Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

People Are Really Good at Heart

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Gratitude List:
1. Daffodils.  Narcissus.  Sunny golden greetings.
2. Orioles.  It’s too early, I know.  Way too early, I suppose.  But I dreamed last night of that whistle, high in the sycamore tree, of the oriole announcing his return.  I can’t wait until that bright bird is back with us.
3. Getting it done.  This and that and the other thing.  It DOES come together, even when it feels impossible.
4. The goodness in everyone.  Lately, my belief in this idea is being sorely shaken.  In this election cycle, I have begun to let a deep cynicism about the motives and benevolence of others begin to seep into my consciousness.  I want to continue to hold onto the belief that there is something inside each of us that can be touched and met.  If Anne Frank could say it, I can at least do my best to try to believe that “in spite of everything, people are really good at heart.”
5. Towering clouds.

May we walk in Beauty!  (In Goodness.)

Garden Peach, Goldie, and Green Zebra

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(The babies are coming up in the greenhouse.  We will be selling tomatoes this summer.)

Gratitude List:
1. How prayer changes the one who is praying.
2. That sliver of a new moon that rode low in the sky last night as I was driving home.
3. Warm breezes.
4. Chickadee’s spring song.  “S-weeeeet?”
5. Knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.

May we walk in Beauty!

Fierce

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Acorn caps and dandelion fluff.  Oak leaf.

Gratitude List:
1. Fierce love.  I keep coming back to that word–fierce–lately.  This impulse to protect the ones we love with whatever we have inside us.  Today is a day to hold someone in Mama Bear love.  Stand at the door of that cave and bear your teeth.
2. How decisions dawn, especially when they are tough decisions.  Still, the right answer comes.
3. Kindness.  Someone said yesterday, “Kindness is one of my core beliefs.”
4. Speedwell and crocus and windflower.  The green of the aconite leaves when the flowers fade.
5. Parent Teacher Conferences this evening.  I have so many ninth graders that I end up with a pretty full schedule.  I love talking with parents about their students, being able to characterize how I  see them in class.  May our time be fruitful and helpful.

May we walk in Beauty!

Slipping Out of Bounds

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Cacao
I went through a period of time when, instead of gluing down the pieces of a collage, I would just set them together, and then photograph them.  I carried with me a little box of collage elements for months, arranging and rearranging them.  I don’t know if this was a good and interesting artistic process or a symbol of something in my brain that was unwilling to commit to permanence.  Still, some of the photos that I took then continue to grab at strands in my unconscious, like this one.

Gratitude List:
1. The way crocus refuse to stay within their borders.  While I do believe in good, strong, safe boundaries, I do think that those crocus escaping out over the lawn have a special message.
2. Good strong boundaries.
3. Breathing room.
4. The poem that is beginning to form.
5. How language shapes and creates ideas.  How ideas hinge on the language used to express them.

May we walk in Beauty!

We Can Do It!

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March 8
International Women’s Day, celebrated around the world since 1911, to honor the work that women do.  This year’s theme is a pledge for parity, with the core belief that empowering women will lead to greater sustainability on the planet.

Gratitude List:
1. Berta Cáceres, a Honduran environmentalist and human rights worker, 2015 winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, who rallied the indigenous Lenca people to oust the builders of the Agua Zarca Dam, a project which would have cut off water for the Lenca and made it impossible for them to continue living sustainably on the land.  She was assassinated last week in her home.
2. Harriet Tubman, whose story amazes and inspires me, challenges and informs me.  If all you know about her is that she rescued people out of slavery, you owe it to yourself to find out more about her, about her many roles during the war, and how she continued to work for human rights and dignity until she died.
3. Wangari Mathaai, the Kenyan college professor and founder of the Green Belt Movement, first woman in East Africa with a doctorate degree, and 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who saved Karura Forest, who planted trees, who worked for the rights of women.  (Karura Forest is again threatened with development, and the Green Belt Movement is working to save it yet again.)
4. Jane Goodall, who, though she is in her early 80s, continues to travel around the world to speak on behalf of sustainability, earth care, and animal rights.
5. All you women in my life who have mentored me and modeled for me how to live sustainably, how to regulate and care for my own energy, how to stand up and speak out, how to do the work.  Friends and family, women older than me, my peers, and young women, too–my nieces and my students–who show me every day what it means to make a hopeful difference in the world.

