Gratitudes

None of this Nonsense, Please!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

nonsense
In Patricia Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, the witch Morwen lives in a cottage in the woods with a large sign above the door which reads, “None of this Nonsense, Please!” I wonder if I ought to put one above my classroom door. . .

Gratitude List:
1. Saturday mornings when the boys play and play together. I am going to make oatmeal for breakfast.
2. A nice weekend with lots of space for getting my work done. Thinking of going to school on Monday with all my papers graded.
3. Characters from story that inspire me to take hold of my best self. For a little while now, I am going to be the No-nonsense witch.
4. The autumn slant of sunlight. How the hollow glows and then sparkles.
5. Titmice–this seems to be their season in the hollow. They’re not simply grey–there’s a subtle blue that shines in their feathers when they fly. And they have that little touch of russet on their flanks.

May we walk in Beauty!

Honing Perception

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

vulture1
I love these computer apps that turn a photo into a painting. The photo of the moment the vulture sat on the telephone pole and spread her wings does not do justice to the awe and wonder of the moment, but the painting version starts to add that layer.

<Post-publish edit: After I posted this, I went to my Facebook page and saw that on this same day last year I posted a gratitude reflection on the color indigo. I love that synchronicity. I wonder if mid-October is a particularly apt time to notice indigo.>

Gratitude List:
1. Parent-Teacher Conferences yesterday. It takes extra energy, and it’s a really long day, but I love the chance to tell parents how I see their student in classes. Yesterday one of my colleagues talked about the moments before a parent enters the room for a conference–he said, “You have to ‘put on the child.'” It may sound strange, but that’s exactly right. It feels almost like a prayer moment, that moment of breathing, of calling the image of the student into my head and heart, before we begin to talk. I often find myself glancing at the seat where the student sits when I am talking to the parents, as though the student is there in the room.  This kind of awareness is particularly important, I think, when we are discussing difficulties, because conversations about challenges can veer into talking as though the student is the problem, but of course that isn’t it at all. The student may have a problem, and we are there to strategize solutions. Parent-teacher conferences are a kind of professional development–both for the parenting and the teaching. We both come away with ideas for supporting these marvelous young people.
2. The colors of sunset. I am still intrigued by the new research that says that scholars who have studied ancient languages can’t find a word for blue. If we don’t have a word for a thing, it usually means we do not conceptualize it. I am baffled by the lack of blue in ancient eyes. On the other hand, indigo seems to be a color that modern eyes struggle to see. We keep dropping it from the rainbow, or we substitute Prussian Blue. I keep going back to the interview I heard with Oliver Sacks on Radiolab where he discussed his search to truly see indigo, how he could only see it during a drug-induced hallucination.  I feel like sunset is the time to settle the eyes and brain into a meditative state that might possibly be able to conceptualize and interpret the colors without the help of mind-altering substances. Sunset and sunrise are the moments when I think I am closest to understanding blue and indigo, to experiencing the shades and shifts of color throughout the spectrum.
3. The Moon, the First Star, and the Dragon-Shaped Cloud–these three accompanied me on the ride home as I drove into the sunset yesterday evening.
4. Literature and Story. When I got home last night, my kids were totally engrossed in their books. One of the reasons that I am an English teacher is that I want to give my students the gift of story. I don’t need them to all become voracious readers, but I want them all to learn to find satisfaction in story. The same goes for my boys–I love when they become involved in story. I suppose that the ability to get lost in a story is sort of like the ability to see certain colors. As we enter a story, we refine our internal perceptions of human experience, increasing our ability to conceptualize the shades and colors that fill the spectrum of what it means to be human. Let’s keep searching for each other’s indigo.
5. Michelle Obama. She is one of the most inspiring speech-makers I have listened to. I will miss her as First Lady.

May we walk in Beauty!

Keys to the Morning

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

collab
Three years ago, inspired by some of the parent-child artistic collaborations I had seen on the internet, I asked my then 7yo to draw me a picture, and then I colored it. I think there were several that I did with both boys at that time. It might be time to do some more of these.

Here are the keys to the morning.
Here is the doorway to dawn.
Step reverently on the pathway,
until you reach the two trees at the top of the ridge,
the crumbling snag on your left,
the shivering beech on your right.
Step eastward between them,
eyes ever watchful,
heart ever open.

Gratitude List:
1. Warmth
2. Song
3. Family
4. Light
5. Memory

May we walk in Beauty!

Simple List

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

stump

Gratitude List:
1. The shining eyes of my students. I am carrying some of them a little heavily these days, as I become aware of the weighty anxieties that some of then hold within them.
2. Last night’s dinner. Jon cooked small shells, and mixed them with peas and spinach in a cream and parmesan sauce.
3. My new pen. I finally did it. I ordered myself a real fountain pen. It is sleek and shining and beautiful. (Unfortunately, the ink I ordered is coming in a separate package, so I need to wait a little while to try it out.)
4. Challenging and respectful conversations. I really like when people respectfully challenge my ideas. It helps to keep me honest, for one thing, but it also helps me to hone and define the ideas which I do find most compelling.
5. I know I say this one often, but it is two of my daily moments of delight: Crossing the Susquehanna on the way to and from school. I love this River. I love how it holds not only the idea of place but of time, how you can see the remnants of the ancient fishing weirs that the Susquehannocks used for catching fish.

