Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Trying for a Thomas Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Rusinga
My father took this photo of me on Rusinga Island when I was five. A couple years ago, I wanted to take a picture of it for a project I was working on, but I couldn’t get past the crazy reflections that kept occurring. Then I realized I could use the reflections and put myself, 41 years later, into the photo.  (This is the same trip where my brother found an interesting stone on the beach and took it for his collection.  Forty-some years later, as he was reading about the tools of early hominids, a photo of a particular stone caught his eye and he remembered his Rusinga stone, which he had, still stashed away.  He knew how to make the right contacts, and his stone now resides in the Smithsonian Museum, a verified example of one of the earliest hominid tools to be found.)

Today is Easter 2, the day when we look at Thomas, who has come to us down the centuries as Doubter.  Something in me admires his pragmatism, his weighing of the truth and facts, his declaration that he needs to see the evidence.  He had a scientific mind.

Make space in this house
for all of the people you are.
Make room for the schemer,
the doubter, the cynic,
but open some space
for the credulous child
and the mystic, the dreamer,
the wild one, the quiet one.

Open a space within
for the glass-half-full to dance
with the glass-half-empty,
for the monk to sing songs
of revolution with the fury.

There in those rooms,
the One may enter
and speak your many names,
saying, Peace be yours.

Gratitude List:
1. Wild wind.  May I be wind-shriven, too.  There’s that song by the Medical Mission Sisters: “Blow, blow, blow till I be but breath of the Spirit blowing in me.”
2. Pink trees
3. Communities and circles of caring.  Knowing that other people get it, this work of holding our places in the web.  Knowing that you’re out there, doing your work while I am trying my best to do mine here.
4. The hope and promise of the seed.
5. How the answers we seek can sometimes enter through the locked doors and closed rooms of our fearful hearts.

May we walk in Beauty and Blossoms!

Sing Me that Song

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fern

Last year, I began my April 2 Poem with “Sing me that Song.”

I’ll try it again this year:

Sing me that song,
like Phoebe in spring,
where you sing your own name
over and over,
reminding the world
how you belong here,
naming this spot as your true home.

Sing it fiercely into the rain.
Sing your true name.
Sing it like a whisper in the dawn,
then loud and louder,
feeling it enter the the deepest corners
inside the hidden chambers of your heart,
inside the locked rooms
where you waited so fearfully
for hope to enter.

Gratitude List:
1. Phoebe in the hollow
2. I’m just going to repeat this one from two years ago: “Robin singing the sun to birth and singing it to sleep again [in the] evening. A day bookmarked by robinsong cannot go far awry.”
3. Poetry
4. Presence
5. Planning

May we walk in Beauty!

National Poetry Month!

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irony

Happy National Poetry Month!

all day I listened
for the small, wild thread
of your song,
like the first notes
of a sparrow
tuning up for morning

Gratitude List:
1. The music in yesterday’s chapel.  I could listen to Mindy Nolt sing for hours.  Sending the students out into their day with the message that everything will work itself out.
2. How things come together even when they seem like they won’t.
3. That impossibly golden forsythia.
4. Morning clouds–layers of colors and shadows.
5. Mercy and grace.  Mercy and grace.  Mercy and grace.

May we walk in Mercy.

Live in the Sunshine

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Emerson

Not exactly a poem, perhaps, but I will write it like one:

Just for today,
let all the stories be happy ones,
full of surprise and laughter,
the gifts of the unexpected.

Tomorrow,
we’ll get back to the business
of saving the world,
of figuring out how
to love away the meanness,
how to create a shining space
in the dim and dingy rooms.

But today,
let all the stories be happy ones.

Gratitude List:
1. I really didn’t want to give up a day off for an IU13 conference, but I am incredibly glad I went, inspired to engage students in the written word, full of helpful ideas for sparking interest in the text, and eager to keep learning myself.
2. Back to school.  Back to rhythm.  I admit, it’s hard to get back to the work after a wonderful break, but I do miss it when I am away.  I love having a job I love.
3. Small graces.  A little extra time to do something.  A moment of sunshine on a gray day.  A smile from someone in a distracted moment.
4. Tiger eye–such a shiny stone.
5. The great wisdom of my friends.  I am fortunate to have many wise and compassionate and hopeful people in my life.

May we walk in Beauty.

What Gives Rise

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DSCN9081

Redacted Poem: I pulled the words and phrases from one page in an old copy of National Geographic.  My favorite phrase is “some visionaries face revision.”

What Gives Rise

ancestors             explore a better place
close the circle             completing the journey

yet it hardly ended

we go to Mars             backtrack and regroup
some visionaries face revision
trying to figure out
what gives rise to this “madness”

we’re doing what they did
an urge to explore rises in us

you find people
passionate enough
intrigued enough
curious enough

Gratitude List:
1. One small boy who is seven years old today.  He has a hilarious sense of humor, a well-developed sense of himself, and open-hearted compassion for the people around him.  He is an observer, watching and noticing little details, from the kind of car everyone drives to whether or not someone seems to be having a good or a bad day.  I am so glad that he came to be in this family.
2. The ways in which the body is designed to protect itself and heal itself.  Those minute guard dogs, the white blood cells, are meant to attack scary intruders.  Today I am praying for someone’s white blood cells to be healthfully and speedily replenished.  The body is designed to do that, too.  May it be so.
3. More reconnecting.  Strengthening the web.  Building the form and reconnecting the strands.
4. Making dolls/creatures.  I haven’t made anything with a personality for a while. (I’ve been making hearts and scarves and things.)  I had sort of forgotten the satisfying way that I begin to fall in love with something as soon as it has eyes and it begins to take the shape that it is meant to take.
5. Warm days.  I managed to get through winter without too much whining about the cold (I guess it wasn’t particularly cold for very long).

