Gratitudes

Bubble Dragon

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I wrote this last year, and it’s even more true today, if that’s possible:
“You know that exercise you do, where you list 12 famous people, dead or alive, that you would invite to dinner? I always loved that, seating Joan of Arc next to Harriet Tubman and Hildegarde of Bingen next to Starhawk. I love to ponder such conversations.

“Still, lately the table I fantasize about setting includes many more than 12, and all of you are living souls whom I know here in this space. Many of you I have never met in person, in this lifetime at least, and some of you I see rarely or never anymore, but I treasure who we have been together, and I am grateful for re-connection here in this place. Oh, how we would laugh and talk and sing and weep and eat until the wee hours if we were to set such a table. We’d need a many-day feast, I think.

“Thank you for being my friends.”
*
“One tree is like another tree, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether. More or less like people – a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes. Hello Tom, hello Andy. Hello Archibald Violet, and Clarissa Bluebell. Hello Lilian Willow, and Noah, the oak tree I have hugged and kissed every first day of spring for the last thirty years. And in reply its thousand of leaves tremble! What a life is ours! Doesn’t anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the middle of the night and sing?” —Mary Oliver
*
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
—John Keats
*
“Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.”
—Rumi
*
“My friends, it is solidarity of labor we want. We do not want to find fault with each other, but to solidify our forces and say to each other: ‘We must be together; our masters are joined together and we must do the same thing.’” —Mother Jones
*
“Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.” —Franklin Roosevelt

Gratitude List:
1. Wise friends
2. Thoughtful teenagers
3. Real, actual compassionate souls
4. Eggs on toast–comfort food
5. Sweater weather

May we walk in Beauty!

Joy in the Toolbox

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“I (we) need to find ways to make Joyfullness part of the resistance tool box. . .To resist the evils of our day we must find the joy of shared humanity and let it pollinate the rage at what threatens that.” —Craig Sottolano
*
“Emergence never happens all at once. It is a slow stepping into the expanded capacity of your next self. You may need practice at releasing in those places you’ve grown accustomed to bracing which, like a tight swaddle, was comforting in its limits. But when the time to remain hidden comes to its natural end, you must begin to inhabit your new dimensionality. Breathe into the fullness of your gaining altitude and consider that what presents itself as fear may actually be exhilaration. As your future approaches you, worry less how it may receive you and say a prayer instead for your becoming approachable.” —Toko-pa Turner
*
“I was often in love with something or someone,” wrote Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. “I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me.”
*
“Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is the matter with us, we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.”
—D.H. Lawrence
*
Lord’s Prayer:
Translation by Neil Douglas Klotz, Sufi

O Birther! Creator of the Cosmos,
Focus your light within us— make it useful:
Create your reign of unity now-
Your one desire then acts with ours,
as in all light, so in all forms.
Grant what we need each day in bread and insight.
Loose the cords of mistakes binding us,
as we release the strands we hold of others’ guilt.
Don’t let surface things delude us,
But free us from what holds us back.
From you is born all ruling will,
the power and the life to do,
the song that beautifies all,
from age to age it renews.
Truly— power to these statements—
may they be the ground from which all
my actions grow: Amen.
*
Song
by Syrian Poet Adonis
Translated By Khaled Mattawa
from “Elegy for the First Century”

Bells on our eyelashes
and the death throes of words,
and I among fields of speech,
a knight on a horse made of dirt.
My lungs are my poetry, my eyes a book,
and I, under the skin of words,
on the beaming banks of foam,
a poet who sang and died
leaving this singed elegy
before the faces of poets,
for birds at the edge of sky.

Gratitude List:
1. Remembering the music that was important in certain growing stages. Graceland. Closer to Fine.
2. The ways that modern social media brings back connections and conversations from twenty or thirty years ago. Re-connections.
3. The coming of autumn means cauliflower!
4. A brand-spankin’-fresh new week
5. Yesterday’s naps and organizing

May we walk in Beauty!

