Gratitudes

All the Things I Wish I Had Said

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I am using the Curtis Memorial Library Prompt List for a series of morning exercises.  After yesterday’s Abecedarian poem, I began thinking about how I wish I could have given it to some of my students this past semester.  I think the next set of poems I am writing might be:
All the Things I Wish I Had Said (While You Were Still Here)

Courage
An Acrostic Poem

Can you feel how it fills you
once you offer it that space
underneath your ribs?
Remember: You can do this.
After all you have been through,
give yourself this breath, and this one.
Each one will offer you space for another.

Gratitude List:
1. (What gives you strength?) Finding new summer rhythms–more writing, more reading, more yoga.
2. (What opens your heart?) The way that people listen to each other
3. (What refuels you?) Sleep–the summer sleep is returning
4. (What gives you energy?) A clean house
5. (What makes you more completely human?) Stories

May we walk in Beauty!

Abecedarian

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house

An Abecedarian Poem
for some young people I know

Always give Love the last word: You
belong here, you have a place here.
Carry that awareness inside,
deep within you, where you cannot
evade its holy truth. You were
formed for this world, for this moment.

Go, yes, into all the world, and
hold out your hands. Share that good news
in every place that you enter.
Jump with both feet into your life,
keeping hold of this, your mantra:
Love will always have the last word.

Maybe you struggle to hold on.
No one seems to understand you,
or it all seems futile.  Be the
person that you have been needing.
Question authority, yes, but
resist the pull of destruction.

Sometimes it will seem that you are
the only one who lives by Love.
Understand this: You’re not alone.
Voice your anxieties and pain.
Walk openly. You cannot be
x’ed out or erased.  You belong.

You have a role to play, full of
zeal. Let love have the final word.

Gratitude List:
1. Morning yoga, which is to say
2. stretching myself into new ways of thinking and being, which is to say
3. growing and transforming, which is to say
4. giving up old forms that no longer serve, which is to say
5. morning has arrived with such shine, such vigor.

May we walk in Love.

Dreamers and Poets

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Having fun with the photo apps on my new phone.

Gratitude List:
1. (What gives you courage?)
The people who use language to build bridges
The ones who sit outside the fortress
and invite the rock-throwers to the table
The ones who sit in the breach
and reach their hands to both sides
The ones who straddle the trenches
2. (What is satisfying?) My classroom is ready for summer cleaning.
3. (Who is helpful?) All the people who work at the school to clean up after us, to prepare the place for the next season.  They don’t get thanked enough.
4. (What is healing?) Eight hours of sleep.  When did I last get eight hours of sleep?  And there was very little waking up throughout.
5. (Where do you find inspiration?) Dreams and poems.  Dreamers and poets.

May we walk in Beauty!

Pity Party

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

catdragon
Leonardo da Vinci cat sketches.

Dreams:
In one dream, I am looking at a pile of wooden bits and pieces, sort of frustrated at the mess, when I realize that it’s all the parts to a spinning wheel, and a really fine wheel at that.  All I have to do is put it together.  (I think I should get out my spindle this summer.)

In another dream, I standing outside with friends when there is a shimmering in the air nearby, like some tiny creature slipping through the veil between worlds.  “That’s a hummingbird!” someone says.  We keep watching it flitting around.  It still looks more like a creature of faerie to me.

Today is a challenging Gratitude List.  I have been having an allergy-stricken pity party for the past 18 hours.  It’s hard to create a Gratitude List in the midst of self-pity.  I considered not even doing this this morning because this one–wracked as it is by self-pity–feels self-absorbed, but it is also part of my process of growing.  Perhaps this will help me to move beyond myself.

Gratitude List:
1. (What is comforting?) A snoogly kid next to me in the big chair.
2. (What is comforting?) Seven hours of not sneezing.
3. (What is comforting?) While the day ahead has lots of work, I can schedule it myself.
4. (What pleases you?) The green light of morning touching the tops of the trees in the hollow.
5. (What do you anticipate?) Rest, solitude, clear sinuses

May we walk in Beauty!

