Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

The Social Contract

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How can I trust that you are who you say you are?
How can you know I am who I represent myself to be?
Don’t we all have several selves that we show to the world?
Aren’t we allowed a few secrets?

Sometimes in my life I have felt the burden of social expectation, the claustrophobia of sitting in a box not of my own making, because people expect certain behavior from my particular subsets.  I carry so many labels, as you do, and they can become burdensome.  There are expectations for the Mennonite Girl, the Missionary Kid, the Wife, the Mother, the Teacher, the Organic Farmer.  In some of my earlier decades, as I was wrangling my own vision of myownself from all these labels, I deliberately set out to break the rules, to be an iconoclast about the boxes that threatened to silence me.  I think I’ve been a late bloomer, only really starting to realize somewhere in my 40s that I don’t need to be the box and I don’t need to explain the box, and I don’t need to break the box.  I just need to live who I am and let people figure it out the best they can.

But there’s another side to this idea of the social contract, a good side, a really redeeming side.  While I don’t want you to assume that I am a certain person based on the many labels that mark me, I DO want you and I to both be able to make certain assumptions about each other, to be able to trust that unwritten social contract.  I want us to believe that the other one will do her best to keep her promises.  I want us to be able to assume that each other’s children are cared for as lovingly in private as they are in public, that we’re true to our spouses and partners, that we’re not playing fast and loose with people’s hearts, that we’re people of honor and faithfulness.

Yes, you need your personal private space, and I need some secrets of my own.  Yes, I am a slightly meaner parent in private than in public–sometimes.  Yes, I may hope that you think of me as an adventurous spirit even though my adventures are mostly vicarious, through the medium of novels that I read.  Yes, I sometimes feel like I am enacting some sort of con when I call myself a poet.

If you are a pious and thoughtful spiritual person, I promise not to be shocked by the tattoo of a dragon on your back.  If you are someone who speaks kindly and lovingly in public settings, I promise not to gasp when you get a little snarky in a moment of rant. Let’s give each other a little leeway.

Still.  I hope we can balance that kind of looseness in our social contract with some higher ideals.  Let’s expect of each other that we will be kind to our children and the other people and animals who share our space.  Let’s expect fidelity of each other, in friendship, in love and marriage and partnership, in our work.  Let’s expect each other to be honorable.  I know that I will likely fail your trust in some of the little things, as you may fail mine.  But holding each other to the basic principles of honor and fidelity and kindness seems to be the heart of the social contract.

If we want our words to have power and meaning, then I think that actions and aspect, words and behavior, need to rhyme in some way.  If I can’t keep true to who I say I am, I let all my personal power leak away.  If we lie to each other, we decrease our ability to be effective in the world.

Gratitude List:
1.  Good friends.  True and wise and faithful friends.
2.  Boundaries
3.  Iron ore and magnets
4.  Concentric circles
5.  Trust

May we walk in Beauty.

Elemental

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Fire Cider

Gratitude List:
1.  Birds.  Kestrel on a Wire.  Snow geese in a corn-stubble field.  Bluebirds muttering in the chestnut tree: “There now.  Everything is going to be okay.”
2.  Music.  So much good music yesterday and today.  Indigo Girls’ CD: Nomads, Indians, and Saints–for some reason I came back to it all fresh again yesterday.  Then the Blossom Hill String Band.  This morning’s singing and tears.
3.  Holding it all in the Bowl of the Heart.  It all has to go in there together, and somehow the mix of it all, all the beautiful and difficult and tender and angry and wretched stories, all in there together–somehow it feels right.  That is how it is meant to be.
4.  Spring, She rises.  The footsteps of Persephone are visible now everywhere I turn.
5.  Fire Cider, Elderberry Tincture, and Kombucha.  Good Medicine.

May we walk in Beauty.

Bridges

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Gratitude List:
1.  A green mossy bridge in Scotland
2.  Mythology
3.  The fiery cleansing of anger
4.  Circles of three.  This one.  That one.  Overlapping, creating a web.
5.  A truly free morning ahead.

May we walk in Beauty.

Thinking About Lent

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2014 March 001

 

I am a big fan of 40-day journeys in any religion. And, while Mennonites used to eschew anything that seemed too much like a high church tradition, in my growing up years we began to explore the idea of Lent with more and more fascination.   I don’t always choose something to give up, and I don’t always go about it very intentionally, but I like to mark the season, to be aware of the changes in the world and in myself during these 6 or 7 weeks, to be a cheerleader for others who are walking this journey with deliberation and intention.

