Gratitudes

All in the Bowl

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Into that bowl of my heart,
along with my rages and furies,
with recent betrayals,
with my crushing self-doubt,
with your anxieties and your tears

(yes, let me keep them there, too
you know as well as I do
and as well as the Universe knows
that when my crying time comes
as it unfortunately and inevitably
comes to us all
you’ll be running to catch my tears
in a bowl of your own, and not because
I hold yours now–no, it will be because
it’s who you are
it’s what you do
it’s what we do)

into just that bowl,
along with all that,
I place

a small white stone
bee, bee, bee, crocus, bee
concentric circles of friendship
the feel of the sun on my hair
deep rumbling rolls of laughter like thunder.

May we walk in Beauty.

The Social Contract

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

How can I trust that you are who you say you are?
How can you know I am who I represent myself to be?
Don’t we all have several selves that we show to the world?
Aren’t we allowed a few secrets?

Sometimes in my life I have felt the burden of social expectation, the claustrophobia of sitting in a box not of my own making, because people expect certain behavior from my particular subsets.  I carry so many labels, as you do, and they can become burdensome.  There are expectations for the Mennonite Girl, the Missionary Kid, the Wife, the Mother, the Teacher, the Organic Farmer.  In some of my earlier decades, as I was wrangling my own vision of myownself from all these labels, I deliberately set out to break the rules, to be an iconoclast about the boxes that threatened to silence me.  I think I’ve been a late bloomer, only really starting to realize somewhere in my 40s that I don’t need to be the box and I don’t need to explain the box, and I don’t need to break the box.  I just need to live who I am and let people figure it out the best they can.

But there’s another side to this idea of the social contract, a good side, a really redeeming side.  While I don’t want you to assume that I am a certain person based on the many labels that mark me, I DO want you and I to both be able to make certain assumptions about each other, to be able to trust that unwritten social contract.  I want us to believe that the other one will do her best to keep her promises.  I want us to be able to assume that each other’s children are cared for as lovingly in private as they are in public, that we’re true to our spouses and partners, that we’re not playing fast and loose with people’s hearts, that we’re people of honor and faithfulness.

Yes, you need your personal private space, and I need some secrets of my own.  Yes, I am a slightly meaner parent in private than in public–sometimes.  Yes, I may hope that you think of me as an adventurous spirit even though my adventures are mostly vicarious, through the medium of novels that I read.  Yes, I sometimes feel like I am enacting some sort of con when I call myself a poet.

If you are a pious and thoughtful spiritual person, I promise not to be shocked by the tattoo of a dragon on your back.  If you are someone who speaks kindly and lovingly in public settings, I promise not to gasp when you get a little snarky in a moment of rant. Let’s give each other a little leeway.

Still.  I hope we can balance that kind of looseness in our social contract with some higher ideals.  Let’s expect of each other that we will be kind to our children and the other people and animals who share our space.  Let’s expect fidelity of each other, in friendship, in love and marriage and partnership, in our work.  Let’s expect each other to be honorable.  I know that I will likely fail your trust in some of the little things, as you may fail mine.  But holding each other to the basic principles of honor and fidelity and kindness seems to be the heart of the social contract.

If we want our words to have power and meaning, then I think that actions and aspect, words and behavior, need to rhyme in some way.  If I can’t keep true to who I say I am, I let all my personal power leak away.  If we lie to each other, we decrease our ability to be effective in the world.

Gratitude List:
1.  Good friends.  True and wise and faithful friends.
2.  Boundaries
3.  Iron ore and magnets
4.  Concentric circles
5.  Trust

May we walk in Beauty.

Elemental

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Fire Cider

Gratitude List:
1.  Birds.  Kestrel on a Wire.  Snow geese in a corn-stubble field.  Bluebirds muttering in the chestnut tree: “There now.  Everything is going to be okay.”
2.  Music.  So much good music yesterday and today.  Indigo Girls’ CD: Nomads, Indians, and Saints–for some reason I came back to it all fresh again yesterday.  Then the Blossom Hill String Band.  This morning’s singing and tears.
3.  Holding it all in the Bowl of the Heart.  It all has to go in there together, and somehow the mix of it all, all the beautiful and difficult and tender and angry and wretched stories, all in there together–somehow it feels right.  That is how it is meant to be.
4.  Spring, She rises.  The footsteps of Persephone are visible now everywhere I turn.
5.  Fire Cider, Elderberry Tincture, and Kombucha.  Good Medicine.

May we walk in Beauty.

Bridges

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Gratitude List:
1.  A green mossy bridge in Scotland
2.  Mythology
3.  The fiery cleansing of anger
4.  Circles of three.  This one.  That one.  Overlapping, creating a web.
5.  A truly free morning ahead.

May we walk in Beauty.

Yes, More Snow Geese

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2014 February 088

Gratitude List:
1.  Like snowflakes falling across the field, they settled.  Like they were choreographed.  Snow geese.  It always reminds me of the chilly winter day about 20 years ago when Jon and I were hiking on a ridge at Middle Creek and we looked out over the valley and the lake and it was suddenly like being inside one of those Japanese paintings, where petals or snowflakes or geese are settling downward so gracefully.  Today was no less magical.
2.  Dinner with good friends.  I just don’t want to say goodbye.
3.  Quest for a stone.
4.  The River.  Always this River and this Bridge.
5.  Spikes of crocus in the flowerbed, and sunny aconite abloom.

May we walk in Beauty.

Delta of Geese

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Gratitude List:
1.  A delta of snow geese flying above the River last night.
2. The sunset: first a tangerine glow that seemed to shimmer around us, then magenta, and finally crimson.
3. Dandelion tips growing in my brother’s flower beds.  Persephone rises.
4. Teaching myself to go back to sleep.  (Knock on wood)  Not only have I not had midnight insomnia for ages, I have been sleeping until 6:30 lately.
5. Dreams that remind me I’m okay.

