Musings

What’s the Problem?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt at Brewer’s blog is to write a Problem Poem. I was reading Idra Novey’s poem “That’s How Far I’d Drive for It” in the November Poetry journal today during library time, in which she does this short series of three lines near the end of this three-page poem in which she creates a beautiful negation full of relief after bad things didn’t happen. Crises occurred, but the worst-case scenarios didn’t happen. So in my poem today, I am taking the problems and subjecting them to Novey’s negation. (The pond, of course, is metaphor for a different kind of near-drowning.)

Negation

But I didn’t stay at the bottom of that pond.
They didn’t cross the threshold at the Gates of Death.
The sky didn’t open up and swallow us.
The world was not drowned in the great silence.
We didn’t get consigned to hell.

Someone started singing,

the vultures came, and were fed,
the work got done, the children tended,
the bills got paid, the truth got said,
the dream became the dreamer,
the morning star continued shining yet more brightly in the dawn.

Gratitude List:
1. Poetry journal. About a year ago, one of the guest editors suggested reading the journal with a pencil or pen, and marking it up, underlining and responding to the poets. I do that regularly now, and I think I have become an even more careful reader, and I’ve also found such intense inspiration for my own writing as I pause and consider my responses to the poems. I think it helps me learn better how to unpack literature with my students, too.
2. Friday morning breakfast with colleagues.
3. That painting of the ivory-billed woodpecker that my dad made for me.
4. Dreams coming true.
5. I stopped to put some of my culled books in a little free library today, and picked up a copy of Natasha Trethaway’s Monument! What a treasure!
May we walk in Beauty!

“Awake, my dear. Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of light and let it breathe.” —Hafiz

“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan

“The heavens are sweeping us along in a cyclone of stars.” —Teilhard de Chardin

“Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or heart coming from. the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body. Another time, there was the booming voice of an ocean storm thundering from far out at sea, telling about what lived in the distance, about the rough water that would arrive, wave after wave revealing the disturbance at center.

Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark, considering snow. On the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place. I wonder if it will return this summer, if it will multiply and move up to the other stand of flowers in a territorial struggle.

It’s winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” —Linda Hogan

Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison

Joseph Campbell: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”

Catching the Ferry

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Kirumi Bridge, across the Mara River: Ming’aro Pictures Empire

Brewer’s prompt today is to write a Childhood Object poem. A couple days ago, I was scrolling around Tanzania on Google Earth, and saw a bridge over the Mara River where we used to cross by ferry when I was a child. I think the last time I was there in 1988, there was already a bridge, but I was suddenly flooded with memories of waiting for the ferry at the Mara River. There’s even a little video of drone footage of the bridge on Youtube.

I have never seen it, but there’s
a bridge there now across the Mara,
steel and concrete on the Sirari Road.
You used to need to catch the ferry to cross,
waiting on the eastern shore of the river,
bulrushes and papyrus lining the banks.
What crocodile would have been bold enough
to lurk among them, with the rattle and rev
of lorries and garis lined up for the next crossing?
Even fifty years later, and half a world away,
I pass a truck idling diesel fumes,
and I am back again on that riverbank,
the sun sparkling on the water, the hum of Swahili
in the drowsing afternoon, the distant ferry
approaching from from the Mwanza side.

Gratitude List:
1. The threads which connect dreams to waking life
2. My colleagues–daily I am grateful for this thoughtful and caring group of people
3. Ethiopian food–Jon shared his leftovers
4. Origami–I love the meditative nature of paper folding–I have been making zhen xian bao (Google it)
5. Weaving the pieces together.
May we walk in Beauty!

“No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—
November!”
—Thomas Hood, No!

