Gratitudes

Sunrise

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Color.  I am still in the haven of Michelle Johnson’s beautiful list of colors from the other day.  I think I am pretty good at noticing the colors around me, and then someone comes along and gives me such delicious words for color, and suddenly the shade and hue and vibrancy all around me is so much richer.  *Today, I am specifically grateful for the rosy beige color of onion skins and then way their hue and roundness matches the eggs I bring down from the hens.
2.  Even after he had announced (twice) that he would not be going to school today, when I said it was time to leave, Joss jumped up and scampered down the hill to the car.
3.  The way Pepita Hen’s feathers have come back in after being pecked by her coopmates and being chomped by a skunk.  She looks like a new bird, sleek and shiny.  There’s a new sparkle in her eye.  If that poor tattered little henny can grow back her feathers with such grace, maybe I can, maybe you can, too.
4.  You.  The way you open your arms and your heart to love even when you know that you will likely have to say goodbye.  You know that love is what matters, in the long run.  Your love will heal so much of what hurts in the world.
5.  Sunrise.

May we walk in Beauty.

Colors

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Colors
2.  Morning mist
3.  The daily, monthly, yearly cycles of Earth
4.  Taking care of myself
5.  Breakfast

May we walk in Beauty.

Word Play

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I love anagrams.  You know, where you take a word, scramble the letters, and come up with another word?  Most of the times, there’s something poetic about the juxtaposition of two words that seem to be unrelated except for the accident of their having the same letters in various combinations.

VILE, EVIL, LIVE–that’s a simple trio, but isn’t there a funny little magic to it?  Why is it so satisfying?  Those first two are similar, and then *poof* you neutralize them with the third.  It’s sort of like a good haiku: Here’s an idea, here’s a similar idea, here’s a little bit of a surprise.

Just a vowel-step away, you have LOVE, VOLE, and that’s just cute.  And you can play a little with that because EVOL is the beginning of evolution, so there’s a whole new way to start a poem. . .

I’ve always been attached to the SANTA, SATAN acronym, because it feels sort of iconoclastic in a naughty schoolchild sort of way.

And I love the little ones that can just be twisted and turned inside out in all sorts of ways, RATS, STAR, ARTS, TARS, for example.

In longer words, I have a particular love of the ones that switch just a letter or two in the middle.  PRENATAL, PARENTAL, PATERNAL.  The first gives way to the other two.  I have slightly uncomfortable associations with the word paternal because it’s so close to paternalistic, but my own pater is a really amazing and wonderful person, so that redeems the word.  What I find really super-satisfying in this one is that prenatal makes use of a prefix, so it significantly reduces the possibility that they’re actually related in some obscure ancient Latin or Indo-European language.  Of course, it switches more letters than the others, so maybe it loses elegance points.

The next set does have some root relationship, but only in their prefix and ending.  CONSERVATION, CONVERSATION.  And we really do need to make sure that we’re having that particular conservation in these days, eh?  I had to pause before I typed that word to make sure I was getting the right one of the two.  Conserve, Converse.  Verse, Serve.  I should probably be less lazy and look up those roots.

I went to an Anti-GMO rally the other day and carried a sign I had made.  It reads: “Label GMOS: Our Food is Sacred.”  At one point during the rally, it hit me that an uncareful reader might think that I think our food is actually frightened of what is being done to it in labs.  Hmm.  SACRED, SCARED.  Are they opposites?  Not really, but they do sort of throw each other into relief.

(This last one feels like it wants to be a whole post itself, or a poem.  It’s what got me settling these words into the computer this morning.  Instead of a piece of inspiration, though, today you get a little glimpse of the classroom part of my brain.)

I wonder if there’s a term for this sort of anagram, the kind that just switches a couple letters in the middle, sort of like an internal Spoonerism.  I’m looking for others for my collection, if you have any to suggest.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Lost is found
2.  Playing with words
3,  Sourdough bread (I have no Off button for sourdough bread, and may end up eating the whole loaf before my family wakes up this morning.)
4.  That marvelous Afghani supper my mom made for us last night.  (Hmmm. Perhaps I’ll stop with the sourdough bread and eat some of that for breakfast instead.)
5.   Feathers

May we walk in Beauty.

