Gratitudes

Complicit

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I have been brooding today about Bill Cosby. Does it really matter whether a farmer/schoolteacher/mother/poet forms an opinion about the Bill Cosby rape story? I can just ignore it all, say it’s none of my business, and move on. It’s a mark, perhaps, of our shallow culture that we get wrapped up in the lives of celebrities to the point that uncovering a celebrity’s history of sexual predation would throw me, would cause me such a sense of intermingled fury and grief. Perhaps. Still, I think when someone is lively or delightful or thoughtful or beautiful in the wider culture in which we participate, we do feel a connection that goes beyond the merely mundane. I wept when violinist Isaac Stern died, when the poetic voice of Maya Angelou passed on, when Robin Williams left us with only memories of his laughter. So I supposed this response isn’t preposterous.

But there’s another piece of it that’s really bothering me today, and that is that when this recent part of the story broke this past week, I had a moment of deja vu: “Oh yeah.  Wasn’t there something about this a few years ago?”  As I began to read the account of Scott Simon’s questions and the stories of more and more women coming forward, I remembered that I had read earlier–and damning–accusations a few years ago. Why did I forget?  Why did I put that out of mind and go on accepting Bill Cosby as America’s Mr. Funnyman?  America’s Everydad, as Mark Morford called him. And that’s the thing that bothers me, because that’s a hallmark of rape culture–that the predator can so often minimize his crimes in the face of his power or celebrity or general congeniality that people either don’t believe the stories of his victims or they participate in the minimization, ignore the true implications of the accusations, and go on living as though nothing has happened, and the victim gets violated again, this time by the world’s refusal to acknowledge her story. Again, why does it matter what I think? Why should I bother to form an opinion on the matter? It troubles me, though, that something in me would have minimized the earlier stories, would have lived in denial that someone who brought such delight and wonder into our homes could be cavalierly destroying people’s lives. I feel complicit in the culture of denial. Sullied.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Hiking at Sam Lewis State Park. Every time I go there and climb on the rocks with the kids, I am more and more aware of how old I am getting, how clambering over the big rocks is getting harder and harder. Still, it’s worth the scramble up to the top of the rocks pile, to look through the trees to the River, to imagine what it must have been like for the First People who walked here to stand perhaps on the very same rocks looking out to the River.
2.  Sharing the awe. Yesterday in my last class, I mentioned something about the morning’s sunrise, and suddenly three or four students were all talking at once, clamoring to tell their experiences of watching the sky that morning.
3.  I don’t have to figure it all out.  I don’t have to be perfect for every moment.  I just need to be Present.
4.  The last assignment in the course I am taking was to watch a video on renewing energy, on play and flow and working joyfully.  And then to go play for an hour.  I took that seriously, and we all spent most of the day with the Legos, sorting and building and playing.  It is very satisfying to be assigned to play.  My children loved that.
5.  Colcannon

May we walk in Beauty!

Reminders

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Gratitude List:
1.  All my Facebook friends who write gratitude lists, which reminds me to do my own.
2.  The bolt of magenta that flowed upward from the morning’s tangerine sunrise onto an indigo belly of cloud.  Sounds a little over-done to read it like that, but that’s kind of how it is with these morning sunrises.  Show-offy.  I’m not complaining.
3.  The same tangerine and magenta in the sunset today.  My life feels a little closed in these days, driving into sunrise on my morning commute and into sunset on my evening commute, and indoors for the hours between.  But hail and welcome, Winter, anyway.  And thank you for the colors.
4.  There’s this thing about the crows.  I can’t quite figure out how to work it into a poem.  I want to say that I am a row of bare white sycamore trees with crows in my hair, crows like thoughts above me.  Perhaps it’s crows and sunset.  Crows and sunset and bare trees.  What is the riddle that keeps asking to be noticed when the crows fly?  I love them so.
5.  And sundogs.  Also in the crows and sunset train.  Still, their own thing.  They way they settle gently on top of a cloud.  How they brighten the sky directly outside their arc.  How they suggest a full circle spectrum around the sun.

May we walk in Beauty!

It’s Always About the Bridge

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Last January, during the high holy days that come at the year’s turning, before the 12th Day of Christmas, I had a dream about bridges, and I decided that Bridges would be my image for the year.  Little did I know back then how I would be creating a bridge between two times of my life, between Farmer and Teacher, and traveling every day across the bridges from Wrightsville to Columbia to the place of the Iron Bridge, where it crosses the Millstream.  Little did I know then how desperate I would be right now for language, for images, for ideas which could bridge the gaps between people who cannot seem to see their way across the chasms toward each other.