“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” —Mary Oliver

“Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.” —Muriel Rukeyser

“We discover the Earth in the depths of our being through participation, not through isolation or exploitation. We are most ourselves when we are most intimate with the rivers and mountains and woodlands, with the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens… We belong here. Our home is here. The excitement and fulfillment of our lives is here… Just as we are fulfilled in our communion with the larger community to which we belong, so too the universe itself and every being in the universe is fulfilled in us.” —Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe

Words of Howard Zinn:
“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t ‘win,’ there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

“If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.” ―Jelaluddin Rumi

“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” –Roald Dahl, The Witches

“For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap its’ knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows, the joy, the poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff. You have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.” –Anais Nin

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“On such a day each road is planned
To lead to some enchanted land;
Each turning meets expectancy.
The signs I read on every hand.
I know by autumn’s wizardry
On such a day the world can be
Only a great glad dream for me–
Only a great glad dream for me!”
–Eleanor Myers Jewett, “An Autumn Day”

“Change is not merely necessary to life, it is life.”
–Alvin Toffler

“In the morning I went out to pick dandelions and was drawn to the Echinacea patch where I found a honeybee clinging to one of the pink flowers. She seemed in distress, confused and weak. She kept falling off the flower and then catching herself in midair and flying dizzily back. She kept trying to get back to work, to collect her pollen and nectar to take home to the hive to make honey but she was getting weaker and weaker and then she fell into my hand. I knew she would never make it back to her hive. For the next half hour she rested in my palm, her life slowly ebbing away as a thunderstorm started to brew. I sat on the earth waiting for death with her. The lightening flashed over the mountains, a family of turkeys slowly walked the ridge, a wild dog keyed into what was happening circled past us. The trees appeared startlingly vivid and conscious as the wind blew up and the thunder cracked and then her death was finished. She was gone forever. But in her going she taught me to take every moment as my last flower, do what I could and make something sweet of it.” –Layne Redmond

Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.
–Thomas Merton

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
–Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein

“Learn to tell the story of the red leaves against water.
Read the alphabet of walnut branches newly bared for winter.
Become literate in the language of cricket and of wren,
of the footsteps of skunk and the changeability of weather.

Interpret the text of the wind in the hollow.
Scan the documents of cloud and constellation.
Enter the tale of rose hip and nettle and sassafras.
Study Wisdom and she will find you.”
–Beth Weaver-Kreider

“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” –Khalil Gibran

“Awake, my dear! Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of Light and let it breathe.” ―Hafez (Ladinsky)

“We who hobnob with hobbits and tell tales about little green men are used to being dismissed as mere entertainers, or sternly disapproved of as escapists. But I think perhaps the categories are changing, like the times. Sophisticated readers are accepting the fact that an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce an improbable and hypothetical art. At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

Duskwalking

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Goldfinch Farm, February 2023

I’d gotten into a rhythm, waking up in the mornings, putting on my sneakers, finding my prayer beads, greeting the dawn, and walking. It takes me about 30-40 minutes to go through the beads, and walking at a fast clip actually seemed to enhance the meditation while I followed my doctor’s orders to get more regular exercise.

But the new school year came along, and in order to get in that 40 minutes, I would have to wake up before 5. That just wasn’t going to happen. So I’ve started doing my walking meditations at night. The timing is a little less specific, and it can get pushed off in favor of last minute lesson prep or other obligations, if I’m not careful, but I am finding that duskwalking brings its own kind of magic.

Duskwalking Gratitude List:
1. Bats. I used to keep daily tabs on the bats when we were farming. There were two who roosted under the barn overhang for several years. Perhaps these are their descendants.
2. Owls! There really is nothing sweeter than the whinny of a screech owl in the dusk.
3. Lightning bugs. Still around in August!
4. Evening breeze.
5. The moon. For years, I have been keeping track of the moon’s cycling, but as I walk every evening, I see the shifts in her position from night to night as she changes shape.
May we walk in Beauty!

“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

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors.

But today we kneel only to truth,
follow only beauty,
and obey only LOVE.
—Kahlil Gibran
****”
“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

The Greywoman

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In the first part of the dream, there is a premonition of fire. We (I am with a group of people I love) are in a small house in a tiny village high on the side of a mountain in West Virginia. It’s not Philippi, where I spent a couple years of my childhood, but I know it’s WVA. I wake up from sleeping in my dream, my head filled with fire. I see the town, the whole mountainside blazing. In my dream within a dream, the house was engulfed in flames, and I was screaming that there wouldn’t be enough time to get out. I felt the pure knowledge that I was going to die. When I wake up from the dream-in-a-dream, I know that the conflagration will be started by extra rail ties that were stacked up beside the railroad tracks. I can see the initiating spark on the one tie as it tumbles down the mountainside.

