Gratitudes

Grace Beyond Chance

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A little Wendell Berry, an excerpt from The Wheel:

In a mist of light
falling with the rain
I walk this ground
of which dead men
and women I have loved
are part, as they
are part of me. In earth,
in blood, in mind,
the dead and the living
into each other pass,
as the living pass
in and out of loves
as stepping to a song.
The way I go is
marriage to this place,
grace beyond chance,
love’s braided dance
covering the world.
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“My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who you are and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.” –Maya Angelou
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“Sometimes it seems as though the Wildest One (you might call her God, or the Universe, or Love) is actively meddling in the affairs of mortals, like I am given a thing to learn, and then immediately after am handed the situations necessary for practice and integration.” –Beth Weaver-Kreider
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“You don’t need to attend every argument you are invited to.” –anonymous (possibly Zig Ziglar)

Gratitude List:
1. We are definitely at lap cat stage in our relationship. Thor is often so hyperactive that he’ll jump up on a lap only to jump down twenty seconds later. But now he settles in for the long haul.
2. Watching friendships form among the first years. This afternoon, during a quiz game we were playing, three students found their way to the front of the room so they could see the board better. It wasn’t long until they were giggling together, deciding to play as a team. I felt like I was getting a premonition of a long-term belongingness group taking shape. Three kids with very different backgrounds, different genders, different races, same smiles. May their friendship grow and flourish.
3. Got my glasses fixed. I am tired of carrying around a pair of readers and whipping them on and off my face for different distances.
4. The messy, idealistic dream we have of a democracy. It doesn’t always work well, and we sometimes yell and grumble instead of debating and discussing, but we’re working at it. I read Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again” to my classes today for my daily poem. He makes it clear that the American Dream has failed him, but that he still believes in the promise of equality and sustenance for all. It reminded me that we DO have this ideal to fight for, flawed as we are.
5. The lessons in dreams. Last night’s dream is unsettling and full of anxiety. I think I know what my Deepest self is trying to tell me, and I am grateful for the urgent message. Perhaps if I listen, the images can be a little gentler next time.

May we walk in Beauty!

Minds Like Still Water

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“On teaching:…the job seems to require the sort of skills one would need to pilot a bus full of live chickens backwards, with no brakes, down a rocky road through the Andes while simultaneously providing colorful and informative commentary on the scenery.” ―Franklin Habit
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“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.” ―W.B. Yeats
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“We’re all lovers and we’re all destroyers. We’re all frightened and at the same time we all want terribly to trust. This is part of our struggle. We have to help what is most beautiful to emerge in us and to divert the powers of darkness and violence. I learn to be able to say, ‘This is my fragility. I must learn about it and use it in a constructive way.'” ―Jean Vanier
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“I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire. 
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid, more accessible;
to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.”
―Dawna Markova

Gratitude:
Not so much a list tonight. A recognition, perhaps of the thrumming of the web, the sense of connection and holding spaces for each other. The warmth of face-to-face connections and eye contact. Twinkling eyes. The fierce protectiveness we feel for the ones in our care, and the sense of being cared for just so fiercely by others. The way lines on a page–a screen–can be drawn between us, so that we can come away with a sense that we Know each other, that we Belong in each other’s circles. That mystical sense of knowing that someone is
praying
spelling
dreaming
sending energy
holding the light
carrying stones
on my behalf, on your behalf, on behalf of the world.

May you feel yourself upon the web.

Poetry is the Lifeblood of Rebellion

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“The most radical thing any of us can do at this time is to be fully present to what is happening in the world.” -Joanna Macy
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“All I’m saying is,
Refuse to act like nothing is happening.” —Natasha Alvarez
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“If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.” –Harriet Tubman
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“Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.” –David Whyte
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“Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.” –Alice Walker
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“Autumn is a second spring, when every leaf is a flower.” –Albert Camus
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RESPONSIBILITY
by Grace Paley
It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners
giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets
also leaflets they can hardly bear to look at
because of the screaming rhetoric
It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy
to hang out and
prophesy
It is the responsibility of the poet to not pay war taxes
It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory
towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C
and buckwheat fields and army camps
It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman
It is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power as the
Quakers say
It is the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the
powerless
It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no
freedom without justice and this means economic
justice and love justice
It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original
and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems
It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it
on in the way storytellers decant the story of life
There is no freedom without fear and bravery
there is no
freedom unless
earth and air and water continue and children
also continue
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman
to keep an eye on
this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be
listened to this time

Gratitude List:
1. Dinner with the dormies
2. My colleagues
3. Being listened to, being heard
4. This little air conditioner in the window
5. The way mist gathers in the hollow

May we walk in Beauty!

That Ancient Song

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“Our indigenous voice is that ancient song which emanates from our gratitude. It knows no such construct as comparison or exclusion because it is devotional. It sings to keep the stars in the sky and the moon rising in its arc across the night. It sings to all the helpful conditions that are enabling our well-being in every given moment and it recognizes itself as an essential note in that great choir of being.” —Dreamwork with Toko-pa
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“We owe it to ourselves and to the next generation to conserve the environment so that we can bequeath our children a sustainable world that benefits all.” —Wangari Maathai
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Sometimes we have a strong sense of what our destiny is calling us to do, but we don’t feel quite ready or brave enough to answer the call. We need a push, an intervention, a serendipitous stroke—what you might call “fate bait.”

