Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

The Book

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winterfarm

The Twelve Nights are finished. I might have resisted this waking up, resented this leaving of the cocoon, but for the bright surprise of the snow, the sun enlivening it to an almost unbearable shine, the way the Light shone so forcefully on this Epiphany day.

I have a jumble of words and ideas tumbling about in my brain from the past two weeks: Intuition, Birds of Prey (fierceness?), Aunt Lizzie (rampant creativity?), and the Book. As I made my Vision Board last week, the phrases “Unchain the book” and “Unlock the book” came into my head. And last night I woke in the middle of the night, and the phrase “Use the book” was skittering around in my brain.

So this Year my word will be Book. I tell my students that their lives are the stories of their own making. Some parts seem to be written for us, but even so, we write the meaning of the events that occur. We choose how the story is recorded within us, how we interpret our lives. This year, I will be the writer of my story. I will carry the satellite words of intuition and fierceness and creativity with me as well, and let them inform the story I create, both with my life and in my writing.

Gratitude List:
1. The young years. This is a wistful gratitude. With every passing day, I am noticing the baby days expiring on my youngest. I am gathering all I can of each tiny bit of baby sweetness into the jar of my heart to save for later. Here I am, Winnie the Pooh, standing at the edge of the Hunderd Aker Wood, watching Christopher Robin recede into the world. My heart is so full of the pride and the pain of it, the love and the loss of it.
2. I am grateful for their growing up, too. I treasure each new grown-up thing, how they think and wonder. Their curiosity. Their desire to know, to learn, to create.
3. Snow. Wasn’t that lovely? I love snow. It makes the cold feel worthwhile. It makes the winter feel real. It gives the dreamtime a blanket.
4. Those stripey clouds on the way home from school today. My carpool mates and I decided that they looked like the lines on a piece of notebook paper, just waiting for a poem. Or the ribs of a god (we’re listening to The Heroes of Olympus on our journeys). Or the oars of a great flying Viking ship.
5. The relationship of words to music. The musicality of language.

May we walk in Beauty!

Last Night of Twelvenight

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jack-frost

Tonight is the last night of Twelvenight, the last of the Days of Christmas. Tomorrow morning the Light dawns. The Magi arrive. Watch for the Aha! what is waiting within you to be discovered?

Meanwhile, here in the dark nights of Winter, I have been ruminating on dreams and images, the ideas and words that have been floating around me in the days since Solstice, searching for my word for the coming year. I have some ideas: there are the recent frequent family references to my Aunt Lizzie along with her appearance in my dreams, there’s the eagle that keeps appearing at different places on my way to and from Lancaster, the calls to listen to my intuition, The Fool, the fire imagery. I’ll see if tonight’s dreams bring any sorting or synthesis. Tomorrow I find my 2017 Word.

Gratitude List:
1. That eagle again–this time sitting in a tree at Sam Lewis State Park as we passed on our way home this evening.
2. This sleeping thing seems to be working better lately. So much better. Of course, less disturbed sleep means fewer remembered dreams, but I’ll take the restedness over the dream-messages at this point.
3. I can’t stop writing about the sky. So orange this morning–deep, deep, glowing russet–and this afternoon a golden stair of light spiraling down through cloud.
4. Saying no, sorting, keeping what stuff is mine, but only that stuff.
5. The power of poetry to get students talking about emotions and internal landscapes.

May we walk in Beauty!

Finding the Map Home

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bridge

When have you felt yourself to be your best self?
When have you been most comfortable being who you are?
What would it take to find your way back into that house of yourself?
Did you leave yourself a map?
Is there an old photograph in an dusty album somewhere in your heart
that you can use to guide yourself back to that place?
It might be as simple as taking three deep breaths,
clicking your sneaker-clad heels together three times,
and chanting, “I want to go home, I want to go home,
I want to go home.”
Shall we try it?

Gratitude List:
1. Jon Weaver-Kreider’s delicious dinner of spinach-stuffed shells.
2. Driving to school in that dawning.
3. Driving home from school in that sunset.
4. The gentle lengthening of the days.
5. Re-reading Julius Caesar. I never get tired of it, and it always brings new revelations. I love having a job where I can read Shakespeare with teenagers.

May we walk in Beauty!

Breathing into the Spine

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lichen2

Breathe with me. Take a moment and sit quietly, noticing how your breath moves in and out of your lungs and your body. As you let out your breath, feel your shoulders slip back slightly (not clenched), and your spine straighten. Sigh. Yawn. Breathe right into your spine.

I’ve noticed lately that breathing into my spine gives me a new thread of energy, a sustained and quiet extra push. I also feel more confident, less apologetic, readier to engage, somehow. I wonder if I could find a space between each class for a 15-second spinal breath. Even that is a challenge these days. I love my students, but I don’t get much of a break between classes. Still–fifteen seconds might be manageable. I think it will make me readier to engage each class as it comes in.