May we walk with wisdom, with courage, and with strength.  May we make the world a better place.

Around the Corner

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spring
(Stolen from the internet.  I do not know the photog.)

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday’s Scholastics Awards Ceremony, honoring the thoughtful and careful work of student writers.
2. It looks like the migrating snow goose population at Middle Creek is really strong this year.
3. Ritual of turning over a new leaf–letting the old thing dissolve in water
4. Being part of many concentric circles of community.  How could I survive without you?
5. Trees.  Sap is rising, buds are forming.

May we walk in Beauty!

May the Waters Run Free

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2014 February 085
Here is a picture of my River, the Susquehanna River, flowing.  May the waters run free.

Gratitude List:
1. The warm glow of pride on the faces of parents and families and friends watching their students perform a marvelous drama.
2. Water.  May the waters run freely for all.
3. The activists who put their lives on the line.  I think today, with deep sadness and great respect, of Berta Caceres, an environmental and indigenous peoples activist who was assassinated in Honduras last week.  May her legacy live on.
4. Good fair trade coffee.
5. Making progress toward goals.  Incremental.  Step-by-step.

May we walk in Beauty!

What is Attention, but Love?

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I wrote this after reading Mary Oliver’s poem, “Of Love.”

It’s a process repeated everywhere you look:
the way the beech tree catches and holds the wind in her hair,
the way the meadow grasses gather around the tentative feet of the fox,
the way the hands of the clay hold and guide the flow of waters.

What is attention, but a kind of loving?
Living in awareness is a constant tumble into loves.
The way your eyes twinkle when you tell a story.
The way your listening hands reach outward.
The way a new thought is born in your eyes.
The hearty abandon of your laughter,
the caress of your voice,
the shine that surrounds you.

Gratitude List:
1. The way a tenor line can turn a song from sweet to sublime.
2. The lessons we are here to learn, even when they are tough.  I am finding that I need to step back from trying to protect my children from the pains and problems of life, so they are more free to learn from the things that approach them.  This is hard, hard work, and it is a lesson of my own.
3. The buffy fluff of that mockingbird hunched out there in the brambles.
4. The sense of smell.  Most subtle of senses, I think.  I sometimes realize that I have been reacting to a scent even before I am consciously aware of it.  Like a dream, where you don’t always grasp what is happening until just after it has happened.
5. Persephone rises.  She always does.  Her purple footprints are singing aves in the flowerbeds.

May we walk in Beauty!

Learning to Fly

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2012 October 053

Never fight a cloud.
Never grasp the wind
in your fists.  Wind is
meant to be ridden
like a rough colt.
Give yourself to it
as you give yourself
to the salt waves.
Let it buffet you,
twist and batter you.
Rise.  Breathe deeply.
Learn the pathways
of currents and drafts.

(First line found on an online “poetry generator.”  This is a very drafty draft, but I do want to write something about riding the wind, so I will let it be a place-holder.)

Gratitude List:
1. Watching a high school crew create a dramatic performance.  The students at my school and their directors did an amazing job putting together “The Sound of Music” last night.
2. Sleep.  This is a placeholder.  I am running on very little sleep at the moment, and will likely run a little low for the next couple of nights.  But I am grateful for sleep, for the little I can get now, and for the good rest I will get in a few days.
3. That lovely, lovely snow.  Simple frosting.
4. The sense of taste.  Isn’t flavor a marvelous thing?
5. Weaving the threads together.  People.  Meanings.  Ideas.

May we walk in Beauty!

Being a Body

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I think it is time for me to start planning my retreat to the monastery when school ends this spring.  I want to go sit under the boughs of the cathedral tree again.

Gratitude List:
1. Gulls by the hundreds flying in the dawn across the River
2. Watching the freshmen really take up the work of deep discussion
3. How one foot just goes in front of the other.  Then the next one.
4. The sense of sight.  As my eyes age, I am more and more keenly aware of how appreciate clear vision.
5. Being in a body.  Incarnation.  There is so much to learn in this body, and I spend entirely too much time wishing it were different in some way, like I just did by wishing that my eyes weren’t aging quite so quickly.  And every moment, every itch, every ache, every noticing, is a chance to learn something about the interaction of spirit and matter.

May we walk in Beauty!