Gratitude List:
1. Art
2. Play
3. Prayer
4. Work
5. Breathing
May we walk in Beauty!
Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider
Love and Hope
“Where there is love, there is life.” –Mahatma Gandhi
Today is US Independence Day:
May your celebrations today be filled with joyful moments with people you truly See you.
May we as a people live up to the ideals we set for ourselves, the dreams we claim to offer, and
the maturity that independence demands.
Here is your assignment for this morning, class: Set a timer for ten minutes. Write a poem or an essay about what this day means to you without using the words freedom, values, ideals, dream, democracy, independence, liberty. (Yes, I broke those rules in the little blessing I wrote up there–that’s what gave me this idea.)
Perhaps it is a function of the lazy rabbit-trail-filled brain-meanderings of summer, but a warning: Today’s gratitude list is rife with parenthetical notations. I could not help myself, but I am not apologizing, nor am I amending.
Gratitude List:
1. I still haven’t seen one this season, but Jon keeps seeing them, and it makes me happy to know that they live here, too: black snakes. They’re earnest and secretive, mysterious.
2. Yesterday I wrote about prayer, and a new and dear friend wrote to me of the Sufi concept of prayer as “opening to the divine radiance.” I looked it up, and my preliminary searches have found references to the phrase “Divine Radiance” in Muslim, Christian, and Jewish discussions of prayer. This brings me great joy. (And it was a lovely synchronicity, because I read her note just after a conversation with my parents, in which we had discussed Sufi mysticism, in which my father had been reading Hafiz poems to me. Am I not fortunate to have such parents? There’s a bonus gratitude thrown in for the morning.)
3. I love the charge in the air on a morning that is waiting for rain.
4. All the flowers. In my parents’ (yes, there they are again) garden: deep red gloriosa lily with yellow tips, fluffy white hydrangea, deep purple and dusky rose lisianthus (because my name is Elizabeth Ann, I have this feeling that the Lizzy-Ann flower is personal to me), deep magenta rose, yellow day lily, violet clematis. Along the roadsides, thousands of blue-eyed chicory (we used to call them cornflowers–I like both names), the elegant dusty green and golden-tipped heads of hag’s taper (mullein, but I like the common name), shaggy pink balls of milkweed that haven’t yet been mowed down (please let them stay!), bright orange day lilies, the delicate lace of Queen Anne, violet carpets of vetch, bright golden patches of buttercup.
5. Community conversations
May we walk–like the snakes, like the flowers, like the birds–in Beauty, in Wisdom, in Prayer.
Scattering Prayers
Scattering Milkweed seeds like prayers.
Yesterday I mowed a labyrinth into the grassy patch between the barn and the greenhouse. The boys and I took a basket of milkweed pods that we had gathered last fall, and spiraled our way into the center of the labyrinth, where we scattered the the fluff like prayers. Prayers for the monarchs, for the future of these children and the planet that supports them, for the people I carry in my heart. For you. For me. For transformation, and for compassion and for love. For Beauty, and for fun.
Gratitude List:
1. That wren out there reminding me to keeping listening, keep talking, keep the conversation going.
2. Being in a body. These morning aches, this slightly blurry vision, this stuffy head–it’s all part of being in the body, along with tastebuds, sensations of cool breezes and warm sweaters, satisfying stretches.
3. Prayers. I am re-establishing my connection to the word prayer. I will keep using my other words, too–carrying stones, casting webs, holding the bowl–but prayer is a strong universal signifier for being mindful and concerned, and I am finding that I am choosing it more often to represent what I do, wordless as it so often is.
4. That tiger swallowtail that slipped like a sunbeam down the green slope of the ridge yesterday.
5. Compassion, and all the places you find it.
May we walk in Beauty!
The Guest House
The Guest House
by Rumi
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’re 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 whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Before I left for the monastery, I collected several poems and quotations and short essays that I wanted to take along for pondering and meditating: David Whyte’s short piece on Rest, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman. My parents each gave me separate Einstein quotations about Mystery, and my mother pulled this Rumi poem out of her own journal-book and handed it to me. These became the texts which helped to frame my thinking.