But we have things to do, a funeral to attend in the larger town down at the foot of the mountain. I think that town is in Virginia because of who we meet at the funeral. All along the road to the town, I keep looking for signs of fire, keep thinking I smell fire., but nothing happens, and the dream is no longer about fire.

The funeral is for a young woman in her late teens. I don’t know how she died. At the doors of the little church (it’s one of those tiny churches which is basically all sanctuary) stands my Great Aunt Lydia. In life she wasn’t more than 5’3”, but here she is almost six feet tall, ramrod straight, solid, protectively fierce.She is dressed all in grey with a grey hat on her head (though that was not the tradition in her church in real life). I realize that she is the one who is in charge of the funeral. She hugs me, lovingly but business-like: she has a job to do. A tiny woman in green hugs me. I realize she is also a great aunt, but I can’t remember her name. She says she is Aunt Carol (there is no Aunt Carol in my waking life family tree).

In the church, I sit a couple pews behind my grandmother. We don’t greet each other, but it is not awkward or rude–we’re there for a purpose. Most of the people in the church are elders with a few middle aged folks scattered in. The funeral starts, and the youth group comes out of a front room. They’re in charge. They do a series of chants and songs and games, like you’d do in camp or youth group. It’s playful and spirited, and I know Aunt Lydia approves. Two of the younger youth begin a dance battle, and then the elders intervene a little and gently turn it into a sort of line dance or quiet conga line to forestall the energy getting out of control. Everyone understands that this is the youth group’s way of celebrating the life of their beloved friend.

That’s the end of the dream. It’s been a while since I have had such a potent dream. This one feels like something. You know how it is? My mind has been on Maui, so perhaps that’s why the fire dream. Still, I wonder if there was a message about learning to interpret my intuitions. What I love most is the sense of being surrounded by the great aunts and grandmothers, and how they were watching out for the young ones, letting them be their glorious selves and experience their grief in their own ways, but also guiding.

I was aware throughout the walk to the church and while I was seated in the church, of the weight against my waist of the pouch holding my magical doll.

And here am I, in the waking world, with a life that is spent in guiding teenagers to be their best, most fulfilled and joyful selves. I think the spirits and ancestors are offering their help.

The other day, one of my beloveds asked during a conversation, whether the rest of us thought that people are generally acting from their best selves. This has been the conundrum I ask myself when I wake in the middle of the night to try to make myself go back to sleep. Last night, before the dream, during my insomnia hours, I began to think about how, if we’re not examining our inner selves, if we’re not in touch with our own motivations, we’re probably more likely to act in self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, in a bid for attention and fame, or power and domination, or wealth. Or worse, to see others abased or demeaned. Did I experience a little glee last night when I heard about the indictments? Part of me excuses that as human nature, especially because it represents justice being done to a group of people who were actively manipulating others for power and domination. But part of me also asks myself to do a little better. To keep doing better.

Gratitude List:
1. Messages in dreams
2. Help from the ancestors
3. Road trip: Today is my last day of summer and I am going to go to the National Shrine at Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto in Emmitsburg, MD. Before I head west, I am going to drive to Columbia to the statue of Quan Am.
4. The way people circle round to create a bowl to hold each other
5. The morning’s quiet breezes and walnut leaves twirling down
May we walk in Beauty!

“Whoever you are,
now I place my hand upon you,
that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear.
I have loved many women and men,
but I love none better than you.”
—Walt Whitman, “To You”

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” —Salman Rushdie

“I used to say, ‘There is a God-shaped hole in me.’ For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.” —Salman Rushdie

“Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.”
—Hafez

“The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.” —Hildegard of Bingen

“Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.” —St. Hildegard of Bingen

“The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.” —Howard Zinn

“Dominance. Control. These things the unjust seek most of all. And so it is the duty of the just to defy dominance and to challenge control.” —Robert Fanney

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.” —Alice Walker

“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.” —Alice Walker

“I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way…I can’t apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to… We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful…We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.” —Alice Walker

