Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

. . .And Another Thing

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I know I have already posted a Gratitude List for today, but,

MONARCH!  I finally saw one today.

I have been feeling weary and depressed about the news of monarch decline, worried that someday I will be telling my children, “Remember the orange butterflies?  The monarchs?  You saw those before they became extinct.”  The word is bad.  Pesticides and herbicides here in the US coupled with deforestation in their wintering grounds in Mexico are depleting the populations at an alarming rate.

And part of me has been feeling hopeful, too, like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin to appear.  Like maybe I can be sincere enough and hopeful enough that they will at least appear here in this place, lay eggs, grow fat and healthy on our organic nectars, and develop strength for the next generation to journey south.  And one appeared today in the milkweed patch that we keep for their welcome.

She is female, of course.  I don’t know that for a fact, but I am willing it to be true, so that she will lay as many eggs as her little body can manage.  And I will tend them with hopeful energy.

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This is not the one I saw today.

I Get By With A Little Help

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Gratitude List:
1.  Inventiveness and building creativity.  Camp Invention for my oldest boy: “Camp Invention is the complete opposite of swimming lessons,” Ellis said.  Swimming lessons were a bust.  Swimming lessons were labeled Torture.  “I love Camp.”
2.  Healing:  Winky the cat is getting back to her old self, grooming herself, eating, asking for petting.  This is the second year she’s gone through a June-July malaise.
3.  This weather:  I think I am getting over a malaise of my own.  Crisp, clear mornings, cool breezes, blue sky with fluffy clouds.  Bring it on.
4.  The lovely *Ping* that canning jars make as they seal.  That’s the sound of satisfaction with a completed task.  Even when it’s tomato sauce, and the jars are upside-down on the counter, there is often a muffled *ping* that announces their completion.
5.  All the people who help to make the ongoing story of this farm possible: Jon Weaver-Kreider, the intrepid farm crew, friends and grandparents who care for the children, Tracey who cleans the house, customers who treasure good fresh food, people who support local and sustainable businesses.  I get by with a little help from my friends.

May we walk in Beauty.

I Have Been Circling

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The summer has caught me up in its tangled strings.  Throughout the day, ideas for my gratitude list pop into my head.  I try to grab and secure them, but someone has left the lid off the pot while making this batch of popcorn, and they zing away before I can grasp them.

I’m not too fussed about it.  This is the nature of summer.  As the cooler weather returns and daily demands of the farm settle into more predictable rhythms, I’ll get the lid back on that wanton kettle of my brain.

Perhaps I have written this before: My friend Sarah and I have talked about how perhaps something about the gratitude list ought to be a little difficult, how for those of us who live fairly closely with the natural world, it would be pretty easy to rattle off a list of five natural things every day, and this might defeat the purpose a little.  This is a temptation for me.  On the other hand, I want my gratitude lists, like poetry, to carry several layers of meaning, as I hope this one will.

Gratitude List:
1.  Hummingbird: Yesterday when I came down from harvest, I let myself drop underneath the poplar tree.  I lay there watching the sun glowing through the pollen-golden wings of a tiger swallowtail wandering among the leaves, when suddenly there she was, wings a-blur in a patch of blue between the branches.  I don’t think I’ve ever observed a hummer in flight from directly below before.  She was a double fan of pure motion and light.  A lemniscate.  No wonder the Hopi and Navajo see her as the messenger between the worlds.  If I see her again today, what message shall I send?
2.  Toad: Yesterday I was with a crew harvesting tomatoes, while Holly and Mary Jo were picking squash.  Suddenly, Holly started to whoop and holler.  A few moments later, as we were loading our tomato bins into the back of the truck, Holly came over, her hands cupped together.  I thought she was wringing out a wet rag: water was streaming from between her fingers.  Instead, she was gently holding the largest toad I have ever seen, and it was performing its natural response to being picked up by a human.  I’m still a little stunned that it could hold that much liquid inside it.  Toads have been a watchful presence in my writing this past winter, so it felt like a doubly good omen.
3.  Pears: Driving the tractor down the hill, I noticed the pears shaping up beautifully on the trees in the orchard.   I can almost taste them.
4.  Tomatoes: Tomatoes satisfy on so many levels.  I have my first six quarts of 2013 sauce on the counter ready to go to the basement shelves for the season.  Fresh salsa with cilantro and lime and hot peppers.  But right now, the thing I love so much is the wanton variety of their shapes and colors when you put them in a bin together.  I didn’t get a shot of yesterday’s bins, but the one attached to this post looks almost the same.
5.  Rilke:  “I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”  Rob Breszny challenged his readers to write their own permutation.  Here’s mine: ” I am circling around the Core, around the Source, and I have been circling since my thousand times began, and I still do not know whether I am a watchful toad, or a wordless prayer, or a cool wind above the fields.”

