Gratitude List: 1. Fibonacci spirals and the lawfulness of the apparent chaos of the universe. 2. Cycles and seasons. In the middle of challenges, the certainty (at least the hope) that the cycle will shift again to calm. 3. The tang of pesto 4. The people who are afraid, but who stand up for truth and humanity anyway, who don’t let threats or money or power or despair cow them into silence. 5. This reminder from Theodore Parker and MLK: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Gratitude List: 1. The red oak down Ducktown Road 2. All of Ducktown, really. Orange and yellow and every shade of fire. 3. Rice and beans. 4. Edgar Allen Poe and James Earl Jones 5. Listening to audiobooks on the ride to and from school with the carpool. Right now it’s Maggie Stiefvater’s Dream Thieves, part of her Raven Cycle series. Such excellent writing. I remember feeling this sort of delight in the writing of Douglas Adams, Patricia McKillip, Terry Pratchett (for different reasons, but the same sort of excitement about every sentence).
Gratitude List: 1. There’s something to be said for being welcomed into the day by three small furpeople as though one is a long-lost traveler returning home at last. 2. Owls calling through the gloam. 3. I like that word, “gloam,” and “gloaming.” And “crepuscular,” though it sounds a little like a disease. “Dusk” and “dawn,” the grey times of day. The words are pleasant, and suggest the magic present in the liminal moments of the day cycle. 4. The clean white page. Possibility. 5. Onion bagels.
May we walk in Beauty!
Here’s a poem I started working on yesterday. It might still want some revision:
Your Wild Cry by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider
When the gun of the hunter is trained on your arrow, on the vee in the sky where you strain your wings beneath the belly of cloud, call aloud to your sisters to fly with the wind, to fly true. Tip your wings through the gap between beams of autumn sunlight, shift your shape, shift your seeming. Turn your goose to crow, to wren. Turn into jay, into warbler. Dive down, fly low, change your sky-riven cry to caw, to buzz, to a twittering in the brushy fields.
Don’t let your voice be silenced. Change it. Don’t let your call be deadened. Let it echo through the valleys and hillsides. Take a new voice, more insistent, more urgent, and wilder.
Gratitude List: 1. The satisfying pinkish shine of a well-scrubbed copper-bottomed pot. 2. The clucks and buzzes and twitterings of the people in the bushes on the late migration south. 3. Rain and wind. I love storminess. I remember when Miss Gehman showed us the Olivier version of King Lear in high school Shakespeare class–It was the storm that sold me, the King and his Fool out in the storm. 4. There really are windows everywhere. You just need to know how to look. Sometimes when life is intense, it’s just hard to see them. 5. The urgency of Greta Thunberg and Autumn Peltier and their cohort.
There are windows everywhere, if you choose to see them.
Gratitude List: 1. That within us which is wild and untameable. The Wildness that calls to be experienced and known. This is why one of my names for the Holy One is the Wildest One. 2. Autumn walks. Leaves falling all around. Red berries. The scuttlings of small animals and birds in the brush. 3. Circles of protection and care. 4. Haiku and Tanka and terse, short-form poetry. 5. A good night’s sleep.
Cherry Lane: In the Eastern Orchard, Cherry and Pear and Wild Rose
Gratitude List: 1. Red berries and autumn leaves and morning mist. And afternoon walks through the fields and orchards. 2. A day off. It’s a working day, but one I can take at my own pace. (Last night was really rough with gastro-intestinal issues, so I am especially grateful that I don’t have to go anywhere today. And I feel much better this morning.) 3. Maddy Prior and Steeleye Span and their fierce and folksy ilk–my soundtrack for today. 4. Reflected light. 5. You, my beautiful beloveds. How the right word always seems to come at the right moment. Sometimes I need to stew and fret and grumble for a while within the maze of my own troubles, but when it gets hard to breathe there always seems to be a thread in this amazing tapestry that I can grasp onto. May our webs and weavings grow ever outward to hold all within our reach.