“There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.” ―Linda Hogan
****”
“Underlying symptoms that typify the Midlife Passage is the assumption that we shall be saved by finding and connecting with someone or something new in the outer world. Alas, for the drowning midlife sailor there are no such life preservers. We are in the sea-surge of the soul, along with many others to be sure, but needing to swim under our own power. The truth is simply that what we must know will come from within. If we can align our lives with that truth, no matter how difficult the abrasions of the world, we will feel healing, hope and new life. The experience of early childhood, and later of our culture, alienated us from ourselves. We can only get back on course by reconnecting with our inner truths.” —James Hollis

“Having a lover/friend who regards you as a living growing criatura, being, just as much as the tree from the ground, or a ficus in the house, or a rose garden out in the side yard… having a lover and friends who look at you as a true living breathing entity, one that is human but made of very fine and moist and magical things as well… a lover and friends who support the criatura in you… these are the people you are looking for. They will be the friends of your soul for life. Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows.” —Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power.

Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.”
—Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames, The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

The Happy Heretic Hits 56

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

But, first things first: My book is born!

Ten years ago, I ventured into the world of self-publishing. I created my own little imprint called Skunk Holler Poetryworks (we live in a dip between the arms of Pisgah Ridge casually known as Skunk Hollow). Then I published a book of Poetry called The Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird. It’s a mouthful of a name, which is often the burden of first children. A year later, Skunk Holler Poetryworks published a second volume: Holding the Bowl of the Heart. Then I dithered. The company I use to publish the books can print a single copy or dozens, as demand requires. That means no up-front capital for me unless I buy a batch of author copies. The downside of this marvelous situation is that the company is an Amazon company, and I feel like I am working within the belly of the beast. So for years, I just didn’t publish anything. I haven’t been able to find another company with the incredibly user-friendly design system, the marketing potential, and the one-off printing. So I didn’t publish for almost a decade.

But then last year happened. I became The Heretic. I wrote some of my best poems. And The Heretic’s Book of Prayer was born. I wanted to publish it, but I am essentially an unknown poet, and I like having total control of everything from font to layout to organization to cover design, so I jumped back into the belly of the beast.

This is definitely my best book so far. The poems are stronger and more confident. The organization tells a story that I want to tell. The focus is crisper. And in the sorting and editing of poems, I actually found that I have enough poems for a second book, possibly titled Seasons of the Witch.

You can buy The Heretic’s Book of Prayer on Amazon. My dream is to eventually set up a page on The Mockingbird Chronicles website where you can order all of my books directly from me, but I am not that smart yet. I’ll need some tutoring to manage it, and my IT Guy is leaving for college in two weeks.

Shameless ad: Buy my book, please!

And. It’s my birthday! I’m turning 56. I’ve done my yearly research, and there doesn’t appear to be anything mathematically interesting about the number 56. There’s something about it being the sum of the first six triangular numbers, making it a tetrahedral number, so there’s that.

The angel number and numerology people all seem to agree that 56 is a number of transformation and change. I’ll take that! As I have been praying along with the current Way of the Rose Novena, I have been asking for focus and determination, and somehow that seems to have translated to the focus I needed to get this book done. Also, I recently asked my doctor how I can deal with the exhaustion and aches. She suggested, I start eating a careful Mediterranean diet, and exercising more. Exercise has always been my bugaboo, but then I thought about the fact that I am already spending 30-40 minutes a day saying my rosary–What if I would walk during that time? So I’ve added a brisk walk every day. In a week and a half, I am feeling a change. So maybe the transformative aspect of 56 can help me continue to develop greater health in the coming year.

I asked if I could write the blurb about the saint for today on The Way of the Rose novena page. I chose St. Harriet Tubman. You should be able to read it by clicking here.

Gratitude List:
1. How people circle ’round to protect the vulnerable.
2. Examples of people who offered their lives for justice for others.
3. Goldfinches along the roads these days, how they fly up twittering so joyfully.
4. The little fairy birds that flitted ahead of me on my walk today. I think they must be field sparrows, but in the dusk they looked tiny and fairy-like.
5. Aging. Yes, really. Despite the aches and the hormone shifts and the new and edgy anxieties. I love how we change and ripen, how our faces begin to show the art of our living. Birthdays remind me that I am always on the turning wheel, and what a glorious ride it can be!

