Gratitude of Resistance Nine:
Rhythms and seasons. A new quarter. Putting the old quarter to bed. Tabula Rasa. A fresh clean sheet.
Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider
Trees Afire with Autumn
Gratitude of Resistance Eight:
The Maples, the Maples, the Maples! The Oaks, the Beeches, the trees–all gone golden, gone shining. All afire. Something has happened in the last week that has brought the colors here to a fever pitch. This month of November, I have an informal daily check-in in classes, asking students to call out the things they are grateful for. Yesterday, my contribution was the red maple across the building from my room, and in every class there was a chorus of awed Yes! when I said it. I love how we’re all caught in the beauty, captured by the same awe and wonder.
The Tender Hearts of Teenagers
Gratitude of Resistance Eight:
The UNICEF Club. These students put together a wonderful little party yesterday afternoon to raise money for disaster relief in the Caribbean. I’m really proud of them and their intention to do good in the world, to make life easier for others. They showed the movie Coco at the event, and lots of people got weepy when Miguel sang Hector’s song for Coco. I love these tender-hearted teenagers.
May we walk in Beauty!
Trick or Treat
We got a late trick or treat start, so I didn’t get the obligatory photo in their costumes (we’re going to make them dress up for a photo shoot today or tomorrow), but here’s a pumpkin carving photo. Barn shadows are stunning in these autumns afternoons.
Gratitude of Resistance Seven:
This national ritual of blessing the children. That’s really what it is. Yes, it’s too much candy. Yes, there are sometimes pretty bloody images. Still, what we experience as a family every year on Halloween is genuine neighborliness. People sit out on their porches and smile at children, give them treats, tell them how great they look. And we folk who come from dark country roads into well-light towns are always welcomed as neighbors. This is my vision of America. We ought to have more door-to-door holidays.
May we walk in Beauty! Won’t you be my neighbor?
Red
Gratitude of Resistance Six:
Red. Yesterday it was a symbol of a community united to support our wider grieving community. After two students at Warwick were killed in a terrible car accident on Friday, word went out to schools around the county to wear red (Warwick’s color) this week to support our sister school as they come to terms with this great loss. On both Monday and Tuesday, LM’s halls and classrooms were red. The willingness of people to share in the griefs of strangers and acquaintances has been moving and inspiring. People are quick to live out of their best selves when called upon to be present for those who hurt. May it be ever so.
May we walk in Beauty!
Autumn Glory
Gratitude of Resistance Five:
Autumn Glory. Michelangelo clouds. Fierce breezes. Deeper, richer colors. Coolness. Maples afire. The swish of leaves. Woodsmoke.
May we walk in Beauty!
Penny the Dog
Gratitude of Resistance Four:
Penny. Dogs. Interspecies communication. Jon was the first to notice the dog walking across the newly-harvested cornfield across from Landis Homes. We were on our way to eat lunch in the restaurant there with my parents and we’d just gotten out of the car. We watched her a moment. She was making a straight line, mostly, but she looked a little confused. We could see it in her aspect. When I crossed the road and spoke to her, she made a steady line toward me. As we approached each other and I was considering at what point I should kneel down to her, she made the first move, sitting down, hunching her shoulders, and tucking her head down to her paws. It was pretty clear that she was saying something like, “I think I have been a very bad dog, but I am lost and scared and I need your help.”
I found her phone number on her tag, and as I started to stand up to call, she saw Jon and the boys in the LH parking lot and made a happy beeline straight for them. Fortunately there was a break in traffic, so she got across. Jon lifted her into the back of the Prius and sat in the back while I drove down the road to the address listed on her tag. She didn’t want to stay in the way back alone, so she jumped over the seat and into Jon’s lap, where she proceeded to lick his face.
At her house, her person said that she is usually very good about staying in the yard, but that she thinks Penny was disoriented by the change in her view after the corn was harvested.
I’m not the kind of person who lives with a dog, but I love dogs, and the way this sweet little beagley person communicated with us yesterday was a delight. All’s well that ends well.
