Gratitudes

Thunderbolt and Courage

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Gratitude List:
1.  This: “Sometimes, there are days like this when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt. ” —President Obama
2.  Bree Newsome–She climbed that flagpole and took down that obscenity.  She’d had enough already.  When they put cuffs on her, she held her head up, smiled, and recited the Lord’s Prayer as they walked her out.  We showed the video to the boys–“Sometimes,” I told them, “people break laws for good reasons.”
3.  Cat on my lap on a chilly evening.  His head is so heavy on my right wrist, I might have to quit typing.
4.  Shifting and re-making spaces.  Ellis wants space of his own, so I am giving him my “Room of Her Own” and moving my space up to the attic.  I’ll have to see what it’s like in weather changes, but right now it feels just right.  Even more my own than the little room was down below.
5.  Tending the head space, as well as the heart space.

May we walk in Beauty!

Love Wins

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Gratitude List:
1. Love wins.
2. Fried tomatoes for breakfast
3. Such a birdy day: titmouse fledglings, nuthatch, crows, cardinals, goldfinch, swallows. . .
4. Dream visitors: turkey, this time
5. Tomato sandwiches for supper

May we walk in Love!

Marvel and Wonder

How would things change if, every time we approached the word God in our speech, we would instead use the word Love?  Parker Palmer does this sometimes, and it is powerful: We are made, each one of us in the image of Love.

Would we be less judgmental, more likely to be little versions of Love ourselves?

***

Last night in the Dreamings, I was in a green field of clover and vetch at the edge of a wood.  I was out in the field and standing just outside the trees and looking at me very intently, watching and observing me, was Turkey.  I was gathering blue feathers in the field, and a teen-aged boy was walking up the path toward me.  Turkey watched.  I wanted to be friendly to the boy, but I didn’t want to encourage conversation because gathering the feathers was a private and personal thing for me and I wanted to be alone to contemplate.

I have been reading Jamie Sams’ words about Turkey, a symbol of the Give-Away, the “deep and abiding recognition of the sacrifices of both self and others.”  She seems to be a symbol of reaching a new and deeper place.  Feathers are gifts to me, symbols of my communication with Spirit, and blue feathers are about finding my voice.  I feel like Turkey was watching me, like the “woman of that place” in the Denise Levertov poem, to be sure that I was noticing and appreciating the gifts, both the social and the contemplative moments (especially the contemplative rhythm of summer), the voice, being in the presence of Spirit.

The Fountain
by Denise Levertov

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen

the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes

found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.

The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched — but not because
she grudged the water,

only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,

it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,

up and out through the rock.

– See more at: http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/blog/2013/03/15/denise-levertov-the-fountain-2/#sthash.1onaRPdD.dpuf

Moth Mummy

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Gratitude List:
1. Gentle rain
2. Studying
3. Tomatoes!
4. Cecropia Moth Cocoon
5. Mockingbird: he is effusive, irrepressible, ebullient, buoyant, rhapsodic

May we walk in Beauty!

***

cecropia  Cecropia 2

The cecropia moth cocoon has been attached to the bar of the cast iron plant holder for almost a year now.  I knew it was dead, but I didn’t want to think about it.  Today, Jon and Holly opened it up.  Jon could hardly get his knife through the shell of the cocoon.  Cecropias are silk moths, and this cocoon had hard strands of silk surrounding a paper-like material that was tougher than cardboard (silk and “cardboard” visible in second picture).  Inside was this magical faerie mummy being.  You can see her head to the right side of the first photo, and her legs folded down the center.  Wrapping the head and legs are her two long, feathery antennae, and her wings drape gracefully around the rest of it.  I am so sad that she did not have the chance to emerge.  Still I am fascinated by this incredible moment of transformation frozen in the moments before emergence.

***

I am taking a class right now for professional development, called Shaping a Community of Learners, through the Anabaptist Learning Institute.  One of the recent assignments was to respond to one of William Stafford’s poems, or to choose another poet’s poem which speaks to the spiritual life of the teacher.  I chose Mary Oliver’s “Landscape.” The assignment briefly discussed Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future, which I reference in the paper.  I discovered the Oliver poem when I was reading this OnBeing blog entry by Parker Palmer.

Here is the paper I wrote:

I love the poetry of William Stafford–his ethic of care for humans, animals, and the earth; his hope that acknowledges the journey of anxiety and despair that it takes to get there; his ability to find a moment of worship in a clod of earth.  I excitedly read through all the options listed.  I was focusing on a couple possibilities when, just last night, I came upon a post Parker Palmer wrote for the OnBeing blog, in which he responded to Mary Oliver’s “Landscape.”  I am not sure that Mary Oliver fits the category of Christian Poet exactly, but my own spiritual journey has been so constantly fed and nourished by her words that I think her work will fit the parameters of the assignment.