May we walk ever in Beauty!

“Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.”
― Tom Robbins

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

“The Seven of Pentacles”
by Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

“Life…is a wonder. It is a sky laden with clouds of contradictions.” —Naguib Mahfouz

“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” —Coco Chanel

“By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.” —Teilhard de Chardin

“Soul of my soul … be water in this now-river.” —Rumi

“You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe, and your name is Love.” —Rumi

“There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even human, has achieved, in the centre of one’s sphere, what the bee has achieved on her own: and if intelligence from another world were to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation, I would offer the humble comb of honey.” —Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life Of The Bee, 1924

“If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.” —Rumi

“In these cataclysmic times, living in what Michael Meade calls the ‘slow apocalypse,’ despair can be dangerously seductive. Our lives may feel inadequate to the terrible momentum of our times, but it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief.

“While despair traps us in the bog of despondency, grief carries us into life. Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty.

“If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings, and slip the poetry between our words.

“Rumi says, “All medicine wants is pain to cure.” And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude, our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation that medicine might reach through and towards us.” —Toko-pa Turner

Artemis at Midlife

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

I have been doing magic to enhance my focus and intention in these flowing days of wibbly-wobbly summer time, in this larger season of my life which has lost its focus and drive, when I have left so many of my little (and big) dreams lying somewhere along the path. Every summer for the past nine years, I have told myself I would organize my poetry into another book, and September always slides in and I have nothing to show.

Call it fear of failure, or of success.
Call it undiagnosed ADHD.
Call it setting aside my own needs for the needs of others.
Call it laziness and procrastination.
Call it addiction to distractions.
Call it the overwhelm of having TOO MANY poems to sort through.

Whatever it is, I have stood behind this wall of it for nearly a decade now, and I am ready to move on. This summer something shifted. Here I am in the vestibule of July, and I have two very messy collections of poetry that I am working on. Oh, they’re nothing like ready. I have arranging and editing and cutting to do, and maybe something to add here or there. But I have TWO actual pools of poems headed toward publication. I’m not entirely sure what brought about the change.

Call it the magic spells.
Call it the recent 54-day novena in which I told the Mother my heart’s desire was to finish another book.
Call it finally crawling out of the psycho-spiritual constraints of existing within a Mennonite institution.
Call it the new fire of midlife.

Whatever it is, I am grateful.

Today begins a new 54-day novena with The Way of the Rose, and I don’t mind making public my plea. I am asking for Focus. I have been imagining the Goddess Diana with her bow, focused laser-like on her object. This morning during my prayers I got an image in my head of Artemis at Midlife. I came down from the pear grove and wrote that poem:

Artemis at Midlife

One of her greatest attributes is vibrant youth,
like her bow, like her swarm of leggy hounds,
like her fierce protection of the wilds
and of her own wild autonomy.

She was never supposed to get old.
Her eyes have blurred and softened, so now
she relies upon her sense of her body in space,
her inner eyes, to find the target.

Her weight has settled and gathered
in her belly and her thighs, and so
she hides no longer in the slender saplings
but among the tumbled rocks.

The whip-quick Alani who swirled
like mist around her thighs, barking
and racing to confront the wayward hunter
in the green wood, rest now in grassy hollows

like sleepy bears in the moonlight,
raising their heads as the goddess
rises to cool herself in the stream
after one more inexorable hot flash.

There was a day when she ran fleetly
through the forest, leaping from rock
to log, and lightly across ravines. No more.
Her body has found its home in gravity,

and she wanders quietly, no longer
baying the wild stag with hounds,
but waiting, silent, under a great oak,
for the regal beast to come to her.

Gratitude List:
1. Finding Focus, though with softer vision
2. Breakthrough and Shift
3. The wide-open splendor of a summer’s day
4. Making friendship bracelets with kids
5. The way a poem helps to shape meaning
May we walk in Beauty!

