearing from the groves and fields completely.
Hunkering down perhaps,
ruffling my feathers in the cool fall breezes
and settling deeper inside myself for a bit,
to a place where there are fewer words.

Not sulking, not anxious, not despairing,
just settling, shifting the patterns,
changing up the rhythms a bit.

I’ll see you back here again
someday soon,
when I have had a chance
to find a new rhythm,
to identify new patterns.

I’ll draw and sing,
write my secret poems,
gather dreams and images,
stories and feathers.

As always, I’ll be holding my part of the web,
feeling the tension and tug as you do your work
on your own part of the web.
I’ll trust that you are there,
and you can know I will be here,
and I will return, soon enough,
when the winds blow me back again.

Meanwhile, Walk in Beauty!

Breathe and Push

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A lovely script we found in an old book. I need to practice my general calligraphy.

Gratitude List:
1. Sibling games and songs in chapel today. Sweet, sweet.
2. Josiah’s first Christmas concert tonight, playing cello in the third grade orchestra. He was so excited. He made sure to invite his grandparents a week ago. He was counting down the hours until it was time. He was so proud to be part of it.
3. Valarie Kaur’s quote: “What if this is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?” Images of an America in transition, in the final stages of labor, and we can hear the midwife saying, “Breathe!” and finally, “Push!”
4. How the future steps ever so carefully toward us.
5. You and you. I haven’t put you on my gratitude lists recently,  but you’re always there in some form. The fact that I can know that you’re out there, doing your work, changing the world, holding out the truth, narrating the story–that gives me hope, and reminds me that I am not alone.

May we walk in Beauty!

Always a Trail to Follow

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Here is a tiny story-thing I wrote last year on this day:

In the days when the people had begun to keep their lives in great boxes, living less and less on the land, a girl was born who could read the scripts and runes in the landscapes.

When a frog leaped into the pond with a startled “Eeep!” the ripples and circles in the surface of the pond read, “Splash!” of course, but also something about the day being green, the waters cool on the gills, and the polliwogs growing hale and hearty.

In a branch burrowed and tunneled by bark beetles, she could read the insect-runes: “Chronicle of the Year of Our Lady Wingshine: We are preparing for another winter. Tunnels and fortifications are underway and a healthy grub population is thriving. No woodpeckers spotted in three cycles.”

The branches on the trees crossed and curled to make whole novels of story, revealing the secret lives of owl and warbler, the gossip of squirrels, and the wisdom of ancient oaks.

Across a vast tangerine sunset, she read the letters and lines created by flocks of migrating geese and calling swans: “When your heart has two homes, you will always be a wanderer.”

And much more subtle, but as real as the words in water or bark or sky, the musky tang of a fox in the undergrowth wove through the lines and curls of autumn grasses, which she read as, “There is always a trail to follow, if you will give your heart to the moment.”

Gratitude List:
1. Chicken Pot Pie for supper. Jon’s a great cook!
2. One of my students, who is an artist, talks about how she sees beauty in every person. Yes.
3. Settling into the darkness of winter. It’s not easy for me. I have to talk myself through it every year. I love the womb of dark. I love the comforting raven’s wings about me. Still, I feel as though I am losing time. I want to sleep and eat and sit and dream. I am finding my winter rhythm. Don’t ask too much of me right now.
4. Mist in the morning over the bridge. We all imagined where we wanted to be when we came through the mist on the other side of the bridge. We were still in Columbia, but that’s okay. Sometime I really do want to come through the mist into Avalon or Hogwarts or Iceland.
5. The dreamtime. My brain begins to gather dreams in its cobwebs in these long nights. There was snow in last night’s dream.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Dreams of Trees

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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!

Be Namers

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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!

Magic Happens

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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!

Back in the Day

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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!

Broken Vessel

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

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!

Which One to Grow

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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!