Gratitudes

The Guest House

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Wall

The Guest House
by Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Before I left for the monastery, I collected several poems and quotations and short essays that I wanted to take along for pondering and meditating: David Whyte’s short piece on Rest, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman. My parents each gave me separate Einstein quotations about Mystery, and my mother pulled this Rumi poem out of her own journal-book and handed it to me.  These became the texts which helped to frame my thinking.

On my final morning in Wernersville, I sat down with my friend to talk about our times of solitude, and at one point she began to quote this very poem!  I tend to absorb synchronicities like this with the weight of Messages.  When, in three days, two different people offer me the same set of words, it makes me perk up my inner ears a little more intently.

This was my third solitary retreat at the Jesuit Center.  The first time, many years ago, I was wounded, needing to recover my sense of myself after some significant re-arranging of my own ego.  Last year, I was exhausted, needing to re-establish my connection with my inner self after a heady first year of high school teaching–I was psychically hungry for introvert time.  This year, while I felt a deep inner need for solitude and quiet thought, it felt less like a time of recovery than a time of shifting and integrating and re-structuring.  This year, the question is less one of how I heal than of how I carry retreat into my daily life, how I grow and expand my contemplative work into my non-retreat life.

In a way, going on retreat is like playing at being a monk.  The word monk is etymologically related to the Greek word monos: singular, alone.  My work in these days following my monastic moment is to integrate that singleness of purpose, that enriching inner solitude, into my daily life.  This is where Rumi’s poem comes in.  After three days of quiet reflection, I want to slam my door on the noise, the dark thoughts, the interruptions. I want to hold on to that sense of peace and quiet with every ounce of my inner strength. Instead, Rumi invites me to be hospitable to the distractions and interruptions, to welcome them all–laughing–at my door.

That third stanza, particularly, about inviting in even the crowd of sorrows who clear your rooms of furniture, reminds me of the story I just read about Abba Eupreprius, a desert father who was robbed of all of his few possessions, except for his walking stick.  When he discovered the loss, he picked up his walking stick and ran after the thieves, calling, “Wait!  You forgot something!”  Can I be that hospitable?  Even to the thoughts and hurts that grind at my ego?  Even to the griefs and anxieties that threaten to destabilize my inner rooms?  To welcome them as guests who are clearing me out “for some new delight”?

Gratitude List:
1. All the guests who arrive at my “guest house,” and Rumi and my beloveds, who remind me to be hospitable even to the challenges
2. Mystery, wonder, delight
3. Yesterday’s quiet and cooperative hours of play.  There was almost no fighting whatsoever.  I know that the fighting is part of their work, part of how they teach each other, but it’s nice to have some moments of other kinds of learning.
4. Putting a puzzle together, how it makes the mind work hard to visualize, then re-formulate the vision, how it offers the brain and the heart a metaphor for problem-solving
5. Metaphors, symbols, tools

May we walk in Beauty!

Begin Again

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments
Ent

“There was an old man named Michael Finnegan.
He had whiskers on his chin-igan.
They grew out and then grew in again.
Poor old Michael Finnegan.  Begin again. . .”
(repeat, ad nauseum)

One of my meditations this week at the monastery was on the concept of Beginner’s Mind that the Buddhists speak of, and also on St. Benedict, who said, “Always we begin again.” And then on Thomas Merton, who said, “There are only three stages to this work: to be a beginner, to be more of a beginner, and to be only a beginner.” I have been reading Christine Valters Paintner’s annotations on selected sayings of the desert fathers and mothers, and contemplating in particular some of their words regarding the Beginner’s Mind.

Abba Anthony, it is said, asked a group of monks and other seekers to expound a certain theological point, one by one, and when he reached Father Joseph, he asked him, too.  Father Joseph simply said, “I don’t know.”  Abba Anthony said, “This one has found the way.  He says he does not know.”

Abba Macarius, when asked by a group of seekers to tell about what it means to be a monk, said, “Ah!  I am not a monk myself, but I have seen them.”  This one reminds me of the legendary comment of the mathematician and mystic Pythagoras, who was asked to speak of how he became wise, and answered, “I am not wise.  I am a lover of wisdom.”