“The doors to the world of the wild self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door. If you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the Sky and water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.” —Aldo Leopold

“Recognize the invisible hands that guide you, the breath that breathes you, the walls and roof that keep cold from chilling you, the water that magically springs from your taps, the long line of ancestors whose every step made your incarnation possible. You belong to these holy helpers. You have undisputed membership. In your recognition of this wealth, your own life cannot help but become an offering back to that which feeds you.” —Toko-pa Turner

“The very form of our thinking has to be re-formed from “thinking about” to “thinking within,” and Silence is the teacher. . . . Silence is intelligence. . . . As we enter into Silence, we enter into Wisdom. We do not become wise but enter into the objective Wisdom of world processes. Judgment, as the primary mode of our thinking, ceases or is taken up only when needed for our practical life. As we enter into the Wisdom of Silence, we allow ourselves to be taught by the things of the world.” —Robert Sardello

“To disobey in order to take action is the byword of all creative spirits. The history of human progress amounts to a series of Promethean acts. But autonomy is also attained in the daily workings of individual lives by means of many small Promethean disobediences, at once clever, well thought out, and patiently pursued, so subtle at times as to avoid punishment entirely.” —Gaston Bachelard

“Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” ―Linda Hogan

“I didn’t mean to tell you,” Mrs Whatsit faltered. “I didn’t mean ever to let you know. But, oh, my dears, I did so love being a star!” —Marlene L’Engle

“Some black cats are witches in disguise. Some witches are black cats in disguise.” —Folklore of Wales

“Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand…the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.” —Alan Lightman

“The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.” —Adrienne Rich

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.” —Adrienne Rich

“Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,” for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.

[…]

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” —Adrienne Rich

Sun Behind the Rain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Happy Midsummer’s Day! Summer Solstice, or Litha, is the longest day in the calendar of the northern hemisphere, the day to celebrate the sun, to be grateful for the energy and warmth it gives, to consider the element of fire.

This is a season to pay closer attention to your energy. What fires you up,
gets you excited and energized,
angry and irritable?
Those are the things to pay attention to.
Can you modulate the flow of energy,
not to deny anger, but to regulate and use it,
not to hinder creative endeavors,
but to thoughtfully channel that fire
into satisfying work?

Where I am today, we are receiving desperately-needed rain. Not a day to stand in the field and feel the rays of sun energizing my body. Instead, today will be a day to walk in the glorious rain and meditate on how the source of energy is always there, even when I can’t feel it.

Wishing you a deep awareness of the sun’s revivifying power today. May you feel energized and open. May joy be always present, even when grief and pain are your companions.

Gratitude List:

1. Rain!

2. The sun is always there.

3. So much to learn. There’s no end to the learning.

4. Time with the family. Stepping outside routine gives us new ways to know each other.

5. Watching teenagers grow into themselves and develop maturity.

May we walk in Beauty!

“This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.” —Margaret Atwood
*****
Sometimes everything
has to be
enscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.
—David Whyte
*****
“Whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market.” —Pope Francis
*****
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” —Annie Dillard
*****
“Now, on the longest day, light triumphs, and yet begins the decline into dark. We turn the Wheel… for we have planted the seeds of our own changes, and to grow we must accept even the passing of the sun… Set Sail…See with clear eyes…See how we shine!” —Starhawk
*****
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” —Albert Einstein
*****
“Ceremonies large and small have the power to focus attention to a way of living awake in the world. The visible became invisible, merging with the soil.” —Robin Wall Kimmerer
*****
“The cure for anything is salt water—tears, sweat, or the sea.” —Isak Dinesen

Compassion

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

These days, we travel through a landscape mapped out
of trauma and trouble. There, says the boy as we travel the highway,
is where a semi caught fire. Four fire stations responded.

And there, he says a little while later, is where that accident happened
last Friday. You know, when the woman and her baby were airlifted
to the Medical Center? And over there is where that jeep rolled over.

He would tell me, if he ever read my poetry, that this is all wrong,
that I have made up the accidents (and I have), that he told me
not just how many stations responded, but their numbers

and apparatus as well. This is true. I spin and embroider truth into story
while he lives in a world of facts and numbers, of call signs and
response times, first dues, tankers and tillers, flashing lights and sirens.

