Gratitudes

Downer

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

I needed a downer.  My body had ratcheted into code red, defenses up against the yearly assault from the tulips on the poplar tree, all systems working full-tilt to expel the enemy.  Sneezing, wheezing, itching, weeping.  One antihistamine dose and a 10-hour night of sleep later, I’m sitting in this fuzzy bubble of calm.  My arms and legs feel like they belong to a gorilla, and it just doesn’t seem worth the effort to drag my body around from place to place.  The world is coming at me through a veil this morning.  But oh, the relief.  I haven’t sneezed once yet today.

I try to tend to the allergies with nettle and plantain tea, mostly.  But every once in a while, my body panics and assumes that the poplar tree is out to kill me.  Then I need a little something else to calm it down so I can get on with my life.  Thing is, I am in love with that blooming tree that brings my oriole here each spring, that opens green buds to reveal their tangerine hearts.  Dangerous beauty.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Beauty all around
2. Honey Locust trees in bloom–honey vanilla scent hovering about
3. Sleep
4. Rites of Passage and Blessing: pre-school graduation
5. Plan B

May we walk in Beauty!

Allergies

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how can it be that the poplar tree

in this season
of its most righteous
blooming beauty
is so toxic to me

the poplar
and the honey locust
so popular with the bees
tender tendrils of scent
wafting through the hollow
on a breeze
make me sneeze

 

Gratitude List:
1. Nettle and chamomile and plantain tea (and when that doesn’t seem to cut it, an antihistamine to fall back on)
2. Good, caring, professional teachers for our children this past year
3. Catbird and mockingbird: we got some sass here in the holler
4. Those snakes of wild gypsy wind that rushed down the green hill yesterday in the gloaming
5. Dr. Maya Angelou.  Phenomenal Woman.  She contributed so much to our literary and cultural landscape.  Here’s one of the last things she put out to the world: “Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.”

May we walk in Beauty!

Deep Listening

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Sometimes you need to circle back and remember the moment you looked out the window and saw the wolf standing there.  It’s so nice to have people who can take you by the hand and gently lead you there, before you get too far away from it, you know?  If I don’t process the fearful places, then I am in danger of living as though the wolf is still out there, even in the midst of the party and the celebration.

Yesterday, my sister-in-law did this for me.  She is a gifted listener and questioner.  In the midst of all the lovely ways my family has helped to celebrate of how sweetly hopes and prayers have been answered for my family in the past month, she invited me to sit down in a quiet place, and asked gently about the process that led to all this newness and transformation.  “I would like to hear more. . ”

This was also a chance for me to absorb some good modelling, to learn more about listening and asking deep and compassionate heart-opening questions.  So today, this week, I want to practice living from that centered and thoughtful listening place.

Gratitude List:
1.  Listening.
2. Being deeply listened to
3. Cousins, mine, my children’s
4. Baby bunny
5. Books, books, books

May we walk in Beauty!

Birds in the Sunshine

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I am typing this at my parents’ house, remembering my gratitude list of yesterday.  Outside the window, a little baby bunny was washing her face in the garden under a flowering bush, and a chickadee brought a seed to eat on the perch my dad has set up right outside the window.  The boys and their cousins are devouring bacon in the kitchen.

Gratitude List:
1. Pewee and indigo bunting in morning sun
2. A morning of listening to Chester tell stories.  What a privilege to listen to someone who has lived for almost 100 years.
3. Clear thinking and reasoning
4. Surprises: getting to figure out who left me that beautiful gemstone scarab bracelet in my box at church
5. The Weaver family.  I am so grateful for my aunts and uncles and cousins, my parents and siblings and nieces and nephews.

May we walk in Beauty!

Found Tanka

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Lorax
Reading The Lorax to the children at The March
Against Monsanto in Lancaster yesterday.  Photo by
Michelle Johnson.

