Gratitudes

Prayerful

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I do not know what this is–one of the boys took it with a special filter–but I like how it draws me in and centers me.

Yesterday morning as I was doing some last-minute puttering at my desk, a group of students tapped on my door.  “We’re doing a prayer walk,” they told me.  “Can we come in and pray for you?”

So much of my focus when I am at school is on how I can care for and meet the needs of these young people that it threw me for a momentary loop to be on the receiving end.  I didn’t quite know how to be.  It was lovely and powerful and extremely meaningful, here at the stressful end of a semester–with the anxiety and excitement of the semester that is approaching–to simply stand there and receive the gift and the grace of their prayers, like feathers, like stones, like a bowl that held me throughout the whole day and which will carry me into the newness of the coming weeks.

It strikes me that in these days when there are such sharp distinctions being made between religions and denominations and spiritual perspectives, that one thing we can do is to offer each other our prayer.  Or energy.  Or meditation.  Or goodwill.  Whatever we call it.  That reaching out toward each other in spirit, casting the web, carrying and holding each other.

Gratitude List:
1. Spending the morning drawing with my kiddos.
2. Mist in the hollow.
3. Warm coffee on a chilly morning.
4. How resolve settles into the spine.
5. Prayer.

May we walk in Beauty!

Three Eggs of Possibility

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Three Small Eggs

What three small eggs
are you incubating?

Three tender dreams,
three hidden hopes,
three waiting wishes. . .

How will you hatch them?
How will you nurture and tend
the golden possibilities they contain?

Name them now.

Gratitude List:
1. Endings and Beginnings.  Today is the last day of the first semester.  I am ready for a change, ready for the new start.
2. Baby Steps.  I am learning, finally, here as I approach the end of a half century, that I can take baby steps.  I don’t have to wait until I am ready to do The Whole Thing before I embark on a project.  May I keep learning this one.
3. Learning to know people from all over the world.  I keep being struck by how incredibly fortunate I am to work in a place where I can get to know people from China and Korea and Japan and Ethiopia and Russia and Vietnam and the Dominican Republic and. . .
4. The pink, salmon, tangerine glow to the clouds yesterday afternoon when I was leaving school.
5. Hopes and dreams.  These are the days when the seniors begin to show up at the doors of the English teachers, desperately seeking advice about their college essays.  What tender documents these are, holding their dreams.  Yesterday afternoon’s essay was an eloquent expression of a student’s desire to be part of the solution to poverty.

May we walk in Beauty!

Bold, Wise Counsel

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Yesterday, I missed writing about my Word of the Year because of computer issues.

For the last few years, I have been choosing a word or phrase that will frame my thinking and processing for the year.  I observe my dreaming during the hush of the Christmas Twelvenight, from Solstice until Epiphany, looking for the images and ideas that float to the surface and stick with me.

In 2013, when I began doing this, the word that came was Palimpsest, the word for an ancient vellum manuscript that has been reused so that the previous layers of text appear through the new text.  In 2014, I chose the word Bridge, not knowing then that that year would find me at the end of my job search teaching at my own alma mater, which uses the image of the bridge.  Last year, I don’t know if I really defined a specific word.  In a way, I continued using the Bridge, but I also carried Mystery or Secret or Silence as words that were part of my path for the year.

Last year, I had very few dreams, and only pulled a few images from the flotsam at the very end.  This year, I have been dreaming in furious rushes, waking frequently during the nights with wild and impetuous images still clinging to the cobwebs of my brain.  Early on, I had several dreams about a particular character whom I don’t recognize from my waking life, but working with this character and the other themes of my dreams this season, I am choosing Bold Wise Counsel as my phrase for the year.  I keep wanting to take that word “bold” out of there, but something keeps nudging it back in there.  And I don’t know that it’s about me going around and offering counsel as much as it is about me being open to receiving the good counsel of others.  Perhaps it’s about sharing ideas back and forth, knowing when to speak.  I know that in the weeks leading up to the dreams that gave me the phrase, I had asked several wise people for help with something, and found their wisdom to be incredibly helpful in sorting out a thorny problem.

