Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Trying to Unsee

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You can’t unsee things.  I would not have chosen to see that picture of the baby on the beach, but it popped up on my screen when a well-meaning friend put it on Facebook.  I can’t scratch it out of my brain, and the more I try to unsee it, the more it appears, unbidden.  Yesterday, it appeared in my head as I was playing in the water with my own children. A sudden chill overtook me, left me gasping, barely able to restrain myself from reaching out and grabbing my own laughing children, to pull them both from the water to safety.  When I was in college, I had a series of nightmares about seriously injured children asking me for help, and I couldn’t help them.  I could swear that this very image was in those dreams.

Other layers of worry catch me, too–the thought of all my shining teenagers with their phones, slipping like swimmers through the waters of the images that appear there, stumbling upon horror and gore: the world’s realities that they will not be able to unsee.  How will a photo of a drowned child compound their anxieties, their despairs, their rage?  How will such a picture drown their sense of safety and holiness and wonder about the world around them?

I want to know about the troubles of the world.  I think we need to, if we are to participate in the Work of changing the world.  I think my students need to know that we do not live in a perfect world–they, too, will need the information in order to become participants with us in the business of creating a more just and compassionate future.  Still, I do not want to see them stumbling into these terrifying boundary-lands. I do not want to wander here myself.

Yesterday, during our Staff Development Day at LMS, historian John Roth (our input speaker for the day) told a story of an Amishman quizzing a group of Mennonites about television.
“How many of you own a TV?” he asked.  Every hand went up.
“How many of you think you probably watch too much TV?”  Again, every hand went up.
“How many of you think that your children watch too much TV?”  Every hand.
“How many of you will go home today and get rid of your televisions?”  Nobody raised a hand.

I am not ready to simply accept the inevitability that my children will be witness to murder and tragedy via the screens that surround us.  I don’t want to accept that inevitability for my students, either, though I have less influence on that sphere.

I don’t know how to end this, how to wrap it up.  The loose ends are all over the place.  Pandora’s box is virtual, but it’s been opened, and a host of terrors and rages and sadnesses have been unleashed upon us.

 

After all that, I need a
Gratitude List:
1.  That box of yarn that came in the mail today.  Watching how the boys couldn’t keep their hands off it, how they immediately developed projects and plans for the different balls of yarn.  One small boy is planning to weave many, many little patches that he will sew together into a woven blanket.  The other made me show him how to crochet.

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2.  Music.  One boy is learning cello for the orchestra and trombone for the band.  And after my rant about technology, I must also note that I am grateful for the ability to use a computer program that helps him to listen for the pitch.
3.  Monarchs. I saw two adults today, and two caterpillars.
4.  Yesterday’s John Roth lectures on Teaching to Transform.  His final point of the day was an eloquent examination of a spiritual practice that I call Holding the Bowl of the Heart, and that he called something like Being Attentive to the Beauty of Holiness.  It’s about expansively opening oneself to wonder and awe, compassion and love, while recognizing that for humans, these experiences are intermixed with death and grief and shame and anger.  So one holds them all together, with an attentive awareness that both sides of experience inform and shape each other. Beauty is another of my names for God.
5.  Quartz and kyanite, garnet and serpentine.

May we walk in Beauty.

God the Wolf

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Today you are God the Wolf,
howling down the forest pathways of my memory,
padding through purple shadows into moonlight,
elusive as the fogs which drift into the clearings
where I listen for you calling,
calling me from comfort into wildness.

Gratitude List:
1. Wildness
2. Philosophizing about time with teenagers.
3. This Pope.  He called today a Day of Prayer of for the Environment, and he’s declaring a Jubilee Year of Mercy for next year.  Perhaps the rest of us will learn something, too.
4. The Heart.  Abstractly and physically.  Too many people in my village are experiencing heart trouble right now for my comfort.  May their hearts beat with strength and fortitude, and bring them life.  And your heart, too–may it be strong and full of life.
5. The heat will break, and cooler days will come again.  (Yes, that was a back-handed gratitude, if I ever wrote one.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Memory and Ideas

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Gratitude List:
1. “Transforming Memory.”  Thank you, Mindy!
2. Boy and his Grandma watching Little League championships together.
3. Reading the FB page for this weekend’s poetry tent.  The posts: one line from the poet’s pieces, and then a photo of the poet.  The lines themselves became poems of the poems, packing the meaning more tightly, into one crystal moment.  Powerful stuff.
4. New ideas, how they sprout in the unconscious like those sweet potatoes in the basement, sending sprouts straight up to the sunlight.
5. Sight, vision, observation

May we walk in Beauty!

