Gratitudes

Soup and Imperfection

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This new life I have embarked upon has shifted my flow of energy drastically.  Working with teenagers is invigorating and energizing, but it can be incredibly draining, too.  I am finding my way back to a kind of equilibrium, but meanwhile I am treading gently, learning to say No again with the same sort of intentionality I learned when I had small babies.  Now my days are filled brimful with words.  I am on stage much of the day, putting word together into strings and strands of ideas to rush out upon the webs that connect my heart and thoughts to the hearts and thought of my students.  I am listening to and reading words.  Somehow, in the midst of this, I have developed again a shyness and a reticence about throwing down a poem upon the page in the mornings, to see what appears and where I can take it.  I will get back to that place again.  Perhaps I can begin to draw out some of the webs from my school life and work them onto this tabula rasa.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Seeing Chiques Rock, and the River, and the bridges, in a different light each morning.  How the sun lights up the trees on the eastern horizon as I drive into morning.
2.  It happens every October when the air starts to get cold, but I love the desperation of kitty snuggles at this time of year.  Such purrings.
3.  I am still trying to find ways to be grateful through this early morning insomnia that I have developed again.  But I am truly grateful that I don’t have to fight myself to get myself out of bed these days.  That would feel really miserable.  Now I just need to find a way to bring 4 am a little closer to 5:30 in my body’s clock.
4.  Soup and the people who make it.
5.  Not being perfect.  This one’s hard.  I want to be super teacher.  I want to be the one who always nails every lesson, every question, every challenge.  I’m not that person.  Sometimes my lessons fall flat.  Sometimes I just don’t meet the challenges the way they need me too.  I can be too easy on them, or too strict, all at the wrong times.  But I think I am sufficient,and managing rather well most of the time, and as we said in the Waldorf school, I think they will learn simply from watching me strive.  I still wish I were an ace, a star, a golden child.  But short of that, I’ll settle for being sufficient, comfortable, and loving.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Gift of Conflict

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Gratitude List:

1. Remembering just in time to see the conflict moments not as things that get in my way, but as learning opportunities that I have been graciously given.  Oh, how lucky I have been to receive this particular little bit of conflict.  I am learning so much.
2.  Those heartfelt classroom conversations just get deeper and richer.  And I don’t feel as though I am doing anything much but listening and nodding and reminding people not to talk over each other.  Today’s conversation in one class in particular went down many rabbit trails, but by the time we reached the end of class, it had accomplished, with much greater depth, the work of the activity that I had planned before the conversation took over.
3.  I think the future is going to be in good hands.  Such competent hands, such clear-thinking heads, such compassionate hearts.
4.  That moment, each morning, when I get to the crest of Pisgah ridge, over by Sam Lewis Park, and the sun is just beginning to peek over the far eastern horizon.  This morning the valley was hidden by fog, but I was above the fog for just a few moments.  It made the whole day an adventure to begin it like that.
5.  Finding the next level of energy behind the veil of weariness.  I really wanted to find the energy to make up a Jeopardy game for my Academic Writing students tomorrow.  And I did.
6.  And an extra one today, because I am feeling like a rebel: the words of Anne Lamott.

May we walk in Beauty!

Treasures in the Haystack

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Today as I was walking down the hall, I noticed a small group of first years huddled in a little cluster not far from a grove of tree-like seniors.  The freshmen looked so young and innocent and small compared to the sturdy and confident older students.  I realized that it was only partly about their respective heights; it was also about their carriage and body language.  The blooming from childhood to young adulthood really seems to happen in these few years that they walk the halls of high school.  I also realized that those particular freshmen, who seemed so small in comparison to the seniors, were actually all taller than I am.  Heh.

I should be grading.  I have a big stack of essays that really need to be done by tomorrow.  But my gratitude list today is sort of centered around that stack.