The Dragon in the Park

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“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke
*
“Hope is a renewable option:
If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.” ―Barbara Kingsolver
*
“There is a voice that doesn’t use words.
Listen.”
―Rumi
*
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
―Carl Jung
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“I don’t ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.”
―Mary Oliver
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“We have come into this exquisite world to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom, and light.”
―Hafiz

Gratitude List:
1. On the way past Sam Lewis Park yesterday afternoon, we saw a dragon in the sky. And two dinosaurs. And two trilobites. People were flying kites. I think they’re known as Finnish kites. A high up leader kite is tethered to a balloon-style kite. The higher kite pulls the lower one up into the air. It’s amazing to watch.
2. Bubbles. Also at the park, a couple had brought along several buckets full of soap solution and long rope-style bubble wands. They created enormous bubbles.
3. Sharing stories. Stories, like bridges between us.
4. The Labor movement–people believing in their cause–in worker safety, in justice and fairness in pay, in reasonable hours, in respectable treatment of employees.
5. Playing games with the kids.

May we walk in Beauty!

It Lights the Whole World

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“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
– e. e. cummings
*
“I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” –Frederick Douglass
*
Even
after
all this time
the sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”

Look
what happens
with a love like that —
It lights the whole
world.

–Hafiz
*
Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.
~ Mother Teresa

Gratitude List:
1. Re-arranging. We have a storage and clutter problem, but this weekend, we’ve been sorting and shifting, finding places for things, getting the right pieces of furniture for the right jobs.
2. The red berries on the dogwood trees
3. Hints of yellow and red in the leaves
4. Bridges
5. Warm socks

May we walk in Beauty!

Truth is a Mirror

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Time is Telling.

“The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of others. This is where bravery lives, where we’ll find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the presence of power.”
—Terry Tempest Williams
*
“To understand the world knowledge is not enough. You must see it, touch it, live in its presence.”
–Teilhard de Chardin
*
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” — Maya Angelou
*
“Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.” –Pablo Neruda
*
“Not to spoil the ending for you, but everything is going to be okay.” –Anonymous
*
“may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old …” –e.e. cummings
*
“Truth was a mirror in the hands of God
It fell, and broke into pieces.
Everybody took a piece of it,
and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.” –Rumi

Gratitude List:
1. Collegiality. I really enjoy the people I work with. Laughing together is powerful social glue.
2. Cool mornings and rain.
3. Supper at Mexitaly last night. Big burrito with mango habanero sauce!
4. These cats. I know it’s an obsession these days. Thorby is so funny, flopping on the floor for belly rubs and petting his own face. Sachs still likes quiet, secluded spaces, but I no longer have to snort dust bunnies under the bed in order to get to know him. He comes out for regular petting sessions and purring.
5. Three deer in the horse field near Highpoint last evening when the sun was slanting in.

May we walk in Beauty!

Daily Feather

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In the lower right, the original photo, of a feather in the clouds. The others are filtered through Dreamscope app. 

“In summer, the song sings itself.”
―William Carlos Williams
*
“All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.” ―Edward Abbey
*
“They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.” ―Kahlil Gibran
*
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” ―Pablo Picasso
*
“Every breath is a sacrament, an affirmation of our connection with all other living things, a renewal of our link with our ancestors and a contribution to generations yet to come. Our breath is a part of life’s breath, the ocean of air that envelops the earth.” ―David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature
*
“Memory is an invitation to the source of our life, to a fuller participation in the now, to a future about to happen, but ultimately to a frontier identity that holds them all at once.” ―David Whyte
*
“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
―not actually Benjamin Franklin, as the internet claims
*
Lines
by Martha Collins

Draw a line. Write a line. There.
Stay in line, hold the line, a glance
between the lines is fine but don’t
turn corners, cross, cut in, go over
or out, between two points of no
return’s a line of flight, between
two points of view’s a line of vision.
But a line of thought is rarely
straight, an open line’s no party
line, however fine your point.
A line of fire communicates, but drop
your weapons and drop your line,
consider the shortest distance from x
to y, let x be me, let y be you.

Gratitude List:
1. Not feeling wretched. Sometimes it’s good to have a day of pathetic wretchedness in order to remember how wonderful normal feels. Is that weird? It just feels so incredibly good not to feel awful.
2. Driving Pippi Prius again. In the same vein as #1, I was incredibly grateful that my father let us borrow his car while Pippi was getting her battery cells fixed, and his car is wonderful, but it just feels so good to drive my car again. As a smallish person, I feel most comfortable and safest driving a little car.
3. Following #2, I am grateful that we did not have to replace the whole hybrid battery just yet. The local garage thought that would be necessary, but Sam the Prius guy was able to change the cells instead, and they were still under warranty. We’ll save the big expenses for another time.
4. Long weekend ahead. I have a lovely day of in-service ahead with my colleagues, and then three days of break.
5. The puppycat. Joss and Thorby are playing fetch all over the house.