Even poor old Michael Finnegan, in the quote up there by the weeping beech tree, is a classic beginner, with the added idiomatic mystery that “to grow out your beard” and “to grow in your beard” mean relatively the same thing.  We singsong his story, can’t figure it out, and begin again, until our buzzing heads can’t take it anymore.

I returned home from the monastery to this quotation by Rilke, so exquisitely perfect in its timing:
“If the Angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner.”

In some ways the way of the desert Ammas and Abbas, the way of Buddha, of Merton, of Rilke and Finnegan is the way of the Fool, who is always dancing along the edge of that cliff, wind in her hair, free of the burden of being a wise soul, only always seeking wisdom, each moment a new beginning in the quest.

Gratitude List:
1. My Shining Rose of a friend has just been placed at the top of the heart transplant list, which means that she will likely get her new heart within the next two or three weeks.  This is to me a relief and a terror. Now is the time to hold her in the waiting, to wait and to trust.
2. Beginning again and again and again.  How this frees me from the burden of expectation.
3. Yesterday’s froggy moments.  We found a Spotted Green Frog (rana clamintans) hopping around under the old poplar.  The children needed to take it to the pond, so we settled it onto a muddy bank, where it rested a moment, then plooped into the pond and swam into the weeds nearby.  And the bullfrogs boomed at us from all around the pond’s edges.
4. Even now, the yellow leaves of the walnut tree are pirouetting gracefully down the wind.  Now, when the life force is pushing everything towards abundance, fullness, brilliant health–even now, is the beautiful reminder of decline.  The cycle itself is layers of cycles, birth and death all at once.
5. You.  Me. Encounters.  How every moment that we meet, in whatever virtual or physical spaces, is an opportunity for both of us to experience something new, something profound, something holy.  Thank you for the ways you enrich my moments.

May we walk in Beauty, beginning anew every moment.

Time for Integration

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HungryFountain

“The fulness of joy is to behold God in everything.” –Julian of Norwich

I am home from my time of solitude at the Jesuit Center.  How shall I carry the monastery within me as I integrate my experiences into my daily round? Of what profit is contemplative work if it cannot be integrated into the quotidian and the mundane?  This will be my focus for the next few days.
* How does my time of silence inform my interactions with an angry child?
* How is inner order affected by the unavoidable outer disorder of a busy house and farm?

I will find more questions in the coming days, I am certain.

Some of the words that I have been holding in my heartbowl this week:
Satisfaction
Beginning
Balance
Integration
Solitude
Silence

Gratitude List:
1. Chance Encounter #1: Just as I was walking into the center on Monday, I crossed paths with an old friend who just happened to be on solitary silent retreat at the Center for the exact same days that I was.  We greeted each other, entered silence, passed each other throughout the days there, and held a short written conversation with a plan to meet and converse about our retreat experiences on Wednesday morning.  What a gift!  What a holy coincidence. (Some people say there are no coincidences.  I think there are holy coincidences–chance experiences that we mold and turn into holy or sacred moments.)
2. Chance Encounter #2: In the evening of my second day, as I was deeply into a collage meditation in the Ignatian Room in the basement, a pair of women caught my attention to ask how to register.  Bonnie had gone home for the day, and these women were new and didn’t know what to do.  I helped them find their registration sheets, find their way to their room, and figure out when dinner was.  They were sweetly grateful.  I found them again yesterday morning, and broke my silence to talk with them.  They are Sisters of Mercy, both of them former teachers, still educators.  They were delighted to talk together about the vocation of education, and they told me that they will add me and my students to their centering prayer times in the evenings.  Another supremely holy moment, a brilliant moment.  They embraced me and kissed me and blessed me, and I will carry my encounter with Sister Mary Clare and Sister Bridget into my summer and into my teaching.
3. Vanilla ice cream and berries–strawberries and freshly-picked black raspberries.
4. Settling into home with my guys.  Re-integration is a noisy and sometimes conflicted affair, but pleasant and delightful nonetheless.
5. The new project is born.  This seed has been a long time germinating, but during retreat it sprang up fiercely and vividly.  It will take a lot of nurture to see it to completion, but I feel prepared for the task.

