Musings

Daughters

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

As I read the first line of Eavan Boland’s poem “The Lost Land,” I felt as though I knew exactly what the second line was going to be.  I was almost shocked when I read her second line and saw that it was not what had happened in my own head.  I think that means that I need to write my own “daughters” poem.  I’m not sure where it will take me.  I have been mulling different places to take it for a week or so now.  If I can find a breath between the stacks of grading, I’ll try some exercises to shake it out.  Here, for now, are the first two lines.  The first is stolen from Eavan Boland, and the second is the compulsion line that forced itself out before I could read further in her poem.

I have two daughters.
Their names are Memory and Loss.

Gratitude List:
1. Autumn breezes.  Thermal delight.
2. Breaking through.
3. Apples.
4. Walking through the doorways.
5. Water.

May the waters flow free for all.  May all people find safety.  May we walk in Beauty.

Practice and Discipline

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I am coming to realize that there is a difference for me between a spiritual practice and a spiritual discipline.  I have tended to use those words interchangeably, particularly when I talk about my gratitude lists.  In the past month, my gratitude lists have been sporadic as I try to settle myself into the rhythm of school.   As I take a moment now to breathe, and wonder whether it has made a difference, it hits me that the lists are my discipline, the form that anchors the spiritual practices of gratitude and attentiveness.

I have been asking my self whether I have been living in shallower layers because I have not been careful to write my lists.  I think, however, that it is the commitment to being attentive which really keeps me working in the deeper layers.  And while it is possible to do so without a particular discipline, having a regular discipline that anchors me into that work of attentiveness does keep me grounded in the deep layers.

A spiritual discipline can become an empty shell of a form it if is not practiced with intention and care.  A spiritual practice can float away and dissipate if it is not anchored by deliberate spiritual practices.

Gratitude List:
1. The recent sunrises from the crest of Mt. Pisgah: magenta, tangerine, aquamarine, violet.  Mist caught in the folds of the foothills.  Wraiths of fog skuthering over golden fields.
2. Safe places.  Creating places of safety, in the outer world, in the inner world.  We make plans to build houses and shelters for people.  I think about what sort of blueprint there might be for us to intentionally build our inner selves into safe and sheltering spaces for those who are frightened or injured or outcast.
3.  The whimsical childish conjecture from my scientist has begun to feel distinctly like real-life physics lessons, and I realize that the wild speculations have been preparation for continued curious pondering about the nature of the world.  Yesterday, it was that the undertow of a previous wave helps the next one to break.  He is figuring out these things on his own through observation even before he learns them in the classroom.  I can only sit back and marvel.  This is a reminder to me as a teacher to always build on my students’ natural awareness as much as possible, and to keep sparking their curiosity.  Even grammar has logical and reasonable patterns.
4. The chuckles and humming of contented children.
5. Flocks of a thousand swallows racing back and forth along the island, filling up on insects before they hop out over ocean for their journey south.  We did not see monarchs or dragonflies this year, but the winds were really strong, and I think they may have been waiting in thickets and woods until the coast is clear (so to speak).

May we walk in Beauty!

Feathers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Feathers

I have written before about the feathers.  Two years ago, it began in mid-July: I realized one day that I had been finding a feather every single day for about two weeks.  I kept watch, then, and realized that, until early September, I found a feather almost every single day.

Last year, it was longer: early July through the end of September.  I needed feathers then.  I was jumping off a cliff into a new and unknown wind, and I needed the reminder that my wings would carry me.  They did.  I used the idea to talk to my students about how we make the meaning in our lives, how the Science me said, “Yes, there are owls hard at work in the holler, and the little birds are feeding the next generation of owlets.”  But the Poet me said, “Yes, I needed an affirmation from outside myself that I had wings that would catch the wind, and the message was feathers.”  I get to choose the meaning for my own story.  And both meanings carry a certain truth, enriching each other.  We all choose our meanings, even when we’re not aware of consciously doing so.

This year, back in early August, I had a run of about a week of feather-finding.  I thought I was back in business, but then I didn’t find any for a couple weeks.  Now again, for the past ten days or so, I have found a feather every day, sometimes at home, and sometimes at school.

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Palimpsest

Another shifting meaning story that came my way again today is that of the Palimpsest, the old vellum manuscripts which were scraped when one text was no longer necessary, and new words written on the pages.  Highly valued by modern researchers, the re-appearance of the “under-text” gives historians not one but two texts to work with.

