Gratitudes

Advent 2: What Will You Risk?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today we make our turning into the second passage. Yesterday’s journey was quite pleasant, really, as I looked around and saw how many are taking this journey with us. That’s the paradox, isn’t it? It’s a solitary journey that we walk in community, a journey of silence that contains the whispers and singing of others, a joyful anticipation and a recognition of deep grief and pain. Can we hold both sides of the story, center ourselves within the paradox? Sure, we can. Labyrinths are funny that way. They’re disorienting and confusing, and you can never really know where you are, and yet—unlike the fragmented turnings of a maze—the pathway is a single twisting line. All we have to do is to follow the next twist ahead.

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes reminds us that we were made for these times, echoing Mordecai, the loving uncle in the ancient story, telling his niece Esther the Queen: “Perhaps you were brought here for just such a time as this.” Esther risked her own life to save her people from a capricious and arrogant ruler. As we journey today, let’s ask ourselves: What are we willing to risk in these times? What will we put on the line?

Simply walking into this labyrinth is a risk. We do not know what is around the next bend, what monsters lurk deep and unrecognized within the shadows of our psyches. But walking together, holding our lights high, whispering to each, “I’m here; don’t be afraid,” we can find our way through.

Yesterday, we thought about those burdens in our packs. I have one that I don’t know how to carry, and it asks that question about what I am willing to risk. I’ll put my pack down a moment here and take it out. Open it up. See, all that rage and grief and uncertainty swirling around in there? I want to be one of the ones who stands in the gap here when my country still has not returned the children to their parents, when no one seems to know what to do to make that happen. I want to speak out, to speak truth. But I don’t know how, exactly. So it all just swirls around in there, taking up space and making my pack so heavy.

Take a moment to explore one of the burdens in your own pack, one that you don’t know quite what to do with. Write about it in your journal, or tell a friend about it. Write a song or poem, or paint a painting. I still don’t know exactly how I am going to resolve mine, but it feels lighter now. Maybe this December journey will shed some light for me. For you, too.

Envisioning Peace:
Yesterday in church, Michelle asked us to hold Isaiah’s vision of a world in which the response is peace and understanding rather than violence, ploughshares rather than swords. She asked us to consider situations in which people chose the peaceful path. During Advent, I’m going to look for stories and ideas that hold this vision.

For today’s story, I hold in my mind the vision of Queen Esther taking the risk onto herself, speaking her truth, and averting the genocide of her people. I think that one of the ways in which people step into the ploughshares vision is to choose a third path. Instead of simply capitulating to the injustice or taking up arms to fight it, this path does resist and stand up to the oppression, but with truth instead of weapons.

I think this is just what our times are calling for. How can we envision this third response?

Opening the Door to Advent: Day 1

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Advent, Day One:
It seems as though we’ve been walking in this forest forever, daily trekking deeper into the dark woods. At first, in the golden light of September, we revelled in the slanting light, the gentle breeze, the energizing zing in the air. Slowly and steadily, we walked further into the wood, each day closing in around us little by little: more shadow, less light.

Today we have arrived at the doorway to the labyrinth of December. We hear the voices of the carolers, and we notice the twinkling lights, the bustle, the rushing to prepare, prepare, prepare. We join in. And also we stand aside, wondering if this is really the meaning of it all. We celebrate the community the season brings, the sense of participating in ancient rituals and traditions. And we sigh and roll our eyes, frustrated with the commercialism and materialism of it all, the knowledge that the season has been co-opted by a capitalist system that must see profits this month in order to succeed.

We stand at the door of the labyrinth. We’ve been walking in increasing shadow for weeks now, and today we step into the deeper shadows of the maze, carrying our heart-lights to guide us, seeking the light that will carry us into the coming year. In the Christian tradition, people pause and consider the coming of the child of light, the one who breaks the chains of oppression, sets the captives free, brings healing to the nations. Ancient pre-christian European traditions and their modern-day followers await the birth of the solar child at Yule. We recognize in both of these over-laid traditions that the outer shadows are mirrored by our inner shadows, and just as we cannot escape the shadows of the outer world, we must walk through the inner shadowscape in order reach the light at the center. And together, we seek the light that is coming.

Today, we walk the first passage into the labyrinth. What are you carrying this year as you walk? Can you give it a name? Write a bullet list of the heavy things that weigh down the pack on your back. What fears and anxieties and angers do you carry? What complacency? What closed boxes reside in that pack, boxes you fear to look into? Can you simply give them names for now?

