Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Toadstools, Children, and Rainstorms

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2013 July 058
Magic!  Toadstools have appeared by the shop.

Gratitude List:
1.  The scent of my friends lingering in the air around me after hugs.  All day, I catch these little wisps of scent that I can trace to people I hugged this morning.
2.  Being part of a community that welcomes and blesses the babies with great intention and love.  What joy.  And the sweet soft sounds of a contented baby in her grandfather’s arms next to me in church.
3.  My philosopher-son.  On the Sweet Honey song “On Children,” Ellis said, “Mom, I think that last verse is about not trying to make your children be like you, but trying to be more like them.”  Oh yes, kiddo, you got it.
4.  Steam rising from the roads after the storm.  That rain took the temperature down almost 20 degrees in 45 minutes.  Whoosh.
5.  The “Wheep!” of the great-crested flycatcher in the woods at my parents’ house.

May we walk in beauty.

Love Songs to the Hens

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2013 July 018
Cheshire Fred

Gratitude List:
1.  Catching Ellis in an unguarded moment singing love songs to his hens.
2.  Hard work, and then more hard work.
3.  The love songs of bluebirds.
4.  This moment.
5.  And this one.

May we walk in beauty.

Inter-Deepen-Dance

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Gratitude List:
1.  Watching fireflies rise from the fields while the children dance around and chase them.
2.  Pearl, that little white dog who loves my dad so very much.  She watches everyone who enters a room, but gets a particular look of adoration in her big brown eyes when her Pawpaw comes in.
3.  Sitting around the table with the family, laughing together.
4.  Spinning wool with my nephews.
5.  Gypsy Wind.  It unsettles me and fills me with longing, and makes me want to take wing.  In the end, it always reminds me why I love this here, this when.  So I am grateful, even when my spirit longs to wander.

“You are beautiful, and I have loved you dearly, more dearly than the spoken word can tell.”  –Roger Whittaker

Clouds, Gardens and Everything Comes Together

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These are the days when I become a quiet rock,
a quivering leaf, an ear of lichen
listening to the stones grow.
The words have wandered away,
eloquence eludes me,
and all my sentences begin
with the word So.

Wind will sing in my feathers
but my own story waits
like a seed in the heart of earth,
like a dream that must rise through mud,
a bubble, the nymph of a damselfly
crawling through centuries
up the stalk of a smooth green reed
to be born to the blue light.

There is a roaring in my ears
like the sound of grief or rage.
But it is only the lazy hum of summer,
of fireflies clicking their rhythms
into the velvet indigo of solstice,
communing with the moon.

Another day I’ll dawn,
but for now I will sink
slowly into the pond
with Grandmother Moon
and leave my message with the fish.

2013 June 141
The makings of a batch of medicine bags: spinning the wool, crocheting, and adding beads and cord.  Portable and easy to fit in the spaces of a busy season.

Gratitude List:
1.  Clouds.  Not cloudiness, which is its own sort of blessing at times.  But clouds, those Michelangelo works of art that have been so magnificent in the recent spate of changeable weather.
2.  Vegetable Gardens.  Have you seen it, too?  Everywhere, woven through people’s flower patches, a few tomato cages, a wide-spreading squash.  Or off to the side of the house–out front, even–tidy or  wanton, fenced or flowing vegetable gardens.  If this crazy economy has been good for anything, I think it has empowered people to remember that they can grow their own food.
3.  The way things come together sometimes, even when you’re not quite trying.  This is especially nice when I remember the times when things haven’t come together, even when I’ve tried desperately.
4.  Day lilies and chicory.  Bright orange stars on all the back-road banks, and chicory’s beautiful blue eyes, almost as sparkly as my Jonny’s.  Let’s throw in some lace, shall we?  Queen Anne has plenty to spare.  And something golden to balance the lace–buttercups!  And just here, a cascade of lush lavender vetch.  Oh summer!  You fill my spirit.
5.  Making.  There are moments in these busy days when I have to sit down and rest, but my hands still want something to do.  I have found my way back to making again, and am satisfied.

May we walk in Beauty.

Burning Bridges

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Gratitude List:
1.  Fickle weather.  Shall we have a little shower?  Okay.  So a bit of thunder?  Now some sun and a gentle breeze.  Here’s some lightning and a whoosh of  rain.  Mist and drizzle?  Sure.  I loved the variety of weathers this day.
2.  Burning Bridges.  Well, ours at least.  We went to the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the day Union troops burned the Wrightsville bridge to stop Confederate forces from crossing the Susquehanna.  Tonight they lit fires on the piers of the old bridge, closed off the modern bridge so we could stand on it and watch, and then lit fireworks.  On the way home, Jon asked Ellis–who was wildly fascinated by all the bits of engineering involved in the process–what his favorite part of the evening was.  He said, “There were good jokes.”  He liked the camaraderie with our friends the Freibergs and the odd Civil War historian.  That warms my heart.
3.  The fridge is working again.  Jon is right–being without it was really not big deal.  We have other working fridges in the house for farm things.  But I was getting really tired of  running up and down the basement stairs just to make breakfast, and then to put it all away.
4.  Break time with the farm crew.  Speaking of camaraderie, I love the conversation and community of sitting around the table eating together.
5.  Bed.  I am tired, so tired.

May we walk in beauty.

The Moon, My Otis, and Spinning the Web

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2013 June 116

Gratitude List:
1. That moon!  I finally did catch a glimpse last night.   Beautiful.
2. Sweet little Otis (for myotis lucifugus, the Latin name for little brown bat), who roosts in the barn.  May he and his kind live long and prosper.
3. The call of the goldfinch: “So Sweee-eeet!”
4. Getting back to spinning again. Follow the twist up the strand. Release.  Let go.  Trust the spiral to catch and hold.  Magic.
5. Billy Collins.