When reading a palimpsest, you must look beyond the surface text to read the deeper meaning.  A colleague of mine today showed me his journal, an altered book, in which he is using gesso to white out old text and writing his own text on top.  We got to talking about how people are palimpsests, too–how important it is to read beneath the surface to the deeper “text” that shines through the surface layers.

Gratitude List:
1. Challenging conversations.  I am learning to balance the speaking and the listening, I think. Still, there is so much to learn, so much to practice.
2. The miracle of the heart, of the heartbeat.
3. Collaboration.
4. Feathers and flight.
5. Palimpsest.

May we walk in Beauty!

Trying to Unsee

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You can’t unsee things.  I would not have chosen to see that picture of the baby on the beach, but it popped up on my screen when a well-meaning friend put it on Facebook.  I can’t scratch it out of my brain, and the more I try to unsee it, the more it appears, unbidden.  Yesterday, it appeared in my head as I was playing in the water with my own children. A sudden chill overtook me, left me gasping, barely able to restrain myself from reaching out and grabbing my own laughing children, to pull them both from the water to safety.  When I was in college, I had a series of nightmares about seriously injured children asking me for help, and I couldn’t help them.  I could swear that this very image was in those dreams.

Other layers of worry catch me, too–the thought of all my shining teenagers with their phones, slipping like swimmers through the waters of the images that appear there, stumbling upon horror and gore: the world’s realities that they will not be able to unsee.  How will a photo of a drowned child compound their anxieties, their despairs, their rage?  How will such a picture drown their sense of safety and holiness and wonder about the world around them?

I want to know about the troubles of the world.  I think we need to, if we are to participate in the Work of changing the world.  I think my students need to know that we do not live in a perfect world–they, too, will need the information in order to become participants with us in the business of creating a more just and compassionate future.  Still, I do not want to see them stumbling into these terrifying boundary-lands. I do not want to wander here myself.

Yesterday, during our Staff Development Day at LMS, historian John Roth (our input speaker for the day) told a story of an Amishman quizzing a group of Mennonites about television.
“How many of you own a TV?” he asked.  Every hand went up.
“How many of you think you probably watch too much TV?”  Again, every hand went up.
“How many of you think that your children watch too much TV?”  Every hand.
“How many of you will go home today and get rid of your televisions?”  Nobody raised a hand.

I am not ready to simply accept the inevitability that my children will be witness to murder and tragedy via the screens that surround us.  I don’t want to accept that inevitability for my students, either, though I have less influence on that sphere.

I don’t know how to end this, how to wrap it up.  The loose ends are all over the place.  Pandora’s box is virtual, but it’s been opened, and a host of terrors and rages and sadnesses have been unleashed upon us.

 

After all that, I need a
Gratitude List:
1.  That box of yarn that came in the mail today.  Watching how the boys couldn’t keep their hands off it, how they immediately developed projects and plans for the different balls of yarn.  One small boy is planning to weave many, many little patches that he will sew together into a woven blanket.  The other made me show him how to crochet.

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2.  Music.  One boy is learning cello for the orchestra and trombone for the band.  And after my rant about technology, I must also note that I am grateful for the ability to use a computer program that helps him to listen for the pitch.
3.  Monarchs. I saw two adults today, and two caterpillars.
4.  Yesterday’s John Roth lectures on Teaching to Transform.  His final point of the day was an eloquent examination of a spiritual practice that I call Holding the Bowl of the Heart, and that he called something like Being Attentive to the Beauty of Holiness.  It’s about expansively opening oneself to wonder and awe, compassion and love, while recognizing that for humans, these experiences are intermixed with death and grief and shame and anger.  So one holds them all together, with an attentive awareness that both sides of experience inform and shape each other. Beauty is another of my names for God.
5.  Quartz and kyanite, garnet and serpentine.

May we walk in Beauty.

Whiplash

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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This is a whiplash of a week, one of those times when the emotional setting is not tuned to a specific feeling, but is simply set on High.

Excitement?  In spades.  School starts tomorrow.

Anxiety?  Under control, but really bubbly.  School starts tomorrow.

Lament?  Really, really deep.  Tomorrow evening is the life celebration for a good man who left the world too soon.