Gratitude List:
1.  All these stories.  Perhaps it’s a little brutal, a little brusque, to ask these young folks whom I don’t really know to write essays for me, describing something that brought about a change in their lives.  Oh, how tender, how vulnerable, their responses.  I hold them like eggs, like butterfly wings, like whispers.  Tales of joyful tears at the birth of a niece or a nephew, of tenderly nurturing small creatures, of leaving their homes to travel to the US to study, of deciding to care about their futures and their dreams.  Oh, the stacks of grading can be a teacher’s bane, like mythological challenges to be overcome, but they hold such treasures.  Such powerful and fragile treasures.  Have I said how in love I am with these people who fill my days?
2.  How a little bit of unplanned time in the classroom can sometimes turn into powerful discussion time.  Yesterday, it was about how, when you stand up against something wrong, it makes it easier for the next person to do so.  Today, it was parenting techniques, and helping children to develop intrinsic motivations to choose the “right” option instead of forcing them to follow the extrinsic motivation of threats of parental punishment.  Really.  These are wise and thoughtful folks.
3.  Monarchs on the move.  I keep seeing them–it’s migration time.
4.  Wild geese.  The ones that fly overhead.  The ones in Mary Oliver’s poem.  The ones in Mary Black’s song.  The one some call the Spirit.
5.  Tomorrow we go to the beach.  The farm work will go on here without us.  The school work will get done in the cracks and spaces.  And I will have a day and a half to breathe seas air and refresh and rejuvenate.  Blessed be.

May we walk in Beauty.

Detritus

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

In the field
you examine leaves and feathers
stones and bones
to learn the stories of the land
to see who has passed this way
and how the wind has blown.

At the end of the day
I sweep the broom
across the cold white tiles
of the classroom floor.

A gentle snow of tiny paper pieces
torn from spiral books
falls silently all day
upon the floor

and as I pull those tiny flakes
with my broom,
and candy wrappers,
hair, so much long hair
and almost every day
at least one plastic pen clip,

I wonder what they could tell me,
if I knew how to listen,
about the young trees
which have dropped
these pieces and bits:

That girl, the one who tore
this piece of paper from her notebook
scattering tiny shreds around her on the floor,
would her litter tell me of her loneliness?

The broken bits of pen
perhaps would tell
of the boy who is holding
holding everything in
just barely but something
every day must break
so he doesn’t.

Could I piece a story
from the long strands of hair,
the gum wrappers and bright foils?

Now there is a new lore to learn,
new creatures to track
in the wild places.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  The whole family playing together in the dusk
2.  More fairy toadstools emerging in the fairy circle
3.  A powerful community-building moment in my class, initiated by a student
4.  Seeing a tiny light at the end of this tunnel of grading that I made for myself
5.  Elderberries, elderberries, rah, rah, rah!  I am drinking elderberry syrup almost like juice by now, but it seems to be keeping the thises and thats at bay.   Thanks to Tabea for the elderberries.  Gotta get me a couple of bushes.

May we walk in Beauty!

Green Fire

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Here’s the beginning of something.  My poet-mind is distracted these days.  I have been reading a little Aldo Leopold for a class I need to take.  The Green Fire has caught my attention.  This is unfinished, but there are stacks of grading to be done.

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain.”  –Aldo Leopold

Only the mountain knows perhaps
where the green fire is kindled
how the viridian flame leaps
down the slopes and into the hollows
how it broods in the deep crevasse
enkindles in every womb
caterpillar and field mouse
wolf and deer and human
how it shines behind the eye.

Perhaps the desert too
has pondered with the mountain
the quiet licking emerald ember that
touched by the merest drop of moisture
tenders into flame
drawing forth
the impossible sprout from the seed

 

Gratitude List:
1.  That song about Divine Mystery being the Beauty of a raven.  Joyful is the dark.
2.  Gathering with friends on a mountain.  Everybody laughing, singing, eating together.
3.  A new week, full of potential and promise.
4.  How the clock seemed to stop this morning at 5 and drag the minutes slowly until 5:30.  I don’t know how much I slept in that time, but I needed the sense that I was sleeping in.
5.  This work of loving.  Even when it hurts because the one you hold is hurting.