In the solar year of 360-odd days, you can divide that up into eight roughly equal pieces of pie, which are all about 45-ish days in length.  It is no surprise that we seem to choose 40 days as our time period for initiation journeys that lead to personal transformation.  I like to live by those seasonal segments. And Lent, like Ramadan, is a floaty sort of journey, never at the same place in the year. Mysterious. Moon-chosen.  While I can trust to the regular rhythms of Solstices and Equinoxes and their cross quarters, Lent and its riot of a starting party, Mardi Gras, jump out of nowhere with a bright “aha”!

I know why people repudiate Lent, and I can understand the concern with the “I’m a worm” sort of processing that sometimes gets attached to it.  I believe in the free spirit, the hopeful soul, in loving and treasuring our own selves.  But things can always be interpreted in so many ways, and I think Lent can be a powerful time of remembering our place in the cosmos and our connection to Radical Love. It’s a chance to re-set our habit life, to Choose to live with intention, rather than to be slaves to our addictions. And this can be a joyful experience.

I did not set out to write this with a specific Lenten Intention for this year, but as I have been writing, two ideas have begun to crystallize.  They are both related to the general theme of Self-Care that seems to have worked its way into my story at this time.  I try to work with these things in everyday life, but perhaps giving them the weight of Lenten Intention will help me to establish them more clearly in my living.

One has to do with my relationship to Things.  Periodically, I have gone through periods of time when I try to give away at least one thing every week.  This Lent, I will try to go through the house every day and choose at least one thing to give away.  It will serve to de-clutter the house, but also to help me re-set my attachment to stuff.

The other has to do with eating joyfully.  Last night I shared a joyful meal with friends who are leaving the country for several years. I want to make memories around tables.  I want to deepen and expand my understanding of the powerful connection between the Earth and my body.  I want to become ever more attuned to what nourishes me, body and spirit.

Whether or not you make a specific journey this Lenten season, I wish you the power of your intentions, the hope of new life springing forth, the embrace of Radical Love, and a deeper connection to your own Source.

Yes, More Snow Geese

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2014 February 088

Gratitude List:
1.  Like snowflakes falling across the field, they settled.  Like they were choreographed.  Snow geese.  It always reminds me of the chilly winter day about 20 years ago when Jon and I were hiking on a ridge at Middle Creek and we looked out over the valley and the lake and it was suddenly like being inside one of those Japanese paintings, where petals or snowflakes or geese are settling downward so gracefully.  Today was no less magical.
2.  Dinner with good friends.  I just don’t want to say goodbye.
3.  Quest for a stone.
4.  The River.  Always this River and this Bridge.
5.  Spikes of crocus in the flowerbed, and sunny aconite abloom.

May we walk in Beauty.

Delta of Geese

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Gratitude List:
1.  A delta of snow geese flying above the River last night.
2. The sunset: first a tangerine glow that seemed to shimmer around us, then magenta, and finally crimson.
3. Dandelion tips growing in my brother’s flower beds.  Persephone rises.
4. Teaching myself to go back to sleep.  (Knock on wood)  Not only have I not had midnight insomnia for ages, I have been sleeping until 6:30 lately.
5. Dreams that remind me I’m okay.

May we walk in Beauty.

Blessings and Benedictions

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Blessing.  Benediction.  Benison.  In Old Irish, beannacht.  In Swahili, baraka.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the act of blessing, of passing on the blessing, of sharing benediction with each other.  Such churchy words, eh?  Don’t let that distract from their universal power.

This evening I watched my incredible niece give her senior presentation at her school, a somewhat daunting rite of passage that requires each student to give a 20-minute presentation on herself (or himself), her goals and ideals, her personal story.  My niece focused a great deal of her presentation on her family and her community, and it was clear that this is a young person who is grounded in her connections to others, who finds meaning in relationship and conversation and interaction.  I am a very proud auntie.

While the senior presentation is a rite of passage designed to challenge the students to express who they are, where they have come from, and where they are headed, it was clear that a vital role of the whole process was to have a moment to bless each student individually.  This was a ritual of benediction.  The students, in telling their stories, receive from their teachers and gathered family and friends a sense of the importance and vitality of their own stories.  They are now empowered with the sacred duty to fulfill their destinies, to find meaning in their lives.