May we walk in Beauty!

No Cure for Curiosity

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Daily Feather.

“You’ve seen my descent. Now watch my rising.” –Rumi
*
“If I have something that is too difficult for adults to swallow, I will write it in a book for children.” –Madeline L’Engle
*
“Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other people, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.” – Albert Einstein
*
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” –perhaps Dorothy Parker
*
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” –Thomas Paine
*
“Once in a lifetime the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.” – Seamus Heaney

Gratitude List:
1. Sleep is healing, and I got lots yesterday and last night. Cold, be gone!
2. Did I mention those fields of sunflowers? I might do it every day for a while. How those golden faces turn toward sunrise.
3. My colleagues. What a team of earnest, compassionate, gentle people, all focused on building up and supporting our teenagers.
4. My kids’ teachers.
5. Homemade pizza

May we walk in Beauty!

Awaken Yourself

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments


My parents put so much care into the growing of their bed of lisianthus flowers. This one is only slightly altered with the Dreamscope app. The photo was a little blurry, but I like the composition, so I sent it through the filter.

“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.” ―Bill Bullard
*
“If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.” ―Lao Tzu
*
“Don’t let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.” ―Mae Jemison
*
“You can never leave footprints that last if you are always walking on tiptoe.” ―Leymah Gbowee
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“I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.” ―Clara Barton
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“When we seek what is truest in our own tradition, we discover we are one with those who seek what is truest in their tradition.” ―James Finley
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“This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of atomic annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.
*
“We’re in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit.” ― David Suzuki
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“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” ―W.B. Yeats
*
“There are two ways to live:
you can live as if
nothing is a miracle;
you can live as if
everything is a miracle.”
―Albert Einstein

Gratitude List:
1. The Lehman fields of sunflowers, how they turn their golden faces to the rising sun.
2. I have a very light day today because of 9th-grade testing and orientation. I have a bad cold and a sleep deficit, so it’s perfect timing.
3. How we get to create the meaning of our own stories.
4. The way a cup of coffee transforms me from sleep to waking. I know it is a drug, but it sure was a helpful one this morning.
5. Resolve

May we walk in Beauty!

Live Like the Truth is True

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

“I want to live like the truth is true and go where love has not been found.” –Al Letson, host of podcast Reveal, quoting Father Greg Boyle, about his reasons for protecting a white supremacist from a beating
*
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr.
*
“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
(excerpt from “Inversnaid”) –Gerard Manley Hopkins
*
“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what to hope for.
And the most you can do is live inside that hope.”
–Barbara Kingsolver
*
And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
~ Roald Dahl
*
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” ~C. S. Lewis
*
“Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.” ~Lou Reed

Gratitude List:
1. I came home from work yesterday and went upstairs, and both cats were on top of the bed. Nobody scurried away in terror at the approaching sound of my feet. No one even flinched when I came into the room. We’re making progress.
2. First responders and rescuers in Texas. I worry about what mob spirit does in fractured times. Those who have put their time and lives on the line to rescue people and animals caught in the floodwaters are participating in a different sort of “mob” spirit, building off of each other’s energies to save lives.
3. Spiralized summer squash sauteed with tomatoes, topped with pesto.
4. Reading poetry to young people
5. The silence of early morning, when the thundering goblin cats have settled down, and only I and the crickets are awake.

May we walk in Beauty!

Heart at Rest

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In the dream, I too looked directly at the sun. Gold-orange sparkles flashed out from the surface, crackling and twinkling in the air in front of the enormous orb. Was it my looking that caused the sparks, I wonder? And then I turned my face to the other side of the sky, and the moon hung over the horizon, bigger than a hundred moons, filling the sky with its silver face.

“Anyone who feeds on majesty becomes eloquent. The bee, From mystic inspiration, fills its rooms with honey.” ―Rumi
*
“A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.” ― John Ciardi
*
“The heart must be at rest before the mind, like a quiet lake under an unclouded summer evening, can reflect the solemn starlight and the splendid mysteries of heaven.”
―McDonald Clarke (1798–1842) New York poet
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“How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Gratitude List:
1. Those owls. Every night now, my sleep is measured by the rhythm of the owls.
2. The new week is a blank slate
3. Even when the night is a tangle of sneezing kid and twisting dreams, there has been sleep, enough to refresh and renew
4. Interlocking rings of community
5. The ones who speak truth to power. How much we need them today.

May we walk in Beauty!