Gratitudes

Listing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN8033
I am planning my end-of-year mini course for seniors, a Writer’s Contemplative Retreat.  I am thinking that I will begin each day with a gratitude list.  I have been reviewing Mary Oliver’s questions, and also trying to watch my mind as I make my own morning list.  I don’t necessarily think conscious questions into the open space of my brain, but there are trails down which I wander when I am thinking up my morning list.  Here are some questions I might ask my students to get them thinking:

* What is beautiful?  What fills me with wonder?  What images have slowed me down and caused me to pause in the past day?  What slows me down?
* What people do I appreciate?  In the past day, what people have I noticed being extra shiny?  Who does things to make the world a better place?  Who helps me?
* What satisfies me?  What makes me say, “Yes, that’s right”?
* What has surprised me in the past day?
* What helps me make it through?  What helps me to cope?  Life can feel downright difficult and wearisome sometimes.  In those moments, what helps me to hold on and face the challenges?

This last is the one that compelled me to write that list this this morning.  I realized that sometimes when I get to the last point or two–especially during times of high stress–I struggle to finish the list.  My mind begins to drag and complain and remind me that I’m tired and exhausted and crotchety.  But the discipline of the list kicks in–I have to finish the blasted thing, even if I’m grumpy.  So my mind goes to the question of what will help me to get through the challenge and the stress.

It makes me think of the fairy tale archetype of the mentor who tells the lost child what to look for: “There will be a signpost that will show you the way.  When you see the road passing between two hills, you know you are nearing your journey’s end.  Ask the old woman who stands at the crossroads for a crust of bread, and she will feed you.”  If I am feeling stressed, spending a moment in the morning to imagine the signposts that will help me to make it through the next portion of my journey helps me to find my way through without becoming overwhelmed.

Gratitude List:
1. Synchronous connections.  As I plan my mini-course, I contacted a local church with an outdoor labyrinth, and I discovered that the deacon who works with the labyrinth is someone I have met and deeply admired.
2. The music teachers at Wrightsville Elementary.  On Tuesday, The strings teacher couldn’t be there for the concert, and the music department head just leapt in and led the orchestras.
3. Blue herons flying above the highway.
4. Raccoon and deer in the hollow.
5. Making lists.

May we walk in Beauty!

Birdy

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN9145

Gratitude List:
1. Red-winged Blackbird
2. Oriole
3. Goldfinch
4. Bluebird
5. Hawk on the wing

May we walk in Beauty!

Gardens and Islands

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN9214
Season of the ferns.

Gratitude List:
1. Goethite, those small brown-black cubes we find in the fields.  Remineralized pyrite.  Philosopher’s stone.
2. The Curious Garden.  A small boy came home from school yesterday, inspired by a book/video his teacher had shown him in class.  He wanted me to help him to create a place behind the house where he would put plants he likes.  Then he took me inside to show me the book on the computer.  As we were finding this, he said, “I think you’re really going to like this one.”  I love that, that he is sharing literature with me, thinking about whether I would like it.  And he was right.  I really did.
3. Meeting the challenges.  I’m really living into The Odyssey right now, looking at the islands of Odysseus’s journey, thinking about the things that derail me, that challenge me, that keep from becoming my truest self, and the challenges that help me to become my truest self.
4. Planning my contemplative retreat.  I’ve chosen dates for my monastery trip.  Today I will call and reserve my little room.  I cannot express how deeply satisfying this is.
5. I also heard orioles on campus yesterday–even one in the tree outside my window!

May we walk in Beauty!

Dropping Keys

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN9204

Gratitude List:
1. This poem by Hafiz, from yesterday morning:

The small woman
Builds cages for everyone
He
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck her head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.

