Musings

Bold, Wise Counsel

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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!

Live in the Layers

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boro
Japanese Fisherman’s winter jacket

Much as I love this semester’s batch of students, I am looking forward to wrapping up this semester this week, and getting started on the new schedule.  Many of my first years will continue on with me into second semester, but it will be in different configurations of classes, and this coming semester I will teach Drama and Creative Writing instead of Academic Writing and Writing Skills.  I like fresh starts, new plans, tabula rasa.  Part of me really resisted the fact that we still have a week of first semester to finish when we return to school, but a looser, more flexible part of me loves the rolling start, the fact that we don’t have to do it all at once, the beginning of the new year and the beginning of the semester.

I have recently become a little obsessed with Japanese boro cloths.  Traditionally, this was a mending process used by workers to create durable and often beautiful fixes to torn and worn-out clothing.  Instead of trying to create a look of new perfection, boro mending created a new cloth by layering patches and scraps with distinctive stitching, and the results maintained the integrity of the original cloth while making it a whole new thing.  It reminds me of the sense of layering in a palimpsest manuscript: the old part shines and twinkles through to the new.  Come to think of it, living in an area with layers and layers of history is sort of like a boro or a palimpsest–some days when I drive across the bridge, I am acutely aware of how this River was once the home and highway of the Susquehannock peoples, or how it was one of the waterways that people followed to escape the torment of bondage in their flight to freedom in the north.

As Stanley Kunitz’s “nimbus-clouded voice” suggests: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.”  May your new year be full of fresh starts and new dreams, but may the new be stitched and overlaid artistically and pleasingly upon the past that has birthed this new beginning.

(Tomorrow is the eve of Epiphany–what is the Aha that is awaiting?)

Gratitude List:
1. Rhythm and Schedules
2. Envisioning possibilities
3. Starting fresh
4. Layers
5. Choosing every day to live the life that I would love.  (That’s a John O’Donohue reference)

May we walk in Beauty!  May your possibilities be endless.

Send Down the Roots

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Roots
(As is the way with internet searches, I found this beautiful piece of artwork with no reference to the artist.  If you know, please send me the information.)

Now is the time
to send down the roots,
fine little hairs feeling their way
spiraling into the moist darkness,
between clods and stones,
around the bones
of those who came before,
through the streams that run
deep beneath the surface.

Now is the time
to feed and nurture
all that lives beneath the surface,
all that searches for depth,
all that gathers strength
from the comforting darkness of earth.

Now is the time to bless
the part of the plant that seeks shadow,
that grows inward,
faithfully finding its way
by blind instinct
toward the center.

Gratitude List:
1. Tea with Marie and Benn, conversing and exploring puzzles with the beloved community.
2. How a puzzle on the table creates a perfect setting for making a new friend.  It fills up the awkward silences, gives you a shared task, and is itself an image of untangling and ordering creating a new thing.
3. Roots
4. Still a few more days of Christmas Break.  I feel myself opening, loosening, drawing toward my center.
5. Richard Rohrer.  Moving on from Cynthia Bourgeault’s deepening words of Advent, I have begun to work more intentionally with his daily words.  Today:

God’s life is living itself in me. I am aware of life living itself in me.
God’s love is living itself in me. I am aware of love living itself in me.

May Love live us.

Going Away, Coming Home

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When I wake in the night, I usually catalog the dreams I have just been having, so that they stick around a little longer in the morning.  It’s sort of like the process that grade-schoolers do in language arts: What’s the main idea?  What is the controlling image?  Then usually, I can sort of grab it in the morning before it floats away.  It didn’t work this morning.  Back in my own bed after several nights away–and my bones are aching lots these day–there was quite a bit of waking up.  I know that I was telling myself many interesting stories in the night, but they have all dissipated in the fresh morning.  I feel as though I already know the word that I will be gleaning from my dreams for the coming year, but I don’t yet want to close the door to possibility.  Not until Epiphany.

One of my new Facebook friends also chooses a yearly word or image to frame her meditations for the coming year.  She crowd-sourced a list to choose from on Facebook.  It was exciting to read people’s choices.  Some of my favorites: threshold, rise, growth, renew, phoenix, explore, ground, roots, claim, rebirth, reestablish, blossom, exuberance, adapt, fear not, voyage, blessed, hospitality. . .  Perhaps I ought to just write the whole list in my notebook for daily meditations.

***

I am realizing again how easy it is to get out of the practice of poetry.  I need to re-figure in these days how I can once again step into the stream.  I will be starting to teach a Creative Writing class at school in a couple weeks (I feel a little as though I have been living my whole writer’s life for this), and I may try to hang some of my own writing disciplines on this course.  It would be good modeling for the students, if I am writing as well.

