Musings

Scandalous Grace

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Sometimes it just feels good to settle into the grumpy places, like a hen, and brood a bit. Then when the time is right, you step out into the sunshine, shake the dust out of your feathers, and run with the flock.

We live in the layers. Part of me wants to be so evolved and conscious in my living that I don’t get into the occasional grumpy snit, that I don’t lose my temper and holler at my kids, that I don’t go on a rant with no reasonable basis in facts, that I don’t buy myself a new pair of boots just for the fleeting happiness of new stuff. But there’s a paradox in there, I think. To actually embrace my humanness, to live in the layered reality of being a being in a body right now, I have to experience those bits of me that I am a little sheepish or ashamed about. Part of the mystery and the delight of being human is the life in the layers–we can be seeking to understand the deep pools of our emotions and the far-reaching paths of spirit and still, when it comes down to it, these are the clothes we wear, these human clothes, and sometimes the emotional bits get a little messy.

Perhaps it’s also partially a function of the Swiss/German DNA that I carry in my human clothing. Even while I am having a rant or a snit, some small voice in the back of my head is saying, “Now is that reasonable?  Is that proper?” Perhaps for me, diving more deeply into the layers, exploring the depth of my humanness, might mean stilling that voice, letting myself have at it, not worrying whether my current rant is grounded in verifiable facts like a college research paper, whether I am going to sound sulky or whiny.

I think that what I am saying is that reason and philosophy and spiritual seeking are all good and useful tools, but that a life too focused on being reasonable and rational can divorce us from the emotional part of our fully human selves. Emotions aren’t reasonable. Like any art supply, they’re messy. But they’re colorful, too. Here’s to the art of living in the layers!

Gratitude List:
1. Getting home in the dark and getting out of the car to the hooting of the Great Horned Owl in the bamboo. They’re really active right now. About a week ago, one night as we were putting the boys to bed, the owls were having a regular hootenanny out in the woods–there must have been at least three of them, and they weren’t leaving their usual thoughtful pauses between comments.
2. I finished all my coursework for my class:Building Caring Communities. It has been a wonderful class, and I have found much that I can apply directly to my classroom, so I am grateful for that. But I am weary and eager to have a little less on my plate for a while, so I am grateful that it is over, too.
3. Family time over the holiday. Crazy Uno games with both sides of the family. Thoughtful conversations. Hugs and snuggles and sharing delicious food.
4. Tender justice and scandalous grace.
5. Revolutionary poetry.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Scrooge of Thanksgiving

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Everything I write today feels like it needs a qualification behind it.  I feel as though I should be a sort of priestess of Thanksgiving, carrying my gratitude practice into this day like it is my High Holy Day.  Instead, I feel more like the Scrooge of Thanksgiving this morning.  I start to write “Happy Thanksgiving!” but I feel like I need to discuss that in terms of the history of genocide in the US and in terms of the weight I am feeling about racism and injustice at this particular historical moment.  I want to write about how grateful I am for the unaltering yearly shift from growing season to harvest and then to winter’s rest, but I feel like I need to discuss that in terms of climate change and the anxiety I feel about human alteration of the planet’s weather.  I want to write about how excited I am to spend time with my family, but I am still caught up in the whirlwind of papers to write and plans to make and the sense of guilt that rides me about how I am neglecting my own children.

I’m not depressed.  Just grumpy and out of sorts.  I had a moment this morning when I thought, Maybe it’s time to give up the Gratitude Practice and pick up a different tool for a while.  Maybe it’s time to pick up the practice of the Flaming Sword of Justice again.  Perhaps it’s time to become a Holy Curmudgeon, giving the world a good hearty dose of Harsh Reality.  (Yes, I realize it’s too late–I’ve already done so here.)

Here is the part of the short, thoughtful essay where the writer is supposed to take a sense of ick and discomfort and turn it around into something thoughtful and witty, something hopeful and positive and enchanting.  I don’t have that to offer you today.  Not quite.  Just this: that today, of all days, is not the day to give up this work of Gratitude.  That today, of all days, is the day when I need it most of all.  Perhaps on some sunny spring morning when I cannot bear to write only five things, when my heart is overflowing with gratitude, perhaps that is the day that I can say I am ready to move on to explore another practice.  And of course, I won’t ever actually abandon this tool.  I’ll keep it in my box, along with the Flaming Sword of Justice and some of the other tools I have worked with over the years, and bring it out on days like today when I need it most.

