Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

The Song of the Toad and the Little Birds

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I am playing around with throwing some random pieces together to see how they fit.  This is a collage I will likely cut apart again and re-formulate at another time.  Perhaps.  Unless it seems to live as I live with it a little.

This is the blank page, the tabula rasa
the cloudless blue sky waiting to see
how the weather will fill it.
Sleep shrouding sense
muted and whispering.
This is the field in the springtime
ready for planting.

I cannot tell you everything.
I cannot tell you anything.
How can I be more explicit?
You disturbed the bee at her labor.
Your dreams broke the silence
of my garden.

We do not come this day bearing flowers.
We do not come this day singing songs of victory.
Weaving our silence
Bearing our candles
These are the gates we will enter
Bearing the weight of the war in our eyes.

What is the job of this poem?
So many things conspire to keep me asleep.
The heart is the vessel of response
not the information-gatherer.

There it is.
There it is again.
Coming back to the story
–always–
of the toad and the little birds.
Glittering.  Hard and cold.
Be watchful.  Be bold.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  There was a dairy farmer “who loved the land and his animals, and took very good care of them. . . .  He was a loving person with a very kind heart.”  For his kind heart and the gentle daughter he raised.
2.  For the beautiful Pequea Valley and a fierce wind to scour the worries away.
3.  For the silent and tricksy activism of my husband.  I cannot tell you what it is, for then it would no longer be his silent revolution.  Just know that behind the scenes he is making the world a better place for us all.  (No, he is not the real Banksy.)
4.  For the serious and earnest nature of my people, for their singing, their love of conversation, their care of the bereaved.  You sit in a Mennonite funeral and you can smell the food cooking downstairs and you know that everyone will be taken care of.
5.  For love, because we can love each other even when we don’t agree.  Because when it comes down to it, love is really what we need.

Much love.  So much love.

“Oh look!” said Joss.  “Roxanne [the car] has a mustache!”

2013 March 060

I Asked the Chickens

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Feeling unsettled and out of sorts
I asked the chickens what they have to offer me.
All they could give me was their hunger
and insatiable curiosity
and small tender clucks of comfort.

And eggs.
Of course eggs.

And maybe that’s all quite a lot to give
as an answer after all.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Driving through Lancaster County in the late afternoon with my parents.  There is a reason people travel from all over the world to visit this farmland.
2.  An Amishman digging a grave with a shovel.  Why does this move me so much–that the church/funeral home/whoever did not use power equipment, but instead hired people to do the work by hand?  I personalizes it, keeps it from being about the noise and the mechanization, brings it back down to the human scale.
3.  Hearing my parents talk about their own church’s process with end-of-life issues, taking back the role of preparing bodies for burial from the funeral homes, not embalming, creating community responses around the experience of death, not prolonging dying with medicine and out-of-context care.  This is powerful community work.
4.  I feel a shift a-coming.  Big shifts, cosmic shifts?
5.  My new tiger eye ring.  (I had to rip it back into the mundane a moment–though perhaps there’s nothing mundane about this ring. . .)
May we walk the path of compassion.

2013 March

Trying to Break the Sense

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

My assignment for myself was to try to break the sense, break the sentence.  I was going to use the half-hour sessions of writing during the last three days to create fodder for this poem.  I stumbled a bit on that, and I never really broke out of the sentence.  But I have a little something interesting, I think.

Green is the toad word the
song of the morning the
hush of  a wee slamander
crouching beneath stars

I would be indigo
arcing through waterfall
I would be waterfall
dripping and gushing
I wonder when singing
reflects the rainbow
or whether my wandering greenness
displays a museum of dreams

Now that’s the brown metaphor
I was hunting
the hitching of zing to aha
There we go
Here we go
Falling beneath the wheel of the moment

And here’s a sunbeam
or off to the races we dance
but the moonlight is ticklish
and you’ve been in tangles
so when do we settle
like spiders in corners
to ponder the morning?