I know people who do this in their everyday story, effortlessly and “unshowily,” humbly: constantly passing blessings on to those around them, to the people they meet.  Un-self-consciously offering to others that sense of purpose and connection to something bigger than themselves.  The way these people treasure the stories they are offered makes the story-teller feel validated and blessed, as thought they, too, now have a sacred task before them.

Gratitude List:
1.  My marvelous niece Lara.  And all my incredible nieces and nephews.
2.  Blessings
3.  Earthshine
4.  Spirals
5.  Winter aconite

May we walk in Beauty!

In the Dream Labyrinth

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My sister says that there is a building somewhere in Virginia which was designed to confuse the sense of direction, to force people to stop each other in the halls to ask, “Do you know the way to Conference Room C? Or even how to get to the third floor from here?”

The labyrinth of halls and underground passages and stairs and places that seem to go nowhere is designed to force the wandering souls to interact, to find their way together.  I find the idea intriguing, and something in my waking self steps forward with excitement at the challenge, at the genius of creating a space which intentionally unmoors people in order to force them to depend on each other.

But on the other hand, this is the landscape of my most deeply frustrating dreams.  I am always wandering down hallways, running up flights of stairs, only to find that I’ve arrived at the wrong end of the building, my appointment was set for an hour ago, I’m late for class, and I haven’t studied for the test.  The year is nearly over and I forgot to go to class all year, and if I could just find my way through the halls to the office, I could set everything straight.

Perhaps those dreams lie at the heart of my own anxieties, social and otherwise.  There’s a structure there that everyone else seems to get, to understand.  I seem to be the only one in the dreams (and sometimes in life) who can’t find my way, who can’t figure out how it’s supposed to be laid out, who has forgotten where to go and even why I was there in the first place.

Next time I find myself lost in the labyrinth of an institution in my dreams, perhaps I’ll stop and ask someone for help, see if I can inject a new way of interacting with the space of the dream.  Perhaps that will in turn inform something in my waking life, give me a new perspective on my own ability to wake up more fully to my own story.

Gratitude List:
1.  Simple Musings, a new booklet written by a whole group of friends–reflections on the season of Lent
2.  Snow Geese: a large flock (hundreds?) circling a corn field north of Columbia
3.  This image: Just a few fields down from the geese sits a farm that is bisected by an old railroad siding.  The siding is raised on a little bank to keep it level, and a fringe of trees grows along it and in front of a farmhouse.  This afternoon an old long-horned bull was standing on the siding as we passed.
4.  Storm downgrade
5.  Benediction, blessing.

May we walk in Beauty!

Winter’s Last Stand

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I know I have felt this panic before.
February has finally ambled its pokey self
right out the door and we sit on the cusp
of March which should mean spring,
but doesn’t.  What it is, is:
it’s the last month of pregnancy.
When you know and your body knows
that the next thing should be upon you
but something in the universe conspires
to keep you in the grip of what has been
just a little longer, but you know
that this one could go long.
Just like the last one did, and how will you,
how will you ever bear it?  Not one
more month, not another week, even.
Oh please, Timekeeper of the Universe,
if you know what is in me, get this child,
get this everlasting winter, get it out of me,
get it over with.  I’m ready for transition.

Gratitude List:
1.  Game night.  All generations.  Dutch Blitz tournament.  Letting our hair down.
2.  Mallard couples flirting on the pond
3.  Dusting off the tschotschkes
4.  Altar-building (which may be a repetition of #3)
5.  Rhythm of the in-breath, out-breath, pause.

May we walk in Beauty.

Mr. Rogers

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Gratitude List:
1.  For Jon, who was born today, a few years ago, who bought himself his birthday present so that I could have the boys give it to him: four Family Circus books that we haven’t read.  Don’t tell the kids–they think he was truly surprised.
2.  Buy one, get one free: fudge brownies for the birthday celebration from La Dolce Vita.  If you live near Lancaster, this is the place to go for your birthday party supplies.  And this one may seem more indulgently mundane than usual, but the experience was sublime.
3.  Lighten Up Lancaster and the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce: I know that might sound dull and organizational, except that it isn’t, because these are local organizations that are pouring their energy into connecting local eaters with local farmers.
4.  Mr. Rogers.  He died eleven years ago today.  I do believe he was a saint or boddhisattva or something.  My apologies to my FB friends who’ve been inundated by my favorite neighbor’s quotations today, but here’s my favorite of the lot: “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”
5.  Inner warmth, to help me contend with the outer cold.

May we walk in Beauty!