Gratitudes

Finding the Map Home

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

bridge

When have you felt yourself to be your best self?
When have you been most comfortable being who you are?
What would it take to find your way back into that house of yourself?
Did you leave yourself a map?
Is there an old photograph in an dusty album somewhere in your heart
that you can use to guide yourself back to that place?
It might be as simple as taking three deep breaths,
clicking your sneaker-clad heels together three times,
and chanting, “I want to go home, I want to go home,
I want to go home.”
Shall we try it?

Gratitude List:
1. Jon Weaver-Kreider’s delicious dinner of spinach-stuffed shells.
2. Driving to school in that dawning.
3. Driving home from school in that sunset.
4. The gentle lengthening of the days.
5. Re-reading Julius Caesar. I never get tired of it, and it always brings new revelations. I love having a job where I can read Shakespeare with teenagers.

May we walk in Beauty!

Breathing into the Spine

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

lichen2

Breathe with me. Take a moment and sit quietly, noticing how your breath moves in and out of your lungs and your body. As you let out your breath, feel your shoulders slip back slightly (not clenched), and your spine straighten. Sigh. Yawn. Breathe right into your spine.

I’ve noticed lately that breathing into my spine gives me a new thread of energy, a sustained and quiet extra push. I also feel more confident, less apologetic, readier to engage, somehow. I wonder if I could find a space between each class for a 15-second spinal breath. Even that is a challenge these days. I love my students, but I don’t get much of a break between classes. Still–fifteen seconds might be manageable. I think it will make me readier to engage each class as it comes in.

Gratitude List:
1. I never did write on Sunday about that marvelous moon and the star it held above its horns. That was Beautiful. Satisfying.
2. The poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa (“Rock Me, Mercy”)
3. The Fool, dancing on the edge of the cliffs
4. Shifting perspectives, looking in different ways, Seeing
5. New energy

May we walk in Beauty!

Re-Do

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

oak1

I heard someone speak today about the “re-” words, about how they’re so often really positive: rejuvenate, reconciliation, resolve, resolution, recreation, recharge. . . I like that, and I love looking at the probable root words: juvenate, conciliation, solve, solution, creation, charge. . . I agree that they’re positive, but part of their brightness lies in their shadows. If you are re-conciling, there’s a suggestion that the first “conciliation” didn’t quite work out. If you need to re-solve an issue, perhaps it was left un-solved, or it dis-solved somewhere along the line.

I don’t think that makes them less perky or positive, however. Perhaps more so. To know the willful comfort of a re-solution when the first solution didn’t take. To understand the depth of peace in deliberate re-creation which takes me back to a sense of the wholeness of creation.

I suppose it’s become a truism that people only deeply appreciate something when they know how easily it can be lost, but that’s probably because it’s so true. There’s a wonder and a joy in the initial birth of a thing, but the deep appreciation and gratitude for what we have often comes in the awareness of how easily it is lost.

I have been disdainful of the term New Year’s Resolution because of the flippant and glib ways in which we discuss and create New Year’s Resolutions in our culture. Perhaps if I consider (or re-consider) them as re-solutions, they might make more sense to me. In what ways have my past solutions not been sufficient? How can I re-solve my challenges? And in the process, can I offer my past self a little more compassion, knowing how easy it can be to lose sight of my original intentions?

Gratitude List:
1. Listening to a man whistling and a boy harmonizing with him on a hum
2. Getting back into the rhythm
3. Preparing a short story for submission–I don’t think I’ve ever submitted a short story before
4. Re-solving, re-storing, re-creating, re-conciling. Re-
5. Sleep and dreams

May we walk in Beauty!

Give Yourself to Love

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

roots

Another year has dawned, Bright Ones! And of course time is a human construct. Where we begin to count its passage on this Wheel of the Year is utterly arbitrary. I like how it has come to be that we create a passage, a doorway in time, here in this place of winter, just after we have swung around the sun again and begun to whirl in toward Equinox. I love the Days Out of Time marked by the twelve or fifteen days of Solstice or Christmas to Epiphany. I revel in the dreamtime of these days.