Now consider the light which you carry in your hand. Picture it. Is it a bright flashlight with a focused beam? Or are the batteries dying, offering a diffuse and precarious light? Is it a lantern, full and bright with a strong flame? Or a candle, flickering in a protected glass jar? Consider the strength of the light you carry. How can you shore it up and strengthen it for the coming journey?

If your batteries are dying, what will refuel them? Will you do one piece of art a day? Even if it’s a 3’x5′ doodle? Will you read three poems every morning when you wake up? Will you walk for half an hour on your lunch break? Will you sing along to the radio in the car without worrying about what people in the other cars think? Will you call someone you love? If your batteries are weak or your flame is low, commit to doing one thing today to strengthen your light on this first passage into the shadow-realm.

Good. Let’s walk together through today’s passage. What a lovely light you carry! Mine’s been flickering a lot lately. Sometimes, it burns so brightly and cheerily, I think I’ll never have to worry, but then a gust of wind comes along without warning and nearly extinguishes it. But we can feel safer if we walk together. If one of us begins to lose the light, let’s trust that someone else’s light will be sufficient for a little while until we can get our own going strongly again.

Gratitude List:
1. That fox we watched nosing along the creek and the bosque yesterday. This morning, in the hollow at the base of the cherry tree by the creek, we imagine that some woods and weeds tucked into the shadows there was the fox curled up and sleeping. It really does look like it!
2. We saw two of the white squirrels at Londonderry Village yesterday. Rumors are that there are as many as five.
3. Seasonal rituals and celebrations that help to offer comfort and direction for the inner journey.
4. Companions in the labyrinth of December. Thank you for sharing your lights.
5. The light will return.

May we walk in Beauty!

Who Will You Harbor?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In that story where the pregnant woman and her husband get turned away from every door, would you have offered them shelter? Would you have helped the baby? Why not do it today? Why not help the travelers seeking shelter? Why not help the people fleeing with their child from violence? Speak up for them. Stand against the violent policies that tear apart their families and send them back into danger. Listen to Sweet Honey in the Rock: “Would You Harbor Me?”

Gratitude List:
1. You, who harbored me, my angst and my anxiety, my wrangling and my struggling. Let us be the ones who harbor others.
2. Your patience. I am a slow, slow, learner, but I am teachable. Thanks for trusting that I can learn.
3. Chocolate cream of wheat pudding. I just wanted a sort of healthy-ish snack, but somehow, I started dumping cocoa powder and sugar into the cream of wheat.
4. Reflections, and reflections of reflections. In water and windows. In eyes and hearts and souls.
5. People who help me not to do the knee-jerk dance, who help me to calm down, settle, relax and breathe before reacting.

May we walk in Beauty!

Combustible Child

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
I was a little obsessed yesterday with the way the sun shone through the wine and water glasses.

In the dream, there is a combustible child, who is likely at any moment to burst into flame: hair, chest, shins on fire. I am the child, running to escape a mob of children. Their fear and their curiosity and their rage torment me. I just want to be alone, so I can burn in peace. I burn, but I am not harmed. But my fire can burn the buildings of the town, and the trees.

Also I am a child in the mob. I run with the others, trying to catch the combustible child. I want to protect him. I know that some of the others mean to kill him, and I want to be the first to find him, to warn him, to help him. But he is always ahead of us.

We are in the labyrinthine passages beneath an old mill building. I am the child, running and hiding, afraid the light of my burning will show the children where I am. I am also seeking the child, fearful that he will hurt himself, or burn the building down, but mostly that the other children will hurt him.

I have found a way to the roof of the old mill. The others are still mostly down in the underground passages. The building is wood, but it is not burning beneath me, although other buildings have burned in the past. Down below, I am a child in the mob; I hear two children talking. They have discovered one of the secrets of the combustible child: “I think he was the one we thought had drowned there in the lake. Remember?” I have to find the combustible child and warn him.

(I welcome comments and thoughts about my dreams. I don’t feel comfortable with the “Your dream means” sort of interpretations, but speculative and conjectural comments and questions are better for helping me to think through what might be going on.)

