Remind Me
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
If ever again
I should be in danger
of losing my wild
I will need you
to remind me of this night,
how the wind came roaring
down the hollow,
how leaves scattered
and skuthered
like blizzard-driven snow,
how the great loving eye
of the moon gazed
through ragged sheets
of clouds which raced
across the sky.
Today’s poem.
Your ancestors surround the well
of love unconditional, sending you forth
with the blessing on the unforgotten ones.
Step into the silver light
of the first snow,
tingling with anticipation.
One day is the gentle fall of soft flakes
on dark soil, the next is the wild storm
you must struggle through to survive.
It’s a slog, a long-haul prospect,
a journey through the labyrinth
of caverns, until you reach the light.
There, at the end, you find your tribe,
telling the story by firelight. There will be
laughter, there will be dancing.
Focus your vision on blackthorn
and hagstone, on the faerie bramble
and the wild wild wind.
November 2, Poem-a-Day
All Souls’ Day
Ode to the Late Bloomers
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Hello, you late bloomers
you November roses,
you gray-headed adventurers
you fresh faced elders.
Hello you long rememberers
with whimsical notions.
Good morning, hoary elders:
This new dawn is for you.
It’s your turn to shine
you golden-aged, wide-eyed,
always-beginners,
you never-stop-learners,
you never-stop-tryers .
This is your Third Act,
your October sparkle,
your Autumnal glory,
your riot of color.
Make it your best one,
filled with adventure,
youthful eyes twinkling,
follow the piper into the mountains.
Claim your desires.
Dream a new dream.
It’s November, so it is time to begin Poem-a-Day again. As I was looking for inspiration for this first day’s poem, I saw some notes I had made for the work I am doing with Kore/Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate. I wanted to set the poem onto the page in a format similar to the way I take notes.
Poem-a-Day Rules for Myself:
1. I am free to write utter crap.
2. My intention is to post a poem every day in November, no matter how small, no matter how late in the day.
3. If I get one good poem out of the month, I will celebrate.
Gratitude List:
1. My parents are safe and well in their new apartment.
2. The way the light angles in during this season.
3. My incredible students–I love watching the seniors create and present their Local Legends and Lore presentations on our Halloween Trail every year. I had to miss it this year because of my parents’ move, but helping them prepare is always a highlight.
4. An extra hour of sleep tonight.
5. Rituals to mark the changing seasons (externally and internally)
May we walk in Beauty!
No King
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
It was the perfect image, actually:
a rogue king (self-proclaimed)
shitting on his people,
slit-eyes shifting
in haughty detachment,
in the cabin of a fake fighter jet.
Unwanted, incompetent,
unable even to wear his own
safety gear safely. Alone
in the sky, unstable, unhinged,
no flicker of inner worlds
in his incurious eyes,
a demented troll awakened
to perform a moment’s school bully vengeance.
And you there, in your thousands,
there in your millions, you in you
high-spirited froggy and unicorn glee,
how you cavorted, supporting your neighbors,
singing, thumbs-upping, and honking,
you, dressed in your first amendment,
you, wearing your We The People,
holding your Constitutional rights in your fists,
remember that no king, no dictator,
no foolish, decrepit would-be emperor
will ever take away your right to be free.
A week ago, I came across the call for an economic blackout from September 16-20. Someone made the suggestion that the real impact would be for as many people as possible to stop using social media for the duration because Facebook and Instagram and their ilk are also owned by the big-money folks, so I stepped off social media for the week as well. Yesterday, I talked with my friend and mentor Sarah Preston about boycotts and protest and change. Here are some of my thoughts in response to our conversation and this past week:
I’ve been attending Menno Action’s Tuesday evening Zoom meetings called Courage School for the past few weeks. One of the images they keep referring to is the idea that we think of the power structures as a pyramid with a strong, wide base, impossible to break down. In reality, it’s more like an inverted pyramid, propped up by church, community organizations, schools, businesses, corporations. If we can begin to very deliberately pull out the support of those struts, the structure will collapse. So yes, I think boycotts can be at least a temporary part of influencing those props to shift away from supporting the empire. And also, we need to be strategic about pulling out those props, and using them to build the world we envision.
