Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

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Gratitude List:
1. Snow geese.  In the distance, it looks like a flock of Canadas, but there’s something less substantial about them, leaner, longer in the wing–and their silhouettes are just a little lighter in the blue.  Then they flash in the sun and you see the white, and the onyx wingtips.  The turning of wheel into spring is real when the sojourners begin their trek homeward.
2. The great horned owls are out there calling each other.
3. I never did write about that Full Moon last Tuesday, how it was hanging over the edge of the horizon as I drove out the driveway in the morning, and how, when I cleared the top of the ridge, it suddenly seemed to leap into the sky.
4. I am grateful for the way my church values children.  Participation in services, rituals and rites of passage, and Child Protection Policy.  A whole Sunday service and sermon given to the need to have a strong and sound Child Protection Policy.
5. Walking around the farm this afternoon with my little scientist, photographing animal tracks and scat.
6. Singing a sick child to sleep.
7. Balance.  Form and Freedom.  Structure and Creative License.  I had some really good discussions last Friday with several of my classes about rules, why we need them, why we sometimes need to break them.  About extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for ethical behavior.  About consequences and responsibility.  I have some wise, wise people in my life, and many of those wise folks are under the age of twenty.

May we walk in Beauty.

Taking a Walk

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Random thoughts from a walk around the farm this afternoon:

–This Step-Counting contest at school is doing what it is supposed to, getting me out and walking.  I am afraid I am letting my team down with my low, low numbers.  I am more sedentary than I admitted to myself–grading and FB and granny squares and playing Legos keeps me sitting in one place.  A lot.
–On one hand the pedometer feels like a ball and chain.  I check it every half hour or so throughout the day, and I am feeling incredible pressure to get up and walking.  On the other hand, it pushes me to get outside and walk, which I don’t usually take the time for, so it’s freeing me, too.
–I like being on a walk.  I live having been walking.  I like having walked.  I just don’t like going walking.  It’s the anticipation and the getting myself in gear part that I don’t like.
–There were tracks everywhere in the last bits of snow and slush: deer, squirrel, bird, bird, bird, and canid.  Maybe that last is fox, maybe dog, maybe coyote.
–I haven’t seen a coyote in years, though Jon saw a pair of them only a couple weeks ago.  I was pretty desperate to find evidence of them in the tracks today.  One set of tracks had a really largish print, and the claws pushed deep into the snow.
–I found a grey-ish owl pellet and broke it apart to look for the mouse bones. But then I realized it was probably a misshapen piece of raccoon poo.
–The bees are sleeping.  I wonder how they’re surviving the winter in their hive.
–I found two unopened pods in one of the milkweed patches.  We brought them down to the house.  Jon has been collecting milkweed seeds with the hope that he can get some to grow in the spring to give away.
–One Small Boy came up to me and said, “Best snack ever!” as he crunched a chunk of ice in his left hand and then chewed off a bite of the kale in his right hand.
–That yellow frost-nipped kale looks about as winter-bitten as I feel right now.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Wind that scours
2. Fire that transforms
3. Water that purifies
4. Earth that supports
5. Spirit that inspires

May we walk in Beauty!

Geese and Crows and Oh-the-Wind!

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Gratitude List:
1. That gypsy wind yesterday, on Brighid’s Day, that scoured the sky, scooped me through the afternoon, tossed geese and crows about like winter leaves.
2. Those crows, those devil-may-care rebels, those renegades, those defiant fliers.  They leapt into the wind, fierce and fearless.
3. Those geese, less jaunty than the crows, more at the mercy of the winds.  Still, they motored on through the gales.  And then one group banked against the grey background of cloud, and they were snow geese, sojourners already returning.  And then there were whole flocks, and some were dark, the Canadas, who live here all year long, and some were the frosty white northerners with their jet black wing tips.  And did I mention it was Brighid’s Day?
4. And on the subject of the wind, there is that new art installation at the new train station in Lancaster with all those twisty bits that whirl in the breeze and stop my heart for just the briefest moment before it goes dancing away with the wind.
5. And then there was that tangerine glow this morning, and two rays of sunlight shooting a magenta X across the low grey cloud, an X that seemed to mark this very moment in time, the quarter point between the cross points of the Solstices and Equinoxes, this Quickening season of Brighid, of the Candle, of the Time-of-the-Small-Animals-Awakening.

Beauty all Around!

Welcoming What Comes

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It is Groundhog’s Day. That whistle pig is the guide. It’s time to assess: What will I keep hidden in the dark recesses of winter and what will I bring out into the light? As the groundhog is emerging from winter sleep and starting to think about the Farmer’s vegetables, what will I open my own eyes to? What plans will I make for the coming season?  How ill I nourish myself?

It is Brigit’s Day. Her followers committed themselves to keep her fires always lit. What flames need my vigilance and attention in the coming year?  What paths and processes will I commit myself to following?  What will be my contemplative work in these final weeks of winter?

It is Candlemas. Time to tend to the candles, to bless the tools that will give me light in the coming year.

Here’s to February, the longest month.

Gratitude List:
1. The work of the emergency Women’s Shelter in Lancaster at the YWCA.
2. Early morning sun and late afternoon sun casting long blue shadows of trees over the snowy fields.
3. Looking forward.  Looking backward.  Looking inward.
4. Six weeks.  It’s only six weeks.  I can make it through winter.
5. You.  Thank you for all the ways you keep the fires lit, all the ways you bring light, all the ways you lift your candles and say, “Here.  This is the way.”

May we walk in Beauty!

