Gratitudes

If I’d Only

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

fire-and-water
Fire and water–A photo I took of fire, melded with the Japanese wave painting. I feel like there’s a human portrait in there. . .

Today’s prompt is to write an “If I’d Only _________” poem.

If I’d Only Had More Time
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

If I’d only had more time
had more rhythm
had more passion
had more energy
more focus, more rhyme

If I’d only had more zeal
had more wisdom
had more hope
had more tenderness
more compassion, more appeal

If I’d only had more sass
had more impertinence
had more whoop
had more in-your-face
more fierce, more brass

If I’d only had more only
had more mostly
had more often
had more will
more do
less lonely

Gratitude List:
1. The moment when I crawl into bed in the evenings. The delicious feeling of being just about to fall asleep
2. The messages in dreams
3. Poetry prompts
4. The mix of leaves in the yard: poplar, oak, maple, sycamore, walnut, locust
5. Always beginning again

May we walk in Beauty!

Spirit Animal: Hyena

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hyena1

Today’s poetry prompt is to write a Spirit Animal Poem.  I have spent some time over the years thinking about my connections to certain animals. Hyena is only one of many in my meditations, but she is perhaps rarely spoken of as a spirit animal. It’s time she gets her due:

Hyena
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Elusive as mist I slip
through the village
at midnight.

Eyes moon-bright,
I lope in the shadows
down the starry path
toward the river.

My night-song will wake you
with a tingle in your spine:
a bark, a laugh, a warning.

I defend your door from danger,
standing at the gates,
in the liminal spaces
between the village of your heart
and the river of your living.

Listen for the padding of my paws
in the darkness outside your window.
Watch for my shadow
to cross the moonlight
in your doorway.

Gratitude List:
1. The way a line of mist hung low over the River on our way home from school this afternoon.
2. Chocolate. I’m so glad the gods decided to share their food. I know dark chocolate is supposed to be the best, but I am really savoring Equal Exchange’s milk chocolate right now.
3. On All Souls Day, my blood ancestors, who put their lives and homes on the line for what they believed to be right.
4. The ancestors of this land where we live and walk and farm. The souls who hunted here, who traveled through, who may have lived on these hills.
5. The ones we’ve loved and lost, who’ve gone on before us.  May their memories bring comfort. May the stones of grief we carry turn light as bright and shining leaves.

May we walk in Beauty!

I Come, I Go

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floerstones
A quick trick rock stack.

For the month of November, I have decided to move my writing time to the time before bed. I will use my more wakeful mornings for the tasks of grading, use my more reflective evenings for writing and gratitude lists, and use the whole day to consider the poetry prompts at Robert Lee Brewer’s blog for the Writer’s Digest.

Today’s prompt is to write either a come or a go poem, or both.  Here’s my attempt, trying to get at some of the tension I feel when overwhelmed by lots of work, and unable to give the rest of my life the attention it requires. Composed in the shower.

I go, I come.
I’m gone, then home.

I’m home, My Dear!
Not there, not here.

My restless soul
is everywhere.

I try to rhyme.
The words won’t come.
There isn’t time.
My brain is numb.

I want to stay.
I want to roam.

I come, I’m gone.
I go, I’m home.

Gratitude List:
1. All the colors of the maples. The fires of autumn.
2. Shifting habits and rhythms and rituals. Changing it up to shake it up.
3. That sandalwood soap, so richly-scented and lathery and heartening.
4. Blessings. The real kind that people pass to each other.
5. Clear water from the spring, with lemon and lime.

May we walk in Beauty!

All Saints Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

imag2208
Experimenting: I took this with my phone, through a magnifying glass.

All Saints Day is dawning. Every year, I take this day to consider the people who inspire me, whose lives have given me the courage and determination to live my own life with more integrity and compassion and hope.  I don’t usually put family members and close friends on the list, because they are sort of a given. But I don’t stick to the Catholic list of saints either, though many of the saints that I carry around with myself as models and examples of reflective life are Catholic saints.

These are only five of my saints–this day’s saints. It feels odd to write the list and not include Harriet Tubman or Hildegarde of Bingen or Julian of Norwich–they’ve been on the lists before. Off the top of my head, and from the center of my heart, here is this year’s list:

Gratitude List:
1. The Water Protectors. This year, the people who stand in North Dakota to protest the pipeline that would run through their sacred land and under their sacred waters are some of my greatest inspiration. Their example of peaceful, prayerful protest encourages me to walk with justice.
2. Rachel Carson, biologist and author of Silent Spring, because she reminds me to watch and listen and draw conclusions, and to to be afraid to speak up.
3. Mary Oliver, because I know that whenever I feel lost within myself, I can turn to her poems and find my way through the forest. Because she teaches me to pay attention.
4. St. Benedict, because he reminds me of the importance of order and rhythm in my life, of the power of radical hospitality, of the need to stay fresh–always beginning again.
5. Maya Angelou, because of her incredible strength and her enormous heart.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Doorway of the Dark

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young

Now we enter the doorway of the dark, step across the threshold of the year into the dreaming time, the time of release and letting go, the time of journeying to the underworld.