Let’s keep staying grounded, keep breathing, keep loving, keep checking in with each other, keep reaching out, keep building, keep nurturing, keep protesting. . . Breathe, ground, dance, hug, write, sing, hum, hold babies, paint, remember, tell stories–whatever you need to do to stay with the process, to hold onto hope and truth and peace and your sense of your truest self.
In last night’s dream, a woman commandeered my car to drive somewhere way out into Nowheresville. This is the second time in two weeks that I’ve had a dream about someone taking over the wheel of my car so they could drive to their destination out in the middle of nowhere. It’s not a carjacking, because they fully intended in both cases to get out and leave my car to me when we reached our destination, but still, it’s uncomfortable to me to find myself a passenger in my own car.
In the dream, a woman motions me into a parking lot at a convenience store, and I pull in, sort of catty-cornered, so I can hear her question. She starts talking even before I get the window open, asking me if I know the way to Lizard Point.
She has a sort of shopping cart filled with all sorts of things, including a baby seat with a baby climbing out of it. She just opens the door of my car and starts putting the baby seat into the back seat, so I grab the baby who is sweet and cooing, and I clean up the vomit baby has spit up all over itself. Before I know it, the woman is in the car getting ready to back out of the parking lot on the way to Lizard Point.
I don’t remember the trip in the dream, but when we get to the building where she wanted to go, while the woman unloads her things, I go to get the baby out of the car seat. The baby has thrown up all over again, this time much worse, and there’s nothing in the car or anywhere to clean up the mess. The baby’s face is ashy white and I’m afraid the child has died or will die.
At this point lucid brain kicks in, and I realize that I’m in a dream, that this baby is a symbol or metaphor for something instead of a living (dying) child, and that I can pull myself out of the dream so I don’t have to keep experiencing the horror of this image. It’s 3:00 in the morning.
A note about Lizard Point: this is the name of a geography game that I sometimes play but haven’t for a while. If you like geography, and want to learn more, I recommend it or Seterra. Globle and Worldle (notice the extra L) are also fun. Especially in times like these when there’s lots of news of places around the world, I like that my brain can now see where on a map Ukraine or Yemen or Myanmar is. It helps me feel connected.
One of my beloveds recently mentioned that they thought I’m a little too deferential, that I don’t speak up enough for what I really want. While I am working on saying things like, “I want,” “I need,” “I desire,” I’m also a Seven on the Enneagram, which means that pretty much anything can make me feel happy and content. So if I say, “Hey, let’s do this!” And you say, “Sure, but what about this instead?” I’m probably going to agree with the thing you suggest because both things will make me happy just being with you is what makes me happy. Still, I do want to take this person’s point seriously, and I wonder at these dreams in which someone commandeers my car, whether there is a message that I need to start saying, “No, I really want to do this.”
These dreams about someone else driving my car might also relate to the fact that we have a driver with a learner’s permit in the family right now. I am now mostly in the passenger seat, so that’s an image my brain would likely latch onto.
I could wake myself up from the horror dream of a dying child, but I wake into a world where children are dying, and it seems that people are too distracted, like the mother in my dream, to notice the constant crisis. And I feel utterly helpless.
Wheels of energy radiating strands of color, texture, and sound. Summer evening sun sparkling and twinkling and streaming through ribbons of energy.
Yesterday evening, I went to Don Ziegler’s Energy Wheels Exhibit, a magical and contemplative journey through the energy of the elements, with the spirit of his wife Priscilla, my beloved friend, present in all the twinkling of light, the undulating ribbon, the chimes of the Cosmos.
Don told me to interact with them as I felt led, and so I walked into each one, and took selfies within each wheel.
I began at the Spirit Wheel.
The Wind Wheel’s Ribbons were white, and they reflected into the water of the pool:
I found myself at home in the Earth Wheel:
And the Fire Wheel danced around me as I entered:
Don didn’t stop at the traditional Elements. He’s a plant man–of course Chlorophyll would speak to him.
I can’t seem to get my video of the Cosmos Wheel to load up here. I can’t do justice to Cosmos without the sound. Wires and bits of chain, energetically charged pendants and pieces, a tiny round piece of meteorite that my brother found in Tanzania when we were kids, prisms and crystals and chiming pieces of metal.