Prophets in the Street

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Gratitude List:
1.The Poetry Spoken Here Tent at York Arts Fest:

The prophets are out in the streets
picking up the threads of the story.
The shamans, the healers,
the truth-tellers all,
singing and howling,
whispering at the top of their lungs.

This is how the wind changes, my people.
This is how the paradigm shifts.

Give my poets a megaphone.

2. Last night, we discovered a little online program-thing called Noteflight, which I can use to separate the tenor or bass line from a hymn so Ellis can see it by itself to make for easier reading.  Also, yesterday, he got his trombone at school.  After an hour or more of playing our instruments along with the tenor line of Ode to Joy, an exhausted and light-headed boy rhapsodized, “I love this!  I love this program!  I love music!”  May it be ever so.
3. Sandra.  Thank you for folding the laundry.  My goodness.  Thank you for inspiring my boys.  Thank you for being part of our village.
4. Heather Shining Stone Woman.  So good to see you.  Thankyou for the treasures.  My heart is over-flowing.  You gave me so much more than stones. . .
5. Creativity and the Muses.  That Radiolab moment today when they interviewed Elizabeth Gilbert.  I almost needed to park the car by the side of the road so I could get out and jump up and down.

May we all find our voices.

Violet Eyes

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Gratitude List:
1. Monty Python
2. The Amish girl with the ancient violet eyes who smiled at me almost conspiratorially–we both know where Mrs. M keeps her key.  Her eyes matched her dress, and she was a whiz on the scooter.
3. Hummingbirds in the morning glories.
4. Weekend
5. Friday morning Faculty Hymn Sing.  We suggest songs, we sing, we talk about our associations and ideas about the songs.  I have missed this over the summer.

May we walk in Song.

Morning Glories and You

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Gratitude List:
1. The electric color of those morning glories.  Vivid.  Dazzling.  Heart-stopping.
2. Yesterday morning at about this time, Joss and I were hanging out in the living room, like we are now, and he looked at the balcony window beside my head and gasped.  Mama Hummingbird was hovering outside, looking in at us.  (Bonus gratitude: weekend mornings with my boy.  I write.  He plays trains.)
3. How people hold each other in times of tragedy.
4. Having so many opportunities to do the things I love to do.
5. You and You and You.  You inspire me so much.  Even (or especially) when you say you don’t think you’re very strong, because you’re stronger than you realize.  Trust me on that.  You’re a survivor.  You are truly resilient, and it shows, even when it doesn’t feel like it to you.  You make that decision every day to do the one thing you know to do.

May we walk in Beauty.  Beauty Ever Ancient, Ever New.

Heat and Happiness

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Yesterday tended to be a little overwhelming in so many ways.  Mostly in that joyous, sort of out-of-body way that happens at any marvelous beginning.  It was delightful to be back in that garden of shining flowers, all those eager and timid and excited and anxious faces.  Each one carrying a web of associations and connections.

The heat, also, was overwhelming.  I think of myself as pretty tough in a hot situation, but it did almost conquer me by seventh period.   I need to drink more, I suppose.  The thought of adding another fan on top of my air conditioning unit and my other fan makes my voice ache.  I need to do some more strategizing about how to manage it.  I’ll use the computer labs every time they’re free, for one, though students tend to focus on the computer rather than on the other types of work when we’re in the labs.

Gratitude List:
1. There might be rain today–perhaps a break in the heat?
2. All those beautiful faces.
3. Being in a place where the work is the Work.
4. Beginning with a three-day week–slow starts.
5. My own children seem to have had a wonderful start to their year, too.

May we walk in Beauty!

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.