Gratitudes

Out in the Wind

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Here was the prompt for a borrowed poem:  Because today is 3/11/13, I decided to go to a book near at hand, turn to page 13, scan down to the 3rd line, and choose eleven words to use in some form in a poem.  I sort of cheated, by looking through four books until I found one that I could work with.  This was Barbara Walker’s Feminist Fairy Tales, from the tale of Princess Questa.  I chose the phrase, “. . .went out to walk the dunes in the wintry wind, weeping. . .”  The final poem is perhaps a little overwrought, but it was cathartic to run with it, to see where it took me.  (This was to be March Monday Morning, but I seem to have trouble posting poems in the mornings).

Out you went in the wintry wind
to walk the dunes, weeping
with only a scattering of sandpipers
to witness, and a scuttling crab.

The wind tore the tattered foam from the waves,
sent shreds of lather scudding like sailboats
over the sands, and wrenched your voice from you.

You keened your word
into the force of the gale
a wail, like a siren.

The wind snatched it up with such unholy force
it sucked the breath right out of you.

But your word was carried like a seed pod
in the womb of the wind, to break open
high above all our fields, releasing
a thousand seeds to fall to earth
as the wind itself grew ragged
and shattered into calmer breezes.

We felt them fall, like a net upon us,
and now we wait, our breathing bated
to see what will grow.

Gratitude List:
1.  The perfect hexagonal symmetry of a purple crocus in the lawn, three petals curving inward, three curling out.  No wonder the bees find themselves at home in there.
2.  Sorted Legos.  That seems a little OCD, but something about having them all sorted into piles of color shifted the boys’ attention, and their play become more focused and cooperative for a time.
3.  Tiny green things poking up their heads in the greenhouse.  The way onions come up folded like laundry and then gently unfold into the sun.
4.  Corn casserole–yay for last summer’s frozen bounty!
5.  Courage for the difficult conversations.

Namaste

One way to keep the cats from actually sitting on the counter. . .

2013 March 025

Tea Party and Prodigality

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Gratitude List:
1.  Prodigality: lavish, profuse, wanton
2.  Bees humming in the crocus flowers
3.  The wild conversations that were happening all over the hollow this morning when I walked out to feed the chickens: wild geese calling, woodpecker thrumming, wren, bluebird, chickadee, somebody asking, “Sweet?”
4.  Pot luck lunches!
5.  Family Tea Party: We usually have a Family Movie Night every week or two.  Lately the boys declare many evenings “Family (Something) Night.”  Before we settled in to watch Family Circus Specials for Family Movie Night this evening, Ellis declared that it was also Family Tea Party Night.  What fun.  There were three rules (“I have another rooooo-lah!” Joss declared imperiously): 1.  You must lick the sugar out of the bottom of the tea cup.  2.  No one may throw your tea on the floor.  3.  No one may bring a cannon to the tea party.  (Rooooo-lah-making was suspended when the rules became too silly.)  And Auntie Valerie makes my gratitude list yet again–it was her old tea set.

2013 March 027

March Monday: The Way of Trees

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I was hoping that by giving myself a few days I would have something more polished to put up here, but this one feels like it needs a lot more work.  But the Mockingbird says to put it out there anyway. 

A teenaged boy drives his loud car
through the hollow at midnight
on his way from anger to angst.
Ribbons of red sparks catch
on the thorns of the locust trees.

Golden flowers of a woman’s hope
settle into the branches
of the towering sycamore
as she sits in its shade
and speaks her story.

The poplar, too, and the walnuts,
grasp the thoughts and dreams
of people passing through,
the green streamers of a new love,
the fierce orange flames of betrayal.

At night, the trees feed our dreams
with the colors they have harvested.
In the hollow, we dream with the trees,
our sleeping stories tangled
with the strands the trees have gathered.

 

March 3 Gratitude List:

1. Sunlight sparkling through whirling snow.
2. The way shadows hold the shapes of things. the way the snow stayed in the shadow of the poplar tree on the roof while all the rest melted away in the sun.
3. The quest and the questions. Yearning for the Ineffable Mystery.
4. Sea-tumbled, egg-shaped granite.
5. Stories. Love stories, family stories, personal stories.
May we walk in beauty.