On my final morning in Wernersville, I sat down with my friend to talk about our times of solitude, and at one point she began to quote this very poem! I tend to absorb synchronicities like this with the weight of Messages. When, in three days, two different people offer me the same set of words, it makes me perk up my inner ears a little more intently.
This was my third solitary retreat at the Jesuit Center. The first time, many years ago, I was wounded, needing to recover my sense of myself after some significant re-arranging of my own ego. Last year, I was exhausted, needing to re-establish my connection with my inner self after a heady first year of high school teaching–I was psychically hungry for introvert time. This year, while I felt a deep inner need for solitude and quiet thought, it felt less like a time of recovery than a time of shifting and integrating and re-structuring. This year, the question is less one of how I heal than of how I carry retreat into my daily life, how I grow and expand my contemplative work into my non-retreat life.
In a way, going on retreat is like playing at being a monk. The word monk is etymologically related to the Greek word monos: singular, alone. My work in these days following my monastic moment is to integrate that singleness of purpose, that enriching inner solitude, into my daily life. This is where Rumi’s poem comes in. After three days of quiet reflection, I want to slam my door on the noise, the dark thoughts, the interruptions. I want to hold on to that sense of peace and quiet with every ounce of my inner strength. Instead, Rumi invites me to be hospitable to the distractions and interruptions, to welcome them all–laughing–at my door.
That third stanza, particularly, about inviting in even the crowd of sorrows who clear your rooms of furniture, reminds me of the story I just read about Abba Eupreprius, a desert father who was robbed of all of his few possessions, except for his walking stick. When he discovered the loss, he picked up his walking stick and ran after the thieves, calling, “Wait! You forgot something!” Can I be that hospitable? Even to the thoughts and hurts that grind at my ego? Even to the griefs and anxieties that threaten to destabilize my inner rooms? To welcome them as guests who are clearing me out “for some new delight”?
Gratitude List:
1. All the guests who arrive at my “guest house,” and Rumi and my beloveds, who remind me to be hospitable even to the challenges
2. Mystery, wonder, delight
3. Yesterday’s quiet and cooperative hours of play. There was almost no fighting whatsoever. I know that the fighting is part of their work, part of how they teach each other, but it’s nice to have some moments of other kinds of learning.
4. Putting a puzzle together, how it makes the mind work hard to visualize, then re-formulate the vision, how it offers the brain and the heart a metaphor for problem-solving
5. Metaphors, symbols, tools
May we walk in Beauty!
Begin Again
“There was an old man named Michael Finnegan.
He had whiskers on his chin-igan.
They grew out and then grew in again.
Poor old Michael Finnegan. Begin again. . .”
(repeat, ad nauseum)
One of my meditations this week at the monastery was on the concept of Beginner’s Mind that the Buddhists speak of, and also on St. Benedict, who said, “Always we begin again.” And then on Thomas Merton, who said, “There are only three stages to this work: to be a beginner, to be more of a beginner, and to be only a beginner.” I have been reading Christine Valters Paintner’s annotations on selected sayings of the desert fathers and mothers, and contemplating in particular some of their words regarding the Beginner’s Mind.
Abba Anthony, it is said, asked a group of monks and other seekers to expound a certain theological point, one by one, and when he reached Father Joseph, he asked him, too. Father Joseph simply said, “I don’t know.” Abba Anthony said, “This one has found the way. He says he does not know.”
Abba Macarius, when asked by a group of seekers to tell about what it means to be a monk, said, “Ah! I am not a monk myself, but I have seen them.” This one reminds me of the legendary comment of the mathematician and mystic Pythagoras, who was asked to speak of how he became wise, and answered, “I am not wise. I am a lover of wisdom.”
Even poor old Michael Finnegan, in the quote up there by the weeping beech tree, is a classic beginner, with the added idiomatic mystery that “to grow out your beard” and “to grow in your beard” mean relatively the same thing. We singsong his story, can’t figure it out, and begin again, until our buzzing heads can’t take it anymore.
