Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Here We Go Again!

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This has to be brief.  My mornings have hit the sudden shift.  Up at 5:30, quick lunch prep and kitchen tidying, a few minutes on the computer, and out the door by 6:30 at the latest.

I am a swirling ball of excitement and anxiety.  This is the “good” kind of anxiety, I think–the kind that keeps me moving and energized.

I would be glad of your prayers and Presence as I go into the classroom today.  And pray for my students, for all students and teachers, for yourself as you are filling some sort of teaching role in the world.  Let us tend to our work, but also to our Work.

Blessings.

Gratitude List:
1. My open-hearted  and playful and earnest colleagues
2. The administrative people of my school.  This is a place where I can walk into the principal’s office to get a little clarity about classroom behavior management and end up in a discussion about grace and compassion.
3. The maintenance and custodial and computer and office staff who keep it all running behind the scenes.
4. The parents of my students who are entrusting their young people to my care.
5. My students.  Shining.

May we walk in Beauty!

Whiplash

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This is a whiplash of a week, one of those times when the emotional setting is not tuned to a specific feeling, but is simply set on High.

Excitement?  In spades.  School starts tomorrow.

Anxiety?  Under control, but really bubbly.  School starts tomorrow.

Lament?  Really, really deep.  Tomorrow evening is the life celebration for a good man who left the world too soon.

Joy?  Absolutely. I h ave only to lift my eyes up and look about me in these mid-August days to fine something that makes my heart sing.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Emotions.  They’re a compass, even when they’re all over the place.
2. Contemplation.  Breathing.  Grounding the emotions, so I can really experience them, rather than simply dashing wildly from one to the other.
3. The tender orange sliver of a rising new moon last night as I was leaving LMH.  I am a believer in omens (propitious ones at least), and that one felt like a gentle nod toward the hope and the delight that this coming year brings.
4. Seasons turning.  Constancy.  One thing comes after another.
5. Feathers.  I’ve told this story before, because it fills me with wonder.  Last year and the year before, for at least six or seven weeks in the months of July and August, I found an almost daily feather.  Both years, there were perhaps two or three days in a six-week span when a feather did not appear in my path.  This year has broken the pattern somewhat.  I am definitely finding more feathers all of a sudden, one every two or three days.  Yesterday morning, just as I left for a computer training at school, there was one, on the pavement right at the door of my car.

May we walk in Beauty!
Keep your heart-eyes open.

Gratitude and Praise

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Gratitude List:
1. The first school events for the year are happening today.  First is a computer system training, and I always feel like I can use more training on the computer details.  And it will be delightful to see colleagues again.  In the evening is the New Student Orientation.  I’ll be sorry to miss my own children’s back-to-school night, but I’m really excited to get the room looking welcoming and friendly, and then to start meeting some of my new students and their parents.
2. Richard Rohr’s Mystics series.  I have always been drawing to the writings of the mystics, to their poetry, to the stories of their lives, but it’s only recently, in this series, that I feel as though I am beginning to understand a little of what a contemplative life might look like.
3. The Village that is helping us to raise our children: grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, friends, farm community, and teachers.  Tonight they will meet the teachers who will be with them through this year.  I am trying to get in touch with the anxiety I feel on behalf of my children: Will the teachers like them?  Will they be kind?  Will they understand my kids’ quirks?  Will they laugh with them?  This is one of those turn-around moments: So often, I think in terms of being the teacher that my students need; today, I commit to considering how I can be the teacher that mu students’ parents need me to be for their beloved young people.
4. Old friends and new ones.  I love you all.
5. The hunger, the ache, the longing for Beauty.

May we walk in Beauty!

Here is the second of the Psalms that I am writing for this series at my church.  One of my favorite ways to write poetry is to have an idea that burns in me, and then to suggest to that idea that it has a particular pathway to follow in order to come outside to play, and this project has three.  The parameters of this project are that the poems are: 1) They’re to be Psalms (I am free to interpret that as I choose–I am trying to make the language Psalm-like), 2) They each have a theme (desire, laments, praise, thanksgiving. . .), 3) They fit the Confessional moment in the church service.  Last August I was writing a short poem a day for a postcard project.  I didn’t do that one this year, but I am really grateful for this one: I am discovering that even when life is really busy, having a specific poetic task in the back of my head helps to frame the contemplative work of a season.

