Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Stand Up to the Bully

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Planting
It’s seeding time again!  Even though things are changing here, Jon is hard at work, planting seeds for the coming season.  We’ll have a short late-season CSA this fall, but he is planning to sell tomatoes and other goodies individually throughout the summer.  I keep wanting to call that a la carte,

I am becoming increasingly anxious and nervous about the continued popularity of a certain political candidate, despite his obvious and in-your-face xenophobia, racism, sexism, his narcissism and bullying.  I don’t want to live in a country with people who support meanness over substance, who prefer bombast to thoughtfulness, who would rather have a showperson than a statesperson.  I see so many potential terrible endings to this fiasco.  I am angry and frightened, and more than a little shrill.  I’m not sure that right now I can say with Anne Frank that I believe people are really good at heart.  Where is the goodness hidden inside people who stand around and watch with glee while the playground bully gets ready to beat up another victim?  Is this what we’ve come to?  This is not the America I thought I knew.

Gratitude List:
1. Wind–scouring me, scattering me, pulling me out of my safe places.
2. Orange–a waking up color
3. Watching several of our seniors give their senior presentations last night.  They tend to balk at the process, and wonder why we make them do this, but they rise so beautifully to the challenge.  It’s like they’re stepping out onto the launching pad.  See how ready you are to fly!
4. Sunrises
5. Thoughtful discussions with students.

May we walk in Beauty!

Blue Fire

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Gratitude List:
1. That spring-singer out in the trees.  Cardinal: “Pretty, pretty, pretty!”
2. Yesterday’s sunrise.  The sun came into the hollow not golden as usual, but magenta and rose.  I felt like I was inside a heart.
3. Teaching is such a balance of the giving of instruction and input, and getting out of the way of the process.  Yesterday’s Drama class was a powerful example of how the real magic often happens when the teacher slips off to the sidelines.  There’s no real formula for making that happen.  Each group is different and each day is different, but yesterday was a shining, shining Moment.  A gift.
4. The flashes of blue fire inside my labradorite beads.
5. The green eyes of that small boy over there.

May we walk in Beauty!

Wake-Up Words

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My Anabaptist ancestors spoke about being in the world, but not of it.  My love of the writings of the mystics and of Sufi thought has caused me to tend to tend to reject that notion.  I am in this world, this body, to experience the world, to know matter intimartely.  The idea has so often been interpreted as a call to a matter-denying asceticism.  Yet, while at least some of those early Anabaptists seem to have been interested in living ascetically, they were also living in a time when the city-states and political structures of their day demanded their spiritual as well as their political allegiance.  Their choice to focus on not being of this world was a rejection of the force of empire.

Today, we are also living within structures that, while they claim to offer freedom of spirit and idea, have a tendency to demand allegiance, an empire of consumerism and militarism.  We may not always see the victims of this empire, but they’re there.  This empire in which I live is responsible for so much that goes against Good News: forced labor and child labor making cheap things for us to buy; rampant exploitation of the planet’s resources; demand for precious metals and minerals that cause conflict and wars in other parts of the world; sales of arms to and support of militaries that harm their own people; bombing of innocent civilians in an attempt to kill our “enemies”; bowing to the god of Might and Force.

How can we live in this empire and not experience some of the numbing effects of its daily fare?  And how can we live in this empire, and yet not be of it?

Gratitude List:
1. Jim’s wake-up words: You are what you eat.  If you eat the food of the empire, you take on the characteristics of the empire.  I am not grateful for this truth, living within the belly of the empire as I do, but I am grateful for the reminder to live with that awareness.
2. The cycle of life.  The young ones keep rising to take their place.
3. Water.  I take it for granted all too often.  I flick the dial on the dishwasher, turn on the tap, adjust the knobs on the shower, fill my coffee pot.  Not everyone has access to clean water.  For some, the filling of the water-need is arduous and treacherous.  May the waters run free and clear for all.
4. All the things that DO get done.  I get to feeling a little ragged about all the things that don’t get done, but in the meantime so many things do get accomplished.
5. Snow geese.  They haven’t stopped in the Wrightsville/Columbia fields this year (at least not that I have seen).  It was a joy to see them in the fields near Campbelltown yesterday afternoon.

May we walk in Beauty!

If I Say Green

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This is from a few summers ago, a male, looking a little worn and tired.  Here’s a wish for safe journeys northward this season, and much milkweed.

If I say green to you
when the winds of winter
still carry a chill
over the fields
at the top of the hill,
when indigo pockets of shadows
still harbor small mounds of snow,

will you know what I mean,
how even in these days
of limbo, of in-between,
something rises,
barely seen, a little frill,
a thrill of green
beneath the brown of winter?

Gratitude List:
1. Bowling with my guys yesterday.  I have been an occasional bowler for much of my life, and I am abysmal, but I love it, and I love how Ellis loves it.
2. The way the future approaches, as if out of a mist.
3. The population of monarch butterflies in Mexico this past season covered 10 miles of forest (compared to less than 3 the previous year, and less than 2 the year before that).
4. The slow and gentle process of awakening.  Every day, a nudge into a new space.
5.  All the compassionate hearts.  I do get terribly weighed down by the brutality and crassness of the language in the public sphere, especially now.  I need to keep bringing myself back to ground, remembering You and You and You and your healing acts of love in the world. How you don’t let the challenges keep you from moving forward and holding the world in your heart.  Oh, how you inspire me, You and You and You and You. . .

May we walk in Love.

Persephone is Rising

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The crocus spring up.
Persephone is rising.
My heart awakens.