Gratitude List:
1. Going away to celebrate with family, but also coming home again.
2. Making plans for new ways to stay organized and on top of things.
3. This week coming.  Like time out of time.
4. Texture and textile.
5. I am still living with the residual lessons of that movie, Inside Out.  I am grateful that a cute little movie can reach inside and and pull out my guts.  (Sorry. That was a little graphic.  But it hit me pretty hard.)

May we walk in Beauty, with Wisdom and Awareness.

Inside Out

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2014 April 119

Thoughts from watching Inside Out:
Fear and anger and disgust can be really unhelpful in the decision-making process, but they’re there to help protect us.
Sometimes you need to sit awhile with sadness before you can go chasing after joy.

Gratitude List:
1. Inside Out.  The movie.  I thought the title meant that it was about seeing a person from the inside out.  I didn’t realize that it might also mean that it would turn me inside out.  I was a whimpering mess by the end.  Sigh.  But I came out hyper-aware of the emotional state of my children.  This will be good for my parenting.  I love this movie.
2. The long black fingers at the ends of the wings of the crows.  I have been flexing my hands like crows’ wings all day yesterday.
3. Rice and curry dinner, figgy pudding, and singing.
4. Most of the family sitting on that big wrap-around couch.  Perhaps the world ends here, when we are lounging and snuggling and giggling and sleeping all together. (Reference to Joy Harjo’s kitchen table.)
5. Talking it through.  Wise counsel.  Wise women.

May we walk in Wisdom.

Grace and Balance and Beauty

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DSCN8800
Christmas morning dewdrops on a birch tree.

My dreams have been disturbed the last two nights, sleeping in other rooms, other beds.  Last night, I was living by myself in an apartment, and I was moving out, turning over the lease to someone else.  I realized that I was going to have nowhere to live, nowhere to sleep.  I thought of all the many people in the town that I knew, and tried to think of who to call to ask for a place to stay, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Even when I was talking to people I knew, I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Hey!  Could I stay at your house for a couple days?”  I told myself it was because I am an introvert, but I knew that it is because I couldn’t find the humility.  One of my fatal flaws, I think, is the inability to ask for help when I really need it.

Gratitude List:
1. Grace and balance.  (I have been watching my 9-year-old learn to ride his new ripstick.)
2. Beauty all around.  (I have been taking walks with my 6-year-old, looking for interesting things to photograph.)
3. A misty Christmas Day.
4. Fun playing games with the family.  (3-person chess is exhilarating!  And Ticket to Ride is stressful.)
5. You.  Your stories.  The music you make.  The powerful thoughts you put into the world.  The beauty and grace that you notice and share.  The way you are real.

So much love!

Bold Counsel

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labyrinth

Last night’s sleep was broken and convoluted.  Fredthecat started yowling at 3:30 (he has been much better lately so we had started letting him stay inside), so I went down and helped him out.  That disturbed a somewhat distressing dream: I was in school, in my classroom, and I heard a woman and a young child coming down the hall.  The child was in full tantrum and the woman was yelling.  Just outside my room, I heard the sound of the woman slapping the child.  I rushed to the door to try to intervene.  When I opened it, the child was standing quietly watching the mother, who was incredibly distraught in her abject shame and mortification at what she had done.  That’s when the yowling woke me up.  <Perhaps, the work is to help each other learn to live beyond our shame, so we become less bound to our reactive instincts.>

At 5:30, I was awakened by the sound of a trombone playing the Star Wars theme (we had told them not to come into our room and wake us up before 7:00, but we hadn’t specified that no one should play the trombone downstairs).  The dream that shattered was much sweeter and more tender.  We had gotten a new kitten, bright orange with black stripes, like a tiger.  I remember thinking that this was not an actual tiger cub, but in my waking space, I now re-call the image, and it was a very stocky kitten, and very tiger-like.  I was in the process of thinking of its name when I woke up.

*******

Because the comforting character of my dreams in previous nights had told me zir* name was Conrad, I looked that up this morning.  How incredibly appropriate!  Conrad comes from old German, and means “bold counselor.”  This week, I have been the recipient of such good and wise counsel from people I respect.  I love when the pieces fit together so seamlessly.

*zir: one of options for a non-gendered third person possessive pronoun.  While Conrad’s name is usually used for males, the Conrad presence in my dreams seems to need to not be attached to a gender.

Gratitude List:
1. Sleeping until 7 (sort of) and waking up to the children
2. Bold counsel
3. The Festival of 9 Lessons and Carols, and the new refugee carol
4. More dreams, more images, more stories.
5. The time of rest begins.

May we walk in Peace, in Hope, in Love–and always–in Beauty!

Sunreturn

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2014 January 010
The sun is not up yet today, and I must be off, but this is from a previous, and snowy, year.  Here comes the sun!

