Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

True Names

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2013 April 004

I gave my students in Creative Writing an assignment to create a collage and then write a short story or poem or essay that was sparked by the images that came together.  The idea was to begin the semester by unhitching the horse of the brain from the writing process for a moment–letting the creative urge impel them–and also to get them working with images right away.

I haven’t taken a photo of my collage yet, but here is the poem I wrote in response to them (I always seem to make two collages at a time).  A friend of mine recently turned me on to Francisco X. Alarcon’s poetry (he died a couple days ago), and I am finding the simplicity of his work to be incredibly powerful.  I cannot quite get myself to simplify enough to really be Alarconesque, but it was a powerful poetic experience to work in his style.  Also, we have been working with models of professional writers as a way to spark creativity, and we were working with an Ursula Le Guin short story about True Names, and that also found its way into my poem:

fire and flight

after the fire
has kindled
within you
patient gestation
of coals beneath
your heart
between
your ribs

fire within you
fire in the earth
fire in the fruit
the egg
the seed

flames will burst forth
and you will rise

you will know
your wings
you will
open your feathers
catch the breezes

the old world
of magic and monsters
will fall away
below you

you will dance
on pillows of cloud
you will swim
in rivers of air

you will hear your
true name
in the voice
of the wind

Gratitude List:
1. The promise of snow.  (I know, it causes anxiety, too, not knowing what will happen, but I look forward to being cocooned in the house for a time.)
2. Making collage.  Perhaps it was an entirely personal agenda to give that assignment, but I had fun making my own collages.
3. Lights at ends of tunnels.
4. Taking root.  Taking flight.
5. True Names.  One of your True Names is Beloved.

May we walk in Beauty!

Colors

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(We decided that with young readers in the house, it might be nice to have a sort of family creed or motto on the wall for them to explore, so we bought this one from Flinchbaugh’s Farm Market and gave it to ourselves for Christmas.  They read it out loud quite a lot.  The one about doing loud really well is, of course, their most vocal favorite.)

Gratitude List:
I have to be really careful to focus on the drive to work these days because I am driving into sunrise, and the colors tend to throw me toward a deep meditative mode.  I suppose I could try to attach symbolic significance to the various colors and the way they deepen my meditative state, but I’m not sure that it’s something nameable.  Yesterday there were wings of clouds that rose upward from the point where the sun was about to rise.  At their base they were a (1) glowing tangerine orange, which shaded upward through (2) magenta into a rich, deep (3) violet.  The tops of the clouds were rimed with a velvety (4) indigo, and behind it all was that pure and serene (5) aquamarine that I love so much.  I had to stop and get some snacks for my Advisory Group, and when I got back on the road, everything had shifted, and the clouds were, for a moment, a simple shining (6) gold.  I think I should take another art class with someone who can give me more vocabulary for color–the last art class I took was at Sunbridge College in 2002, and the color work we did there has become part of my regular meditations.

What experiences with color enrich your spirit?

Blessing

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2013 May 051

Here is a poem from this day in 2013.  It’s one of my favorites.

May the bright breeze of morning rouse your heart to singing,
May the fire of the noonday warm your heart to hopefulness,
May the cooling rains of evening wash your heart to freshness,
May the enclosing arms of the earth hold you through the midnight.

Walk in paths of the winds that awaken,
Walk through the fires that burn off the scars,
Walk in the waters that cool and renew,
Stand with your feet firmly planted on earth

Until you hear the voice of the wind,
Until you breathe the essence of the fire,
Until you smell the message of the waters,
Until you feel the heartbeat of the earth,
Until you see the sun rise
within you,
within you.

Gratitude List:
1. The wisdom and thoughtfulness of that group of students who led chapel yesterday, telling stories of their experiences of racism, opening up the conversation.  The post-chapel discussion took more than two periods because people were so caught up in it, and people were talking about it in the halls.  I am grateful for the courage they had to share their stories and get the conversation going.
2. Warm mittens
3. More readings from the desert mothers and fathers.
4. The collage assignment in Creative Writing.  I love watching them create and develop and work with images.
5. Routines.  Developing helpful habits.

May we walk in Beauty!

