Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Playing Nicely Together

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rough beast
This is an old photo.  Winky is no longer with us, and I miss her.  For some reason, she loved to sleep in the nativity scene.  Fred did, too, but now he seems content to curl up underneath the tree.

Gratitude List:
1. Sometimes those kids play so beautifully together.  Yesterday afternoon, for almost an hour, they played the dreidel game together without fighting, without yelling.  Let’s all try to play nicely together too, shall we?
2. Salmon sunset in the hollow last night.
3. Untangling old patterns.  Drawing new ones.
4. Owls.  Most mornings I hear them as I am working here quietly.  May there always be great horned owls in the wood.
5. The week ahead.  May it be filled with satisfying work, powerful ideas, and loving connections.

May we walk in Beauty!

Growth

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A caution, from William Stafford:

“If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in
the world and following the wrong god
home, we may miss our star.”

found poem
A found poem I put together a year ago.

Gratitude List:
1. Cleaning and shifting in order to make room for Christmas.  Changing up the routine.  Even Mzee Fred, the old man cat, changed his routine: we couldn’t bear to kick him out last night–he looked so peaceful sleeping under the tree–so we left him there, and he didn’t come yowling up the stairs at 3:30 in typical fashion.  I woke him up this morning.
2. Taking a day’s break from the news.  I may do it again today.  Only a few moments at day’s beginning and day’s end. . .  Bringing the Contemplative and the Activist into balance.
3. Pattern and texture and line.  I have started exploring the meditative possibilities of Zentangles and doodles again, and am loving the way it helps me notice things, to pay attention.  It can get obsessive, as it did the other day when a girl with amazing braids walked into my class–I wanted to sit down and draw them.  She had braided several little strands of fishtail braid and then she braided those together.  Layers of line and texture.
4. Mercy.  Like dawn, like light streaming in, illuminating the dark corners.
5. How we grow together in wisdom.  One of us says something, and it sparks a new idea for the other.  Together we refine and develop and grow and share.  Isn’t it lovely how that works?  Thank you for being open to working new wisdom together.

May was walk in Beauty, in Mercy, in Wisdom.

News Break

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MO

I am taking the rest of the day off from news.

I am signing off for the rest of the day.
Today when I think about guns,
when I think about Syria,
when I think about politicos who infuriate me,
when I think about the students who are in such pain,
instead of riding the tide of fury or despair or anxiety,
I will take a moment to notice the feeling,
then go and focus on where the energy or prayer must go.
I am not even doing a public gratitude list today.
Know that I am grateful,
especially for you,
for all the light and wonder,
all the hope and energy,
all the passion and intensity
you bring to my life and to the world.
Walk in Beauty, in Peace, in Salaam, in Shalom.

Vigilance

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vigilance

Gratitude List:
1. Inner vigilance.  Not panicky hyper-attention, but calm and thoughtful dropped and open attention.  So much to learn about the world.
2. The sun-limned cloud on the journey home from school yesterday.
3. Making art with  a small person.
4. Watching a small person dive headfirst into the world of literature.  (Now to make sure he can get anything else done.)
5. Honey.  Those bees know what they’re doing.  As Ellis said once when he was about three: “Honey is my favorite medicine.”

May we walk in Beauty!

The Contemplative and the Activist

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Kloster Disibodenberg
Kloster Disibodenberg

Two streams have been nudging me in different directions lately.

On one hand, I have been working through the Desert Wisdom Advent series from Spirituality and Practice.  While it can be frustrating to try to dig further into a contemplative life during the hustle and bustle of the daily, I believe that it is possible, and this is helping me to find my spaces.  I am trying to maintain that interior castle (was it Teresa of Avila who called it that?), the place of calm and contemplation that keeps me from getting whirled away by the whirlwind of the moment.

The other stream is the rising despair that I am feeling about the lack of will we seem to have in the United States to do anything about our mass murder problem.  We begin to look like people who live in a repressive political regime, unwilling and unable to make a change because the oppressor is too big for us to conquer.  But here it isn’t a government that is keeping us cowed and silent–it’s the NRA.  What keeps us from standing up and saying, “Enough already!”  The US has had more gun-related mass murders than there have been days in 2015.  I think we need an active anti-NRA revolution.

I glibly wrote something the other day about how the work of the contemplative needs to feed the work of the activist in order to keep the activist from despair, in order to keep the contemplative from irrelevance.  Perhaps that can be true.  Somehow I need to find the link.  Contemplation and calm are not the same thing as apathy and impotence.  Perhaps activism can be honed and sharpened by inner work.

