Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

A Blessing and Two Gratitude Lists

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

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.

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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.

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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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The Busy Season Has Begun

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Farm season has begun.  I am exhausted, and falling asleep in the recliner in the evenings.  But it’s the best kind of exhausted, the kind that comes from good hard work out in the elements, working with great people, and hanging out with our customers.  It will mean that I will not be posting as regularly, likely only a couple times a week.  I’ll keep working at gratitude, keep formulating poems and ideas.

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Gratitude List:
1.  Harvesting conversations, working our way down a strawberry patch.
2.  Share days.  Those are the days when the shareholders come to pick up their weekly produce.  I love to sit and chat, to talk with people about food and recipes and children and education and spirituality and Reiki and growing older and growing up. . .
3.  Providing beauty and nourishment for people.
4.  Sandra and my parents: I always know that someone is seeing to the needs of my children on these mornings when I am seeing to the needs of the farm.
5.  Jane Peifer, Mim Book, and whoever comes next.  Cycles, giving space for grieving, welcoming the next chapter in the story.

May we walk in Beauty.

Fledging and Farming

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Gratitude List:
1.  Phoebes are fledging.  I am grateful for the close-up, firsthand connection we get with the natural world.  (I am also stressed out about needing to watch over more young and vulnerable folks in the world.)
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2.  We found where the orioles have their nest.  Just a woven bag of strings and plant fibers hanging out at the very end of a branch.
3.  A wonderful first harvest day.  Again we have a delightful and energetic crew, lots of good energy, and a great community of vegetable-lovers stopping by all afternoon.  The shares were on the small side, but full of delicious goodness.
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4.  We’ve had good rain, but it didn’t rain today.
5.  The way the village raises the children.

May we walk in Beauty.

Bhutan’s Happiness, Poetic Conversations, and Strawberries

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Gratitude List:
1.  My dear friend Carol told me today that Bhutan calculates the GNP of Happiness.  I thought she was being poetic.  She told me she was serious, and I looked it up.  Bhutan monitors its GNH: Gross National Happiness.  This gives me intense satisfaction.
2.  Here’s the link to my interview with Carla Christopher, York’s Poet Laureate and all-around amazing person.  It was such an incredible honor.  I could have taken up the whole hour just to keep talking with her, thinking out loud about poetry together.  My part is near the beginning, just after Carla’s own amazing poem, but don’t stop there.  There are other really great poets and artists and musicians coming up after.
3.  We are ready.  Tomorrow morning the curtain will rise on season 2013 at Goldfinch Farm CSA, and we are ready to go.
4.  Picking strawberries in the rain.  Really.  It was a blast, and the crew is such fun, and you have to eat the seconds as you go until you get a stomach ache, but you can’t stop eating strawberries because the season is so short, and you have to stock up on strawberry goodness for another whole year.
5.  Finding myself at home in my own heart.

May we walk in Beauty!

Music and Yellow

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Gratitude List:
1.  Rising Appalachia.  Great music.  And then the whole train of music that listening to them on Youtube brought me into: MaMuse, Nahko Bear, Estas Tonne, The Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir.
2.  Singing.  Working out really difficult music in a small group of singers, singing in large groups, four-part harmony, old hymns.
3.  I think the goldfinches at my parents’ house are yellower than anything I have ever seen.  They make the goldfinches of Goldfinch Farm look green by comparison.  They take that shining gold of the sun and they raise it another sparkle.
4.  This quotation:  “Beauty appears when something is completely and absolutely and openly itself.”   ~~Deena Metzger, “Entering the Ghost River”
5.  New ideas.

May we walk in beauty.

Waking Up

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Like the remnants of fog burning away in the morning sun
the last rags of dream whisper through the valleys
of my waking brain, gnats caught in the cobwebs of consciousness.

In the beginning of the year, the drops of mist form words
and a sentence emerges like a sapling from the fog:
All that I have been is compounded in the present moment.

One morning I wake and the spiders whisper the name
of an impossibly green stone, like poison, like miracles:
Dioptase, a viridian eye that sends forth the tentacles of the heart.

Or a song will be ringing in my ears as I tiptoe downstairs
in the dawn: Give yourself to love, if love is what you’re after.
Open up your heart to the tears and the laughter.

I gather the strands of silk and wool and hope that have caught
on the fences between the world of waking and sleeping,
and weave them into the story of the day, the week, the year.

There was this one: I am walking down a sunny city street
and am filled suddenly with foreboding, knowledge of a Terrible Presence.
I know that it will destroy me, and the world, if it senses my recognition.