Wind, Warmth, and Wisdom

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

hawk

Gratitude List:
1. The morning colors in the sky
2. Wind. Such wind!
3. Warm places to be
4. Wise and courageous friends
5. Humor

May we walk in Beauty!

“The Women, United, Will Never Be Defeated”

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

bird

Two nights ago, my sleep was broken up by an anxious child who couldn’t get back to sleep, so I slept on the floor of his room with him. The broken sleep led me to remember my dreams much more clearly.

The one about the car accident was so real that, on the way to church in the morning, I showed my family an intersection similar to the one where the accident occurred, and when I walked out to the car after church, I experienced a momentary but real dread because I didn’t want to see the scraped-up side of the car. I was relieved when the split second passed and I realized it had been only a dream.

In the other dream, someone had brought a large cardboard box full of  writhing snakes into some sort of social gathering–I think we were going to have a dance. The snakes immediately crawled out and covered the floor. I was really worried that someone was going to step on them, but they took care of themselves. I held a couple, loving their intent and watchful eyes, their flickering tongues. Snakes are symbolic of regeneration, of the cycles of life. I have personally associated them with rising feminine power, particularly in their association with the Minoan snake dancers.  After a day of processing the magnified disgust, I was feeling at the shameless misogyny of one of our political candidates, I think I needed a reminder of the collective power of women. And I needn’t worry about them getting stepped on. We will take care of ourselves.

“The women, united, will never be defeated.” –Ubaka Hill

Gratitude List:
1. Dreams that wander into the daylight
2. Images that empower and strengthen the will
3. Clouds: I never get tired of clouds
4. Voices of reason amidst the craziness
5. Wild wind. It can be almost unbearable, the way it calls to be followed, the way it makes me long to go journeying, rambling, adventuring.

May we walk in Beauty!

Rain and the Promise of Rain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

bowl
Stones today, for all the people and places I hold in my heart. Stones for the people of Haiti. For the Water Protectors. For ones standing for justice everywhere. For friends experiencing uncertainty, illness, and grief. For those who have fled their homes because of war and terror, and for those who want to flee but cannot. For those making new lives in new lands. 

I am having trouble coming up with a gratitude list today. My brain is tired, perhaps, or yesterday was a little too focused on just getting work done, and I didn’t really do my work of paying attention. Attention is the spiritual work that comes before gratitude. If I let myself stay inside my head for a day, then I don’t get into the body spaces that focus my attention.

Gratitude List:
1. Ironing. Ironing means order and tidiness. It’s meditative work, but work I almost never do. Some of my dresses really require ironing, which forces me to do this adult work once in a while. I’ll say ironing and mean: making order and meditating.
2. Rain and the promise of rain.
3. Robins outside the window, discussing the coming flight south, or the movement into the deeper woods.
4. Learning to pay attention.
5. Communities.

May we walk in Beauty!

Gained in Translation

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

oct-words
Mockingbird Words: This is a word cloud of the words on this blog from the first week of October.

I am playing around with Google translate this Saturday morning. I translated a short poem of mine into Bengali and back again. The basic poem was pretty similar, but when we got back to English, giant feather had become hairy giants.  That’s extremely promising for a little bit of fun.  The sentence structure of the original poem was pretty straightforward, so the algorithms brought most of the poem back to at least a sense of the original, even when I sent it through several languages before coming back to English.

This is addicting.  I am going to try a poem that begins with a somewhat fractured sentence structure already, send it through several translations, and see what comes back.  Here is my original tanka, titled “Riddle”:

Down halls of dream, through
tattered veils of old stories
no fury, no fear
only the question of where
the next riddle will appear.

Zulu * Burmese * Haitian Creole * Portuguese * Maori * Japanese * and back to English again:

And, the bedroom
It covers the history of his face
Anger do not be afraid
Question
It displays the following password.

“It covers the history of his face” is a fascinating line. I still like my original line, but I wonder how it would go to say:

tattered veils of old stories
cover the history of her face

There’s some possibility there. As goofy as this exercise is, there’s a point here: I sometimes (often?) get caught in certain ways of saying things, stuck in linguistic and imagistic patterns. I worry that my poems sometimes begin to sound all the same. In Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird, I published several poems that were an attempt to break out of my own boxes. The results were several rather surreal poems that I am rather in love with, but which–in hindsight–I think might be somewhat unrelatable to anyone outside my own head.

Here, after some more play with translator, and re-crafting, is “Riddle,” no longer a tanka, and perhaps a little more layered, perhaps a little too clunky:

Down halls of dream,
through tattered curtains of old fairy tales
which cover the history of her face
without eyes, without fear–
only the question of where
the next riddle (this mystery)
will appear.

I was going to stop here, but then I took that last form and translated it into Cebuano and back again, and this marvel appeared:

Dream Hall,
By Tttered Krtens Old fairy tale
He covered his face HISTORY
Vithut Mata, Vithut Fiyr–
Questions included Ware
Next Ridley (Mystery)
The Makita.