Gratitude List: 1. How the smell of coffee begins to revive me, even before the first sip. 2. Featherbed weather. 3. Thursdays that are Fridays. 4. Red and orange trees, and how they focus the blue behind them. 5. Morning silence. Lately, the noise of the day occasionally feels like an assault. I need to store up morning silence like cool water and sip from the memory well of it all through the day.
Poem from a year or so ago: Prayers and Rage by Beth Weaver-Kreider
What can we give besides our prayers and rage?
And what will that avail?
Send out the story on October winds.
Fling it high, where crows are flying.
Send the message echoing into earth
with every pounding step you take.
Listen.
Let the shells of your ears gather the story.
Reel in the gossamer strands of the tale
and weave them into the veil you wear.
Listen for the stories of those who weep,
those who rage, those who only speak
with the shrug of a shoulder,
with a sigh, with a shudder.
Listen, too, to those who walk right in,
who step into your circle without invitation.
Listen to the voices that are hard to hear.
Offer only the bread that is yours to give.
Be like the old gods, with the raven Wisdom
on one shoulder and Memory on the other,
and Reason perched upon your hat.
Offer what is yours: your rage, your prayer, your watchful quiet heart.
And another, more thematically whimsical: Duck, duck, goose. Goose, goose, wren. Mist, moon, mist. October.
Gratitude List: 1. Finding my way again to deep breath. 2. Chilly autumn rain. Yes, really. The melancholy of a rainy fall day can be satisfying even for sanguine personalities. 3. While I have never been a big fan of the cold season, I love wearing layers and leggings, and that season has returned, and so I feel much more comfortable in clothing. 4. This full-spectrum lamp that Jon bought to help boost us through the coming winter. Light-bathing. 5. The distinctly autumn sounds of the calls of geese and jays and crows. I feel my animal self more distinctly in these days, pulling between the longing to migrate and the longing to hunker down and burrow in.
“Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.” —Rumi Like big sweaters and soft scarves on a chilly fall morning, I am finding a return to a regular practice of gratitude to be fortifying against internal chills.
Gratitude List: 1. One small boy submitted a cello piece he wrote, to the York Symphony Orchestra Song Writing Contest for students. He received a call from the director yesterday that he won an honorable mention. I’m so happy that his hard work received some recognition. 2. Stories. Grit. Resilience. Resolve. 3. The small sounds of morning. The little water fountain, a boy shuffling through pages in the next room. Small cat squeaks and mews of greeting. 4. Advocates. 5. A warm robe and slippers.
Gratitude List: 1. The play, while it was absolutely marvelous, is over. I only ushered, and I am exhausted. My son the sound engineer is more tired than I, and I am sure the actors are working on a deficit. It’s going to be a gentle week in my classroom, I think. 2. Fall color. The maple trees are on fire. 3. Listening ears. 4. Challenge. I am trying to lean into the challenges, and accept what they will teach me. Does this get harder with age? Or am I just in a phase of comfort-seeking? In my dream last night, I was afraid to scale a large rock, but when it came to it, I scrambled up without effort. I will carry that sense of personal empowerment with me. 5. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s more of an exhortation than a gratitude. So personal exhortations will be my fifth gratitude. When I find myself in a negative self-talk loop, I’ll add exhortations. You’ve got this, Grrrrl.
May we walk in Beauty!
(Isn’t that “h” in exhaustion and exhortation an interesting bit of extra and perhaps unheeded breathiness? I do like it. Say exhaustion with the “h” and it has a nice helpful exhale in the middle. Exhale–that’s an “h” that definitely gets pronounced. It’s almost onomatopoetic: It sounds like what it is. And the almost enunciated “h” in exhortation is fortifying. Try saying that one in the word, and you’re ready to conquer that coming challenge. Remember to breathe!)
Mockingbird Chronicles 