I have been mining my dreams again for the word or phrase that I will take into this year. Several years ago, I woke up one morning with the word Palimpsest in my head. It became my word for the year, the idea that we live in layers, simultaneously experiencing the past and the present. The next year was Bridge. The next, Mystery and Secrets and Impeccability. And last year’s phrase was Bold Wise Counsel. Ooh. That was important. What will be my word for this year, I wonder? I have begun to wait until the Dreamtime of Twelvenight is officially over on Epiphany, so I will give myself these next five nights to settle. I think because we celebrated Epiphany Sunday at church this morning, I am particularly impatient this year.

Join me? Keep particular watch on your dreams (daydreams, too) and conversations in the coming days. What images keep coming back? What songs present themselves? What names keep surfacing in conversation? Be like the Magi, who followed their intuition and a star through the dark nights to seek their truth. What will be your words and images for 2017?

Here is a poem I wrote in 2015 about the impatience and the anticipation of seeking out the word or idea that I will use to shape and mold my story for the coming year:

Waiting for the Dreams
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

While I wait for the dreams to be complete
while I sit at the feet of winter
listening

waiting for the little bell to ring
for the sound of rushing wings
for the things born in darkness
to take form
to rise up–

while a vulture flies across my window
red root and plantain nourish and heal me
a lynx crouches by a granite outcrop in the meadow
the storyteller raises her voice in a chant of longing
and a silent girl turns the corner ahead of me

I sit down to work
and sleep overtakes me:
One more vision for the road
One more message for the journey

Gratitude List:
1. Give Yourself to Love. What a song. I loved Mindy and Jared’s version this morning.
2. The Magi–colorful, messy outsiders who followed their intuition and a star: What a story about stepping into the unknown dark to seek their truth with only the stars and their intuition to guide. Mindy’s tales of magi this morning: Giving, Resisting, and Being Honest.
3. Dinner with the family, reflecting on the ways in which our parents have inspired us, considering–in their presence–some of the legacy they have given us: noticing beauty, advocacy, mentoring others, using their own voices to empower others. The story of Grandpa wanting to send my mother to college, how Uncle Moses and Aunt Lydia told him to send her to EMC, which is where she met my father. The story of Joe Shenk introducing them, and of their first “date.” How series of decisions come together to make a story happen.
4. Those vultures, sunsheen on their black feathers, kettling above Columbia this morning.
5. An afternoon with my college friends. Dear, dear thoughtful people. There’s never enough time together, and yet even a few hours is satisfying. What a profound blessing it is to have friends who are family.

May we walk in Beauty!

Looking Back, Looking Forward

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
janus1

The Roman god Janus looks backward and forward.

Looking back, looking forward.
These are the Days of Doorway,
of standing on the threshold
between the worlds of what was
and what will be.

What of the past will you choose to carry into the future? What will you cut loose and remove from your story? Perhaps we cannot revise the events of the past, but we can revise the way we tell them, the meaning we make from them. And the future stands wide open before us, waiting for us to take up the pen and create the tale to come.

Here’s an exercise you can try: Looking Back/Looking Forward. Without making intentional value judgments, consider some of the themes of your past year (looking back). Consider how you will carry them or cut them loose in the coming year (looking forward).

Looking back, I see that often in the past year, I allowed myself to be overcome with weariness. I allowed the waiting tasks to overwhelm my ability to be present in the moment.

Looking forward, I will have strategies to deal with weariness. I will try to keep naps and extra coffee for last resorts. I’ll start with a walk around the farm, seeking signs of foxes. I’ll make sure I take my vitamin. I’ll eat some protein. I’ll drink water. I’ll do my balance poses. I’ll stand up and take ten deep breaths.

Looking back, I see how I allowed the birth of a wonderful idea to begin to take hold of my soul, to find its way into the images and colors of my dreams.

Looking forward, I will nurture this dream like the tenderest of seeds, watering it, feeding it, giving it space to grow and develop. I will work for this one.

Looking back, I feel a sense of satisfaction in the accomplishment of having written at least a gratitude list almost every day. And I have done my balance poses with the John O’Donohue poem almost every day. I have begun naming my emotions more consistently before reacting. I have been less consistent with checking in with my energy, and I have neglected quiet meditation.

Looking forward, I will continue to write regularly, to stretch and breathe and recite my daily poem. I will keep checking in with emotion and energy, and focus on settling into meditation for five to ten minutes a day.

