Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

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!

There Was Going to Be a Poem

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There was going to be a poem about the little birds,
but that didn’t happen.  Of course, all the poems come back,
at some point, to the little birds, so there’s that.
And then I would have been writing about shame,
or rather, I did write about shame.  For days.
But then I never took it past the messy draft,
and so this big space opened up and then the bit about grief
started to rise like dough in the back of the oven
near the pilot light.  But I’m sort of an amateur myself
when it comes to grief.  And I don’t want experience–
please, Universe, keep me naive on that score–
but I want to know how to hold it, because it’s always there
in the soup we swim in, always edging up to someone,
somewhere.  And I want to know how to hold it,
because it is part of the essential story, yours,
and someone else’s, too.  Not just Mary watching her son
die up there on that hill.  It is, well, part of the soup.
And then there are, of course, the little birds,
and the way they hover over the flowers at sunset
or dart through the brush, whisper-like and timid.
The way shadows grow over the fields in the afternoon
and the breezes begin to settle into the hollow.

Gratitude List:
1.  Friends who, intentionally or inadvertently, light a fire under me when I need it most.
2.  Considering the semantic shading of gratefulness and gratitude.
3.  Vermilion
4.  The wild excitement of coming down the home stretch on a long-term project.
5.  Re-fashioning, re-crafting, re-purposing, re-making, and not just in the realm of the physical, you know?

May we walk in Beauty!

Tomatoes

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Keeping a youngster on task with homework tonight is taking just about all the psychic energy that I can muster.  I was going to try my hand at a prose poem, inspired by the work of Kristy Bowen in the current BloodLotus, but I’ll just give you the link to that and let you be inspired, too.  I am especially fond of the one about the birds.

Gratitude List:
1.  The Mystery of a tomato seed,
2.  how it contains within its tiny envelope
the blueprint of a jungly tomato plant,
3.  how it waits, still in the cool soil,
for its moment,
4.  then cracks through its little shell
with root always downward
and sprout reaching up and out,
5.  to create its very own fruit and seeds.

May we walk in Beauty!

We Muddle Through

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Gratitude List:
1.  The way gill-over-the-ground stands up in the holes in the snow made by my footprints, face to the sun, ready for greening.
2.  The way the swans winked in and out of my sight against the clouds, as though they were shifting between worlds.
3.  The way the house finch sat in the top of the maple and sang and sang its heart out to the sun.
4.  The way the willows are turning that pre-green yellow.
5.  These quotes from today:
“You have built a place in my story.”
“We muddle through with the wisdom and the courage that we have.”
Bonus:
6.  Courage.  Remembering that it is couer-age (heart, hearten, enheart).  I hear you speak your truth even when it is difficult and painful, when it’s hard to trust, when you’re angry, when you’re shy, when you don’t think you’ll find the right words–and it en-heart-ens me, en-couer-ages me.  Thank you for that gift.  You are so full of heartening courage.  I am incredibly grateful for the ways that you teach me.

So much love.
May we walk in Beauty.

Birds of Skunk Hollow

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Somewhere in the wood,
mourning dove sings of desire:
“Who and who and who?”
Then, from deep in the bamboo,
the owl answers, “You, you, you.”

Gratitude List:
1.  Synchronicity.  People in very different places of my life this week have recommended that I read the very same two authors.
2.  Owl and dove
3.  Sun and thaw and thaw and thaw.
4.  Will forces
5.  Poppy jasper

May we walk in Beauty!

Are You Dancing?

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“Is the wind at your back?” asked my friend Saheeb when I saw him today.  “Are you dancing?”

What a marvelous greeting!
How is the universe conspiring to show you your truest self?  
Is the sun shining on your face?
Have you answered the invitation to heal the world?
What does the rhythm of the cosmos tell you?
Is the wind at your back?
Are you finding the keys to your desires?
Are you dancing?

Gratitude List:
1.  Helpful questions from a compassionate heart
2.  Reminders that sometimes it’s okay to stall, to rest, to wait, to pause: this is different from paralysis or stagnation, though it’s hard for me sometimes to tell the difference.
3.  Playing with the stones at the shop.  I named one large piece of iron ore The Stone of the Waking Dragon
4.  Staying attuned and awake.  This is a blessing and also painful, but still I am grateful to be awake and awakening, to be part of it all. 
5.  Two five-egg days in a row!

May we walk in Beauty.

Transpiration

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2014 January 103

I always have to think a moment before I say that one.
Is it transpiration or transubstantiation?
Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
The snow is transmuted before our eyes
from one sort of substance into another,
mystical and magical, a sacred event,
rising like a breath in a haze above the white fields.

Trans-spire.
Change of spirit.
Altered breath.

I know my own spirit rose,
transformed,
to watch the wraiths of haze lift
upward into blue sky
where gulls were flying
south to north and north to south.
My heart joined them in that dance.

Gratitude List:
1.  Collaborative art.  This one began as a squiggle.  “I’ll draw and you color,” said Joss.  I took a little heat for interpreting it into a drawing instead of keeping it abstract, but he’s satisfied now that it’s done.  The scanner washed out the color a little.  It’s called “Checkers Turtle climbs the ladder to the stars.”
2.  Kombucha
3.  THAW
4.  Helping out at Preschool today
5.  Left foot, right foot, breathe.

May we walk in Beauty.