Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Deep Dreaming

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In last night’s Dreamtime, I am at lodge or little village or somewhere. I am working at my friend’s shop, which is sort of like a little kiosk place in the lobby of the lodge. I can’t find anything. People are asking for herbs and homeopathic remedies, and I know what they are and where I would normally find them, but in this tiny space, I can’t find anything. People are nice about it, though. I find a piece of paper, written in my own handwriting years prior, but which seems to be relevant for this moment. In the dream, I can’t figure out how I can be in both times at once, and a whole part of the dream is me pondering that and trying to figure it out.

A little later, I am walking up on the hill behind the lodge/village in the moonlight. I pass a white tree with red and black shadows and patterns running up and down the trunk, and it’s all bathed in moonlight, glowing. It’s a moment of incredible beauty and wonder. I run back to the lodge/farm/village for my camera. On the way back up the hill, I pass the purple okra patch, which is beautiful in itself. I pause to admire the okra, and notice several stalks that are blighted and chewed by some animal. I’m lucky that I have one of those craft razors with me, and I slice off the dead and broken bits. My handy razor glints in the moonlight. I return to the Beautiful Tree, and realize that I have again left my camera behind, so I race back down the hill, which–as you may know–is particularly exhausting in dreams.

Then I am packing up my things and heading home from this place. My friend asks if I can take her puppy Otus (it is spelled like the owl and not the human name) along with me. He’s an adorable little ball of grey-brown fluff, and he loves to be with me. On the way home, I remember that my friend and her boyfriend were planning to move and would be looking at a new house on my route home, so I stop in. Since it’s an Open House, I just walk in. My friend and her boyfriend are singing together. He’s sitting in the living room looking through boxes, and she’s puttering around in the bedroom and kitchen, unpacking. They’ve already moved! They’re surprised to see me just walking into their house. They wonder if I knew the code to get in the front door, but I say it was open.

My friend offers me some art supplies and sets up a board and paper on her bed so I can paint. She introduces me to her new kitten, which turns out to be two kittens, and they’re living breathing animals, but they’re crocheted. They love playing with Otus the puppy. When I am finished with my painting, I clean up, find Otus, thank my friends, and wake up.

Much to ponder today: Layers of time. The White Tree. The need to capture a photo. Nurturing the okra. The colors of the tree and the okra. My shining and helpful razor blade. Otus the puppy (the screech owl, Otus asio, is personal symbol of mine). Walking into my friend’s house despite the combination lock. Space for art. The crocheted kittens.

Gratitude List:
1. Josiah and I just witnessed the most amazing thing! While I was writing my dream, I glanced up to see the raccoon (we’d seen her once before) striding purposefully over the bluff and down to one of the walnut trees in a little circular area behind the house that I call the cauldron. (I hollered “Raccoon!” and Joss was the only one awake to come watch with me.) She paused and looked my way, then climbed the tree. When she reached a branch about house height, she slipped in behind the branch to a place where there must be a hollow place. We watched her take hold of a little one, bring it down the tree in her jaws, and carry it up over the bluff. She was gone for several minutes, anxious minutes for us, while we watched another baby up on the branch, trying to figure out how to follow its mama. Finally she returned and got that one, too. We think she must have already moved at least a third kit before we saw her the first time. What a deep and satisfying pleasure to witness such a moment. My hat is off to this careful and intentional mama. Those little ones will soon be too big for her to carry up the walnut tree in her mouth. I suppose she and the little ones are the ones who ate the duck eggs from the nest by the pond. Such sadness. Such thriving life. The wheel of life is beautiful and terrible.
2. I successfully baked a crusty, tasty, yeasty loaf with my wild yeasts yesterday. It was SO satisfying. Maybe now, instead of discarding my extra starter, I should bake flat cakes to leave out for the raccoon family.
3. That oriole is the loudest voice in the hollow, and constant, and beautiful–an orange flame dancing along the branches of the neighbors’ walnut and flitting from clump to clump of new leaves.
4. I might be emotionally done with school, but if I have to push through, it is nice to do it with a cat snuggled up to my thigh. If I sit on the couch, I usually end up with a cat snuggled up on each side.
5. I watched a short video this morning of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s reflections this morning that helped me recalibrate (her words) a bit, to shift my focus again to living in the moment and not living for the moment of The End of All This. Maybe you want to watch it, too.
6. Dream messages: I think everything is going to be okay, in the end. I will get into the places I need to get into. There will be quiet and gentle community. I will be true to my inner guides. I will do useful work.
7. So many necessary gratitudes today. Last one for today: Our neighbor found her cat. We’d been watching a calico cat in the neighbors’ yard across the street for the past few days. She was hanging out with one of the feral ginger bobtailed cats that we call Gunther and Stumpy Bob. Yesterday we found a paper in our mailbox from the neighbor up the street, asking if anyone had seen her calico cat. I texted her that we had seen her and that we would keep our eyes out. And she texted back that they had found her! It’s interesting how, when one’s heart is bruised and weary, the relief in a small story like this brings such a lightness and lift.

