Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Follow Love

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I like to set my camera to “Fireworks” and then “draw” with fire.

There will be days, Bright Spirits,
when you will not know which way to go,
when the voices will tell you to follow a path
where light shines righteously through branches
and others are striding with purpose.

“This is the right way, the truest path,”
they will call to you, and they will wave their hands
and motion you to join them on their journey.
But you will sense something lurking there
in the hard, sharp edges of the light
and you will know that it is not your road.

But how will you know your own way?
Follow Love.  It will never lead you false.
It may whisper to you from the shadows
of a little-trodden tracks through brambles,
or call you across the wide and shining spaces
over rocky mountain passes,
leaving cairns and altars
to help you find your way.

Follow the roads where Love calls you.
Love will guide you where you must go.

Gratitude List:
1. The team of teachers and support staff and administrators who care for our children.  They pay attention, they notice, they plan and adapt and respond to the children’s needs.  It makes me want to commit even more fully to notice each of my own students with clarity and intention.
2. First family fire in the fire pit.  Making s’mores.
3. My first view this morning when I opened my eyes was a windowful of pink, where the dogwood tree is vigorously blooming.
4. In-service day.  Yesterday’s in-service offered some good time to collaborate, and learn from, and bond with colleagues.  I really do like the people I work with.
5. The flock of deer that ran across the road and leapt the stream into the bosque.  (My family tells me that I must call them a herd, but I feel like a herd is thunky and stolid, but a flock is fluttery and wispy, like the deer that crossed my road.  So my family will have to put up with my word.)

May we walk in Beauty!  May the rains water the earth and refresh us all.

Don’t You Wish that You Could Hear Them Ring?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Yesterday after school, I went out the front door and smelled something overpoweringly beautiful.  They’re here.

Just quickly:

A List Poem for Earth Day

Julia Butterfly Hill
The trees are breathing while we sleep
Wangari Maathai
The trees cover the hillsides now
Jane Goodall
The wild ones are watching
Rachel Carson
Above us, the falcons while and turn
John Muir
The mountains come alive with wildflowers
Vandana Shiva
The seeds break open and send forth roots
The Lorax
Someone is speaking for the ones with no voice
You

Gratitude List:
1. Defenders of the Earth.  Those girls who spoke in chapel yesterday about caring for the environment, following in the footsteps of Carson and Shiva and Muir and Hill.
2. Lilies of the Valley
3. Brown Creeper
4. Making Mandazis.  I have never made what I would call a truly successful batch until last night.
5. In-Service Day today (and my body sort of let me sleep in until 6:30).  I like to have occasional days where we are working, but I am being fed rather than doing the feeding.

Much Love!  May we walk in Beauty!

Threads of a Poem

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Spider is writing her poems along the field
from sedge to bramble to foxtail
in silver shining threads and dew.

Gratitude List:
1. Several new babies safely in the world now.  Blessings on the new people and their parents.
2. Dawn chorus.  I may need to change up my routine and do my writing in the evenings so I can sit out on the porch and listen to the morning’s symphony.
3. Harriet Tubman will be on the $20 bill.  It’s a symbol, and it’s only money, but it’s a nod to her role in our history.  The people we set up as our heroes shape who we become as a nation.  This is a small step, but it has the potential to show us a better side of who we can be.
4. Resolve.  Determination. Will.  I don’t know about you, but it seems as though I have energy cycles–sometimes I can only focus on getting done the things I need to get done at the moment, whether it’s a lot or a little.  There are times, however, when it seems as though the winds push through an extra measure of resolve, and the energy for moving forward is more constant.
5. How spring always has a new thing.  The crocus and the earliest spring flowers are faded, but a few daffodils remain.  Ms. Freiberg’s yellow tulips are still shining in the morning dew, and the my guarddogwood trees are daring each other to be the first to burst into bloom.  (Now, if only oriole would come and whistle for me.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Camels on the Brain

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My brain is all a-fuzz this morning.  It wants to keep attaching itself to that image from my dream last night, the one that kept me sleeping through the four o’clock hour (finally), of a camel lying in the bed of a truck, wearing sunglasses.  But I don’t have that manic inner edge on this sleepy morning that would enable me to make such a surreal poem.  Why don’t you try that one?  (Edit: Okay, so I did manage a little of that poem down below.)

