Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

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My brain has been so focused of late on forms of speech other than poetry.  This one will have to be a place holder, I think, so that I can come back to the subject of that blue.  I know poets have written of blue before.  Still, I need to find my own words for this blue.  It’s not the blue of sadness, though it holds sadness deep within it.  It’s too simple, somehow, to say that it represents love.  Love is too broad for one color.  But that is in there, too.  I need to go to an art museum this winter, and look for it, or go back to that little chapel with the Chagall windows near the Hudson River and let the blue light wash me.

there will need to be more poems
more poems about the blue

the Samaritan’s clothes
as he lifts the dying man
on van Gogh’s mountain

the welling glow
of any Chagall window
where you stand in the shine
and blue surrounds you
while angels and ordinaries
float in the ether

or Mary’s cloak
the blue of the world
which was borne within her

 

Gratitude List:
1.  My family is fed.  Jon cooks wonderful meals.  Mom and other friends have shared food with us.  We’re finding our way into this new rhythm.
2.  Elderberries and sleep: magic healing duo.  Crossing my fingers that they will continue to hold this cold at bay.
3.  Another student story: Yesterday as I was tidying up the room during my planning period, a student that I know mostly by sight stopped by on her way somewhere else and started to tell me about the Peace Fellowship group that she is a part of.  She began speaking very articulately about justice and compassion and love, about working together in intergenerational groups, about encouraging diversity, about how she believes the work of peace is intimately bound up with the work of caring for the earth.  I held her words tenderly and thanked her and told her I would look up her peace group, and all the while I was hearing the words of Miranda in The Tempest, “Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!”  There’s hope.  So much hope in this next generation.
4.  This beautiful rock that Suzy brought me: red sandstone-looking bits, black lave-like bits, and shiny, sparkly twinkles all throughout.
5.  I am not necessarily grateful that I am no longer finding a daily feather, but I am grateful that the transition is occurring.  I have made the leap.  My wings have held in the winds, for the most part.  No I need to find my feet on earth.  Now is the time to move from feathers to stones.  Roots.  Solidity.

May we walk in Beauty!

Bridges

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Gratitude List:
1.  The way the setting sun slants between the trees at the corner where the bees live, making the hive and the beeyard glow, while everything else is in shadow.
2.  Grammar.  The structure of language,  The way it creates the bridge over which our ideas can  travel between us.  I know I have been repeating versions of this one recently.  It’s just that as I delve more deeply again into this sacred discipline of the structure of language, I am again struck by what a miracle and a gift speech is.
3.  Singing in a circle so we can look into each others’ eyes.
4.  Exhausting as it is to add more work to my plate, I am loving this first course of the set that my school requires new teachers to take.  This one is called Building Caring Communities.  In some ways it feels a bit like a repeat of work I have done in college and grad school, and on my own in the intervening years, but I think I always gain new insight when I step back into different topics, especially when I am with a new cohort.
5.  Cool morning.

May we walk in Beauty.

Word-Bridges

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I need to take my moments of contemplation when I can get them these days.  Only three weeks into the semester, and I have already (at least once) left a piece of my lesson planning to the morning.  And that eats up not only time, but also confidence.  Yet I am feeling an internal sense that not only should I be maintaining my morning reflection time, but perhaps I need to expand my writing practices.  Now, because I am spending my days teaching writing, when I write for myownself, I am keenly conscious of how I am moving around inside these sentences, pulling the ideas of this sentence into being perhaps even while I typed the previous sentence.  Considering whether a fragment here might be well-used to effect.  Wondering whether I can hold onto the depth of the idea that I am working with if I shift for a moment into discussion of the what happens when I explore the room of a sentence while I am writing it.