So here is my attempt at today’s gratitude list, unqualified by doom and general grouchiness:

Gratitude List:
1. Coffee
2. Coats
3. Chocolate
4. Children
5. Already the gloom is lifting.  Already the energy of the day begins to enter.  Already the sense of possibility begins to shine over the shadow of too-much-to-do-in-too-little-time.  Already the medicine of this practice begins to do its work.  You don’t know, sometimes, if you’re going to get there until you get there.  And sometimes that is the story that needs to unfold.

May you have a moment of peace today.  May we walk in Beauty.

So here, qualified as it is by a thousand things, from the depths of my curmudgeonly soul: Happy Thanksgiving! (And I mean it this time.)

Complicit

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I have been brooding today about Bill Cosby. Does it really matter whether a farmer/schoolteacher/mother/poet forms an opinion about the Bill Cosby rape story? I can just ignore it all, say it’s none of my business, and move on. It’s a mark, perhaps, of our shallow culture that we get wrapped up in the lives of celebrities to the point that uncovering a celebrity’s history of sexual predation would throw me, would cause me such a sense of intermingled fury and grief. Perhaps. Still, I think when someone is lively or delightful or thoughtful or beautiful in the wider culture in which we participate, we do feel a connection that goes beyond the merely mundane. I wept when violinist Isaac Stern died, when the poetic voice of Maya Angelou passed on, when Robin Williams left us with only memories of his laughter. So I supposed this response isn’t preposterous.

But there’s another piece of it that’s really bothering me today, and that is that when this recent part of the story broke this past week, I had a moment of deja vu: “Oh yeah.  Wasn’t there something about this a few years ago?”  As I began to read the account of Scott Simon’s questions and the stories of more and more women coming forward, I remembered that I had read earlier–and damning–accusations a few years ago. Why did I forget?  Why did I put that out of mind and go on accepting Bill Cosby as America’s Mr. Funnyman?  America’s Everydad, as Mark Morford called him. And that’s the thing that bothers me, because that’s a hallmark of rape culture–that the predator can so often minimize his crimes in the face of his power or celebrity or general congeniality that people either don’t believe the stories of his victims or they participate in the minimization, ignore the true implications of the accusations, and go on living as though nothing has happened, and the victim gets violated again, this time by the world’s refusal to acknowledge her story. Again, why does it matter what I think? Why should I bother to form an opinion on the matter? It troubles me, though, that something in me would have minimized the earlier stories, would have lived in denial that someone who brought such delight and wonder into our homes could be cavalierly destroying people’s lives. I feel complicit in the culture of denial. Sullied.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Hiking at Sam Lewis State Park. Every time I go there and climb on the rocks with the kids, I am more and more aware of how old I am getting, how clambering over the big rocks is getting harder and harder. Still, it’s worth the scramble up to the top of the rocks pile, to look through the trees to the River, to imagine what it must have been like for the First People who walked here to stand perhaps on the very same rocks looking out to the River.
2.  Sharing the awe. Yesterday in my last class, I mentioned something about the morning’s sunrise, and suddenly three or four students were all talking at once, clamoring to tell their experiences of watching the sky that morning.
3.  I don’t have to figure it all out.  I don’t have to be perfect for every moment.  I just need to be Present.
4.  The last assignment in the course I am taking was to watch a video on renewing energy, on play and flow and working joyfully.  And then to go play for an hour.  I took that seriously, and we all spent most of the day with the Legos, sorting and building and playing.  It is very satisfying to be assigned to play.  My children loved that.
5.  Colcannon

May we walk in Beauty!

It’s Always About the Bridge

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Last January, during the high holy days that come at the year’s turning, before the 12th Day of Christmas, I had a dream about bridges, and I decided that Bridges would be my image for the year.  Little did I know back then how I would be creating a bridge between two times of my life, between Farmer and Teacher, and traveling every day across the bridges from Wrightsville to Columbia to the place of the Iron Bridge, where it crosses the Millstream.  Little did I know then how desperate I would be right now for language, for images, for ideas which could bridge the gaps between people who cannot seem to see their way across the chasms toward each other.

In my twenties and thirties, I spent a decade away from the Mennonite church, searching for a way to find my own place among my people on my own terms, with language that could hold me in the basket, too.  I have been back again now for another decade, and engaged with people who ask many of the same questions I do, who sometimes walk through the boggy places at the edges of the Village with me, and now we stop and look around at each other through the mists, and wonder how this new gulf could have formed between some of us, and how we’ll find our way to each other again, and whether we have the skills or energy to build a bridge across.

