Gratitudes

On Beauty and Love

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I have been thinking about how to help my students develop confidence in their own strength, to help nurture a sense of self-worth that will help to protect them.  I have noticed how the beauty trap persists for young women, the powerful desire to be seen by the eyes of others (especially boys) as beautiful, and how this feed into their own sense of their own worthiness or unworthiness to be loved.  This poem needs lots of organizing and more thought to it, but it will hold the place for now.

Don’t be beautiful.
Be edgy.  Be friendly. Be bold.
Be strong. Be quirky. Be wild.
Don’t be mild.
Be fierce.  Be thoughtful. Be brave.
Be gracious. Be loving. Be You.
Don’t be cute.
Be happy. Be tender. Be funny.
Be raw. Be powerful. Be real.

Gratitude:
I think I will begin doing one item or one paragraph for a little while.  I am feeling an inner shift these days, a readiness for something new.
I am grateful for love: Love wins.  Follow where the love goes.  That’s where the answers are.

May we walk in Beauty!

What Is the Message?

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The bluebird told me, and I told the wren.
The bluebird got it from someone on the ground,
a vole, perhaps, or field mouse,
who’d caught the gist from the catfish
who lives in a corner of the pond.
She’d heard it from the turtle
who was scratching a hole in the bank
where she could lay her clutch
of pearly eggs, and she said she had learned it
from the black snake looping its way
along a branch of locust, careful of the thorns.
Who knows where that old slitherer
came upon the information?  Perhaps
she heard it on the wind
as it whispered through the valley.

I regret I cannot tell you what it was–
it has gone on now, beyond me
and beyond this poem’s edges.
Ask wren, perhaps, but he has already
told the thing to bat, who’s given it
to a thoughtfully grazing groundhog
who keeps her springtime quarters
across the field there by the little oak,
right where a sprinkle of sunshine
sparkles in the dew most mornings.

Gratitude List:
1. Earth: The view from the top of the ridge of Mt. Pisgah, looking down to the Susquehanna River always lifts my spirits.  How did I get so lucky, to get such a view almost every day?
2. Air: Poetry and Stories spoken aloud.  Last night’s Spoken Word Play (the 14th) was profound and powerful.
3. Fire: Making fire with the boys yesterday.  Ellis finally drew flames from a pile of sycamore fluff, using the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass.  Joss wanted a fire, too, so we built two small fires on bricks on the driveway, and the boys spent hours feeding them with sticks (it cleaned up the yard, that’s certain).  Joss toasted a piece of bread, and they each roasted potatoes in the hot coals for our supper.  I recently read, “They won’t remember their best afternoon of television.”  That’s the truth.  But I think they’ll remember the day they made fire.
4. Water: The River.  Did I say the River?  I cross her twice every day.  She runs through our lives like a thread that weaves us together with the lives of those who live all along her shores, and with those who have ever lived here in this place where she runs.
5. Spirit: That which enlivens and animates us.  Love that connects and weaves us together, like the River.

May we walk in Beauty!

Today’s Task

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Today has a singular work,
a quest that only you can accomplish,
a riddle that only you can solve.
What is the knot that you will untangle?
What missing piece will you add to the puzzle?

In the story, you enter the house of the witch
and she gives you three impossible tasks,
problems that you must solve
with heart and ingenuity
and a little help from a friend.
What has she asked of you today?

Gratitude List:
1. Tweaking.  Trying until you get it right.
2. Fun with First Graders.  Yesterday’s field trip was delightful, even when the bus broke down.
3. My children’s wise and caring teachers.
4. Good stories.  Well acted.  Well told.  Well lived.
5. How the heart seeks what it needs.

May we walk in Beauty!

Awakenings

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(Some of them survived!)

Here in the green
where the wren is calling
and earthworms begin their work,
you can sense the great heart
of the whole,
beating,
loving,
aware.

