Musings

A Wide Open Field

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

2014 April 068

Sometimes I think that I am a Benedictine, seeking the Order that would give my life an established contemplative rhythm: work and prayer, work and prayer, work that is prayer.

Sometimes I think I am Ignatian, looking to follow the Rule, the map to the journey inward: this step, then this one, then this–deeper, deeper, deeper.

Sometimes I think I am Franciscan, seeking the Holy One in the mundane, in the wild places, in the faces of people around me, in the incarnate world.

Or–how would I even say this one?–Julianist?  Seeking ecstasy and union with the One.

Hildegardian–Searching for the correspondences between the eternal and the temporal, to see the macro within the micro.

Brigidan–Tending, nurturing, observing, experiencing pure devotion.  Perhaps this one could also be called Oliverian (I am a follower of the way of Mary Oliver, of paying attention).

My own tradition has no saints, so I wander into the realm of the Catholics and others to borrow theirs.  The more I study, the more it seems to me that some of the least dogmatically churchy people are some of the people the church holds up most lovingly for veneration.  Even many of my own Anabaptist forbears were rebels and refuseniks, iconoclasts and outsiders.  It helps me to remember this, that my own sense of being on the edge, of standing in the open field outside the structure of the church, of lurking on the fringes, is part of a long tradition.  It’s what Father Richard Rohr calls the place of spiritual freedom: “a life on the edge of the inside–not at the center or at the top, but not outside throwing rocks, either.”

Some of those we venerate were stone-throwers themselves.  I’ve seen the modern iconoclasts and rebels picking up stones, have joined in that myself, actually.  And if I am honest, my fingers still occasionally twitch with the desire to join the battlers again.  Sometimes even the people who speak most passionately and articulately for the way of peace and justice in the world are all the while wreaking violence and destruction in the spiritual field.  I will put down my stones, and I will continue to stand out here on the field of the fringe, my feet in the world of both/and.

Perhaps, in the end, I am all of the above, and a Mennonite, too, following the path of Menno Simons toward Quietness, toward Yieldedness, toward Community, not blind submission to the established order, but a resting in the peace of being on this wide and open field, experiencing and sharing grace, absorbing the lessons of so many who have been here before.

Gratitude List:
1. The field is so wide, so eternally expansive
2. Articulators, people who envision the pathways–saints and poets and musicians and artists and children and you
3. Purring–why is a cat’s purr so calming to humans?
4. Someone else woke up early in this house so he could make paper hearts to hang all around to celebrate Valentine’s Day
5. Balance

May we walk in Beauty!

Reprise

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

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Someone has been making Valentines.

I don’t suppose it’s plagiarism to grab something I wrote two years ago and put it up here today.  This is an old gratitude list, but as I was looking at it this morning, I was struck by how profoundly applicable it is to my Now, so I am reprising it today.  I need to keep point #5 in mind.  I could extend that one today, to say that when we really believe in the goodness of people, in the truth of their hearts, people rise and reach outward in ways that surprise us all.  I know it’s true for me.  I am always more likely to extend myself out of my self-absorbed bubble when I know that the people around me are expecting the best of me.

With students, I think this is incredibly important.  When we approach a situation or a class with a sense of suspicion, they will respond with defiance.  When we believe in their hearts and minds, and ask them to be authentic human beings, they are eager to share their profound truths and to show kindness.  Yes, there is sometimes a lot of goofiness and cynicism and youthful narcissism to wade through at times, but accountability and trust are powerful offerings that help to overcome some of the prickliness.  And they, of course, often see our own prickliness and harshness more clearly than we do.


Gratitude List:

1.  Strong boundaries
2.  Compassionate hearts
3.  The balance of boundaries and compassion
4.  Morning mist rising from my River.  When I say “my” River, I don’t mean it as mine alone.  Nor do I mean that it is my River exclusive of all other rivers.  But it can be my River and one of my rivers and still belong also to you and to all of us in the way that I can say you are my Friend, and yet you are not exclusively mine, nor are you my only friend, but that I love you in a particular way that is particular to our relationship.  My River.  The mist rises from it in the red morning light, and there is so much magic in it.  And also in you.
5.  And this: Goodness.  There is so much goodness in people, in strangers even.  And I know too many stories, especially in recent days, of people who fell to the lowest pitches of bullyhood and meanness and real evil when left to their own devices.  But this also is true, so gloriously true: that so many people are simply good, simply full of heart and tenderness and compassion.  That you do not have to bang on the doors or scratch very deeply at all before goodness oozes out all over, fresh and raw and sweet like honey.  I have seen it just today, how you can look into a stranger’s eyes and see it and know it is there, and follow it.   The guy who drives your tow truck may be a philosopher to rival the ancient mystics.  The woman who sells you groceries may have some rich wisdom about human nature that even the respected psychoanalysts have yet to figure.  So many wise ones to discover.  So many namaste moments to explore.