You and I, we are individual universes, separate in our separate realms, joined by. . .what?  (Meta-mind wonders how I should have punctuated that one and hopes a grammarian friend will give suggestions.) What is the web that connects us in our isolated worlds?  Love and hope, certainly.  Gesture and expression.  Still, we need language to channel those deep rivers of self between us, to make the webs between us glow and shine.  As we build these word, bridges, construct whole rooms and tunnels of sentences, cities of paragraphed ideas, our worlds connect.  I can write to you and you can write to me, and we can say to each other that we know each other, even if we have not seen each others’ faces.  Just because of words.  May all our words bring deeper understanding, more powerful connections.

Gratitude List:
1.  Personal pep-talks, for that is what this has been.  It was a short night, and it promises to be a hot day in the classroom, me yelling my words out over the fans.  Still, I cannot be anything but grateful to for the gift of this opportunity to help this cohort of 90 young people develop and perfect their ability to work with language, this magical tool for human connection.  May it be so.
2.  The great horned owls.  I know I just wrote about them a couple days ago, but their deep and startling voices here in the fall are almost as trance-inducing as my friend the oriole was in spring.  When I am grumbling at the rude voice of the alarm clock, the sudden surprised whooping of the owls in the bamboo forest will make me smile and be glad to be awake in this darkness.
3.  Following my predecessor at the school.  She was well-loved by quite a number of students.  Random students keep wandering in and looking around, a little lost, and introducing themselves as former students of hers.  Some of them even return repeatedly, as though simply the memory of her in that room makes it a haven amidst the bustle of the school day.  Big shoes to fill.  I’ll be my own me, of course, but do my best to keep her light shining in the window.
4.  Word-bridges.  Sentence-halls.  Paragraph-houses.  All these artificial structures and codes that we have created in millennia of human development that enable us to close the space between us.
5.  Annoying as his constant demands for attention, food, attention, and food can be, I love the way Fred the cat meows, his whole face getting into the act.  I love the way he won’t take no for an answer when he wants snuggles and I am wearing a dark blue dress that cannot have orange cat hair upon it.  I had to go get a blanket to cover me because he would have his mama-cuddle this morning, no matter what I said.

May we walk in Beauty!

So Much We Do not See

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There is so much we do not see.
We walk through a maze of rocks on a beach
and think that all the world is washed in beige,
when before us lie the myriad possibilities
of the rainbow, if we would only turn our gazes
to the shine, the light that splinters
into beauty on every surface.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  The great horned owls are calling this morning.  I have heard three distinct voices, I think.  Their call, here in the hollow, is the same rhythm as I have heard it elsewhere, but there’s something different, like a regional accent, an extra light bounce between the early notes.
2.  From my end, chapel seemed to go well yesterday.  They seemed attentive to what I was saying.  I talked about the Open Bowl of the Heart: the practice I do, when I get to feeling hopeless and despairing about what is wrong in the world, of visualizing that my heart can hold it all, the stories of horror right alongside the stories of unexpected kindness and the beauty around me.
3.  Elderberries!  Thanks to my wonderful friend Tabea, I now have two large bags of berries in the freezer, enough to make quite a bit of syrup to keep my family healthy in the coming winter, I hope.
4.  Unexpected kindnesses.  A student I have never met walked into my classroom and deposited on my desk a picture that he had drawn for me, a beautiful pencil rendering of a movie heroine.  Apparently he used to draw pictures for my predecessor, and he decided to keep up the tradition.  Lucky me!
5.  This gray moth that is fluttering about in front of the computer has a little flash of rosy sheen when its wings catch the light just so, and when it slows down enough for me to see.  It’s sort of like the magic of moonstone or labradorite, appearing dull and grayish on the surface, but filled with faerie twinkles when it is turned to the light just so.  Maybe people are like that, too, the ones who seem to be going about the day in a gray pallor, not drawing particular attention to themselves suddenly shine forth a color you can’t even name, it comes on you so whimsically.

May we walk in Beauty!

Singing and Stories

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Sign outside of a building and remodeling business in York:  “Do more of what makes you holy.”