Gratitude List:
1. Awakeners.  People (both the mentoring and the challenging) who wake up something within me that wants to be more whole, more real, more alive.
2. Love wins.  Love will always win.  Put down your stones and walk away.  Love wins.
3. Field Trip.  Today I am taking a personal day to be a mom rather than a teacher.  First graders are going to the Science Factory.
4. Hafiz.  “Your heart and my heart are very, very old friends.”  They are, aren’t they?
5. How some people center their wisdom in their compassionate hearts.  That’s the direction I want to go, too.

May we walk in Beauty!

Don’t Know How to Pray

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

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When I don’t know how to pray:

What can you see out the windows
of your hospital room?
Clouds scuttling through blue
or raindrops chanting down?
Does a crow saunter down the wind
or a dove whistle through air?

Or there, in the rooms where you wait,
look for that crack in the corner,
the spider missed by the cleaning crew.
Watch for the color orange
in someone’s shoelaces
or an owl brooch on a nurse’s lanyard.

I’m sending you something by wind,
by feather, by stone,
sending you heart and fire,
sending you prayers like rain.

Gratitude List:
1. Having the hard conversations.  They make us better people.  And that’s what we’re here for, eh?  To become better people.
2. Spoken Word Play 14.  We had our dress rehearsal last night.  Dress rehearsal is actually my favorite part–that’s when I get to hear everyone else’s poems and stories.
3. Praying in any way I can.  Being part of the web.  I think I say this one a lot, but it seems to come around a lot.  And I need to acknowledge within myself the anxieties I feel for the people I love, but I don’t want to dwell on those, so it helps to take it to this place, to give the mind the work to do.  Send love.  Send prayer.  Send a mockingbird.
4. Boy walking down the hall yesterday with a red tulip behind his ear.  (Yeah, yeah–he probably shouldn’t have picked it.  Still, it was cute.)
5. My youngest kid is turning into a grammar cop.  I’ll have to catch him before he turns too pedantic, but in the meantime, it’s really fun to have him sit here berating me for beginning sentences with “And. . .”

May we walk in Beauty!

Vision and Re-Vision

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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My classroom door.  Perhaps it’s time to tidy it a bit.

What of Little Red’s mother?
She had to know the child would wander,
had to know the natural curiosity,
the inborn politeness that would not scorn a stranger,
toothy as he was, and oily with charm.

Did she lie awake at night,
heart pounding,
plotting how to protect her child
from wolves and poison and brambles?

And when the strange news reached her,
of her child and her mother
rescued from the ravenous belly of death,
did she quake with the knowledge
of all she could not protect them from?

(We’re practicing poetry revisions in Creative Writing right now.  This is one that will need the scalpel, but I might be able to pull something out of it.  Yesterday, I took one of my poems from a few days ago, threw it up on the Smart Board, and did some revisions right in front of them.  They were really quiet.  I hope that it gave them courage to work their own poems into shape.)

Gratitude List:
1. Re-vision.  Re-shaping.  Re-creating.  Re-making.  Re-forming.  (I am thinking that Visions and Re-Visions might be the name of my next book.  I wonder if it’s been done already.)
2. Fifty miles to the gallon.  I have only driven the Prius for a day now, but I have become what Jon calls a hyper-miler–I drive to get the good mileage.
3. Zesty greens
4. The yellow tulips outside the office at school.  Red stripes through the petals.
5. Phoebe and white-throat sparrow, plaintive and insistent.

May we walk in Beauty!

Laundress

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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It has been a couple years since I have had the time and energy to maintain a Poet-Tree in the yard, so I made one on my bulletin board.

Today’s poem is a threading together of fragments of Facebook posts from years gone by on this day.  A Facebook Found Fragment poem.

Doozy of a storm.
The poetry is shredded.
I will be such a laundress today
and fix up my tree.
I have a fierce attachment to hope.

Sleep is such a magical elixir. And elderberry.

The trees are taking that last inbreath
before they explode into bloom.
My heart is breaking. And healing. And breaking.

Soak up the energy,
give yourself a break from perfectionism,
sample a bit and see what it tastes like,
become a drop of sunlight
and whisper in on the breeze.