I’m fascinated by the way each element affects me in the selfies. Iam reminded that I have all these elements within me. One exercise I have done in groups–writing groups, tarot classes, magic classes–is to ask which element you most closely identify with: Air, Fire, Water, Wind? I find it helpful to explore how our personalities may be more airy or grounded, fiery or flowing. Last night’s installation had me asking a different question: How do all the elements present themselves within me? They are all present (Chlorophyll and Cosmos, too, and Spirit) within each of us.
I’m so grateful to Don for following his intuition and creating this incredible art installation. When one person is true to the vision that comes to them, it inspires others to follow their own visions and dreams and intuitions.
Well, here’s a fun etymology! Syn- means together, as in synchronize, synonym, synapse, sync. But that second part is harder. It could, according to etymologyonline.com, come from the old Greek word kerannynai, or the word krasis, which both carry the meaning of a mixture or blending. To blend together. Probably the appropriate linguistic trail.
But eymologyonline.com also explains that the cretism could also refer to Crete, and an old adage about “lying like a Cretan.” To bring the liars together? Hmmm.
The word took on specific meaning during the German Reformation, when people with varying ideas of religion were fracturing into sects, and theologians were working to “bring together” or syncretize their theological systems. As often happens when people try to stitch varying ideas together, the sects became even more fractured, and syncretism became a bad word, taking on the meaning of trying to put together things which absolutely should not be put together.
Which is how I learned it, in a Religion class in my Mennonite High School. Syncretists, we learned, see religious experience as a smorgasbord, taking a little of this and a little of that, whatever shiny ideas their ignorant or heretical minds find appetizing. We were told that they don’t commit to a single path, so they are less enlightened, less spiritually mature, than the creedal religions, like Islam, Judaism, and especially Christianity.
While I certainly, and to my shame, felt the superiority and pity required by the fervent evangelical system of my Religion class regarding the syncretists, something in me started singing then–perhaps it was the budding poet: “Not everyone feels compelled to fit the boxes! Some people choose their path.” Perhaps that was when I first began to give myself just a little permission to look at my spiritual story from a lens other than the steel-sided theological boxes I was handed by church and school.
I love the old Catholic women who pray to Mary and also read tarot cards, the devout Mennonite grandmothers of my own lineage who may have been practitioners of the German sympathetic magical tradition of powwow, the indigenous people who honor the ancestral truths passed on to them while weaving them into faith traditions they’ve known from other lines of ancestry, the witches who follow the path of the Earth Goddess and maintain their heritage faiths in whatever way seems best to them.
Today, I often call myself a Universalist, which applies, and yet that label takes me out of the specific realms where I find my spiritual buffet. I am an Anabaptist Mennonite, steeped in the peace tradition and the yieldedness and the opposition to Empire that my Mennonite ancestors experienced. Faith without works is dead, they said, and the priesthood belongs to all believers. I no longer accept the moniker Christian because of the way that term has been drained of its life-force and turned vampirical by the blood-sucking life-denying forces of the modern US evangelical movement. But I am dedicated to the teachings of Jesus. And, like the old Catholic women, I pray to his mother in all her forms.
And I am a witch, a word I wore quietly in private until it was given me as a public accusation and I chose to wear it proudly and publicly. A witch is one who trusts her own connection to the life-giving force of the Earth, of the Goddess who is the spiritual expression of Earth. One who believes in being her own priestess (like the Mennonites and their egalitarian priesthood). One who believes in finding Truth in her embodied experience. One who believes that magic is, as Dion Fortune wrote, “changing consciousness at will,” beginning with my own consciousness. I honor the rich traditions of indigenous spirituality here in the US and in Africa and elsewhere in the world, not choosing to assimilate their beliefs into my own, but allowing them to inform and enrich my personal practices and beliefs, which are grounded in my own heritage.
Mostly I am a poet, finding significance in metaphor and symbol, in the way words and ideas and images and people weave together to create a tapestry of meaning.
I recently watched The Truman Show again with one of my high school classes, and afterward we compared the image of Truman Burbank standing at the top of the staircase at the edge of the sky at the border of his world with the image of the “Flammarian Engraving” of the man peeking under the veil of the visible world into the deeper reality of the workings of the universe. I want to be always finding my way to the next doorway, the next veil, ready to face my fears and stand in awe at the new discoveries to be made. Ready to syncretize new ideas and revelations with my current limited understanding.
Mockingbird Chronicles 