Gratitude List:
1. New batch of fire cider on the way
2. Today’s brain is less foggy than yesterday’s
3. Thursday (it’s almost Friday)
4. Ginger
5. Rich colors for drab days

May we walk in Beauty!

Clear Vision

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monastery
“Amma Syncletica said, ‘There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s own mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.’ “

Gratitude List:
1. Elderberry syrup
2. Story to listen to on the journey
3. Boy making Christmas
4. Clear vision
5. Developing the interior castle

May we walk in Beauty!

Nurse-Boy

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phoenix
“If you will, you can become all flame,” said Abba Joseph to Abba Lot.

Gratitude List:
1. A small nurse-boy.  When they got home from their grandparents’ house yesterday, and I was waking up groggily and painfully from a nap, a small boy sprang into action.  He started rubbing my feet.  Then he called out to his dad, “Dad!  Bring her some food!”  Then he called out to his brother, “Hey!  Come rub her feet while I go get my violin and play her some music!”  No matter that he was doing his Worst-Whiner Schtick within minutes.  I felt greatly cared-for.
2. Feeling better.  I knew it would happen.  I still sound like a granddaddy bullfrog, and I look pretty pale and ashen, but I feel so much better.
3. This Advent course that a friend gave me.  It’s from Cynthia Bourgeault’s Spirituality and Practice group.  It is on the spirituality of the desert abbas and ammas.  I am learning lots.  Today’s lesson is hard.  It’s good for me.
4. Shifting practices.  I will continue to write regular poems, but I am glad for a break from the prompts for a while.  Imposed discipline from the outside is important, but then it needs to settle into the corners a bit.
5. Brownies

May we walk in Beauty!

The Moment

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I lay down for a nap, to try to sleep off some of this fog.  I thought that perhaps I could catch a fish from the dream-stream for the poem that I am to write today.  The prompt is “let the moment begin.”  When I woke up, the last line of this poem that I wrote in April of 2014 was singing itself over and over again in my head.  It took me about half an hour to realize it was my own.

Prayer

To wait within the moment for the coming dawn,
To breathe the single breath of all that lives,
To walk the web on which we all belong,
To face the newborn day with love instead of fear.

To listen for the whisper of the Spirit’s wind,
To feel Creator’s heartbeat in the world around,
To hear the grace of the Beloved in my neighbor’s voice,
To embrace the sacred space between the past and change.

* * * *

So, today’s poem might look a little like this:

Step into the stream of time and change,
feel the tug and swirl that draws you on,
swimming where the current takes you.
Say the words that hammer at your throat:

I am here.

And again, as you feel the current take you,
no longer the same here where you were:

I am here.  And here.  I am here.

Let it echo from the walls of your heart
as the stream bears you onward and outward.
Each time you say it, you burst into flame,
all flame, all wind, all perfect dreaming:

I am here.

I Am Here

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Home sick from school today, but lost to be grateful for.

Gratitude List:
1. The painting of a road above the altar yesterday.
2. Singing, singing, singing
3. Ruby Bridges–her courage and her determination.  If a six-year-old could pray daily for those people who daily abused her, perhaps I can find it in me to pray for these presidential candidates who get my goat?
4. Meditation.  The Desert Ammas and Abbas.  Zentangle.
5. I know I will feel better again.  I sort of forget what normal feels like, and it has only been a few days of this.  Still, I know that I will get better.  I say an extra prayer for those who live with permanent or chronic illness or disability.

May we walk in Beauty!

An Open Letter

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Today’s Prompt is An Open Letter.  I am so beaten up by this bad cold that I can’t even think straight to write.

An Open Letter to the Bug

I don’t even know what to call you:
A Bad Cold? Feverless Flu? Exasperation?
Whatever.  I concede.  You’ve got me.

I knew going in to that family party three days ago
that I was already sunk, but I struggled onward,
enjoyed the day, and likely infected at least three loved ones.

By yesterday, I was sure I was back on my feet again
but you laid me so low, I couldn’t even taste
that sweet potato casserole, that shoo-fly pie.

Today was just a blur of throwing good money
after bad.  I can just do this one more thing,
I thought, but I’m a goner now, for sure.

I’ll soak myself in Ny-Quil
and sleep you out of my system.