Gratitude List:
1. Those Middle School Quiz Bowlers.  I loved being the reader for their match this week, asking them questions that I knew I couldn’t answer, or knowing the answer and needing to secretly keep it tucked away so it wouldn’t show on my face when they began to guess.  What delightful energy middle schoolers have!
2. Vision Board.  Last night, after days of near-constant grading, I took a little break to make a vision board for the coming year.  It was a wonderful process, and I am caught by the images that I put together, loving the way that they work together.
3. Thresholds.  Here I stand at the limbo end of a semester, not wanting to add to their burden of stress or my already huge stacks of grading.  Thinking about the last words I want to give in the last two days of the semester, and planning for the semester to come.
4. Yesterday morning’s moon.  Again.  And the stars that hold her in their bowl of twinkle.  If I have to be up and about before dawn, the moon is a marvelous compensation.
5. Sleep.  I put a picture of a sleeping giraffe on my vision board.  I envision myself getting sufficient sleep in the coming year.  It’s a pretty mundane thing, perhaps, to put on a vision board, but sleep is one of the keys to my good health in many ways, and I plan to make health a priority.  I am still often wakeful at night, but lately I have been getting back to sleep (which has been part of the problem) and sleeping until the alarm.

May we walk in Beauty!

Shades of Blue

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May this year bring you joy
like crows rising from the fields

fierce
wild joy

yelling full-voice
into the wind

rowing through the tempest
with nothing but feathers.

Gratitude List:
1. Wise counselors appearing in dreams
2. It’s never too late
3. Believing in the possibilities
4. Crows
5. All those shades of blue in yesterday’s sky

May we walk in Beauty!

Live in the Layers

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Japanese Fisherman’s winter jacket

Much as I love this semester’s batch of students, I am looking forward to wrapping up this semester this week, and getting started on the new schedule.  Many of my first years will continue on with me into second semester, but it will be in different configurations of classes, and this coming semester I will teach Drama and Creative Writing instead of Academic Writing and Writing Skills.  I like fresh starts, new plans, tabula rasa.  Part of me really resisted the fact that we still have a week of first semester to finish when we return to school, but a looser, more flexible part of me loves the rolling start, the fact that we don’t have to do it all at once, the beginning of the new year and the beginning of the semester.

I have recently become a little obsessed with Japanese boro cloths.  Traditionally, this was a mending process used by workers to create durable and often beautiful fixes to torn and worn-out clothing.  Instead of trying to create a look of new perfection, boro mending created a new cloth by layering patches and scraps with distinctive stitching, and the results maintained the integrity of the original cloth while making it a whole new thing.  It reminds me of the sense of layering in a palimpsest manuscript: the old part shines and twinkles through to the new.  Come to think of it, living in an area with layers and layers of history is sort of like a boro or a palimpsest–some days when I drive across the bridge, I am acutely aware of how this River was once the home and highway of the Susquehannock peoples, or how it was one of the waterways that people followed to escape the torment of bondage in their flight to freedom in the north.

As Stanley Kunitz’s “nimbus-clouded voice” suggests: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.”  May your new year be full of fresh starts and new dreams, but may the new be stitched and overlaid artistically and pleasingly upon the past that has birthed this new beginning.

(Tomorrow is the eve of Epiphany–what is the Aha that is awaiting?)

Gratitude List:
1. Rhythm and Schedules
2. Envisioning possibilities
3. Starting fresh
4. Layers
5. Choosing every day to live the life that I would love.  (That’s a John O’Donohue reference)

May we walk in Beauty!  May your possibilities be endless.

Let Me Learn

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

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May I learn to walk today
the way that butterfly walks
down sunbeams and breezes
in a purposeful meander
from shimmer to glory to shine:
desire to desire

to speak in the manner of fox
who listens all day from her home
in a hole beneath bramble
quiet and quivering,
and speaks only in the dark
a fierce and joyful bark
that tingles the spine
and calls out the wildness

to dream the dreams
of the ones who will become,
there in the round stones
of shell, patient, breathing,
until the moment is ripe
for breaking open the houses
that have held them protected.

Gratitude List:
1. Hearing the fox scream from the bosque in the midnight.  Terrifying and thrilling.
2. The Underground Railroad history of Columbia.  We went to see a train layout at the Columbia Historical Preservation Society yesterday and got into conversation with a man who is an expert on Columbia’s role in helping people escape from slavery.
3. These halcyon days of Winter Break that are almost at an end.  It has been time out of time.  Many mornings for snuggling.  Lots of play and chatter.  (In the interests of balanced reporting, it must probably be noted that there has been yelling and grouching and sulking as well).
4. Dream-messages
5. Moving on to new chapters.

May we walk in Beauty!

This is How It Begins

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This is how it begins:
each year, each week, each day,
each golden shining drop of moment
approaches,
full of expectancy,
dawning,
ready for our use.