May we walk in Wonder and in Beauty!

“If you feel thirsty, then
drink from your cup.
The birds will keep singing
until they wake up.”
– Franz Wright

“Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” –attributed to Buddha and to Nelson Mandela

“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”
― Junot Díaz

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath

Breathing Up to Dragons

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Spot the dragon.

Five or six years ago, a friend read my animal cards for me, to determine what animal energies exist at my personal cardinal points: horses at east, lizard at south, panther at west, and crow at north. Frog at left, ant at right, dragonfly below, butterfly above, and antelope within. I loved this reading, and it helped me immensely in my breathing meditations, in helping me to orient myself within a safe sphere.

A few weeks went by, and I felt sad because there was no owl in the reading. There was no bat. There was no honey bee. And I began to think about the cross-quarter points on the circle. Who stands at my southeast? My northwest? So I meditated a while, and filled those in.

Then one day as I was breathing and meditating, I decided that because the animal meditations had so enlivened my awareness of my personal circle and orientation, they might help enliven my chakra breathing and meditating, so I contemplated and meditated, and found animals for each of those energetic points as well.

I work with more than seven chakras, and until all was said and done, I had thirty energy points, on my body and in my surrounding sphere, that I began to check in with. I found that, in order to remember them and not have to check a paper while I was breathing and meditating, I began going through them in my head as I was falling asleep. This helped me memorize them, and it helped me get back to sleep if I woke up in the night.

At the time, I was working in a shop that sells precious stones, and I found that as I imagined breathing into the great tortoise who stands at my earth star chakra, I was picturing serpentine, that stone that appears to hold within itself a map of vast landscapes. So I added a stone at each point. A while later I added plants. I stopped there. With occasional doubling up (both elephant and whale exist at my lower heart chakra), that’s over elements to remember and work with.

All of this is simply to explain why seeing a dragon in the clouds on my walk yesterday was particularly satisfying. At the very top of the chakras that I breathe open in my meditations, in the soul star chakra, are dragons. So when I saw the dragon, I recognized part of my inner self in the outer landscape, and I breathed all the way up to dragons, without even meditating.

And in some ways, that’s the point of the whole thing. Encountering animals and birds and plants and stones out there in the world outside myself brings me to a grounded awareness of my inner spaces. Now the morning birdsong, while just as beautiful as ever, is also a subtle reminder to keep my voice strong because of the songbirds at my throat chakra. A deer crossing the field at dusk reminds me to consider my higher heart chakra, to open myself further to deep self-compassion and unconditional love. The inner and outer landscapes mirror and reveal each other. Even up to dragons.