Small Town

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Today’s Auto Writing Prompt: Featuring at least one example from each of the five senses, describe a small town.  It is helpful for me to force myself to do a sudden descriptive writing piece since this is the type of work I demand from my students.

The town marches straight up the hillside. Walking up Main Street from the River, you feel the weight of gravity pulling you backwards and downwards.  Perhaps it’s the weight of the town’s own defiant history, furtively harboring the desperate people who followed the River northward to freedom and burning the bridge across the River to keep the southern armies from marching on their neighbors to the east.  Brick and stone and wood–your fingers can almost trace the layers of history, read the stories of rebellion and desperation in the walls of this town.

On a clear breezy day, you will just catch the briefest whiff of the metallic tang mingled with rot (almost more a taste than a smell) that comes from the dump high on the ridge, and the town is daily filled with the rumble of trucks from many parts of Pennsylvania and her neighbors on their way to unload their burdens at the landfill.

Gratitude List:
1. The heart-filling gratitude of students.
2. Little naps
3. Nailing it, but also trying again when I don’t nail it. So, second chances.
4. Being part of a team, a net, a compassionate web–knowing that others are also looking out for the ones I feel troubled about
5. Snowy mornings.  My favorite thing, besides a little extra time in the mornings with my family, is seeing the tracks in the snow.  Cat feet. Squirrel feet. Bird feet.  Wingtips.

May we walk in Beauty!

Breaching Innocence

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I had an anguished moment of breaching my child’s innocence tonight. It all started with the project I was helping him with, a poster on Thurgood Marshall. And that’s great, right?

And we read that he was a staunch opponent of the death penalty. And that’s great, right?

Only: “What is that, Mom? What is the death penalty?”
Really, I had no idea he didn’t know. I told him. I am a firm believer in not unpacking the harsh realities too early for children, but I don’t believe in the outright lie.

“But then the person who put someone to death would have to be put to death, too, right? And then on and on. . .”

Me: “Yes, it would seem like that, but we say that it is the state that puts them to death, not the person.”

Quiet. Thoughtful eyes. “Well, I’m glad they don’t do that anymore.”
Oh, Sonny. “Well, actually. . .”

Then, with certainty, “Only in other countries, right?”
Really. He said that. I knew we were going all the way down this trail. “No, here, too.”

And, here it comes: “But not in Pennsylvania?”

“Yes, in Pennsylvania, too, Buddy. I’m not happy about any of it myself.”

At least if he needs to know this small and terrible truth, he has it in the context of the good man of Thurgood Marshall. Loving Source of the Universe, may he always find violence confusing and strange. May he be one who works for the best of human good.

Waking Up

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Today’s Writing Prompt from Auto Writing Prompt is to write a two sentence story with a mood change.

I have been walking through this fog, in this wood, since before there was a before.  Today I saw a shimmering silver light above the trees.

Gratitude List:
1. Deer on the hillside
2. Sharp-shinned hawk in a tree
3. Snowflakes
4. Baby wombats (google “baby wombat images”)
5. Mary Oliver’s “Starlings in Winter” (you can google that, too)

May we walk in Beauty!

Child of Promise

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Yesterday’s writing prompt from a friend of a friend: “Write a seven sentence story featuring a grape leaf, a kayak, and the color chartreuse.”

So I tried my hand at a sort of flash fiction thingie in the interstices of the day. I think mine turned out more like a fragment or the conclusion of a larger piece than an actual story, but here goes. Seven sentences, and all the necessary words included.

Eleanor the Illustrious, Queen of Chickenroost, opened her eyes just as the golden kayak of the sun slipped free of its horizon moorings and sailed into view above the hills east of the farm. Shadows shifted in the corners of the coop, and Eleanor ruffled the last sooty vestiges of night from her speckled feathers, keeping one bright eye on the strange Visitor who snored shallowly, curled in a pile of straw across the room from her nesting box.

On the rooftop, the sudden clarion of Janticle’s matins rang forth upon the hills and fields, juddering the Visitor to a wakeful and wary crouch, patchy grey fur a-quiver and bare pink tail snaking over the dusty floor.

“Mistress,” spoke the tiny royal hen into the ringing silence that followed the Rooster-king’s bugling, “you will be safe as long as you stay in these lands. We have heard tales, whispered from the rafters by wandering spiders and trilled through the gardens by sparrows and finches returning from sojourns in southern lands, of the Brave and Valiant deeds of Chartreuse D’Rat, and of the Vanquishing of Moses the Viper only last week in the Battle of the Vineyard.”

Chartreuse the Mighty calmed visibly as Her Ladyship spoke, and–bowing low and murmuring her thanks–held out the bundle she had carried close and warmed with her own body heat for the last days of her long journey.

“Here,” she said, unwrapping a small brown egg from a grape leaf and placing it gently beneath the soft feathers of the amazed Queen, “is the Child of the Prophecy.”

Clouds like Mountains

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Gratitude:
1. Coyotes in the bosque.  I didn’t see them.  Jon did.  (Now my heart is a little fluttery with sadness because this afternoon, someone knocked on our door and asked if he could hunt foxes and coyotes on our property. We said, “No, we like them here.”)
2. The sound of the white-throat as we shoveled the drive this morning.
3. Family.  Weaver family reunion this afternoon.  It’s great to re-connect and hear everyone’s stories.
4. Those clouds that looked like mountains in the distance.
5. When people’s dreams come true.

May we walk in Beauty!

So Much Depends

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Gratitude List:
So much depends upon. . .
1. Crows and crows and crows
2. in a white winter field
3. beside a red barn.

4. And a snowy break from routine
5. and a nap.

May we walk in Beauty!