It’s a person or event that awakens our dormant willpower and draws us inexorably toward our necessary destiny; it’s a thunderbolt or siren song or stage whisper that gives us a good excuse to go do what we know we should do.

Do you have any ideas about how to put yourself in the vicinity of your fate bait?”
—Rob Brezsny
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“And death, when he comes
to the door with his own
inimitable calling card
shall find a homestead
resurrected with laughter and dance
and the festival of the meat
of the young lamb and the red porridge
of the new corn”
—Kofi Awoonor

Gratitude List:
1. Magenta
2. Cerulean
3. Viridian
4. Gold
5. Violet

May we walk in Beauty!

So Many Fragile Things

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“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” ―J.R.R. Tolkien
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“The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire” ―Teilhard de Chardin
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“There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”
―Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
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“Grace met us right there. It meets you right where it finds you, but it does not leave you where it found you. It moves you toward breath; moves you towards things being a little bit better: wow. Grace WD-40. Grace is water wings. Grace makes you shake your head with wonder, and laugh and cry.” ―Anne Lamott
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To Be Of Use
by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
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“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.” ―Oscar Wilde
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“No single voice will be able to take control if everyone in the circle has a voice.” ―Kay Pranis
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” I look up at God every day, and I say, “You are SUCH a show-off.” I have to shake my head and laugh. Maybe God does, too. If He or She does not have a sense of humor, I am doomed.” ―Anne Lamott

Gratitude List:
1. The protesters, showing us how to make courageous choices
2. In the new day, the crisis of the previous night pales
3. Today’s songs, especially this line: “. . .unseen wings, protecting, hide you.”
4. Catching up
5. Living with cats

May we walk in Beauty!

Children of One Blood

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“It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother. We all share the blood of the first mother – we are truly children of one blood.”
–Layne Redmond
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“For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us.”
~ Carl G. Jung
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The Call Away
by Robert Bly

A cold wind flows over the cornfields;
Fleets of blackbirds ride that ocean.
I want to be out of here, go out,
Outdoors, anywhere in wind.
My back against a shed wall, I settle
Down where no one can find me.
I stare out at the box-elder leaves
Moving frond-like in that mysterious water.
What is it that I want? Not money,
Not a large desk, not a house with ten rooms.
This is what I want to do: to sit here,
To take no part, to be called away by wind.
I want to go the new way, build a shack
With one door, sit against the door frame.
After twenty years, you will see on my face
The same expression you see in the grass.
*
“On this day, the Autumn Equinox, we are in perfect balance between light and dark. As we straddle this threshold time, you may be experiencing both an expanded sense of self alongside some painful contractions into a familiar darkness.

It may help to remember that sometimes we are plummeted into our darkest depths precisely because we have elevated our ceilings on Love. Our demons appear most ferociously when they feel threatened by a new attitude.

So please consider your contractions are actually validations of where you are bravely digging into your own substrate to unearth those limiting patterns and, in releasing them, revealing a greater capacity for belonging and joy.

Keep going,” Toko-pa Turner

Gratitude List:
1. Holding paradoxes. Leaning into ambiguity. (I stole this from last year’s list, but it’s apt.)
2. Tiny Toad
3. The village–fun and play, and support when things get tough
4. People who know what to do in a crisis
5. Cool evenings

May we walk in Beauty!

Bless the Seeds

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A Blessed Autumn Equinox to you.

“We have arrived at Autumn Equinox, one of those exquisite balance points of the year cycle, the moment of shift in the whirl around our star. The light has been shifting, coming in at a slant that sets everything atwinkle. Every dusk, hundreds of robins sail into the hollow and set up a clatter and cacophony in the bamboo grove. The geese are going, cormorants winging their way, thousands of feet above us, or angling down to the River for a rest. Seeds burst forth.

Say a blessing for the seeds, those packets of potential that burst from the ripened fruits of the flower buds and fall to earth, some to be trampled by passing feet, some to be eaten–fuel for the journeys of the little birds or stocked up by small animals as fat for the coming cold. And some to fall into the rich soil to wait through the winter until it is time to Become.

How has your own ripening been? What is the seed within you at this moment? What is the hopeful little bundle of potential that is waiting to fall, to be carried by the winds and the waves and the creatures that pass, to tumble into the soil of your future self? What has ripened within you, and what will you release, knowing it may grow and bear its own fruit, or may become food for others? What of yourself do you give to this season? Say a blessing for the seeds.” ―Beth Weaver-Kreider
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“There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.” ―Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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“Stories,” he’d said, his voice low and almost husky, “we are made up of stories. And even the ones that seem the most like lies can be our deepest hidden truths.”
― Jane Yolen, Briar Rose
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“Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored.”
― Patricia A. McKillip
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“Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.” ―Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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“Let my soul smile through my heart and my heart smile through my eyes, that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts.” ―Paramahansa Yogananda

Gratitude List:
1. The morning sky. Sundogs. Woven clouds. Golden pathways of the sun.
2. Those young hawks sitting everywhere, learning to make it on their own. Buffy bellies high in the trees.
3. Walnut leaves fluttering down through afternoon sun. Cherry blossoms of autumn.
4. A tidy house. Well, sort of tidy. Tidier, anyway.
5. Singing with people

May we walk in Beauty!

