Gratitudes

Tender Little Dragon

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dragon1

Here is something I wrote four years ago today. I found it really helpful to the me of today:

“This morning when we were playing with our gnomes, Joss decided that the gnome house was on fire, and he raced to get a group of gnomes to put it out. “Red! We need all the red gnomes!” Exactly–to put out a fire, it takes lots of red gnomes. Ellis chimed in, “And Minus! We need the Minus Gnome! Because a house with fire Minus the fire is just a house!”

Sometimes I sure would like to use some of Minus Gnome’s magic on me. An anxious Beth Minus anxiety is just Beth. Angst-ridden, anger-struck Beth Minus angst and anger? Beth. So that’s a nice little thing to do with meditation. Of course as soon as I began to work with the idea, it hit me again that the angers and angsts are so often born of compassion and caring, and for those I have been seeking the services of Multiplication Gnome. I need to untangle the compassion from its attendant anger at injustice, its partner anxiety at losses to those I love.

Wow. Look at those words that I wanted to get rid of: Angst, Anxiety, Anger. . .I looked them up, along with their sister Anguish. There at their root is angh-, which comes from the Indo-European language tree, and generally refers to distress of some sort. That lovely vowel–ah–cut short in the back of the throat, closed up along with all hope of breath: Angh!

Fear, shame, anger, distress: what sound emerges when you truly feel them? Angh! Choke.

But still, that lovely vowel–ah–the first we say in so many languages: Mama, Abba, Baba, Dada, Nana, Papa. The opposite of the choke, our family names, our names for the Ineffable Mystery: they release the breath in a tender sigh. Ah. There we go.

When I get really stuck in the Angh, I can dislodge that choke with a little Hahaha, a great belly laugh to force the air back through, a little spiritual CPR, so to speak. Or skip down the street with a Tra-la-la, a little song to start up the rhythm of breathing again. Or a little eureka, a bright discovery with a great Aha!

So the next time I wake up at three in the morning, suddenly filled with the dread of what is happening to this world that I have brought these light-filled children into, or choked with shame for some harshness I have spoken to their tender hearts, I think I will apply the Ah!, the Mama, the Ha! and see if that breath can be a lullaby to take my spirit back to sleep.”

Gratitude List:
1. Love Songs for chapel this morning, and serenaders wandering the halls all day.
2. Tender little dragons
3. The kinds of questions this kid comes up with: “Mom, what if we were to be reincarnated as a planet or other celestial body?”
4. The ones who are leading us into the next levels of consciousness–a lot of them are teenagers.
5. The people rise up, ask questions, hold the powerful accountable, and tiny little changes begin to happen.

May we walk in Beauty!

Gnosis

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bridge1

These days when I am in the car by myself, I switch over the audio book CD from The Mark of Athena, which we listen to as a carpool on the way to and from school, to Tucker Malarkey’s Resurrection, an audio mystery book I got from the library book sale last summer. It’s an interesting slow-unraveling story about a young woman (post-WWII) who goes to settle the affairs of her archaeologist father in Egypt after his suspicious death. She discovers that he was working on finding and translating fragments of text from papyri found at Oxyrhynchus, and that someone is trying to stop the texts from becoming public. It’s entirely fiction, of course, except that it’s loosely based on some of the hype surrounding the mid-1940s discoveries of papyri fragments at Oxyrhynchus.

It makes me want to start looking again at some of the Gnostic texts and other gospels that were not included in the canon by the councils and church leaders by the time of the Synod of Hippo Regius in 393.  The novel I am reading contends that the non-canonical gospels were actively suppressed, often violently, by church leaders who were threatened by the gnosticism of many of the texts. We have Elaine Pagels’ book on Thomas: Beyond Belief, and perhaps I will start there, as well as searching through the fascinating online Nag Hammadi Library.

Gnosis has always been one of my favorite words. It rings something inside me when I hear it. I remember that even before I really knew what it meant, I was drawn to its mystery. What are the layers beneath the stories I’ve heard all my life? What are the patterns and secrets that were kept so fiercely out of the text that we read today? Who were these early followers of Jesus? I think of gnosis as gut knowledge, bones knowledge, the kind of thing you know within yourself to be right and true.

Early gnostics believed that the physical world was to be transcended in favor of spiritual realities, a primary sticking point for me. Perhaps this is how some people reach their gnosis. I think the physical world is to be entered fully, experienced profoundly, relished deeply. For me, it’s about settling into the gut, the bones, the blood, seeking the way Spirit imbues matter, not the way it transcends it.

