Gratitudes

Case Clothed

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

The prompt for today was to write a “Case ______” poem. I immediately thought of Case Closed, but that felt really cliched, almost what the prompt was fishing for. Then Jon made some comment on my outfit for the day, something about my sartorial responsibility, and suddenly I was off and running. My closet isn’t quite as dire as this makes it sound, perhaps, but. . .well. . .perhaps it is.

Case Clothed

It’s a clear case of sartorial irresponsibility,
a cache of clothes exploded to infinity.
My closet’s filled with clothes that don’t suit me.
Textures and colors that please the eye,
but little that fits my current sensibility,
which is perhaps my own inability
to see the consequences of my own materiality,
to truly understand the concept of simplicity.
It’s time to chase my self-indulgence with austerity,
And close the case on this insanity.

Gratitude List:
1. Soft fur, soft feathers, soft blankets
2. Wildness
3. Wind
4. Poetry
5. Perspective

May we walk in Beauty!

Observing a Photograph of My Great-Great-Grandmother

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s Prompt is to write a portrait poem. I looked at an old photo of my great-great-grandmother, Catherine Witwer Weaver, who was a midwife.

I took a photo of the photo on the wall, and captured the light from my own room reflected into hers, and there is the room of my own head casting a shadow on the left side of the photo.

Gratitude List:
1. Poeming
2. Grandmothers
3. Kestrel on a wire
4. Dreaming
5. Sleeping

May we walk in Beauty!

You, Too, Will Rise Again

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


Today is the first day of National Poetry Month 2018! As I often do, I will follow Robert Lee Brewer’s poetry prompts on his blog Poetic Asides (associated with Writer’s Digest) for writing a poem a day during the month. Today’s prompt is to write a “secret” poem.

Lately I’ve been finding great satisfaction in publishing my tiny poems on Instagram, in a short and terse format. It requires a different set of poetic muscles to write in extremely short forms. There’s something that feels more intimate in this process, and I find my short poems taking on a Sufi-esque tenderness. I find myself wanting to emulate Rumi and Hafiz. So today, I just tried to make it happen. I would like to shift it so there isn’t a direct gendered pronoun in the last line, but I didn’t want to lose the intimacy.

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday’s celebration of a beautiful, vibrant, compassionate, wise, intellectual, and grateful woman. Grieving together as a gathered community. Stories of the Mama Bear, the Turtle Dove, the Wise Owl.
2. Those goldfinches at my father’s feeders are wearing their spring motley, and the gold is shining through.
3. Getting out and walking with the family. Every winter, I start to feel like it will never get better, like the rest of my life will be spent indoors. Then there comes a day when things open up, I can crawl out from under the rock of the season, and I can suddenly breathe again.
4. Redbuds are blooming! Have you seen them? Oh, my heart suddenly felt free again when I saw them.
5. Transformation. I know we spend our time in the tomb before we can be resurrected, but I just always lose sight of the coming transformation.

May we walk in Beauty!

View From A Day

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Gratitude List:
1. Mama Goose is nesting by the pond
2. Three very fuzzy sheep
3. A colony of cats
4. Handsome Lonesome Joe the duck
5. The little apple tree

May we walk in Beauty!

Finding the Thread

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flowers11

Gratitude List:
1. Reading poetry with friends
2. Mama goose on a nest by the pond
3. The Middle School exhibition at my school tonight.
4. We found Sachs the cat, after he spent the night locked in the back part of the basement.
5. Finding the thread of the story.

May we walk in Beauty!

Their Day Has Already Begun

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Gratitude List:
1. The marching
2. The community
3. The poetry
4. The speeches
5. The chanting

May we walk in Beauty!

The Bridge is Fraying

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I remember drawing this five years ago after I had a little dream about a little gnome/elf/spirit-being who chose to be my helper.

Sometimes lately, I feel as though the bridge can’t hold. The gulf between us is widening, and the the bridge is strained almost beyond repair. This cultural divide in the US keeps growing, keeps expanding. What words can we string together into lines and cables to hold the space between us? Or do we just give up? Wave goodbye across the chasm? Accept that we no longer have common ground? It has torn the fabric of my church, torn the roots of families and friendships, of social groups and communities.