Perhaps we can build a bridge of song, strong four-part harmonies to give it structure, old hymn tunes mingling with a strummed guitar and songs from our family in other lands.  I hear you there, through the mist, across the waters.  Sing louder, please.  Remind me why we need this bridge.  Some days I get so weary of trying to maintain the vision of it in that space between my brows.  Here are my tears, here is my rage, here is my voice like a strand of silver cobweb, thrown out into the darkness, to weave and twine with yours.  How shall we begin?

 

Gratitude List:
1. Ellis combing my hair, like I used to comb my mother’s hair.
2. Bridges everywhere.  I think that the young ones are a bridge.  But will their time ripen soon enough?
3. Thoughtful conversations with friends.  I do not have to brood alone.
4. The thousand thousand crows in the trees along Route 30.  I know that they are a trial for those who live and work there, but the magic and the mystery and the incredible wonder of them filling the treetops and flying through the dusk and the rain answers some sort of question in my spirit that I don’t yet know how to ask.
5. The Number One Ladies Detective Agency.  I have been listening to Alexander McCall Smith books on my commute lately, and enjoying the accents of Botswana.

May we walk in Beauty!

Stories and Sun Dogs

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Now that I have finished The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit on books on tape, along with a partial set of Sherlock Holmes stories I bought at the library book sale, I thought I might use some of the time during my car ride to work on a story for the Central PA magazine short story contest.  It’s not due until February, so maybe I’ll actually finish it this year.  I have started this same story several times, and this year I realized that one of the essentials that it has been missing is an actual plot of any sort.  Maybe this year I’ll give it a bit of a plot and by next year I’ll be able to submit it.  Who knows?  Maybe even this year I’ll get it whipped into shape.  Meanwhile, it’s a lovely thing to occupy my head on my daily journey.  It’s based on my dreams of my grandmother’s house.

Gratitude List:
1.  Broken light, which is to say, rainbows and sun dogs.  I haven’t seen a rainbow for a little while, but sometimes I see sun dogs as I drive west on 30.
2.  Glory cloud on the way home from work today.  Sun streaming in beams through the clouds, like the sun was a great eye and the rays were lashes all around it.  And then a tangerine sunset beneath.
3.  That fever has gone down and seems to be staying down.  May the Little Kid stay well now.
4.  Tea.  We are entering the season of tea.  Tea and gloves.
5.  Word play, poems, shapes of words on the page, the taste of words in the mouth.  A story that might get born.

May we walk in Beauty.

Re-Building Bridges

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

We watched a couple videos of Turkish Ebru painting, Boy and I.  In Ebru painting, the artist drips ink on to the surface of the water, then manipulates the surface to create beautiful designs which cling to the paper the artist rests on the water’s surface.

Afterward, “Can you get down my painting box?”

“I think we’re out of painting paper.”

“That’s okay.  I’ll find some cardboard.”

P1020389

Gratitude List:
1.  The wild creative imagination of children.  How one thing suddenly becomes another thing, which morphs into a totally different thing.  Well, now.  Isn’t that sort of like life?  Maybe the Divine Source of all Being is a Child playing with colors:  “This one looks like a farmer.  But if I twist this brush a little bit this way, she turns into a teacher.  See?”  Capricious, maybe.  But magical.  Just let this one dry a good while please, Kid, before you go shifting this part of the design again.
2.  Ends of tunnels.  Beginnings of bridges.  Spanning the distances.  Breathe, baby, breathe, while you cross that bridge.  And don’t, whatever you do, hold your breath in the tunnels!  Look for the light–it’s really there.
3.  Re-built bridges, diamonds, rust.  A couple days ago, I heard Joan Baez singing “Diamonds and Rust” on the radio, and it took me back 25 years in one instant.  It took me right back to the happy times before the burning of a bridge, of a friendship.  The bridge has been re-built, of course, and this new one is as beautiful as my bridge that arches over the Susquehanna when the sun hits it just so in the mornings.  But that long-ago burning still sometimes haunts me with the shame of my pettiness and selfishness, despite the great grace of my co-re-builder, despite the years that have passed.  Sometimes I just have to go back and look at the old pilings where the old bridge used to be, to see how there’s moss growing there, and small trees, how the wreck sets off the incredible grace of the new bridge, how the sun shines on it all as Beauty.  This is one of the big gratitudes of my life, one of the constants: the Grace of friendship.
4.  Oh, that slant of light in the mornings in the hollow makes me almost as giddy and obsessed as my oriole did in springtime.  I miss it most mornings these days because I am gone before sunrise.  See, we sit down here in the shadows of the bowl, and we know that it is day because the sky has brightened up above, but then the sun slants down and hits the tops of the trees with a golden shimmer that moves down the trunks.  There comes a point when the sun just spills down the hillsides like liquid gold.
5.  Both.  And.  I like those words.
6.  (Because sometimes you need more than five.)  It’s a long way away, but I am planning my self-care moment, anticipating my Time of Silence.  The thought of my own retreat fills me with energy.