Gratitude List:
1. Milkweed seeds, tossed to the winds as a blessing.
2. Little round “eggs” of moss, blown off the garage roof.
3. Looking backward, looking forward.
4. Slaying my dragons.
5. Talking to Mara on the phone this morning.

May we walk in Beauty!

Gestating Ideas

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

lichen

What is gestating within you in these days? What ideas and dreams are you brooding on? What seeds are waiting deep within you to break open their casings and begin seeking upward for sunshine and air?

Now is the time to give them secret and tender names, to hold them gently and to imagine what how they will appear when they are full grown. Sing to them, those ideas and dreams. Breathe on them. Look lovingly upon them, with eyes full of wonder. It may even be time to begin to whisper them to the dawn: “I wonder how my life would be if I would. . .”

Gratitude List:
1. Gestating intentions and ideas
2. Time with family, chances to chat and catch up. These fine, fine young folks.
3. The Janus pose–looking forward, looking back. But being in this moment.
4. Figgy pudding
5. The marriage of wisdom and compassion.

May we walk in Beauty!

Snugglesome

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snugglesome

Gratitude List:
1. Bald Eagles. Twice in the last two days, I have seen a bald eagle (perhaps the same one) near the Wrightsville exit off 30. Once in the air, and once in a tree. Every time I see one, I bless the memory of Rachel Carson, and remember that one person can make a difference in the world. Were it not for Rachel Carson, we very well might not have bald eagles to be grateful for.
2. This snugglesome cat. I knew him when he was a kitten, and now he is an old man, and I have only slipped from young adult into middle age. I feel as though I have gone from being his Mama to being his granddaughter. And so time is fleeting, and I am grateful for the time he has with us.
3. Poetry–putting it out into the world in a more intentional way.
4. I think that the sick-folk are getting better. I haven’t heard anyone cough for a good half-hour now.
5. En-visioning. I began a little Vision Booklet today. It came together very easily because I used collage bits that I have been saving. Probably just for this. I think that I have sorted out my heart’s desire a little more explicitly this year than I have before. That is satisfying.

May we walk in Beauty!

Confirmation

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

tree angel tree

I see it in many different spiritual systems (Christian and others), that hyper-positive word on Abundance, spoken with a jaw-clenched grin and wide eyes: Just pray hard enough, visualize brightly enough, give someone money enough, and you will find material blessings and happiness and all your dreams will come true. And you might get to heaven, to boot. You’ve heard the pitch too, perhaps: there’s so often, on the underside, a suggestion that if you’re poor or sick or unhappy, you’ve just been doing it wrong. You need to try harder.

It can be tempting, in the face of the Abundance sales pitch and its attendant guilt trip, to ignore or repudiate the ideas that thinking positively and visualizing what your heart really desires are actually helpful meditative techniques to discover and develop the dreams that you really want to bring to life.

I don’t really believe that I can think myself rich–perhaps that’s why I’m not. But I don’t think it works that way. I think that in order to create something in the physical world, we have to imagine it, have to believe it possible. And I think that too often, we throw out the early models of a dream because they seem unattainable, impossible. We stab ourselves in the feet because we believe ourselves incapable, unable.

Some people seem to have an inherent confidence and certainty in their dreams. They think a thing, believe in its potential, and suddenly they’ve made it happen. Some of us have to take it slower, perhaps, consider the options, shape the dream slowly, like sculpting stone.

When I first came across the idea of a Vision Board, I dismissed it because it sounded like the Abundance sales pitch. but then I began to look at the collages I have made obsessively throughout my life, and I realize that some of what I was doing was enacting my vision of what I wanted to create, or acknowledging an unsettled inner state that I couldn’t put words to, and suddenly the Vision Board made sense to me.

I’ve been wrestling and wrangling some dreams in the past year, some ideas that want to be born, and the past few weeks have seen them boil up to the surface again. Fearful that I will let them fizzle and die in the mundane activities of my everyday life, I have decided to do some collage Vision-work to keep them alive, keep them boiling.