Gratitude List:
1. I never did write on Sunday about that marvelous moon and the star it held above its horns. That was Beautiful. Satisfying.
2. The poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa (“Rock Me, Mercy”)
3. The Fool, dancing on the edge of the cliffs
4. Shifting perspectives, looking in different ways, Seeing
5. New energy

May we walk in Beauty!

Re-Do

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oak1

I heard someone speak today about the “re-” words, about how they’re so often really positive: rejuvenate, reconciliation, resolve, resolution, recreation, recharge. . . I like that, and I love looking at the probable root words: juvenate, conciliation, solve, solution, creation, charge. . . I agree that they’re positive, but part of their brightness lies in their shadows. If you are re-conciling, there’s a suggestion that the first “conciliation” didn’t quite work out. If you need to re-solve an issue, perhaps it was left un-solved, or it dis-solved somewhere along the line.

I don’t think that makes them less perky or positive, however. Perhaps more so. To know the willful comfort of a re-solution when the first solution didn’t take. To understand the depth of peace in deliberate re-creation which takes me back to a sense of the wholeness of creation.

I suppose it’s become a truism that people only deeply appreciate something when they know how easily it can be lost, but that’s probably because it’s so true. There’s a wonder and a joy in the initial birth of a thing, but the deep appreciation and gratitude for what we have often comes in the awareness of how easily it is lost.

I have been disdainful of the term New Year’s Resolution because of the flippant and glib ways in which we discuss and create New Year’s Resolutions in our culture. Perhaps if I consider (or re-consider) them as re-solutions, they might make more sense to me. In what ways have my past solutions not been sufficient? How can I re-solve my challenges? And in the process, can I offer my past self a little more compassion, knowing how easy it can be to lose sight of my original intentions?

Gratitude List:
1. Listening to a man whistling and a boy harmonizing with him on a hum
2. Getting back into the rhythm
3. Preparing a short story for submission–I don’t think I’ve ever submitted a short story before
4. Re-solving, re-storing, re-creating, re-conciling. Re-
5. Sleep and dreams

May we walk in Beauty!

Give Yourself to Love

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

roots

Another year has dawned, Bright Ones! And of course time is a human construct. Where we begin to count its passage on this Wheel of the Year is utterly arbitrary. I like how it has come to be that we create a passage, a doorway in time, here in this place of winter, just after we have swung around the sun again and begun to whirl in toward Equinox. I love the Days Out of Time marked by the twelve or fifteen days of Solstice or Christmas to Epiphany. I revel in the dreamtime of these days.

I have been mining my dreams again for the word or phrase that I will take into this year. Several years ago, I woke up one morning with the word Palimpsest in my head. It became my word for the year, the idea that we live in layers, simultaneously experiencing the past and the present. The next year was Bridge. The next, Mystery and Secrets and Impeccability. And last year’s phrase was Bold Wise Counsel. Ooh. That was important. What will be my word for this year, I wonder? I have begun to wait until the Dreamtime of Twelvenight is officially over on Epiphany, so I will give myself these next five nights to settle. I think because we celebrated Epiphany Sunday at church this morning, I am particularly impatient this year.

Join me? Keep particular watch on your dreams (daydreams, too) and conversations in the coming days. What images keep coming back? What songs present themselves? What names keep surfacing in conversation? Be like the Magi, who followed their intuition and a star through the dark nights to seek their truth. What will be your words and images for 2017?

Here is a poem I wrote in 2015 about the impatience and the anticipation of seeking out the word or idea that I will use to shape and mold my story for the coming year:

Waiting for the Dreams
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

While I wait for the dreams to be complete
while I sit at the feet of winter
listening

waiting for the little bell to ring
for the sound of rushing wings
for the things born in darkness
to take form
to rise up–

while a vulture flies across my window
red root and plantain nourish and heal me
a lynx crouches by a granite outcrop in the meadow
the storyteller raises her voice in a chant of longing
and a silent girl turns the corner ahead of me

I sit down to work
and sleep overtakes me:
One more vision for the road
One more message for the journey

Gratitude List:
1. Give Yourself to Love. What a song. I loved Mindy and Jared’s version this morning.
2. The Magi–colorful, messy outsiders who followed their intuition and a star: What a story about stepping into the unknown dark to seek their truth with only the stars and their intuition to guide. Mindy’s tales of magi this morning: Giving, Resisting, and Being Honest.
3. Dinner with the family, reflecting on the ways in which our parents have inspired us, considering–in their presence–some of the legacy they have given us: noticing beauty, advocacy, mentoring others, using their own voices to empower others. The story of Grandpa wanting to send my mother to college, how Uncle Moses and Aunt Lydia told him to send her to EMC, which is where she met my father. The story of Joe Shenk introducing them, and of their first “date.” How series of decisions come together to make a story happen.
4. Those vultures, sunsheen on their black feathers, kettling above Columbia this morning.
5. An afternoon with my college friends. Dear, dear thoughtful people. There’s never enough time together, and yet even a few hours is satisfying. What a profound blessing it is to have friends who are family.

