Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Wings Wide

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

hummer
Just a picture of green leaves, but if you look really closely and squint your eyes and cock your head to the side, about a third of the way along the very bottom of the photo, you can make out the silhouette of the mother hummingbird’s head, her bill pointing down as she feeds her baby.

For the Vulture

When you came to rest upon the pole
and opened your wings
wide to the sky,
were you holding up that cloud, or
warming your shoulders in the sun?

Were you warning the people in the valley
that death will one day visit us all,
or reminding us that all of life
is one great cycle, with no beginning
and no end?

I felt it as a benediction,
the pastor raising her hands toward heaven
and blessing her tiny congregation
gathered under the sycamore tree.

Gratitude List:
1. Hummingbirds. I know. Every day, right? But yes, every single day, and yesterday I trained my binoculars on the nest when the mother flew away and saw two tiny needle beaks poking up above the nest’s rim. Picture a metal bottle cap–the inside of the nest is only millimeters deeper than that, and two tiny hearts beat inside two impossibly tiny winged creatures who live inside that space. My heart keeps falling on its knees.
2. Friday. I love teaching, love my new batch of students, love seeing my earnest colleagues daily. And. And. I am exhausted. The first week is a glorious whirl. At one point this week, I found myself telling one class about another class’s deadline.  One the day when I was orienting all the classes to the use of certain computer programs, I completely missed a step in the last class of the day because I thought I had told them already–I had said it so many times already. That said–I am eager for the weekend of rest.
3. Poetry. My life is so much richer for the beauty of language that surrounds me.
4. Hymn sing. Friday mornings, the faculty gathers before school to sing hymns together. It’s the perfect thing to wake up the spirit for the last day of the week. What a perfect, perfect metaphor for the work we do together, to sit and blend our harmonies once a week.
5. Solitude. (I need to carefully find my moments of solitude in the new rhythm of my life.)

May we walk in Beauty, ever ancient, ever new.

Visitors

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Yesterday, just after Ellis and I got home from school, all four of us were hanging out at the picnic table, talking about our days, when a vulture (I think turkey) flew low above the poplar tree and settled on the telephone pole at the end of the drive. I managed to grab my camera, and just as I  raised it and got into position for the photo, she opened her arms and turned her head like this. Like someone from an ancient Egyptian papyrus.  Holy moment.

If you don’t know me, and only read my daily gratitude lists, I wonder if my life might come across as unbalancedly charmed and positive. Five things every day to be grateful for. Happiness, joy, contentment, satisfaction. It really is all there. But every life has its challenges and pain, too.

If this daily practice of inward-looking is teaching me anything, it is that the examined life must name and engage all the feelings and experiences that enter the heart.  And the practice of intentionally naming the gratitudes isn’t about ignoring the pain, or even simply putting the difficult things into context so that I can look away and only focus on the wonder and the loveliness. Sometimes it is about looking the hardest things in the eye and welcoming them in, too. Friendship and love bring us support and companionship and deep satisfaction, but opening the heart to others means that we share their griefs, carry their pain, open ourselves to the risks of broken relationships.  Noticing the hummingbird nest in the sycamore tree brings falling-down-on-your-knees wonder and daily magic, but it also makes heat waves and storms and predators anxious realities when your heart is filled with the fragile life of tiny birds. And wonder is not only the exquisitely impossible hummingbird, but the ancient bald vulture opening her wings in the sun.

My favorite poem on this topic is Rumi’s “Guesthouse”

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

— Jellaludin Rumi,
translation by Coleman Barks

Gratitude List:
1. The vulture visitor
2. Yesterday I finally saw a hummingbird baby peeking a tiny head over the rim of the nest after the mother flew away. First a tiny ruffly wing, then the needle beak, then the round marble of a head–smaller than a marble! My heart fell down on its knees.
3. Welcoming it all, open-winged, like the vulture on the pole
4. Challenges that keep me from complacency
5. Fierce and tender mothers. My sister friends, holding each other through difficult times. Hummingbird.