2. Hearing oriole’s voice added to the dawn chorus.
3. Becoming more familiar with that inner labyrinth.  Learning to recognize the turnings.
4. Vision.  I complain a lot lately about my glasses, about my shifting vision, but really, I am so glad for my sight: for the ability to read, to see a blue heron in the distance flying across the River, for the way eyes let light in.
5. The rabbits of Palmyra.  They have such personality.  Last night, on the way home from my mother-in-law’s house we saw (again) a game of leap rabbit, where two rabbits square off in a yard: one makes a sudden rush toward the other, who leaps into the air while the rushing rabbit dashes beneath.  They do this repeatedly–I assume it’s a dominance thing, but it’s really entertaining to watch.  But the most engaging story is this: Yesterday morning, my mother-in-law went to open her living room blinds, and there was a rabbit standing with its back feet on her porch couch and its front feet on her windowsill, looking in at her!  It crouched back down on the couch for a moment and then stood up and looked in again.  Then it jumped up on the windowsill and looked in for a few moments before hopping down and away.  I think it was thanking her for all the flowers she has planted for it to eat.

May we walk in Beauty!

Fire Bird is Back!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Baltimore_oriole_male
(Not  my photo–from Wikipedia, labeled for reuse.)

Gratitude List:
1. Fire Bird is back in the hollow. The oriole has returned.  I have been watching and listening for weeks now.  Yesterday, as I was getting out of the shower, I heard his whistle.  I opened the window, and he flew in to sit on the branch of sycamore right in front of me, whistling and whistling.  I felt as though my longing had drawn him here. Later in the afternoon, his lady came, too, timid and whispery, yellow-green like the leaves on the poplar.  And he is such an impossible orange.  Satisfying orange.
2. A bright and shining bird of a boy who is ten years old today.  He is driven by his curiosity, compelled to explore and tweak and consider, to question and create and figure things out.  I can’t imagine anymore what life was like before he was part of it.
3. Drawing to ourselves what we love.
4. My mother.  Mentor and model, thoughtful and contemplative, she has done so much to make the world a better and more just place.
5. Mother Earth

May we walk in Beauty!

You Are the Dragon, You Are the Cave

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

DSCN9148

The thing you learn, of course,
before you strap your sword belt on,
is that the princess you pledged to save
is only yourself in another guise,
that the dragon you swore to smite
is simply your own roaring ego
belching flame in the mouth of the cave.

You are the villagers rioting in the streets,
and calling for the dragon’s blood.
You are the bells that pealed from the towers
when the dragon circled above the town.
You are the sword,
the shield, the very cave,
the small frightened mouse
trampled in the fray.
You are the village.
You are the mountain.
You are the day itself,
quiet witness to the story.

Gratitude List:
1. Compassion
2. Nettles
3. The color orange
4. Routine.  Breaking routine.
5. Clear vision

May we walk in Beauty!

Walking in the Big Story

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN9177
Another dancing fire picture from last week.  This one is a little dragony. 

Gratitude List:
1. Homemade pizza.  With onions and fresh basil on top.
2. Inner exploration.  I am finishing this semester with my Creative Writers with an autobiographical piece, using lots and lots of writing prompts to explore their identity, to really look at what makes them who they are.  I think that self-reflection can help us to develop into more mature and healthy people.
3. Good Ethiopian Coffee to start my morning
4. Waking up, and then waking up, and then waking up.  There are always new rooms to awaken within.
5. How the stories that we read and listen to intertwine themselves with our own.  Sometimes this process is more intense than others.  I can remember the beautiful language and imagery of certain books with pleasure, but it’s when I am working a book–not just reading it–that I really thoroughly absorb it and take it in.  It happened to me at a young age with the Narnia books, and much later with the Lord of the Rings.  The Odyssey.  Perhaps it’s epics and journey stories that do it mostly.  We ourselves become part of the meta-myth.

May we walk in Beauty!

May the Fourth Be With You!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN9218
I want to figure out how to get some good, crisp, detailed photos of my collages.

I’m sorry, I just had to use that title.  There are certain days that simply must be given their due.  March Fourth is one of them, and today.

