Gratitudes

You are Beloved

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

When they are babies or small children, each child at my church is held and blessed by one of our pastors, and told: “You are known and loved by God.” Whatever your word for that great and unknowable–but personal and tender–Mystery, know this today and always: The One who is the Source and Cause of all being, all Beauty, all Knowing, all Making, loves you. Knows you. As intimately as a painter who cherishes the tiny green dot of color in a painting, which she knows is there, which she placed there with purpose. You are deeply and singularly beloved.

Gratitude List:
1. Contemplating Longing and Belonging, and the Web upon which we all live and move.
2. Deep sleep. Somehow, at this point of middle age, sleep has become a regular visitor to this list–perhaps because it’s not so regular in real life
3. How dreams teach me about myself
4. Artistic processes–whether it be collage or poetry or doodles, or simply seeing and listening
5. All my Beloveds. You’re in my heart, on my web. I cast a line from me to you today. Take hold.

May we walk in Beauty!

Rising

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Gratitude List:
1. Rising. All the little spring plants are rising up. Aconite and hellebore. Onion grass. I’ve been meaning to get a hellebore for years, and last year my friend gave me one. The greenery has been up since Brigid’s Day. May soon we’ll see a shy Lenten Rose.
2. Chocolate. Yeah, I bought “too much” for Young Son’s classroom. The “extras” were yummy.
3. Elderberry and zinc. Crossing my fingers that I can keep this cold at bay. I’m usually fine in the mornings, but I crash in the afternoons. I am going to take my elderberry and zinc along to school. Maybe I should nap during lunch–sleep seems to be one of the best revivers.
4. Homemade pizza.
5. Safety nets. We have yearly mental health screenings for students at certain grade levels at our school. A team of gentle souls from a local counseling center interviews students, giving them a chance to talk about their problems. I dream about the day we could get an ongoing grant or something to be able to screen all kids every year. One thing this does is that it normalizes this kind of conversation about mental health. It’s a check-up, just like a physical.

May we walk in Beauty!

Growing

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In second or third grade, my teachers did that thing where you fill a jar with wet paper towels and then poke corn kernels and beans around the outside, and as they send out roots and send up shoots, you get to watch the whole process. Last fall, I decided I wanted to do that in my classroom, just for a little excitement, even if it’s an English class in a high school rather than an elementary science room. I left the jar of corn on my desk for a long time, too busy to get to it, but at the beginning of the semester, a couple students noticed and asked what it was. When I told them, they went and filled the jar with wet paper towels, and we poked the corn in along the sides. I rubber-banded a piece of plastic over the top to keep in the moisture.

Within days, the roots were beginning to grow, and it was less than a week before the sprouts started poking upward. I brought them home last night to plant in a little container, and now I am going to do a set of beans.

Maybe it will help my students to connect with natural processes in a visceral way. Maybe it will be a metaphor for their own rampant growth. Maybe it’s just a nice diversion, a way to spark and nurture generalized curiosity. It’s a fun thing to have in the classroom, and a community-building experience: Everyone is rooting for growth.

Gratitude List:
1. Growth
2. Green
3. Curiosity
4. Hope (Curiosity and Hope were the themes of last weekend’s conference)
5. Jon WK. He’s always on my implicit Gratitude List, but sometimes I’ve just got to mention how marvelous it is to share a life with such a wise and compassionate soul.

May we walk in Beauty!

Beets are Deadly Serious

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This is a photo of a poster in the dining room at the National Conference Center. I love Jitterbug Perfume. I need to try to figure out how to use this as a basis for a Creative Writing exercise in descriptive and fanciful writing. It’s so imaginative, it goes way out beyond extended metaphor. Part of it is the wild riff on beets themselves, and part of it is the repeated comparison to the characteristics of other vegetables.

And that last line. Suddenly beet people are desperate, perhaps visionary, perhaps utterly mad.

Try it. Choose a random thing, a thing among things, something you can compare to other items in a similar category: paper clips, Legos, dogwood tree. Describe it, in terms of itself, but also in terms of the other things in its category. Who exemplifies the characteristics of your item? Remember that you really aren’t describing an item at all, but a person.

Gratitude List:
1. Kitty snuggles. (Except at 3 in the morning. No, even that is sweet, if disruptive. Thor seems to have some anxiety issues related to Mama going away. He kept waking me up. He wanted to perch on top of me–shoulder, hip–but seemed to need to hold on with his claws. Sigh. Still, midnight purrs and kitty kisses are precious.)
2. Being home. Being away, and then being home again.
3. Making plans, making progress toward goals.
4. Morning sun.
5. The moon, the moon, the moon.

May we walk in Beauty!

Going Home

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Doorways
by Beth Weaver-Kreider, 2006

“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
Where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.” ~~Rumi

Everywhere you look,
Open doorways beckon.

See, there between those two trees?
Look, the still waters of the pond are doors which open inward.
Who enters when the breezes wrinkle the waters’ surface?
Someone has just walked out the doorway of that clump of tall grass,
Leaving the door ajar.
Hurry! Perhaps we can follow!

Wander the hill and the hollow.
Follow the wayward winds that rush and tumble over the thresholds.
Listen in the dawn for the voices.

The chickadee who scolds you from the apple tree
Is the herald of someone soon to enter.
Wash your hands and face.
Stand up straight.
You have guests to greet.

Draw water from the spring.
Set extra places at the table
And throw another log on the fire.