I know I am part of the problem. My own ideals and values keep me settled on one side of the chasm. I must speak up and speak out for what I believe to be right and against what I believe to be great wrong. I can no more shift my position than I could leap into air and fly across the widening gulf. But there are places of common ground between us–I am certain of that, and I don’t know how to connect them when the space between us grows so rapidly.

What I think we need to recognize is that when we are torn apart from each other in these ways, something within us is also torn. When you and I can no longer touch or hear each other across this chasm, something within each of us also becomes unmoored, unhinged. If the bridge breaks, we all lose something of ourselves.

Gratitude List:
1. That golden moment of sun touching the snowy tops of the trees as it enters the hollow.
2. The spring songs of sparrow and wren and titmouse.
3. As frustrating as his attention is at 5 am, I love the way this little ginger cat loves me.
4. Catching up. Yesterday brought me a lot closer to being caught up.
5. The threads that hold us together.

May we walk in Beauty!

Manifesting

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Here’s a meme that’s been making its rounds on social media lately:
The way you are describing your life is the way it is manifesting.
The way you are describing your life is the way it is manifesting.
The way you are describing your life is the way it is manifesting.

Now tell me again:
How are things going?

It’s not a NEW thought, really. The way it catches me is more about how it’s worded. It gets behind my oh-I-know-that-stuff-already defenses. The gratitude work has been immensely helpful to me in breaking some of the old cycles of complaint and self pity that happen when I describe my life to myself as series of burdensome events. Yes, if I look back at my meanderings on this blog over the years, I can see that I have been struggling–successfully and unsuccessfully–with this process in its deeper psychic layers. It’s not that I haven’t read and absorbed Shakti Gawain (she’s a sweet version of the Norman Vincent Peale for the New Age set). What you visualize is what you become, she says. One of the sermons I remember from years ago was one in which my pastor spoke about what we tell ourselves about ourselves. Do I keep telling myself I am exhausted and overwhelmed? (Yes.) Then I feel/am exhausted and overwhelmed. I “know” this principle, but I need to keep deepening it.

I can’t just visualize myself NOT overwhelmed and exhausted because visualization and belief don’t make the stacks of work go away. Imagination and action have to go together. That, too, has been a principle I have long been working to realize within myself. The contemplative and the activist need to dance together.

When I began this blog six years ago, I decided to move beyond just thinking of myself as a poet, but to DO poetry, to let those strips of words across the page in every gratitude list be little poems where I would daily juxtapose images and ideas that formed little poems of my day. As I began to describe myself to myself as a poet, I found my way into the identity of poet in a more solid way than I had ever done before.

Throughout my life, I have had begun several novels, imagining plot and structure in my brain, thinking through characters, beginning first chapters. And then abandoning them as life took over. A couple days ago, my friend Fern talked about Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book Big Magic, in which she talks about how the ideas come shopping for us, and if we don’t answer them, they go away and find someone else to bring them to reality. I have two ideas that have been knocking at my door for a couple years now. To use the words of that meme up there, I am afraid to describe my life in terms of writing books. That is partly because I have been such a squirrel with the ideas that come knocking. I don’t want to do that anymore. If I welcome one in for tea, then i want to invite it to stay for the weekend, instead of becoming enamored of the next one that comes along and letting the first one drift away in loneliness and rejection.

So I’m putting it out there. The book idea I began working on two summers ago is still hanging out in the corners. I am going to feed it, begin to shape it, help it find its place. And the novel that began knocking a year ago has again begun to catch my attention. I’m grateful that these two friends have stuck around, and I want to facilitate their existence.

Still, I need to tend to the overwhelm of the mundane, or my life will implode. For now, I will catch little spaces in each week to tend to these companions, and plan for a summertime process that might give me time to work more intentionally with them.

I am a little sheepish when I speak about this, because I know what a squirrel I have been, how I have wandered away from the urgent ideas in the past. Oooh. See what I did there? I described my life in terms of a tendency to failure. What if I turned that around? What if, instead, I described my life this way: I have been a seeker of new ideas, a kid in the candy shop of story, a dreamer of books. And now, I am going to see if I can draw some of those ideas out of the ether, begin to describe myself as a writer of books.

