Gratitudes

Maintaining Balance

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

The gypsy wind came rattling through at 4:30 this morning.  It raised gooseflesh on my arms and the hair on the back of my neck tingled.  No more sleep.  No more sleep.  Down the stairs, some quiet reading, a little coffee and then some yoga tree poses.

In six months of regular morning tree poses, my balance has improved considerably.  I’m happy enough in my body, don’t get me wrong, but physical balance has never really been one of my strong points.  It’s a little startling to me that I can get this rather unathletic middle-aged body to pick up a new trick.  And it’s odd to me how place-oriented my balance is.  When I try the poses somewhere other than my kitchen, I teeter and totter and tumble all over the place.

On the internal front, I have been living with a low-grade fury again.  I have allowed this government shut down to throw me off my internal equilibrium.  I can’t seem to maintain balance,  to keep myself upright.  I want to rant and call names and burn bridges.
Somewhere I’ll find the poetry for this, the way to speak the need for justice in this story.  Right now, it’s still a little blind and crazed.  One thing that seems to help me hold my morning tree poses is the mirror in my kitchen.  When I look into my own eyes, my body suddenly remembers its upright nature and I stop thinking about falling.And oh.  I have not been writing gratitude lists.  I have stepped out of my space, walked away from my internal mirror.  How could I expect to keep my balance?  Here, then, is me back in my place, practicing my balance postures:

Gratitude List:
1.  A weekend with thoughtful, hopeful women.  All the grandmothers we carry with us.  Open hearts, open eyes.
2.  Dragonfly
3.  Autumn bird conversations.  Mockingbird is back at it after a summer of quiet.  Screech owl and great horned owl have been calling  even after dawn has brought the day.  Phoebe is moving through again.  Robin hordes have been amassing in the hollow every evening, and they begin the mornings with a deafening chatter.  I have even heard the kingfisher’s fussy chitter along Cabin Creek.
4.  A community of rebels
5.  Morning solitude

May we walk in Beauty.

Jiggetty Jig

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2013 September 162

Home again, home again, from a lovely five days in Stone Harbor, NJ.  Instead of trying to whittle my Gratitude List from all those days down to five, or even ten, here is a list of general joys from the trip:

1.  Getting the Farmer off the farm.  Watching him relax.
2.  We got there in time to see the massive flock of swallows snapping up insects on a short pit stop on their southward journey.  By mid-day Friday, they’d gone south.
3.  The full moon over my right shoulder, and the sun leaping out of the early morning waves in front of me, and the season changing (certainly at that very moment) to Autumn.
4.  Monarchs.  So few, so few.  But still.  Some.
5.  Sitting.
6.  Trash scavenging treasures: a beach rake, another beach umbrella in really good shape, a boogie board.  Call me a vulture.
7.  Josiah opened the screen door on Friday morning: “Now we’re open for love and business.”
8.  Dolphins!
9.  Dragonflies!
10.  Sylvester’s Fish Market, Nemo’s, Tortilla Flats, Uncle Bill’s Pancake House.  In other words, good eating.
11.  There were no more throwing up incidents after we got there.  We needed to get rid of that old car seat anyway.  Now we have a nice new booster.
12.  Big shovels to dig massive holes with.  As soon as they had a good hole, the boys would start nesting, creating sand shelves for their tools, making roads for the construction equipment. . .
14.  Making drip castles with Ellis.
15.  The way the boys hum quietly to themselves as they play in the sand, as they swim in the pool.
16.  Ellis jumping off the sand ridge into the water, into the sun.
17.  Watching my child’s eyes when he realized that he had just kept himself afloat in the pool.
18.  You know what I mean about the sun-road on the waves?  I love how it always appears to lead directly to me.

May we walk that road in Beauty.

Shedding the Skin

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2013 September 059
Safe in the hollow of the tree.
You will be sustained and held.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Good humor, light-heartedness, the way laughter heals and draws people together.
2.  Sustenance
3.  The lessons of snake: shedding the skin, renewal
4.  Finding the thread of the story
5.  Study

May we walk in Beauty.