Monday Mornings in March

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I have had my February off from writing poetry.  January’s poems were more challenging for me to write than the November batch, and they all came out more roughly cut, more in need of attention.  In the next few days, I hope to have the chapbook “Holding the Bowl of the Heart” off to Finishing Line Press for the Emerging Women’s Voices contest.  But meanwhile, I feel in need of a little discipline to keep me writing.

To that end, I am going to do a Monday poem each week in March.  I’ll try to post a prompt or discuss an idea a few days before, in case anyone wants to write with me.

For Monday, I am working on a poem about dreams.  I know I’ve done this before, but I have one in the kettle, cooking up, and I need a deadline to get it onto paper.  Where do dreams come from?  Or what connection do dreams have to our everyday landscapes?  I am working with images of trees and spiderwebs.

Join me?  Dreams, webs, trees, something like that. . .

Gratitude List:
1.  The bald eagle that flapped around the hollow this afternoon.  I had been looking out the dining room window when I saw a large buffy shape in the woods that put me in mind of a large bird, though I could tell it was just place where a branch had broken off a tree.  I sort of fell into a reverie, thinking about giant mythical birds, and what it would be like to see a really large bird like a roc out in the woods.  Suddenly, from the trees off to the left, by the pond, a bald eagle flapped outward and upward.  It sort of twisted around and looked like it was going to rest in the poplar tree before it took off.  I felt like I had recognized its energy signature before I even saw it, like I intuited its presence.
2.  Crocus and honeybees (I have seen both this spring, though not together.  The photo of the bumble below is from another spring.)
3.  The courage of the women of this article.
4.  The warm time is coming.
5.  Planting onions in the greenhouse today.  Getting my hands dirty.  Worm poop.

May we walk in beauty.

Coming soon to a yard near you. . .

2010 March 160

Bluebirds and Miracles

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Bluebirds.   When I went out to tend chickens this morning, a pair of them sat in the little tree nearby and talked to me.  The wrens yell, “Here’s where I belong and don’t anyone get into my space!”  The yellow-throat sparrows call, “Here!  I’m here!  Won’t somebody please notice me?”  And other birds sing joyfully and exuberantly.  But bluebirds sing so quietly and sweetly, you could almost miss them: “Everything’s going to be okay, you know?  Here, let me tell you a little story.”  And there’s a bluebird that signals my father when his meal-worm feeder is empty.  But then when it’s filled and the bird has eaten all it wants, it comes back and sits on a little perch my dad put up outside his window–you can’t tell me that bird isn’t there to say thank you.  Oh, and there’s a pair inspecting the birdhouse out back for a potential nesting site.
2.  The laughter of chickens.  Okay, so they don’t actually laugh.  They sort of fuss and dither and clook about the daily fare.  They’re probably a little too simple-minded to get the joke, so they don’t laugh much.  But Jessica thought that’s what I wrote yesterday (see below), and I love the whimsy of the thought of laughing chickens.  Delightful.
3.  Meeting an online friend in person.  These connections we make with other people (in physical life, in computer realms) are like spiderwebs–gossamer, exquisite.  Treasures.
4.  Cerulean.  I’m back to bluebirds.  Isn’t that an exquisite color when the sun shines on their shoulders?  Thoreau said that the “bluebird carries the sky on his back.”  Oh yes he does.
5.  Milagros.  Doesn’t that just sound like a pleasant word?  Even before I looked up the meaning, and having heard it in various contexts without knowing its meaning for sure, it was a word I wanted to carry around for a while.  It’s Spanish: miracle, wonder.  Paul Simon could have just said that these are the days of milagros.  Oh, “the way we look to a distant constellation that is shining in the corner of the sky.”

May we walk in beauty like the bluebird walks on air.

 

February 25, 2013

Gratitude List:
1. The laughter of children
2. The curiosity of chickens
3. The steadfastness of friends
4. The healing powers of the body
5. The nourishment of food
Namaste

2012 August 018
Sunny in the summertime

Highlights

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  The Wisdom of children.  (“Mom,” says Joss, “we have boats because of salt.  Because we need the boats to go get the salt.”)
2.  True entrepreneurial spirit.  Kristen is building her own business, and doing it with flair and panache.  And she makes people feel beautiful in the process.  I love it.
3.  Flavors of East Africa
4.  The wolf is not at the door, and even if he were, he COULD be a friendly wolf.
5.  Loving the work.
May we walk in beauty.