In spiritual and community traditions across the globe, this is the season of remembering, of bringing to mind the ones we have loved who are no longer with us. It is a time to hold to our griefs close to our hearts, and to release them to the winds, like leaves. Some say that these are the days when the veil between worlds is thin, when our connection to those we’ve loved and lost may we stronger, more real.

Yesterday in my church, this took the form of a ritual of memory and grief. We came together and we spoke of loss, and we remembered together. We lit candles and we heard story and we sang.

For the past couple weeks, the robins having been settling in at the dusk each evening here in the hollow. There’s a wild chattering in the treetops, and the wingfolk draw a complex web of lines across the hollow, sailing short distances from tree to tree, tree to tree. It’s like a playground full of excitable children.

What would our webs look like, were they all made visible? Connecting point to connecting point–what lines are drawn between ourselves and those who have gone before, between ourselves and others in the world today?

I draw a line between myself and my first immigrant ancestors, the Weavers leaving persecution in Germany and settling on farms in the Weaverland Valley, invited to grow crops and flourish in this good soil, the Schlabachs making a similar move to Ohio’s fertile plains. What did they know of the ones who had farmed the land before them?

I draw a line between myself and the Water Protectors on the Dakota plains, from the Susquehanna, river of my heart, to the Missouri, whose waters are endangered by the black oil snake that approaches nearer with every passing day. I draw the line to their ancestors, the First People on these lands. This line travels through broken treaties, through colonial suppression, through Wounded Knee, through Little Big Horn. Their work today looks oh-so-frighteningly similar.

What does it mean to come from a persecuted people? To identify as the descendant of those who were forced to leave their homeland in search of safety? That is the story I live by.

What does it mean that those very travelers, those refugee wanderers seeking safety and freedom to baptize as they believed–what does it mean that they settled land where others had lived and hunted and wandered?  Did they have words or concepts to explain Manifest Destiny, Doctrine of Discovery?

Today as I stand on this threshold of the season’s darkness, I will remember back before my memory. I will hold the connection between myself and those hopeful refugees from the pain and trial of the old world to the new. I will not excuse or explain away their settlement of fertile valleys, their claim of land which had once been free.  I will neither take one the shame nor dismiss it. I am their distant daughter, as the ones who stand for Water in the Dakotas are the distant children of those who moved across these lands, belonging to the land rather than claiming it for themselves.  Today we draw new lines. We make new patterns, new webs firmly anchored to the old ones. We wing our way into the dusk, like those robins, connecting point to point, idea to idea, memory to memory, grief to grief, until we have a web that will hold us as we move into the season that approaches.

Gratitude List:
1. Tears of joy and relief
2. Tears of sorrow and release
3. How the trees are letting go
4. Circles and webs of caring
5. Community rituals

May we walk in Beauty!

Heart to Heart

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heartdonate-lifeOne heart to another.

Gratitude:
It’s all one big gratitude today. Just a little over two days ago, my friend Kyla was finally released from the from Duke University Hospital after almost six months in Intensive Care. During that time, her heart continued to lose function and efficiency due to the Emery Dreifus Muscular Dystrophy that has been attacking her heart muscle. Several times she nearly died. She reached the point where her body simply became so weak that even if her new heart arrived, she would have been unable to withstand the life-saving surgery.

A couple weeks ago, she received a Ventricular Assist Device–a tool to help her heart do its work. This was open heart surgery, and she took quite a while to recover, but with lots of will and determination, and the help of physical therapists and family and friends, she was finally cleared for discharge from the hospital three days ago. She and her fiance and her mother moved across the street from the hospital to the Ronald McDonald House.

Yesterday, her mother watched a helicopter land on the hospital roof and wondered–perhaps for the hundredth time–whether that might be the one that held Kyla’s new heart. It wasn’t long until they received the call asking them to head across the street and prepare for surgery. Kyla’s new heart had arrived!  She began prepping for surgery at six last evening. By 12:30 this morning, she had returned to Intensive Care, and it appears that the surgery has been a success, and that she will be on the road to recovery with her new heart very soon. I feel like saying Hallelujah!

It has been such a long and devastating road for Kyla and her family and loved ones. The waiting–not knowing whether she would survive until the new heart arrived, not knowing if she would be strong enough to receive the new heart when it did come–has been painful and draining. The longer it went, the harder it became to visualize the actual arrival of the new heart.