You can search online for Vision Boards. Some of what I found was really inspiring. Others felt like exercises in narcissism. I don’t want to fall into that trap. I want to keep this contemplative and meditative. I think this will be my process:

Ask myself:
1. What is the dream that is begging to be born?
2. What is a reasonable timeline for bringing it to being?
3. What does it look like to create this dream in the world?
4. What does it feel like to create this dream in the world?

Then I am going to use the bits and pieces of collage that I have collected over the years to create my Vision Board. I have taken a piece of poster board and made an eight-page booklet to make a portable multi-page “Board.” I think it is important that I be able to carry it with me, so I can meditate on it no matter where I am. I hung last year’s Vision Board on the door to the basement, and I pass it several times a day, but it’s in a dark little space in the house, and I stopped really looking at it.

Last year, I tried to create it all in one sitting, but I think I need to do this over many days. I need to sit with it and watch it evolve, add to it as time goes on. One of the many sites I looked at today suggested handwriting the words and quotations that I want to add instead of typing them out. I think that’s an excellent idea. Handwriting activates as different part of the brain than typing does, and one of my goals for 2017 is to write more by hand.

Gratitude List:
1. Starting a Vision Board for the coming year/s. Thank you, Sarah!
2. The delight of a kiddo heading to his Grandparents’ house for the night. (Big brother was too sick to go, and took the disappointment with grace.)
3. Feeling a great sense of accomplishment. I’ve sent out two chapbooks for two separate contests. Now I need to get some individual poems out there, too.
4. When a single idea or reference keeps getting repeated in different places and different ways–dreams, Facebook references, old poems I have dredged up–and it feels like a confirmation of something I have been feeling or processing.
5. This week of time outside of time.

May we walk in Beauty!

Never Again

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

conestoga
Their names were:
Kyunqueagoah and Koweenasee
Tenseedaagua and Kanianguas
Saquies-hat-tah and Chee-na-wan
Quaachow (Kyunqueagoah’s son)
Shae-e-kah (a boy)
Ex-undas (Young Sheehays, a boy)*
Tong-quas (a boy)
Hy-ye-naes (a boy)
Ko-qoa-e-un-quas (a girl)
Karen-do-uah (a little girl)
Canu-kie-sung (a girl)
* (Sheehays was the name of one of the six murdered on the 14th of December in the village of Conestoga. I cannot find record of whether they were related. It is possible. Likely?)

Six adults and eight children, living–for their own safety–in the Lancaster workhouse, when they were brutally massacred by an angry armed band of vigilantes in 1763. Except for an elderly couple who escaped the brutal massacre because they lived elsewhere, these are the last of the Susquehannocks.

Tonight, we gathered at the spot with candles and sage. We talked quietly and cradled our candles against the breeze. I saw friends I treasure, and made a new friend–a wise woman full of compassion and infectious hope. May our resolve and hope and community call us forth into a new year with a firm commitment to continue to create a world more in harmony with Spirit and each other, one that will not tolerate hate and meanness, but will celebrate every act of gentleness and open-heartedness as Spirit-given.

Gratitude List:
1. Old friends. New friends. Isn’t it wonderful to have friends who “get” you? Who can intuit what you’re really about?
2. The smell of sacred sage, how it hangs about in my clothes and hair, reminding me to let go, let go, let go. . .
3. Commemoration. Saying “Never Again” together, and together drawing on hope for new pathways and ways of being. Plotting the loving revolution.
4. Chocolate. Chocolate and coffee. And more chocolate.
5. Maggie Doyne and BlinkNow. I showed the boys a video of her this evening, and they were really curious about her and what it means to parent fifty children. All around the world, there are people doing the Work: Maggie Doyne. Malala. Some kind woman on a bus somewhere standing between a bully and a vulnerable person. The Water Protectors. You.

May we walk in Beauty!

Alien Bales

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aliens
This is a photo of those round hay bales run through a Dreamscope filter. I’ve always thought they looked like something from and alien culture and this seems to prove it.
Gratitude List:
1. Rest
2. Time to focus on some poetry projects. I have another chapbook in the works for a contest. I hope to send it out before January.
3. The social comfort of card games
4. Dreams
5. A warm cat. We going to try letting him stay upstairs tonight instead of going into the basement. I am guessing I will be getting up at three during his angst-concert to put him downstairs, but maybe he’ll be able to keep it to himself.

May we walk in Beauty!