In Beauty may we walk!

Seeking Solitude

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DSCN8116
In a couple hours, I will be heading up to the Jesuit Center for three days of solitude.  I will not write on the blog until I return.

Gratitude List:
1. Wandering and pondering
2. Solitude and silence
3. Memory and dream
4. Reflection and contemplation
5. Re-imagining

May we walk in Beauty!

Sleeping Out of Doors

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Little Sister

Gratitude List:
1. (What has held you?) Falling asleep to the sound of crickets and peepers, watching the fireflies twinkling in the feathery leaves of the walnut tree.  I have been reading of their decline, but have not noticed it here in the Hollow.  If anything, this year they are more prolific.
2. (What satisfies?) Watching how the children made an immediate home in the big tent, how they long to live outside.
3. (What delights?) My seven-year-old taskmaster.  Yesterday, it was all I could do to catch a moment to myself.  If I wandered away from the garage, he would find me and give me a ticket: No Parking, and tell me to get back to cleaning the garage for Monday’s shares.  He claimed he wanted to help, and he certainly did help quite a bit, but he also sat on a chair and “suggested” the next thing that I should do.
4. (Where did you meet the Great Mystery?) In flavorful food, in the morning sun on walnut leaves, in the whispery sound of a small person playing behind me.
5. (What draws you forward?) Three days of solitude approach.  I leave tomorrow morning for the Jesuit Center.  What an excited little monk-person I am.  How will I find stillness when I am squirming so much with the very anticipation?  (I think I will manage.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Panda and Panther

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Panda and Panther
I am rather proud of these two paintings which I managed despite the fact that the canvases constantly twitched and squinted.  Panther requested that I paint green eyes on his eyelids, which meant that he went around with his eyes closed for a while.  When he smudged his paint, he touched it up himself.  He has requested that we buy ourselves a family set of face paints. I think I will.

Gratitude List:
1. A day of play
2. Public spaces that are created specifically for children. (Yes, I know it’s a lucrative business.  Still, the Hands on House is particularly well done.  My boys were some of the older ones there, and they became obsessed with keeping the factory room tidied and organized.)
3. The determination of a small child to participate in the cleaning of the garage, the preparation for the first share of the season on Monday.
4. Mist in the mornings.  Makes me want to hike to Rivendell.
5. Courage, which I think is different than bravery, because the courageous person recognizes that she is terrified, but she takes the next breath anyway.  I have friends who are deeply courageous, though perhaps they don’t realize how deeply courageous they are.  (Root is couer = Heart.) I want to start a poem like Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” only to say:
You do not have to be brave.
You only have to fill your aching lungs with one more breath.
You do not have to wait until you no longer feel afraid.
You only have to step from this moment into the next one.

May we walk in Beauty, in Couer-age.

Fire and Water

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Fire

Today is St. John’s Day.  Fire and Water.  Bonfire and baptism.  Transformation.

Gratitude List:
1. (What do you hear?) On a morning heavy with rain in the air, the sound of a train in the deep distance, near the River.
2. (What gives you fire?) Clearing spaces for the projects at hand.  If you want to make a fire in the woods of your life, you have to clear away the brush and detritus, eh?
3. (What cleanses and transforms you?) A fresh start every morning.  Tabula rasa.  Solitude.
4. (What has been hard?) Juggling family and personal writing and being part of the farm and scheduling school prep and finding time to be with friends.  When I lay it out like this, the thing that I find really frustrating–the juggling–brings me a list of all the things that I am most grateful for.
5. (What will you pay attention to today?) I am going to listen especially carefully for the source moments of conflict between the boys so that I can help them work it through rather than simply reacting.

May we walk in Beauty!

It’s wildlife dreams right now.  The other night I was trying to distract three hungry swimming bears from eating my friends.  Last night, skunks and badgers.  Oh, and a baby bear.  And puppies.  Somebody had one of the baby skunks on the table in a little wooden baby chair.  It was sitting back and enjoying all the little tidbits it was being fed.  I found the other one, and a black and white puppy, wandering around the yard near the badger nest, and thought I would make a joke about two black and white puppies.  It was really funny in my dream.  The mother badger (or stoat?) was taking care of a bear cub among her babies.  At first I thought it was a giant rabbit, but it turned out to be a bear.