May we walk in Beauty!

Egg of a Moon

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Gratitude List:
1.  That egg of a seed of a dream of a moon.
2.  So much unfolds.
3.  Listening to Tolkien on the journey to and from work.
4.  Keeping the story moving.
5.  Eating my words is not always terribly distasteful.

May we walk in Beauty!

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My brain has been so focused of late on forms of speech other than poetry.  This one will have to be a place holder, I think, so that I can come back to the subject of that blue.  I know poets have written of blue before.  Still, I need to find my own words for this blue.  It’s not the blue of sadness, though it holds sadness deep within it.  It’s too simple, somehow, to say that it represents love.  Love is too broad for one color.  But that is in there, too.  I need to go to an art museum this winter, and look for it, or go back to that little chapel with the Chagall windows near the Hudson River and let the blue light wash me.

there will need to be more poems
more poems about the blue

the Samaritan’s clothes
as he lifts the dying man
on van Gogh’s mountain

the welling glow
of any Chagall window
where you stand in the shine
and blue surrounds you
while angels and ordinaries
float in the ether

or Mary’s cloak
the blue of the world
which was borne within her

 

Gratitude List:
1.  My family is fed.  Jon cooks wonderful meals.  Mom and other friends have shared food with us.  We’re finding our way into this new rhythm.
2.  Elderberries and sleep: magic healing duo.  Crossing my fingers that they will continue to hold this cold at bay.
3.  Another student story: Yesterday as I was tidying up the room during my planning period, a student that I know mostly by sight stopped by on her way somewhere else and started to tell me about the Peace Fellowship group that she is a part of.  She began speaking very articulately about justice and compassion and love, about working together in intergenerational groups, about encouraging diversity, about how she believes the work of peace is intimately bound up with the work of caring for the earth.  I held her words tenderly and thanked her and told her I would look up her peace group, and all the while I was hearing the words of Miranda in The Tempest, “Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!”  There’s hope.  So much hope in this next generation.
4.  This beautiful rock that Suzy brought me: red sandstone-looking bits, black lave-like bits, and shiny, sparkly twinkles all throughout.
5.  I am not necessarily grateful that I am no longer finding a daily feather, but I am grateful that the transition is occurring.  I have made the leap.  My wings have held in the winds, for the most part.  No I need to find my feet on earth.  Now is the time to move from feathers to stones.  Roots.  Solidity.

May we walk in Beauty!

Bridges

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Gratitude List:
1.  The way the setting sun slants between the trees at the corner where the bees live, making the hive and the beeyard glow, while everything else is in shadow.
2.  Grammar.  The structure of language,  The way it creates the bridge over which our ideas can  travel between us.  I know I have been repeating versions of this one recently.  It’s just that as I delve more deeply again into this sacred discipline of the structure of language, I am again struck by what a miracle and a gift speech is.
3.  Singing in a circle so we can look into each others’ eyes.
4.  Exhausting as it is to add more work to my plate, I am loving this first course of the set that my school requires new teachers to take.  This one is called Building Caring Communities.  In some ways it feels a bit like a repeat of work I have done in college and grad school, and on my own in the intervening years, but I think I always gain new insight when I step back into different topics, especially when I am with a new cohort.
5.  Cool morning.

May we walk in Beauty.

Word-Bridges

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I need to take my moments of contemplation when I can get them these days.  Only three weeks into the semester, and I have already (at least once) left a piece of my lesson planning to the morning.  And that eats up not only time, but also confidence.  Yet I am feeling an internal sense that not only should I be maintaining my morning reflection time, but perhaps I need to expand my writing practices.  Now, because I am spending my days teaching writing, when I write for myownself, I am keenly conscious of how I am moving around inside these sentences, pulling the ideas of this sentence into being perhaps even while I typed the previous sentence.  Considering whether a fragment here might be well-used to effect.  Wondering whether I can hold onto the depth of the idea that I am working with if I shift for a moment into discussion of the what happens when I explore the room of a sentence while I am writing it.