May we walk in Beauty!

Let Wonder Be Your Guide

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kindness rock

Gratitude List:
1. The Little Engine that Could: “I think I can!” Always the subject of the first chapel, since I was a sophomore at my school. This story has been a bridge across my own shift from student to teacher.
2. All those Bright and Shining faces yesterday. Lots of shyness and lots of nervous energy all ’round. So sweet.
3. My own 2nd and 6th graders both had marvelous first days as well.
4. Cool mornings. My brain gears up more quickly on cool mornings.
5. The fierce mothers. My friend Sarah has been putting this one on her list lately, and I copy her as an act of prayer. Mara and Lisa have been holding their daughters with such fiercely loving hearts in these days. I will stand in these circles of mothers and others as Katie recovers, and as we hold out every shred of certainty that Kyla’s new heart will come soon.

May we walk in Beauty!

What Will You Write?

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What will you write on this page,
a blank ocean of white before you,
waiting for your mark?

The words and the images you lay upon this day
you will write with your grandmother’s pen,
with drops of blood from your fingertip,
with the blue quill of a wingfeather
dropped on the wind
from a passing jay.

Will you write joy? Will you write patience?
What will you write when grief
appears upon the page?
How will you work
around the stains of tears and sweat,
of oil and the smudges of your daily labor?

Let your words be beautiful and terrible,
your images shining and crisp,
your actions ancient,
yet newer than the fragments
of blue eggshell in your cupped hand.

Gratitude List:
1. This blank page of a school year beginning
2. My earnest and compassionate colleagues
3. The Shining Ones who will walk in my doorway today
4. The Work: Love and Learning. Love of Learning.
5. Bridges. Every moment is a bridge.

May we walk in Beauty!

Here We Go!

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I can’t remember which of my father’s books this came from. I felt like such a smarty-pants, realizing that I could take a photo of it, rather than interrupting the conversation to write it down, but then I forgot to keep track of which book it was in. I think it was one by John Philip Newell.
“. . .in every human I love something of You.” Such a sense of the Mystery immanent within everyone. Seek and you will find.

Here I sit, in the roller coaster at the very top of that first hill, the very moment of pause before release, and the first thrilling whoosh down the first slope. So much excitement and anticipation. A little anxiety. But I’ve ridden roller coasters before, and this is my third round on this one. This time, I might even be ready to throw my hands up and scream for sheer delight on some of the wild corners I know are coming.

Today is Faculty Day at school, and tomorrow we welcome the Bright and Shining Ones back into the halls. I’m looking forward to this ride. I know myself a little better this year. I’m calmer. Still excited. Carrying Etty Hillesum’s quotation with me into this year, to seek the Source, the Mystery, the Divine, in each of my colleagues and my students and their parents. Hillesum also wrote in her journals that she was seeking to open doors for God in each connection she made with other people. Let’s do that too, shall we?

Gratitude List:
1. Water that comes out of the sky. Soothing rain. Sitting with my parents on their front porch in the rain. Rain on the lisianthus.
2. That dragonfly who zipped back and forth through the heaviest part of the downpour, heedless of the raindrops. I think she was flying between them, actually. And then as we drove slowly away after the rain was gone, she hovered along beside us all the way to the stop sign.
3. The songs. The singing. “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.”
4. Everyone is welcome at the table. Everyone.
5. All those shades of pink and violet on the altar yesterday.

May we walk in Beauty!

