Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Exploring What it Means to Be Human

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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In the dream, I am giving a lecture to a group of prospective students and parents, and the moment they walk in for my presentation, I forget everything: what I was planning to say, what I am supposed to be talking about, why we are even here in this room.  I am in a complete and utter panic, so I just begin speaking about whatever comes to mind.  We always live in the context of our emotional lives, I tell them.  In the reactive world of daily existence, we don’t often remember to stop and examine what it means to be human.  We aren’t born with the training to step back and explore what it means to be creatures of emotion.  Stories give us that–they take us out of the auto-pilot realm of reactions and give us a slow and thoughtful opportunity to look at what it is to be human.  Like looking at insects held on a pin, literature lets us closely and carefully examine the human condition, and to reflect on ourselves as participants in the human condition.  That is why we study literature.

Not too bad for an on-the-fly, middle of the night dream lecture, though I am a little disturbed by the insect analogy.  I think in the dream I actually said skewered on a pin.  Yeesh.  Anyway, the people nodded and seemed to understand.

Gratitude List:
1. (What makes you curious?) How life-reality seeps into dream-reality.  How they inform each other.  How a dream can inform and settle anxieties: So often my anxiety dreams heighten my anxiety–last night’s dream resolved it.
2. (What is satisfying?) Words and related words: Solve and resolve and dissolve.  Image and magic and imagine.  (Occasionally my mind automatically anagrams words.  The other day, we sat at a restaurant table with a sign that seemed to read, “This table reserved for pirates of 6 or more.”  My mind had anagrammed parties to pirates.  I find this oddly satisfying–pirates and parties are now inextricably linked in my brain.  Like parental and paternal.  Like conversation and conservation.  Reverse-reserve. And the phonetic anagram chicken-kitchen.  Oy–I think I have just officially entered Summertime Brain.)
3. (What is a small thing of wonder?) That toad in the field.  Jon took the picture.  Toads please me, and make my heart happy.
4. (What was fun?) The big yard sale at Lebanon Valley Brethren Home yesterday, an annual event for the family.  Now we have to find a place for all the cords and electronics that one boy has collected, for all the new books, for the games and doodads.  It goes to a good cause, and the boys love it.  They interact with the residents who run the various areas of the sale, and they practice politeness.  I bought a museum-style book on the history of the alphabet and a collection of Whitman’s poetry and prose, along with two Kahlil Gibran books.  And I bought someone’s old cell phone, which I will use as a camera.
5. (What inspires you?) The fledglings standing on the edge of the nest, spreading their wings for first flight.  Today we graduate our seniors.  At Dedication last night, they already wore the aura of the adults they are becoming.  There was still plenty of silliness and bounciness, but it was held within the reverence and earnestness of this Moment of their lives.  Fly Well, Bright Ones!

May we walk, may we fly, in Beauty!

What Thing of Beauty Have you Seen?

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Gratitude List:
1. (What thing of beauty have you seen?) A Bridge that loops stone arches out over a River.
2. (What heals?) Confrontation can lead to new levels of sympathetic understanding.
3. (What touched your heart?) Yesterday before we wrapped up our mini-course, one boy asked if we could get everyone to gather around another boy who is joining the army and pray for his safety.  This is something we can all do, pacifist or not.  He proceeded to pray for his friend, and then for all of us, a spontaneous opening of the heart.
4. (What do you anticipate?) This is the day of the big yard sale at the retirement village where my mother-in-law lives.  For some reason, it has become an Event for our family, and this year it falls the day after all of us have finished school, so we’re even more excited than usual.  It’s in a big barn, so the rain shouldn’t affect our fun.
5. (What makes you marvel?) The way jumping spiders interact and react, as though they’re teeny tiny puppies.  The way they seem to notice me as a person, too.  Mantises and dragonflies also seem to have this awareness, though i haven’t noticed it in other spiders and insects.

May we walk in Beauty!