St. John’s Eve

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Tea
And here is the tea I made using the three roots I harvested, along with a few others I had in my cupboard, and some slices of ginger root as well.  Roots teas are simmered rather than steeped, and my kitchen smelled earthy and wholesome during the process.

I am going to slip out of poetry-writing mode for a little while now, as I begin the summer process of compiling and editing, sorting and weeding the writings that I have now.  Today is St. John’s Eve, the day before the feast day of St. John the Baptist.  Throughout time and cultural spaces, this celebration has changed and shifted, collected some of the meanings of the Solstice which has passed only days ago.

Midsummer marks the moment in the northern hemisphere when the sun begins to lose its power (though we don’t feel it for many months yet).  St. John’s Day carries with it the transformative weight of the symbolic gift of baptism that St. John created, so the dying light is also representative of our own dying lights and our own transformative resurrections throughout our lives.  The cycles continue.  Change is not only possible, not only inevitable, but welcome.

Paradoxically, while the Sun-king is overthrown as the days begin to shorten, his power continues strong, and flares up for the next season.  I think this is the time for me to take the words that I have written and subject them to a baptism, watch them transform.  I have read that in some celebrations of St. John’s Day, a snake is one of the primary symbols, the creature who sheds its skin, leaving its dead self behind, while the living part continues on, sleek and shining, transformed.  That is what I seek for my words in this season.  I will continue to write gratitude lists for daily practice, and occasional poems and ramblings as the Muse speaks.

I found this traditional St. John’s Day poem:
Green is gold
Fire is wet
Future’s told
Dragon’s met.

May you meet your dragon with courage and aplomb in this season as you step into your future.

Gratitude List:
1. Date night was wonderful last night.  Friends gave us a gift certificate to the Accomac.  I don’t know that I have ever sat down in a restaurant and said to myself that I could order whatever I wanted, with no limits, but this is precisely what we did last night.  Jon had a Wild Boar Bibimbap with kimchi for appetizer, and a Petit Mignon with herbed potatoes and scorched asparagus with preserved lemon.  I had Chilled Sweet Pea Soup with lotus pods (like Odysseus’s crew members I might have chosen to stay in that land of the lotus forever) and Blackened Swordfish with summer squash and herb sauce, along with the asparagus.  For dessert, he had an Accomac version of a hot fudge sundae and I had Bananas Foster (though they don’t flambee it tableside on the wooden porch).  We shared a cosmopolitan made with cranberry juice and jalapeno-infused vodka.  I think I will be infusing some jalapenos this summer–it seems like such a medicinal thing to use for a fancy drink, but I love that heat.
2. All the adults who care for and offer attention to my children.  I grew up in such a nest as well, with wise and friendly and funny adults who took time for me, and I am incredibly grateful for the adults who create the same protected space for my own children.  I am thinking right now of Sandra, in particular, who has been their summertime companion for years now.  Now when they are probably old enough to be required to entertain themselves on farm days, they cannot do without her, and this is as it should be.
3. Cool winds announcing rain.  The plink of raindrops on leaves.
4. Cycles and changes. Transformation.  Leaving the old skin behind to live in the new and tender and shining skin.
5. Layers of sound in the distance and nearby in the morning.  Birdsong mingled with the human sounds of the day’s beginning.

May we walk in Beauty!

Roots and Lune (or, A Lune in June)

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

 Welcome to the renovated Mockingbird Chronicles!Roots

Not a particularly interesting photo to inaugurate my new blog design, I know, and Google Collage randomized the pics, so it doesn’t automatically show the process.  Still, this is a project I want to document.  On Monday (Solstice), I went to my friend Sarah’s house and dug up a burdock.  I planted it out in the woods’ edge where it should help to break up the clay.  I took a piece of the root, and then harvested some curly dock root and some dandelion root.  In the bottom center, the roots are all washed and waiting to be peeled (curly dock top left, burdock bottom left, and dandelion to the right).  Right center: Peeled.  I let them dry overnight, and the next morning Jon said what I was thinking: “They look like bones.”  Burdock is top left, dandelion top right, and curly dock is in the bottom right.  The bottom left photo shows them in their jars after about four hours in the dryer (dandelion and curly dock on left, burdock on right). Now for tea.