I returned home from the monastery to this quotation by Rilke, so exquisitely perfect in its timing:
“If the Angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner.”
In some ways the way of the desert Ammas and Abbas, the way of Buddha, of Merton, of Rilke and Finnegan is the way of the Fool, who is always dancing along the edge of that cliff, wind in her hair, free of the burden of being a wise soul, only always seeking wisdom, each moment a new beginning in the quest.
Gratitude List:
1. My Shining Rose of a friend has just been placed at the top of the heart transplant list, which means that she will likely get her new heart within the next two or three weeks. This is to me a relief and a terror. Now is the time to hold her in the waiting, to wait and to trust.
2. Beginning again and again and again. How this frees me from the burden of expectation.
3. Yesterday’s froggy moments. We found a Spotted Green Frog (rana clamintans) hopping around under the old poplar. The children needed to take it to the pond, so we settled it onto a muddy bank, where it rested a moment, then plooped into the pond and swam into the weeds nearby. And the bullfrogs boomed at us from all around the pond’s edges.
4. Even now, the yellow leaves of the walnut tree are pirouetting gracefully down the wind. Now, when the life force is pushing everything towards abundance, fullness, brilliant health–even now, is the beautiful reminder of decline. The cycle itself is layers of cycles, birth and death all at once.
5. You. Me. Encounters. How every moment that we meet, in whatever virtual or physical spaces, is an opportunity for both of us to experience something new, something profound, something holy. Thank you for the ways you enrich my moments.
May we walk in Beauty, beginning anew every moment.
Time for Integration
“The fulness of joy is to behold God in everything.” –Julian of Norwich
I am home from my time of solitude at the Jesuit Center. How shall I carry the monastery within me as I integrate my experiences into my daily round? Of what profit is contemplative work if it cannot be integrated into the quotidian and the mundane? This will be my focus for the next few days.
* How does my time of silence inform my interactions with an angry child?
* How is inner order affected by the unavoidable outer disorder of a busy house and farm?
I will find more questions in the coming days, I am certain.
Some of the words that I have been holding in my heartbowl this week:
Satisfaction
Beginning
Balance
Integration
Solitude
Silence
Gratitude List:
1. Chance Encounter #1: Just as I was walking into the center on Monday, I crossed paths with an old friend who just happened to be on solitary silent retreat at the Center for the exact same days that I was. We greeted each other, entered silence, passed each other throughout the days there, and held a short written conversation with a plan to meet and converse about our retreat experiences on Wednesday morning. What a gift! What a holy coincidence. (Some people say there are no coincidences. I think there are holy coincidences–chance experiences that we mold and turn into holy or sacred moments.)
2. Chance Encounter #2: In the evening of my second day, as I was deeply into a collage meditation in the Ignatian Room in the basement, a pair of women caught my attention to ask how to register. Bonnie had gone home for the day, and these women were new and didn’t know what to do. I helped them find their registration sheets, find their way to their room, and figure out when dinner was. They were sweetly grateful. I found them again yesterday morning, and broke my silence to talk with them. They are Sisters of Mercy, both of them former teachers, still educators. They were delighted to talk together about the vocation of education, and they told me that they will add me and my students to their centering prayer times in the evenings. Another supremely holy moment, a brilliant moment. They embraced me and kissed me and blessed me, and I will carry my encounter with Sister Mary Clare and Sister Bridget into my summer and into my teaching.
3. Vanilla ice cream and berries–strawberries and freshly-picked black raspberries.
4. Settling into home with my guys. Re-integration is a noisy and sometimes conflicted affair, but pleasant and delightful nonetheless.
5. The new project is born. This seed has been a long time germinating, but during retreat it sprang up fiercely and vividly. It will take a lot of nurture to see it to completion, but I feel prepared for the task.
In Beauty may we walk!
Seeking Solitude
In a couple hours, I will be heading up to the Jesuit Center for three days of solitude. I will not write on the blog until I return.
