Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

“The Women, United, Will Never Be Defeated”

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bird

Two nights ago, my sleep was broken up by an anxious child who couldn’t get back to sleep, so I slept on the floor of his room with him. The broken sleep led me to remember my dreams much more clearly.

The one about the car accident was so real that, on the way to church in the morning, I showed my family an intersection similar to the one where the accident occurred, and when I walked out to the car after church, I experienced a momentary but real dread because I didn’t want to see the scraped-up side of the car. I was relieved when the split second passed and I realized it had been only a dream.

In the other dream, someone had brought a large cardboard box full of  writhing snakes into some sort of social gathering–I think we were going to have a dance. The snakes immediately crawled out and covered the floor. I was really worried that someone was going to step on them, but they took care of themselves. I held a couple, loving their intent and watchful eyes, their flickering tongues. Snakes are symbolic of regeneration, of the cycles of life. I have personally associated them with rising feminine power, particularly in their association with the Minoan snake dancers.  After a day of processing the magnified disgust, I was feeling at the shameless misogyny of one of our political candidates, I think I needed a reminder of the collective power of women. And I needn’t worry about them getting stepped on. We will take care of ourselves.

“The women, united, will never be defeated.” –Ubaka Hill

Gratitude List:
1. Dreams that wander into the daylight
2. Images that empower and strengthen the will
3. Clouds: I never get tired of clouds
4. Voices of reason amidst the craziness
5. Wild wind. It can be almost unbearable, the way it calls to be followed, the way it makes me long to go journeying, rambling, adventuring.

May we walk in Beauty!

Rain and the Promise of Rain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

bowl
Stones today, for all the people and places I hold in my heart. Stones for the people of Haiti. For the Water Protectors. For ones standing for justice everywhere. For friends experiencing uncertainty, illness, and grief. For those who have fled their homes because of war and terror, and for those who want to flee but cannot. For those making new lives in new lands. 

I am having trouble coming up with a gratitude list today. My brain is tired, perhaps, or yesterday was a little too focused on just getting work done, and I didn’t really do my work of paying attention. Attention is the spiritual work that comes before gratitude. If I let myself stay inside my head for a day, then I don’t get into the body spaces that focus my attention.

Gratitude List:
1. Ironing. Ironing means order and tidiness. It’s meditative work, but work I almost never do. Some of my dresses really require ironing, which forces me to do this adult work once in a while. I’ll say ironing and mean: making order and meditating.
2. Rain and the promise of rain.
3. Robins outside the window, discussing the coming flight south, or the movement into the deeper woods.
4. Learning to pay attention.
5. Communities.

May we walk in Beauty!

Gained in Translation

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oct-words
Mockingbird Words: This is a word cloud of the words on this blog from the first week of October.

I am playing around with Google translate this Saturday morning. I translated a short poem of mine into Bengali and back again. The basic poem was pretty similar, but when we got back to English, giant feather had become hairy giants.  That’s extremely promising for a little bit of fun.  The sentence structure of the original poem was pretty straightforward, so the algorithms brought most of the poem back to at least a sense of the original, even when I sent it through several languages before coming back to English.

This is addicting.  I am going to try a poem that begins with a somewhat fractured sentence structure already, send it through several translations, and see what comes back.  Here is my original tanka, titled “Riddle”:

Down halls of dream, through
tattered veils of old stories
no fury, no fear
only the question of where
the next riddle will appear.

Zulu * Burmese * Haitian Creole * Portuguese * Maori * Japanese * and back to English again:

And, the bedroom
It covers the history of his face
Anger do not be afraid
Question
It displays the following password.

“It covers the history of his face” is a fascinating line. I still like my original line, but I wonder how it would go to say:

tattered veils of old stories
cover the history of her face

There’s some possibility there. As goofy as this exercise is, there’s a point here: I sometimes (often?) get caught in certain ways of saying things, stuck in linguistic and imagistic patterns. I worry that my poems sometimes begin to sound all the same. In Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird, I published several poems that were an attempt to break out of my own boxes. The results were several rather surreal poems that I am rather in love with, but which–in hindsight–I think might be somewhat unrelatable to anyone outside my own head.