My Gratitude List today is a reprise of the one I wrote on this day three years ago:
1. Noticing. Today I have been thinking about the spiritual practice of noticing, and of all the ways
2. My parents have taught me to notice. How noticing keeps me conscious of
3. The present moment. How the present moment is
4. The Exquisite Doorway between past and future. How that transition from past to future is always taking place, as naturally as
5. Breathing out and breathing in.

May we walk in Beauty. Namaste.

Dragons and Olympians

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN9215
You can take the girl out of the Waldorf, but you can’t take the Waldorf out of the girl: Here is a dragon I drew on my chalkboard.  After I erased the tree that I had started drawing, I received requests from students for a red dragon.  I was a good challenge, and fun to watch them discover it as it developed over several days.

Facebook tells me that for the past two years on this very day, I heard and saw Oriole for the first time that spring.  I have been worried that I haven’t been aware of him yet, wondering if my busy schedule has kept me from noticing, or whether he has chosen not to return to the hollow.  Sometimes several of them come at once and fight for the prime territories.  Now I can be patient a little while longer.  I miss my bright friend.

Gratitude List:
1. The gold has returned to the goldfinches.  The bluebird, as Thoreau says, may carry the sky on his back, but the goldfinch carries the sun on his.
2. A cozy warm dress on a chilly May morning.
3. Summer vacation is coming.  I love teaching dearly, but at this time of year, I begin to anticipate June with the intensity of a senior.
4. Our ancient traditions: Yesterday, I volunteered to be one of the measurers for the track meet at school, holding the end of the measuring tape for the shot put, discus, and javelin.  Two of the guys on the team are in my English class, where we happen to be studying Ancient Greece, where the earliest Olympians competing in those same contests.
5. The little places in the day where I get a chance to breathe.

May we walk in Beauty!

Stories Will Hatch

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN9138
Bird in a tree.

April is finished.  I need a break from the daily poem for a while, time to let the words deepen before I spew them out onto the screen.

Gratitude List:
1. The car did start on Saturday night.  In the parking lot after the play, I saw that Pippi the Prius’s lights were doing a weird blinky thing, and she was making a parping sound, like she was on some sort of alarm–I don’t know whether she has any such features.  I pushed the unlock button several times and she settled down, but when I tried to start her, she was on the lowest battery bar, and she just turned herself off.  I called AAA, but after the call, I tried turning her on again, and she purred to life.  Her battery bars were really low, but she slowly recharged herself, so I cancelled the AAA call and went home.  Because she’s so different from anything I have ever driven, I didn’t feel like I even had the ability to assess what’s wrong.
2. One boy is writing a report on Dave Brubeck for music class.  Yesterday afternoon, I realized that the thing he’d been humming all day was “Take Five,” and that the odd clicky thing he does with his tongue was marking some of the stressed beats.  I’ve got a kid who genuinely likes Brubeck–we’ve done at least one parenting thing right.
3. Yesterday’s sermon: The Disruption of Healing.  There’s a lot to think about in there.  Do I really want to be healed?  I have gotten pretty comfortable with the status quo–healing/growing/becoming requires change and change can be itchy and painful.  But my healing is bound up with the healing of others, with the planet.  So we forge ahead.  We push for new growth.  We shed the old dragon skins.
4. The ways stories hatch.  Maybe I will grab the momentum of this one and get it onto paper before it fades.  I need to listen to my own advice.  I am really good about telling students to write down their ideas, to play and tinker with the elements of a story, to fearlessly jump into it.  I guess I had better put my money where my mouth is. . .
5. You.  You who read my blog, you who notice a flash of color or a beautiful set of words and point it out, you who cast your nets of compassion out into the world, you who make that almost alchemical connection between idea and word–putting thought into hearable form, you who twinkle when you smile, you who think deeply before you speak, you who chatter and chuckle and keep everyone happy, you who feed others, you who hold babies, you who strive and strive.

Much love!  May we walk in Beauty!