Gratitude List:
1. Wandering and pondering
2. Solitude and silence
3. Memory and dream
4. Reflection and contemplation
5. Re-imagining
May we walk in Beauty!
Sleeping Out of Doors
Gratitude List:
1. (What has held you?) Falling asleep to the sound of crickets and peepers, watching the fireflies twinkling in the feathery leaves of the walnut tree. I have been reading of their decline, but have not noticed it here in the Hollow. If anything, this year they are more prolific.
2. (What satisfies?) Watching how the children made an immediate home in the big tent, how they long to live outside.
3. (What delights?) My seven-year-old taskmaster. Yesterday, it was all I could do to catch a moment to myself. If I wandered away from the garage, he would find me and give me a ticket: No Parking, and tell me to get back to cleaning the garage for Monday’s shares. He claimed he wanted to help, and he certainly did help quite a bit, but he also sat on a chair and “suggested” the next thing that I should do.
4. (Where did you meet the Great Mystery?) In flavorful food, in the morning sun on walnut leaves, in the whispery sound of a small person playing behind me.
5. (What draws you forward?) Three days of solitude approach. I leave tomorrow morning for the Jesuit Center. What an excited little monk-person I am. How will I find stillness when I am squirming so much with the very anticipation? (I think I will manage.)
May we walk in Beauty!
Panda and Panther
I am rather proud of these two paintings which I managed despite the fact that the canvases constantly twitched and squinted. Panther requested that I paint green eyes on his eyelids, which meant that he went around with his eyes closed for a while. When he smudged his paint, he touched it up himself. He has requested that we buy ourselves a family set of face paints. I think I will.
Gratitude List:
1. A day of play
2. Public spaces that are created specifically for children. (Yes, I know it’s a lucrative business. Still, the Hands on House is particularly well done. My boys were some of the older ones there, and they became obsessed with keeping the factory room tidied and organized.)
3. The determination of a small child to participate in the cleaning of the garage, the preparation for the first share of the season on Monday.
4. Mist in the mornings. Makes me want to hike to Rivendell.
5. Courage, which I think is different than bravery, because the courageous person recognizes that she is terrified, but she takes the next breath anyway. I have friends who are deeply courageous, though perhaps they don’t realize how deeply courageous they are. (Root is couer = Heart.) I want to start a poem like Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” only to say:
You do not have to be brave.
You only have to fill your aching lungs with one more breath.
You do not have to wait until you no longer feel afraid.
You only have to step from this moment into the next one.
May we walk in Beauty, in Couer-age.
Fire and Water
Today is St. John’s Day. Fire and Water. Bonfire and baptism. Transformation.
Gratitude List:
1. (What do you hear?) On a morning heavy with rain in the air, the sound of a train in the deep distance, near the River.
2. (What gives you fire?) Clearing spaces for the projects at hand. If you want to make a fire in the woods of your life, you have to clear away the brush and detritus, eh?
3. (What cleanses and transforms you?) A fresh start every morning. Tabula rasa. Solitude.
4. (What has been hard?) Juggling family and personal writing and being part of the farm and scheduling school prep and finding time to be with friends. When I lay it out like this, the thing that I find really frustrating–the juggling–brings me a list of all the things that I am most grateful for.
5. (What will you pay attention to today?) I am going to listen especially carefully for the source moments of conflict between the boys so that I can help them work it through rather than simply reacting.
May we walk in Beauty!
It’s wildlife dreams right now. The other night I was trying to distract three hungry swimming bears from eating my friends. Last night, skunks and badgers. Oh, and a baby bear. And puppies. Somebody had one of the baby skunks on the table in a little wooden baby chair. It was sitting back and enjoying all the little tidbits it was being fed. I found the other one, and a black and white puppy, wandering around the yard near the badger nest, and thought I would make a joke about two black and white puppies. It was really funny in my dream. The mother badger (or stoat?) was taking care of a bear cub among her babies. At first I thought it was a giant rabbit, but it turned out to be a bear.
Mockingbird Chronicles 