Living into the Wildness of Abundance

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

MLKDream

Gratitude List:
1.  The Lancaster Emergency Women’s Winter Shelter.  I am grateful that my church and so many organizations in Lancaster participate in making sure the program is staffed with volunteers throughout the winter.  It’s cold out there, and dangerous at night.  The motto for the program is “Safe.  Warm. Dry.”
2. Baked oatmeal with mixed berries for supper on a cold night.
3. The Here and Now piece yesterday on NPR about the hyenas of Harar, Ethiopia, and the man who feeds them.  When the city was built in the 13th century, low entry passages were left in the thick walls, so the hyenas could come and go throughout the city.
4. Getting enough sleep.  I lost sleep over the weekend because I did a shift at the shelter, but I have had time for naps, and lately I fall right back to sleep when I wake in the night.  I even struggle to wake up in the mornings instead of my body pushing me out of bed at 4.  I will receive this with gratitude for as long as it lasts.
5. Sunday’s sermon. Live with a belief in abundance: I have abundant time, sleep, resources to accomplish my Work.  There is enough for all of us.  The church has certainly twisted and skewed this concept over time: to believe in abundance is to believe that God will make you wealthy, to exploit the earth for material resources.  I have responded to that erroneous thinking by shifting to a sometimes scrimping frugality that has me living with a sense of scarcity, of never having enough time, enough sleep, enough resources–and that pushes me into a hoarding spirit, not just of stuff, but of time and spirit–and this can be paralyzing.  Writing these gratitude lists has helped me to learn to appreciate the abundance of my life.  The words on Sunday helped me to look at how I can deepen that belief and live into the wildness of that.

May we walk in Beauty!

What Have You Done?

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Just a little morning riff here:

“What have you done for color?” –Henri Matisse

What have you done for color,
for light, for dancing?

What have you done
for the quiet journey of the sun
over the ridgetop at dawn?

What have you done for the line,
for the eloquent curve,
for the circle?

What have you done for the pure note,
the perfect A that hangs in the air above you?

Gratitude List:
1. Pie night.  I didn’t write about that when it happened, but when I got home on Friday, Jon was making pie crusts.  He made an out-of-this world vegetable pie, and with the leftover dough, we mixed up a lemon sponge pie.  I think we will have to do this more often.  Of course, it brought to mind the cherry pie that he made for me once when we were dating.  He told the boys that he would help them some day if they want to make pies to impress their dates and their families.
2. How getting rid of things makes the things you hold onto even more real.  We gave away a rather large stack of vinyl records the other day, and suddenly I find myself playing the ones we kept.  My ears are still filled with Abba.
3. Watching a child become a reader.  Literacy is a magical thing.
4. Miracles and wonder.  These are the days. . .
5. Learning the new script for how I speak about myself to myself.  (This is a constant process.)

May we walk in Beauty!

The Gift of Today

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kittykisses

Gratitude List:
1. Today.  What a gift.  Here’s another one, with all the same hours as yesterday.  And tomorrow, another one will come.
2. Good Work.  English teachers tend to fuss a bit about the stacks of grading (and I have a massive stack of last semester’s papers to finish in the precious hours of today), but it’s Good Work.  Meaningful.
3. Nourishment.  Nurture.  I want to ponder those words a little.  What are the shades of difference in their meanings?  How are they similar?
4. Laughter.  One of my mentors in a previous teaching job once told me, “Make them laugh every day.”  I think that applies to families and friends and oneself as much as to the classroom.  Laugh every day.
5. Clearing out.  We are working on getting rid of 2016 things from our house in 2016.  It’s a real challenge, about 39 things a week, 168 things a month.  And it feels good.  It also makes me more aware of not bringing in more stuff.
6. The sun has just lifted over the ridge and into the kitchen window.  Hello, Bright Friend.

May we walk in Beauty!

Stretching

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2013 August 175
This is a firebird in a campfire, but it feels like it belongs with the sunset thunderbird story.

