Gratitudes

The Hat

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

mockingbird

Today, my act of resistance is knitting my hat for the march.

What is yours?

Gratitude List:
1. Those clouds, which were wings, and the sundog which smiled on them.
2. How the boys get so many things. I was buying pink yarn today for my kittycat hat (that’s what I call it so I don’t have to explain too much to them at this point), and Ellis said, “But if you’re all wearing pink hats, isn’t that sort of playing into the stereotypes about women and pink?” Savvy kid. I said we were reclaiming it. They helped me pick out the yarn, and were both really excited when I found some eyelash yarn to knit into the hat. Ellis wanted to carry it around the store.
3. Belongingness
4. Knitting. Knotting. Making. I feel a little like Madame Dufarge knitting up this hat. I might not be knitting information for the revolution, but I am knitting for the revolution. (And I think I didn’t cast on enough stitches–my needles are smaller than the pattern suggested. I’ll take out these first rows and start again. And this time with magical intent.)
5. Finding new ways to say things. New vocabulary. New structures. New synapses firing in the brain.

May we walk in Beauty!

Tactics for the Resistance

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

vulture
I choose the vulture today because vultures are watchers. And vultures are composters, taking what is dead and decaying and turning it into the energy that gives them flight. May we, too, take the old and decayed and rotten, and use it to create flight and vision. [This particular piece is an altered photo (I took the original from the internet that was labeled for noncommercial reuse with modification).  I love those long primaries.]

In the weeks leading up to the election, a local pastor wrote a regular blog on the theme, “Love is Our Resistance.” That phrase keeps coming back to me these days. I have a sense deep in my gut that these next years are going to demand serious resistance, like the prayerful peaceful protests at Standing Rock, like the life-on-the-line peaceful demonstrations led by Martin Luther King and John Lewis and so many others. Perhaps these are the days for the new revolution. I imagine the call to the movement:

And what shall be your resistance?
Love is our resistance!
And what shall be your revolution?
Our revolution will be Peace!
What will be your tactics?
Open hearts. Prayer. Standing in the gap. Believing in each other. Speaking truth against the barrage of lies.

Peaceful, heart-led revolution is not a new thing. On this weekend when we commemorate the life and ideas of Martin Luther King, it seems perfectly fitting that people around the country are considering what their methods of resistance will be for the coming years. Let us take Martin Luther King as one of our pillars as we walk into the uncertain future.

Yesterday, a thought that has been forming within me since November 9 finally broke through the veil into words. It is this: These times will demand something new of us, and will shape our characters in ways we could have not imagined. As we rise to this work, we will become our best selves in ways we might not have, had we not had to meet the challenges that are coming our way.

I had read Clarrissa Pinkola Estes’ essay “We Were Made for These Times” to my students on Friday, and her words helped me to think this through. It’s not that I am grateful for the way things have gone. I am deeply troubled. Still, we can meet this as an opportunity to grow into our best selves, to let our souls shine. In the end, we will have become stronger, more loving and thoughtful people than we might have if we did not have these difficult days to face.

Keep reaching out. Look for the others who are doing the work of Loving Resistance. When you feel despair creeping upon you, find some small act of resistance you can do to further the revolution. If you know me well, you will hear me talking to myself.
* Tell radical truth. Confront the lies with truth and beauty and art and loving action.
* Encourage someone who is doing the Work.
* Write a postcard, make a call, stand on a street corner with a sign.
* Smile at people. Assume the best of people. Be someone who makes people want to be their Best Selves.
* Pray, in whatever way you pray. Pray in church, in synagogue, at the mosque, in the woods, in your kitchen, on the banks of the rivers. Hold stones. Make magic spells. Cast webs of prayer between you and those who are most vulnerable: the poor, immigrants, people of color, LGBTQI people, women, the Earth.
* Listen more than speaking.
*Live your prayers into being.
* Don’t feel like you always have to take a side. Just do the work. Be present to the situation in the moment, and do the work that needs to be done, whether it be speaking against the lie, or taking hands, or praying, or standing between vulnerable people and hatred.

What are your tactics for resistance?

Gratitude List:
1. Resistance and revolution
2. All those who have gone before. We have such a multitude of people who have gone before us who have practiced this form of resistance, who show us the way. Today I think in particular about the words and actions of Martin Luther King.
3. Awakenings
4. The Best Selves we are all becoming
5. You. We’re in this together, and I know that everything will be fine in the end, because you are there, doing your work, too–loving, praying, helping, holding.

May we walk in Beauty!

En-Couraging

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

screechowl

Gratitude List:
1. Golden morning moonset, and a russet sunrise.
2. Introducing my students to Shakespearean insults.
3. People rising to the occasion.
4. Grace and civility and kindness are not dead. (I know that seems like the total antithesis of number 2, but it just all fits.)
5. Voice Class recital for Chapel this morning. I am en-couraged by the courage of those young folks taking the stage and taking risks. And the music was sublime.

May we walk in Beauty!