Gratitude List:
1. William Carlos Williams Moment: so much depends on a tangerine sun rising through blue into a violet magenta cloud. Suddenly all is cerulean and indigo and golden.
2. Heart Moment: Receiving an email from one of our graduates, asking several of us to pray for him as he prepares to deploy as a medic to the Syrian border. We have a bridge between us, despite my pacifism, and I am honored to be among those praying for his safety, praying that he may be a blessing to those he serves.
3. Comfort Moment: Sitting under a feather bed, reading a fantasy novel to my boy.
4. Moment of Depth: This quotation, by Alice Walker–“Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.”
5. Pleasure Moment: Shells with spinach and peas in a creamy cheesy sauce.

May we walk in Beauty!

Break Every Chain

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aconite
Sun on aconite.

A good reminder in church today: Let’s listen more than we talk.  Or listen before we talk, perhaps. What is the pain behind the lashing out? What is the story behind the closed doors and windows? Where does that rant come from? What truth can be excavated from a bagful of raging fury?

And then: Let’s speak up more than we are silent. Although it sounds like the opposite of the first part, it’s really a good next step, isn’t it? Listen first. Find the source of pain, of confusion, of anger, of despair. Then speak up. When you see an injustice, speak out. The front of the bulletin at church today was the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote:

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

We have a new generation in the current walk toward justice. Will we need to repent again for our silence, or will we meet the challenges ahead with courage and joy, speaking up for those who are harmed by hatred of their race or country, their sexuality or gender, their religion or their class?

Courage and joy. I wish you Courage and Joy.

Gratitude List:
1. William Carlos Williams moment: So much depends on a green field dotted with white gulls in the winter rain.
2. My church congregation, who welcome students from my school to lead the service today on anti-racism, with much applause and appreciation.
3. Those young people. I learn so much from them. Constantly. They will lead us. We just need to give them the safe spaces to learn the power of their voices. And then we need to be their back-up, their safety net, their boosters. I am incredibly proud of them. Break every chain.
4. That shade of brown/salmon/ochre that is the color of the leafy forest floor seen through trees on a rainy day. You know the color I’m talking about? It’s so satisfying.
5. Listening. Speaking Up.

May we walk in Beauty!

Outrage

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

seaglass-and-sun

I feel like I keep writing the same thing–balance, balance, balance. Reminding myself to keep centered in the midst of complicated emotions.

I’m letting outrage rattle around inside my Bowl of Feelings these days, trying to get a sense of how it looks, how it feels, what it does in there. There’s a certain surge of energy that feels really righteous and powerful and effective in the moment of outrage. It drives me to write postcards and make telephone calls and to put try to get the word out there. I do believe that it has its place. I had been on the verge of writing that I would be rejecting outrage, when that last sentence happened–I think it really is outrage that fuels those good and effective works.  But outrage also has some strange backfires:

* Feeling it and letting it energize me can make me feel as though I have made effective responses when I have actually done nothing.
* When the energy drops off, it drops WAY off, leaving me a depleted husk.
* It leads to incredible self-righteousness.
* When I do manage to sustain the energy of it over time (and the events of these weeks make that easy), it can lead to an overpowering sense of despair.  Or, on the other side of that coin: numbness.

When I get a bad headache, I tend to avoid painkillers for as long as I can stand it. It’s like I want to feel the message my body is giving me, to try to understand what it is saying. After both of my C-sections, I found myself refusing the painkillers I was offered. Perhaps it was partly because after the pain of those long labors, nothing felt painful anymore, but again, it seemed like I needed the messages of pain to inform me of my physical limits.

I think that outrage is sort of like those pains. It’s the call to wake up and listen, the urging to pay attention. We can’t let ourselves get capsized by it. Keep at least some painkillers handy–good music, conversation with loving friends, meditation, a good escapist book, prayer, pictures of otters–so that when the pain takes you out of yourself, you have something to bring you back.

I think I am going to have to make this my spiritual practice for the coming years: to hold the coals of outrage in my hand in such a way that I can just bear it, so that it will keep me awake and aware, but to find my way to hold grace and lightness as well.

Gratitude List:
1. Hundreds of white gulls flying above the bridge.
2. The sun shining through the red tail of a hawk above me.
3. Sun shining through the golden petals of aconite.
4. Grace to help carry and mediate the outrage.
5. Good people. They’re everywhere. Let’s not get ourselves separated into camps–good folks are everywhere. Look for them.

May we walk in Beauty!

Dazzle

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

sunspots

In the dark season
daylight wanes and shadows grow
then sun shines on snow

Gratitude List:
1. Moon. Sigh, I didn’t see her show tonight, but still: Moon.
2. Story
3. Rest
4. This Cat
5. Winter

May we walk in Beauty!

Snow Day

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sunspots    pond

spring-door    tictacsnow

Some of the day’s delights.
Gratitude List:
1. Sun on snow. Shine.
2. A snow day.
3. Baking cookies
4. Making pizza
5. Migrators: a mixed flock of boat-tailed grackles and red-winged blackbirds, and a few cowbirds came whooshing through the hollow.