Put Hands and Feet on Your Prayer

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Today is International Day of Peace.
Last year on this day, I wrote about being the Medicine for the Moment. This year’s stories are hauntingly the same, although the names and places have changed. The response of the powerful and disconnected to the tragedies around us remains as simplistic and crass as ever.

“Where is the medicine for this moment?

These are crass and ironic times, when the tragedies of millions of lives, of people fleeing their homes in terror, are reduced to a simplistic candy analogy. Where is the medicine?

When day after day after horrific day, another black man lies dead in the streets, the evidence of his murder caught on camera, and no one is brought to justice.  Where is the medicine?

When the nations of people who first lived upon this land call for a halt to the destruction of the land and water, and the response is to bulldoze the graves of their ancestors. Where is the medicine?

The tides of hate and selfishness and division have risen, and those who See must come together in these times to pray, to hold council, to stand against all that tears at the fabric of our common humanity. When history looks back at us, let it not be said that we sat quietly by while our sisters and brothers were subjected to hate and horror and terror.

Today is the International Day of Peace.  What will be your prayer for peace today? How will you put hands and feet on your prayer? What medicine will you be for this moment?”
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“The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails.” –Merlin (T. H. White)
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“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” –Mary Oliver
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“Be silent, or say something better than silence.”
–Pythagoras
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“Don’t you see? Violence doesn’t end violence. It extends it.” –The Doctor (Eleven)

Gratitude List:
1. Savannah’s Peace Day Chapel presentation this morning–a student leading us to consider how we can learn to listen to each other even when we don’t agree, encouraging us to keep doing the small everyday things that make a difference in people’s lives.
2. That was coyotes I heard howling up on the hill! Coyotes! We’ve seen them several times over the years, but we’ve never heard them sing in the hollow before. What a haunting and evocative music. (I’m also glad that the cats are indoor people.)
3. Tomorrow is Friday. I am eager to find my way into the weekend. Also, Friday means Hymn Sing.
4. Salmon patties, green beans, and a chichen itza pepper.
5. All the people, everywhere, who work for peace in the world, who expand the boundaries of loving, who open their hearts.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Bud Always Opens Toward Decay

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“Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.” ―Wendell Berry, from “What Are People For?”
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“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.” ―Gertrude Stein
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“It is Story that heals us, that shapeshifts us, that saves us.” ―Sylvia V. Linseadt
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“It can hurt to go through life with your heart open, but not as much as it does to go through life with your heart closed.” –Jim Doty
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The bud always opens toward decay,
toward falling, the fragile bits within
slipping off their tiny moorings,
sifting downward, petals drooping,
dropping to the ground below,
offering beauty and a lingering aroma
in the briefest span.

The bud which never opens
also lives toward decay and rot
but never senses sun-warm petals,
never knows the draw of butterfly,
the tickle of the bee, never feels
the moment of release, of
settling to earth.
–Beth Weaver-Kreider

Gratitude List:
1. The gift of a new mantra. Today a young woman recounted a story of not getting what she needed in a certain situation. “Next time, I will speak my need,” she said. Me too.
2. That Ross Gay poem, “Sorrow is Not My Name”
“I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.”
3. Shelter. Food. Clothing.
4. Music
5. The last of the summer sweet corn. It seems appropriate to have an end-of-summer corn dinner.

May we walk in Beauty!

Drawing Forth the Impossible Sprout

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The doorway to Room 206: Magic happens here

“I am not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my ship.” –Louisa May Alcott
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“The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.” –Margaret Storm Jameson
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“Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior.
You are beneath the thinker.
You are the stillness beneath the mental noise.
You are the love and joy beneath the pain.”
–Eckhart Tolle
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One of my own, beginning with an Aldo Leopold quote. I read the Leopold essay again yesterday with my Academic Writing students in preparation for our Cause and Effect essay:

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain.” –Aldo Leopold

Only the mountain knows perhaps
where the green fire is kindled
how the viridian flame leaps
down the slopes and into the hollows
how it broods in the deep crevasse
enkindles in every womb
caterpillar and field mouse
wolf and deer and human
how it shines behind the eye.

Perhaps the desert too
has pondered with the mountain
the quiet licking emerald ember that
touched by the merest drop of moisture
tenders into flame
drawing forth
the impossible sprout from the seed
–Beth Weaver-Kreider
*
With That Moon Language
by Hafiz

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud; Otherwise,
someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon
in each eye that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
–Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Gratitude List:
1. Cheesy bread and eggs for supper
2. Life Force, green fire
3. Collages and strippy poetry
4. When he isn’t yelling or whining, this kid is always singing or making jokes
5. Good Work

May we walk in Beauty!