Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Sun and Sunflowers

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sun-and-flowers

This river keeps rolling
rushing beneath me
even when my small boat
rests still on the water
quiet and open

Gratitude List:
1. Good Parenting is alive and well. Yesterday at Hersheypark, in the claustrophobic middle of the masses, where exhausted, grouchy parents are trying to deal with exhausted, grouchy children, I did not expect to so consistently witness such tender and attentive parenting. The whole point of going to an amusement part as a family is to have fun together, and mostly I saw adults eagerly sharing and creating a fun experience for their children.
2. Watching a child conquer his fears by going on a slightly scary roller coaster. “Let’s do that one again!”
3. Oak and sycamore and larch. The beautiful old trees at the park.
4. Seeing the world from high above. Perspective.
5. Doing the inner work. There is always a new challenge, a new practice, a new perspective to incorporate.

May we walk in Beauty!

Magnolia and Goldenrod

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imag1949
Late bloom on a magnolia-type tree in the little garden area behind my school.

I feel like I want a disclaimer before I write a poem about sadness. I realize that my life has been free of the iron grip of sadness that many people experience through depression or trauma or deep, recurring grief. I wrote this poem because I am trying to be Rumi’s Guest House and welcome in any and all who come my way, to learn from them what they would teach me. Sometimes I am a poet sitting at a pool, fishing out a single word at a time. Other days, I sit beside the stream, and the poem jumps right out into my lap and only needs to be tidied up a bit before they’re ready for the page.  This is one of the latter, though I think I will need to spend some time fishing for more of an ending.

She’s a strange guest, is Sadness.
She knocks on the door
and when I open it
she turns her face away, says,
“You probably shouldn’t invite me in.”

But when I close the door,
she comes in anyway,
seeping in around the edges of the door
and standing with her back to the wall.
And then she grows.

When I look directly at her, she dissipates
into the indigo shadows,
and all I can see are her eyes,
full of grief, full of resignation.

Sadness. It’s hard to know her, really,
to understand what she wants of me.

Sometimes she comes in as a cold wind
and I feel my senses tingle with the approach of her
before the world goes numb in her silence.

Gratitude List:
1. Goldenrod! Everywhere is goldenrod! I am awash in it. Fields of it along the roadway between Maytown and Elizabethtown. There was goldenrod in almost every flower bouquet at Linda’s viewing the other night. I love that I will now have that association.
2. Learning to greet all the guests (a la Rumi)
3. Going to Hersheypark with my fellas today.
4. How little Greta the Schnauzer loves the kids. She is my mother-in-law’s neighbor dog, and she gets beside herself when we pull in, only settling down quietly to watch after everyone has properly greeted her.
5. A comparatively light grading stack this weekend.

May we walk in Beauty!

Remembering Old Friends

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

imag1857
This is one of the Lehmans’ fields, just about a week ago. Now their heads are all bowed, the petals have faded and dried up, and the seeds are filling in.

Last night I went to the viewing for a childhood friend of mine. When we moved to Pennsylvania when I was ten years old, Linda and her family lived about a mile away from us–a nice bike ride–and our families went to the same church.  Linda was tall and sort of shy; I was short and chatty. I remember hanging out in her family’s cool basement, reading each other the Dear Abby column from old newspapers, playing with her brother’s chemistry set (I think we wanted to make something blow up–what kid with a chemistry set doesn’t?), and riding our bikes down over the field to the Green Dragon yard sale and buying stuffed animals that our mothers wouldn’t let into the house.

We went to different high schools, but we remained friends, going to youth group together, and writing each other long notes during the week that we would give to each other to read each Sunday at church. On really cold winter afternoons, a bunch of us would head over to Leroy and Beulah’s pond for raucous games of MudSucker, a version of ice hockey with players on skates or in big old boots, and lots of body checking and laughter.

Linda was a loyal and gentle friend, always present in conversation, often smiling, thoughtful, and lots of fun to be with.

After high school, our lives went different ways, and I never made the effort to get back together. We each made attempts here and there to connect, but somehow we never managed to maintain the connection.  Every once in a while, I would wonder where she was, how she was doing. I reconnected with our friend Stacey a couple years ago on Facebook, and she at least updated me on Linda, but I still didn’t make the extra effort to get her number, to call her, to see her again.