Hymn Sing

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Gratitude List:
1. The poetry of old hymns.  John Ruth (may he live forever) articulated this beautifully last night.  I have been itching to find words for why I keep returning to the oldest hymns, even when the patriarchal language and theology send part of me into a tizzy.  It has to do with the fact that we’re singing poetry together.
2. The resonance of a hymn-sing in hardwood-floored gallery.  A perfect space for four-part harmony.
3. Singing and reading poetry in a gallery.  The hymns and poems and paintings all have a deep sense of structure beneath the surface vibrancy and color.  While we sang, while I read, I gazed at Freiman Stoltzfus’s mandala painting on his Symphony of Spring wall.  We sang “For the beauty of the earth”–this line caught me: “for the mystic harmony linking sense to sound and sight.”  Holy moments.  (If you get into Lancaster, you must check out Freiman’s gallery on Prince Street.)
4. Roma and John Ruth.  What lovely people!  They must be nearing 90, but they’re as crisp and playful as ever, she leading the songs with vigor, he giving vignettes and thoughts on each song, on the state of singing, on how moving it is to watch youtube videos about interspecies interactions.  And here is the amazing thing: After I introduced myself to him, I mentioned that we had talked about my great-grandfather 25 years ago.  He remembered the conversation (better than I did).  He’s written a 1000+-page book in the intervening years, met hundreds of new people, traveled the world, and he could still remember meeting a kid just out of college and researching her family history.  What a brilliant mind.
5. Words and word-lovers.

May we walk in Beauty!

Somewhere in the World

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Shere Khan of Skunk Hollow (we watched  The Jungle Book last night)

Somewhere in the world
there must be a house
where you will find safety,
a place where maybe
you will find the grace of wholeness.

Somewhere in the world
there must be a word
that holds your truest name,
a word that is a haven,
a shelter for your aching.

Somewhere in the world
there must be a table
set for soothing, set for aiding,
a table that will make
a new way for your healing.

Gratitude List:
1. Dreams
2. Metaphors
3. Symbols
4. Poems
5. Laughter

May we walk in Beauty!

Exploring What it Means to Be Human

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In the dream, I am giving a lecture to a group of prospective students and parents, and the moment they walk in for my presentation, I forget everything: what I was planning to say, what I am supposed to be talking about, why we are even here in this room.  I am in a complete and utter panic, so I just begin speaking about whatever comes to mind.  We always live in the context of our emotional lives, I tell them.  In the reactive world of daily existence, we don’t often remember to stop and examine what it means to be human.  We aren’t born with the training to step back and explore what it means to be creatures of emotion.  Stories give us that–they take us out of the auto-pilot realm of reactions and give us a slow and thoughtful opportunity to look at what it is to be human.  Like looking at insects held on a pin, literature lets us closely and carefully examine the human condition, and to reflect on ourselves as participants in the human condition.  That is why we study literature.

Not too bad for an on-the-fly, middle of the night dream lecture, though I am a little disturbed by the insect analogy.  I think in the dream I actually said skewered on a pin.  Yeesh.  Anyway, the people nodded and seemed to understand.

Gratitude List:
1. (What makes you curious?) How life-reality seeps into dream-reality.  How they inform each other.  How a dream can inform and settle anxieties: So often my anxiety dreams heighten my anxiety–last night’s dream resolved it.
2. (What is satisfying?) Words and related words: Solve and resolve and dissolve.  Image and magic and imagine.  (Occasionally my mind automatically anagrams words.  The other day, we sat at a restaurant table with a sign that seemed to read, “This table reserved for pirates of 6 or more.”  My mind had anagrammed parties to pirates.  I find this oddly satisfying–pirates and parties are now inextricably linked in my brain.  Like parental and paternal.  Like conversation and conservation.  Reverse-reserve. And the phonetic anagram chicken-kitchen.  Oy–I think I have just officially entered Summertime Brain.)
3. (What is a small thing of wonder?) That toad in the field.  Jon took the picture.  Toads please me, and make my heart happy.
4. (What was fun?) The big yard sale at Lebanon Valley Brethren Home yesterday, an annual event for the family.  Now we have to find a place for all the cords and electronics that one boy has collected, for all the new books, for the games and doodads.  It goes to a good cause, and the boys love it.  They interact with the residents who run the various areas of the sale, and they practice politeness.  I bought a museum-style book on the history of the alphabet and a collection of Whitman’s poetry and prose, along with two Kahlil Gibran books.  And I bought someone’s old cell phone, which I will use as a camera.
5. (What inspires you?) The fledglings standing on the edge of the nest, spreading their wings for first flight.  Today we graduate our seniors.  At Dedication last night, they already wore the aura of the adults they are becoming.  There was still plenty of silliness and bounciness, but it was held within the reverence and earnestness of this Moment of their lives.  Fly Well, Bright Ones!