May we walk in Beauty!

Vision Booklet 2017

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vision1 vision2 vision3 vision4 vision5 vision6 vision7

 

These are the seven pages of my Vision Booklet for the coming year. I have been carrying some of these collage bits about with me for a couple years now, and it was time to release them. I feel like I must have been holding onto them so that I could create the visions that I am working with at the moment.

If you live in the Lancaster (PA) area and want guidance to to create your own Vision Board for 2017, Radiance has invited local artist Nancy Warble to lead a workshop on January 7.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

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janus1

The Roman god Janus looks backward and forward.

Looking back, looking forward.
These are the Days of Doorway,
of standing on the threshold
between the worlds of what was
and what will be.

What of the past will you choose to carry into the future? What will you cut loose and remove from your story? Perhaps we cannot revise the events of the past, but we can revise the way we tell them, the meaning we make from them. And the future stands wide open before us, waiting for us to take up the pen and create the tale to come.

Here’s an exercise you can try: Looking Back/Looking Forward. Without making intentional value judgments, consider some of the themes of your past year (looking back). Consider how you will carry them or cut them loose in the coming year (looking forward).

Looking back, I see that often in the past year, I allowed myself to be overcome with weariness. I allowed the waiting tasks to overwhelm my ability to be present in the moment.

Looking forward, I will have strategies to deal with weariness. I will try to keep naps and extra coffee for last resorts. I’ll start with a walk around the farm, seeking signs of foxes. I’ll make sure I take my vitamin. I’ll eat some protein. I’ll drink water. I’ll do my balance poses. I’ll stand up and take ten deep breaths.

Looking back, I see how I allowed the birth of a wonderful idea to begin to take hold of my soul, to find its way into the images and colors of my dreams.

Looking forward, I will nurture this dream like the tenderest of seeds, watering it, feeding it, giving it space to grow and develop. I will work for this one.

Looking back, I feel a sense of satisfaction in the accomplishment of having written at least a gratitude list almost every day. And I have done my balance poses with the John O’Donohue poem almost every day. I have begun naming my emotions more consistently before reacting. I have been less consistent with checking in with my energy, and I have neglected quiet meditation.

Looking forward, I will continue to write regularly, to stretch and breathe and recite my daily poem. I will keep checking in with emotion and energy, and focus on settling into meditation for five to ten minutes a day.

Gratitude List:
1. Milkweed seeds, tossed to the winds as a blessing.
2. Little round “eggs” of moss, blown off the garage roof.
3. Looking backward, looking forward.
4. Slaying my dragons.
5. Talking to Mara on the phone this morning.

May we walk in Beauty!

Gestating Ideas

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lichen

What is gestating within you in these days? What ideas and dreams are you brooding on? What seeds are waiting deep within you to break open their casings and begin seeking upward for sunshine and air?

Now is the time to give them secret and tender names, to hold them gently and to imagine what how they will appear when they are full grown. Sing to them, those ideas and dreams. Breathe on them. Look lovingly upon them, with eyes full of wonder. It may even be time to begin to whisper them to the dawn: “I wonder how my life would be if I would. . .”

Gratitude List:
1. Gestating intentions and ideas
2. Time with family, chances to chat and catch up. These fine, fine young folks.
3. The Janus pose–looking forward, looking back. But being in this moment.
4. Figgy pudding
5. The marriage of wisdom and compassion.

May we walk in Beauty!

Snugglesome

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snugglesome

Gratitude List:
1. Bald Eagles. Twice in the last two days, I have seen a bald eagle (perhaps the same one) near the Wrightsville exit off 30. Once in the air, and once in a tree. Every time I see one, I bless the memory of Rachel Carson, and remember that one person can make a difference in the world. Were it not for Rachel Carson, we very well might not have bald eagles to be grateful for.
2. This snugglesome cat. I knew him when he was a kitten, and now he is an old man, and I have only slipped from young adult into middle age. I feel as though I have gone from being his Mama to being his granddaughter. And so time is fleeting, and I am grateful for the time he has with us.
3. Poetry–putting it out into the world in a more intentional way.
4. I think that the sick-folk are getting better. I haven’t heard anyone cough for a good half-hour now.
5. En-visioning. I began a little Vision Booklet today. It came together very easily because I used collage bits that I have been saving. Probably just for this. I think that I have sorted out my heart’s desire a little more explicitly this year than I have before. That is satisfying.

May we walk in Beauty!