Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

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.

Sun

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Gratitude List:

1.  Sun on snow.  The sound of thaw.
2.  Sun dogs
3.  Elements
4.  Rwandan coffee
5.  Clearing

Color

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Gratitude List:
1.  All the bright colors people were wearing this morning: bright pink and lavender/violet, vibrant blues and reds.  My spirit needed just those colors.
2.  Enriching conversation
3.  Grapefruit
4.  The way that pretending can sometimes actually make a thing so.  I am pretending to manage through all this snow and cold, and sometimes I almost actually enjoy it.  Sometimes I am coping.
5.  Engaging / not engaging.  Sometimes knowing when to choose the right one.

May we walk in Beauty.

Faerie Snow

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“Don’t count your sheep,” says Ellis, “until the wolf is gone.”

Gratitude List:
1.  Chocolate and a burger for grounding
2.  The Emergency Women’s Shelter at the YWCA
3.  10 hours of sleep–winter hibernation-style
4.  The way the snow glows blue from inside?  Have you noticed?  What makes it do that, I wonder?  I’m thinking it’s the faeries.
5.  All my Valentines, you and you and someone else: we draw these webs between us,
made of chocolate and sunlight and tentative smiles
and Facebook notes and photos of the places we love
and the toothy grins of our children
and the hope of helping out a little bit
and seeking our roots and our sources together
and following traditions
and breaking traditions
and going a little bit wilder
and dancing until the chickens come home to roost.

Much love.  May we walk in Beauty!

Thunder Snow

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Let it be known
that the chickadee and sparrow
were singing songs of spring today
as I dug myself out the tail end
of that first blizzard.

Gratitude List:
1.  Towhee at the feeder
2.  Mockingbird hanging out on the balcony
3.  Thunder snow–I know I have experienced it before, but the green lightning sort of threw me.  That was pretty exciting.
4.  The egg incident.  It’s on my gratitude list because it made me laugh today.  I started to shovel the drive this noon after I fed the hens and gathered the eggs.  There were four eggs, and somehow I forgot about them in the five minutes it took me to walk down the hill, and they were in the coat pocket on my right hip where I get a little extra leverage for tossing heavy loads of snow.  Yeah.  Egg soup in my pocket.  My coat needed a washing anyway.
5.  Reading Narnia with the boys.

May we walk in Beauty.

Gracious Goodness

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Gratitude List:
1.  Strong boundaries
2.  Compassionate hearts
3.  The balance of boundaries and compassion
4.  Morning mist rising from my River.  When I say “my” River, I don’t mean it as mine alone.  Nor do I mean that it is my River exclusive of all other rivers.  But it can be my River and one of my rivers and still belong also to you and to all of us in the way that I can say you are my Friend, and yet you are not exclusively mine, nor are you my only friend, but that I love you in a particular way that is particular to our relationship.  My River.  The mist rises from it in the red morning light, and there is so much magic in it.  And also in you.
5.  And this: Goodness.  There is so much goodness in people, in strangers even.  And I know too many stories, especially in recent days, of people who fell to the lowest pitches of bullyhood and meanness and real evil when left to their own devices.  But this also is true, so gloriously true: that so many people are simply good, simply full of heart and tenderness and compassion.  That you do not have to bang on the doors or scratch very deeply at all before goodness oozes out all over, fresh and raw and sweet like honey.  I have seen it just today, how you can look into a stranger’s eyes and see it and know it is there, and follow it.   The guy who drives your tow truck may be a philosopher to rival the ancient mystics.  The woman who sells you groceries may have some rich wisdom about human nature that even the respected psychoanalysts have yet to figure.  So many wise ones to discover.  So many namaste moments to explore.

May we walk in Beauty.

Write Your Own Lexicon

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Gratitude list first today, and then a task:

Gratitude List:
1. Words, dictionaries, semantics
2. Romance
3. A day of not-snowing
4. Sourdough bread
5. Lovey-dovey cats.

May we walk in Beauty!

Today’s task is to start your own dictionary.  I think I am going to call mine Words of Power, or Word-Hoard, or maybe Crazy Beth’s Lexicon.  It’s a project that will take more than today, of course.  I think I’ll put the words in the book that I put together every year (I can’t bring myself to say scrapbook,  but that’s essentially what it is.)

I haven’t yet read all of Kathleen Norris’ Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, but the idea has inspired me for some time now: to think about words that hold particular meaning for me in my own spiritual wandering and wrangle the semantics.  These are my own personal T.A.R.D.I.S. words: like Doctor Who’s time machine, they are bigger on the inside than they appear from the outside.  As I have carried them about with me over time, they have taken on nuances and shades of meaning that may not have been there when I first picked them up.  They’re luminous and numinous (and those are both words that ought to make my list), shining from the inside, and suggesting that there is Deeper Meaning in the world.

Noticing:
This is the one I have chosen to define my spiritual story.  I want to be a Noticer.  It’s not a new idea, not my own, just a word that I have picked up and tinkered with.

Be conscious, be awake, be observant.  Live in the present moment.  Be here now, said Ram Dass.  Don’t walk past the color purple in a field and not notice it, says Alice Walker.  Be mindful.  Notice the white gull in a wintry sky, the way dawn creeps up over the river, the sound of the bluebird in the maple tree, the smell of gill-over-the-grass when you walk upon it.

Notice the way your lover’s eyes twinkle and sparkle when he’s trying to make you laugh, the way your child’s muscles relax as she settles onto your lap while you’re reading, the way your friend’s eyebrows crinkle when she tells you something that makes her worry.  Notice the way energy flows between people, the way the air crackles around someone who is feeling the power of her ability to communicate, the way the shadows creep around someone who is feeling depleted and anxious.

Bridge:
Every Christmastide–those 12 days between Yule/Christmas and Epiphany-ish–I pay extra close attention to my dreams, watching for images and words that I might harvest for the coming season of my life, to give shape to my emerging story.  This year, I woke up one morning not with a dream remembered, but with a single word waiting for me: Bridge.  Last year or the year before, I wrote a poem for an organization called Bridge of Hope which helps to set up community safety nets for women and children who have experienced homelessness.  My Waldorf friends speak of the Rainbow Bridge as the place where the souls of children come from the other world to this place, and where the living pass to the realms of the dead.  We create bridges between people, between places.

Build bridges between myself and my deeper self, between friends from diverse circles, between ideas that feel oppositional.  Build bridges of light and hope, of spiderweb and dreams, build bridges of words that cross chasms where lurk despair and rage and fear.  I’m going to be working on this word for the whole year.

Others I will add: Palimpsest, Graces, Luminous / Numinous, Web

What words will make your list?