Gratitude List:
1. Thunderbird Firebird Sunset: Can we do another sunset here?  It’s just that last night’s sunset was so much like a portent, like a message.  The sky behind was shading to tender aquamarine, the way it gets lighter and brighter before it darkens into night.  The clouds in front, layered lines of tufty fluff, were tinged with magenta on the bottom, with the realest indigo above, and true violet between.  The sky where the sun had just been was the glowing orange of coals.  But the most striking thing about it all was that in the space where the orange was, there was the clearly delineated shape of a thunderbird, like the ones carved by the Susquehannock people in the rocks of the River.  It was rising up out of the earth into the sky, a bird of flame.
2. An empty box: Last night, I picked up an empty cardboard box to take upstairs (we store the strongest ones in the attic).  I noticed that it was the box where I had kept the notes from my first teaching job, at Butler County Community College.  I had brought it down to put my papers in the recycling bin, and they went off in the truck early this morning.  And there’s an odd weight lifted from my shoulders.  Getting rid of my old notes and papers (which I never look at) means that I can now completely trust my own inner resources and my ability to find answers in the present day.  I can believe that what I learned in the past is part of me today, and I don’t have to keep papers as a link to my past to remind myself of what I might have forgotten.
3. I’ve got this: That’s my mantra for the time being.  I realized that although I think of myself as a fairly positive person, I have been continually feeding myself shameful messages about how I never seem to be able to stay organized and on top of things.  At the same time, I would set unrealistic goals about what I might be able to get done in any given amount of time.  In this coming season of my life, I will be setting realistic goals, and I will feed myself the message that I can do it.  Talking to a colleague yesterday, I mentioned that I am trying to keep my messages to myself positive, and without knowing my mantra, she said, “You’ve got this!”  Yes, yes, I believe I do.
4. Shakespeare and teenagers: We’re studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream in English 9 right now.  Yesterday one girl came to me after class and said, “I thought this Shakespeare stuff would be boring because it’s so old and hard to understand, but I really love this story!”  This is why I became a teacher.  Those words are a bright, bright, shiny stone that I will carry around with me for a long time.
5. Why am I at a loss to find the fifth today?  There are so many, many things that I am grateful for, but nothing seems to be quite the one that finishes this list.  Stretching.  That’s it.  Stretching.  Slow, careful, breath-infused stretching.  Yes, and that means more than it means.

May we walk in Beauty!

Being Interpreted

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Remembering my days of quiet contemplation at the monastery last summer.  Longing for another weekend there in a few months.

Gratitude List:
1. Elderberry syrup, which being interpreted means: I have kept the cold at bay so far.
2. The coming 3-day weekend, which being interpreted means: Sleep.
3. Those crows–how can I stop writing about the thousand crows?–which being interpreted means: Something inside me is flying into the wind.
4. These quiet morning moments of feeding the introvert, which being interpreted means: Silence.
5. Poetry, which means words, which means layers of language, which means a bridge.

May we ever walk in Beauty!

Season of Owl

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2013 May 032

This is the season of owl,
of winds that howl through the hollow,
the season of the sharp bark
of the fox, voicing longing in the bosque.

This is the season of bitter,
of fierce flakes feathering cheeks and hands,
the season of crystal, crisp and cutting,
of beauty that will slice you open.

This is the season of rising,
thin and pale, into the dawn air,
but also of burrowing, huddling deep
into the layers that hold you.

Walk the thin line of today with care,
one foot precisely placed, the other. . .
Perhaps you will notice,
when you raise your eyes for a moment,
how the line curves out ahead of you,
bringing you
always
back home.

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday’s really lovely start to the new semester.  Nobody, including myself, is very squirrelly yet (we’ll get there, I’m sure).
2. The energy of teaching a new class.  Like being the newbie again.  I’m a little terrified, but in a good and energizing way.
3. Clouds.  Whole fantasy worlds and landscapes there above us.  This is the time of year when the clouds are tinged with sunset as I drive home, and tinged again with sunrise on my way to work.
4. Snow.  Just a dusting.
5. How a hot drink warms hands and face.

Blessings on your day!  May you find Beauty.

Hot Tea and the Moon

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Gratitude List:
1. That tiniest sliver of a moon last night
2. A hot cup of tea on a cold winter evening
3. Freshly tidied spaces
4. Tabula rasa–today, we begin a new semester
5. The way my hands will sometimes remind me of my mother’s hands.

May we walk in Beauty!