The shooter was disgruntled. An employee. The shooter died after a gunfight with police. The gunman was a worker.
The day was most devastating. The most devastating in history.
The people involved were our neighbors. The shooter was confronted shortly after opening fire. There was an exchange of gunfire. The police officer’s vest stopped a bullet. The police officer was injured.
People heard someone falling. People went to investigate. There was a woman. There was blood all over. Get out of the building! The guy’s got a gun!
Unsure how to react. In a way you want to stay. In a way you don’t want to stay.
The shooting occurred when people were conducting business. People were hiding under their desks.
Police found a pistol and a rifle. The suspect is thought to have purchased the firearms legally. People can take guns into public buildings. The mass shooting took place. The FBI is responding. The president has been briefed.
Six people were hospitalized. Deadliest mass shooting. Since November. Twelve people were killed. Senator devastated by the news. My heart is with everyone. Praying for a swift recovery. Praying for all involved as we learn more. Praying for our city. We are resilient. We will get through this. Stronger than before. We always do.
Gratitude List: 1. Dreaming of crows. The way poet/priestesses unpack the images. Snuggling my shadows. 2. Today I had so many opportunities to do my WORK. Teaching is my vocation, and I love so much about it, but the best thing about it is that it lets me do my Work. It includes tears and hugs and hard conversations and so much self-reflection. 3. Curiosity. When people get curious about each other. Curiosity is a fine engineer, building bridges of gossamer web and light across chasms. But stronger bridges than you can imagine. 4. This fine boy of mine, who keeps being ahead of himself in so many ways. Perhaps what I mean to say is that he is ahead of my perceptions. Or that he grows into whatever space he enters. With grace and thoughtfulness. . .and curiosity (there it is again). He leaves a stage of childhood behind tonight at his eighth grade graduation. 5. Cool breezes. This means exactly what it says, because my room is hot as a sauna. But then it means more than that because your poems and your wisdom and your presence in the world are cool breezes to me, my friends.
If you could trust your voice completely, if you didn’t have to consider how how others would respond, if you didn’t have to be safe, to be tame, to be docile and humble, acceptable and charming and quiet, if you had not been trained to make your words into an easy chair, to turn your voice to honey: What would you say?
In 2005, my first pregnancy ended in a traumatic miscarriage. I recognize that all miscarriages are traumatic; this one, however, did not take care of itself. After the initial days of a slow bleed, I experienced a day of what I learned later (during the labor for my first live birth) was essentially hard labor. At thirteen weeks, my body went into full contraction mode to expel this pregnancy. I began to recover. I grieved. I went back to work, only to experience massive bleeding which began while I was teaching a class. I rushed to the ER at Women’s and Babies Hospital, where I was given surgical help to complete the miscarriage.
This was one of the most difficult times of my life. In the hospital, I received immediate and compassionate care from everyone involved. There was no questioning, no second-guessing. Of course my records confirmed that I had had a sonogram the previous week that showed a nonviable fetus. Still, I experience horror when I think of the stories I have read of women in my same situation who were forced to wait and bleed for hours or days because a rigorously anti-abortion hospital would not give surgical assistance without establishing the lack of a heartbeat. In some cases, women have developed infections or lost grave amounts of blood or even died for lack of essential medical care during miscarriage.
Will these merciless anti-abortion laws increase the risks for miscarrying women? I have absolutely no doubt that they will. On top of that, women who are experiencing the tragedy of pregnancy loss, of the self-doubt and shame we carry about how our bodies have let us down, will be placed in the position of being interrogated about whether they did anything to cause their miscarriages, with the risk of being charged as felons if they are not believed.
If some of us are particularly twitchy and quick to rage and grieving these days, it might have something to do with this, with having to re-open the trauma of our pregnancy losses–for whatever their reason or cause–finding ourselves imagining what the world will be like for women of the future who may have to endure what we experienced, only without compassionate care or empathetic understanding.
It’s time to trust women to understand what is happening to our bodies.
Yesterday was Endangered Species Day. Here is a poem I wrote for the occasion two or three years ago. Perhaps some of the endangered ones are not all with us anymore:
Ritual for the Greeting of the Lost and Endangered Ones by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Before you cross the threshold, remember to greet the guardians of the place. Step to the center of the circle.
Stand still and silent, watchful and waiting. Close your eyes and you will feel them all about you: soft breath, whiskers and feathers, cool sinuous scales and rough bristles, hints of movement like the whispers in a dream.
Turn to the east, to the birds, to the wing-folk, turn to the flying ones, feathered and beaked ones. Feel the sky darken as Passenger Pigeons fly over. Hear the maniacal bark of the Laughing Owl, the whistles and chuckles of the Carolina Parakeet, the caw and the clamor of the Hawaiian Crow, the deep distant drumming of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. All these, the People of the Wind, gone now. Gone.