Gratitude List:
1. How tears sometimes bless the receiver of tears. Sharing emotion, like sharing bread.
2. Laughing with loved ones
3. Pumpkin coconut pie, venison pie, chocolate pumpkin cheesecake pie
4. Sweet soft cat. I’m a little grumpy because Thor was chasing Sachs all around the house, thumpily and hissily. I could not get him to stop. I came downstairs to the recliner, hoping it would distract him, and I could get back to sleep. No. I held him and gave him a lecture about chasing kitties. No. Every time I settled down to sleep, he was off and thundering. The minute I turned on the light and picked up the laptop, he jumped up beside me, rolled onto his back, and fell into a deep sleep. Sigh. And am I grouchy? No, I just love this soft warm breathing presence beside me. I’ll nap later.
5. Belonging. I don’t always feel like I belong, or like I understand the unwritten rules of certain groups, even though I think I am a pretty good observer of human nature. So when I am in a group whose rules accept everyone’s awkwardness and oddness unconditionally, which loves each one not in spite of our oddities, but because of them, then I feel safe. Then I feel belonging. I am especially grateful to those of you who know how to extend unconditional welcome in ways that make everyone believe they belong.

May we walk in Beauty!

May Your Table Be Wide

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I wrote this a year or two ago, not realizing how extremely similar the title was to Jan Richardson’s World Communion Sunday poem. Clearly, her phrase sank deeply into my psyche. So I added a little dedication to the title to recognize her original.

The Table is Wide
(with gratitude to Jan Richardson)

May your table be wide,
may your arms be laden
with the bounty of harvest,
may your heart be willing.

May your feast be filling,
may your beloved’s eyes
be filled with laughter,
may your table be wide.

May your doors be open,
may strangers be welcome
to sit at your table,
may your feast be filling.

May your heart be willing,
may stories flow like wine
poured into glasses,
may your doors be open.
May your table be wide.

Gratitude List:
1. Poets and poetry, especially Jan Richardson’s blessings
2. Anticipating time with my parents and my siblings and my niblings
3. Wind: scouring, releasing, revealing, energizing
4. Pie
5. Open hearts, open arms, open tables

May we walk in Beauty!

Dropping Down and Feeling

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

For several years, I’ve been practicing a spiritual discipline that I think of as non-defensiveness. I am not even sure when I first began it. It sounds vaguely Buddhist or Gandhian, and I’m certain those are influences, but I can’t really define where or how I began it as a spiritual discipline. Lately, I’m becoming uncomfortable with the term because it feels so non, so negativizing. And as I try to expand my ability to stay in touch with my feelings, something about the word feels too cold and calculating, too harshly reasonable, too solidly logical.

I think of rage and fury and defensiveness as the vanguard emotions, the frontier responses. They’re out there on the front lines, fighting it out. When I feel attacked, I practice dropping down below the fray, finding the steady place beneath the wild turmoil of the fighting plain (plane). And I have been getting better at that, good at taking that breath, realizing that my instinct is to dash in with my own verbal bombs, and instead dropping down. That dropping down, sinking to center, settling in–that’s the non-defensive posture that I have been learning to take.

I think, however, that there’s a danger of being non-defensively defensive, of sinking into that posture while wearing a mask of cold, hard, untouchable reason. It feels safe to step out of the fray and begin to take apart the arguments with logic. This is the King’s response–to break it down with the force of mind, the sword of reason. It’s not a bad stance, but it needs to be paired with the Queen’s shrewd eye for the inner world, her awareness of the secrets hidden in the chalice, the grail. If I don’t acknowledge my emotions while I drop down, I fail to find the true spiritual depth I’m seeking by not getting sucked into the skirmish.

It’s only by fully acknowledging the feelings that the skirmish brings up within me that I can truly grow from a non-defensive posture. Otherwise, I am just a Tin Man. While I breathe and drop down, I want to tell myself the story of my feelings: I feel hurt; I feel attacked and stalked; this wounds me.

Last spring, in Dr. Amanda Kemp’s course/workshop on Holding Space for Transformation, her emphasis on recognizing and acknowledging your feelings as you interrupt your defensive responses in the heat of the moment really spoke to me. When I mask my inner work with reason, I leave the feelings untended, and the wounds fester underneath my chain mail and my suit of armor.

And, to continue the martial metaphor, it isn’t that I never get into the battle. In these times, I believe that it is of utmost importance that people of conscience stand as a unified and powerful force against the powers that threaten to destroy the earth and the children, that silence the voices of the vulnerable, that exclude and marginalize difference and otherness. But I will not be effective in the big things if I spend my energy skirmishing, if I let myself get distracted from the big story by the little attacks in my individual story. And this big story needs us to be fully-realized humans who are capable workers in the realms of both reason and emotion. So the challenge, in the small skirmishes, is to drop down, but also to feel.

(I acknowledge that the archetypes of King and Queen are deeply gendered. I also find that they’re part of the language of the deep group conscious of my particular cultural background. Certainly, as a woman, I am more than the box that the Queen sits in, and I am more also than the King-Queen binary. I think that the fluid and ungendered realm of the Fool is where we will all be more free, but that’s for another day’s ruminations.)