Seven Questions

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2013 March 168

In the last week or two, I have been studying the chakras again, those energy centers located along the spine. I don’t want to do a discussion of the history or meanings of the chakras here–you can google chakra and find out everything you want to know. What I want to do for the next day or two or more is to change up my Gratitude List for a while to an Examen again, to ask myself seven questions each day for a little while, questions that correspond to the essential nature of each chakra:
Root — Survival, support, basic needs
Sacral — Creativity, joy, desire, compassion
Solar Plexus — Will, resolve, determination, personal power
Heart — Love, connection to others
Throat — Expression of self, voice, speaking highest truth
Brow — Knowing, seeing, understanding
Crown — Connection to spirit (God, Mystery, Universe, Life), divine wisdom

Because of English literacy conventions, we read downward instead of upward, but I imagine my questions actually beginning at the root, the base of my spine, and moving upward until they reach the top of my head. As I do for my Gratitude Lists, I will not try to answer my whole life or even my whole day in one question, but to pick one item from the past day that shines out in response to each question.

(Note: Having worked my way to the end of the list, I see how much extra time and meditation this takes. I may have to limit a Chakra Examen to weekends.)

Daily Examen (as Gratitude List and Chakra Meditation):
1. What has supported you? Jon and the children. I sometimes get frustrated that there are so many distractions while I am trying to work and plan, but this is the bowl that holds me, this home of my three. The busyness and activity are part of the work, part of what makes my work possible.
2. How have you encountered joy? Perhaps it’s more amazement than joy–the way some people just Know how to do a thing without ever needing to be taught. We let Ellis take apart the old Chromebook yesterday to see if he could fix it. I truly expected that we would end up putting it in the trash, but it’s working now. His dad made a stand for it to support it because of some of the broken parts, but the screen is working fine.  There’s a Swahili phrase that my mother uses sometimes that expresses it better than I can say it in English: Nimeshangaa. It means something like, “I am filled with wonder.”
3. What resolve is filling you? Balance and Organization. Okay, two for the price of one here, but my resolve to be organized and focused is part of bringing balance into my daily and weekly rhythms in the coming months.
4. What opened your heart? I handed some cash out the window to a homeless man yesterday, and Joss reached up to add a dollar bill of his own.
5. What do you need to say? Pick up each moment of silence and joy, and carry it with you like a jewel.
6. What did you See? The shift in the children–they are so ready to step up to the coming school year, so eager to be part of their class cohort.
7. How did the Mystery meet you? Here she comes again: Hummingbird. I watched her feed her babies again yesterday.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Only Way In Is In

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2013 August 348
The only way in is in.

Here is an old poem of mine. I am not feeling knife-edgy lately, but perhaps you are:

Some days
you feel as though
you have been walking that knife edge
forever,
too afraid
to look to right or left.

Then one day,
you raise your gaze
and there before you
is the green valley
with a blue glass lake
and a silent island
that you have been seeking
in every dream
since you were born.

Gratitude List:
1. Sweet yesterday. The last day of summer for me. Weekends don’t count. Yesterday was a weekday, the last free day of the work week before school begins. Teachers return on Monday, and we welcome the Bright Ones back on Tuesday.  I do love what I do, what we create together at school. Still, these lovely days–no matter how busy they get–of loosely planned rhythm, are sweet and wonderful.
2. Anticipating new rhythms. No matter how sweet the days of summer, something in me also longs for the formal rhythms of the school year.
3. Balance. I think this will be the theme of my school year this year. Particularly with the packs of grading that come in. I have a color-coded calendar all ready so I can visually see when the bigger papers are due.
4. Learning to know my own brain. I know that I am a visual learner, that I often have to see a word or a musical score or a fact in order to “get” it, even if seeing means visualizing it in my brain. When I meet a new person with an interesting name, I spell it out on the screen inside my head so it is easier to remember. Those color-coded calendars are part of my plan to work with the quirks of my brain this year, to give myself the necessary visual cues to get my work done more efficiently.
5. Cicadas. Yesterday, I stood and listened to the concert for a while. When I just move through it without thinking about it, it’s a confusing roar, but when I stop to listen, I can hear one band to the left starting to gear up, while the band in front of me is at full roar at a slightly different pitch. To the right is a third, reedier-sounding gang, trying to meet the roar in the middle, but fading out. What an amazing idea the cicada is–the seasonality (not just annual, but seasons of years at a time), the shells and wings and awkward flight bodies, the roaring.