Grandmother’s Roots

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the peonies have
finally awakened in
the doorway of June
transient blooms and roots that
come from grandmother’s garden

Examen and Gratitude:
1. (Who inspires you?) Harriet Tubman.  Today, I finish my mini-course with my students at the River.  We will talk of dreams and water, of the Underground Railroad that traveled up this River, the walk to freedom.  And I will tell them of the Dreamer, Harriet Tubman–legend says that sometimes she would suddenly fall asleep at really dangerous moments on the journey northward, but when she awoke, she would know the next way to go.
2. (What makes you glad?) Sun on the wing of the red-winged blackbird.
3. (What fills you with deep joy?) The inclusive laughter of teenagers, the way they perform for each other to make each other laugh, the way the laughter catches from one to another and on down the line like a wildfire.
4. (What is your hunger?) For solitude, for silence, for deep quiet.  Even in the midst of loving these last days with my young people, part of me is turning toward the quiet of summer and the deliberate pacing of the long days.
5. (What wakes you up and calls you forward?) Trying on new ways to use words, reading poets who break up language and use it like mosaic and collage artists use broken bits of glass and pieces of paper.

May we walk in Beauty!

All the Shades of Green

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See that green and orange tulip bloom against the red barn?  My body thinks that little flower wants to kill me.  When the tulip tree begins to send out its pollens, my body sets up a racket of sneezing and sniffling and eye-watering–whatever it can do to try to keep the pollen out.  Beautiful, though, aren’t they?  I would like to fly above a grove of tulip poplars in May.

Gratitude List:
1. My bright and shiny group of mini-course kids.  Yesterday was much harder than I had expected.  It is exhausting to be the sole entertainment and input for a group of students for an entire day.  A much bigger task than I had thought.  But I love it, and I love them.  Bright and shiny.
2. Murphy found his way home.  (A small dog I know got out of his fence two days ago and spent a whole night and two days away from his people.  He’s back with them now.)
3. All the shades of green.
4. Visuals for the sacred journey: labyrinths, spirals, pathways, stones. . .
5. Conversations that go deep and wide.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Gifts of the Tulip Tree

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Female callosamia angulifera: The Tulip Tree Moth.

Gratitude List:
1. Quiet
2. Coffee
3. Tenderness
4. Yellow iris
5. How every end carries within it the seed of a new beginning

May we walk in Beauty!

Keep Turning

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I am finding the simple three-circuit labyrinth to be really satisfying.  Like a spiral, each circuit brings you one step closer toward the center, yet there’s that unsettling turning at the end of the circuit.  Wait a minute!  I’m now going the other way!  Still, despite the change in direction, I continue to move ever closer to the center.  This hit me yesterday.  Life has sent me reversals.  I have had moments when I have suddenly changed directions.  The whiplash can feel overwhelming, the sense of lost time or futility in what came before–but the turnings also bring me closer to the center.  The apparent about-faces and the changes of plan do not mean that I am going backwards, undoing the past.  I am still moving closer to the center. It all leads toward the center.

Gratitude List:
1. (What feeds you?) The red of the poppies.  I think I could probably live on the food of that red.  Such an impossible color.  That and the orange of Oriole.  And the thousands greens of the last week of May.
2. (What finds resolution?) I now have fewer balls to juggle, fewer plates to keep spinning in the air.  I can look to caring for my children more intentionally, to tidying and cleaning and systematizing.
3. (What images draw you?) The labyrinth.  We used the labyrinth as the structure for the service in church yesterday, and this Wednesday, I will be focusing on the labyrinth for my mini-course with my students.
4. (Who has been helpful?) Walt Whitman, Rachel Carson, Sojourner Truth–I will meditate on the words and lives of these wise ones this week.
5. (What helps you cope?) This little air conditioner.  If I choose to live beneath the branches of a grand tulip poplar, I must have respite during its blooming season.  This magnificent tree draws our orioles to us.  Its leafy embrace cools us here in the hollow during hot summer days.  It stands across from the sycamore like a sentinel.  It is a city teeming with life, vibrant with the flashing colors, the buzzing and twittering conversations, the busy living of its residents. Its buttery blooms are elegant. . .and toxic to me.  We make allowances.  We adjust ourselves sometimes to live with those we love.  For the week or two that it sends pollen to bless the world around, I spend my time at home in these rooms with the air conditioner on, venturing out for short periods to listen to birdsong, to watch the sun shift across the sky.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Shifting Colors of the Day

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Red.