Gratitude List:
1. Bald eagle
2. Shooting star
3. The shining talents of our shining young people
4. The sound of Spring
5. Laughter

May we walk in Beauty!

The Light Beckons

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

“Every day, priests minutely examine the Law
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.
Before doing that, though, they should learn
How to read the love letters sent by the wind
and rain, the snow and moon.”
—Ikkyu

Gratitude List:
1. Mitakuye oyasin: All my relations. That’s you, my Beloveds, and this curled-up ball of ginger fur beside me, and the sycamore tree that holds up the moon, and the moon, and the little mouse that makes a racket in the walls at night.
2. Parent Teacher Conferences: I always feel nervous. It’s a different sort of social situation than normal, and these are the real stakeholders in the work that I do. It’s not the same as a performance review, but I am responsible to these people for the care and nurture of their children, and I want to articulate well my perceptions of their children in my classroom. And it’s always a wonderful time, even when there are crunchy bits in the conversation. It’s an honor to do this work, and an honor to talk to the parents.
3. One daffodil has opened next to the school offices. I want to get a photo tomorrow–maybe it will have some friends by then.
4. The patience of robins.
5. The voices of the young people.

May we walk in Beauty!

Taking Stock

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

Mine is not a particularly stressful life. My basic needs are met. I know my kids will be fed. I have great support systems: family, friends, colleagues, students, church. My traumas have been few, and my griefs have occurred within the compassionate circles of people who know how to love. My greatest stresses are the ones I put on myself, usually: taking on more than I can accomplish, frittering away too much time that could be spent actually doing things I love.

In the face of stress, I tend to go all British: keep a stiff upper lip and soldier on. Often that serves me well―it keeps me from getting too deep into the circular ruts that I can gouge in my brain. Fall down. Get up. Keep walking. Fall down again. Get up again. Continue. It works. And my gratitude and mindfulness spiritual practices have helped to keep me away from the ruts.

Today, however, my mind began to enumerate all the stressors that have plagued me in the past few weeks. Instead of entering the ruts, as I began to list them all, I suddenly began to feel a weight lifting. The tiredness and crankiness and insomnia and heaviness that have begun to plague me seemed no longer unreasonable. In the past month, I have felt a little buffeted, a little at the mercy of fate. When I can recognize that, accept that it gets me down, maybe I can offer myself a little compassion, take a rest, and move forward.

1. It started several weeks ago, with the shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. How to hold that? How to respond? How do we break an organization with such power and grasp as the NRA?
2. Shortly after that, my family started getting sick. Fortunately for us, none of us got the full-fledged flu, or at least our immune systems battled well. But all of us got sick. One child was out of school for almost a week. The parents were both just barely holding on. We probably should have all taken a sick day together and just laid around getting our rest and fluids.
3. Finally we made it through the worst of the sickies, and then we got hit by a wind storm that took out our power, water, and heat for the best part of three days.
4. Monday, the morning after the power finally came on, my eldest son fell up the stairs on his way to class and broke his arm. We finally managed to get him back to school and practicing for a performance this weekend.
5. Today at lunch, one of my students, who sits near my desk, said she heard my phone vibrating behind the desk over and over again all period. I woke it up, and it lit up with phone and text messages saying that my youngest son’s school (his entire district, actually) had been evacuated due to a bomb threat.
6. And through it all, I have continued to try to figure out what my role is in resisting the Death Eaters who seem to be taking over.

That’s a lot of stress. And at each point, I realized how fortunate we are:
1. Comforting community
2. My children are well and healthy for the most part
3. Three days is not very long to be without power, in the grand scheme of things, and we could go to my parents’ house for heat and water and light.
4. A broken arm is not a concussion, is not a chronic disease, is not a long-term problem. Little kid bones tend to heal fast and well.
5. My children have many adults, from family members to teachers and administrators, who are looking out for their safety and best interests. And I know that their classmates whose families have fewer support structures than we do also receive the same benefit of caring and tender teachers and administrators.
6. No one has to resist the Death Eaters alone. We’re all in this together. And it’s been done before.

May we walk in Beauty!