May we walk in Beauty!

Stand Still

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garden peach
Garden Peach tomatoes. Sweet, juicy, almost fruity. These two happen to be heart-shaped.

Reading Parker Palmer this morning, I again came across this poem by David Wagoner. I had such a strong reaction to this when I first read it a couple years ago that I can still recall how my skin felt as the words took hold.

Lost
by David Wagoner, from Collected Poems 1956-1976

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. you must let it find you.

Gratitude List:
1. She might not be gone. I was certain that the hummingbird had left her nest, either abandoning her eggs as unviable, or getting too skittish about all the activity below her. This is the sort of thing I worry about. Yesterday, I watched her zip up to the nest, and instead of sitting on it like she usually does, she perched on the rim, and stuck her beak down into the nest. I can’t be positive, but this appeared to be the behavior of someone feeding young ones. Holding out hope.
2. Jumping spiders. They’re sort of like teeny tiny puppies, only you don’t have to worry about who is going to take care of them. Yesterday, I encountered a tiny brown jumping spider who kept leaping from finger to finger. It was like she understood where I wanted her to jump to next. She would race toward me across the vast distance of my hand, and then look up at me, and then when the people at the picnic table laughed, she would suddenly stop and twist her body so she could look at them, and then we would resume our little game.
3. The village that raises the children. My kids hadn’t seen Sandra for several weeks, and yesterday when she came, they raced to her and couldn’t stop bending her ear. She listens to them, she converses at their level, but never talks down to them.
4. Also, the schools. Last night was Back to School night at Wrightsville Elementary. I love the teachers and administration and staff at this local elementary school. I love the friendly, earnest culture of the place.
5. Encountering Beauty–in words, in the visual realm, in the aural realm. Sort of like encountering that little spider–there are moments when Beauty seems to say, “I get you. I am here to play with you for this one bright shining moment.”

May we walk in Beauty!

Photobomber

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“What comes, will go. What is found, will be lost again.
But what you are is beyond coming and going and beyond description.
You are It.”
—Rumi

Gratitude List:
1. Lemons and limes, which is to say: that which refreshes.
2. Bumblebee photobombers, which is to say: that which surprises and delights.
3. The Sufi poets, which is to say, that which deepens and enheartnes.
4. The great-horned owl in the poplar tree, which is to say, that which awakens and reminds.
5. This fuzzy fellow sleeping here beside me, which is to say: that which trusts and belongs.

May we walk in Beauty!

Praise

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WORDSCloud

Psalm of Praise
(10 August 2015)

Yours is the music that enters our hearts.
Delight of you enlivens our voices to join in the song.
We are born to worship our Maker.

The world is awash in color and music;
your works are enkindled in sparkle and dazzle.
Every bright bird, each flashing star,
the chirp of the cricket and drone of cicada,
roaring waterfall, quivering leaf–
all of creation sings your glory.

We have only to look up and outward,
and wonder will fill our mouths with praise.

Yet daily our hands reach out
for wealth and power and fame,
instead of rising to praise you.

Our eyes are set on the glitter and shine
of all the distractions that we have made,
and not on your grace and your beauty.

Our voices turn to bitter complaint,
to quarrels and bluster and grumbling,
instead of joining creation’s constant hymn
of praise to the Creator.

O God of wonder and beauty and grace,
open the eyes of our hearts,
awaken our senses to all you have made,
that our spirits may rise in wonder,
that our voices may open in song,
that our days may be filled with praise.

Gratitude List:
1. Symbols. The way images act like bowls to hold ideas.
2. Words. The way they act like bowls to hold ideas.
3. Blue. Is there are greater range of blues in the sky these days?
4. Rain.
5. Crape Myrtle. I saw so many on Chincoteague, but then since we have been home, I have been noticing them all over here as well. Sometimes you need to leave home to notice something you appreciate about it.

May we walk in Beauty!