“. . .but be listened to this time.”

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

cassandraCassandra was the princess of Troy, a priestess of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war. The god Apollo loved Cassandra, and offered her the gift of prophecy. She maintained her single-minded devotion to her patroness, and so Apollo added a curse to his gift: Though she would always prophesy with complete accuracy, no one would believe her.

In the days before the Greeks breached the walls of Troy in their great horse, Cassandra prophesied the destruction of the city. Had her parents–the king and queen–and her brothers listened to her, the people might have been more wary and seen through the Greeks’ trickery. As it was, she was doomed to watch her beloved city fall, knowing that the people she loved could have been saved had they only believed her.

Perhaps you are feeling like Cassandra these days. Keep speaking your truth. Keep telling the world what you see happening around you. As Grace Paley says in her powerful poem, “Responsibility“:

“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. Gangly blue heron walking across the ice of the pond this afternoon.
2. Reading about gnomes with a small person this afternoon. That Rien Poortvliet book desperately needs updating to reflect the fact that gnomes are much more open-minded these days regarding gender roles. If I made a mistake and read to him the sexist bits as they appeared in the book, he corrected me: “No, it’s not man, Mom. It’s man and woman.” Yup.
3. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Leymah Gbowee, who said, “It’s time for women to stop being politely angry.”
4. People who keep the fires lit.
5. That 45-minute nap I took this morning when I realized I had a 2-hour delay. I was in that space of mid-consciousness, where I was almost lucid dreaming, and almost consciously planning a project. And a warm cat purred on top of me.

May we walk in Beauty!

On Intersectionality

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

deer

Today, I have been thinking about feminism and intersectionality. There’s lots of good–and some perhaps-not-so-good–commentary on the webs these days about the Women’s March coming up in a few weeks. While I don’t want to leap blindly onto any new bandwagon that comes along, I also want to lend my voice to a gathering movement for equal rights for all people, one that recognizes–hopefully–that the leadership roles and the power to shape the movement must be held by women of color. By all means include white women in the work of advancing feminism, but for too long we have allowed the veils of privilege to keep us ignorant of the full range of women’s experiences, and I think it is time and more than time for white women to take the listening role.  Here are some ways that white women can position ourselves within the movement.
1. Be listeners. Listen to the stories of women of color.
2. Believe. When we talk about abuse, we say that one of the things we need to do is to believe women when they speak their stories. This applies here, too: When women of color speak about the pain and anger and frustration, believe them, even (particularly) when it is about racism.
3. Avoid the day’s common default response of outrage and huffiness. When women of color have something to say about their experiences or about how they have been treated by white women, don’t get miffed. This prevents listening. Let’s just skip the defensive posture, open our ears, and reach out our hands. How else will we hear truth?
4. Put the power and energy of our inherent privilege to the use of the movement, and to our sisters of color. Offer our sisters whatever power and leverage we are able to create from our own privileged positions.
5. When I was a teenager, and my mother was trying to train me to be a more engaged participant in the life of our household, she pushed me to keep asking, “What can I do next?” That’s a good question for us, too. “What can I do?” Instead of, “I think you should. . .”
6. Be ready to keep learning.

I like Shishi Rose‘s take on the subject.

Gratitude List:
1. Layers. Layers of clothing on a cold day. Layers of ideas. Layers of caring and concern.
2. The bowl is big enough to hold us all.
3. The color pink. I am finding a new appreciation for pink. I am starting to wear more grandmotherly pinks and roses and beige. That’s okay. I need the gentleness of rose right now, and the ferocity of fuschia.
4. Arundathi Roy and Vandana Shiva. Look up quotations by them on GoodReads.
5. Baked oatmeal with blueberries for supper.

May we walk in Beauty!

Patience

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

toad

Toad. Symbol–for me, at least–of grounding, of quiet, thoughtful observation. The toad is a wise  and patient watcher who doesn’t get rattled about much of anything, except perhaps grabby humans. There’s always time, for a toad. The toad is a simple center of gravity. Resting is baseline. Movement throws the whole works off balance with a waddle or a leap. A toad is the base chakra–solid support and the instinct to survive and thrive.

Gratitude List:
1. Warm clothes on a cold day.
2. A house that keeps my children warm.
3. A good story to listen to.
4. These sunny yellow walls.
5. Patience. Thoughtful observation.

May we walk in Beauty!

Fellowship Meal

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

tortoise

Gratitude List:
(Brought to you by a Mennonite Fellowship Meal and a Full Belly)
1. Curried Lentils
2. Red Beet Egg
3. Creamed Corn
4. Kale Salad
5. Brownies

May we walk in Beauty!

Three Crows

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

crows1
This is a public domain stock photo that I filtered. I wanted an image of three crows in a tree.

Today we packed up Christmas. I like to keep the decorations up through the twelve days, but then we need to get our space back. The tree makes me feel claustrophobic after a while, and the rug needed a good vacuuming to get the needles out. Suddenly the living room has space again. We’ve let Lego-land completely take over the library floor, so it’s especially nice to have a mostly empty floor in one room at least.