Landscape
Mary Oliver

Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about

spiritual patience? Isn’t it clear
the black oaks along the path are standing
as though they were the most fragile of flowers?

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Every morning, so far, I’m alive. And now
the crows break off from the rest of the darkness
and burst up into the sky—as though

all night they had thought of what they would like
their lives to be, and imagined
their strong, thick wings.

I want to read Howard Gardner’s work on the five aspects of mind sometime.  Meanwhile, I want to add “Open-heartedness” to the list, or perhaps to begin a list of various aspects of the heart, and begin with this one.  Mary Oliver’s poem “Landscape” holds this idea of open-heartedness for me.

Oliver writes “. . .if the doors of my heart / ever close, I am as good as dead.”  If I close the doors of my heart to the darknesses that surround me–to the poverty and racism and destruction of the earth, to last week’s massacre in Charleston, to the desperate plight of refugees fleeing places of conflict–then I also close my heart to the lecture of the moss, the posture of the oaks, the imaginings of the crows.  As I hone my sensitivity to the story that comes from the world around me–to the “lecture[s]” from the natural world, my sensitivity to the plight of other humans and other parts of the earth is also heightened.  But I do not want to shut off that part of myself, because I believe with Oliver that to close those doors is like dying.

My students bring me these darknesses.  They come to class and they ask what I think of the latest Painful Thing in the News.  I think I do a disservice to them if I minimize or ignore their questions and their need to come to terms with the harsh realities.  If I want my teaching to be transformative, I think I need to incorporate these things into the discussions, connect what is happening now to the readings that we are doing.  I need to listen to them process and discuss and think critically about the issues that beset us,  and encourage them to think about and write about these things.  If my students and I are in training to be people of service to the world, to teach and model peace and reverence in our lives, then part of our work is to know of the difficult things and to find ways to respond.  Part of my job as their teacher is to model ways to keep those heart doors open while finding ways to “disentangle [ourselves] from the darkness,” as Palmer writes in his response to this poem.

One way to keep imagining our “strong, thick wings” so that we may “burst up into the sky” is to maintain an inner life that contemplates the world of nature, and the depth of spirit of the people all around us.  I hope that I can model for my students the reflective work of listening to our inner voices, to finding the deep wisdom in the people around us, and to reading the text of the natural world around us: reverence, wonder, awe, spiritual observation and noticing.  That work, which Oliver describes in her poem, helps to balance the work of staying aware of the pain of the world.

In the past year, as I have been teaching at LMH, I have become more aware, too, of the fact that it is not just a one-way street, that it isn’t just about how I model this idea of holding our heart doors open for both the reverence and the shadows, but that they already have these capabilities within them.  They are already doing this work.  If I can find the right questions and poems and the right listening attitude, they bring their own transformative wisdom to the table.

(Parker Palmer’s OnBeing blog post: “Poetry as Sacrament: Disentangling from the Darkness”

http://www.onbeing.org/blog/poetry-as-sacrament-disentangling-from-the-darkness/7692)

Conversation in Tanka

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Gratitude List:
1. Learning to swim.  How and when did that boy learn to swim?  Last September, he was nervous and just barely able to keep himself afloat.  Throughout the winter, after several sessions with his grandparents in the pool at Landis Homes, he has become a fish.  Today he was jumping off the diving board and swimming most of the way across the pool.
2. They keep eating vegetables without complaining.  No one has complained or fussed about supper for two nights now, and they both keep asking for seconds.  No one even mentioned the zucchini I grated into the roux I made for the macaroni.  They just ate it.
3. Poets.  Poetic conversation.
4. Reading with the boys.  We have gotten back into the rhythm of reading together again.  We finished The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler tonight and started a book of Patricia Wrede’s short stories.
5. A clean house.

May we walk in Beauty!

Featured image

My friend Mara Eve Robbins, a poet with gift for exploring the landscape of the heart (and I keep wanting to insert more and more notes about her here, such as the fact that she is the one who got me started on the spiritual practice of gratitude and that she is the person who helped me finally name myself Poet), hosts a Tanka Tuesday thread on her Facebook page every Tuesday.  She posts a tanka (5/7/5/7/7 syllable count) and invites friends to respond.  In the true conversational spirit of tanka, these little poems sometimes develop into rich and heart-opening conversations.