Here, after some more play with translator, and re-crafting, is “Riddle,” no longer a tanka, and perhaps a little more layered, perhaps a little too clunky:

Down halls of dream,
through tattered curtains of old fairy tales
which cover the history of her face
without eyes, without fear–
only the question of where
the next riddle (this mystery)
will appear.

I was going to stop here, but then I took that last form and translated it into Cebuano and back again, and this marvel appeared:

Dream Hall,
By Tttered Krtens Old fairy tale
He covered his face HISTORY
Vithut Mata, Vithut Fiyr–
Questions included Ware
Next Ridley (Mystery)
The Makita.

Perhaps my next experiments should be to break down even the structure of the words, and play with invented spellings. Vithut for without has captured my imagination. And Mata. Is that eyes? Or matter? I need to simply force myself to stop now, or I’ll be doing this until noon.

Gratitude List:
1. Wordplay. Layers of meanings in words that shift and change color, dash away, and return with whole new meanings. Connections between words and meanings and languages.
2. Imagination. This boy, who is doing his spelling homework here on the floor beside me, suddenly yelled out, “Narwhal!” He had stuck his pencil between his toes (because that’s what you do) and caught the shadow of it on the floor. It did indeed look exactly like a narwhal.
3. Yesterday’s Service of Thanksgiving at my school. Music, speech and story, visuals. Generations. The Moment, for me, was when the choir was coming off the stage. I was one of the first ones off, so I got to watch as members of a composite choir of people of all ages filed into their rows. We all felt a sense of belonging to the choir because we had all been in some form of LMS choir throughout the years. It brought 75 years of time together into one moment.  Deeply moving.
4. Saturday morning sleeping in. I feel so rested and ready for the day.
5. Thermally satisfying weather.

May we walk in Beauty!

Poem: A Minute

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beach
A few years ago I was working on a project about my younger self, and I wanted to take a photograph of this framed photo that my father took of me when I was six, standing on the shore of Rusinga Island. I just couldn’t seem to get the photo without the glare and the reflection in the glass of myself taking the photo. Suddenly I realized that I needed to put my current self into the photo, too, and set it up to intentionally gt my shadow on the glass.

Here is a poem from October 16, 2013. The form is called a minute, using three 20-syllable stanzas (60 syllables, like 60 seconds, equals one minute):

Out in the dawn, a misty sea
in walnut tree
a silent crow
will dream of snow

will ruffle feathers in the chill
will wait until
the first bright ray
begins the day

then with a final shake will rise
from branch to skies
and this will be
a memory

Gratitude List:
1. My School. Today Lancaster Mennonite School launches its 75th year celebrations.
2. I can’t get over the wreaths and draperies of mist on the fields on the way to school. Even yesterday afternoon on the way home, there was a snake of mist winding down the River along the western shore by Accomac.
3. I made it through the week. I have been having terrible sinus headaches in the last few days, and I kept thinking it might turn into something worse, but it hasn’t. If I am going to have allergy issues in the fall, I would rather have silent sinus headaches than the wild sneezing and sniffling and burning eyes that I sometimes get.
4. The color purple. (You know what Sug says in the book of that name.) Rich, inviting, heart-opening.
5. The poetry of Langston Hughes. One of my students asked me last week if I knew anything about Langston Hughes, so this week has been Langston Hughes week in my class.  This morning will be “I, to, Sing America.”

May we walk in Beauty!

It Matters

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imag1865

Yesterday I used the word Matrix as one of my names for that great Force we so often call God. I realize that the associations of meaning for the word Matrix in our culture have been taken over by the movie that bears that name. So matrix has come to be associated with a sort of world-dominating, mind-controlling enslavement.

The true definition, however, is the environment in which something grows, the source or mold from which new forms are cast.  When you hold an amethyst cluster, the base rock–that milky, gravelly bit from which the crystals spring–is matrix, the mother-source of the crystal. The root of matrix is the Latin word mater, which is mother, which is womb, which is source.

In English, we have matter, which is a verb denoting something’s significance and a noun meaning something with a physical nature. The sentence “You matter to me” means that you are significant to me. With an awareness of its connections to its Latin roots, it seems to speak more deeply to the ways in which relationships mold and shape us. Suddenly your significance in that sentence is about shaping and molding who I am. If a particular cause matters  to you, it is not simply important, perhaps, but it also helps to define and give shape to who you are.