The key, I learned without learning,
is to keep that knowledge hidden in the back of my brain
and cover it up with gratitude and joy and hope.

(Already I know that I will be revising this poem, to make it less self-referential, less plodding.  But I wanted to get it down today, and this is the place where I do this work.  Welcome to my process.)

Gratitude List:
1.  Towhee is back.  Ellis misidentified him as the orchard oriole.  If you know the two birds or have a bird book handy, you’ll understand why that makes me proud.  He’s getting his birder’s eyes on.
2.  Weighing cheese for the farm store with Ellis.  Impromptu math lesson on rounding up and down to the nickel.
3.  Chocolate cake/brownie goodness.  We have discovered the Grand Unifying Theory.  This is the basis of everything.  I love the Saturday crew.
4.  Phoebe babies in the barn.  It reminded me of the lovely book which my Great Aunt Lizzie gave to us when we were children.  I will read it to my own children again this coming week as we wait for the little ones to fledge.
5.  Ellis making the point that one of the things that is important to him is taking care of the very smallest ones.
(Hmmm.  A lot of Ellis in this list.  He’s a special kid, and so is his brother.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Doves in the Rain

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It’s a little grainy, I know, but I like the way it captures his concentration.  Yesterday afternoon when it was starting to pour, Jon made this little city for the boys, out of a packing insert.  The hours of delight and play and more drawing on the part of the children that has ensued has made this rainy day special.

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Gratitude List:
1.  The way my poets shatter my heart and put me back together again.  I cannot find the reference at the moment, but there is a myth of a goddess who was rent into pieces and then put back together.  It always disturbed me.  Now I think I understand it a little better.  And yes, they are my poets.  I claim them.  Thank you, Leigh and Mara.
2.  The way the mourning dove raises her wings to the rain.  I remember one day in Tanzania when the rains had come late, so painfully late, and the resident flock of doves sat on the packed earth in the new rain and rolled on their sides, each with a wing pointed skyward, letting the water soak them all the way to their wingpits.
3.  All the surfaces in the Market Room are clean and ready.  The curtain will rise in just a few days on the 2013 season of Goldfinch Farm CSA!
4.  A clear-headed day with no sniffles, no sneezing and easy breathing.  This is SUCH a big deal to me, it is worth listing it on a gratitude list.
5.  Watching Jon relax and take a well-deserved farmer nap this afternoon.

May we walk in Beauty.

 

Yesterday’s List–
Gratitude List:
1. Scent of honeysuckle
2. Deep, soaking rain
3. Making new friends
4. A clean house
5. Catbirds

May we walk in Beauty.

Mulberries and Mountain Laurel

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Gratitude List:
1. Mulberries
2. Kingfishers
3. Mountain Laurel
4. Recycling
5. A-Muse-ment

May we walk in Beauty.

The Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird is available here.

Boxful of Dreams Come True

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How does one receive
a boxful of dreams come true?
I will name the man in the big brown truck
a priest or professor.  Do I bow or kneel to receive it,
the sunlight sparkling
through leaves of dogwood.
Just stand and smile,
and take it into my hands.
Are there ritual words of thanks and blessing?
Can you know, good sir,
how this act, this moment,
changes me from one thing to another?
How the moment I turn
and walk away from you
I have become something else,
something else entirely?

Song of the Toad
Click on the photo to purchase it on Amazon.

Gratitude List:
1.  My book is here!
2.  The strawberries are in
3.  I won the May Poetry Contest on Versify
4.  That weather out there is as perfect as it can get, and something about perfect weather makes me feel whole and happy.
5.  Did I mention that my book came today?

May we walk in beauty.

The Way You Walk Toward Healing

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Gratitude List:
1.  Brown thrashers on the lawn in the gloaming
2.  The hope of the hummingbird (soon, soon!)
3.  Such pleasant temperatures and cool breezes
4.  Wise friends
5.  The way you walk toward healing.
And I mean you.
So many people I know have lived
through such losses.
Lived, and then chosen
somehow, to put a foot forward
then another, to take the next breath
when your chest has been crushed by grief.
Perhaps you cannot understand this
or perhaps you can:
you have unleashed into the world
such bigness of grace
in those moments of choosing
just the next step, the next breath.
It may have felt like a slog
or like nothing, or hell
but you walked on, you breathed.
Take it for what it is worth:
some learning soul somewhere
has noticed and seen it
for the grace that it is.

May we walk in beauty.