He’s been at it for over a year now, I think, listening to scanners,
memorizing the station numbers and apparatus for every accident
within three counties. He checks the maps and nearest intersections,

knows every township and borough we drive through,
and can tell you when the local fire department is going to receive
its new tanker truck and how much they paid. I nod and smile,

accepting his avalanche of data as a point of connection between us,
trying to sort through for something I can remember, can feed back
with more than a glazed nod. Yes, I was listening to your voice,

to the thread of the story you spin from the numbers,
of lives picked from the brink of disaster, cared for by humans
rushing to respond, people plucked from the river (living or

dead), children found by friendly searchers in the woods,
lives in the balance. May I tell the story forward a moment,
and backward? How I see how the tiny child who created a club

to save lost and wounded animals and insects has grown into
a watchful observer of tragedy, who may one day grow
into a responder, one who rushes to the crisis, saying,

It’s okay now, someone is here to help. There are so many ways
to care, like you, with your drive to know that someone will always
coming rushing to the scene when a life is at stake.

This feels like it needs lots of revision work.

While I was writing it, he came downstairs to tell me that the same address occurs in two local townships, and that first responders had just been dispatched to the wrong address of a five-year-old who was choking and not breathing, but that they caught the error on the way and went to the correct home. We so rarely learn the end of these stories. All I can do is pray for these fragile lives in the middle of their crises, and hope that help gets there in time.

Gratitude List:
1. Crows
2. White horse in a field of buttercups
3. Scent of fox: this morning in the grove, it was so very strong
4. So much life in the magical sycamore tree
5. The caring hearts of these young people

May we walk in Beauty!

“A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.” —Terry Pratchett

“Oh, God, make me a hollow reed, from which the pith of self hath been blown so that I may become as a clear channel through which Thy Love may flow to others. I have left behind me impatience and discontent. I will chafe no more at my lot. I commit myself wholly into thy hands, for thou are my Guide in the desert, the Teacher of my ignorance, the Physician of my sickness.” —attributed to Abdu’l-Bahá

“Truth is an agile cat. It has more than nine lives.” —Joy Harjo

Silence
by Hafiz

A day of Silence
can be a pilgrimage in itself.
A day of Silence
can help you listen
to the Soul play
in marvelous lute and drum.
Is not most talking
a crazed defense of a crumbling fort?
I thought we came her
to surrender in Silence,
to yield to Light and Happiness,
to Dance within
in celebration of Love’s Victory!

“What if we reframed ‘living with uncertainty’ to ‘navigating mystery'”? —Martin Shaw

The Glorious Mysteries

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today is the last day of National Poetry Month. It has been another marvelous month. I have felt like the Muse was active more days this month than not, for which I am grateful. I never know when I begin these things whether I am going to hit a wall by day ten and have to slog through to the end. I’m grateful that there was so much to find and follow this month.

I have four more weeks of school, and then I’ll hopefully have time to do some editing. I really want to commit to going through my work and pulling together another book. But I have said that several times in the past few years, so I need to find the Key in order to make it happen.

The rosary prayers go in a cycle of three sets: The Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries. There is a fourth set that was added by Pope John Paul II, but I haven’t studied those. As I have been praying the rosary since August, I have been meditating on the mysteries as a Path of Initiation to Enlightenment. I believe we are repeating this cycle over and over again in our lives, and the three-day cycle of repetition in the rosary cycle offers a way to meditate on one’s current cycle of transformation.

The Joyful Mysteries are about hearing and accepting the call to transformation:
1. The Annunciation: Hearing the call, meeting the beloved angel being, saying Yes, consenting to the process
2. The Visit with Elizabeth: Mentoring, wise confidante, comfort and counsel
3. The Birth: Stepping onto the path, hatching, the seed bursts forth, the initiation
4. The Elder Blessing: Blessing and commissioning by the priest/priestess, they say: “I have waited my whole life for this!”
5. The Finding in the Temple: Finding the purpose, defining the vision of the initiation story

The Sorrowful Mysteries are about meeting the challenges of the enlightenment journey:
1. The Agony in the Garden: Facing betrayal and abandonment, anxiety about what is to come
2. The Flogging in the Temple: Pain, the reality of betrayal, enduring the torture
3. The Crown of Thorns: Being shamed and mocked, standing shameless in the face of taunting
4. The Bearing of the Cross: Picking up the work that must happen even in the midst of trauma and anguish
5. Death: Death, loss, symbolic death, end of old life and way of being

