The prompts today are “bar” and “The Last _______.” Yesterday, I was mulling what the lore of these days might be, and the word Apocalypticon floated through my brain. It turns out there’s already a book by that name, but I thought it might be a good name for a poem.
The Apocalypticon: The Last Revelation by Beth Weaver-Kreider
One That spring, Grace found her first morel on the west-facing slope of the ridge. Everyone was finding them, actually, that spring. Everyone was eating morels, and Emily planted a gangster garden. Bootleggers and mob bosses graced her green. All we had seen before was somehow new now, more verdant.
Two One of us began receiving messages from a golden koi who circled slowly beneath the lilies of a lake. She would not tell us what the Lady told her, only: “Take what you need. Too much is at stake.”
Three I did battle with poison ivy that spring, apologizing a hundred times a day for cutting her thousand arms, but ivy laughed in crimson leaves and grew like the Revolution was at hand.
Four Some of us sat with our demons, telling old tales of battles long gone, bellying up to the bar of lost memories, or singing them to sleep with old songs, while Clare chanted exorcisms in the sleet on windy mountains pushing back the forces that threaten to submerge the story. I know of two who nearly lost the trail, wandering far into the shadows.
Five We stopped using the word normal, re-wove older linguistic threads, spun ancient stories into the chapters we were writing. We re-worded our vocabularies, re-ordered our syntax, re-discovered voices we thought had forgotten how to speak.
Six We caught our own flocks of wild yeast, planted potatoes in neat rows, learned new words for magic and for prayer, exploring layer after layer of mysteries, parting the curtains, and watching the ways of the moon.
The grumbling is getting louder. The anxiety is rising. People are starting to toss the words “rights” and “freedom” around. People are afraid that this is all power-plays by the leadership to cow us, subject us, hold us in our places. And why shouldn’t they be afraid? When have we ever known the (mostly) rich (mostly) white (mostly) male ruling class to work on behalf of the people, to remember their sweetly quaint little title of “public servant”? Who should we trust?
The doctors. And scientists. We can, hopefully, trust the scientists and the physicians. And the story. Trust the story. Watch how it has played out across the globe. Remember Italy. Remember China.
It’s very likely that some of the governors are working out of self-interest and electability, that some are too cautious and timid, that others are hungrily consolidating power in a time when people are vulnerable. So I will trust the leaders who seem to be trusting the doctors and the scientists and the story. It hasn’t been difficult to find an example of a leaders who isn’t trusting the science, who is inexorably manipulating the narrative to feed his own ego and his own power. And if you want to start talking about freedom and rights, let’s begin with the ways in which he has been harming the freedom and the rights of the common people since the day he took office. I’m going to cast my lot in with the governors on this one.
This doesn’t have to be an American frontier epic contest between your fear and your freedom. That’s an old and worn-out trope, and it’s a false dichotomy, a fairy tale told to us by end-stage capitalism. The governors are not Big Bart riding into town with all guns blazing, ordering the women and children to cower in their homes. In this story, we make the choice to stay home, to wait, to isolate, in order to protect the vulnerable ones among us, in order to protect our health care workers.
As far as I know, my parents and my immuno-compromised beloveds are all safe. But if we resume business as usual too soon, they may all be in danger, and those you love, too. It’s not about whether or not you or I personally fear death. It’s about whether we have the deep communal compassion to do something that protects the most vulnerable among us. Remember, this is the Exile for the Good of the Realm.
Gratitude List: 1. The Iron Lady Trail. My Project Manager says I shouldn’t call it that, that it’s still unnamed, but he initially called it the Iron Lady, and so I’m calling it that for now. Josiah is marking and clearing a series of deer trails in the woods above the pond. He calls himself the Project Manager, and her has enlisted his progenitors to assist with the cutting of poison ivy and brambles. Yesterday after our schoolwork, we cleared a side trail that links the Iron Lady (I mean Unnamed) Trail to a second entrance to the fields. This one emerges from the woods beneath a curving limb of a cherry tree. For too long, the poison ivy has kept us out of the woods. We are going to try to keep the trails maintained so we can have some passages through the woods. 2. The passion with which my kids follow their interests. It can be tiring to listen to hours of discourse on the minute differences between the Tesla models, or how to build a very detailed something-or-other in Minecraft, or the many reasons why a particularly obscure piece of technology is either illegal or shady or brilliant. Still, I love that they can be passionate about things that have near-zero interest for me. 3. Homemade oatmeal protein bars. I don’t know why I got away from making them. And of course, I have no recipe, so I have to go back and recreate it. The ones I made last night are too crumbly. But they taste good! 4. The veils of green appearing through the woods. 5. I am loving the poetry-writing process right now. It’s very much like the energy of April 2012 (I think that was the year), when I felt something click and sizzle. This is perhaps less giddy, more grounded, but it tingles. I’m especially grateful for my poet-community right now.
Take care of each other. Walk in Beauty!
The Soul, it sees by synesthesia Tasting light caressed by song A touch is like a descant fire resonant and strong. —Craig Sottolano
“I’m not as cooperative as you might want a woman to be.” —Carrie Fisher
“The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.” —Adrienne Rich
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. -—Raymond Carver’s Late Fragment, inscribed on his tombstone
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.
The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last.
All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you. —David Whyte
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” ―Mother Teresa
“Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” ―Linda Hogan
“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” ―Leonard Bernstein
Today’s prompts were fun to mash up: “dream,” and “middle of the week.” Also, I had my Creative Writing students write a list poem today, so I wanted to try one of those, too. Pile on the fun.
Transformation by Beth Weaver-Kreider
On Sunday, she dreamed she was inside an egg, arms and legs curled tight, and light (diffuse) swirling through the veil of shell around her.
On Monday, she dreamed she walked a pathway underneath an overarching fern. Fronds unfurled where dragonflies hovered above, large as dragons.
On Tuesday, she dreamed of thorn and bramble, rose and blackberry sending tendrils grasping, catching clothing, and bright crimson drops of blood.
On Wednesday, the fulcrum of the week, no dream disturbed her sleep, no portents woke her, no messages arrived through the veil between.
On Thursday, the forest of her dreams darkened and wolves prowled just beyond her firelight. Wolves howled in shadows, eyes a-glint.
On Friday, she died in her dreaming, yet stood at the edge of the clearing, watching her body where it lay among mayapples and mushrooms.
On Saturday, the dream spread a wide gleaming sea in her path. She stepped into a coracle boat, ivory, smooth as eggshell.
This morning, I found this image that I altered a year ago. That’s another thing about Mary Magdalene: she went out actually searching for the Beloved. Like Rumi and Hafez, she followed the trail of her longing. Thomas hid, Peter went back to work, the Emmaus travelers whispered their grief. Mary went searching, asking, into the cave itself and out again into the sunlit garden.
I love this series of stories, the Mary Magdalene story, the Emmaus story, the Thomas story, the Peter and the Fish story, and anticipate them with glee every year–Jesus, the Holy Fool, going from beloved to beloved with the Easter-eggiest of Easter eggs. Surprise! It’s me! Certain surprises are deeply heart-opening. The veil is suddenly torn down. The stone explodes from the entrance of the cave and light streams in. I love how Jesus sets up the epiphanies with the exact surprise each person needs: the gardener turning into the sunlight and speaking her name, the ghost-like appearance in a room where he had not been and the physical touch Thomas demanded, the wise comforter and breaker of bread for confused and grief-weary travelers, the stranger on the beach cooking fish to challenge and reconcile Peter. Everybody got what they needed in the surprises he gave them.
Springtime brings epiphanies and surprises: the sudden glimpse of a morel in the leaf-litter (I’m still looking for my first), the flash of red on a blackbird’s wing, the bursting of bloom on the dogwood that was naked just three days ago. The new and different slant of sun on the sidewalk, the particular springiness of the breezes and winds, the warmth in the air. May spring surprise you even during isolation. May your hear the Beloved calling your name. Remember: Even as you search, the Beloved is seeking you.
Gratitude List: 1. Last year on this day, I wrote about the musical thrill when leading singing in church, of being in front of all those earnest and joyful voices. I miss that. There will be lots of singing in church in The After. 2. I have always been incredibly grateful for the way we work as a team at school—faculty, guidance, administration, staff—to support students and their families, and now, more than ever, I am deeply moved by the net that we create (we’re trying hard to create) together. 3. Mr. Redwing just puffed out his flaming sleeves from atop the feeder stand and whistled merrily. 4. While I have noticed that I am holding tension in my body in ways I never have before, I am also learning new ways to stretch and breathe in order to release tension. 5. I think today might be a grocery day. We’re trying to make the time Between last longer and longer, but these kid eat a thousand things and guzzle milk like water. And as scary as it is to send someone out and to bring things in, grocery day is a shift of the rhythm. And we’re out of yeast, just as I was hitting my stride on the baking jag, so maybe there’ll be yeast tomorrow. At least there will be more flour so I can consider starting my own yeast.
Take care of each other. Walk in Beauty!
“Let me tell you what I do know though… I know mountains grow because of their fault lines. I know lakes turn that gorgeous shade of turquoise because of their silt. I know jewels are formed under pressure. I know trees can grow through rocks, and rivers can break canyons. I know there are 120 crayola crayons to choose from, so you can color yourself any which way you like. I know the earth smells fabulous after a hard rain, and I know she breathes. I know out of the destruction of forest fires, new and stronger ecosystems can emerge. I know there is life in the deepest depths of the ocean and her tides can soften stone. I know there can be no shadows without light. I know the passion is in the risk. I know time heals, and most things will be okay eventually. I know you are made of the star stuff, and I know out there somebody loves you; exactly the way you are, even if you haven’t found them yet. I know all these things, and tell them to you — in case you forgot to remember.” —Jacquelyn Taylor
“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” —James Baldwin
“We have tried to create a watertight social system so that mercy is not needed, nor even attractive. Mercy admits and accepts that not all problems can be solved by our techniques, formulas, and technology. The ‘superfluous’ opening of the human heart that we call mercy is essential for any structure or institution to remain human and humanizing.” —Richard Rohr
“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” —Anne Lamott
“Your heart and my heart are very, very old friends.” —Hafiz
“Now I see the secret of making the best person, it is to grow in the open air and eat and sleep with the earth.” —Walt Whitman
“Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.” —John Muir
“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” —Roald Dahl
“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as she is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things she would not have thought of if she had not started to say them.” —William Stafford (but I have changed the pronouns to feminine)
“America stands for exactly what Americans will stand for. History doesn’t write itself. It must be lived and practiced.” —Jesse Williams
There are the people who keep saying, “When things get back to normal.” I hear the sense of loss, the sense of things thrown out of kilter, in that–the longing to be able to be back with the people we loved, to go to the places we have come to love, to play and interact, to look people in the eye. I hear, and feel, the terrible anxiety of the livelihood losses created by a world on pause. Yes, I too eagerly anticipate the time when things get back to that normal.
There are the people who are critiquing the privilege in that statement. Getting back to what normal? they ask. I need to keep interrogating this for myself. I respect this critique. I want the new normal that comes when all this is over to open doors for more people. I don’t want to go back to a normal that privileges capital over humanity, that privileges the makers of abstract capital over the creators of actual necessary things, and the ones who make society flow smoothly.
There are the people who are celebrating this abnormal as a breathing time for the environment. Less pollution of all kinds–less particulate matter in the air, less noise, fewer lights–offers wildlands and wild creatures a chance to rebound, to heal. We are seeing the Mother’s graceful ability to heal herself. It’s happening before our eyes. There is hope. I don’t want to go go back to a normal that mindlessly plunders and destroys the Mother for capital gain.
I’ve begun thinking about it as The After. What do we want the world to be In The After? How can we honor the deep desire for a “normal,” a stability, a rhythm and routine that so many are expressing, and also strive for a new way of being? Can we make the kindnesses and the mutual aid a matter of course? Can we make the idea of everyone working together for the safety of our most vulnerable one of the established standards of the After? Will we find ways to walk the Earth with more respectful silence, so as not to disturb Her children? Will we give up plunder and competition in favor of sharing and co-existence? Perhaps now, the voices of the ones who have always striven for justice and equality, for kindness and ecological awareness, will be heard above the clamor.
What is the world you want to live in? We have been living in a pause, the world on hold, but there will come a time when we begin to move again, when we step out of the pause into a new something (a new normal, perhaps). Let’s commit to making The After a more just, more tender, more egalitarian, more eco-conscious world. Speak up now. Tell your ideas now. This is the gestation period, the time to be forming and visualizing and developing the normal that is to come in The After.
Gratitude List: 1. Visionaries 2. Dreamers 3. The people who implement ideas 4. Kindness 5. Hope
May we walk in Beauty!
“Grief is normal. It’s not like you’ll have a life someday with no grief. Life is all about loss, but grief is the medicine for that loss. Grief is not your problem. Grief is not the sorrow. Grief is the medicine. The people that have grief cultural awareness are always turning all of their losses into beauty in order to make more life instead of just trying to get through it and then forget about it.” —Martin Prechtel
“The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.” —Bayard Rustin
“My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing.” —Osip Mandelstam, Russian poet and essayist
“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.” ―Washington Irving
“Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.” ―David Whyte
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling—their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
“Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” ―Arundhati Roy, War Talk
“And this brings us back to the Hen Wife—that figure of magic who dwells comfortably among us, not off by the crossroads or in the dark of the woods; who is married, not solitary; who is equally at home with the wild and domestic, with the animal and human worlds. She is, I believe, among us still: dispensing her wisdom and exercising her power in kitchens and farmyards (and the urban equivalent) to this day—anywhere that women gather, talk among themselves, and pass knowledge down to the next generations.” ―Terri Windling
Today’s Prompts are Sacrifice and Purpose. In this one, I followed where the sounds and rhythms led me rather than working for a particularly tight meaning.
Let Loose by Beth Weaver-Kreider
At what price, this sacrifice? What personal cost, what cross, what losses must she bear, to wear the mantle she’s been handed?
And how much of it is her choice to give voice to all the stories offered her in dreams? What seems to be the answer to the question she’s been dancing since she woke?
What purpose does it serve, this nervous laughter, crafting tales that avoid disaster, trails of crumbs to follow home when all’s played out.
Could she have stayed within the boundaries? Prayed more devoutly? Sounded pious when her soul was out of kilter? Filtered out the deeper truths that led her out beyond the fields?
No, she was meant to wander further than the walls the maps required. She was tired of living tamely in domesticated trance. She had to dance into the open, throw her fancy to the winds, take her chances where she could and race the storm across the wildlands to find the answer to her ache.
Artists, left to right: Owen Couch, unknown, Robert Lentz, Richard Stodart, unknown (If you know the makers of either of the unknowns, I would be grateful to learn.)
She has always been one of my favorite characters from the stories of Jesus, along with Photina, the Woman at the Well. Women who lived raw and wild, undomesticated and on their own terms. There always seems to be something more, something deeper, something I can’t quite hear or understand, like a powerful dream that’s just fading before I can remember the details, or a word that sits on the tip of the tongue without finding its way into the open air. Mary Magdalene holds a Mystery that is always one step deeper into the veil of mists, one more curtain to encounter, one more step into the wilderness.
All the attempts to nail down her mystery, to put words to it, always leave me a little cold, compelling as they are: Maybe she was Jesus’ wife or lover. Maybe she was the real writer of one of the canonic gospels. Maybe she is the Holy Grail. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Mary Magdalene sits, like the High Priestess, before the curtain of mysteries, and only as I gain wisdom will I be granted the clue or the code or the shaft of golden sunlight that will admit me to the next stage of understanding. Like all the deepest mysteries, like the Deep Self, she lives in the realm of image and symbol, offering egg and thunder, grail and alabaster jar, skull and hair and tears. Best understood on the level of a dream. Best spoken in poetry, perhaps.
That moment of Mary’s epiphany is the mirror of every moment of yearning and longing and ache. Deep grief gives way to confusion and an intensification of grief: Where have they taken the body? And then the moment when the Beloved calls her by her name. I can never write that without getting chills and tearing up. Thomas, Peter, The Emmaus Travelers–those surprises are all coming, all delightful. But this one moment of sunlight in a garden and the sound of her/my name in the voice of the Beloved–it needs no pinning down, no explanation.
Gratitude List: 1. Wind. Yes, it’s scary, and I don’t really need more anxiety right now, but it’s so beautiful and powerful. After the big winds, I always think, “Wind-shriven,” the world scoured clean. 2. This long weekend. I have not yet gotten my lagging work completed, but I have had three marvelous days of baking and sewing and trail-work and playing with the family. 3. The story of Mary Magdalene. I need her Mystery and Epiphany now, perhaps more than ever. 4. Making plans even in the midst of this uncertainty. Putting programs and ideas and lesson plans into online formats is so much less than ideal, but I feel myself growing and thinking in new ways. In the after, I will be informed by the ways my brain has been forced to adapt in these months, and hopefully that will contribute to a glorious new normal instead of a return to an old normal. 5. Martin Prechtel’s ideas about Grief and Praise. I am going to have to buy some of his books.
May we walk in Beauty!
“I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.” ―Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” ―Emma Lazarus
“Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.” ―Ernest Hemingway
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” ―Robert Frost
“What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as One, Received not in essence but by participation. It is just as if you lit a flame from a live flame: It is the entire flame you receive.” ―St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022)
“We love the things we love for what they are.” ―Robert Frost
“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.” ―Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” ―Sarah Williams
“Resist much, obey little.” ―Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
“Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.” ―e. e. cummings
“If we do not mean that God is male when we use masculine pronouns and imagery, then why should there be any objections to using female imagery and pronouns as well?” ―Carol P. Christ
“Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful.” ―Carol P. Christ
The prompts today are “spirit” and “eggs.” And it is Easter, so that wants to weave into the mix. One of my favorite moments in all of the New Testament stories is the moment when Mary Magdalene is weeping in the garden, and asks the gardener where they have taken her beloved, and the gardener turns, and it IS her beloved, and he says her name. This feels like one of the holiest stories to me.
Grief is the Egg by Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Grief is not your problem. Grief is not the sorrow. Grief is the medicine.” —Martin Prechtel
There are people who sing when they weep, who wail for the dead in poems, chant the wandering spirits into seeds that will sprout in the new world as trees, or storms, or whales.
Grief is not the rock that entombs you. It is the egg of the thing to come, the precious perfume in the alabaster jar that finds its way to praise life and living even as it anoints the dead. The egg and the seed are the medicine.
Grief is no dead end road. It is the curtain rent in two, the woman weeping in the garden: “Tell me, if you know, where they have taken my beloved.”
Grief is the egg of the moment, radiant with sunlight, just before the gardener turns, and you hear your name.
May you feel your spirit rise today, rolling away the stone from the entrance and bursting forth into the shining garden.
May you sense the impossible truth today. As you huddle in your anguished grieving, may you hear the Gardener call your name as you turn into the light.
Gratitude List: 1. A shining morning 2. Making things: clothing and poems and bread 3. All the colors out there: flashes of red and yellow in the trees, blue and green 4. Courage 5. Sunlight in the hollow
May we walk in Beauty!
“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ―Rumi
“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ―Buddha
Some words on my River, from Robert Louis Stevenson: “I have been changed from what I was before; and drunk too deep perchance the lotus of the air, Beside the Susquehanna and along the Delaware.” ―Robert Louis Stevenson
“. . .and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.” ―Robert Louis Stevenson
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ―Elie Wiesel
Rob Brezsny: Plato said God was a geometer who created an ordered universe imbued with mathematical principles. Through the ages, scientists who’ve dared to speak of a Supreme Being have sounded the same theme. Galileo wrote, “To understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics.”
Modern physicist Stephen Hawking says that by using mathematical theories to comprehend the nature of the cosmos, we’re trying to know “the mind of God.”
But philosopher Richard Tarnas proposes a different model. In his book “Cosmos and Psyche,” he suggests that God is an artist—more in the mold of Shakespeare than Einstein.
For myself―as I converse with God every day―I find Her equally at home as a mathematician and artist.
Mockingbird Chronicles 