The gift of life through organ donation is a tender, tender thing. Somewhere, someone is experiencing grief at the loss of someone they loved, while we celebrate the new life that has come to one we love. May that family be comforted in their grief. May they find solace in the knowledge that their loss has given others the gift of life.

If you aren’t an organ donor, please consider signing up today. Here is the link to Donate Life, the national organ donation registry. What a powerful legacy you leave in the world–giving someone new life.

O Beautiful

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flutterby
Gathering the last of the summer’s pollen.

The sun rises over the purple mountains
and the amber grains are waving in the autumn morning mist.
Herds of buffalo roam across the grasslands
and a line of tanks and armored trucks
tops the rise like a robot snake,
vanguard of the black snake
that slithers beneath those spacious skies
toward the waters where the People pray and watch.

(This is a quick sketch, a draft. I have been wanting to work on a longer piece that weaves together bits and pieces of our songs and statements on liberty and freedom with the story of what is happening on the plains today in North Dakota. Perhaps that will come, too.)

Gratitude List:
1. The delightful performance of “Peter and the Starcatcher” last night. The wordplay is hilarious. The students were incredible, and really rose to the challenge of making the verbal jousting understandable.
2. Waking up to read with the kids this morning.
3. Fall sun and breezes.
4. The Water Protectors.
5. Truth tellers.

May we walk in Beauty!

A Long Weekend

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

stones-or-eggs Eggs or stones?

Gratitude List:
1. Hooray! Pippi Prius can be fixed. It took a while to get the details worked out with the insurance company, and the damage was apparently almost equal to her value, but they’ve agreed to go ahead and do it.
2. My colleagues. Yesterday was an in-service day, and much as I always wish I could just have those days to decompress or catch up on work, I always come away feeling energized and inspired for the work ahead–also, grateful for the earnest, positive, playful energy of my colleagues.
3. Our school superintendent, Richard Thomas. Since he announced his coming retirement last winter, it’s been disconcerting to think of the future of the school without him. He has helped this school system to shape a vision of itself as a community, as a place where students and teachers and staff work to become our best selves, to create a place of shalom. Yesterday we had a chance to try to tell him a little bit about what he means to us.
4. The Search Committee, who had a huge task in a short time. They listened well, heard our concerns and our hopes for the future, and found someone who seems to have vision and determination and savvy enough to step into the superintendent’s role.  They have been careful to be confidential when confidentiality has been necessary, while staying as transparent as possible. Yesterday they carefully led us through their process of the past six months and shared the ways in which our new superintendent fits the values and ideals that we gave them.
5. Today. I can work all day to catch up. I didn’t get as much done last weekend as I wanted. I plan to go to school on Monday with no late grading hanging over my head.

Shalom.

A Little Confession

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

new-doll
Yesterday’s dollie as interpreted by the Dreamscope app.

Here’s a little confession: I haven’t been such a good monk-in-the-world lately. I keep letting my equilibrium get thrown. I tell myself and others that it’s the election. I tell us that it is because I am so terribly busy. I tell us that it is the season for a different sort of looking at the world.

I still write my gratitude lists, and I still try to pay attention, but I have let myself sharpen up the edges. I know, I know. No one is perfect. No one can be balanced and thoughtful all the time. Monks get angry, too. Sure, I will give myself a break. Still, I think the whole point of living this examined life is to examine–non-judgmentally–how we have been living and responding to the world.

Perhaps it was making that little corn dollie that reminded me. I have walked quietly away from my intuitive self. Finding a moment to make some art, to let my hands and heart lead the way into a process, has given me a chance to bring myself back into reflection.

Here’s to St. Benedict and beginning again. Always. Every day. Every morning.

Gratitude List:
1. One of my former teachers was walking the halls yesterday–Janet Gehman, who lit the literature fires for me. It was a treasure to see her and to invite her into my classroom, to tell my students that this was MY teacher.
2. Macaroni and cheese. Comfort food.
3. Warm layers on a blustery day.
4. Long weekend coming.
5. Small person on my lap.

May we walk in Beauty!

Wild

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corn-dollie
It has been a long time since I have made a corn dollie. I think it’s because the preparation process is a lot of work–saving the best of the husks and drying them without letting them mold, then soaking them. Yesterday while Josiah and I were out walking, I started picking up corn husks and flowers, and I made myself a wild little dollie. It was a lot harder to work with the brittle husks that I picked up in the field, but it was extremely satisfying, and I like the wild look of her–my “proper” dollies look really tame and domesticated in comparison. We got back from our walk at dusk, so the photo is a little dark.

Gratitude List:
1. Wildness
2. Wind
3. Warmth
4. Wisdom
5. Watchfulness

May we walk in Beauty!