Joy?  Absolutely. I h ave only to lift my eyes up and look about me in these mid-August days to fine something that makes my heart sing.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Emotions.  They’re a compass, even when they’re all over the place.
2. Contemplation.  Breathing.  Grounding the emotions, so I can really experience them, rather than simply dashing wildly from one to the other.
3. The tender orange sliver of a rising new moon last night as I was leaving LMH.  I am a believer in omens (propitious ones at least), and that one felt like a gentle nod toward the hope and the delight that this coming year brings.
4. Seasons turning.  Constancy.  One thing comes after another.
5. Feathers.  I’ve told this story before, because it fills me with wonder.  Last year and the year before, for at least six or seven weeks in the months of July and August, I found an almost daily feather.  Both years, there were perhaps two or three days in a six-week span when a feather did not appear in my path.  This year has broken the pattern somewhat.  I am definitely finding more feathers all of a sudden, one every two or three days.  Yesterday morning, just as I left for a computer training at school, there was one, on the pavement right at the door of my car.

May we walk in Beauty!
Keep your heart-eyes open.

Gratitude and Praise

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Gratitude List:
1. The first school events for the year are happening today.  First is a computer system training, and I always feel like I can use more training on the computer details.  And it will be delightful to see colleagues again.  In the evening is the New Student Orientation.  I’ll be sorry to miss my own children’s back-to-school night, but I’m really excited to get the room looking welcoming and friendly, and then to start meeting some of my new students and their parents.
2. Richard Rohr’s Mystics series.  I have always been drawing to the writings of the mystics, to their poetry, to the stories of their lives, but it’s only recently, in this series, that I feel as though I am beginning to understand a little of what a contemplative life might look like.
3. The Village that is helping us to raise our children: grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, friends, farm community, and teachers.  Tonight they will meet the teachers who will be with them through this year.  I am trying to get in touch with the anxiety I feel on behalf of my children: Will the teachers like them?  Will they be kind?  Will they understand my kids’ quirks?  Will they laugh with them?  This is one of those turn-around moments: So often, I think in terms of being the teacher that my students need; today, I commit to considering how I can be the teacher that mu students’ parents need me to be for their beloved young people.
4. Old friends and new ones.  I love you all.
5. The hunger, the ache, the longing for Beauty.

May we walk in Beauty!

Here is the second of the Psalms that I am writing for this series at my church.  One of my favorite ways to write poetry is to have an idea that burns in me, and then to suggest to that idea that it has a particular pathway to follow in order to come outside to play, and this project has three.  The parameters of this project are that the poems are: 1) They’re to be Psalms (I am free to interpret that as I choose–I am trying to make the language Psalm-like), 2) They each have a theme (desire, laments, praise, thanksgiving. . .), 3) They fit the Confessional moment in the church service.  Last August I was writing a short poem a day for a postcard project.  I didn’t do that one this year, but I am really grateful for this one: I am discovering that even when life is really busy, having a specific poetic task in the back of my head helps to frame the contemplative work of a season.

Psalm: Praise
10 August 2015

Yours is the music that enters our hearts.
Delight of you enlivens our voices to join in the song.
We are born to worship our Maker.

The world is awash in color and music;
your works are enkindled in sparkle and dazzle.
Every bright bird, each flashing star,
the chirp of the cricket and drone of cicada,
roaring waterfall, quivering leaf–
all of creation sings your glory.

We have only to look up and outward,
and wonder will fill our mouths with praise.

Yet daily our hands reach out
for wealth and power and fame,
instead of rising to praise you.

Our eyes are set on the glitter and shine
of all the distractions that we have made,
and not on your grace and your beauty.

Our voices turn to bitter complaint,
to quarrels and bluster and grumbling,
instead of joining creation’s constant hymn
of praise to the Creator.

O God of wonder and beauty and grace,
open the eyes of our hearts,
awaken our senses to all you have made,
that our spirits may rise in wonder,
that our voices may open in song,
that our days may be filled with praise.

Stones and Words

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Carin

Gratitude List:
1. Last night’s late-night conversation, like John O’Donohue describes, where “you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the [group] of you on to a different plane.”
2. “The winds are changing.”  And the moment in a thoughtful conversation when someone starts to stitch the narrative together with a simple phrase that holds the weight of the conversation like strong spider silk.  This is the furthest thing from a platitude–it’s more like a group mantra.  And it gets taken up like a little chorus, with a rueful smile or a sudden moment of eye contact, repeated from one person to another: “The winds are changing.”  We recognize in the moment something of how very different our lives are and how very the same.
3. How the conversation continues over time.  It isn’t really separate conversations that take place year to year to year, but one long conversation that builds on itself.  How a word gets used today that rings a bell in memory and draws out an image of the same word used in the same space with the same people, a year ago, or two, or three.  How meaning evolves, not just within myself, but in the group.
4. Preparing the heart space.  So much work remains to be done, but the work on the heart moves on apace.
5. Presence.  I have so much to learn about being truly Present.  I think this may be one of the Next Steps.