Gratitude List:
1. Dragons in the clouds
2. Meditative practices
3. I have to say it: School is almost over for the year. I need this kind of school to be over now please. I will be able to prepare myself for online learning in the fall, if that is what we must do, but for now, I am really grateful that this school year is almost over. For me. For my students. For my family.
4. Small creative projects that I can fit into the day’s rhythms. I made five little one-sheet/one-cut booklets yesterday. I want to print out several of my little Songs of the Beloved to glue into them as I decorate them.
5. Yeast. I got a little overwhelmed last week with the care and feeding of my wild yeasts, so I tossed it into the fridge. Yesterday I was ready to play again, so I took it out to warm up, then fed it last night, and I am about to go mix and knead the dough for a loaf today. I have been marginally successful in the past couple of months, so this might be my last attempt. If today’s loaf is still too cakey, I am going to return my yeasts to the wild and just keep using bought yeast. Still, working with this particular force of nature is a deep joy, no matter the little frustrations.

May we walk in Beauty!

“A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.” —Terry Pratchett

“Oh, God, make me a hollow reed, from which the pith of self hath been blown so that I may become as a clear channel through which Thy Love may flow to others. I have left behind me impatience and discontent. I will chafe no more at my lot. I commit myself wholly into thy hands, for thou are my Guide in the desert, the Teacher of my ignorance, the Physician of my sickness.” —attributed to Abdu’l-Bahá

“Truth is an agile cat. It has more than nine lives.” —Joy Harjo

Silence

A day of Silence
can be a pilgrimage in itself.
A day of Silence
can help you listen
to the Soul play
in marvelous lute and drum.
Is not most talking
a crazed defense of a crumbling fort?
I thought we came her
to surrender in Silence,
to yield to Light and Happiness,
to Dance within
in celebration of Love’s Victory!
—Hafiz

Weary

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

There are days/weeks when it just all begins to feel like you’re trudging uphill through mud to get to your destination. It’s hard to sort out the immediate from the long-term. What has to happen now? What should I be doing? Why am I baking another loaf of bread?

Sleep patterns get disrupted. A couple late nights means mid-day naps, which means tossing and turning the next night. It’s almost midnight, and I have finally finished the project I was working on. Why am I still awake at 1?

They say this is a good time to establish wellness routines. I walk. I do yoga. I breathe. How many days has it been so cold How many days of walking have I missed? One? Two? Five?

I know this is temporary, that it’s usually only a couple days of fog until the crisper air begins clearing my brain again. Meanwhile, I need to do little things that help me to cope. Set timers to work for an hour at a time and then take a break. Make sure I get the walk and the stretching in every day. And recognize that there are other things happening in my brain, even if the productivity piece is a challenge. I have been doing lots of thinking and meditating, building something inside rather than outside myself.

And you? How are you faring? What one thing will you do to give today a boost of energy?

“My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” —Anais Nin

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power.

“Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget… another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” —Arundhati Roy

“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.” —Jonas Mekas

Rob Brezsny:
Think about your relationship to human beings who haven’t been born yet. What might you create for them to use? How can you make your life a gift to the future? Can you not only help preserve the wonders we live amidst, but actually enhance them? Keep in mind this thought from Lewis Carroll: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.”

Finding the Magic

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
I still have a lot to learn, and I didn’t take a lot of time on this one.

Gratitude List:
1. We had our first takeout in eight weeks yesterday. It was a treat!
2. Yesterday, a blue-gray gnatcatcher came searching for bugs in the cobwebs o the balcony, and sat still for a little while so we could get a perfect view. My eyes have never been good at discerning fast and distant birds, so warblers and their ilk are usually out of my purview. I just assume they’re all chickadees. So it was nice to see this sweet little one up close.
3. Josiah and I saw three bright orange orioles flying across the road during our walk yesterday.
4. Last week Josiah showed me somewhere where I can really easily remove backgrounds from photos to make pngs for digital collage. physical collage has always been a really exciting art form for me, and this has great possibilities.
5. Finding the magic.

May we walk in Beauty!