May we walk in beauty.

Changelings

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To put in the Who-Are-You-And-What-Have-You-Done-With-My-Children? File:
1.  This morning, the one who looks like my four-year-old child named Joss, woke up and got himself dressed entirely by himself.  Without fussing.
2.  This evening, the Joss one ate his supper without asking me to feed him.  Without fussing.  And it was soup! (see #3)
3.  For supper I served eggplant soup.  Both of these people who look like my children said it was the best thing ever, and could I make it every evening?

All I can figure is that there must be faeries about.

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This is a photo from yesterday: Joss eating slices of raw onion.  When he was two, I left him in the market room by himself for a few minutes, and when I came back, he was sitting on the floor munching on a raw leek.  He ate at least four that day, maybe five.  He still likes raw onions, though now he needs to have a cup of COLD water handy, and he does sometimes get a little overwhelmed by them.  Today was the first that he showed an interest in eggplant.

Gratitude List:
1.  Thunder
2.  Jon Weaver-Kreider
3.  Today’s picnic lunch.  The boys decided that we were having a family picnic up at their garden, to eat what they harvested.  Hot as blazes, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
4.  Eggplant soup
5.  Thumbs.

May we walk in Beauty.

Palms Filled With Air

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(for Bret and Sue, in memory of Eli)

the tiny bird needed
someone with the fierce
and tender heart of Buddha
to scoop green feathers
into cupped palms

someone who knew
–oh, how you knew–
to neither cringe at dying
nor waste hope for living

but only to watch
to feel the quivering heartbeat
to listen for the feeble chirrup
to look into the white-ringed eye
to say I am here
to feel the slide of feathers
as wings took the shape
of your palms
and filled them with air
with a whole world

light as ashes
scattered over sunset

Gratitude List:
1.  How tidy the bank looks after I have mowed
2.  Sweat
3.  Root Beer Floats
4.  Golden tomatoes that look like the sun
5.  Hummingbird

May we walk in Beauty.

Home Again

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I wish I had had my camera.  I wish I could draw well and fast.  Instead, I’ll have to try to give you the picture in words.

It’s a really hot day on the beach.  The elements are all doing their elemental best to claim the day: sand, air, sun and waves.  You have to yell to be heard above the pounding of the surf, and the tide is rising fast, claiming sneakers and chairs and sand pails faster than their startled owners can drag them in.  One dad gets a bright idea to stave off the loss of his space by building a sea wall, and digs a fortification in front of his family’s umbrella: a deep hole with a wall on the side to the ocean.  Suddenly kids from all over have gotten into the act, digging and fortifying.

My boys ran down with their cousins to join in.  Parents came, too, and we built drip castles all along the line of the wall.  And the wall held against the tide, giving the umbrella people another forty minutes of time before the hole behind the wall filled with fresh cold sea water, and the children went from castle-builders to merfolk, dabbling in the pool they’d created and covering themselves with yellow foam.