Mushrooms

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Today we praise mushrooms,
whose dreams alone we see,
the fruiting body, the stalk,
the periscope eye
sneaking a peek above earth.

Here’s to mycelium, to messages,
to the network threading beneath us,
hyphae, like delicate fairy hair,
highways of information, of connection.
Sprawling communities of fungi
lurking unseen beneath our blind feet,
silently doing their work.

Here’s to twinkling spores that glimmer
and drift through a single shaft
of sunlight on the woods floor,
to the tender gills which carry the spores,
to the wanton gift.

A blessing on the unseen,
the not-there but suddenly appearing,
the wisdom of the fungus,
of rot, of humus, of mold,
of breaking it down.
Gratitude List:
1.  The creative force of children
2.  Mushrooms popping up everywhere
3.  Sunshine, blue sky
4.  Wren
5.  Listening

May we walk in Beauty!

Before

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Before we wandered these hills, other feet stood on the rocks, walked these woods, heard the way the breezes played through the poplars, watched the sun shoot its borning rays down into the hollows.

Before the parking lots and asphalt roads.  Before the houses and the malls, like a million million mushrooms gathered in every valley and on every hilltop. Before the tearing machines, the industrial fumes, the buzz and rumble of commerce.

Before the barbarians came, before the savages appeared with their guns, with hearts of stone seeking halls of gold.

This is not a new story, but somehow we keep missing the point, keep calling the wrong ones the savages, keep stepping up to the bench of divine justice, lawyers defending the mass murderer.  Before the first (or not the first) one sailed the ocean blue, before him, yes, there was war here.  Yes, sometimes there was famine and disease.

But before the big boats began to appear here, there were functioning and thriving societies here.  Families in villages and longhouses, in townsful of people.  There was hunting and fishing and foraging.  There was knowledge and wisdom.  There were councils and songs, dances and dreamings.  There was art and society, law and leisure.

Today I will not celebrate the ending of that world.  Today I will mourn for the world that was lost when “first contact” was made.  I will walk in the woods with my children.  I will forage for something to make into tea or supper.  I will stand on these stones with my feet and re-member what stories I can.

Gratitude List:
1.  The ancestors.  Of me.  Of this land.
2.  Telling the truth
3.  Re-wilding
4.  New dreamings
5.  Robins in the bosque

May we walk in Beauty.

Do Something That Won’t Compute

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

“So, friends,” says Wendell Berry in The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, “every day do something / that won’t compute.”

The politicos and the war-mongers and the marketing gurus and the ad execs and the creators of glitzy trash and junk, they all think they’ve got us figured out.  They think they know what we want.  We’re the consumers, and they’re going to give us something to consume, whether it be a genetically engineered piece of sweet junk filled with high fructose corn syrup, a mindless screen diversion or a satisfying show of martial power.  And if we’re the consumers in the equation, they’re the ones who are raking in the dough.  At an ever-increasing, alarming rate of speed.

Every day, let’s choose to do something that doesn’t fit that model.  Let’s be the Makers, the Creators, the Designers of our own health, happiness, well-being.  The Crafters of our own delicious world.  Let’s make our own entertainment, be responsible for our own health, learn to love the taste of real unprocessed food, design our own lives according to our own stories.

“As soon as the generals and the politicos / can predict the motions of your mind,” says Wendell Berry, “lose it. Leave it as a sign / to mark the false trail, the way / you didn’t go. Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction. / Practice resurrection.”

Gratitude List:
1.  A little sun and blue sky yesterday.  A day without rain.
2.  The bright and earnest energy of the activists at the anti-GMO rally.
3.  Natasha’s spot-on speech from the rally: Kill the Beast
4.  Stuffed shells
5.  Snuggles

May we walk in Beauty.

Rally

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

The children are up and bouncing around upstairs.  My speech is ready for the Anti-GMO rally in Lancaster today.  Today brings shareholders to the farm to pick up their weekly produce, good coffee shared with friends, bits of clean-up from yesterday’s flooding.