May we walk in Beauty.

I Found My Way

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Yes, a selfie, a bleary and shaggy morning in my little monk’s cell at the National Conference Center.

I’m at the National Conference Center in Leesburg, VA for the biennial Mennonite Educator’s Conference this weekend.  I am giddier about this than I should be, taking it as a little vacation for the routine.  I do miss my family, but I also treasure times when I only have to think about getting myownself from place to place.  And that actually takes a certain amount of surreal effort in this building.  It was designed to be confusing and unsettling in order to force people to talk to each other.  It accomplishes all that.  I kind of like it.  Being in a building with a distinct agenda gives it a certain personality, like it’s an entity in the work of the weekend.

Gratitude List:
1. I finally managed to get the names of all 196 countries of the world in the Countries Quiz I have been playing online
2. I found my room all by myself
3. I slept until the alarm this morning
4. Spending two days among people where the main goal is to talk about how we can be most effective at caring for the young people in our classrooms
5. Moments of quiet

May we walk in Beauty!

Exploring the Shadows

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2014 January 018
Sun and shadow.

It’s Brigid’s Day.  It’s Candlemas.  Day of the Groundhog.  Day of the Shadow.

The thing about shadows?  They appear most clearly on the brightest days.  Those cloudy and overcast days, when everything is one singular tone–the shadows are hints and mirages only.  But on days when the sun is shining brightly, then the shadows flow and scatter about your feet and down the hill, pooling and puddling like water in the hollows and crevices.  On sparkling days, you can look into the shadows and discern the deep indigo and violet.  The shadow becomes a mirror, another layer of reality overlaid upon the everyday.

Today, I will light my candle in the dark places and watch for the way the light shifts the darkness around me, how it helps to define and shape the darkness, how it gives meaning to the shapes of things as their shadows find them, mirror them, define them.  Today, I will be the groundhog, searching for the shadow that defines and mirrors me, that offers me a new vision of who I am when I am outside the safe burrow of myself and standing in the sunlight.

May your shadow be a reflection of the Truest You.

Gratitude List:
1. Sleep.  I seem to need more of it these days.  And I am sleeping more deeply.
2. Shadows.  Mirrors. Reflections.
3. Indigo. I’ve been meditating on indigo.  I want to do more research on human perception of blues, indigo in particular.  When people began talking about no longer including it in the rainbow line-up, I was really bothered, and was consequently delighted when my 6yo came home from school and told me about Roy G Biv (the I is still in there).
4. Dinner with the dormies last night.
5. Circling the wagons. Joining hands to hold the net.  Casting the lines from person to person to form the web.

May we walk in Beauty!

Look into the Shadow

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Today is Brigid’s Eve, one of those halfway days in the year.  Partway between Solstice and Equinox, it’s one of those moments in the year’s turning that gives us a breathing space to pause and take stock.  The light has been growing again for six weeks, and my winter-dulled consciousness is now catching up, now finally noticing the way day begins to spread out wider before me.

Tomorrow morning, amid all the goofiness that surrounds the moment here in Pennsylvania, we will take note of whether a largish rodent will or will not notice her shadow, and we will use that to predict the ending of the winter season.  Six weeks from now is the beginning of May, and no matter which way the shadows fall today, spring will be here by then.

If I take my seat in my comfortable burrow with the groundhogs for the moment and consider what light may arrive at my doorstep by tomorrow morning, I find myself considering what there is within me that may need to be drawn into the light, and what must remain protected in the inky space behind me.  Can I find the courage to look into the aching indigo of my own shadows?

It’s a fine enough question to ask: Will the groundhog see its shadow?  But try to turn it around, and ask yourself: Will I see my own?

Gratitude List:
1.  All that music yesterday.  In the morning–singing, singing.  The String Band in the evening.  Watching the children watch the band.  They loved the song about sandwiches.  So glad Santa finally brought them a banjo or two, but I’m sad that the trade-off was the double bass.
2. Vulnerability.  People who model vulnerability and open-heartedness.
3. Courage.  Couer (old French for heart).  Couer-age.  En-couer-age-ment: Enheartening.
4. Making new friends who seem like old friends.
5. Looking into the teeth of the questions.

Take Courage.  Take Heart.