How will I inhabit the house
of the now that approaches?
How will I wear the cloth
of the day that is given?
How will I wander the story
of the year that has just now
leapt into shining view
through the gray clouds of winter?

I will face this year with resolution
(this week, this day, this moment)
not to wait until this whirling planet
has danced around the sun
to make the new thing new,
but to step into each freshly-birthed now
with eyes that see the golden shine of possibility
and ears that hear the note of each plucked strand of moment.

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Dew on Mullein.

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday, the family together celebrating a woman of wisdom and compassion.  Some families celebrate the New Year.  We celebrate a birthday.
2. More conversations with the beloved community, with wise parents and in-laws and out-laws.  How listening well and sharing ideas becomes more than the sum of all the conversational bits that appear. How ideas build upon ideas, and shape the ones that came before, and open up spaces for new thoughts to appear.  How iron sharpens iron.  How certain conversations at certain moments prepare me to do the Work that approaches.
3. Three golden rays of sun yesterday before the sun set, shooting through a rift in the grey cloud.  The sun, the sun, the sun: I saw the sun!  And now, here in the crisp morning, nothing but blue above, and golden shine now slipping over the ridge and into the hollow.
4. I have been listening this week to Mindy Nolt’s Movers and Lovers, deeply and intensely, grateful for each phrase.  Move. Love. Listen.
5. The Work.  I am learning, slowly and in tiny little ways, to stop asking myself what I can get from each moment, but instead what my Work is here in the moment.  And realizing, ever so dimly, that when I am really doing my Work (really doing my Work), I am also receiving what I need.

May we–in each dawning moment of this coming year and week and day–walk in Beauty!

Send Down the Roots

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Roots
(As is the way with internet searches, I found this beautiful piece of artwork with no reference to the artist.  If you know, please send me the information.)

Now is the time
to send down the roots,
fine little hairs feeling their way
spiraling into the moist darkness,
between clods and stones,
around the bones
of those who came before,
through the streams that run
deep beneath the surface.

Now is the time
to feed and nurture
all that lives beneath the surface,
all that searches for depth,
all that gathers strength
from the comforting darkness of earth.

Now is the time to bless
the part of the plant that seeks shadow,
that grows inward,
faithfully finding its way
by blind instinct
toward the center.

Gratitude List:
1. Tea with Marie and Benn, conversing and exploring puzzles with the beloved community.
2. How a puzzle on the table creates a perfect setting for making a new friend.  It fills up the awkward silences, gives you a shared task, and is itself an image of untangling and ordering creating a new thing.
3. Roots
4. Still a few more days of Christmas Break.  I feel myself opening, loosening, drawing toward my center.
5. Richard Rohrer.  Moving on from Cynthia Bourgeault’s deepening words of Advent, I have begun to work more intentionally with his daily words.  Today:

God’s life is living itself in me. I am aware of life living itself in me.
God’s love is living itself in me. I am aware of love living itself in me.

May Love live us.

Don’t Be Afraid

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
― Frederick Buechner

Running

Gratitude List:
1. A clean house.  Top to bottom.
2. Tabula rasa.  Starting fresh.
3. Sleeping until 6:30.  I had forgotten that my body could do that.
4. The owl out there, booming in the oak grove. (And in the time it has taken me to ponder and write this morning, dawn has arrived, the owl has settled into silence, and the wren has begun the first notes of the dawn chorus.)
5. The way light is emerging through the mist this morning.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Whole World is on the Wing

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Joss and Cedar
Yesterday we went on a walk to look for beautiful things to photograph.  When I raised my camera to take a picture of this cedar tree that I love, he slipped right in there: “You take a picture of me with the tree, and then I will take one of you.”

You know how sometimes you see one of those huge flocks of birds wheeling over a field–crows or gulls or geese–and then you notice, in the distance, another flock behind it somewhere in the sky?  One of the dreams last night was of a sky full of birds: flocks and flocks and flocks.  My dream-vision was wide-angle.  There were birds above the River, close-up and way off in the distance, in the fields and over the town, high in the sky, between and above and behind the clouds.  And this phrase came to me in the dreaming: “The whole world is on the wing.”

Gratitude List:
1. The Magnificat: “My soul is filled with joy.”
2. Repeated references, everywhere I turn, to “the beloved community.”
3. Wings.
4. Yesterday’s Nap (worthy of an initial capital)
5. Walking in Beauty.

May we walk in Beauty!