Gratitude List:
1.  Water.  There always seems to be too little or too much, but really, we have what we need.  So yesterday’s flood reminds me of flow, and of letting go.
2.  Rallying for a cause
3.  Warm slippers
4.  Healthy, nourishing food
5.  Coffee

May we walk in Beauty.

Growing Up

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Listen for the songs
of the thousand grandmothers
who sing in your blood
whose voices echo in halls
of wakening memory.

2013 October 019

Gratitude List:
1.  That sunset.  Magenta and true orange, indigo and aquamarine.  The sunset-washed clouds were like wispy versions of mammatus clouds.
2.  Volunteer Fire Department.  Our local FDs are all staffed by volunteers.  These people are amazing.  We had a ride last night in a fire engine at the Wrightsville FD Open House.  It was like being inside the Tardis–bigger on the inside.
3.  Aging.  Looking at some photos of myself yesterday, I noticed how my face is showing my age, and I was happy about that.  Something about seeing pictures of myself in my late teens and early twenties makes me a little uncomfortable–I seem so raw and unripe and unseasoned.  Yesterday I realized that I feel comfortable in my skin–creaky knees and achy back and marks of age–in ways that I don’t think I ever have before.  I am incredibly grateful for that.  I just might start calling myself a grown-up pretty soon.
4.  Rain.
5.  Giving myself permission.

May we walk in Beauty.

Haiku and Tanka

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2013 October 044

I am snuggling a boy and a cat in my lap at the moment: benefits of a cool morning.   Makes typing a challenge, though.

Here are a couple poems that walked into my head yesterday.  The first is a tanka, inspired by my friend Mara.  I thought the second was going to be a tanka, too, but while I was waiting for the last two lines to emerge, I realized it was already a haiku.

 

TANKA
See there! In your palm
are the rivers of story,
of constellations,
dragonfly wings, the pathways
of the heart: love, grief, desire.

HAIKU
The now-naked arms
of the walnut tree cradle
the newly-born moon.

Gratitude List:
1.  Autumn birdsong in the hollow
2.  Listening
3.  Constructing my own life
4.  Breakfast
5.  Tiny Poems

May we walk in Beauty.

The Story Roars

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

When I wake up in the morning, parting the cobweb veil between dream and day-consciousness, I often find that some piece of that world hovers about me as I enter the morning.  A fragment of song.  An image.  A phrase.  The tone of the voice or the name of the person who was speaking my dream-name.  The answer to a question.  The Question itself.

This morning’s phrase: The Story Roars.  I love all the places this can go, the way it opens doors into so many passageways in my life.

There, standing just behind the curtain, is my Muse, reminding me to get to work.  To write, to write, to write.  The story is impatient, roaring to be crafted and written.

One of my current spiritual practices was given to me by a friend, the work of honing my listening.  I want to take up the work of listening, of drawing out people’s stories, of working together to be fully engaged in the stories we are living.  Our stories gather around us, waiting for us to give them voice.

Here is a Roar: My friend Natasha is now almost three weeks into a daily blog, The Year of Black Clothing, in which she chronicles and gives voice to her grief and rage over the destruction of Earth, of each other.   Her story is roaring, finding voice, gaining momentum, gathering other voices.  Her roar–so gentle, so fierce, so pained and so loving–is reverberating, drawing other voices in, creating a wild and hopeful call to Do.  To Be.  To Act.  To live our stories as authentically as we can on this Earth we call Home.  Go now and read her roar.  Add your voice to the story.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Yesterday I asked my Facebook friends for advice about a parenting question.  I’m uncomfortable with unsolicited advice-giving, and sometimes even asked-for advice can be haughty.  Not so with the amazing people who responded with gentle concern and powerful ideas to my call for help.  I am so deeply blessed by the many circles of community in my life.  So deeply deeply blessed.
2.  Mentors
3.  The Story
4.  The Voice
5.  The Dawn

May we walk in Beauty.