So much Love.

Fierce Compassion

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I have been trying to figure out how, in the midst of my rages and furies, to find compassion, holding it all in the bowl of the heart.  That is my primary practice.

But now, I think that the work moves forward to a discipline more grammatical–in which order shall I place my adjectives and my nouns, my adverbs, my verbs?  It makes a difference, see:

Shall I be a keeper of a grave grace?  Or shall I practice grace within my gravity?  Shall I continue to seek for compassion in my rage and my anger?  Or shall I actively practice fierce compassion?

How will that look when I walk into a story in which I see harm being done? Sharing compassion fiercely rather than sharing anger compassionately?  Being gravely graceful rather than being gracefully grave?  The order matters, and it will happen differently in different situations, I think.

My story keeps beginning again.

(Thanks to The Story for the “Grace in Gravity” reference and to my friend Lisa Walker LeFevre for opening my heart to the phrase “fierce compassion.)

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Tree spirit.  (Photographed with a mirroring app.)

Gratitude List:
1. Fierce compassion.
2. Butterflies everywhere.  They belongs on the list again and again and again.
3. Milo Zen Puppy.  I haven’t written a gratitude list since I met him a couple days ago, and he is likely the cutest person to ever walk on four legs.  Really.  This is not hyperbole.
4. Radiance.  I mean the shop this time–it was such a pleasure to be there again, in the scents and the colors and all of it.  Seeing Sarah again.  Touching all the stones.  Coming home smelling like Radiance.
5. Radiance.  Yours, this time.  Yours and yours and yours. You shine.  You help me want to keep growing and being a better person.  You push me toward Love.

May we walk in Love.

B-O-B, Queen of Plumbers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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The morning glory that blooms more than a week after the vine has been cut off.  And spiderwebs everywhere.)

Gratitude List

1. The morning mist in the hollow, covering everything like a veil.

2. Dozens of dew-bejeweled spiderwebs scattered across the lawn this morning, layer upon layer of gossamer strands, so thickly laid each makes a little cloth of web.
“Mom!  It looks like bits of ice all over the place!”
Like a personal message for me, from the heart of the Mystery: Don’t forget.  Everything is connected.  You are part of the web.  Part of the cloth.

3. The chipping sparrows twittering in their nest.  Fledglings, soon.  One of the benefits of poor Fredthecat’s encroaching arthritis is that I no longer fly into a panic whenever a nestful of little ones learns to fly.

4. Me and my trusty plumber’s snake Nyoka–we conquered the clog in the outside pipe that leads to the septic system, just like the guy showed us four years ago.

Shove, shove, shove, twist.  (Half an hour of twist and shove and grunt and growl.  Okay, and swear.  Just a teensy-tiny little bit.  Under my breath.)

“Hey Mom!  Do you want to be a member of my Animal Rescue Club?”

Twist, grunt, sweat.  

“Sure.”
The water begins to slowly recede–SHOVE, shoveshoveshove, TWIST!  G-glub.  Sigh, in comes the water again, and more to boot.

“Hey Mom!  Your code name in the club is Bee-Oh-Bee.”

Twisttiwisttwist, shove.
Sploot: Nyoka uncoils and splashes kitchen sink goop into my hair.  Um.  Yuck.

“Great!  Bob!  I am Bob!”

“Mo-o-om.  Not Bob.  Bee-Oh-Bee.”

“Oh.  Okay.  But I like Bob better.”

Twi-i-i-i-st.  Shove, shove.

“You can’t be in the club if you change things.”

(“Little dictator.“)
“Okay.  Bee-Oh-Bee.  That’s me!”

Fizzzzzz.  Bubbles on the surface.  Shove?  Twist?  G-g-glug.  Gurgle.  Whoosh.  

Peek.  Yup, the water is gone!

“I AM BOB (Bee-Oh-Bee), Queen of Plumbers!”