May we walk in Beauty!

Mind and Body

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Last week, I wrote a short essay on the subject of the sacredness of the material world, how in my world view, mind and body are one.  I’ve always had trouble with the dualistic view that sometimes pervades Christian and Buddhist thought, that the spiritual self needs to transcend or abnegate the body in order to reach true spiritual depth.  I think we’re here in these bodies for a particular reason, to experience this material world through the senses, to learn how being human is to be in these bodies.  In my recent life, however, Body and Mind have been a-warring with each other a little, especially in the realm of sleep.

At night, as I am falling asleep, Mind gives Body reminders and instructions: “We’ve checked the alarm clock.  It’s loud enough and it’s set for the correct time.  You can sleep until it goes off.”

Body has already fallen asleep and missed half the instructions.  She’s good at falling asleep the first time.

3 a.m.  Body: “Umm.  Did we really check the. . .”
Mind: “Yes!  Go back to sleep!”

3:20 a.m.  Body: “. . .because if we ever forget, then we might not wake up on time. . .”
Mind:  “Shh!  Just go back to sleep.”

This goes on, every fifteen or twenty minutes, until finally Mind can’t take it anymore, and none of us can get back to sleep, and we get out of bed around 4:30 or 5.  We get some work done, and get ready for school, and then, just at 6:30, when we’re about to head out to the car for school, Body says: “I’m really tired.  Couldn’t we just take a 15-minute nap?”

This has been the pattern almost every night since school began.  Last night, however, we woke up at 4:15, settled back to sleep, and didn’t wake up until the alarm went off.  I only hope it’s the beginning of a shift in the pattern.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Cheesy enchiladas for supper
2.  Making art with kiddos
3.  The table is wide.  So wide.  There’s room for everyone.
4.  Lying in the grass on the hillside to meditate
5.  The maple trees are bursting into flame

May we walk in Beauty!

Soup and Imperfection

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This new life I have embarked upon has shifted my flow of energy drastically.  Working with teenagers is invigorating and energizing, but it can be incredibly draining, too.  I am finding my way back to a kind of equilibrium, but meanwhile I am treading gently, learning to say No again with the same sort of intentionality I learned when I had small babies.  Now my days are filled brimful with words.  I am on stage much of the day, putting word together into strings and strands of ideas to rush out upon the webs that connect my heart and thoughts to the hearts and thought of my students.  I am listening to and reading words.  Somehow, in the midst of this, I have developed again a shyness and a reticence about throwing down a poem upon the page in the mornings, to see what appears and where I can take it.  I will get back to that place again.  Perhaps I can begin to draw out some of the webs from my school life and work them onto this tabula rasa.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Seeing Chiques Rock, and the River, and the bridges, in a different light each morning.  How the sun lights up the trees on the eastern horizon as I drive into morning.
2.  It happens every October when the air starts to get cold, but I love the desperation of kitty snuggles at this time of year.  Such purrings.
3.  I am still trying to find ways to be grateful through this early morning insomnia that I have developed again.  But I am truly grateful that I don’t have to fight myself to get myself out of bed these days.  That would feel really miserable.  Now I just need to find a way to bring 4 am a little closer to 5:30 in my body’s clock.
4.  Soup and the people who make it.
5.  Not being perfect.  This one’s hard.  I want to be super teacher.  I want to be the one who always nails every lesson, every question, every challenge.  I’m not that person.  Sometimes my lessons fall flat.  Sometimes I just don’t meet the challenges the way they need me too.  I can be too easy on them, or too strict, all at the wrong times.  But I think I am sufficient,and managing rather well most of the time, and as we said in the Waldorf school, I think they will learn simply from watching me strive.  I still wish I were an ace, a star, a golden child.  But short of that, I’ll settle for being sufficient, comfortable, and loving.

May we walk in Beauty!

Treasures in the Haystack

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Today as I was walking down the hall, I noticed a small group of first years huddled in a little cluster not far from a grove of tree-like seniors.  The freshmen looked so young and innocent and small compared to the sturdy and confident older students.  I realized that it was only partly about their respective heights; it was also about their carriage and body language.  The blooming from childhood to young adulthood really seems to happen in these few years that they walk the halls of high school.  I also realized that those particular freshmen, who seemed so small in comparison to the seniors, were actually all taller than I am.  Heh.