Gratitude List:
1. (What made you laugh?) Listening to Sir Patrick Stewart read pop song lyrics in the voices of British Shakespearean actors on Ask Me Another last night.
2. (What startled you?) The way the scarlet of the poppies seems to reach through from another world into this one.  The way the deeper, more real red of the cardinal keeps catching my eye in the branches of trees.
3. (What awakened you?) The wisdom of friends, the dogged persistence of people
4. (What do you take for granted?) Light at the flick of a switch, water in the pipes, the trust and support of people close to me
5. (What brings you serenity?) The way light sifts through green, the play of breeze through leaves, the shifting colors of the day

May we walk in Beauty!

Where Do You Find Hope?

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Gratitude List:
1. (What inspires you?)  A child I know.  This morning, I was watching video of President Obama placing a wreath at Hiroshima, and Joss asked what it was about.  I told him a little about the end of WWII, and how this is the first time a US president has visited that site.  “I’m kind of glad he went there,” he said.  I think children often understand these things better than adults do.
2. (Where do you find relief?) Change of schedule, end of year.  There’s sadness in saying goodbye to the seniors–but we know and they know they they’re ready, that they’ve been working toward this coming moment for years.  And I need this summer that I am heading into.  I am looking forward with great relish to sleeping in until past 6, to playing with my children every day, to preparing for next year’s work.  There are a few loose ends to wrap up in the next two weeks, but without the constant pull of classes, I can manage the loose ends.
3. (What fills you with wonder?) The view from Mt. Pisgah near Sam Lewis Park, with mist in the folds of the valleys and mist caught in the trees on the other side of the River.
4. (What will you do for yourself?) I am going to get a haircut today.  Some people have a regular appointment to keep their hair looking a certain way.  This has never been my way.  It usually feels like “an event” when I get my hair cut, like I am treating myself to something special.  I like to do it that way.
5. (What gives you hope?) I need to keep answering this question for myself these days.  I look at the ways of the world and I get rageful or cynical or filled with despair.  And there are good reasons for all of those responses.  But there are also good reasons to be hopeful.  Right now, one of the places I turn for hope is the work of international women’s groups.  These women look into the teeth of the beasts of war and displacement and terror, and they raise their voices and their arms and their hearts.  UN Women, the Nobel Women’s Initiative, Isis-WICCE, Women in Black, TreeSisters, Carry the Future, Code Pink, and many others.  (Which women’s groups inspire you?)

May we walk in Beauty!

What Draws You Forward?

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Gratitude List:
1. (What was helpful?) Jon, bringing the air conditioner down from the attic so my allergies would settle down, nettle tea, elderberry syrup, ginger tincture, and finally–Dayquil
2. (What did you hear?) The otherworldly sound of that girls’ trio yesterday–like angels, perhaps, but with grit in their voices; and the jazz combo that accompanied them; and the tenor voice that I often hear behind me in chapel; and the rootsy/blue-grassy band that played at the end; oriole, who sends off each morning, and welcomes me home in the afternoon
3. (What draws you forward?) The weekend coming, the summer coming, the sense of a job mostly well done
4. (What inspires you?) Students who have stories of hardship, but who persevere anyway; the rebels and revolutionaries who seek to make a world in which all may be welcome everywhere
5. (What do you see?)  Green, blue, golden sun, orange flame of a bird in the leaves, the eyes of young people learning to love themselves and to love the world

May we walk in Beauty!

Ideas Catch Fire

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Planting spring flowers

Gratitude Tanka:
1. Ideas catch fire,
2. fueling the work of the day,
3. lending a focus,
4. bringing order from chaos,
5. shaping the coming story.

May we walk in Beauty!