As I was standing in the breezeway getting up the courage to go out in the cold and take down the wreath and bows, a pair of house finches flew in and sat on the wreath, checking it out for winter quarters, perhaps. I decided to hang the wreath (minus the bow) from one of the trees out back so they can use it if they want.

The person who loses out the most from the Christmas clean-up is Fredthecat. The tree had become his haven. He loved sleeping beneath it. Jon is thinking of buying a ficus to give Fred a tree to sleep beside. Now that’s a good man. But I already knew that.

Gratitude List:
1. Fox prints by the pond. Yesterday after school, Joss and I went walking in the snow by the pond, and we saw fox prints: eight prints and then a three foot space, eight more prints and a three foot space, then eight more prints again. That fox was running. At one point, there was a little spot where someone had scrabbled in the soil, and a little mouse hole was exposed. We figured that the fox got a little snack. But then we noticed that a set of rabbit prints converged with the fox trail, and so we wondered if the fox got a dinner. There were more rabbit trails around, so perhaps the rabbits and fox were out at different times. My Christmas wish was to see a fox. Knowing one was racing through yesterday after the snow makes me feel as though my wish was partly granted.
2. I saw a flock of turkeys today, crouching along a bramble patch on a snowy field.
3. Three crows in a winter tree against a winter sky. There’s something primal and elemental about three crows in a winter tree. I saw two such groups in my driving today.
4. Supportive colleagues.  Wise collaboration with curriculum design.
5. Packing up Christmas. Moving on into January.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Book

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

winterfarm

The Twelve Nights are finished. I might have resisted this waking up, resented this leaving of the cocoon, but for the bright surprise of the snow, the sun enlivening it to an almost unbearable shine, the way the Light shone so forcefully on this Epiphany day.

I have a jumble of words and ideas tumbling about in my brain from the past two weeks: Intuition, Birds of Prey (fierceness?), Aunt Lizzie (rampant creativity?), and the Book. As I made my Vision Board last week, the phrases “Unchain the book” and “Unlock the book” came into my head. And last night I woke in the middle of the night, and the phrase “Use the book” was skittering around in my brain.

So this Year my word will be Book. I tell my students that their lives are the stories of their own making. Some parts seem to be written for us, but even so, we write the meaning of the events that occur. We choose how the story is recorded within us, how we interpret our lives. This year, I will be the writer of my story. I will carry the satellite words of intuition and fierceness and creativity with me as well, and let them inform the story I create, both with my life and in my writing.

Gratitude List:
1. The young years. This is a wistful gratitude. With every passing day, I am noticing the baby days expiring on my youngest. I am gathering all I can of each tiny bit of baby sweetness into the jar of my heart to save for later. Here I am, Winnie the Pooh, standing at the edge of the Hunderd Aker Wood, watching Christopher Robin recede into the world. My heart is so full of the pride and the pain of it, the love and the loss of it.
2. I am grateful for their growing up, too. I treasure each new grown-up thing, how they think and wonder. Their curiosity. Their desire to know, to learn, to create.
3. Snow. Wasn’t that lovely? I love snow. It makes the cold feel worthwhile. It makes the winter feel real. It gives the dreamtime a blanket.
4. Those stripey clouds on the way home from school today. My carpool mates and I decided that they looked like the lines on a piece of notebook paper, just waiting for a poem. Or the ribs of a god (we’re listening to The Heroes of Olympus on our journeys). Or the oars of a great flying Viking ship.
5. The relationship of words to music. The musicality of language.

May we walk in Beauty!

Last Night of Twelvenight

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

jack-frost

Tonight is the last night of Twelvenight, the last of the Days of Christmas. Tomorrow morning the Light dawns. The Magi arrive. Watch for the Aha! what is waiting within you to be discovered?

Meanwhile, here in the dark nights of Winter, I have been ruminating on dreams and images, the ideas and words that have been floating around me in the days since Solstice, searching for my word for the coming year. I have some ideas: there are the recent frequent family references to my Aunt Lizzie along with her appearance in my dreams, there’s the eagle that keeps appearing at different places on my way to and from Lancaster, the calls to listen to my intuition, The Fool, the fire imagery. I’ll see if tonight’s dreams bring any sorting or synthesis. Tomorrow I find my 2017 Word.

Gratitude List:
1. That eagle again–this time sitting in a tree at Sam Lewis State Park as we passed on our way home this evening.
2. This sleeping thing seems to be working better lately. So much better. Of course, less disturbed sleep means fewer remembered dreams, but I’ll take the restedness over the dream-messages at this point.
3. I can’t stop writing about the sky. So orange this morning–deep, deep, glowing russet–and this afternoon a golden stair of light spiraling down through cloud.
4. Saying no, sorting, keeping what stuff is mine, but only that stuff.
5. The power of poetry to get students talking about emotions and internal landscapes.

May we walk in Beauty!