Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Look into the Shadow

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

P1020132
Today is Brigid’s Eve, one of those halfway days in the year.  Partway between Solstice and Equinox, it’s one of those moments in the year’s turning that gives us a breathing space to pause and take stock.  The light has been growing again for six weeks, and my winter-dulled consciousness is now catching up, now finally noticing the way day begins to spread out wider before me.

Tomorrow morning, amid all the goofiness that surrounds the moment here in Pennsylvania, we will take note of whether a largish rodent will or will not notice her shadow, and we will use that to predict the ending of the winter season.  Six weeks from now is the beginning of May, and no matter which way the shadows fall today, spring will be here by then.

If I take my seat in my comfortable burrow with the groundhogs for the moment and consider what light may arrive at my doorstep by tomorrow morning, I find myself considering what there is within me that may need to be drawn into the light, and what must remain protected in the inky space behind me.  Can I find the courage to look into the aching indigo of my own shadows?

It’s a fine enough question to ask: Will the groundhog see its shadow?  But try to turn it around, and ask yourself: Will I see my own?

Gratitude List:
1.  All that music yesterday.  In the morning–singing, singing.  The String Band in the evening.  Watching the children watch the band.  They loved the song about sandwiches.  So glad Santa finally brought them a banjo or two, but I’m sad that the trade-off was the double bass.
2. Vulnerability.  People who model vulnerability and open-heartedness.
3. Courage.  Couer (old French for heart).  Couer-age.  En-couer-age-ment: Enheartening.
4. Making new friends who seem like old friends.
5. Looking into the teeth of the questions.

Take Courage.  Take Heart.

Moving Through Time

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Gratitude List:
1. Ancestors
2. Moving through time.  I keep working with this idea that Michelle talked about a couple weeks ago, about scarcity and abundance.  I have always thought of those ideas in terms of things, but she explored how we tend to live with a sense of scarcity about time as well.  This hit me hard.  It’s how I have been living a good part of my adult life.  I  learned to protect my time, and then I began to guard it, fiercely.  And it just slips away anyway, doesn’t it?  I am practicing moving through time without feeling like I have to hoard it.
3. The sense of smell: right now it’s coffee perking.
4. How things can feel messy and disjointed and out of place and still be okay anyway.
5.  The web.  Again.  The web that holds us all together.  How we cast these lines between us.  How they shine.

May we walk in Beauty!

Doing it Myself

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Gratitude List:
1. With a little coaching from a colleague, a helpful Youtube video, and the assistance of my 9yo IT guy, I fixed the wonky Chromebook screen.  Without sending it off to an expert.  I am more than just a little bit proud of myself. . .
2. Online geography quizzes.  It’s never too late for an old dog to learn a little more about the world she lives in.
3. You and I both woke up this morning.  Isn’t that grand?
4. The way the sun shines on the snow, blindingly.
5. Small folks up and busy right away, making things, humming, chattering happily.  (This is one of those gratitudes that can give a wrong impression if you read it as a statement of always-is.  We do have many mornings like this, but there are equal numbers of mornings when there is whining and fussing and complaining, so the gratitude has to do with recognizing the balance moments when they come and not focusing on the frustration of the out-of-balance moments.) {Okay, so in the ten minutes since I wrote this, there has been some more squabbling.  Still, I am holding out for pleasantness this morning.}

May we walk in Beauty!  May we Shine.

Beads, Like Grace

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

EWK 4 001

Slipping into the arms of an old friend,
I pulled back to look in her shining eyes,
and my beads went skittering over the floor,
heart beads, rose quartz and green aventurine,
so much that has been held back
no longer contained,
scattering like grace
underfoot
and into every corner
ready to be found
by you.