Tomorrow is National Poem in Your Pocket Day, though your local town may have chosen a different day, so look it up.  Wrightsville is doing it on April 29.  But if you’re at my school, you need to have your poem ready to read to me tomorrow.  I will bring the chocolate.

I have five minutes for this poem:

The ghost of a dream
will inhabit the foggy
pathways of my brain
for ages.
I will spend today
driving to Kabul
behind a camel
or lurking in the hallways
of a grand hotel,
searching for lost memories.

Gratitude List:
1. Sleeping through four o’clock.  This is a big deal, and I am grateful, no matter how strange the dreams that accompanied that sleep.
2. Anticipating oriole.  Waiting for the orange flash and the whistle in the treetops.  Listen, listen and watch.
3. Inspiration.  Okay, it’s inspiration about how to introduce adjective clauses to the freshmen, but when that’s the soup you swim in, it’s pretty exciting to get a flash of inspiration.
4. Student poetry.  Yesterday the Creative Writers read their poetry out loud in class.  Actually, only a handful were brave enough to do it, but the ones that came out were wonderful, and at one point after one student had read her poem, I saw another student start to scribble furiously on his notebook.  Moments later, he raised his hand to read–he had just written a poem inspired by her poem.  And hers had been inspired by Robert Frost, so we left our own trails in those yellow woods.
5. Compassion.  How heart reaches to heart.  How a moment can suddenly turn to caring, to holding another.  I want to be more and more mindful of how a word or a gesture or a glance can turn a moment among people to an inner watchfulness, a heightened awareness of each others’ tender souls.

May we walk in Beauty!

Invisibility

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Yesterday as I was walking out of school, a robin began his spring song in the little tree in the parking lot.  This is Josiah’s robin from last year.  He has taped it to our living room wall, and expanded the picture onto other sheets of paper.

You walk on tiptoe,
keeping to the shadows.
Even your voice is hidden
deep in a pocket somewhere,
beneath a layer of gum wrappers,
tissues, and crumbs.

You have practiced the art
of becoming invisible,
of fading into the walls,
until you can step sideways
out of anyone’s awareness.

The trouble with many of the magical arts
is that there comes a point when you don’t know
whether you are casting the spell
or the spell is casting you.

It is time to let this one go.
Walk out of the wallpaper,
stop blurring your edges,
seek your lost voice and speak.

Speak your name into the room,
set your feet firmly on the floor,
and let the world see you.

Gratitude List:
(A list again today)
1. The robin in the tree
2. Digging a hole with a small boy to make a fire pit (though my hands really hurt today from all the shoveling and wheelbarrowing)
3. How you are beginning to let people see you
4. Drawing the line between us, which is to say–making community
5. Opening the bag of this day, to see what it holds inside.  Every day a new thing, eh?  What shall we make of this one?

On Beauty and Love

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I have been thinking about how to help my students develop confidence in their own strength, to help nurture a sense of self-worth that will help to protect them.  I have noticed how the beauty trap persists for young women, the powerful desire to be seen by the eyes of others (especially boys) as beautiful, and how this feed into their own sense of their own worthiness or unworthiness to be loved.  This poem needs lots of organizing and more thought to it, but it will hold the place for now.

Don’t be beautiful.
Be edgy.  Be friendly. Be bold.
Be strong. Be quirky. Be wild.
Don’t be mild.
Be fierce.  Be thoughtful. Be brave.
Be gracious. Be loving. Be You.
Don’t be cute.
Be happy. Be tender. Be funny.
Be raw. Be powerful. Be real.

Gratitude:
I think I will begin doing one item or one paragraph for a little while.  I am feeling an inner shift these days, a readiness for something new.
I am grateful for love: Love wins.  Follow where the love goes.  That’s where the answers are.

May we walk in Beauty!

What Is the Message?

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The bluebird told me, and I told the wren.
The bluebird got it from someone on the ground,
a vole, perhaps, or field mouse,
who’d caught the gist from the catfish
who lives in a corner of the pond.
She’d heard it from the turtle
who was scratching a hole in the bank
where she could lay her clutch
of pearly eggs, and she said she had learned it
from the black snake looping its way
along a branch of locust, careful of the thorns.
Who knows where that old slitherer
came upon the information?  Perhaps
she heard it on the wind
as it whispered through the valley.