 

Gratitude List:
1.  “I love my snow day!” says Joss.  I concur.  Making snow people and eating snow and sledding.
2.  The beautiful necklace Ellis made for himself.  Focused work for hours.  And no self-consciousness about what is “gender appropriate.”
3.  That scrappy little wren who is threatening to make a nest in my garage.
4.  Finding the inner discipline to plan out my extremely busy week.  Planning ahead has actually become something that I have a great deal of resistance to, inwardly.  Pushing through whatever that is makes me feel like I have really accomplished something.
5.  Making the pizza myself, crust and all.  Why don’t we do that more often?

May we walk in beauty.

2013 March 149

Breath-taking

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

What an interesting word, that.  One of those that loses some of its value in its overuse.  Over-spoken and Under-thought, perhaps.  Today, my gratitude list is about Breath-taking Views and Scenes.  Places that make me pause in wonder.  That take my breath away for a moment.  But the act of noticing beauty also gives me breath, sustains me for the often difficult practice of compassion.  Breath-giving.

Gratitude List–5 Breath-Taking and Breath-Giving Views that I Noticed Today:
1.  The early spring view off Mount Pisgah, down over the bubbles of hills toward the River.  Green is spreading, but the leaves have not yet hidden the view.
2.  Heading East on 30 across the Susquehanna, looking toward Chiques Rock, with trees along the River frosted white from the morning mist, the poles along the railroad tracks sticking up blackly among them, and the charcoal grey hill and rocks rising beyond.
3.  A small oak tree, with its leathery leaves still clinging on, in a stubbly corn field, surrounded by tall yellow grasses like wheat.
4.  The very old stone house near the mall–probably once a mill?–surrounded by bone-white sycamores and weeping willows just beginning to don their spring green petticoats.
5.  Great blue herons patiently winging through blue sky.  Primal.
May we walk in beauty.

I realize my list is treeful.  Trees people my consciousness and my heart.
Soon the green will come. . .

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Poetry Prompt: Breaking the Sentence, Breaking the Sense

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I used to write Morning Pages.  Religiously.  I think I wrote for an hour every morning, fast and without pondering.  Julia Cameron said it would help me learn to know my inner artist, and so I did it.  That was about fifteen years ago, and I was writing many poems during that year and finding richness in the writing.  Ask me why I stopped and I can fire off a dozen excuses, some of them actually sort of reasonable.

Just a few weeks ago, at a writers’ retreat in York, John Terlazzo asked us do a similar process in response to several writing prompts, and then encouraged us to pick it up as a daily practice.  And so I have taken up the practice again.

Yesterday, this came out on the page as I was writing: “The idea is that I am trying to break up the sentence, to pull back that veil of sense that covers my brain.  To let myself go.”  One of my favorite ways to write poetry is to string apparently unrelated images together, collage-style, until a unified and profound whole emerges.  I have been wanting to take this process a step further and string words and sounds together in a similar way.  I’m not quite ready for my shoo-be-do-be-doo poem.  And I found that even breaking the sentence was challenging for me.  I’m still stringing images together.  But I’m getting there.  And I want to take it further.

Then this lovely quotation visited my Facebook Feed yesterday.  I agree with many of the people who responded when I posted it (find that conversation here) that many scientists and mathematicians value poetic language to describe the world they explore.  But the basic idea, of the poet approaching truth through paradox–that grabs me:

“It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox.

“T. S. Eliot said that in poetry there is ‘a perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations.’ It is perpetual; it cannot be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and controlled.

“The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize terms, to freeze them into strict denotations; the poet’s tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings.”

—Cleanth Brooks, “The Language of Paradox”

This will be my homework for myself in the next few days, for Monday’s poem:

Poetry Prompt:
To write without stopping for half an hour each day for the next three days, ignoring sentence sense, trying to bring myself into a patter-spatter of images and words.  To break the sentence, to step behind the veil of sense.  Then, sometime on Monday, to glean a poem from among those writings.  Will you join me?

 

Groundhog skull an Goddess Potato:2013 March 098

The Wheel is Turning

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

A poem from 2006, to celebrate the turning of the year-wheel into Spring.