This is a story about regret. I am trying to learn to sit with these crunchy emotions, to welcome them into my guesthouse (to use Rumi’s phrase). If I don’t sit with the tough emotions and listen to the stories they have for me, they get in anyway, and then they barrel around and destroy things. Regret turns to flaming shame and eats all the food in the house. Perhaps if I invite them in for a while, just to talk, and listen to the stories they have to tell me, I can learn something about myself and about the past.

This is a story about friendship. Treasure your friendships in your heart. Know that the friends you make will be there, ready to pick up the threads again when you reconnect. But never waver at a chance to re-connect, to make contact. Our friends become part of us, they shape and mold us in ways we can’t always name. I could vow to never again take a friendship for granted, to never completely lose touch again with people I have loved, but I think it is the way of the world, that people connect and move on, and the contact fades. I can, however, use this moment to remember the ways in which my friends over the years have blessed and changed me, and to be ready, whenever the moment presents itself, to take the time and attention to reconnect, to make that extra effort.

Gratitude List:
1. This weather. Yesterday’s weather was perfect. Thermal Delight.
2. Pawpaws. Like custardy mangoes. I really need to plant me a pawpaw tree.
3. Asian pears. For lunch, I have been eating a soft and tender pawpaw, and then a crisp and crunchy pear. Perfect crunch, perfect sweet tang.
4. Old friends. Even (or especially) in the painful times of death, it is nice to reconnect with friends I have known and loved long ago.
5. Fridays. Faculty hymn sing, a schedule that sort of teaches itself, and anticipating Saturday with the family. Rest. Breathing. Rejuvenating. (I will love Monday, too, when it comes.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Where Does Coyote Go?

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chicken-of-the-woods
Hen of the Woods, Halifax,PA. Altered by Dreamscope.

Where does coyote go to rest in these hills and mountains
cross-hatched by houses and fields of corn and soy?
Where does he lay his head? Where does vixen raise her family?
Where does she hide her young ones?
Where do they find a patch of sun to play in?

Coyote brought us losses. We breathe a sigh in memory
of the soft feathers and sweet cluckings of our little flock.
Perhaps we drew him here with hens, and when they were spent,
he stayed on for fatty groundhog and the tenderness of rabbit.
An we breathe a sigh of gratitude for that.
If only now he brought us rain.

(I’m not sure quite what that is–I think it might work better in a prosey form, but I have become accustomed to lining out my thoughts like poems, considering where I want to breathe in the spaces of the phrase.)

Gratitude List:
1. Sleeping until just minutes before the alarm went off. I think I must have slept even more deeply last night.
2. Watching my children grow and learn and become themselves. Sometimes when they start to talk about what they are learning or thinking about, I find myself watching them from outside myself, marveling at these creatures that I know so intimately and that I do not know at all. Where have they come from?
3. My colleagues. Yesterday after a meeting about our accreditation process, one of the other teachers said to me that he found it interesting that no one in the meeting seemed discouraged or frustrated. Anyone can tell you that the beginning of an accreditation process can seem daunting at best. But he was right–the team seemed cheerful and eager. The administrative folks who are holding us through this and guiding the process are walking with us and brainstorming ways to streamline the process even as we take it seriously and fulfill the work of it thoroughly.
4. This steely grey moment before dawn bounds over the hill, when everything gets just a little quieter, even the crickets, and the trees are silhouetted against the sky.
5. My Book of Days (it sounds better than “bullet journal”) Fishing around inside myself for that fifth point, I keep circling around to my little daybook again, abandoning it because I wrote about it a couple days ago, and picking it up again. I have always had a sort of anxious relationship to calendar-keeping, finding it difficult to conceptualize future time, struggling to commit to future dates because the future is so fluid and I don’t want to nail it down. Somehow the little system that I have begun to use in the last week has helped me to visualize and conceptualize the framework of the future. I feel like I have organized the garage.

May we walk in Beauty!

Limber

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imag1908
Becoming. . .