The People Seemed as Beautiful as Birds

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2013 September 013

Gratitude List:
1.  This vanilla ice cream
2.  That blooming Rose of Sharon
3.  The screech owls that woke me this morning
4.  Coming home to myself,
which is to say,
becoming the person I think I want to be,
which might be sort of like saying,
starting, perhaps, to sort of grow up,
which could be a little like ripening.
Perhaps tomorrow I will feel differently,
and start to doubt my truth again,
but today it feels pretty satisfying.
5.  My children’s teachers, both the official ones and all you others.

May we walk in Beauty.

Yellow Leaf, White Horse

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Yellow leaf
The evening breeze
A white horse is walking between the sun’s rays
Cloud on a hill

Because as goodbye approaches
my heart is practicing the hole

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Ellis, our resident picky eater, ate ten green beans for supper.  And we only asked him to eat two.
2.  Conversations about this thing that is and isn’t faith or belief or religion
3.  Cicadas lulling me to sleep
4.  Getting my hair done.  I do it so infrequently, and it feels SOOO good. It’s therapy.  Really.
5.  Hope.  Even if Pema suggests I abandon it.  I can’t.  Won’t.

May we walk in Beauty.

Weaving Words and Dreams

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2013 August 314
Sweet Chick of a Tomato

Gratitude List:
1.  That lightning cloud.  I have never seen anything like it.  No thunder, but over an hour of constant flashes of lightning lighting up the cloud from within, running along beneath it.  Something magical was happening.
2.  Eyeglasses.  Were it not for reading glasses, my life would be diminishing in so many ways these days.  Writing, reading, artwork, looking at all the little treasures that my children bring to me to see.
3.  My poor skunk-bit chicken is surviving beautifully.  Albeit with a naked butt that might never re-grow feathers.  But she will be okay.
4.  The opportunity to weave my words together with those of an an old friend who is no longer here.  Thanks, Louise.
5.  Diana Nyad.  Courage and determination.  Living one’s dreams.

May we walk in Beauty.

Words. No, I Mean This Moment.

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2013 August 357

Gratitude List:
1.  The prayerful and thoughtful spirit of Grandma Weaver, who died six years ago today, just shy of her 100th birthday.
2.  Words.  No, I mean tears.  Oh, actually, I mean words.
3.  Being adored by chickens.  Really, I can do no wrong in their eyes.  I am their Queen.  If you gt to feeling chronically bad about yourself, get a small flock of hens.
4.  Comfort food: ham and egg casserole.  Chickens, again.
5.  Not being alone in the questions.

May we walk in Beauty.

Spiders and Grace

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2013 August 334  2013 August 339
2013 August 342  2013 August 348

Gratitude List:
1.  Deer.  Listening, unconditional love, the open heart.
2.  Robins congregating in the bosque at night.
3.  Two-year-olds.  I know I have said it before, but they melt me.  Utterly.
4.  Root beer floats
5.  Pattern and design

May we walk in Beauty.

Mom-Made Meals and a Butterfly Bush

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Gratitude List:
1.  Screech owl whinnying at dusk in the bosque.  (Isn’t that a sweet series of sounds?)
2.  For the few times a year when I can’t seem to cope without them: antihistamines.
3.  That vegetable medley casserole my mother made us for supper this evening.  Because every once in a while, it’s just so nice to have a mom-made-meal.  Thanks, Mom!
4.  Medical assistance from Suzy and my dad for my poor little skunk-bit hen.  She’s going to be okay.
5.  The butterfly bush.  I know (now) that it’s an invasive species, and we perhaps should cut it down, but it’s so alive with small pollinating critters that I can’t bear that thought.

May we walk in Beauty.

Sunshine Mandala and an Egg of a Moon

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2013 August 299

Gratitude List:
1.  An orange egg of moon resting on the rim of the bowl of hills above us.
2.  Socializing.  Big one, this.  Someone else watched our children this evening so we could talk to adults.
3.  Sharing story.  Even when the story hurts.  It always helps to tell and hear.
4.  End of the first week of school.  Ellis says the thing he likes best about school is School.  Says he’s developing a Stay Ahead Strategy for keeping up with the class when they write things from the chalkboard because he writes more slowly than most of the others.  (“Did your teacher help you develop that strategy?”  “No, I came up with it myself” he said.  “In fact, just now is the first time I have called it that.”)
5.  We’re halfway through the season.  The light’s at the end of the tunnel.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love what we do.  But we get so very tired.  It the Wednesday of the season.  Energy is renewed simply by the awareness that we’ll get a break.  Some day.

May we walk in Beauty.