Gratitude List:
1. Beads scattering everywhere, shattering something that needed to be opened
2. Time to just hang out with my colleagues last night, and meet potential new students
3. Weekends
4. This red woven scarf–recycled silk saris.  What life did they live before?  Who was beautiful in these shining threads?
5. The sun is returning.  (Blessed be.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Part of the Bowl

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

IMG_2071
(Josiah’s Jack Frost Picture)

Gratitude List:
1. Tonight’s Open House at school.  I love that I work for a place where I anticipate such an event.
2. Being part of the bowl.  Sometimes when someone you love is in a hard spot, all you can do is step into the circle, grab hands with the people beside you, and become part of the net that holds your loved one.  I am grateful for the net of love that connects even strangers in such times, that makes family of us all.  Now for grace and patience and earnestly holding the energy of prayer/healing/light.
3. Bobby Mcferrin’s setting of Psalm 23 (you can google it on youtube) {Oy.  If only my thirty-something self could hear me talking like that.  She’d roll her eyes, of course.}
4. Elderberry syrup and ginger tincture.  And zinc. (And Dragon’s Breath, if the sniffles progress much further.) I am not going to catch the cold.
5. Organizing.  Shifting.  Making spaces.

May we walk in Beauty!

Back to Work

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN8926

Gratitude List:
1. Back to the rhythm, with lots of extra prep time under my belt.
2. The words of Rumi.  Today: “Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.”
3. The helpers
4. That wren out there, welcoming in the morning
5. Onions and mushrooms sauteéd in butter

May we walk in Beauty!  Beauty all around.

How Sun Comes to the Hollow

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

P1020484  P1020487

This is how sun comes to the hollow:
The day arrives before the sun comes in,
the bowl of hills holding the morning,
shadowless and muted,

and then the tops of trees go golden,
branches like spiderwebs catching the sun,
and golden travels down the trunks of oak and locust,

and then a star emerges
over the southeastern rim of the bowl,
pulling shadows out of everything,
spilling gold over the fields.

Gratitude List:
1. One more snow day.  I really needed these snow days right now.  I’d’ve managed, of course, but now I feel less like I’m free-falling into the semester.  Two days of rest and contemplation after doing the grades is perfect for me.
2. One more snow day, which is to say: sleeping in.  I slept until after 7.
3. One more snow day, which is to say: hanging out with the fellas.
4. Anticipating the return to rhythm.
5. Memory of green.

May we walk in Beauty!

Digging Out

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1. The Good Samaritan
2. in his red pickup with a snowplow
3. who drove by on his way to a plowing job as I was trying to tackle this 3.5-foot wall of compressed snow

DSCN8919

4. and turned it into this:
 DSCN8921
taking HOURS of work off our plates.
5. The shining blue at the heart of the snowbank
6. Sending in first semester’s grades.  Every few months, I get this marvelous sense of completion when I send in the grades for a completed semester: that chapter is closed.  Now I can focus on this one.  Sure, there’s often a trial by fire in the last days before grades are due, when I don’t know if I’ll get it all done in time, but it is satisfying to meet the deadline.  And of course, there’s the earnest pledge to myself to create more reasonable end-of-semester grading next time (I think I can manage it this semester!).

May we walk in Beauty!
Take care of each other!

Someone Has Been Walking Here

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

“We carry ourselves wherever we go and we cannot escape by mere flight.” –Matrona I

P1020483
Some people have been walking here.

Gratitude List:
1. Moonshadows.  Did you see the faeries out there last night?  Such magic.  And this morning, it was starshadows.  Starshadows! (I have not seen the five all strung out in their line, but this morning one was pulsing, twinkling at me through the branches of the walnut and sycamore trees, oh so brightly.)
2. The internet connection that makes it possible for me to see what everybody else’s snow looks like on these snowbound days.
3. Getting the work done.  I’ve got this.
4. Baked Oatmeal.  It’s what’s for breakfast.  (Apples in there.)
5. Snow ice cream.  It’s what’s for snack.  (3 cups of snow.  Mix in 1/2 c. sugar, 1 c. milk, and 1 tsp. vanilla.  Add another 2-3 cups of snow.  Serve immediately.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Snowy Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN8911

Gratitude List:
1. Thundersnow (though, frankly, I could have done without the lightning when I was out shoveling a spot for Fred).
2. The children’s delight in the snow.
3. A warm and cozy house.  (I am worried about what the women from the shelter are doing today, hoping someone has made arrangements for them to have indoor spaces today, hoping that there were intrepid volunteers to staff the shelter this weekend.)
4. Word play.
5. Snow.  Did I say snow?  (Oooh, there was another crash of thunder just now!)

May we walk in Beauty!
Stay warm, ya’ll.