Several years ago in mid-September, I was sitting in the parking lot at Temple Beth Israel with boxes of vegetables for our CSA pick-up. During the hour and a half that I was there, at least thirty monarchs floated southward above my head. Like the birds and the dragonflies, monarchs are migrating now, too.

We used to go to the beach at this time of year, when most people have gone home for the summer. No crowds to get in the way–only warm water, cool breezes, and all the wingfolk flying south: flocks of a thousand swallows, and dragonflies and monarchs. The Wetlands Institute at Stone Harbor, NJ has a Monarch Migration Festival every September.

It’s the hummingbirds and the monarchs that really get me, such tiny and vulnerable little bodies sailing out over the Gulf to Mexico, to South America.  Dragonflies look like little machines, like helicopters built for the distance, but even they are vulnerable to weather, far out over the Gulf.

Now is the season for refueling, preparing for the leap into the blue, water and air. What will I risk in this space of my life? What void will you leap into?  Like those orange butterflies, we can trust that the long journeys of the past and the knowledge of the ancestors that lives in our own wings will inform our own flight.

Orange wings dip in farewell–
monarch catches a breeze
and wings toward the Gulf.

(I don’t really have a seasonal word as such in this haiku, but the second part of it is about the migration, so that gives the clue.)

Gratitude List:
1. Limber. Jon used this word yesterday to express something to do with fluid thinking. I like that word, especially as I am more and more aware of how the aging process demands more focused work on keeping the body limber. I like to think that my mind can also be limber if I keep it exercised.
2. Clouds: In yesterday’s sunrise, the clouds were first tangerine and indigo. Magenta. Then ivory and indigo and gold against a Maryblue sky. Clouds of mist hung low over the fields, pooling around the ankles of the cows. Clouds hung low over the River. Layers of clouds filled the sky.
3. Monarchs. Yesterday I took a walk and found four large caterpillars munching on milkweed behind the greenhouse. Eat well, little ones.
4. Janelle’s bees. The Middle School Science room has a hive right in the room. The Queen was quietly holding court, the larvae were squirming to get out of their little chambers, and the workers were dancing directions to each other.
5. This year’s Silhouette staff. That’s the school literary magazine. We had our first meeting yesterday, and they are so eager and willing to get right down to work. I think it’s going to be a really great year.

May we walk in Beauty!

A Bullet Journal and the NYT Crossword

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imag1877
I found them on the path, lying just like this.

Gratitude List:
1. Bullet Journal. I know it’s trendy, and perhaps it’s a pipe dream of an organization system. I’m trying it for now, anyway. It appeals to my doodly, zentangly impulses. It makes the best of my informal half-system of making to-do lists on random pieces of paper, but it keeps them all in one place, and I can also keep my daily notes and lists of things I want to remember. So far, so good. This week, I have made boxes for each group of five papers to grade, and then I can shade in a box for each little stack. Short, achievable goals.
2. Sleeping under cozy covers
3. NYT Sunday crossword. Jon and I do them together, one of us filling out as much as we can, then handing it over. We can usually finish in a day or two. We haven’t been doing them much since we stopped getting the paper, but I bought one last week. I wish I could buy an ad-free Sunday paper.
4. Ice cream. I love the treat of it, even though I wake up with a stuffy nose afterwards.
5. Dragons. The way they fire imagination.

May we walk in Beauty!

Finding the Questions

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imag1876
I spent last week quietly anticipating another walk of the Camp Hebron Labyrinth. On my Saturday morning walk own to the woods, I kept thinking how different the paths and the distances seemed in just a week. The thought appeared in my head: “It’s a different journey now.” Even though I am walking a similar path and toward a different destination, the journey keeps shifting and changing. Just moments after I had begun to ponder what I meant by thinking that, I arrived at the labyrinth to find that a tree had fallen across it.

I recently found this piece of paper on which I wrote, in the summer of 2015, a series of examen-type questions. I think I probably have already written these in the blog, but I am going to put them here again so that I can ponder them this week. I wouldn’t use more than five of them a day, probably, and for similar ones, like the first four, I would spread them out over days, to see how the different ways of asking almost the same question evokes different internal responses.

How did Mystery encounter you today?
How did you encounter Mystery today?
How were you found by Mystery?
How did God/dess seek you?