Perhaps my next experiments should be to break down even the structure of the words, and play with invented spellings. Vithut for without has captured my imagination. And Mata. Is that eyes? Or matter? I need to simply force myself to stop now, or I’ll be doing this until noon.

Gratitude List:
1. Wordplay. Layers of meanings in words that shift and change color, dash away, and return with whole new meanings. Connections between words and meanings and languages.
2. Imagination. This boy, who is doing his spelling homework here on the floor beside me, suddenly yelled out, “Narwhal!” He had stuck his pencil between his toes (because that’s what you do) and caught the shadow of it on the floor. It did indeed look exactly like a narwhal.
3. Yesterday’s Service of Thanksgiving at my school. Music, speech and story, visuals. Generations. The Moment, for me, was when the choir was coming off the stage. I was one of the first ones off, so I got to watch as members of a composite choir of people of all ages filed into their rows. We all felt a sense of belonging to the choir because we had all been in some form of LMS choir throughout the years. It brought 75 years of time together into one moment.  Deeply moving.
4. Saturday morning sleeping in. I feel so rested and ready for the day.
5. Thermally satisfying weather.

May we walk in Beauty!

Poem: A Minute

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

beach
A few years ago I was working on a project about my younger self, and I wanted to take a photograph of this framed photo that my father took of me when I was six, standing on the shore of Rusinga Island. I just couldn’t seem to get the photo without the glare and the reflection in the glass of myself taking the photo. Suddenly I realized that I needed to put my current self into the photo, too, and set it up to intentionally gt my shadow on the glass.

Here is a poem from October 16, 2013. The form is called a minute, using three 20-syllable stanzas (60 syllables, like 60 seconds, equals one minute):

Out in the dawn, a misty sea
in walnut tree
a silent crow
will dream of snow

will ruffle feathers in the chill
will wait until
the first bright ray
begins the day

then with a final shake will rise
from branch to skies
and this will be
a memory

Gratitude List:
1. My School. Today Lancaster Mennonite School launches its 75th year celebrations.
2. I can’t get over the wreaths and draperies of mist on the fields on the way to school. Even yesterday afternoon on the way home, there was a snake of mist winding down the River along the western shore by Accomac.
3. I made it through the week. I have been having terrible sinus headaches in the last few days, and I kept thinking it might turn into something worse, but it hasn’t. If I am going to have allergy issues in the fall, I would rather have silent sinus headaches than the wild sneezing and sniffling and burning eyes that I sometimes get.
4. The color purple. (You know what Sug says in the book of that name.) Rich, inviting, heart-opening.
5. The poetry of Langston Hughes. One of my students asked me last week if I knew anything about Langston Hughes, so this week has been Langston Hughes week in my class.  This morning will be “I, to, Sing America.”

May we walk in Beauty!

It Matters

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

imag1865

Yesterday I used the word Matrix as one of my names for that great Force we so often call God. I realize that the associations of meaning for the word Matrix in our culture have been taken over by the movie that bears that name. So matrix has come to be associated with a sort of world-dominating, mind-controlling enslavement.

The true definition, however, is the environment in which something grows, the source or mold from which new forms are cast.  When you hold an amethyst cluster, the base rock–that milky, gravelly bit from which the crystals spring–is matrix, the mother-source of the crystal. The root of matrix is the Latin word mater, which is mother, which is womb, which is source.

In English, we have matter, which is a verb denoting something’s significance and a noun meaning something with a physical nature. The sentence “You matter to me” means that you are significant to me. With an awareness of its connections to its Latin roots, it seems to speak more deeply to the ways in which relationships mold and shape us. Suddenly your significance in that sentence is about shaping and molding who I am. If a particular cause matters  to you, it is not simply important, perhaps, but it also helps to define and give shape to who you are.

In its meaning of “substance,” matter or material takes on new significance. Substance is source, is the basis, the form-holder for everything, that from which all else springs. Once, someone in a conversation was referring to a difficult physical task, to pushing through the exhaustion, saying, “Mind over Matter!” One of my friends responded that perhaps we ought to think more in terms of matter over mind, that for too many centuries, religion–ancient Greek religion and later, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–separated body and mind and categorized mind and spirit as superior to body. Body became inferior, became shameful, became sinful.  Religion became a way of escaping or mortifying the inferior physical matter.

Can we take matter back into our spiritual story? Instead of placing mind over matter, can we see ourselves as situated within this source material, this body, as a blessing, as our purpose? We are embodied, enmattered, in order to experience the sensations of the material, to know flavor and scent and touch, to learn how to see and to See, to listen, to sense. If we call the One who made us Matrix, then we see ourselves as springing from that Source, molded by the mother-womb. Religion becomes something which brings us into our full selves rather than dividing us into separate pieces that war with each other for dominance, flesh against spirit.

Gratitude List:
1. Matter, stuff, substance
2. Dream
3. Words and their meanings and their deeper meanings
4. Yesterday’s bluebird, flying with the sun on his back
5. How mist rises from the fields in these early morning trips to school

May you See and Feel and Taste and Hear and Smell.