Gratitude List:
1. That green Cholula hot sauce–poblano and jalapeno–that Jon bought yesterday.  At the risk of sounding like a food snob: It was revelatory.
2. Poetry
3. The little elves in the house who got up at 6:15 to start making birthday preparations for their dad.
4. Jon Weaver-Kreider–I don’t mention him here very often because I don’t want to intrude on his privacy by throwing him into my public spheres, but he could be on every gratitude list I make.
5. Loreena McKennitt–I  haven’t listened to her in a long time, but a photograph this week sparked a memory of her music, and I am rediscovering her.

May we walk in Beauty!

Rituals

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Filling in the tiny grave.

Our sweet little Afil Hamster died yesterday.  We are all sad.  I have known some pretty calm and friendly hamsters over the years, and Afil is probably the sweetest one I’ve met.  She would sit still in the crook of an arm to be petted.  When she was out running in her rolling ball, she was always underfoot, following the people feet around the house.  Rodents don’t look you in the eye in quite the way cats and dogs do–they don’t have time for that–but it seemed that Afil could stand the briefest moments of eye contact.

Jon laid her out on a bed of moss in a little box, and we buried her in the bare spot where the beehives were.  Both hives died over the winter, which is another great sadness, so it felt apt to put our little Afil there.  Children have a natural understanding of ritual and ceremony.  It shouldn’t amaze me anymore.  They knew what to do.  Plus, they like to dig, so there’s that.

Such a tiny creature, but she held such a big place in our hearts.  I’m going to miss those bright black eyes, and the little sneezy noises she would make when she woke up to get our attention, how she would climb up into her loft to wait for one of us to open her cage door and pick her up.

Gratitude List:
1. The small furry people
2. Rituals
3. Bees.  Bless the bees.  May other hives and colonies flourish.
4. Three yellow crocus.  Some years no yellow ones appear, and sometimes one or two.  This is, so far, a three-bloom year.  They’re a deeper gold than the sunny aconites.
5. The way you can see the sap rising in the trees down at Flinchbaugh’s Orchard.  There’s a new vigor and color to the limbs.

May we walk in Beauty.

Beloved

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There is such a thing as the Sun.  I captured this photo of the elusive creature a couple days ago, so I know it, whether or not you believe me.

Henri Nouwen said:
“Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the ‘Beloved.’ Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.”

As much as I want to, I don’t think I will read this quotation in my classes.  I think that the specific students to whom I want to give it would only feel a greater burden of guilt because they can’t FEEL Beloved.  But it shows me more deeply how the work we need to do, no matter the physical vocation, is to find ways to show people this truth: You are Beloved. To paraphrase I Corinthians 13: If you are a brilliant intellectual or a gifted teacher, but have not love, you are a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  As I strive to improve my skills and knowledge base as an educator, I need to keep this always in my heart.

Gratitude List:
1. I am Beloved.  You are Beloved.
2. Working together.  Supportive colleagues.
3. Memory
4. Watching a small boy prepare for his dad’s birthday party.
5. Eating ugali.  I don’t know why I don’t make it more often.  (It’s a thick corn-meal mush, sort of like polenta.)

May we walk in Beauty, knowing we are Beloved.

Where Such a River Runs

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What a wonder of a tree.  I am so grateful to live here in this place where such trees stand sentinel, where such a River runs.

Gratitude List:
1. The woman who reads bedtime stories to her little dog, and it settles him in to sleep.
2. Stories of people who stood up for what they knew was right, no matter the personal cost.  These days, Sophie Scholl and Wangari Maathai are on my mind.
3. The work of the Nobel Women’s Initiative.   Currently, laureates Rigoberto Menchu and Jody Williams are in Guatemala, witnessing the Sepur Zarco trial to bring justice for Mayan women survivors of sexual violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan military.
4. Blessings on the seeds!  Jon started planting in the greenhouse yesterday.  We will be selling some tomatoes and their friends throughout the mid-season, and doing a short late-season CSA.
5. Vocation

May we walk in Beauty!

Awakening

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I took yesterday’s photo on Saturday, and today’s photo on Monday.  It’s the same tiny patch of aconites.  In two days, it went from just peeking above the soil surface to blooming.  Blessed be.

Gratitude List:
1. Flexibility, adaptability
2. Mists and fogs.  Mist flowing over the ramparts of the bridge at night, lit by moonlight and lamplight.  Mist in that boggy area by Route 30 on my way to school, back lit, orange in the morning sun.  Mist rising over the Millstream at school.
3. Flocks of gulls.  Yesterday, I stopped briefly on my way home from school to take some pictures of the sun on the River, and the parking lot of the River Park was covered in a white carpet of gulls.  I love to watch them floating on the River, and wheeling above it.
4. This work.  It’s really difficult on some days, and really rewarding on some days.  Sometimes both on the same day, for the same reason.
5. Vegetable stew and crusty bread

May we walk in Beauty!

Late Bloomers

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I thought the aconites beside the shop must have died off, but this weekend when I went to look again, these tiny tender leaves were beginning to uncurl.  That’s okay.  I am a late bloomer, too.

Gratitude List:
1. Jim’s story for the children.  Fear and and grief, but also mystery and strength and transformation.
2. The way the narratives are weaving themselves together, how our stories of loss and grief and hope and transformation become part of the same cloth. I think this is one of the definitions of community.
3. The morning’s moon
4. So many more signs of spring.  I know there’s more wintry mess predicted, but we are whirling toward the sun even so.  The chickweed is coming.  I think I am going to need to go foraging.
5. Stretching the spine

May we walk in Beauty!