Good People
Gratitude of Resistance Three:
Good people doing good work. ASSETS Lancaster, and organization which trains and mentors and invests in small businesses. RAICES provides legal services for immigrants and asylum-seekers. The people who are traveling into Honduras to meet with and comfort and aid the asylum-seekers who are traveling north right now. The canvassers and door-knockers who talk to people about what they really want. You, doing your good work, smiling at your neighbor, picking up trash, writing letters, making change, believing in the best version of us all.
“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estés
*****
“A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.” —Anton Chekhov
*****
“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.” —Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
*****
“I would like to think that everybody in America would think it’s wrong to spend all your time from a position of power vilifying people, questioning their patriotism, calling them enemies of the people and then suddenly pretending that you’re concerned about civility.” —Barack Obama, in Michigan
*****
“And then there are the cravings. Oh, la! ⠀
A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. ⠀
She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows.⠀
She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights ⠀
where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. ⠀
She may feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estés
*****
“It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little.”
—Ellen Bass
*****
“Blessed is this, the new day of slowly uncovering fog, the echoing song of ravens praising a break in the rains, the moon somewhere still quietly ripening, the calm of always receiving another chance.” —Toko-pa Turner
*****
“When we went to jail, we were setting our faces against the world, against things as they are, the terrible injustice of our capitalist industrial system which lives by war and by preparing for war.” —Dorothy Day
*****
“You want to be human. Be angry, it’s okay. But not to practice is not okay. To be angry, that is very human. And to learn how to smile at your anger and make peace with your anger is very nice. That is the whole thing—the meaning of the practice, of the learning. By taking a look at your anger it can be transformed into the kind of energy that you need—understanding and compassion. It is with negative energy that you can make the positive energy. A flower, although beautiful, will become compost someday, but if you know how to transform the compost back into the flower, then you don’t have to worry. You don’t have to worry about your anger because you know how to handle it—to embrace, to recognize, and to transform it. So this is what is possible.” —bell hooks
*****
“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.” —Frida Kahlo
Nourishing Myself with Great Care
Gratitude as Resistance Two:
Meeting the Goal. I try not to talk too much about things like weight loss in a public forum. My first goal–always–even though my inner world doesn’t always actually manage it, is to love my body like it is. As a teacher of teenaged women, I believe that young women desperately need models of women (especially round ones) who are comfortable in our skin. So I try, really hard, to avoid the subject of the D-word.
On the other side of that is a little problem I’ve been carrying around called the Trump Ten. In the months after the inauguration last year, I let myself eat whatever and however I wanted. I was The Comfort Eater. In three months, I added a solid ten pounds to my body. When it hit me, I thought I would just stop the comfort eating and go back to normal. Then I thought I would cut a meal a day and go back to normal. Then I decided that it was impossible to lose weight after 50.
But I kept carrying this extra ten pounds around, and now it felt like I was wearing the president and his team of destroyers around on my hips. (Honey, you’ve GOT to get rid of that!) And at the same time, I realized that my joints were achier than ever, that I was getting winded climbing stairs. Uh-oh. That’s not good.
So I got serious, did some research, and came up with an eating plan. I don’t call it the D-word. I call it Nourishing Myself with Great Care. I think I have been eating more, actually, than I was when I was skipping a meal. I’m defiant by nature and will never follow someone else’s plan entirely–I cobbled together some ideas that made sense to me. I whip butter and coconut oil into my coffee every morning. I eat something called a fat bomb for snacks. I eat a LOT of avocados. I eat less at supper than I used to, but I have the occasional cookie, the occasional bowl of ice cream. I know my hedonistic self enough to understand that without treats, no eating plan would be sustainable, especially when my new favorite show on Netflix is The Great British Baking Show.
I get hungry. A lot. But I’m learning that sometimes hunger actually means thirst. Sometimes it means boredom. And a lot of the time, it means angst or despair or worry or rage. I have to feel the feelings. Sometimes I would like to go back to covering them up with carbohydrates, but I’m trying to be like Rumi and welcome each feeling into the guesthouse of myself. In this day, when so many of the waters of the world are threatened, taking a long drink of water when I feel the aching hole inside can be like a magical or prayerful act of healing intention.