I regret I cannot tell you what it was–
it has gone on now, beyond me
and beyond this poem’s edges.
Ask wren, perhaps, but he has already
told the thing to bat, who’s given it
to a thoughtfully grazing groundhog
who keeps her springtime quarters
across the field there by the little oak,
right where a sprinkle of sunshine
sparkles in the dew most mornings.

Gratitude List:
1. Earth: The view from the top of the ridge of Mt. Pisgah, looking down to the Susquehanna River always lifts my spirits.  How did I get so lucky, to get such a view almost every day?
2. Air: Poetry and Stories spoken aloud.  Last night’s Spoken Word Play (the 14th) was profound and powerful.
3. Fire: Making fire with the boys yesterday.  Ellis finally drew flames from a pile of sycamore fluff, using the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass.  Joss wanted a fire, too, so we built two small fires on bricks on the driveway, and the boys spent hours feeding them with sticks (it cleaned up the yard, that’s certain).  Joss toasted a piece of bread, and they each roasted potatoes in the hot coals for our supper.  I recently read, “They won’t remember their best afternoon of television.”  That’s the truth.  But I think they’ll remember the day they made fire.
4. Water: The River.  Did I say the River?  I cross her twice every day.  She runs through our lives like a thread that weaves us together with the lives of those who live all along her shores, and with those who have ever lived here in this place where she runs.
5. Spirit: That which enlivens and animates us.  Love that connects and weaves us together, like the River.

May we walk in Beauty!

Today’s Task

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Today has a singular work,
a quest that only you can accomplish,
a riddle that only you can solve.
What is the knot that you will untangle?
What missing piece will you add to the puzzle?

In the story, you enter the house of the witch
and she gives you three impossible tasks,
problems that you must solve
with heart and ingenuity
and a little help from a friend.
What has she asked of you today?

Gratitude List:
1. Tweaking.  Trying until you get it right.
2. Fun with First Graders.  Yesterday’s field trip was delightful, even when the bus broke down.
3. My children’s wise and caring teachers.
4. Good stories.  Well acted.  Well told.  Well lived.
5. How the heart seeks what it needs.

May we walk in Beauty!

Awakenings

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(Some of them survived!)

Here in the green
where the wren is calling
and earthworms begin their work,
you can sense the great heart
of the whole,
beating,
loving,
aware.

Gratitude List:
1. Awakeners.  People (both the mentoring and the challenging) who wake up something within me that wants to be more whole, more real, more alive.
2. Love wins.  Love will always win.  Put down your stones and walk away.  Love wins.
3. Field Trip.  Today I am taking a personal day to be a mom rather than a teacher.  First graders are going to the Science Factory.
4. Hafiz.  “Your heart and my heart are very, very old friends.”  They are, aren’t they?
5. How some people center their wisdom in their compassionate hearts.  That’s the direction I want to go, too.

May we walk in Beauty!

Don’t Know How to Pray

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

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When I don’t know how to pray:

What can you see out the windows
of your hospital room?
Clouds scuttling through blue
or raindrops chanting down?
Does a crow saunter down the wind
or a dove whistle through air?

Or there, in the rooms where you wait,
look for that crack in the corner,
the spider missed by the cleaning crew.
Watch for the color orange
in someone’s shoelaces
or an owl brooch on a nurse’s lanyard.

I’m sending you something by wind,
by feather, by stone,
sending you heart and fire,
sending you prayers like rain.

Gratitude List:
1. Having the hard conversations.  They make us better people.  And that’s what we’re here for, eh?  To become better people.
2. Spoken Word Play 14.  We had our dress rehearsal last night.  Dress rehearsal is actually my favorite part–that’s when I get to hear everyone else’s poems and stories.
3. Praying in any way I can.  Being part of the web.  I think I say this one a lot, but it seems to come around a lot.  And I need to acknowledge within myself the anxieties I feel for the people I love, but I don’t want to dwell on those, so it helps to take it to this place, to give the mind the work to do.  Send love.  Send prayer.  Send a mockingbird.
4. Boy walking down the hall yesterday with a red tulip behind his ear.  (Yeah, yeah–he probably shouldn’t have picked it.  Still, it was cute.)
5. My youngest kid is turning into a grammar cop.  I’ll have to catch him before he turns too pedantic, but in the meantime, it’s really fun to have him sit here berating me for beginning sentences with “And. . .”

May we walk in Beauty!