I should be grading.  I have a big stack of essays that really need to be done by tomorrow.  But my gratitude list today is sort of centered around that stack.

Gratitude List:
1.  All these stories.  Perhaps it’s a little brutal, a little brusque, to ask these young folks whom I don’t really know to write essays for me, describing something that brought about a change in their lives.  Oh, how tender, how vulnerable, their responses.  I hold them like eggs, like butterfly wings, like whispers.  Tales of joyful tears at the birth of a niece or a nephew, of tenderly nurturing small creatures, of leaving their homes to travel to the US to study, of deciding to care about their futures and their dreams.  Oh, the stacks of grading can be a teacher’s bane, like mythological challenges to be overcome, but they hold such treasures.  Such powerful and fragile treasures.  Have I said how in love I am with these people who fill my days?
2.  How a little bit of unplanned time in the classroom can sometimes turn into powerful discussion time.  Yesterday, it was about how, when you stand up against something wrong, it makes it easier for the next person to do so.  Today, it was parenting techniques, and helping children to develop intrinsic motivations to choose the “right” option instead of forcing them to follow the extrinsic motivation of threats of parental punishment.  Really.  These are wise and thoughtful folks.
3.  Monarchs on the move.  I keep seeing them–it’s migration time.
4.  Wild geese.  The ones that fly overhead.  The ones in Mary Oliver’s poem.  The ones in Mary Black’s song.  The one some call the Spirit.
5.  Tomorrow we go to the beach.  The farm work will go on here without us.  The school work will get done in the cracks and spaces.  And I will have a day and a half to breathe seas air and refresh and rejuvenate.  Blessed be.

May we walk in Beauty.

Word-Bridges

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I need to take my moments of contemplation when I can get them these days.  Only three weeks into the semester, and I have already (at least once) left a piece of my lesson planning to the morning.  And that eats up not only time, but also confidence.  Yet I am feeling an internal sense that not only should I be maintaining my morning reflection time, but perhaps I need to expand my writing practices.  Now, because I am spending my days teaching writing, when I write for myownself, I am keenly conscious of how I am moving around inside these sentences, pulling the ideas of this sentence into being perhaps even while I typed the previous sentence.  Considering whether a fragment here might be well-used to effect.  Wondering whether I can hold onto the depth of the idea that I am working with if I shift for a moment into discussion of the what happens when I explore the room of a sentence while I am writing it.

You and I, we are individual universes, separate in our separate realms, joined by. . .what?  (Meta-mind wonders how I should have punctuated that one and hopes a grammarian friend will give suggestions.) What is the web that connects us in our isolated worlds?  Love and hope, certainly.  Gesture and expression.  Still, we need language to channel those deep rivers of self between us, to make the webs between us glow and shine.  As we build these word, bridges, construct whole rooms and tunnels of sentences, cities of paragraphed ideas, our worlds connect.  I can write to you and you can write to me, and we can say to each other that we know each other, even if we have not seen each others’ faces.  Just because of words.  May all our words bring deeper understanding, more powerful connections.

Gratitude List:
1.  Personal pep-talks, for that is what this has been.  It was a short night, and it promises to be a hot day in the classroom, me yelling my words out over the fans.  Still, I cannot be anything but grateful to for the gift of this opportunity to help this cohort of 90 young people develop and perfect their ability to work with language, this magical tool for human connection.  May it be so.
2.  The great horned owls.  I know I just wrote about them a couple days ago, but their deep and startling voices here in the fall are almost as trance-inducing as my friend the oriole was in spring.  When I am grumbling at the rude voice of the alarm clock, the sudden surprised whooping of the owls in the bamboo forest will make me smile and be glad to be awake in this darkness.
3.  Following my predecessor at the school.  She was well-loved by quite a number of students.  Random students keep wandering in and looking around, a little lost, and introducing themselves as former students of hers.  Some of them even return repeatedly, as though simply the memory of her in that room makes it a haven amidst the bustle of the school day.  Big shoes to fill.  I’ll be my own me, of course, but do my best to keep her light shining in the window.
4.  Word-bridges.  Sentence-halls.  Paragraph-houses.  All these artificial structures and codes that we have created in millennia of human development that enable us to close the space between us.
5.  Annoying as his constant demands for attention, food, attention, and food can be, I love the way Fred the cat meows, his whole face getting into the act.  I love the way he won’t take no for an answer when he wants snuggles and I am wearing a dark blue dress that cannot have orange cat hair upon it.  I had to go get a blanket to cover me because he would have his mama-cuddle this morning, no matter what I said.

May we walk in Beauty!