Yesterday, the scale told me that the Destroyers were gone, all ten pounds of Evil Administration. Gone. Two months of Paying Attention to eating, and I met my goal. That’s the first part of the gratitude.
But the second part is that last Wednesday as I was walking up the steps to my classroom, I realized that I was walking in the middle of the steps, not using the railing to drag myself up, not dreading the steps, not breathing heavily at the top. I still ache like a fifty-something, but the extra edge is gone. I think reducing sugar and grains has had a marvelous effect. I haven’t been diagnosed with arthritis, but it’s been in the family, and I would like to avoid it as long as I can. Also, my mother reminded me the other day that the empty carbohydrates in sugar and refined flour are implicated in depression. Again, while I have no diagnosis in that realm, I know how close I step to the chasms, and if a nourishing eating plan will keep me from the dangerous edges, I can keep to that.
This isn’t the first time in my life that I have done something like this. My pregnancy years pulled me out of the pattern of healthy nourishment, and while I have been somewhat careful in my eating, I never really went back to a serious intentional look at the sugar/flour content of my daily nourishment.
A small slice of pie, eaten with deep attention and intention, can give the same amount of pleasure as two slices eaten greedily. And now I can usually manage avoid the stupid calories of junky candy. If I am going to indulge, I want it to be something sublime. I still eat the second bowl of ice cream sometimes, and I might have two pieces of pie at a party or gathering if I feel like it. I need to defy, to break the rules at times. But it’s no longer a free-for-all, and in the long term, this way is safer for my physical and mental health.
Gratitude as Resistance
Perhaps I am going to sound a little like a conspiracy theorist here, but I think it holds pretty true, actually. Those who are in power, those trying to consolidate their economic and political power against the people, rely on our anxiety and fear, our disillusionment and angst, our impotent rage and our divisive talk, to paralyze us against positive and just action. I don’t think this means I have to entirely give up my outrage and worry, my despair and angst–they’re the feels I feel, and I won’t cut off my feelings. Still, I can surf them instead of getting sucked into their vortex–which is, I think, what the destroyers want of us.
I have practiced the writing of gratitude lists for about ten years now, on and off, sometimes religiously writing a list a day, sometimes settling into a weekly or bi-weekly pattern. As I have written before, this particular spiritual practice has helped to ground and deepen me, particularly in times of stress and rage and grief. In recent weeks, when the practice might have been extremely helpful, I have been very sparse in my gratitude-contemplations, and I think I have had trouble finding my way back to center. I think it correlates.
This morning, my friend Karen wrote that every day between now and Thanksgiving, she will write one simple gratitude as an act of resistance. That gives the Work of Gratitude a whole new layer of inner empowerment, doesn’t it? Gratitude as Resistance. What better way to resist the destroyers’ dependence on our paralysis?
In order to find my way back toward equilibrium, and to maintain the magical/prayerful intention of resistance, I will follow Karen’s wise example in the coming month and post One Gratitude as Resistance each day in the month leading up to Thanksgiving. Thank you, Karen, for leading me into a new space.
Gratitude One:
Guidance Counselors: Guidance Counselors are superheroes. I have no doubt that you save lives. As a teacher, I am comforted to know that you are there, a safety net, offering solace and help for students in their pain and troubles. At least twice this week, I have been able to rest in the knowledge that someone was taking care of a student who was in a crisis. And when I was helping a student perfect her college application essays, she kept telling me things that her guidance counselor had helped her to think about as she wrote. I’m glad you’re in my village, both my local school village, and in other schools.
May we walk in Beauty!
Here’s a little self-touting:
I’m actually not sure what it means. It’s not a publishing thing, and it doesn’t have prize money or certificates attached to it, but it’s satisfying. I try not to doubt my poetic voice, but when mostly what I have in response to sending poems for publication is a long list of rejections, I sometimes struggle to keep me sense of my poetic self intact. So it was a good morale boost for me to discover yesterday, sort of by accident, that I had won last year’s Poetic Asides November Poem-a-Day Challenge Chapbook contest. The little book is called Shapeshifting, and it contains thirteen poems that I wrote during last November’s challenge.
Mockingbird Chronicles 