Turn to the south, to the mammals, the fur-folk, the ones who run with the fire of the sun in their blood. Here is Celia, last of the sure-footed Pyrenean Ibex. There, standing silently like shadow, the West African Black Rhino. And there, sliding down the riverbank, the Japanese River Otter. This one, the Eastern Cougar, stealthy as dream. That one, the Formosan Clouded Leopard. All these, the People of the Fire, gone now. Gone.
Turn to the west, to the fish, to the fin-folk, turn to the gill people, swimmers and divers, the people of moist places, the people of bogs. That sleek gentle head over there in the water is Baiji, the dolphin of the Yangtze River. There is the fluke of the Atlantic Gray Whale. Shimmering in the cool depths, the Blackfin Cisco, the Galapagos Damsel, the Blue Walleye, the Gravenche. In the swamps and the wetlands, Holdridge’s Toad, Golden Toad, and the Cape Verde Giant Skink. All these, the People of Water, gone now. Gone.
Turn to the north, to the reptiles and insects, turn to the cool ones, the scaly, the earth people. Larger than a boulder, there is Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island Tortoises. There, in coils, like a great rope, the Round Island Burrowing Boa. This lizard–the Jamaican Giant Galliwasp. The Lake Pedder Earthworm, the Polynesian Tree Snail, the Rocky Mountain Locust. All these, the People of the Earth, gone now. Gone.
And wandering in brilliant circles and meanders in the sky about us, but not yet within the circle, bright orange butterflies, the Monarchs, and Honeybees, droplets of sunlight zipping through trees. And others, too, not yet gone– the Pangolin and Mountain Gorilla, the Hawaiian Monk Seal and the Island Fox, the California Condor and the Amur Leopard. All these, the next in line, the ones on the brink.
As you step out of the circle, look to the air above you, see the Bald Eagle wheeling on the wind, the Peregrine Falcon diving toward earth. See the Wolf, the Bison, the Bobcat. These are the ones who stood on the brink, who wandered back to the woods and the wildlands, who walked away from that veil and returned.
Now we must shift. Now we must change. Now we must make a new way.
Yesterday, a complete stranger accused me of the heresy of the gospel of social justice, and went on to intimate that I was heading for flaming hell if I didn’t say an unequivocal yes to his question about whether I believed in penal substitutionary atonement.
While I’m not really fussed about the mythological eternal burning, his questions clarify the blazing chasm that expands between us as we approach this great ecclesiastical divorce.
I am too accustomed, perhaps, to seeing myself outside the group, living instead in the wide open meadow, not the confinement of the windowless box, avoiding the bindings and locks of dogma, and questions that require a yes or a no.
Do you base your faith on what he said, or what was said about him? Which will it be, justice or atonement? Who gets custody of Jesus? Those who don’t want to die without being covered by his death? Or those who seek to live according to the story of his life?
First of all: If this day when everyone speaks of mothers is a day unbearable to you, I wish you the spiraling green of a damp spring day, cool breezes which bring your skin alive, and birdsong which calls your spirit to adventure. If you just cannot do this day, I hope that you can make it your own. Call it the Day of the Lost and Venturesome Soul. Go forth and ride the winds with the joy of your own being in this place.
And also, I must mark this day for myself: First, for the mother who mothered me, who has shown me so much of beauty and goodness in the world, who reminds me to put on the brakes when I start sliding downhill into emotional pits. She taught me to look outside, and to look inside, to marvel, to wonder, to look at the crunchy emotions with as much curiosity as the soaring ones. She reminds me to trust my voice.
I know that not all of us have such women who raised us. In that case, I wish you nurturers in other guises, way-show-ers, path-markers, wise wells and founts of deep inner knowledge, who will mother and mentor you, no matter their gender or parental status. In my life, I have had many mothers who have been guides on this pathway, Hecates to my Persephone. Great gratitude to all of you, beloveds.
And my own mothering space is complicated, as yours might be, too. I began to lose my first pregnancy on Mother’s Day, and birthed my second in this season. I treasure these young souls in my care, and I love being their mother. And, befitting one of the besetting troubles of my own psyche, I feel inadequate to the task. I beat myself up for the many unmotherly things I have done. Still, I am grateful for this chance to grow more fully into myself with them.
On this day, I commit myself to finding my own mothering/mentoring role in the world, to point out the beauty, to encourage the inward look, to nurture, to guide, to mentor, to engage, to See.
No matter your relationship to this day, I wish you a sense of yourself as belonging in this world. Much love.
Today is the last day of April! I love the adrenaline of poeming in April, always a little jittery, not sure I can pull anything out of the old noggin. But oy, am I ever glad when it’s done. I imagine it feels a little like finishing a marathon, though I wouldn’t know anything about that. Today’s Tuesday double prompt on Poetic Asides is to write a Stop/Don’t Stop poem.
Don’t. Don’t do it. Don’t wait for the right time, for some sublime exacting moment, for the torment of inaction to fracture your momentum.
Jump right into the story. Don’t stop planning, plotting, dreaming. Your days of glory seem so distant, but this is the instant you must engage.
Step onto the stage. Stop waiting, stop negating your own power. It’s your hour. The curtain’s rising. Surprise us all.
Mockingbird Chronicles 