Now for a very random poem.  I am opening up this ninth grade literature book at random pages and pulling out lines to weave together for a tanka:

trunk in the attic
they heard the the goddess Circe
a stillness greatens
from the heresy of rain
stop to look fear in the face

It turned out a little ominous, I think.  Perhaps it has to do with the youthy angst of writing which is chosen for teens.  I did not spend a lot of time sorting and choosing and arranging.  I like to play with random poetic constructions sometimes, to break out of some of my own typical patterns and images.  Exercises like this help me see new possibilities for juxtapositions, new ways to fracture sentences to open up new meanings, new sound and rhythm connections.

line 1: Truman Capote, “A Christmas Memory”
line 2: Homer, “The Odyssey”
line 3: Richard Wilbur, “The Writer”
line 4: James Hurst, “The Scarlet Ibis”
line 5: Eleanor Roosevelt

Gratitude List:
1.  Pianos in the city.  If you want to add fun and liveliness to your city, what better way than to get people to paint a bunch of upright pianos in wild and beautiful designs, and then place them in protected nooks around the city.  Spontaneous parties and songfests arise.  Way to go, Lancaster!  That’s delightful community-building.
2.  The March Against Monsanto.  The good, hopeful energy.  Reading The Lorax to the kids.  Selling tomato plants and talking healthy food with people.  The Amish buggy next to my stand with “Say No to GMO” cahled on its side.  The voice of the people.  Knowing our march was one of many around the world.
3.  Rhythm.  Daily, seasonal, poetic, musical. . .
4.  Books.  I am overwhelmed by all the reading I want to do and should be doing, especially with a house to clean and acres to mow and children to tend and a farm to run.  But I love wading into the stacks of books and opening up a poem or a short story.  The novel I am reading at the moment is Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  I recommend it.
5. The deep red/purple of the Japanese maple on the back hill.  It’s just about big enough now to be a little fort this summer for small people.

May we walk in Beauty.

Creeds

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(Commercial Prelude: Today is the Worldwide March Against Monsanto.  Very possibly there is one happening in a town or city near you.  We have one happening in Lancaster, PA, today in the center of the city at 2, with a rally and Awareness Fair afterward.  Join us, wherever you are.  For the bees.)

What are the ideas and assumptions you live by?  What are the beliefs that give meaning to your life?  I know they change from day to day, moment to moment, but if you fling your butterfly net into the brisk morning air of your spirit this morning, what might you catch in there?  How about writing five to start with, and as fast as you can, without thinking, without trying to find really cool ones, but just the ones that first float to the surface.  It strikes me that “creed” might not be the most accurate term, but somehow that’s the one I want to use.

Here are a few that I found in my net this morning.  Remember, this is just a quick, top of the head free association.  That’s the point.  It will be raw, but hopefully it will catch some meaningful tidbits that my thinking mind would overlook or dismiss.  Try it!

1.  Love.  Whatever promotes and supports deep and faithful and trusting Love.  Wanton Love of all that is around us.  Answer the question with Love.
2.  Notice.  Notice as much as possible.  Every detail.  Color, shape, movement, flickers of energy.  Like Sug said in The Color Purple: “I think it pisses God off if you pass by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.”  I think the converse (or is it the inverse?) is true: I think it makes her intensely happy if you DO notice it.
3.  There’s a place for everyone at the table.  I believe this and I want to live by it, but there are people I don’t want at my table, and I don’t know how to reconcile it.  I think I mean that compassion (not just the broad love of #1) ought to somehow be extendable to all, but I want to have my compassion for the rapists and murderers and frackers and oil executives and warmongers from a distance.  Still it’s an ideal I believe in, even if I can’t live it yet.
4.  Listening.  I work so hard at this, and I still get caught up in telling and spilling and requiring you to listen to me instead.  But I think there is something incredibly holy in the act of listening, something that strengthens and fortifies that web that connects us all.
5.  Treasuring the web of all life.  In one sense, I think we’re all one organism of many parts.  Trying to see the world this way helps with the compassion dissonance of #3, I think.  We are all one.  What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves.  What harm I do to you, I do to me, too.  And when we spread love outward, it heals ourownselves.

So a really interesting thing happened there.  Originally, I wrote ten as the suggestion for a number, but I found that by the time I hit the fifth one, I had started to engage my brain, had started to worry what people would say (“That’s too religious!”  “That’s not religious enough!”), had started to delete and re-type, delete and re-type.  Five seems to be a good number for quick reflection, before the brain gets too involved, too Editorial.