May we walk in Beauty!

Wind-Tossed

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EPSON MFP image

Fox

Wind-buffeted,
the crows remain aloft,
daring the sky to toss them higher,
calling each other through the gusts,
daring the air to throw them through branches.
Shall we be crows, too?
Instead of expecting the breezes to gentle us tenderly,
shall we surf the gales with that fierce joy?

Gratitude List:
1. The foxes of Skunk Hollow, and getting a chance to see that flash of orange, that bottle-brush tail, streaking across Cabin Creek and up into the bosque.
2. Professional development opportunities are available everywhere.  Yesterday, because I had a day off, I got to be the parent helper in first grade at Wrightsville.  I helped them write short paragraphs.  It was incredibly informative to see how writing and language arts are being taught in first grade, how some kids get it right away and others struggle to organize their thoughts.  I am really delighted with the competence and compassion of my son’s teacher.
3. Kale for lunch.  I can take a little more time with my lunches on days off.
4. That little willow tree.  I love watching it become its own person.
5. Watching the mesmerizing movement of the trees by the pond during yesterday’s big wind.  It looked like there were layers of wind going opposite directions, and the trees were moving with such intensity, I thought they had to break off, but they had enough flexibility.

May we walk in beauty!

Bananas

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banaba
(This is me at the age of six, in someone’s banana plantation.)

Cold rain has fallen.
Clouds part, sun floods the hollow.
And where have you gone?

Gratitude List:
1.  All the reminders yesterday to keep open to surprises.
2. Nieces and nephews.  Cousins to my children.
3. All the green.  Somehow green means more this spring than usual.
4. Making things.  Creating.  Seeing something inside my head, and then putting it into the physical world. Isn’t that an amazing process?
5. Rain and sun.

May we walk in Beauty!

Surprises

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P1010973

Gratitude List:
1. When we all work together. . . There is just something about coming together with a group of people to accomplish a specific task that creates a sense of community and tribe.  I’ve experienced it in various ways this week–a listening committee, a group helping a friend move, being part of a web of people holding someone in prayer/love/light, classroom work, collegiality.
2. Mockingbird is beginning to welcome everyone back to the hollow in their own languages.  (Okay, I know he’s actually establishing territory, but the effect on my grateful ears is the same either way.)
3. Chocolate. Especially fair trade chocolate.  It is almost impossible for us in the US to extricate our pleasures and our luxuries from the economic and trade systems that oppress others around the world.  May we keep edging our way toward freedom and justice for all people.
4. This coming week.  I don’t know who to thank for the incredibly brilliant idea (whether it’s principals or superintendents)–padding the potential snow days into Easter Break, just after the switch to the final quarter–but it feels like I have been given extra days in the world, like I can slip between times for the next couple of days, get my work done, catch up on my rest, prepare for the coming month, and get back to work reinvigorated.
5. Needle felting.  I started making a couple teeny tiny totoros for a small boy’s upcoming birthday, and his older brother has become obsessed with helping with the needle felting.  I’m a little anxious about a nine-year-old and those tiny spears, but it is perhaps a good exercise in intent focus, and I love doing handwork with my kids.
6.  Hmmm.  I worked hard on this list just now, but I missed this one: new life, birth, how the heart is constantly being resurrected.
7.  Oh, and this one: My favorite Jesus stories are coming up, beginning today: Jesus surprises Mary in the garden. (My friend’s daughter also loves this story: he surprises”his best best best friend,” she says. Yes.)  Then he surprises Thomas and his terrified friends.  Then he surprises the walkers on the Emmaus Road.  Life-transforming surprises.
8. I’ll just keep going: The poetry of David Whyte, particularly Sweet Darkness and Easter Blessing.

May we walk in Beauty!

Conversing With Dragons

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DSCN9023
Windflower

Gratitude List:
1. Reconnecting.  Reconnecting.  Reconnecting.
2. Crow’s Dragon.  You know the Ursula LeGuin idea about dragons?  They’re incredibly wise creatures–intelligent and compelling conversationalists, yet they’re tricksy and manipulative, and you have to be extremely careful or you may find yourself being subtly tricked into making promises you do not want to keep.  Someone has given me a dragon she drew that exquisitely captures this aspect of dragons.
3.  A clean house.  We need to have company more often.
4. Yoga.  I don’t do much, but I do a few minutes every day, and I continue to notice the small ways in which it helps me to be more connected with my body.  Balance, for one thing.
5. Windflowers.  Anemones.  Even more than the crocus, they ignore their boundaries.  They have much to say to me about respectfully blurring the edges of the box.

May we walk in Beauty!

Hearts in the Trees

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DSCN9072
(I have a friend who takes pictures of hearts that she finds in the world, and another friend who takes pictures of trees that she loves.  Here is a heart.  And I love this tree.)

Gratitude List:
1. Hearts.  Trees.  Hearts in trees.   The friends who draw them to my attention.
2. All this blooming.  Everywhere.  You’re blooming too, I think.
3. A day off and hanging out with my muchachos.
4. Arts.  I have been thinking a lot lately about how the arts make us more fully human, more compassionate with ourselves and others, more able to deal with and comprehend our secret inner worlds.  I want to do more to incorporate more art into my teaching, to encourage my students to incorporate more art into their projects.
5. Stories of Holy Week.  I have always thought of Jesus as a revolutionary, but somehow this year I have been struck in a more powerful way with the way the stories of Holy Week portray him: the street theater of the donkey ride into the city, the anarchism of the temple cleansing, the subversive answers to the establishment, the way he turned everybody’s expectations upside-down. (How sad that this story is so often used instead to enforce the status quo.)

May we walk in Beauty!