May we walk in Beauty!

Brilliant

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dscn9222

Gratitude List:
1. Oh wow. I am going to be grateful tonight for Mitch McConnell. Not for what he did, mind you, but for those most excellent words about Elizabeth Warren: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Someone said it’s the whole history of women’s progress summed up in eleven words. Brilliant.
2. The persistence of Elizabeth. And Coretta. And Rosa. And Sojourner. And Harriet. And Kamala. And Michelle. And Vandana. And Rachel. And Jane. And Anonymous. And You. You’ve been warned, given the explanation. Yet nevertheless, you persist. Brilliant.  Thank you.
3. The persistence of an amazing and growing group of students at school who continue to lead us all toward a deeper understanding of inequality and equality, of justice and injustice, of race and wealth and power. I know at a deep level that teachers are in schools not just to teach, but to learn. These young folks keep proving that. They’re brilliant.
4. Venus. Can’t really see her tonight with the storm moving in, but she’s been so incredibly shiny this month. She’s brilliant.
5. The hope of a snow day tomorrow. I am like a little kid. I know it might not pan out, but it’s so exciting to anticipate, especially with scholars here in the household who are also excited about the possibility of at least a delay. every winter deserves at least one, right? This one isn’t brilliant, just sweet.

May we walk in Beauty and Brilliance!

Messages from Skunk

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skonker

Blessed are the watchers, the sentinels, the keepers.
Blessed are the ones who pause and listen
for the quietest voices on the wind.

Blessed are the ones who let truth whisper
in the curling spirals of their ears,
who take it in and feel it in their marrow,
let it settle in their bellies, in the gut, the womb, the blood.
Blessed are the ones who sit with that bright coal
that grows and glows within them
as it reaches flaming fingers into every artery and vein.

I have been in conversation today with a friend on the subject of truth. While I love truth as an ideal, and I have worked on impeccability as a spiritual discipline, I have tended to be uncomfortable speaking of truth because of the way it has been used–particularly in religious circles–as a bludgeon. Too many times I have heard people speak of the One Truth: “I have a corner on the Truth, and unless you believe exactly as I do, you are believing lies and falsehoods and you are hopelessly lost.” Poor, poor Truth. She’s so misunderstood.

And lately she’s become such a commodity. When people in positions of power are slicing her up into tiny fragments, stitching her into their webs of falsehoods, and selling her to the lowest bidder, she’s lost all her sense of purpose in the world. It behooves people of integrity to take her in, harbor her, give her sanctuary. My friend suggested taking Truth inside, and observing your physiological response. How does she feel inside you? These times call for a new and wide-awake relationship with Truth. She’s an ally, not a weapon. She’s a teacher, not a dictator.

Gratitude List:
1) You know how I chose skunk (see February 3) as my symbol of nonviolent resistance? This morning as we were driving between corn-stubbly fields on the way to school, a great big skunker with ambled out of the thin line of woods and looked at us passing by. I love seeing skunks at any time, but today it felt like an affirmation.
2) Crows. I think we saw all 20,000 at once this afternoon. No kidding. They were swirling in the wind above a field like a little cyclone, sitting in all the trees along the highway, flying above us in the sunset. They also feel like a message.
3) All the migrators. Along with the crows, the sky was simply filled with all the wing-folk today. Flock of small birds layered behind the crow flocks, and behind and above them, skeins of geese.
4) That seahorse cloud. Golden-white against the pinking sky. Like an embossment. Far away, it kept its shape longer than other whimsy-clouds tend to, almost the whole way home from school.
5) Vision. Sight. Seeing.

May we walk in Beauty!

February Walk

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mantis dragon-egg

fred aconite

Gratitude List on a Warm February Day:
1. Mantis case: The Fierce Ones will be hatching in spring to help with the insects on the farm.
2. Imagination: We thought maybe a dragon had hatched in the fields near last year’s squash patch.
3. Even the Mzee (Old Man) went walking with us, though he only went part way up the hill.
4. Aconite: Too early by far, but beautiful, catching the rays of the sun.
5. Rambling with the family.

May we ramble in Beauty!

A Bright Red Cardinal

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shiny
Gratitude List:
1. A bright red cardinal amid the brown twisting branches and vines of the bosque.
2. Songs this morning that healed my soul.
3. Humor. Humor helps me to keep it together.
4. Stories of goodness. Let’s just keep doing our little bit of good every day. We will perhaps be called upon to do big good things, but in the meantime, let’s keep doing the little good things.  And reminding each other of the stories we hear of goodness.
5. Afternoon naps, Legos and Percy Jackson. In other words, a restful Sunday afternoon.

May we walk in Beauty!