What awakened you?
What vision brought your spirit awake?
What nudged you? (Or nudged you forward?)
Where does your heart sit?
What gave you wings?
What do you take on your journey?
What do you tuck into the corners?

What quickened within you?
What brought your senses (or your heart, your spirit, your brain) alive?
What do you take deeper?
What do you take into prayer?

What is the weight that you carry?

And not that I am thinking about it again, I’ll add some more from today’s heart:
What itches? What makes you uncomfortable?
What feels unsettled?
What skin are you shedding?
What muscles are you stretching?

Gratitude List:
1. Bridges, and bridge-building language and actions
2. Gathered Community
3. Getting the work organized, making a plan
4. Treasuring each other
5. Waking up–I am struggling with the actual physical process this morning. How much more intense it can be to wake up in other ways. May we always be open to the pull to wake further, to bring our dreams into the wakeful spaces.

May we walk in Beauty!

A Short Break

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leaf

I am signing off for a few days, to sit in the woods, to walk the labyrinth, to listen for the messages that come my way. May you find cool shady spaces where your soul may be a rest. May your ears be filled with beautiful sounds and excellent words. I will continue to hold out my hands to join with yours in this web of prayer and healing. Namaste. Blessed Be.

Parenting as a Spiritual Path

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

meow
I caught him in the middle of conversation. He always has quite a lot to say.

Remember that boy that I brought to tears the other day because of the homework? Last night he finished the project, and got most of the daily homework done, too. Trust the child to find his way, Mama.

It’s just that he reminds me so much of myself, I think. I have always struggled with deadlines, and the stress of the last minute. Still, it is partly the looming deadline itself that brings the fire of inspiration for me–why should it be different for him?

Parenting is a spiritual path, isn’t it? It requires self-awareness in spades.  Self-control. Patience. It brings deep love and gratitude at every step. I keep feeling like I am getting it wrong, begin to feel that shame of inadequacy (and what shame is worse than the shame of letting another human down?), and then suddenly grace appears, and mercy, and whole new rooms open up.

Gratitude List:
1. Pawpaws
2. Getting the work done
3. Last night was Back-to-School Night at school, where the parents walk through their students’ schedules. I think it was just too hot for lots of people, but I did get to have some wonderful conversations with many parents. I love to talk to the parents about their students.
4. The sunrises have been so beautiful. Magenta and violet, gentle and heart-opening.
5. Friday.

May we walk in Beauty!

Needing the Practice

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treelabyrinth
The tree at the center of the labyrinth. Camp Hebron.

Today is one of the days that I really need to do the gratitude work.  I know this because it was hard to make the list today. I’m not falling apart and I am not depressed. I’m just huffy and grumpy and a little stressed out. When I go inside myself to seek the things that I am grateful about, and all I can find is little orts of shame and grumbliness, then I know I need to breathe into it.

I used to walk away from those uncomfortable feelings: “I shouldn’t be feeling shame. Brene Brown says that it is unhelpful! I don’t like grouchy people. Negativity brings us all down.” But they’re there. If I growl at them and walk away, they always grow.

So I’ll sit down a while with them, roll out a few marbles of gratitude that I find tucked in my pockets, and play a little while, see what happens.

As my wise mother tells me: “It doesn’t have to be either/or. It can be both/and.” I don’t have to be a calm and grateful person OR a grouchy bear. This morning, both apply. At least the grateful bit can help to tame the grouchy bear so she doesn’t go around mauling people.

Gratitude List:
1. Dragonflies. I don’t think I am being too whimsical when I say that I think they like to people watch.
2. Stroopies: Perfect little waffle snack with a sweet caramel center. A local company with a mission to hire refugees. May they grow and thrive.
3. Getting to try again. This one is a little shame-based, perhaps. I brought a child to tears last night with my program to get the homework and music practice done. I was a bit of a bully, even if I was trying to be friendly about it. I think he forgives me. I treated him like a problem to be solved. We’ll figure it out. We’ll try again, and I will go in next time with more self-awareness and compassion.
4. Growing into the roles.
5. Reaching the little goals.

May we walk in Beauty!