In my twenties and thirties, I spent a decade away from the Mennonite church, searching for a way to find my own place among my people on my own terms, with language that could hold me in the basket, too.  I have been back again now for another decade, and engaged with people who ask many of the same questions I do, who sometimes walk through the boggy places at the edges of the Village with me, and now we stop and look around at each other through the mists, and wonder how this new gulf could have formed between some of us, and how we’ll find our way to each other again, and whether we have the skills or energy to build a bridge across.

Perhaps we can build a bridge of song, strong four-part harmonies to give it structure, old hymn tunes mingling with a strummed guitar and songs from our family in other lands.  I hear you there, through the mist, across the waters.  Sing louder, please.  Remind me why we need this bridge.  Some days I get so weary of trying to maintain the vision of it in that space between my brows.  Here are my tears, here is my rage, here is my voice like a strand of silver cobweb, thrown out into the darkness, to weave and twine with yours.  How shall we begin?

 

Gratitude List:
1. Ellis combing my hair, like I used to comb my mother’s hair.
2. Bridges everywhere.  I think that the young ones are a bridge.  But will their time ripen soon enough?
3. Thoughtful conversations with friends.  I do not have to brood alone.
4. The thousand thousand crows in the trees along Route 30.  I know that they are a trial for those who live and work there, but the magic and the mystery and the incredible wonder of them filling the treetops and flying through the dusk and the rain answers some sort of question in my spirit that I don’t yet know how to ask.
5. The Number One Ladies Detective Agency.  I have been listening to Alexander McCall Smith books on my commute lately, and enjoying the accents of Botswana.

May we walk in Beauty!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Maple’s gone, mostly
but oak and larch remain,
leathery leaves waiting
waiting for the strongest gusts
to send them whirling.

Sycamore beside the creek
raises her naked arms skyward.

My own leaves skitter about my feet
and my limbs feel the coming chill,
the dearth of birdsong.
But oh, the sky above me
and the ground that holds me here.

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday’s eclectic Music Chapel at school.  This school has talent.
2. The hens have a new home.  I am so sad to say goodbye to my girls, but I know that I could no longer take care of them properly through winter with my new schedule.
3. I found my hats.
4. The drive to create.
5. Autumn is feeling like autumn now.

May we walk in Beauty!

 

New Poems

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Yesterday in class, I had my students write ten-line poems about what a poem is or is not.  Then we read Charles Wright’s “New Poem” together.  I did not bring my journal home with me to record my own poem here, but here’s another sort of like it.

after Charles Wright’s “The New Poem”

This poem will not wander through your dreams calling your name until dawn
This poem will not bake you a pumpkin pie with cloves and cinnamon
This poem will not sit down with you at the table and tell you stories of its childhood
It will not ensure that your candidate is elected
It will not remember your birthday or help you with the dishes

This poem will not tell you where this wind was born
Nor will it offer you a map to the city
This poem will not hold your hand through the time of fever
It will not care for your children when you must work late
It will not fill your gas tank or even buy you a doughnut

This poem might remember your name when you visit for tea
This poem might compliment your diction
This poem might make a comment on the sublime blue of the sky
It might remind you to call your sister
It might turn into a little bird and fly away

Gratitude List:
1.  Small boy is awake and waiting to be read to before we go off to our different days
2.  Gifted young actors on a stage.  If you are in the Lancaster area, you ought to check out The Crucible at LMH tonight or tomorrow.  It’s not a cheery play, but it will change you.  It will move you.
3.  Coffee
4.  Opening spaces
5.  Poems

May we walk in Beauty!

Stories and Sun Dogs

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Now that I have finished The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit on books on tape, along with a partial set of Sherlock Holmes stories I bought at the library book sale, I thought I might use some of the time during my car ride to work on a story for the Central PA magazine short story contest.  It’s not due until February, so maybe I’ll actually finish it this year.  I have started this same story several times, and this year I realized that one of the essentials that it has been missing is an actual plot of any sort.  Maybe this year I’ll give it a bit of a plot and by next year I’ll be able to submit it.  Who knows?  Maybe even this year I’ll get it whipped into shape.  Meanwhile, it’s a lovely thing to occupy my head on my daily journey.  It’s based on my dreams of my grandmother’s house.

Gratitude List:
1.  Broken light, which is to say, rainbows and sun dogs.  I haven’t seen a rainbow for a little while, but sometimes I see sun dogs as I drive west on 30.
2.  Glory cloud on the way home from work today.  Sun streaming in beams through the clouds, like the sun was a great eye and the rays were lashes all around it.  And then a tangerine sunset beneath.
3.  That fever has gone down and seems to be staying down.  May the Little Kid stay well now.
4.  Tea.  We are entering the season of tea.  Tea and gloves.
5.  Word play, poems, shapes of words on the page, the taste of words in the mouth.  A story that might get born.

May we walk in Beauty.