True Names

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2013 April 004

I gave my students in Creative Writing an assignment to create a collage and then write a short story or poem or essay that was sparked by the images that came together.  The idea was to begin the semester by unhitching the horse of the brain from the writing process for a moment–letting the creative urge impel them–and also to get them working with images right away.

I haven’t taken a photo of my collage yet, but here is the poem I wrote in response to them (I always seem to make two collages at a time).  A friend of mine recently turned me on to Francisco X. Alarcon’s poetry (he died a couple days ago), and I am finding the simplicity of his work to be incredibly powerful.  I cannot quite get myself to simplify enough to really be Alarconesque, but it was a powerful poetic experience to work in his style.  Also, we have been working with models of professional writers as a way to spark creativity, and we were working with an Ursula Le Guin short story about True Names, and that also found its way into my poem:

fire and flight

after the fire
has kindled
within you
patient gestation
of coals beneath
your heart
between
your ribs

fire within you
fire in the earth
fire in the fruit
the egg
the seed

flames will burst forth
and you will rise

you will know
your wings
you will
open your feathers
catch the breezes

the old world
of magic and monsters
will fall away
below you

you will dance
on pillows of cloud
you will swim
in rivers of air

you will hear your
true name
in the voice
of the wind

Gratitude List:
1. The promise of snow.  (I know, it causes anxiety, too, not knowing what will happen, but I look forward to being cocooned in the house for a time.)
2. Making collage.  Perhaps it was an entirely personal agenda to give that assignment, but I had fun making my own collages.
3. Lights at ends of tunnels.
4. Taking root.  Taking flight.
5. True Names.  One of your True Names is Beloved.

May we walk in Beauty!

Colors

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DSCN8891
(We decided that with young readers in the house, it might be nice to have a sort of family creed or motto on the wall for them to explore, so we bought this one from Flinchbaugh’s Farm Market and gave it to ourselves for Christmas.  They read it out loud quite a lot.  The one about doing loud really well is, of course, their most vocal favorite.)

Gratitude List:
I have to be really careful to focus on the drive to work these days because I am driving into sunrise, and the colors tend to throw me toward a deep meditative mode.  I suppose I could try to attach symbolic significance to the various colors and the way they deepen my meditative state, but I’m not sure that it’s something nameable.  Yesterday there were wings of clouds that rose upward from the point where the sun was about to rise.  At their base they were a (1) glowing tangerine orange, which shaded upward through (2) magenta into a rich, deep (3) violet.  The tops of the clouds were rimed with a velvety (4) indigo, and behind it all was that pure and serene (5) aquamarine that I love so much.  I had to stop and get some snacks for my Advisory Group, and when I got back on the road, everything had shifted, and the clouds were, for a moment, a simple shining (6) gold.  I think I should take another art class with someone who can give me more vocabulary for color–the last art class I took was at Sunbridge College in 2002, and the color work we did there has become part of my regular meditations.

What experiences with color enrich your spirit?

More on Prayer

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I have been pondering more about prayer in the last day.

Do you remember the story of the Fisher King?  His land is dying because he is mortally wounded, and no one can save him or his kingdom, until Sir Perceval (on his quest for the Holy Grail) asks him the Necessary Question.  In some mystical versions of the story, Sir Perceval simply asks the Fisher King why he is suffering, or he asks him, “What do you need?”  Being asked the right question is part of the Wounded King’s healing.  So too, perhaps, with prayer.  On Friday, the students who gathered in my room and asked if they could pray for me asked me what I needed them to pray about. There is some incredible power in that intensely human interaction in the moment of asking someone,
“May I pray for you?” or
“How can I pray for you?”
“What do you need?”

There is an ethical question related to informed consent when praying for people.  Not everyone appreciates being prayed for, especially from a particular religious perspective.  Asking the question, simply and with love, gives someone the opportunity to graciously refuse the offer of prayer.

There is someone in my life who believes pretty firmly that I am spiritually misguided.  She has tried many different tactics that feel to me very much like she is trying to pressure and manipulate me into changing my basic belief system.  Would I want her to be praying for me?  Would this feel like a further sort of spiritual manipulation?  Possibly.  Still, I think I would welcome prayer, even from someone in a situation like this.  I don’t think that the Great Mystery is going to change me against my will–and prayer opens a channel, casts a web.  Prayer is as likely to change the one who prays as it is to change the one prayed for.  Perhaps if she and I would pray for each other, we might find ourselves in a circle that could contain us both.  The next time I feel attacked, I think I will suggest that we pray for each other.