Today’s prompt is to write a lune, which is sort of haiku-like, and can be on any subject.  It’s a syllable-count poem of 5/3/5.  These tiny lines of two or three (as in lune and cinquain) are really challenging.  I might try some of these that break the line endings, but I have a feeling that there needs to be a purposeful ending to break up the longer lengths.  It might be interesting to do a series of lune and haiku, interspersing them.  And a lune, of course, is moon-shaped, so it might be interesting to take the sense of that instead of the specific directions and do a 7/5/3/5/7, or even a 9/7/5/3/5/7/9.  Oooh.  The possibilities!

Harbor the wildness.
Look around.
Settle into green.

Gratitude List:
1. Shakti energy.  That is to say, the will and the fire to find the way and to dive in to the process.
2. The roadside flowers of late June: always Queen Anne’s Lace, Chicory, and Day Lily, but also Buttercup, Sweet Melilot, Hag’s Taper, and lavender bubbles of Vetch.
3. This question for pondering: What is your greatest joy?  I want to make sure that one category of my questions is about joy.  What brings you joy in this moment?  What memory brings you joy?  What will you do for yourself today to bring joy to yourself (or others)?  (Thank you, Miss Jan.)
4. Yoga.  Stretching the spine, balancing, breathing–they’re so much more than the simple acts of stretch and balance and breath.  Those are words that fill other spaces and other meanings throughout the day.
5. Date night tonight!  I don’t know when we last planned a date for just us. I feel so adult.

May we walk in Beauty!

Little Sisters at Work

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IMAG0392 IMAG0394

The Garden at Herbs from the Labyrinth.  The Little Sisters are happy in their work, and a baby elephant (Ganesha?) helps to keep the order of the labyrinth.

Odd dreams last night after I finally got back to dozing post-insomnia.  My cell phone appeared for the first time in my dreams.  I needed it to take pictures on the beach.  And I dreamed that my younger sister Valerie was actually older than I am and that we had another younger sister with a very different temperament than any of the rest of us.

The Poetry Prompt for today is to write a memory poem.
Here is a picture of me and Suzy and Jennifer before Jennifer went to America for repairs:
IMAG0400_1

On the Lakeshore I could look out and see
distant America where my grandparents
sat over breakfast every day thinking of me
in their light-filled Victorian house
with the wooden banisters and sliding doors.

Jennifer, my doll with the golden hair
who had gone to America to be repaired
sat on their table and dined with them
longing for the day she would be home with me
and Ed Bear and Suzy in her red dress
who I carried under my arm.

Gratitude List:
1. Wise women.  Yesterday’s encounters with Phyllis, with Sarah and Julia.  If I had a daughter, I would send her to Sense of Wonder Camp.
2. Watching and listening to the bees, the Little Sisters, hard at work in the garden, zzzing through sunbeams like liquid light itself.
3. This rain, this moon, this strawberry rhubarb pie.
4. The will to begin.  And there’s an odd gratitude hidden under the rug of those words.  I am grateful for last night’s insomnia. During these bouts my brain functions in a circular fashion.  I am neither wholly asleep nor wholly awake.  I have a project hoard that has been feeling weighty, and last night my brain brought me back again and again to the question of whether the creative thought of someday getting to this work is a good thing, or whether it’s just another stress.  Last night when my mind circled back around to it, I started to imagine my life without this project in it, and I felt such a great relief.  I am going to have some big bags for Re-Uzit this week.  Ah, relief.
5. Burdock, curly dock, dandelion (sounds like a new version of duck, duck, goose)–I have roots of all three plants on my counter.  Today I will grate them and then dry them in the food processor, and use them in teas.  Researching them brought me again to some researches on wild greens, particularly two varieties of wild lettuce that grow on the farm.  I might start experimenting with them a little.

May we walk in Beauty!