You and I, we are individual universes, separate in our separate realms, joined by. . .what?  (Meta-mind wonders how I should have punctuated that one and hopes a grammarian friend will give suggestions.) What is the web that connects us in our isolated worlds?  Love and hope, certainly.  Gesture and expression.  Still, we need language to channel those deep rivers of self between us, to make the webs between us glow and shine.  As we build these word, bridges, construct whole rooms and tunnels of sentences, cities of paragraphed ideas, our worlds connect.  I can write to you and you can write to me, and we can say to each other that we know each other, even if we have not seen each others’ faces.  Just because of words.  May all our words bring deeper understanding, more powerful connections.

Gratitude List:
1.  Personal pep-talks, for that is what this has been.  It was a short night, and it promises to be a hot day in the classroom, me yelling my words out over the fans.  Still, I cannot be anything but grateful to for the gift of this opportunity to help this cohort of 90 young people develop and perfect their ability to work with language, this magical tool for human connection.  May it be so.
2.  The great horned owls.  I know I just wrote about them a couple days ago, but their deep and startling voices here in the fall are almost as trance-inducing as my friend the oriole was in spring.  When I am grumbling at the rude voice of the alarm clock, the sudden surprised whooping of the owls in the bamboo forest will make me smile and be glad to be awake in this darkness.
3.  Following my predecessor at the school.  She was well-loved by quite a number of students.  Random students keep wandering in and looking around, a little lost, and introducing themselves as former students of hers.  Some of them even return repeatedly, as though simply the memory of her in that room makes it a haven amidst the bustle of the school day.  Big shoes to fill.  I’ll be my own me, of course, but do my best to keep her light shining in the window.
4.  Word-bridges.  Sentence-halls.  Paragraph-houses.  All these artificial structures and codes that we have created in millennia of human development that enable us to close the space between us.
5.  Annoying as his constant demands for attention, food, attention, and food can be, I love the way Fred the cat meows, his whole face getting into the act.  I love the way he won’t take no for an answer when he wants snuggles and I am wearing a dark blue dress that cannot have orange cat hair upon it.  I had to go get a blanket to cover me because he would have his mama-cuddle this morning, no matter what I said.

May we walk in Beauty!

So Much We Do not See

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There is so much we do not see.
We walk through a maze of rocks on a beach
and think that all the world is washed in beige,
when before us lie the myriad possibilities
of the rainbow, if we would only turn our gazes
to the shine, the light that splinters
into beauty on every surface.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  The great horned owls are calling this morning.  I have heard three distinct voices, I think.  Their call, here in the hollow, is the same rhythm as I have heard it elsewhere, but there’s something different, like a regional accent, an extra light bounce between the early notes.
2.  From my end, chapel seemed to go well yesterday.  They seemed attentive to what I was saying.  I talked about the Open Bowl of the Heart: the practice I do, when I get to feeling hopeless and despairing about what is wrong in the world, of visualizing that my heart can hold it all, the stories of horror right alongside the stories of unexpected kindness and the beauty around me.
3.  Elderberries!  Thanks to my wonderful friend Tabea, I now have two large bags of berries in the freezer, enough to make quite a bit of syrup to keep my family healthy in the coming winter, I hope.
4.  Unexpected kindnesses.  A student I have never met walked into my classroom and deposited on my desk a picture that he had drawn for me, a beautiful pencil rendering of a movie heroine.  Apparently he used to draw pictures for my predecessor, and he decided to keep up the tradition.  Lucky me!
5.  This gray moth that is fluttering about in front of the computer has a little flash of rosy sheen when its wings catch the light just so, and when it slows down enough for me to see.  It’s sort of like the magic of moonstone or labradorite, appearing dull and grayish on the surface, but filled with faerie twinkles when it is turned to the light just so.  Maybe people are like that, too, the ones who seem to be going about the day in a gray pallor, not drawing particular attention to themselves suddenly shine forth a color you can’t even name, it comes on you so whimsically.

May we walk in Beauty!