Re-Building Bridges

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We watched a couple videos of Turkish Ebru painting, Boy and I.  In Ebru painting, the artist drips ink on to the surface of the water, then manipulates the surface to create beautiful designs which cling to the paper the artist rests on the water’s surface.

Afterward, “Can you get down my painting box?”

“I think we’re out of painting paper.”

“That’s okay.  I’ll find some cardboard.”

P1020389

Gratitude List:
1.  The wild creative imagination of children.  How one thing suddenly becomes another thing, which morphs into a totally different thing.  Well, now.  Isn’t that sort of like life?  Maybe the Divine Source of all Being is a Child playing with colors:  “This one looks like a farmer.  But if I twist this brush a little bit this way, she turns into a teacher.  See?”  Capricious, maybe.  But magical.  Just let this one dry a good while please, Kid, before you go shifting this part of the design again.
2.  Ends of tunnels.  Beginnings of bridges.  Spanning the distances.  Breathe, baby, breathe, while you cross that bridge.  And don’t, whatever you do, hold your breath in the tunnels!  Look for the light–it’s really there.
3.  Re-built bridges, diamonds, rust.  A couple days ago, I heard Joan Baez singing “Diamonds and Rust” on the radio, and it took me back 25 years in one instant.  It took me right back to the happy times before the burning of a bridge, of a friendship.  The bridge has been re-built, of course, and this new one is as beautiful as my bridge that arches over the Susquehanna when the sun hits it just so in the mornings.  But that long-ago burning still sometimes haunts me with the shame of my pettiness and selfishness, despite the great grace of my co-re-builder, despite the years that have passed.  Sometimes I just have to go back and look at the old pilings where the old bridge used to be, to see how there’s moss growing there, and small trees, how the wreck sets off the incredible grace of the new bridge, how the sun shines on it all as Beauty.  This is one of the big gratitudes of my life, one of the constants: the Grace of friendship.
4.  Oh, that slant of light in the mornings in the hollow makes me almost as giddy and obsessed as my oriole did in springtime.  I miss it most mornings these days because I am gone before sunrise.  See, we sit down here in the shadows of the bowl, and we know that it is day because the sky has brightened up above, but then the sun slants down and hits the tops of the trees with a golden shimmer that moves down the trunks.  There comes a point when the sun just spills down the hillsides like liquid gold.
5.  Both.  And.  I like those words.
6.  (Because sometimes you need more than five.)  It’s a long way away, but I am planning my self-care moment, anticipating my Time of Silence.  The thought of my own retreat fills me with energy.

May we walk in Beauty!

Goose, Goose, Maple

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Duck, duck, goose.
Goose, goose, wren.
Mist, moon, mist.

October.

Gratitude List:
1. Maple
2. Maple
3. Maple
4. Dogwood
5. Maple

May we walk in Fiery Beauty!

Because

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“I lack the peace of simple things,” says Wendell Berry
and I concur, almost, because
of the frenzy of the daily commute, because
of the the houseful of stuff we don’t need,
that we trip over in the darkness, because
of the way I am so lost in doing all that must be done.

But Wendell, you know better than most how it’s all around us,
how you can settle your soul into the simple peace, because
of those flaming leaves falling all over my head, because
of the giggle of a five-year-old, because
of sleep, deep restful sleep, because
of the way the corn tastes yellow, but the beans taste green, because
of the way words weave and twist themselves
into something that means something akin to hope.

Gratitude List:
1.  Because of pumpkin pie and delicious Sunday Dinner with good folks
2.  Because of good class preparation time this evening
3.  Because of the color orange, orange in all its colors
4.  Because of Rainer Maria Rilke and living the questions, living into the answers, and because of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the world being crammed with heaven
5.  Because of that song: “In the bulb there is a flower”

Because we walk in Beauty.

Release the Past

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Yesterday’s poem.  I wrote it in response to a photo I saw on my Facebook feed of a person standing in the doorway between two trees at the edge of a wood.

Every step you take is a doorway to somewhere new,
a choice between what was and what will be.
Do not fear the darkness behind you
nor the mists that rise in your path.

Pause on the threshold a moment.
Take a deep and aching breath,and straighten your shoulders.

Release the past with gratitude
for all that it has taught you,
and step forward in strength and beauty.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Waking up late and lounging in bed.  After that last six-week string of insomniac nights, to finally be able to sleep long again, and then to wake up in the morning and just curl up under the feather quilt listening to the quiet sounds of man and boy talking downstairs–that was a joy.  I feel like Bilbo at Rivendell, rejuvenating to the sound of elves.
2.  Always in autumn,that slant of light.  The way it slips over the ridge to the southeast and hits the trees at the edge of the bosque in the western deep of the hollow.  The way it glows on the last of the golden walnut leaves.
3.  Breakfast.
4.  Rachel Carson.
5.  Water.

May the waters all run free and clean and clear.