Day Turns

The way maple swings its wings spiraling down shafts of dawn wind,
The way chickadee whistles on bitter March mornings,
The way lichen spreads grey-green lace upon the patient rocks,
The way the egg falls from jay’s beak to lie silent, cold, and whole upon the moss,
The way the wren defends her nest,
The way rabbit hints at her home and scratches the packed earth,
The way squirrel scolds her wayward cousin’s child.
The way heron stands more still than thought,
The way the pond reflects the orange air at sunset,
The way snake stalks the field mouse through gathering dusk,
The way the fields are washed in the milk of the moon,
The way dark midnight covers the farm like a blanket.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Those little trees in the understory of the woods, the ones that don’t lose their leaves until spring, whose leaves are wisps of yellowed paper against the mottled floor of the wood.
2.  Finding a nearly-empty (but not quite!) jar of Chocolat in the back of the fridge
3.  The many colors of potatoes
4.  Reading books with the whole family
5.  Writing it down
May we walk in beauty.

Not sure why it scanned so blue, nor why I had the impulse to post it here tonight.  This is my Great-Aunt Lizzie (Elizabeth Weaver–I am named for her) and my Grandma Weaver (Marian Weaver, Lizzie’s sister-in-law).  Quilting.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Words, words, words

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Books, words, books
2.  Tankas
3.  Sunset
4.  Compassion / lovingkindness / care
5.  You

May we walk in beauty.

 

March 2011–before we painted the barn red.
Snow then, too.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

For Glee

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

The list poem for a March Monday.  It will suffice for my gratitude list for today:

For glee
for giggle
for grin
for glow
for making snowmen in the snow

For dare
for desire
for delight
for dream
for things not always as they seem

For hilarity
for hope
for honor
for heart
for touch, and healing, and grace, and art

For breath
for blanket
for blessings
for birds
for building stories with our words

 

This is Ellis in 2009.  Today’s snowman is much smaller than this one, and today’s brother looks exactly like the boy in this picture.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Noticing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I just noticed that there is a face in the shadow of the tree on the barn at the top of my blog page.  Just a little to the left of center.  Hmm.  Don’t forget–tomorrow’s poem is a list poem–perhaps a gratitude?

Gratitude List:
1.  Opportunities to practice the work I have committed to, even when it’s hard.
2.  Good music.
3.  Abundance.   Lavish love, overflowing hope.  Yes, even when I sit near or in the shadows.
4.  Children’s literature
5.  Process.  Step by Step.  Just because I/we want to be There at sometime in the future doesn’t mean we have to jump there today.
May we walk in beauty.

Putting the Practice to the Test

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 6 Comments

I am thinking about the practice of gratitude, and why I do it.  Perhaps at first glance, it could appear to be naive and Pollyannish– if I just smell the roses, maybe I won’t notice the pig shit.

Perhaps the truth is not so far away from that, just deeper.  I am realizing that building my capacity for wonder and delight, that opening the space for gratitude in my soul–all this increases the breathing spaces for compassion to be present.   And compassion is about loving the tender blue of the speedwell looking up from a tangle of grasses, but it’s also about recognizing the role of the pig shit in the cycle of life.  Compassion takes a long hard look at the sunset, and then gazes upon the skull of the groundhog in the mud.

I think (hope?) that practicing compassion develops soul muscles that enable us to look unflinchingly at and listen to the ugliness.  It doesn’t make it easier to hear, to see, perhaps, but what I want it to do is to make it more possible for my soul, my heart, to remain present within those stories.  To witness and listen.

Yesterday, I affirmed again–to myself and publicly–that I want this journey to be about holding it all, about experiencing compassion that can witness whatever gets tossed into the bowl.  By evening, I was handed a story that I don’t want to look at.  I don’t want to smell it.  I want to drop it and wash my hands and walk away from it.  I really don’t know the people at the heart of the story, but we share some loved ones in common, and that is where I need to find a way to be watchful and tender and unflinching in the coming weeks, as the story emerges and is reconstructed and re-created, as people I love and respect move through denial and anger and anguish.

So the practice continues.  I am wincing and flinching, but keeping it open, ready to listen, to step further on this path, to practice non-judgementalism.

May we walk in beauty.  Even in this.  May we walk in beauty.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA