Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Welcome, November

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

This month, I am trying to re-arrange some of my daily practice in order to make more space for writing. I have had two books floating about in my brain for some time, but I can never seem to find the time to work on them, so I thought I would give my first morning moments to the process and see what happens. So far, in the last two days, in the moments before I wake up fully, my brain has grasped a piece of dream-flotsam, and wrangled it into an image or phrase which I have used to begin a dreamy piece of super-flash fiction.

Perhaps I’ll be able to fit these into one of the books. Meanwhile, I am following the Dreamcatcher to see what she offers me.

In the past six or eight years, I have missed very few November Poem-A-Day challenges with Poetic Asides blog. This new process feels a little solitary, even lonely. But it feels like I have stepped onto a pathway, in much the same way that my first forays into Poem-A-Day were steps on a poetic pathway.

Here’s another thing: This week, I opened a Bag of Longing to see what was inside. This one was the idea of getting an MFA. It’s been haunting the deep corners of my brain for some time now. I decided to look at it more closely and see what it might look like this week. It’s so easy to get excited about it, but it’s hard to justify adding debt to debt when we have projects on the farm that must be fed money, and when the first of the children has just entered high school and will be exploring college possibilities himself before we can even catch our breath. Shall I close this Bag and stuff it back into a corner before it starts to eat me? Or shall I let the creature inside it out to roam, hoping it can find its own way home?

Gratitude List:
1. The many varieties of orange
2. That bright scarlet leaf on the neighbors’ orange dogwood tree was actually a cardinal
3. One small person humming quietly to himself in the car last night on the way home from trick-or-treating in town
4. November means cats in the bed, and that’s wonderful, as long as they give each other space and don’t start hissing
5. New practices

May we walk in Beauty!

Through the Veil

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This is Catherine Witwer (1833-1905), married to Isaac Weaver. My Great-Aunt Elizabeth Nolt Weaver (her granddaughter) said that she cared for women in childbirth (a lay midwife, I think), and then cared for their older children in her own home so the mothers could recover. Aunt Lizzie told me that people called her Mammy.

They lived at the White Hall Mill on Weaverland Road near Union Grove. My Great-Grandfather John W. Weaver was their son, and his son Daniel was my grandfather, who is my father’s father.

All sorts of ancestors, known and unknown, line the spiraling staircases of your DNA, watching, singing, remembering for you. What will you carry forward as you walk through the veil of this season?

Gratitude List:
1. The way the sun slants through colored leaves in this season when we step further into the darkness.
2. Stepping forward.
3. The light we carry inside ourselves.
4. Knowing, as we walk into this tunnel of seasonal darkness, that we will walk out again in a season to come.
5. The bright candle flame of a new idea.

May we walk in the glow of each other’s lights.

Cycles and Seasons

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1. Fibonacci spirals and the lawfulness of the apparent chaos of the universe.
2. Cycles and seasons. In the middle of challenges, the certainty (at least the hope) that the cycle will shift again to calm.
3. The tang of pesto
4. The people who are afraid, but who stand up for truth and humanity anyway, who don’t let threats or money or power or despair cow them into silence.
5. This reminder from Theodore Parker and MLK:  “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

May we walk in Beauty!

Red

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1. The red oak down Ducktown Road
2. All of Ducktown, really. Orange and yellow and every shade of fire.
3. Rice and beans.
4. Edgar Allen Poe and James Earl Jones
5. Listening to audiobooks on the ride to and from school with the carpool. Right now it’s Maggie Stiefvater’s Dream Thieves, part of her Raven Cycle series. Such excellent writing. I remember feeling this sort of delight in the writing of Douglas Adams, Patricia McKillip, Terry Pratchett (for different reasons, but the same sort of excitement about every sentence).

May we walk in Beauty!

A Goal is a Dream With a Deadline

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1. There’s something to be said for being welcomed into the day by three small furpeople as though one is a long-lost traveler returning home at last.
2. Owls calling through the gloam.
3. I like that word, “gloam,” and “gloaming.” And “crepuscular,” though it sounds a little like a disease. “Dusk” and “dawn,” the grey times of day. The words are pleasant, and suggest the magic present in the liminal moments of the day cycle.
4. The clean white page. Possibility.
5. Onion bagels.

May we walk in Beauty!

Here’s a poem I started working on yesterday. It might still want some revision:

Your Wild Cry
by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider

When the gun of the hunter is trained on your arrow,
on the vee in the sky where you strain your wings
beneath the belly of cloud, call aloud
to your sisters to fly with the wind,
to fly true. Tip your wings through the gap
between beams of autumn sunlight,
shift your shape, shift your seeming.
Turn your goose to crow, to wren. Turn into jay,
into warbler. Dive down, fly low, change your sky-riven cry
to caw, to buzz, to a twittering in the brushy fields.

Don’t let your voice be silenced. Change it.
Don’t let your call be deadened. Let it echo
through the valleys and hillsides. Take a new voice,
more insistent, more urgent, and wilder.

Wind and Windows

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1. The satisfying pinkish shine of a well-scrubbed copper-bottomed pot.
2. The clucks and buzzes and twitterings of the people in the bushes on the late migration south.
3. Rain and wind. I love storminess. I remember when Miss Gehman showed us the Olivier version of King Lear in high school Shakespeare class–It was the storm that sold me, the King and his Fool out in the storm.
4. There really are windows everywhere. You just need to know how to look. Sometimes when life is intense, it’s just hard to see them.
5. The urgency of Greta Thunberg and Autumn Peltier and their cohort.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Wildest One Calls

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments
There are windows everywhere, if you choose to see them.

Gratitude List:
1. That within us which is wild and untameable. The Wildness that calls to be experienced and known. This is why one of my names for the Holy One is the Wildest One.
2. Autumn walks. Leaves falling all around. Red berries. The scuttlings of small animals and birds in the brush.
3. Circles of protection and care.
4. Haiku and Tanka and terse, short-form poetry.
5. A good night’s sleep.

May we walk in Wildness!

Reflected Light and The Road to Faerie

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments
Cherry Lane: In the Eastern Orchard, Cherry and Pear and Wild Rose

Gratitude List:
1. Red berries and autumn leaves and morning mist. And afternoon walks through the fields and orchards.
2. A day off. It’s a working day, but one I can take at my own pace. (Last night was really rough with gastro-intestinal issues, so I am especially grateful that I don’t have to go anywhere today. And I feel much better this morning.)
3. Maddy Prior and Steeleye Span and their fierce and folksy ilk–my soundtrack for today.
4. Reflected light.
5. You, my beautiful beloveds. How the right word always seems to come at the right moment. Sometimes I need to stew and fret and grumble for a while within the maze of my own troubles, but when it gets hard to breathe there always seems to be a thread in this amazing tapestry that I can grasp onto. May our webs and weavings grow ever outward to hold all within our reach.

May we walk in Beauty!

Heart’s Revolution

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1. How the smell of coffee begins to revive me, even before the first sip.
2. Featherbed weather.
3. Thursdays that are Fridays.
4. Red and orange trees, and how they focus the blue behind them.
5. Morning silence. Lately, the noise of the day occasionally feels like an assault. I need to store up morning silence like cool water and sip from the memory well of it all through the day.

May we walk in Beauty!

Mist, Moon, Mist

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Poem from a year or so ago:
Prayers and Rage
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

What can we give besides our prayers and rage?
And what will that avail?
Send out the story on October winds.
Fling it high, where crows are flying.
Send the message echoing into earth
with every pounding step you take.

Listen.
Let the shells of your ears gather the story.
Reel in the gossamer strands of the tale
and weave them into the veil you wear.
Listen for the stories of those who weep,
those who rage, those who only speak
with the shrug of a shoulder,
with a sigh, with a shudder.

Listen, too, to those who walk right in,
who step into your circle without invitation.
Listen to the voices that are hard to hear.
Offer only the bread that is yours to give.
Be like the old gods, with the raven Wisdom
on one shoulder and Memory on the other,
and Reason perched upon your hat.

Offer what is yours:
your rage,
your prayer,
your watchful quiet heart.

And another, more thematically whimsical:
Duck, duck, goose.
Goose, goose, wren.
Mist, moon, mist.
October.

Gratitude List:
1. Finding my way again to deep breath.
2. Chilly autumn rain. Yes, really. The melancholy of a rainy fall day can be satisfying even for sanguine personalities.
3. While I have never been a big fan of the cold season, I love wearing layers and leggings, and that season has returned, and so I feel much more comfortable in clothing.
4. This full-spectrum lamp that Jon bought to help boost us through the coming winter. Light-bathing.
5. The distinctly autumn sounds of the calls of geese and jays and crows. I feel my animal self more distinctly in these days, pulling between the longing to migrate and the longing to hunker down and burrow in.

Much love. Blessings on your Day!