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” —Albert Einstein

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?” ―George Orwell

“Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it.” ―Mark Lawrence

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.” ―Frida Kahlo

“Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.” ―Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“I am always doing what I can’t do yet in order to learn how to do it.” ―Vincent van Gogh

“Do one good thing every day that everyone else is scared to do.” ―Leymah Gbowee

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” ―Rabindranath Tagore

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” ―Margaret Atwood

“We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been—a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.” ―Starhawk

Jesus and the Women

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Jesus and the Women
A Mother’s Day Poem
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

His mother and his aunt made sure he knew more
than just the laws and canons of the men,
the patriarchy passed from father down
to son. They passed on their own mysteries,
from mother, from aunt, to these sons
they were raising. They suspected something big
was coming when Jesus and his cousin
came into their own, and they wanted them prepared.

And at his own wedding, when she upbraided him
for skimping on the wine, the gospels don’t record
his mother’s upraised eyebrow, quirked grin, tilted chin,
the way she swirled those robes of sky like hurricane
about her ankles as she turned and pointed to the empty
amphoras, then poked the steward in the chest, “Just do
whatever he tells you.” How the son hung his head
and shook it side to side, laughing. “Fill ‘em up
with water,” he told them, hands out in front of him,
like surrender. “No one can fight my Mama on this one.”

Martha had her say, too: “Bro! You’re bringing all these people
into the house! There are chairs and tables to set up,
children to tend to, food to be cooked and served.
Can’t you tell Maggie to help me with the work?”

“Whoa! First of all, let’s get this straight. No one tells Maggie
what to do. Maggie does what Maggie wants,
and furthermore, Mama said we’ve got to get the men
into the kitchen, too. Zaccheaus, will you grab that roast?
John, rearrange those chairs, will you? Uncle Nick,
can you catch that baby there before she toddles
out the door? Come sit here with us, Mar, and tell them
that idea you had about community gardens in Bethany.”

And when the party ended in the wee hours of night
and they were cleaning up, Martha handed him a dishcloth:
“Everybody wants a revolution,” she said and slapped him on the back.
“But no one wants to do the dishes.” He chuckled as he did them.

Then there was beloved Maggie—Don’t quibble with me
about Miriam and the Magdal-Eder and the names
of seaside towns. This is my poem, and I say
he called her Maggie like the rest of them, except
in the dark, when those healing hands were wrapped
around her. Then, “Mary,” he said, and “Mary,” again,
which is why the name went through her like knives,
like the sunlight which pierced her eyes on that morning
in the garden. But that came later.

“Why does the rabbi let his wife walk about,” they grumbled
in the synagogue, “with her head uncovered?”

I can see him rolling his eyes. Can’t see you how he
rolls his eyes? How he responds: “We’ve been over this
and over this. No one tells Maggie to do or not do anything.
Maggie speaks. Maggie writes. Maggie lets her raven hair
swirl about her shoulders in the sun. You might
as well tell thunder when to speak or to keep silence.
Maggie’s got a perfect mind, and Maggie will do
whatever Maggie pleases to do, and that pleases me.
Listen to this poem she wrote yesterday:
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the barren one
and many are my sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.”

And when the time had come, they gathered—
mother, aunts, sisters, wife—and they waited
and they watched. They knew what they had to do,
as women do who have received the mysteries of women
from generation to generation, and passed them on,
as women who have borne pain and healed pain
from the beginning of time. They stayed at the cross,
they went to the garden, they carried life forward
in the way that women do, in vials of oil and jars of herbs,
in loaf and grail, in words of thunder, and in mysteries
that you can see if you but look behind the veil.

Gratitude List:
1. My wise and compassionate mother
2. All my beloveds who mother me in so many ways
3. The experience of mothering. The joys and delights outweigh the wrenching sense of inadequacy, the shameful awareness of all I have done wrong in this gig.
4. All those birds out there. Some people say they think that global shelter-in-place has contributed to more songbirds. Anecdotally, I would say that could well be true.
5. Coffee

May we walk in Beauty!

“I stand before what is with an open heart. And with an open heart, I dwell in possibility.” —Macrina Weiderkehr

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
― Ida B. Wells-Barnett

“Somewhere in the world there is a treasure that has no value to anyone but you, and a secret that is meaningless to everyone except you, and a frontier that possesses a revelation only you know how to exploit. Go in search of those things.