May we walk in beauty.

Longest Day Is Here!

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Gratitude List:
1.  Sense of Wonder Camp for Girls.  All those girls: wiggly giggly, serious and silly, poised and awkward and graceful all at once, thoughtful and playful and full of light.  The women who put it together, the mothers and mentors who were there to celebrate their girls.  I felt like I could see the silver webs, like a veil of light, that connected us all.
2.  Leaving a place with a sense of dissatisfaction, not because events were dissatisfying,  but because there were so many people there whose words I wanted to feel settling into the shells of my ears, and there was not time for it all.  I drove home surfing a love wave.  “Oh, and then there was her!  I could have talked with her all night.  Oh, and her!  I just love her.  Right, and then her!  What a tender and kind heart.”
3.  A new green T-Shirt with a Rachel Carson Quotation:   “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
4.  Josiah, though still a little warm, is acting like himself again after a couple days of fever.  He refused the Ibuprofen last night and let the fever do its work on its own.
5.  Longest day.  Summer’s here.  Happy Solstice to you!  May the sun warm you all the way to your bones, fill you with life and health and radiance.  Every day the world begins anew.

May we walk in Beauty.

Tomato Sandwich!

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2011 June 190
This wasn’t today’s sandwich.  I ate that too fast to even think of a photo.  I think that is a Cherokee Purple tomato.

Gratitude List:
1.  The first tomato sandwich!  That crusty, yeasty brown bread and an Iron Lady tomato with sharp cheddar and mayo and salt.  Oh my, oh my, oh my. . .
2.  Was it Andrea who said something at break today about a man who said that when he was a boy he could hear corn growing?  Like a whistling sound, he told her.  I love that so much.
3.  Life force.  That corn up there in #2, and the mung bean sprouts that Ellis grew this week, how they pushed up the lids, and then grew an extra half inch in a hour this morning.
4.  The old, old woman from my dream last night.  Her name is Grafa.  “Sometimes I wake up in the night and fling off the covers,” she tells me.  “I wake up in the middle of the night just to tweak the energy a bit.”  Grafa–writing or drawing?  From Old Norse or Proto-Germanic (according to Wiktionary), means to dig, to bury, to engrave.
5.  The random way that Joss throws words together or sings a word repeatedly while he’s playing, just for the fun of the sounds.  “My teeth are devious!”  “My foot of God.”  “Nairobi, Nairobi, Nairobi!”

May we walk in beauty.

Good Reminders

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Gratitude List:
1.  Seeing my cousin Melanie again after so many years.  What a caring and tender soul.  I loved listening to her powerful stories of the children in her lunch line, of the ways she nudges them to be their best selves, to take themselves seriously, to exceed expectations, even when people have given up on them.  She doesn’t give up on her kids.
2.  This Mary Oliver quotation that my friend Heidi posted to Facebook today:
“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.”
3.  Oh, that oriole.  Orange fire swooping through the blue.  Yesterday I was riding up the hill on the tailgate of the truck, and the oriole flew along behind, keeping pace with us to the top, then swished into the trees.
4.  Fair trade chocolate with sea salt and caramel bits.
5.  Photographs of great-grandparents.

May we walk in Beauty.

A Blessing and Two Gratitude Lists

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First, a Blessing for You, if Today Hurts:
I acknowledge that this can be a challenging day.  If a father in your life is lost or absent, inadequate or terrifying, Father’s Day has to be difficult.  If this is part of your story, my wish for you is that you will find surrogate fathers in your life, people (men and women, even yourownself) who fill the gaps you feel, who support and hold and mentor you, who tell you jokes and honor you for who you are.

2011 November 083

Gratitude List for my Father:
1.  . . .who taught me the delight of the Wing-People, how to look for the flashing color of an oriole in the treetops, or the leaf-green flick of a warbler through the wood, how to distinguish the minute differences between hairy and downy woodpecker.  He taught me to listen for their voices.  My aural memory will never be as powerful as his, but he helped me to hone my ear to listen for the sharp whistle of oriole, the whiskery whisper of a blue-gray gnatcatcher, the cluck of a cuckoo.  He keeps the feeders at Goldfinch Farm clean and filled.
2.  . . .who balances heart and head, who values strong thinking and reasoning, scientific thought and processing, but who keeps his heart open to the hearts of others.
3.  . . .who is an example of being flexible and open to new ideas, new people, new learning.  He holds firmly to his ideals, but is not afraid to change his mind.
4.  . . .who treasures his grandchildren.  He thinks about how to honor and bless all their individual differences and gifts.  He teaches them to use their bright thinking minds and their quick, artful hands, to follow their caring hearts.  And always, how to listen for the birds:  “Did you hear that?”
5.  . . .who values his friends.  I’m not sure that our culture has many models for deep and trusting and sharing friendships between men.  I love to observe the intentionality with which my father has carried his friendships, going all the way back to high school, how he continues to build his relationships with others.

2013 June 014
Gratitude List for Jon:
1.  . . .who is a patient and involved father to his children.  Who takes the time in the middle of a busy day to spend ten minutes playing Legos on the floor.
2.  . . .who starts to plot how to make Christmas and birthdays exciting for his children weeks and months in advance.
3.  . . .who respects the bright minds of his children, carefully engaging them in learning–planting and caring for their garden, using tools, building and fixing, drawing and planning.
4.  . . .who makes us all laugh.  Often.  Who loves to see his children laugh.
5.  . . .who enthralls and enchants his children with bedtime stories.

May we walk in Beauty.

And in Memory of Ellis Kreider,
Jon’s kind and gentle father.

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