The Glorious Mysteries are about stepping into the truth of the new way:
1. Resurrection: Symbolic rebirth, restoration, revivifying, re-energizing, re-awakening
2. Ascension into Heaven: Stepping back onto the path with Enlightenment in sight
3. The Descent of the Holy Spirit: Tongues of fire, new language, deep connection to Spirit, recollection of “This is my Beloved Child in whom I am well pleased.”
4. The Assumption of the Virgin: Taking up the priestessing role, putting on the mantle
5. The Coronation of the Virgin: The Summoning to the coronation of the Queen, living in the glory of the Mystery

This past summer, when I felt caught in cycles of unrelenting Sorrowful Mysteries, it was a comfort to meditate every three days on the process of meeting the challenges and then to remind myself that the Glorious Mysteries follow. And of course, while this is a linear telling, there’s also a layering quality, a sense in which we live all the stages at once.

Gratitude List:
1. Denise Levertov’s poetry
2. Writing practice. I long to have a writer’s life, but in the meantime, I can carve out time for a consistent writing practice
3. Circles of beloved community
4. The quiet misty green of the grove in the morning
5. Always new things to learn
May we walk in Beauty!

“Things aren’t so tangible and sayable as people would have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are world of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.” —Richard Rohr

“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.” —Georgia O’Keeffe

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ―Rebecca Solnit

“The child’s hand
Folding these wings
Wins no wars and ends them all. “
―Thomas Merton

“I never sanction violence. Never. But I wonder how we got to the point when destruction of property deserves greater coverage and a greater portion of our attention than the destruction of human life. Since when do shattered windows matter more than shattered spines, shattered voice boxes, and shattered dreams? When did we become a people who mourn the destruction of things over the destruction of lives?” —Omid Safi

What You See

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today was Lancaster’s Race Against Racism, a couple-thousand-person 5K, in which the community works to raise money for the anti-racism efforts of the local YWCA. I haven’t walked it in six years. Last time, I walked/ran with my then-8-year-old. Today my husband and I walked while the kid, now 14 and a tall leggy runner, ran. He did it in a little over twenty minutes. Jon finished in just over an hour, and I was about ten minutes behind Jon. I walked with a friend who is also somewhat short, and we had a rich conversation while strolling through the city.

A couple days ago, Robert Lee Brewer’s prompt was to write and anapodoton poem. An anapodoton, according to Wiktionary, is “a rhetorical device in which a main clause of a phrase that is not mentioned is implied by a subordinate clause that is mentioned.” I didn’t write one then, but today’s prompt to write about something you see, offered me the “What you see” phrase.

Gratitude List:
1. Lancaster and York Cities and their Races Against Racism. Such important work.
2. Good friends and good conversations
3. My siblings
4. My parents
5. The green glow of trees breathing
May we walk in Beauty!

“To love, my brothers and sisters, does not mean we have to agree. But maybe agreeing to love is the greatest agreement. And the only one that ultimately matters, because it makes a future possible.” —Michael B. Curry

“The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.” —Barry H. Gillespie

“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.” —Ursula K Le Guin

“There is room for you at our table, if you choose to join us.” —Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing

“For beautiful to happen, the beautiful has got to be seen.” —from the musical “Ordinary Days”

“You will be found.” —from the musical “Dear Evan Hansen”
****”
“How do you become the person you’ve forgotten you ever were?” —from the musical “Anastasia”

“The universe is not made up of atoms; it’s made up of tiny stories.” ―Joseph Gordon-Levitt

To all the children
by Thomas Berry

To the children who swim beneath
The waves of the sea, to those who live in
The soils of the Earth, to the children of the flowers
In the meadows and the trees of the forest,
To all those children who roam over the land
And the winged ones who fly with the winds,
To the human children too, that all the children
May go together into the future in the full
Diversity of their regional communities.

Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

“Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you. Unfold your own myth.” ―Rumi (Barks)

“You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.” ―Isabel Allende

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy – the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” ―Bréne Brown, Wholehearted