 

Gratitude List
1.  This amazing and perfect spiderweb outside my window.  Thrive, little spider.  May you and your offspring eat well here in the hollow.
2.  The voice of the people.  Daily I become more cynical about whether the democratic process has any more validity in a system where the richest candidate wins, where corporations and lobbyists can donate huge sums of money to campaigns so that the candidates become beholden to their causes.  I get pretty twisted up inside about it.  But I still think the people have a duty to make our voices heard, perhaps now more than ever.  When this chapter gets written, I want it to be noted that people spoke up.  So, today I join the people in the agora.  For the health of our children.  For the bees and the monarchs.  For the future of the planet.  I am grateful for the voice of the people.
3.  Short fiction.  I am finding it difficult to get a good overall view of the English 9 course I will be teaching in the fall, because I have gotten stuck reading the short stories.  I guess I just have to sit down and read them all so I can focus on the big picture.  What a lovely chore to have.
4.  Belly laughing with the kids
5.  Watching my 8-year-old beginning to develop grace and fluidity to his movements.  Body confidence.  Dancing and climbing and jumping and running.  I think even the klutziest among us (like me) probably went through those phases in childhood where we began to live in our bodies with more awareness.  Today, treasure your body and the ways it moves, the way it propels you from place to place, whether you run or whether you hobble.  What an amazing thing it is that those nerves and synapses within us all work so beautifully.

May we walk in Beauty!

Dreamscapes

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When I dream of beaches, as I did last night, there is often a small mountain or cliff rising out of the ocean 50 or a hundred yards offshore which creates a small lagoon in the shallows between it and the beach.  It’s not usually connected to the mainland–it’s its own formation rising out of the water, sort of like Haystack Rock in Oregon, but the shape and size change from dream to dream.  Last night there was a resort built out over the water right up against it, and my mother and I were searching for a rare red hawk that was known to nest on the cliffs.

I have a city dream, too, and the city is often the same one.  How is it in dreams that the fantastical is so recognizable?  Yes, I know, Mr. Jung.  These are the symbols of the things that happen deep in my subconscious all through the day, so of course I would recognize that those two vastly different places are part of the same city.  Or that the labyrinthine series of rooms and staircases in another recurring dream are all part of my grandmother’s old rambling Victorian house.

There are those school dreams, where I am always late and running ragged through unfamiliar halls and stairways to find a class I might or might not have even signed up for.  But there’s another school, too, a boarding school, deeper in my psyche, I think.  Those school dreams are not about time and responsibility, but about finding people I might know.  They come to me in clusters, like the anxiety school dreams–none for years, and then several in a month.  They don’t feel anxious, though.  More curious.  They seem to be about loneliness and anticipation in equal measure.

There’s a German word, fernweh, that expresses the state of being homesick for a place where you have never been.  Somehow I think it’s connected to these familiar/unfamiliar landscapes in my dreams.  That dis-ease, that sense of unsettledness and longing, grabs me in these dreams of place.  I want to be back there in that place, wandering and exploring, even though the place is nowhere (no physical where) that I have been in my waking life.  Or maybe something in me longs to be back in those half-familiar, half-confusing places of childhood: the boarding school where I went in first grade, the old house we came to when we came to the US from Tanzania, the American schools with their confusing wings and hallways, the family trips to Mombasa or the New Jersey shore.

These places rise out of liminal times from my childhood, threshold spaces where I stood between one place and another, between home and school, between East Africa and the US.  Perhaps that is why the beach dreams are so compelling, poised as they are between land and sea, with cliffs rising high out of the water.  Change, with its odd mix of anxiety and anticipation, is inevitable, and in the midst of shift and transformation, the familiar/unfamiliar places return in dreams, offering a picture of the shift that is occurring.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Dream worlds
2. The way sunlight slants down the hill in the chill mornings
3. The manager at the bank yesterday who helped Ellis set up a savings account.  She took him seriously, asked him questions, complimented him gently without talking down to him.
4. Lunch Bunch day–both kids at school until mid-afternoon!
5. Preparations, plans and anticipation.

May we walk in Beauty!

Today’s List

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
No, no. They aren’t ready yet.  But it’s nice to dream. . .

Gratitude List:
1.  Childcraft Encyclopedias.  One of my favorite rainy day activities when I was a kid was to lie on the floor and pore through Childcraft.  I had bought a set years ago at a book sale, and then donated it to the Waldorf school classroom where I’d been teaching. After I had children, I sort of regretted not keeping it, and I haven’t seen one on a sale since, until yesterday.  And the boys both love it, too.
2.  This early morning quiet
3.  Making progress on long-term projects
4.  Photos of friends with their marriage certificates
5.  Metamorphosis.  The seed, the caterpillar in chrysalis, the tadpole, the nymph: The life force works in tandem with forces of destruction.  Perhaps just at the moment when everything seems to be falling apart, collapsing in on itself or exploding into nothingness, suddenly the life force–which has been quietly at work all along–suddenly begins to take hold and shape and form spring forth.  Shiva and Vishnu together.