This week, I joined in one of these poetic conversations with Mara and my friend Daryl Snider (another heartful poet who weaves his words into powerful music).  They both gave me permission to re-post the conversation here.  I wanted to share it, to offer a way in which healing and hopeful conversations can occur outside the realm of intellectual discussion.  Sometimes we would write one stanza at a time, and sometimes several.  Each bold name is the author of the stanza or stanzas which follow.  I love the way this one carried our ideas like little leaf boats in a stream, how it felt finished when it was finished.  Still, I ached for it not to be ended–even putting it here, I felt like I wanted to keep it going, on and on and on. . .

It began with this tanka by Mara:
This can hold many
missing elements, or can
still miss the many
elements that are held. When
will a new path be forged now?

Daryl:
Hold on elements,
for you are elemental:
simple, being, true.
To be is the way; the path
is the traces of footsteps.

Beth:
As the poet said,
“We make the road by walking.”
Sometimes I follow
the roads others made before,
those footsteps in shifting sands.

Daryl:
Steps of one walker
leave tracks that only steadfast
trackers might follow.
Roads trampled by hungry herds
Leave nothing living behind.

Mara:
Elemental, my
dear Daryl. Flesh on earth, bare
to consequences.
What fire in the center holds
true when accuracy rains?

Beth, I follow your
steps into the shifting sands,
strengthened by fragile
threads. We make a road again
and again that’s more traveled.

Daryl:
Heating elements
give off the fury of fire.
Lighting filaments,
yes, the finer the better,
give the luminance of light.

Yet the energy
at the source of heat and light
is always the same.
That which burns me at the core,
transforms and Illuminates.

Dear Mara and Beth,
Your lights shine bright on my path,
pushing me to play
with words that say more and less
than I ever intended.

A poem’s value
is not in accomplishment
but in the doing:
Time spent doing nothing else
but being … still.

Yet now I must go
and succeed in something else,
something that will make
unpoetic evidence
of bodily existence.

Mara:
Leaving the small cloud
under the larger cloud, rain
waits for the sunrise,
packs suitcases of water
to carry into drier places.

Beth:
I have returned here
to this place of words, pathways:
a-quiver now with
the way these words leave a trail,
clear, for my heart to follow.

Mara:
The flow of trust finds
replenishment or dries up,
waiting for rain. Strong
sun today must find a way
to infuse with light what waits.

Two catbirds; holly
tree. One scolds and one defends.
Flash of underwing.
Open window. Everything
to be done waiting for this.

More from the Monastery

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Featured image

Gratitude List:
1. Those clouds after the storm.  Everything glowed golden.
2. Veggie quiche.  I can’t believe how those boys ate!
3. Playing Pokemon with Ellis.  Yes, I bought myownself a deck. He wins more than I do.
4. Getting more sleep.  My body lets me sleep until 6:30 now.
5. This circle.  You and you and you and me and you and you.

May we walk in Beauty!

Here are some more things that I wrote at the Monastery:
6-15-15, Wernersville Jesuit Center

When I left the beech tree, I thought I would go sit on a bench beside a cobbled patio to put on my sandals, then find the labyrinth on my map.  The patio turned out to be the labyrinth.

Thinking about the animals that have come to my visions this year.  Lynx came to me at the year’s turning.  Macaw dropped me a feather.  Lioness and jaguar have both been reaching me in dreams and waking dreams–their messages are about leadership and impeccability.  This morning as I left the boys, a swallow flew low overhead.  And here in this place, catbird seems to be following me around.

6-16-15
In the main stairway, every time I go up and down the steps, I feel a need to greet the statue of Jesus with the open heart every time I pass him on the first floor landing.  “Hi, Jesus!”

This morning as I walked away from some contemplative time in the Cathedral of the Weeping Beech, I thought I saw a bird dying, thrashing in the grass a small distance from the gazebo.  A soft light caught the twitching, and as I walked closer, the energy did not seem to be about distress.  Suddenly it resolved in my vision into a fawn–the twitching wings were ears.  It was a small one settling in to wait for the mother, shaking the little bugs out of its eyes.

Walking this afternoon: “What makes you sad?” ask the trees.  I ask this question of myself, but somehow, it takes on new shades of meaning in their language.  I tell them all of it, how it hurts me when natural disasters happen, but that the things that make me saddest are the things the people do to hurt each other and the Earth.  Not just the intentional hurts, but the hurts born of people’s greed and lack of desire to know and to notice.