Somewhere in the world there is a person who could ask you the precise question you need to hear in order to catalyze the next phase of your evolution. Do what’s necessary to run into that person.” —Rob Breszny
*“Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it.” —Stephi Wagner

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?” ―George Orwell

“Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, that person sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” —Robert F Kennedy

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil it multiplies it.” —Martin Luther King Jr

“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.” —Frederick Douglass

“Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.” ―Jane Goodall

Faerie Ring

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
You have to look closely to see the Faerie Ring, but it’s there. The clumps on the upper left are hidden in the grass. This is, of course, why they’re so dangerous–you could stumble into one unknowingly and not come out for years. . .

A friend of mine has asked me to avoid saying “rules” when I write about shelter-in-place, because that sounds too martial, too authoritarian. I sort of understand. But “guidelines” feels wrong, too, because so many people seem to be taking them as just that, and ignoring them, going out without masks, not maintaining social distance, acting as though this is all gone. Part of me wants to say: May it be so. May it be gone. But we don’t make a thing “gone” just by declaring it so.

The science seems to be offering us a different picture, one in which we could be facing quarantines and sickness and death for a long time to come. I also want the governor (of PA, where I live) to take us more quickly to yellow and then to green. But I want my parents to be safe, I want the random people who seem to die from this for no apparent reason not to die, I (selfishly) want us to avoid a second peak so I can go back to my classroom in the fall.

Call them what you will–guidelines or rules or orders–please follow through a little longer, for all of us. Wash your hands. Stay home. Plot the Green Revolution. Practice caution and simplicity. Get along without. Keep us all safe.

Gratitude List:
1. This morning at the feeder: goldfinches, bluebirds, doves, downy woodpecker, chipping sparrows, indigo bunting. An indigo bunting in the sun seems lit from within by blue fire. An indigo bunting in the shade sucks all color into itself, holding all the shadows around it within its little bunting shape. What a magical creature.
2. Yesterday I did my Ten Breaths inside a fairy ring of mushroom clump beside the stump of the poplar tree. It was a perfect circle. The faeries did not whisk me away to the Faerie Queen’s realm, perhaps because I have long been a friend of their beloved poplar, perhaps because I am not imaginative enough for their purposes.
3. A family of vultures have taken up residence in the edges of the bosque across the road. Such somber and thoughtful folk they are.
4. The amazing crimson of that little red Japanese maple, and the scarlet of the cardinal up on the hillside above, and the glowing scarlet fire of the head of that red-bellied woodpecker.
5. Nothing in this part of the hollow died of freeze last night. This morning is crisply frigid, breezy and shining.

May we walk in Beauty!

“No matter where you are from, your dreams are valid.” —Lupita Nyong’o

TO MAKE A PROMISE
by David Whyte

Make a place of prayer, no fuss,
just lean into the white brilliance
and say what you needed to say
all along, nothing too much, words
as simple and as yours and as heard
as the bird song above your head
or the river running gently beside you,
let your words join to the world
the way stone nestles on stone
the way the water simply leaves
and goes to the sea,
the way your promise
breathes and belongs
with every other promise
the world has ever made.

Now, leave them to go on,
let your words alone
to carry their own life,
without you, let the promise
go with the river.
Have faith. Walk away.

“Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women. Unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power.” —Andrea Dworkin

Justice Delayed

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

Don’t get me wrong.
I am glad that those men have been arrested.
There’s an aroma of justice to that part of the story.
It’s just that it’s so late in the story.
It’s just that it took a leaked video.
It’s just that it took concerted and focused public outrage.
It’s just that it took so long.
It’s just that it has happened before,
and it will happen again.
And again.
And again.
And what will it take for justice,
each time it happens?
And how does justice happen
if there’s no video to leak?
And is delayed justice any kind of justice at all?

Something is broken in America.
It’s been broken for a long time.
It’s never not been broken.
But we keep saying we have fixed it,
living like it’s been healed.
Acting shocked when we see how broken it is.
And then another round of outrage,
hoping that some sort of justice will be done,
and shrugging with relief and disgust
when the arrests are finally made,
knowing it’s never enough,
never soon enough.