Gratitude List:
1.  The singing.  Oh, the singing!  The listening, the paying attention, the blending of voices, the breathing.
2.  This story: about the Christian man and the Muslim man who traveled together for a time, and every morning read together from the Bible and the Quran.
3.  The morning glories raising their violet and magenta throats toward the dawning.
4.  Yesterday, one boy shared his dessert with the other, oh so kindly, oh so gently.  Little moments that make me remember that all the work is paying off.
5.  The changing of weather and of season–always a new thing in the air to anticipate.

May we walk in Beauty!

Finding Time, Staying Challenged

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Not so much time for poems these days.  Hardly time to catch my breath for the gratitude lists.  All is well.  All is growing and changing.  Moving.  I am tired, so weary.  I am energized, so excited.  I feel competent and capable, but I am also humbled by the fact that I have so very much to learn.

Gratitude List:
1.  More feathers.  Two days ago, as I was walking out of school, I was thinking to myself that I hadn’t found a feather yet that day, and I thought perhaps the daily feather find was at an end.  I had it in my head, the actual words “There will be no more feathers.”  But there, on the sidewalk in front of me was yet another feather.  I have been telling my students that they get to make the meaning of their stories, and I told some of them about the feathers.  I can be the scientific naturalist and say that I find a feather every single day because there are owls in the trees at night eating little birds and crows fighting as they fly above my house and school.  I can say that the Universe is offering me little gifts to remind me that I have wings, that I can fly.  I can say that I just have keen eyes for feathers.  Whatever it is, I am really glad that they keep finding me.
2.  This is a weird one for a gratitude because it’s a difficult story.  But I learned this story this week about how a group of Prussian Mennonites, during WWII, actually sent a letter of support to Hitler.  It was chilling to hear how they unquestioningly thanked the fuhrer for his dedication to the “Fatherland” and to Christian principles.  So sobering.  And a good reminder to myownself to pay more attention to my commitment to my spiritual work than to the work of politics, to keep the political in the perspective of the spiritual.  I am grateful for reminders to be true to the deeper realities.
3.  The laughter of my new friends, my new colleagues.  Belly laughter builds community.  And after the in-breath of focused work together, we need the out-breath of laughter together.
4.  How sleep brings answers.  I went to bed last night anxious about the chapel service I have to prepare for school on Tuesday, not sure what I would say or how I would present my own story.  I woke up this morning knowing exactly (sort of) what I am going to say.
5.  Small kindnesses.  At the end of the day Thursday, I put two bags of trash at my classroom door so I would trip on them and remember to take them out to the big bins.  A student I have never met stopped and peeked in the room and asked it he should throw them away for me.  Little thing, but it made my day.  Probably my week, too.  Or semester.  

May we walk in Beauty!

Blue Fire

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Gratitude List:
1.  My helpful colleagues.  These are people who keep stopping by and asking how things are going even when they know by now that that my answer never stops at “Great!” but always moves on to “But I do have this one little question. . .”  I really enjoy being part of this team, where teachers consider and care about the social, emotional, and spirit lives of the students as well as the pursuit of academic excellence.
2.  So I am happily loving my job.  But I am also relieved and eager for the coming four-day weekend.  Teacher meetings on Friday are still a break for me, a chance to not be “on” all the time, and a lesson-plan-free evening tonight.  Short weeks to begin.  Ease us all in to the year.
3.  The blue faerie fire in those labradorite beads Mara gave me.  What looks like lovely greenish mossy stones, if you sit with them and turn them into the light, will suddenly flash blue fire.  I think that’s one of those things that means more than it means.  And the pendant represents Joy, which is where gratitude often takes me, even when I am tired, even when I am sad.
4.  Sleep.  So important for students and teachers.
5.  Cool breezes this morning.  I don’t know, but I think that my classroom must have hit 90 degrees yesterday.  It’s hard to teach in that.  Maybe it’ll break a bit

May we walk in Beauty!