May we walk in Beauty!

In the Hall of the Old School

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Yesterday I visited the school where I will be teaching, the school I graduated from 29 years ago.  So much is new and different.  So much is the same.  The mural of the hand holding the rainbow still brightens the stairwell (may it always be there).  The old wing still looks much like it did in my day, and it smells exactly the same as it did when I was there.  We opened the door to the classroom where I will be teaching, and one of my own teachers walked out and hugged me.  Did I dream this?  I can hardly believe this is happening.  I used to imagine it, twenty years or so ago, and here it is.

I do have recurring anxiety dreams that take place in a school.  I am trying to find the classes where I am supposed to be either studying or teaching.  I’ll spend the entire dream trying to find where I am supposed to go, going up stairs and through labyrinthine hallways.  I’m always late, sometimes at the end of a semester and realizing that I have forgotten to go to class.  Or I’ll be going to teach the first day of a class and realize that I have forgotten to get a schedule to know when and where it is.  Once, when I was teaching at Butler County Community College, I dreamed that I rushed in late to class only to see my dean teaching the class.  She said since I was always late, she’d decided to take over my schedule.  The thing I realized yesterday about it all was that the setting of the dream is always very similar to my high school alma mater.

In the past ten years, since I have taken a break from teaching, the frequency of those particular anxiety dreams has lessened.  Now that I am teaching again, I wonder if they will increase in frequency again.  And how will it be if the real setting is now overlaid on the dream setting?  And now that the reality has begun to feel so intensely like a happy dream?

Here is little poem that has nothing to do with high school or anxiety dreams:

You must have heard me prescribe hens
for a low self-opinion.
There is nothing like a little chicken worship
to make a body feel like a rock star.

But here’s the thing–
my chickens think that you
are a capital rock star, too.
“Look!” they told me this morning
when I looked in on them.
And I knew exactly
what they meant.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Love is the Answer.  Love is the Answer.  Love is the Answer.
2. That moment when we opened the door to my new classroom, and my own teacher walked out and hugged me.
3. Creating and envisioning new spaces
4. I am going to a book sale today!  I love book sales.
5. Going to vote with the kids.  As cynical as I get about whether this democratic ideal actually has any value in the oligarchy, I want my children to learn and experience the ideal with the hope that one day we will have a truer democracy, disentangled from wealth and corporate influence.  And we stopped at Turkey Hill and bought ice cream on the way home.

May we walk in Love!

Love Trumps Doctrine

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In honor of civil rights activist and wise man Dr. Vincent Harding, a powerful voice for justice whom the world lost yesterday.  The form is a syllable count style called shadorma (3/5/3/3/7/5).
“Love trumps doctrine, every time.”
–Vincent Harding   (July 25, 1931-May 19, 2014)

Every time
like the ace of spades
like Grandma
like berries
in your breakfast cereal
love will trump doctrine.

The surface of this poem is sweet, and there was great gentleness in Vincent Harding, too.  But it must be noted that his deep love was connected to his work in the struggle for Civil Rights in the United States.  The love he spoke of was not only about simple tenderness, but about willfully choosing to love your enemies.  And then to live by that choice no matter what.

What are the doctrines and dogmas that I hold dear, that you cling to, that keep us from loving as we ought?  It’s just so easy for me to look at someone else and point out the way love gets shredded by creeds.  But then I let myself off the hook.  This week at least, in honor of Dr. Harding, I commit myself to focusing on my own story of intolerance, to seeking those hidden places within me where I grasp ideology more tightly than love.

 

Gratitude List:
1. People who live by love rather than dogma.
2. Even though they both kick, the occasional night when a snuggly boy joins us in bed.
3. Sorting and tidying.  Here, in the mundane realm.  Up there, in the brain.
4. Possibilities.  If the thing you are doing isn’t working the way you want it to, you can change it.  Or not.
5. Buttercups.  I followed my up-road neighbor’s lead and mowed around them.  They shine so happily at me.

May we walk in Love!