May we walk, may we fly, in Beauty!

What Thing of Beauty Have you Seen?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Gratitude List:
1. (What thing of beauty have you seen?) A Bridge that loops stone arches out over a River.
2. (What heals?) Confrontation can lead to new levels of sympathetic understanding.
3. (What touched your heart?) Yesterday before we wrapped up our mini-course, one boy asked if we could get everyone to gather around another boy who is joining the army and pray for his safety.  This is something we can all do, pacifist or not.  He proceeded to pray for his friend, and then for all of us, a spontaneous opening of the heart.
4. (What do you anticipate?) This is the day of the big yard sale at the retirement village where my mother-in-law lives.  For some reason, it has become an Event for our family, and this year it falls the day after all of us have finished school, so we’re even more excited than usual.  It’s in a big barn, so the rain shouldn’t affect our fun.
5. (What makes you marvel?) The way jumping spiders interact and react, as though they’re teeny tiny puppies.  The way they seem to notice me as a person, too.  Mantises and dragonflies also seem to have this awareness, though i haven’t noticed it in other spiders and insects.

May we walk in Beauty!

Grandmother’s Roots

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the peonies have
finally awakened in
the doorway of June
transient blooms and roots that
come from grandmother’s garden

Examen and Gratitude:
1. (Who inspires you?) Harriet Tubman.  Today, I finish my mini-course with my students at the River.  We will talk of dreams and water, of the Underground Railroad that traveled up this River, the walk to freedom.  And I will tell them of the Dreamer, Harriet Tubman–legend says that sometimes she would suddenly fall asleep at really dangerous moments on the journey northward, but when she awoke, she would know the next way to go.
2. (What makes you glad?) Sun on the wing of the red-winged blackbird.
3. (What fills you with deep joy?) The inclusive laughter of teenagers, the way they perform for each other to make each other laugh, the way the laughter catches from one to another and on down the line like a wildfire.
4. (What is your hunger?) For solitude, for silence, for deep quiet.  Even in the midst of loving these last days with my young people, part of me is turning toward the quiet of summer and the deliberate pacing of the long days.
5. (What wakes you up and calls you forward?) Trying on new ways to use words, reading poets who break up language and use it like mosaic and collage artists use broken bits of glass and pieces of paper.

May we walk in Beauty!

All the Shades of Green

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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See that green and orange tulip bloom against the red barn?  My body thinks that little flower wants to kill me.  When the tulip tree begins to send out its pollens, my body sets up a racket of sneezing and sniffling and eye-watering–whatever it can do to try to keep the pollen out.  Beautiful, though, aren’t they?  I would like to fly above a grove of tulip poplars in May.

Gratitude List:
1. My bright and shiny group of mini-course kids.  Yesterday was much harder than I had expected.  It is exhausting to be the sole entertainment and input for a group of students for an entire day.  A much bigger task than I had thought.  But I love it, and I love them.  Bright and shiny.
2. Murphy found his way home.  (A small dog I know got out of his fence two days ago and spent a whole night and two days away from his people.  He’s back with them now.)
3. All the shades of green.
4. Visuals for the sacred journey: labyrinths, spirals, pathways, stones. . .
5. Conversations that go deep and wide.

May we walk in Beauty!