And a final word.  I don’t always use the term prayer to mean what I mean.  Like God, I think the idea of prayer is too big to be contained in the box of a single word.  Up there, I called it casting a web.  Opening a channel.  It’s sending energy.  Sending light. Being hopeful on your behalf.  Finding feathers. Holding the bowl.  Holding stones.  Holding.  Always holding.

How may I hold you?

Gratitude List:
1. Catching up
2. Catching new visions
3. Holding and being held
4. Plotting goodness
5. Rain

May we walk in Beauty.  May we hold each other always.

Prayerful

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I do not know what this is–one of the boys took it with a special filter–but I like how it draws me in and centers me.

Yesterday morning as I was doing some last-minute puttering at my desk, a group of students tapped on my door.  “We’re doing a prayer walk,” they told me.  “Can we come in and pray for you?”

So much of my focus when I am at school is on how I can care for and meet the needs of these young people that it threw me for a momentary loop to be on the receiving end.  I didn’t quite know how to be.  It was lovely and powerful and extremely meaningful, here at the stressful end of a semester–with the anxiety and excitement of the semester that is approaching–to simply stand there and receive the gift and the grace of their prayers, like feathers, like stones, like a bowl that held me throughout the whole day and which will carry me into the newness of the coming weeks.

It strikes me that in these days when there are such sharp distinctions being made between religions and denominations and spiritual perspectives, that one thing we can do is to offer each other our prayer.  Or energy.  Or meditation.  Or goodwill.  Whatever we call it.  That reaching out toward each other in spirit, casting the web, carrying and holding each other.

Gratitude List:
1. Spending the morning drawing with my kiddos.
2. Mist in the hollow.
3. Warm coffee on a chilly morning.
4. How resolve settles into the spine.
5. Prayer.

May we walk in Beauty!

Bold, Wise Counsel

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Yesterday, I missed writing about my Word of the Year because of computer issues.

For the last few years, I have been choosing a word or phrase that will frame my thinking and processing for the year.  I observe my dreaming during the hush of the Christmas Twelvenight, from Solstice until Epiphany, looking for the images and ideas that float to the surface and stick with me.

In 2013, when I began doing this, the word that came was Palimpsest, the word for an ancient vellum manuscript that has been reused so that the previous layers of text appear through the new text.  In 2014, I chose the word Bridge, not knowing then that that year would find me at the end of my job search teaching at my own alma mater, which uses the image of the bridge.  Last year, I don’t know if I really defined a specific word.  In a way, I continued using the Bridge, but I also carried Mystery or Secret or Silence as words that were part of my path for the year.

Last year, I had very few dreams, and only pulled a few images from the flotsam at the very end.  This year, I have been dreaming in furious rushes, waking frequently during the nights with wild and impetuous images still clinging to the cobwebs of my brain.  Early on, I had several dreams about a particular character whom I don’t recognize from my waking life, but working with this character and the other themes of my dreams this season, I am choosing Bold Wise Counsel as my phrase for the year.  I keep wanting to take that word “bold” out of there, but something keeps nudging it back in there.  And I don’t know that it’s about me going around and offering counsel as much as it is about me being open to receiving the good counsel of others.  Perhaps it’s about sharing ideas back and forth, knowing when to speak.  I know that in the weeks leading up to the dreams that gave me the phrase, I had asked several wise people for help with something, and found their wisdom to be incredibly helpful in sorting out a thorny problem.

Gratitude List:
1. Those Middle School Quiz Bowlers.  I loved being the reader for their match this week, asking them questions that I knew I couldn’t answer, or knowing the answer and needing to secretly keep it tucked away so it wouldn’t show on my face when they began to guess.  What delightful energy middle schoolers have!
2. Vision Board.  Last night, after days of near-constant grading, I took a little break to make a vision board for the coming year.  It was a wonderful process, and I am caught by the images that I put together, loving the way that they work together.
3. Thresholds.  Here I stand at the limbo end of a semester, not wanting to add to their burden of stress or my already huge stacks of grading.  Thinking about the last words I want to give in the last two days of the semester, and planning for the semester to come.
4. Yesterday morning’s moon.  Again.  And the stars that hold her in their bowl of twinkle.  If I have to be up and about before dawn, the moon is a marvelous compensation.
5. Sleep.  I put a picture of a sleeping giraffe on my vision board.  I envision myself getting sufficient sleep in the coming year.  It’s a pretty mundane thing, perhaps, to put on a vision board, but sleep is one of the keys to my good health in many ways, and I plan to make health a priority.  I am still often wakeful at night, but lately I have been getting back to sleep (which has been part of the problem) and sleeping until the alarm.

May we walk in Beauty!