Gratitude List:
1. Teachers who help me on the path toward wholeness. Thank you.
2. Time off, time out, time between time.
3. Three cats. I think a three-cat house is just about perfect for me.
4. How sleep tosses up bones for the dog of the brain to chew on.
5. That scarlet cardinal shining out in the gray of the morning.

May we walk in Beauty. With intention.

Protector of the Children

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This woman is from a really recent dream/image. I frequently wake up with dream-images in my head, or fragments of song, or a word or phrase, instead of a story. In this case, the central woman is wearing flowing blue robes, and lined along the edges of her cloak are children that she is protecting. She is very much a Mary-figure, and the children are safe in the folds of her cloak. There are dozens and dozens of them. May it be so.

Gratitude List:
1. The ones who protect children. Thank you.
2. The water protectors and earth protectors. Thank you.
3. Core values and deep conscience. We had a lengthy and powerful discussion in a class yesterday about making choices based on core values. My students are wise.
4. Refried beans and tortillas. Weeks ago, Jon made an enormous pot of refried beans, and froze the leftovers in batches. I love refried beans and tortillas.
5. Wordplay.

May we walk in Beauty!

In the Circle of You

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Gratitude List:
1. Vulnerable story-sharing. From exclusion and silencing to belonging and connection. May we all be safe harbors for people seeking belonging.
2. Rainbows in the weaving
3. People across the US are bonding out asylum seekers who have been kept in detention centers and prisons. You can help, too, by going to IBAEPA.org–the Immigration Bond and Advocacy Effort–to help bond out immigrants who are being held in York County Prison. Good people are doing good work. Thanks to these forward-thinking folks.
4. Balancing the science-mind and the mystical-mind. They inform and express each other, when we stop pitting them against each other. Einstein knew the secret.
5. You. I’ve seen how people come to you, their hearts battered by past exclusions and defeats, their sense of worthiness destroyed by dogma and doctrines, and how you open the arms of your heart, and it’s clear that that kind of refusal will never happen here, in the circle of you. Thank you.

May we walk in Love!

Beauty in the Little Things

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
I keep thinking I ought to repaint the door, and then I come to my senses and see the beauty.

Gratitude List:
1. Heart conversations
2. Wise friends
3. The Makers–they inspire me. Make your stuff. Buy things made by humans. Besides the art and the grace of items made by human hands, there’s a deep problem-solving intelligence that imbues handmade items.
4. My shadow-self. I am learning, again, as I eventually do each fall-to-winter turning, to embrace her. She has things to teach me.
5. Twistings of black branches against a grey sky. Austere, in a quiet and thoughtful sense.

May we walk in Beauty!

Coping

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

This is going to sound whinier than I mean it to be. It’s just a reality. Kind of funny, actually, when I’ve worked my way to the other side of it.

In summer, troubles just roll off your back. In winter, they stick together and compound each other, like those little fuzzy seed balls that stick to your socks when you walk in the fields. They catch hold of each other and suddenly they’re one big mass, and you can’t really separate them from each other. For example, the car was hit by a deer, and the light switch in the bedroom broke, and the Prius tail light is out, and the kitchen light and the bathroom lights burned out on the same day, and when we did get a new car, the front light was out, and then the water pump starting gasping like it was going out of business. In summer, you fix things and then you move on. In winter, you feel the weight of cosmic fate pounding you down with each little thing. And so many of these tiny things had to do with lost light, it began to feel like someone was making fun of me: “You feeling a little anxious about the shorter days? The loss of light is bothering you? Let’s try this.”

Ugh. Tiny, minor details. Nothing to get fussed about. You fix stuff and you move on. In summer. In winter, you gripe about it, and you feel burdened, and then you fix stuff and move on.

Gratitude List:
1. There is a frog who lives in the springhouse. This knowledge makes me happy.
2. Sun streaming in to the hollow
3. The sleeping silence of a Saturday morning house
4. The Givers. Lancaster raised $10.5 million for charitable causes yesterday. I kept the ExtraGive main page and the page for our school on the board all day yesterday, and kept refreshing it for my students to see. Thank you, Lancaster, for giving your time and money and hearts to help build up our community.
5. The vibrant browns of late autumn. The salmon-beige beech tree leaves in the understory of the woods along Ducktown Road. The leathery burnt-orange of this oak up the hill. The auburn oak across from Flinchbaugh’s.

May we walk in Beauty!