Share Your Gifts

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Gratitude List:

1.  Mara hugs.  Finally.  Mara has been my good friend for a couple of years now.  It was Mara who gave me the courage to actually call myself a poet, to publish, to take my work seriously.  She has helped me learn language for expressing deeper emotion.  I stole from her this gratitude practice, which has become such a key for me.  And yesterday, I got to see her eyes, feel her hugs, hear her voice, watch how she speaks.  So grateful for this friendship.  For the sharing of gifts, back and forth, for Kyla and Dylan.
2.  Gift of a Great Blue Heron feather.  With such a feather in my hair, I will stand tall and watchful, I will fly brightly, I will speak with an ancient voice.
3.  Pink dawn on the hills and the River valley as I drive to school in these early mornings.  Mist rising from the River, from the fields.  Magic.
4.  Moving more deeply into the role of teacher.  So much more than teaching prepositional phrases and independent clauses.  Watching, learning to watch, for the webs between them, tending the social web.  Reading of their dreams, precious as eggs.  I fall in love with them every day, exhausting as they can be.
5.  And then there’s Mara again.  How do you thank someone who, whether she knew she was doing  it or not, has handed you your own voice on a plate and said, “Here.  Try it.”

May we walk in Beauty!  Namaste.

Reading the Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Yesterday as I was sweeping up my classroom at the end of the day, I got to thinking about leaves and feathers and little paper frizzies.  When my world was centered mostly around the house and farm, I felt like I sort of learned to read the litter of leaf and bark and feather, of stone and seedpod.  Now my association have shifted from the glorious beings of tree and field to the glorious beings of teenagers, and I wonder: can I learn to read the weather of the day through the little bits of paper and pens and pencils, the candy wrappers and strands of hair that I sweep up before I go home?  Teenagers are like trees, I think, dropping little bits of this and that as they go about their day.  I’m listening and watching. . .

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Kingfisher chattering along the MillStream
2.  I’m meeting Mara today!  A dear and wonderful friend whom I have never met in person is coming to see me!
3.  The way the planning of one day gives naturally on to the planning of the next day.  I get stumped about how to proceed with the lesson plans, but then I step back and look at it from a bit of a distance, and suddenly the next thing falls into place.  And the great thing about it is that the planning muscle is one which is strengthened with use, so the more I do it, the less anxiety-producing it will become.
4.  Comfortable shoes (this is a reminder to myself: yesterday’s shoes were not comfortable)
5.  The moment when I get home in the afternoons and see those boys and Jon.  Shiningest moment of the day.

May we walk in Beauty!

There Needs to Be a Poem

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There needs to be a poem here
something to fill the space
to inspire
to bless.

There needs to be a word
that fills the small green hollows
between the first shy greeting
and the questions
that draw out the hearts
like small burrowing animals
from their safe nests.

There needs to be a song here.
At least a whispered line
with a hint of a melody
and a rhythm
like the chirping of the tree frogs
high in the oak grove.

Let us stand in the moment
shoulder to shoulder
like the deer on the verge
we caught in our headlights,
and listen for the distant unrolling of words.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  That wonderful woman at OfficeMax yesterday who said that since the Lancaster store was selling notebooks for a penny a piece, she could give me the same price, and then only gulped a little when I said, “That’s so great!  I’d like a hundred for my English classes!”  I quickly realized that I was taking overenthusiastic advantage of a kindness and cut my number back just a little.
2.  Waters of Transformation.  Yes, indeed.
3.  I have a job where people sometimes start the day with a collegial hymn-sing.  Have I landed in a perfect place for me, or what?
4.  Inspiration struck when I needed it and before I was a complete wreck of exhaustion: I have been a little anxious this weekend about preparation for the coming week.  I came away from last week sort of feeling like I had drained my wells of inspiration for lesson plans.  Just like poetry writing, however: When you let go, sometimes the streams begin to trickle back in again, and sometimes they come in as a flood. I hope the students are a tenth as eager for the work I present tomorrow as I am to present it.
5.  Family time.  Meeting Kim’s dear children.  Basking in Craig’s delightful smile.  Listening to the harmonica trio play in harmony.  Discussing recipes for fish.

May we walk in Beauty!