2012 July 056

Unexpected Connections

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Gratitude List:
1.  Unexpected connections
2.  Hundreds of white gulls cascading down toward the River like snowflakes
3.  Nourishment, sustenance, flavor
4.  Trying hard
5.  Letting go
May we walk in beauty.

Happy Dance

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Being Fourth Runner Up.  (At the beginning of November, I started this blog as a way to force myself to keep doing the regular exercise of writing a daily poem with Writer’s Digest blogger Robert Brewer’s prompts for the Poem-A-Day Chapbook Challenge.  I gathered the poems from that month, formed them into a chapbook with help from some wonderful women, and submitted it to the contest.  This morning I found out that I am the Fourth Runner Up!  That’s sort of like Sixth Place.  There’s no money or publication or fame attached, but it feels so good.  And the poems of the Winner and the Honorable Mention that Brewer posted this morning–they were really wonderful.  Now to prepare the manuscript to send to Finishing Line Press for their contest–deadline extended to the middle of March.)  Happy dance!
2.  Crows flying across the field in an Ursa Major formation
3.  Jen Brant’s amazing chocolate raspberry flour-less cake deliciousness
4.  Joy, joy, joy
5.  Hugs
May we walk in beauty.

From Angh to Ma

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 5 Comments

2012 November 144

This morning when we were playing with our gnomes, Joss decided that the gnome house was on fire, and he raced to get a group of gnomes to put it out.  “Red!  We need all the red gnomes!”  Exactly–to put out a fire, it takes lots of red gnomes.  Ellis chimed in, “And Minus!  We need the Minus Gnome!  Because a house with fire Minus the fire is just a house!”

Sometimes I sure would like to use some of Minus Gnome’s magic on me.  An anxious Beth Minus anxiety is just Beth.   Angst-ridden, anger-struck Beth Minus angst and anger?  Beth.  So that’s a nice little thing to do with meditation.  Of course as soon as I began to work with the idea, it hit me again that the angers and angsts are so often born of compassion and caring, and for those I have been seeking the services of Multiplication Gnome.  I need to untangle the compassion from its attendant anger at injustice, its partner anxiety at losses to those I love.

Wow.  Look at those words that I wanted to get rid of: Angst, Anxiety, Anger. . .I looked them up, along with their sister Anguish.  There at their root is angh-, which comes from the Indo-European language tree, and generally refers to distress of some sort.  That lovely vowel–ah–cut short in the back of the throat, closed up along with all hope of breath: Angh!

Fear, shame, anger, distress: what sound emerges when you truly feel them?  Angh!  Choke.

But still, that lovely vowel–ah–the first we say in so many languages: Mama, Abba, Baba, Dada, Nana, Papa.  The opposite of the choke, our family names, our names for the Ineffable Mystery: they release the breath in a tender sigh.  Ah.  There we go.

When I get really stuck in the Angh, I can dislodge that choke with a little Hahaha, a great belly laugh to force the air back through, a little spiritual CPR, so to speak.  Or skip down the street with a Tra-la-la, a little song to start up the rhythm of breathing again.  Or a little eureka, a bright discovery with a great Aha!

So the next time I wake up at three in the morning, suddenly filled with the dread of what is happening to this world that I have brought these light-filled children into, or choked with shame for some harshness I have spoken to their tender hearts, I think I will apply the Ah!, the Mama, the Ha! and see if that breath can be a lullaby to take my spirit back to sleep.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Moving out of Angh to Ma, Aha! and Hahaha!
2.  A shining piece of quartzite, white as ice, in the field by the henhouse.
3.  The things the gnomes teach us.
4.  A swept and dusted house (partly, anyway)
5.  Love, love, love: oh, you, and you and you!
May we walk in Beauty!

Garlic Faerie and Gratitude

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 OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
October Garlic and Blue Jay Faerie

Gratitude List:
1.  Silly Putty
2.  My three gentlemen
3.  Fastnachts
4.  Appropriate technologies and re-purposing
5.  Giraffes
May we walk in beauty.