Psalm: Praise
10 August 2015

Yours is the music that enters our hearts.
Delight of you enlivens our voices to join in the song.
We are born to worship our Maker.

The world is awash in color and music;
your works are enkindled in sparkle and dazzle.
Every bright bird, each flashing star,
the chirp of the cricket and drone of cicada,
roaring waterfall, quivering leaf–
all of creation sings your glory.

We have only to look up and outward,
and wonder will fill our mouths with praise.

Yet daily our hands reach out
for wealth and power and fame,
instead of rising to praise you.

Our eyes are set on the glitter and shine
of all the distractions that we have made,
and not on your grace and your beauty.

Our voices turn to bitter complaint,
to quarrels and bluster and grumbling,
instead of joining creation’s constant hymn
of praise to the Creator.

O God of wonder and beauty and grace,
open the eyes of our hearts,
awaken our senses to all you have made,
that our spirits may rise in wonder,
that our voices may open in song,
that our days may be filled with praise.

Stones and Words

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Carin

Gratitude List:
1. Last night’s late-night conversation, like John O’Donohue describes, where “you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the [group] of you on to a different plane.”
2. “The winds are changing.”  And the moment in a thoughtful conversation when someone starts to stitch the narrative together with a simple phrase that holds the weight of the conversation like strong spider silk.  This is the furthest thing from a platitude–it’s more like a group mantra.  And it gets taken up like a little chorus, with a rueful smile or a sudden moment of eye contact, repeated from one person to another: “The winds are changing.”  We recognize in the moment something of how very different our lives are and how very the same.
3. How the conversation continues over time.  It isn’t really separate conversations that take place year to year to year, but one long conversation that builds on itself.  How a word gets used today that rings a bell in memory and draws out an image of the same word used in the same space with the same people, a year ago, or two, or three.  How meaning evolves, not just within myself, but in the group.
4. Preparing the heart space.  So much work remains to be done, but the work on the heart moves on apace.
5. Presence.  I have so much to learn about being truly Present.  I think this may be one of the Next Steps.

So much Love.

Sunflowers and Desire

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Gratitude List:
1. “We do not have to live as though we are alone.”  –Wendell Berry
2. Sunflowers
3. Hospitality
4. Indigo: Though perhaps I only have an inkling of it, I think I am learning what it is
5. Changing Gears

May we walk in Beauty!

Here is a Psalm that I wrote, at my pastor’s request, for church last Sunday.  (It doesn’t look so elegant on the page here as it does in the original formatting, but I am too tired to figure out how to make it work in this processor):

Psalm: Desire

O God of Beauty,
God of Marvel,
God of Wonder,
the whole universe that you have made
is built upon desire:
the force that holds electrons in atomic orbit,
that keeps the planets in their dance around the sun,
and wheels the spiraled walk of galaxies
is that same force which holds us to the earth,
which pulls the tides up the beach and back,
and calls us from complacency
to yearn for something more.

Not only do we hunger for you, O God,
but you are the very force of our longing,
the Magnet which draws us ever outward
from the limiting walls of our own egos
to seek your face in all that surrounds us,
to seek your heart in the hearts of our neighbors,
to follow the pathway that leads us homeward.

Our yearning for you is an echo
of your own yearning for your children.

May we carry the knowledge within us,
deep in our cellular constellations,
pulled with the tides of our blood,
that our own deepest longings
are the echoes of your voice
calling us to you.

Draw us ever closer to your Center,
as the sun holds the planets in constant orbit,
as a mother draws her child to her heart,
that our longing may lead us always to you,
our Truest Home.