May we walk in Beauty.

Blessings and Benedictions

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Blessing.  Benediction.  Benison.  In Old Irish, beannacht.  In Swahili, baraka.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the act of blessing, of passing on the blessing, of sharing benediction with each other.  Such churchy words, eh?  Don’t let that distract from their universal power.

This evening I watched my incredible niece give her senior presentation at her school, a somewhat daunting rite of passage that requires each student to give a 20-minute presentation on herself (or himself), her goals and ideals, her personal story.  My niece focused a great deal of her presentation on her family and her community, and it was clear that this is a young person who is grounded in her connections to others, who finds meaning in relationship and conversation and interaction.  I am a very proud auntie.

While the senior presentation is a rite of passage designed to challenge the students to express who they are, where they have come from, and where they are headed, it was clear that a vital role of the whole process was to have a moment to bless each student individually.  This was a ritual of benediction.  The students, in telling their stories, receive from their teachers and gathered family and friends a sense of the importance and vitality of their own stories.  They are now empowered with the sacred duty to fulfill their destinies, to find meaning in their lives.

I know people who do this in their everyday story, effortlessly and “unshowily,” humbly: constantly passing blessings on to those around them, to the people they meet.  Un-self-consciously offering to others that sense of purpose and connection to something bigger than themselves.  The way these people treasure the stories they are offered makes the story-teller feel validated and blessed, as thought they, too, now have a sacred task before them.

Gratitude List:
1.  My marvelous niece Lara.  And all my incredible nieces and nephews.
2.  Blessings
3.  Earthshine
4.  Spirals
5.  Winter aconite

May we walk in Beauty!

In the Dream Labyrinth

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My sister says that there is a building somewhere in Virginia which was designed to confuse the sense of direction, to force people to stop each other in the halls to ask, “Do you know the way to Conference Room C? Or even how to get to the third floor from here?”

The labyrinth of halls and underground passages and stairs and places that seem to go nowhere is designed to force the wandering souls to interact, to find their way together.  I find the idea intriguing, and something in my waking self steps forward with excitement at the challenge, at the genius of creating a space which intentionally unmoors people in order to force them to depend on each other.

But on the other hand, this is the landscape of my most deeply frustrating dreams.  I am always wandering down hallways, running up flights of stairs, only to find that I’ve arrived at the wrong end of the building, my appointment was set for an hour ago, I’m late for class, and I haven’t studied for the test.  The year is nearly over and I forgot to go to class all year, and if I could just find my way through the halls to the office, I could set everything straight.

Perhaps those dreams lie at the heart of my own anxieties, social and otherwise.  There’s a structure there that everyone else seems to get, to understand.  I seem to be the only one in the dreams (and sometimes in life) who can’t find my way, who can’t figure out how it’s supposed to be laid out, who has forgotten where to go and even why I was there in the first place.

Next time I find myself lost in the labyrinth of an institution in my dreams, perhaps I’ll stop and ask someone for help, see if I can inject a new way of interacting with the space of the dream.  Perhaps that will in turn inform something in my waking life, give me a new perspective on my own ability to wake up more fully to my own story.

Gratitude List:
1.  Simple Musings, a new booklet written by a whole group of friends–reflections on the season of Lent
2.  Snow Geese: a large flock (hundreds?) circling a corn field north of Columbia
3.  This image: Just a few fields down from the geese sits a farm that is bisected by an old railroad siding.  The siding is raised on a little bank to keep it level, and a fringe of trees grows along it and in front of a farmhouse.  This afternoon an old long-horned bull was standing on the siding as we passed.
4.  Storm downgrade
5.  Benediction, blessing.

May we walk in Beauty!

Winter’s Last Stand

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I know I have felt this panic before.
February has finally ambled its pokey self
right out the door and we sit on the cusp
of March which should mean spring,
but doesn’t.  What it is, is:
it’s the last month of pregnancy.
When you know and your body knows
that the next thing should be upon you
but something in the universe conspires
to keep you in the grip of what has been
just a little longer, but you know
that this one could go long.
Just like the last one did, and how will you,
how will you ever bear it?  Not one
more month, not another week, even.
Oh please, Timekeeper of the Universe,
if you know what is in me, get this child,
get this everlasting winter, get it out of me,
get it over with.  I’m ready for transition.

Gratitude List:
1.  Game night.  All generations.  Dutch Blitz tournament.  Letting our hair down.
2.  Mallard couples flirting on the pond
3.  Dusting off the tschotschkes
4.  Altar-building (which may be a repetition of #3)
5.  Rhythm of the in-breath, out-breath, pause.

May we walk in Beauty.

Mr. Rogers

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Gratitude List:
1.  For Jon, who was born today, a few years ago, who bought himself his birthday present so that I could have the boys give it to him: four Family Circus books that we haven’t read.  Don’t tell the kids–they think he was truly surprised.
2.  Buy one, get one free: fudge brownies for the birthday celebration from La Dolce Vita.  If you live near Lancaster, this is the place to go for your birthday party supplies.  And this one may seem more indulgently mundane than usual, but the experience was sublime.
3.  Lighten Up Lancaster and the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce: I know that might sound dull and organizational, except that it isn’t, because these are local organizations that are pouring their energy into connecting local eaters with local farmers.
4.  Mr. Rogers.  He died eleven years ago today.  I do believe he was a saint or boddhisattva or something.  My apologies to my FB friends who’ve been inundated by my favorite neighbor’s quotations today, but here’s my favorite of the lot: “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”
5.  Inner warmth, to help me contend with the outer cold.

May we walk in Beauty!