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Gratitude List:
1.  Family time at the beach
2.  Mama Ocean
3.  Watching Joss devour every kind of seafood he could get his hands on: clams, flounder, shrimp, scallops.
4.  Coming home to Jon
5.  Myotis lucifugus, the little brown bat.  The first one to roost in the barn we called Otis because it seemed more likely that a solitary bat would be male.  The friend who was roosting with him today we will call Lucy, in hopes that they might be a breeding pair.  Fly well, small ones.

May we walk in Beauty.

Vigils and Heroes

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Gratitude List:
1.  That lovely crew of people in Lancaster who gathered to share grief and to remind us all to keep on creating a future that is safe for ALL our children.
2.  Temar Boggs and Chris Garcia.  Read about these brave young men who chose to get involved in a terrifying story and follow their guts to bring a little girl home.
3.  Cooking demonstration at Trinity Lutheran in Mt. Joy with Betsey Sterenfeld of Essen.  I am so inspired!
4.  Cycles and seasons
5. My mother-in-law’s beautiful flower beds

With hope for a just and safe future for all our children.

Apologies and Tomatoes

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Gratitude List:
1.  The grace of an apology
2.  Bare feet
3.  Anticipation
4.  Sungold cherry tomatoes
5.  Pesto

May we walk in Beauty.

Wrap Me up in Spiderwebs

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Scarlet Pimpernel

Gratitude List:
1.  The bank of wildflowers in that lawn at the edge of Yorkana.
2.  Tomatoes and peppers in the freezer.
3.  Two-year-olds.  They turn my heart to puddles.  They could wrap me up in spiderwebs and lead me off to faerieland without a struggle.
4.  Rest.
5.  Connection.   Interface.  Meeting.

May we walk in Beauty!

Spinning Gratitude

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I can’t quite make sense of my motivations for how I want to write today’s Gratitude List.  I’m thinking too hard about thinking about it.  You see, I have been complaining all day.  Really complaining about how many things have been going wrong.  I keep it sort of light, too, whining delivered on a platter of intended humor: “I think all the appliances and motorized things on this farm have had a conference and decided to break down at the same time.”

Pretty lame, actually, but that’s the place where you’re supposed to groan with  empathy, and pity me my breakdowns:  Poor woman can’t keep her food cold or drive her car, and her lawn’s turning to jungle.  But I don’t think I am looking for pity, really.  Well, perhaps a little commiseration.  That’s such a great word, such a great idea.  Let’s be a little miserable together at the unfairness of the world, and it will all seem a little easier to bear.

I have been making an internal list today (not necessarily intentionally) of all the things that have gone wrong.  If I twist that list into my gratitude list in some artful way, I will have had my chance at a rant.  But is that really gratitude?

I think it is.  Yes, because this business of writing a gratitude list is not only about finding the wonderful things that do happen; it’s also about putting the brokenness into perspective, about spinning the story into something positive.  Not for spin’s sake, but for gratitude’s sake.  For the sake of centeredness and peace of mind.

In Pronoia, Rob Breszny talks about how when something goes wrong, we focus on that one or two or five things that aren’t working instead of the hundreds of things that are working.  It’s about where you place your focus.  The clocks still work.  Gravity continues to hold me to Earth.  The plants grow.  The children laugh.  The stovetop cooks my morning egg to perfection.

Today I am a Spin Doctor.  Not in search of pity, except as it comes with a little good mojo for all my motorized things to work.

Gratitude List:
1.  My father’s car, and his gracious sharing of it while Roxanne Buick is having herself repaired to pass inspection.
2.  A new (to us) fridge being delivered this week, and the old one taken away with no extra effort from us.  And working substitutes in the meantime.  We’re so fortunate that we have the farm store fridge to tide us over until the new one comes.
3.  The string trimmer works again.  We can at least keep the edges tidy.  And sometimes keep your edges tidy is just the thing.
4.  Spinning.
5.  Perspective.

May we walk in Beauty.