Layers of Dream

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Gratitude List:
1. Good, thoughtful, life-giving, enriching conversations
2. A day mostly to myself
3. That nap.  Full of those dreams where I kept waking up, and then realizing that I was only waking up within the dream.  And I could just swat that little gnat of Waking Self and say, “But nobody needs anything from you today.  You can stay ten layers down in Dream, if you want.”  And so I did.
4. Sacred Clowns.  (Keep your heart-light on the ones in your life, though–they carry more weight than they let on.  That’s what makes them sacred clowns.)
5. Color and texture and pattern.

May we walk in Beauty!

Fierce Compassion

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I have been trying to figure out how, in the midst of my rages and furies, to find compassion, holding it all in the bowl of the heart.  That is my primary practice.

But now, I think that the work moves forward to a discipline more grammatical–in which order shall I place my adjectives and my nouns, my adverbs, my verbs?  It makes a difference, see:

Shall I be a keeper of a grave grace?  Or shall I practice grace within my gravity?  Shall I continue to seek for compassion in my rage and my anger?  Or shall I actively practice fierce compassion?

How will that look when I walk into a story in which I see harm being done? Sharing compassion fiercely rather than sharing anger compassionately?  Being gravely graceful rather than being gracefully grave?  The order matters, and it will happen differently in different situations, I think.

My story keeps beginning again.

(Thanks to The Story for the “Grace in Gravity” reference and to my friend Lisa Walker LeFevre for opening my heart to the phrase “fierce compassion.)

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Tree spirit.  (Photographed with a mirroring app.)

Gratitude List:
1. Fierce compassion.
2. Butterflies everywhere.  They belongs on the list again and again and again.
3. Milo Zen Puppy.  I haven’t written a gratitude list since I met him a couple days ago, and he is likely the cutest person to ever walk on four legs.  Really.  This is not hyperbole.
4. Radiance.  I mean the shop this time–it was such a pleasure to be there again, in the scents and the colors and all of it.  Seeing Sarah again.  Touching all the stones.  Coming home smelling like Radiance.
5. Radiance.  Yours, this time.  Yours and yours and yours. You shine.  You help me want to keep growing and being a better person.  You push me toward Love.

May we walk in Love.

Spiders and Space

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Gratitude List:
1. Watching children wake up.  They’re like spiders, beginning all curled in on themselves, and then there’s the release of the limbs and suddenly they’re all elbows and knees and long limbs flailing and twisting.  I think there are only four limbs per kid, but I wouldn’t be surprised some days if there were eight.
2. August suppers: corn on the cob and tomato sandwiches and blueberries.
3. Making spaces: I spent yesterday in my classroom, puttering and making spaces, getting ready for my students.  The excitement is beginning outweigh the worries about not being ready enough.
4. Sweaty little hands in mine.  I feel time passing, feel their childhoods slipping by at a rate that makes me uneasy.  I want to hold onto those little hands as long as I can.
5. Butterflies everywhere.  The flowerbeds are alive with all manner of swallowtails and commas and question marks (English teachers have their own butterflies!), and I keep seeing monarchs whenever I am driving anywhere.  Fly safely, little ones!
(6. Bonus: In last night’s dream, Billy Collins came to visit, and we recited his poetry together.  I even recited some Mary Oliver for him, and he was impressed.)

May we walk in Beauty!

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Jon holding the mastodon vertebrae and rib, directions, my boy shows his wings, weaving light at the science museum, Kalamazoo Promise, Jon’s great-grandfather’s tractor, boys and their new stuffed animals (where am I going to sit?)

Gratitude List:
1. Safe home from Michigan
2. Snuggles from a happy cat
3. The Wind in the Willows–good travel reading, but my voice is hoarse (I think I read aloud for about six hours today)
4. Screech Owl whinnying a welcome when we arrived home
5. Clouds

May we walk in Beauty!

Lake

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Gratitude List:
1. Osprey and great blue heron wheeling high above the lake
2. Dragonflies flirting and darting above the lake surface
3. Swallows skimming the lake surface
4. Sun sparkling and shimmering across the surface of the lake
5. Children shining in the waters of the lake
6. The best ever seafood taco

May we walk Shining in Beauty!