“What makes you angry?” the trees asked me then.  And many of the things were the same.  Perhaps I need to learn to differentiate better between my emotions.

Something in these questions from the trees unlocks doors within myself that I couldn’t seem to open before.

I was carrying the weight of these things with me when I reached the Mary statue, and something profound happened to me there.  I suddenly felt as though I knew about how her heart is broken again and again and again.  How she holds it all.  There she is, holding the Babe of wonder, her face filled with love for this Child of Promise.  There she is, holding the body of the young man, her son, her face filled with love and grief.  The serenity of her face holds within it the extremes of wonder and grief, love and anguish, that she knew.  She pondered these things in her heart: was she pondering how the act of opening herself to great love also opened herself to great grief?  But choosing to do it anyway, joyfully, because love is always worth it, and our hearts were made large enough and strong enough to hold it ALL.  I wept and wept and wept, holding on to her feet and looking out with her over the valley.

****

I need to keep making the story my own.

Milkweed and Clouds

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Gratitude List:
1. Milkweed and Monarchs.  Milkweed is blooming everywhere this year. Dare I have  hope?
2. Clouds flowing through the sky behind Marie’s sea glass blossom.
3. Public Lament.  Public tears.  Challenge: Don’t go back to sleep.  Don’t get over it.  Don’t forget.
4. Hearing my own words spoken as a blessing, in someone else’s voice.  What a gift.
5. Little boats.  Two boys learned/re-learned how to make paper boats in church today.  One boy is going to make “thousands!”  He is going to set up classes to teach other people how to make boats.  He is talking about how professional paper boat makers might make their creases.  He says things like, “This is how you turn a failure into a success.  You take it back to a hat, and start over from there.”  Yes, Boy.  Always take it back to the hat.  Turn those failures into successes.
6. Family reunion.

May we walk in Beauty!

Solstice Rain

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Triumvirate

Photo by Lauren Liess

I know I have posted already once today, and I do not want to exhaust anyone who may be following these words, but I want to begin daily gratitude lists again for a time.  I need specific spiritual disciplines to follow throughout the shifty days of summer.  I need gratitude to help me wade through the current darkness.  I need the juxtaposition of words and ideas to prompt deeper poetry.

Gratitude List:
1. Solstice Rain
2. and Thunder
3. Mimosa abloom
4. and Magnolia
5. Wayside wildflowers*

May we walk in Beauty!

*chicory, day lily, Queen Anne’s lace, hag’s taper, buttercup, bladderwort

(It’s all nature today, but you are in there, too if you look closely, you and your eye clear as chicory, your heart a-flame like the day lily, your blooming, blooming self.  You know that love has the last word, right?  Always has.  Always will.  We’re all going to make it through this one, too.)

Blue and Gold

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AZ_BlueGoldMacaw02  macaw 1  macaw 2    

Gratitude List:
1. Macaw feather.  The feather appeared in my path one day as I was walking up the hill from the pond, and disappeared as magically as it appeared.  Parrots are symbols of communication, of knowing when to speak and when not to speak, of using language for healing, of ritual and ceremonial language.
2. Berry season.  Strawberries and vanilla ice cream.  Mulberries staining the fingers and mouths of small children.  Wineberries swelling on the briars.  The hard green nuggets of blackberries preparing their sweetness.  And the cherries from the ancient cherry tree by the old spring by Cabin Creek–a little wormy, but sweet, so sweet.
3. Reunions.  With friends on Friday night, we let the children stay up until 11 because they were having so much fun with each other, this second generation of the College Gang.  They made a whirlpool in Abby’s swimming pool, and played themselves dizzy and exhausted.  I think they might remember that evening for the rest of their lives.  I might, too.  One boy slept until two the following afternoon.
4. School.  I’ve written this and written this, how grateful I am about this work, these fine young people, these kind-hearted colleagues, Words and Language, and now the Completion of Year One.  I just don’t want to take any of it for granted.  I have so much mulling to do in the coming weeks about how this has changed my life, what it is calling me to become.
5. Silence.  Tomorrow I go on Retreat.  Three days of silence at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville.  It comes at the perfect time.

May we walk in Beauty!

End of Part Three, Episode One

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And so the first year back to teaching is drawing to a close.  This is my third teaching experience, filling in the gap for me between the community college and the elementary school/middle school.  I love spending my days with teenagers.  They’re energetic, earnest, witty, dramatic, thoughtful, wise (so incredibly wise), idealistic.