See? There you have it:
Sometimes I feel so awkward
about who to be, how to be.
But that means there is always something to learn,
always a new path to explore.

Gratitude List:
1. Anniversaries.  Our wedding anniversary may be in September, but today is a special anniversary.  Here is how I said it three years ago: “This day, [29] years ago. Pizza, pool, and a penny for good luck. I decided that it was time to tell that cute shy boy how much I liked him. Turns out, he liked me too. He’s still cute, and sort of shy, and I like him a whole, whole lot.”
2. New car!  When you try to run your vehicles just to the point before they become more expensive to maintain than it would be to buy a new one, then the purchase of a new car is a really big deal.  Roxanne Rustbucket has served us well for many years–she’s the only car our children know.  Hopefully, Pippi (yes, as in Longstocking–we were thinking of VillavillaCoola) Prius will haul us safely through another decade.
3. Having a day of lesson plans that just follow simply from yesterday’s lesson plans and don’t need a huge amount of planning.
4. Mary Oliver
5. All the shining eyes of the day–thoughtful, hopeful, tricksy, needing, giving, knowing, compassionate, connecting. . .

So much love!  May we walk in Beauty.

Let Your Poem Out to Breathe

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Artist at work.

Today we will do the revision,
the re-make, the whole re-creation.
Today, we bleed.
Read it, and read it again.
Does it say what it means to?
Then get out your scalpel,
excise and re-shape,
find the new form hidden
beneath the words.
Let your poem out to breathe.

Gratitude List:
1. Bruce’s spinach and feta scones
2. I got my copy of Valerie Baer’s Baking With Whole Grains
3. Pot luck
4. Revising.  The poem, the plan, the purpose, even.
5. Getting Ready for Spoken Word Play.  Memorizing.  Seeing Daina and Marie again.  Feeling the shape of the poems on the stage.

May we walk in Beauty!

Making Way for New

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Sad that so many of my ferns have been killed by the cold, I am hoping that the lilies of the valley fare better.

Each of my sons is preceded by a shadow child.
Something calls my children to a time before they were.
And yet they were reluctant–both–to leave the womb,
resisting the raging tides that expelled their siblings early.

Or perhaps my body just refused to give them up,
these two it had managed to hold onto for the count.
My body said, “I’ve got this one.  I’ve got this one!”
Forty-two weeks, and the child was knocking at the door
and still the body wasn’t ready to let go her charge.

Sometimes that which is lost makes way
for that which is to come, creates a space.
That first one would be ten now half a year,
but my eldest celebrates that mark one month away.
That year, I labored twice, in May and May.

How often do we plant a tenuous seed of hope
in fields laid bare by grief and loss?
When you look in the eyes of the past
can you see where sorrow ends
and something new begins?

Gratitude List:
1. Book Sale scores: Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language, three Italo Calvino (gonna be surreal summer of reading), a Milan Kundera, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rushdie, Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea, and Reading Lolita in Tehran.  (I haven’t read Lolita myself–the premise creeps me out–but I have heard good things about Nafisi.)
2. Josiah got a book of 365 crafts a year, and has already made a cardboard gnome house in response.  He thinks there should be many more giant craft books like this.  I showed him my collection, which he says is boring.
3. Ellis got a book on science fair projects and spent the afternoon researching home-made solar cells, which is the topic of his science project this year.
4. Weekend breakfasts
5. Those geese calling out by the pond.

May we walk in Beauty!

This Poem Will Be Short

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I have a boy on one shoulder,
and a cat is clawing at the other,
both grabbing for the reins
of my attention,
so this poem will be short.

Gratitude List:
1. Lovely snow streaming down
2. Buds on the dogwood tree
3. Weekends
4. How meaning appears in layers–I have been pondering the meaning this morning of a rather surreal poem that I wrote almost twenty years ago, and I think I am finally beginning to understand it.  Of course, I have thought that I understood it several times in the intervening years.
5. Book sale today!

May we walk in Beauty!