In its meaning of “substance,” matter or material takes on new significance. Substance is source, is the basis, the form-holder for everything, that from which all else springs. Once, someone in a conversation was referring to a difficult physical task, to pushing through the exhaustion, saying, “Mind over Matter!” One of my friends responded that perhaps we ought to think more in terms of matter over mind, that for too many centuries, religion–ancient Greek religion and later, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–separated body and mind and categorized mind and spirit as superior to body. Body became inferior, became shameful, became sinful.  Religion became a way of escaping or mortifying the inferior physical matter.

Can we take matter back into our spiritual story? Instead of placing mind over matter, can we see ourselves as situated within this source material, this body, as a blessing, as our purpose? We are embodied, enmattered, in order to experience the sensations of the material, to know flavor and scent and touch, to learn how to see and to See, to listen, to sense. If we call the One who made us Matrix, then we see ourselves as springing from that Source, molded by the mother-womb. Religion becomes something which brings us into our full selves rather than dividing us into separate pieces that war with each other for dominance, flesh against spirit.

Gratitude List:
1. Matter, stuff, substance
2. Dream
3. Words and their meanings and their deeper meanings
4. Yesterday’s bluebird, flying with the sun on his back
5. How mist rises from the fields in these early morning trips to school

May you See and Feel and Taste and Hear and Smell.

The Wildest One

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imag1826

Lately, I have been calling her The Wildest One.

We say God, we say Goddess. Great Mother or Holy Father. Some of us say gods instead, and why shouldn’t that be appropriate for a concept that is beyond the ability of our brains to comprehend? Like Madeline L’Engle’s conceptualization of a seraphim, so incomprehensibly complex that it’s a being of many-in-one. Why shouldn’t the One be also Many?

I am not even sure that the category of Being is quite apt, quite complete. Being. Force. Abstract Idea. Conceptual Framework.

We say God is Love. But is Love God?

I like the names Source, Matrix, Creator, Web of all Being. Beauty. Magnum Mysterium–the Greatest Mystery. Impersonal forces and ideas, yet oh-so-personal, because there’s a reflection of it inside me. I think it’s there inside everyone, a spark just waiting to be kindled, waiting to flash out.  (But am I spiritually colonizing others, when I say that I think that there’s a god-thing in everyone? A Goodness?)

The Wildest One. Because the wild will not be wholly known, will not be conquered, nor tamed. Because something wild within me longs for connection with the Wildest One.  We think of wild as predatory, ferocious, dangerous, red in tooth and claw. I suppose there are aspects of ferocity and danger here, but wild is also untamability, growth outside boundaries, that which will not be kept in a house. Wild is the curious faces of bat-eared fox kits that my brother and I watched popping up out of their burrows. Wild is the quiet hippopotamus grazing on the bank of the river. Wild is the wren who makes her home in human habitations, but ever on her own terms. Wild is the geese and the monarchs and the hummingbirds and the dragonflies winging south for winter.  Wild is the green that covers everything, the moment the clippers and trimmers have been put away.

Gratitude List:
1. Holding on to each other.
2. Listening across distances.
3. Wise ones.
4. Wildness.
5. Wilderness.

May we walk in Beauty, in Wildness.

Feast Day of St. Francis

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francis
Saint Francis of Assisi. (I couldn’t find an artist note for this one.)

Today is the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals–some say patron of all ecology. He chose the way of poverty that he might better help those who were poor.

Blessings on the rescuers.
Blessings on the keepers of wild spaces.
Blessings on the ones who talk to the animals.
Blessings on the wild ones.
Blessings on the tree planters.
Blessings on the Water Protectors.
Blessings on those who protest against the greed that destroys the earth.
Blessings on the ones who  care for those without resources.
Blessings on the bridges and the bridge-builders.

Gratitude List:
1. Moments of silence
2. Moments of stretching
3. Moments of creative frenzy
4. Moments of connection
5. Moments of Aha!

May we walk in Beauty!

Time to Re-Envision and Revise

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

bridemusic
Another picture of my brother and me, singing yesterday at a celebration for Bridge of Hope National. 