Sunreturn is the name I give it.  After the longest nights, we whirl back to face our star.

Last night’s dream images:

  • Riding on top of the bus–terrifying.  I had to tell the others that I needed to find another way to get where I was going.  I was too afraid of sliding off.  There was one person–I don’t know who he was, though he was substantial and comforting–who let me hold on to him while I was up there.
  • Trying to find route 76.  Also called Trout Highway.  (I don’t know a rural Rt. 76 in waking life, nor a Trout Highway.)
  • Vast and glorious vistas–rolling hills and mountains, like Scotland.  I think I needed to be on top of the bus to really get those views.  Sigh.
  • Getting separated from my friends (because I couldn’t handle sitting on top of the bus), but finding my own way anyway.

Gratitude List:
1. Watching Mandela with people from the school community last night.  The turn-out was a little small, but hopefully it will still spark some good discussions about how to respond to unjust situations.  “This is how it begins.”
2. Sunreturn.  This morning.  In a few minutes.  We begin to whirl back toward the sun, begin to turn our face once again sunward.
3. Christmas Break.  Soon.  Soon.  Soon.
4. Kindness.  It gets a little under-rated, and sort of smooshed under the big calls for Change and Justice.  It gets pushed aside sometimes by Righteous Indignation.  But Kindness needs its own time in the center.
5. How these children are growing and changing and becoming themselves.  It’s terrifying (No!  Where’s my little tyke?) but so beautiful to watch.  Just now, a small person came to tell me something, and I didn’t entirely recognize his face as he spoke.  Some new, older child is emerging.  Even the loss of a teeny tiny baby tooth shifts the way he looks, the way he speaks.

Salaam, Shalom, Peace.

Shortest Day

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NASA photo

Today is Solstice.  I like to picture us flinging our way through space, held in our ellipse by the flaming star at the center of our dance.  In these days we are out at one of the further points of the oval, and our northern face is turned away, mostly, from the sun.  We get to gaze, for these few moments a year, into darkest space, to sense the comfort of the darkness that enfolds our tiny galaxy, to really feel the presence of the stars.  I feel these Solstice days as a hush or a pause, a breath, before we begin our inward whirl again, back into light, back into slightly closer proximity with the sun.

The twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany are often spoken of as high holy days, days in the Christian calendar when people reflect on the darkness and the light, on our place in the cosmos, on the past year and the coming year.  I like to begin those days of deep reflection at the Solstice, to watch my dreams, to see what images and visions come to me, what words become important.  Perhaps what comes is purely random flotsam from the unconscious, or perhaps it’s messages from the Spirit.  Either way, what appears provides me with visual and linguistic hooks on which to hang some of my meditative practice for the coming year.

May your dreams comfort and disturb you in this season.

Gratitude List:
1. The quietly enfolding darkness
2. Dreams.  Quiet.  Waiting.
3. Good counsel.  I am not alone.
4. Prayer.  Praying.  Inter-cession: being “yielded between.”
5. Looking backward.  Looking forward.  Looking inward and outward.  Up and down.  How many ways can I examine the space around me?

May we walk in the light of the stars.

Radical Hospitality

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

2013 December 105
Today is the anniversary of the day when the Paxtang Boys rode in the pre-dawn hours through the last remaining Susquehannock village in Conestoga, PA, and massacred most of the remaining people of the tribe, a quiet group including elderly residents and children.  Fear of the Other, coupled with bombastic and unreasoning rhetoric, turned a group of citizens into a murderous mob.  

In recent weeks, I have heard bombastic and hateful rhetoric toward the perceived Other spewed from national pulpits.  The mob gathers.  In what ways will you and I work in these days to diffuse and redirect the rhetoric, and to offer hopeful and peaceful responses?

Gratitude List:
1. Synchronicity piled upon synchronicity–feels like messages.  Yesterday morning at church, I picked up and read the introduction to a little book titled Radical Hospitality.  It’s about the Benedictine Rule.  After lunch, my father gave me a copy of the John McQuiston book Always We Begin Again, about the Benedictine Rule.  This morning’s Advent Reading is titled “Radical Hospitality.”  I think I ought to be spending some time with St. Benedict this week.
2. Feeling good.  Throughout the day yesterday, I began to feel sicker and sicker.  I had a low fever in the late afternoon and almost called my principal to get me a sub for today, but I just couldn’t bear the thought of another sick day.  I feel much better this morning.  It was just a quick little bug.
3. Citrus.  Tangerines and grapefruit.
4. All the people who are working for justice and peace in the world.  We can respond to the mob with reason and compassion and tenderness.  Repeating history does not have to be an inevitability.  The Paxtang boys do not need to ride again.
5. The light will return.  The light will return.  (It is so dark, but) the light will return.

May we walk in Beauty, in Shalom, in Salaam, in Peace.