Prepare a feast and pour out libations.
Be ready!
Who knows who will arrive?

Gratitude List:
1. Colleagues: Chances to connect with people I see in the rush of the day, to relax, talk, settle in, play games. I work with good people.
2. Connecting, making the web wider. I was in two small sessions yesterday afternoon that gave me hope and heart, both for myself and the possibilities of better managing the workload (in ways that will push my students to take more responsibility for their own progress), and also for the future for students who get marginalized and ignored.
3. Being fed. Physically, intellectually, spiritually.
4. Hymnsing!
5. Going home again. Eager to see my family.

May we walk in Beauty!

Tunnels and Passages

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Gratitude List:
1. This weird old building complex of rabbitty tunnels and passages. I’m at the National Conference Center again for a Mennonite Education Conference. I have a little monk’s cell that I can escape to whenever the noise and hullabaloo and the press of people gets to be too much for me.
2. Quiet time just for me
3. Webs of connection
4. How story lives within us
5. Breakfast is waiting somewhere down there in the tunnels, if I can only find it. . .

May we walk in Beauty!

Things Work Out

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Same photo as yesterday, sent through a rainy filter.

Gratitude List:
1. Wonder. When I was a kid, my teacher had us fill a jar with wet paper towels, and then poke seeds around the edges, and we watched the corn grow roots and sprouts. Last fall, I brought a jar and some corn into my classroom, and set it on my desk, hoping to get around to doing it in my classroom, just to see what would happen. (I’m a high school English teacher, but wonder is wonder, and science belongs everywhere.) Last week, my students were asking me about the jar, and one of them went and filled it with wet paper towels, and I poked the little kernels in, kind of doubting that it would work as I remembered. But the roots have been growing down, long and strong, and several sturdy green shoots are shooting upward. My students are loving it as much as I am. We’re all rooting (ha!) for the little plants. I guess I will have to transplant them soon, and then I’ll have sweet corn this summer! (Next up: beans.)
2. The power of personal narrative. We do a lot of personal narratives in writing classes. It can be a little challenging to keep it fresh, especially when you have the same students in a couple different classes, but it’s part of the deep curriculum at my school: We want our students to be able to self-examine, to understand who they are.
3. Colors. A student of mine introduced me to the game I Love Hue, an app that sets up a grid of colored squares, and then rearranges a bunch of them, and you have to move them back to the right places in relationship to each other. Sometimes I am a whiz at this game, and sometimes I am terrible. My brain is not consistent in its recognition of varieties of hues. I feel like I’m learning and improving my sense of hues, especially as they shift around the grid in relationship to each other.
4. Books. A friend recommended The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog. It came in the mail yesterday. I want to read it with Josiah, and we’re currently into Avi’s Ragweed and Poppy series, so it will wait, but I am excited to get started. (We were reading The Book of the Dun Cow, but I had forgotten that the basilisks killed Pertelote and Chauntecleer’s three chicks, and that was a deal-breaker for us. We stopped the book.)
5. When the planning works out. My brain was so foggy last night that I went to bed without a plan for Speech class, but I woke up with a very clear picture in my brain of the file where I had last year’s plans for the same thing, and I found it this morning, and it’s brilliant. I don’t know what foggy-brained-me was thinking, trying to re-invent the plans all over.

May we walk in Beauty!

Still

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Gratitude:
Quiet morning. In the world. In my brain.
Remembered reflections on the pond.
Simple morning noises.
Slow dawn.
Coffee.
Sigh.

Aconite Awakens

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Trying to make sense of a dream last night. Buying an old three story house in the city, taller than all the surrounding houses, dozens of rooms. The owners left so much stuff behind, and there was so much to discover: clothes, games, Civil War memorabilia, books, kitchen items. They even left two cats. I think this is a dream of abundance, of sudden knowledge that I have more inner resources than I realized. Now, I need time to meditate in waking life to make the connections.

Gratitude List:
1. The aconite is up, golden buttercups catching the slanting sun rays of a winter afternoon.
2. Walking with Josiah after school. He instigates a walk almost as often as I do.
3. Maybe it’s the season for sundogs? We saw a really sparkly spot of one on the way home again yesterday.
4. I went to bed early last night, and slept all night until morning. Good, solid rest. May my brain be less foggy today than yesterday.
5. My students. All of them, and two in particular, who chose during their Speech class interviews to be interviewed about what it’s like to grow up black or bi-racial in the the US. It’s not their job to teach the rest of us, but they chose to open up their stories, and we learned. Deeply. Most of the best learning moments are not orchestrated by the teacher.

May we walk in Beauty!

Breath Lifts Spirit

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Look what the goddess does when she is sad:
She takes up a tambourine, made of taut skin
and rimmed with castanets of brass,
and she begins to dance.
The sound blares out wildly,
reaching even to the depths of the underworld,
so loud, so clamorous is it.

Look what the goddess does when she is sad:
She finds the wildness in herself,
and as she does,
she finds that there is joy there too.
–Patricia Monaghan (attr. to Euripides)

Gratitude List:
1. One young snow goose in the flock of a thousand Canadas across the road from my parents’ house yesterday.
2. Anticipation: I have an education conference coming up at the end of the week, and I always look forward to the feeling of a little retreat. All the mundane tasks are taken care of. I get my own little room with my own little bed. I love getting to talk to colleagues and others, but also having time completely to myself.
3. Stories that inspire and heal
4. How breath lifts spirit
5. All the people who are working for justice.

May we walk in Beauty!