I really like to work with extremely short poetry. There’s an imagist within me, I suppose, wanting to capture an image like a photograph, to hold it in words, to take the thing that I see and recreate it in such as way that you will see it, too. But I can never seem to leave it only at the image, because everything means something to me. It’s all messages.  Here is one from 2014:

yellow walnut leaves
twist and twirl silently earthward
lavishly giving themselves to breeze, to breath
prodigal as love

I wonder how it would affect the poem were I to change “breath” to “death”?  I’d lose the “r” sound that follows “earth” so nicely, for one thing.  And I like that repeated initial “br.” Maybe I will keep it. I am in revisions mode now, so every word is on the table for possible change and transformation. (Like that “twist.” I like the alliteration “twist and twirl,” but that seems a little bit of an obvious one.  Hmm.)

Gratitude List:
1. The people who do good work in the world, not because of some sense of wanting to feel better about themselves because they do charity, but because they know their future is bound up in the future of all, that we’re all one people, and we must survive together.
2. Organizations like Bridge of Hope and Samara, that work to support families in crisis, to give children a safer and healthier childhood.
3. I didn’t get it all done, but I got a lot of it done, and that feels at least a little satisfying.
4. In the midst of all the daily work, I managed to get my next poetry manuscript onto a single document in the betweeny moments. This week I will print it out, and I’ll start the revising and editing in the next raft of betweeny moments. A friend once told me the story of a wizard who never got wet in the rain because he just walked between the raindrops.  That’s going to be me and this manuscript, working between the raindrops of the daily.
5. Waking up the spine. Stretching. Breathing. The long, slow uncurling into the day’s work.

May we walk in Beauty!

Pigeon and Dawn

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pigeon
Shirati, Tanzania: a long-ago dawn with African green pigeon. (1969?)

From a photo of a distant place of my childhood to a poem of my River, just down the ridge from where I am typing in the newborn morning. I wrote this one of April of 2014:

Susquehanna Dawning
by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider

Stand just there on the sandy bank of the river.
There, where the water laps over the roots
of the ancient sycamore. There, where the bridge
and the memory of a bridge run over the water.

Listen for the rustle and murmur of dawning,
the whisper of wavelets, the groan of the trees,
the sudden wild call of robin: thrush of the morning,
leading the dawn chorus, unwrapping the day.

What will you discover this daybreak, this borning?
What stories will otter bring you? And heron?
What are the words that the river will utter,
there, where the sun spreads the golden road before you?

Gratitude List:
1. Phoebe, sitting out in the misty, dripping trees, calling his name into the dawn.
2. The mist, the rainy season
3. The trees: sycamore, poplar, oak, walnut, dogwood, maple, willow
4. Those two crows, winging purposefully across the hollow
5. All the ways in which we hold each other, carry each other, listen for the sound of each other’s tears and laughter, even from great distances.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Number Four

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flower

Instead of my typical 4:44, I woke up this morning at 5:34, fell asleep again, and woke up at 7:04. My friend Anna tells me that 4 is associated both with the Metal element and with Autumn in Chinese Medicine. Fall is a time of letting go. I think that I am being asked right now to let go of some of my expectations of myself, to realize that I can’t systematize and organize the stress away.

I have to step into the river and start moving the rocks around. Get my feet wet, get my hands muddy.

The number four seems to be my wake-up number. What shall I wake up to in these days when the winds are pulling me to make and create something new, in these days when the weight of work is heavy on me?

Four is also about stability. The square is more static than the triangle. I can rest in the comfort of the four corners of the square, but eventually, I am going to let my balance shift and move into the more dynamic space of the five, which pulses like a star, disrupts the patterns and flow that have been set in the cozy household of the four, and brings a new awareness.

Every step is about waking up, eh?

Gratitude List:
Have you ever noticed
1. How sometimes three or four different leaves will be floating downward through the air, far from the trees, as though they have materialized from some other dimension?
2. How the autumn wind calls, begs for attention, wants you to wander, to go adventuring?
3. How understanding dawns somewhere behind the eyes, how it shifts the eyebrows and the temples upward, how it straightens the spine?
4. How heavier blankets often bring deeper sleep?
5. How new thoughts and ideas flow like streams, little tributaries meandering toward the Big Thought, the new concept, the river of knowing?

May we walk in Beauty!