I do not want to minimize the challenges that have come with the year.  I have met the Monster of Self-Doubt again, in a big way, but I have felt so much more prepared to answer her than I have in the past.  I still have my challenges with organizing and systematizing; I am excited for a summer to re-envision and re-craft my systems so that they can help to keep me afloat during the coming year instead of me trying to keep my systems afloat.  I see where I need to be more firm in certain realms of classroom discipline, particularly in the areas of the students who want to cut up and act out all the time.

All said and done, it’s been just what I needed.  The challenges have definitely fallen into the arena of learning experiences for me, and every day has brought something joyful and delightful.  I have learned as much as I have taught, I think, and that feels like good balance.

Gratitude List:
1.  All those wise, witty, and charming young people I will be missing in the coming weeks.  They brought such sparkle to my days, and taught me about myself and themselves and the world
2. My colleagues: They’re helpful and thoughtful, hard-working and playful.  One of the real joys of coming back to the academy has been feeling part of a team of caring people like this.  I think that good school institutions happen not when people work together to make the institution great, but when the focus is on the students–then the school itself does become great.  My colleagues pursue academic excellence not for its sake alone, but because it is part of helping these students to be the best people they can be.  Head, heart, and hands.  And spirit, too.
3. Caring administrators who understand restorative justice.  One thing I have noticed in the past year when students get a call to the office: They might dread it, knowing that they are going to be held accountable for their actions, but there’s also a sense that they’re going down there to get help with solving a problem.  They know and trust that they will be listened to and treated justly.
4. The promise of getting it done.  I still have many hours of finishing up this year’s details before I can put the year to rest.  Still, it will get done.  Now I can focus on this part of the work.
5. Foraging yesterday afternoon with One Small Boy.  He likes to fill up part of his berry bin with white honeysuckle blossoms (apparently the yellow ones don’t taste as good).  The mulberries by the pond are particularly vigorous this year, though not quite ripe enough to fill a bin.  We found water cress for my sandwich today, and green things for my allergy tea: two kinds of plantain, nettle (a new patch by the pond), purple clover, wild chamomile, several mints, dock.  We picked some cherries (only a little wormy) from the ancient tree beside the spring house.
6. The promise of days and days ahead when I can focus on my own kiddos.  I think the hardest thing about the year has been the long hours of separation from them, and from Jon.  During the past year, at least four days out of five, one boy would wake up before six o’clock so we could have a little cuddle time before I left for school.  This morning, he is still snoring at 7:15–he knows I will be here when he wakes up.  He told his dad that the thing he is most looking forward to this summer is cuddling with Mama in the mornings.  Me too.

May we walk in Beauty!

Gearing Up for the Final Lap

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Poppies

This is from two years ago.

It’s the night before the last week of the first year back to teaching.  Perhaps I should create a rite of passage ritual for myself when I finish all the grading.  To be honest, I have actually planned a restful three-day silent retreat at a local monastery for two weeks from now, so that will be my ritual.

I fall in love so easily.  I get attached, you know?  This shade of purple, that white stone, the way the light falls on the wood of the mantelpiece that we rescued from Grandma’s house before it was torn down.  Oriole who calls to me from the treetops, Afil hamster who watches intently for the Farmer whom she loves to notice her noticing him, the old fuzzy-pants cat who demands more attention than I am ever able to give him.  And these new people of my life–the earnest, anxious, goofy, lively, careful, carefree, fierce, tender, thoughtful, fiery, playful teenagers who populate my weeks.  I have learned so much from teaching them, observing them, listening to them.  And I’ve gotten attached, fallen in love with their antics and their wisdom.  And some of them are flying off to new worlds.  I’m proud, so proud, and grateful.  I’m going to miss them.

Eager as I am for the coming rest and quiet and the chance to step back into the contemplative spaces inside myself, I sort of dread the transitioning, the letting go, the saying goodbye.  I long for the quiet and cling to the chaos.  Same hands, same heart doing the grasping in both directions.

Gratitude List:
1.  All that transition has to teach me.
2. How the chaos of early spring has given way to a certain grace and tidiness about the house and yard.
3. My neighbor’s poppies.  I think I am breaking a commandment, perhaps, coveting them?  No, I really do appreciate their beauty, and I am grateful that they are there–mine did not bloom this year.  I find that right now I am craving poppies with the intensity that I craved cauliflower during my last pregnancy.
4. Norm’s words on looking for hope.
5. Stormy weather.  I love a thunderstorm.  (And maybe it will bring down the last of the tulips on the poplar tree and rain the pollen out of the air.

May we walk in Beauty!