5. So, the Animal Rescue Club.  I am grateful for the Animal Rescue Club and its Darling Dictator.

Knocking on the bathroom door, where I am getting out of the shower, having washed the cloggulus from my Super Plumbing Job from my hair and fingernails: “Mom, you need to come see the clubhouse.  If your chair is too small, I can help you fix it with pillows and stuff.”

This is a great club.  They even help you with the seating arrangements.

I am toweling off.  “Can you please come in soon?  Fred is looking around for a lap to sit on.  Even though Fred used to kill animals, he can still be a member of the club because he doesn’t do it very much anymore.  And he kind of likes the red blanket in the clubhouse.”

So far, we have rescued a monarch from the driveway (he didn’t survive for very long, but we tried our best), a question mark butterfly from the spiderweb behind the house (it took a lot of gentle, careful work to get the sticky web off the wings, but we managed, and that one flew away), and a mouse from under the tractor tire (I do not remember this particular rescue operation, but the boys swear we did it).

May we walk in Beauty.  On the web.  Through the veil.  Removing Clogs and Obstacles.  Rescuing.

Hummingbird in Rumi’s Field

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Female Rubythroat

http://blog.kittykono.com/2012/06/female-ruby-throat-hummingbird.html

My personal spiritual narrative has universalism as a fairly central theme.  One of the tensions I try to keep in balance within me is that of seeing the broad picture while also aligning myself with the church of my childhood and youth, the Mennonites.  Even as my own sights have taken me into far fields, something always holds my identity firmly in the soil of Anabaptism.  Separating it all out into Either or Or has always felt limiting and counter-intuitive to me.  Especially as I have grown to claim my spiritual story as my own, I have found that I don’t want to spend time saying, “I’m this, but not this, or this, or this.”  Instead, what feels right and best to me is to say, “I am this, and also this, and this, and this.”  So when my Mennonites are in a time of crisis, I can no longer say, “But I don’t really care, because I don’t really belong there anymore.”  Because I do.  These are my particular people.

Today, the word came out that the Lancaster Mennonite Conference, a large and historic group that belongs to the Mennonite Church USA demoniation, is considering pulling out of the larger denomination.  We have a history of such divisions, but this one is big, and it affects a lot of people I love.  My own church is not part of this particular conference, so it does not directly affect me.  If I am honest, this impending church divorce between Lancaster Conference and MC USA pains me more than I let on.  If I don’t touch that painful place, then it just boils out as glib snark.  When it was just me sitting on the fringes, I could pretend not to care.  Now, though: Now I have stepped onto a web that includes so many tender young people.  Now I love so many of the teenagers who stand to become the most lost in the wake of this divorce.  Just this week, at Mennonite World Conference (where many denominations of Mennonites from around the world gather together every six years), Remilyn Mondez of the Philippines spoke of growing up in a church in conflict: “Remember, there are children and young people who are trapped in the midst of church conflict,” she said.

Today, as I was outside with my Chromebook, writing with a friend about some of my worries, especially for the youth, the hummingbird reappeared.  This time, she moved from the corner of the building, right to me, at eye level, only a foot or so away.  If you listen to such things, hummingbirds are messengers who travel between worlds.  I choose to believe that this one had a message of comfort and hope, and also a task–to commit to the work of caring for these who may be caught in the middle of the mess.

Before I read the letter that announces the proposed “divorce,” I had spent some time with Parker Palmer’s reflections on Rumi’s poem:

“Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down
in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language
– even the phrase “each other” –
do not make any sense.”

I see us out there, with Hummingbird, in that field, keeping our heart-eyes on the fragile ones and the young ones, opening our ears and our palms to listen, to lie down in the grass where “ideas, language–even the phrase ‘each other’–do not make any sense.”

Gratitude List:
1. Rumi’s field
2. The nest Josiah made in his room by spreading blankets and pillows over the floor–Fredthecat approves.  He has found a new favorite napping spot.
3. Hummingbird
4. Molly Kraybill’s 100 Women photography project.  From 1 to 100.  I began at 100 and worked my way back through the spiraling decades to 1.  Then I went back again to 100.  All those faces.  All those changes.
5. Tonight. We’re going back for the final Mennonite World Conference service tonight.  More singing.  More thoughtful words.  More time with these thousands of loving and messy Mennonites.  More holding one foot in the center and another on the fringe.

May we walk in the fields.