I don’t know how to finish this.
I’ve run out of words.

Birthing Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

Fourteen years ago today, this person came to join us. I’m grateful every day.

Gratitude List:
This amazing child. That’s my gratitude for today.
Fifteen years ago, I lost my first pregnancy, over a period of about a week. One year later, to the week, this marvel of a human came into our lives. From the first hours of his time here, he was curious and awake, observant and engaging. He’s goofy and gorgeous, compassionate and tender. He loves his people and his cats. He spends hours thinking about how things work. He teaches me daily how to be a better person.

“We are not just made by God. We are made of God.” —Julian of Norwich

“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.” —Jonas Mekas

“Awake, my dear. Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of Light, And let it breathe.” —Hafiz

“Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‘I’m with you kid. Let’s go.’” —Maya Angelou

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.” ―Maurice Sendak

“The best teachers are those who tell you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.” —Alexandra K. Trenfor

Parallels

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Portals everywhere.

I have been thinking about parallel stories in the last couple of days. Margaret Starbird begins her book, Woman With the Alabaster Jar, with a retelling of the story/legend of Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea fleeing across deserts to Egypt to safety. And I couldn’t get out of my mind the images of the Flight to Egypt, of Mary and Joseph–the parents of Jesus–fleeing with a donkey and the child of promise across the deserts to safety.

The Flight into Egypt, 1305 - Giotto Art Print, Canvas

Jesus is the sandwich of the stories. In one, an elderly Joseph and his young bride Mary flee with their newly-born child from Herod’s wrath. In the other, an elderly Joseph and his friend’s young bride Mary flee to protect her child or soon-to-be-born child (Jesus’s child) from the wrath of the whole Empire. Knowing how the stories of the second flight were part of medieval European lore, I wonder how many of the Flight to Egypt images from that period may have intended to hold the mystery of the second as well as the first.

There are many historical explorations of the likelihood of Jesus’s marriage and the suppression of this knowledge by 3rd and 4th century patriarchs. I won’t go into that discussion here, except to note that when a story is forced underground, it will find its way to remain within the human collective unconscious. It will show up on the other side of the looking glass. Joseph and Mary flee with the child of promise into Egypt. And beneath that story, reflected in pools of history, wavery and unclear, but there all the same, another Joseph and another Mary flee with another child across the deserts into Egypt.

Gratitude List:
1. Meaningful work. Six years ago today, I interviewed for a job that would change my life. Grateful that I got the job.
2. Ellis. Fourteen years ago today, I began a long and arduous labor that ended with a most incredible young person coming into the world. He arrived unconventionally, and he took his own time, and he opened his eyes and lifted his head and gazed at the world within hours of his arrival. And that’s how he’s been ever since: He moves to his own drumbeat, he’s got his own timeline, and he’s obsessed with figuring out how everything works.
3. That touch of flame in the branches: oriole.
4. Greeeeeeeeeeeeeeen
5. Moon: Tonight is the Full Flower Moon.

May we walk in Beauty!

“One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.” —K.L. Toth

“Believe me, you will find more lessons in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from masters.” —St. Bernard of Clairvaux

“A woman with opinions had better develop a thick skin and a loud voice.” —Anya Seton

“The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.” —Alexandra K.Trenfor

“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living, I want to know what you ache for. It doesn’t interest me how old you are, I want to know if you are willing to risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine. It doesn’t interest me where you live or how rich you are, I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and be sweet to the ones you love. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and truly like the company you keep in the empty moments of your life.” —Oriah Mountain Dreamer

The Bridge

In a trivial gesture, in a greeting,
in the simple glance, directed
in flight toward other eyes,
a golden, a fragile bridge is constructed.
This alone is enough.

Although it is only for a moment, it exists, exists.
This alone is enough.
—Circe Maia
translation from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval

“If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” ―Roald Dahl

“To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” ―Mary Oliver

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” ―Vonnegut