Musings

Finding Time, Staying Challenged

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Not so much time for poems these days.  Hardly time to catch my breath for the gratitude lists.  All is well.  All is growing and changing.  Moving.  I am tired, so weary.  I am energized, so excited.  I feel competent and capable, but I am also humbled by the fact that I have so very much to learn.

Gratitude List:
1.  More feathers.  Two days ago, as I was walking out of school, I was thinking to myself that I hadn’t found a feather yet that day, and I thought perhaps the daily feather find was at an end.  I had it in my head, the actual words “There will be no more feathers.”  But there, on the sidewalk in front of me was yet another feather.  I have been telling my students that they get to make the meaning of their stories, and I told some of them about the feathers.  I can be the scientific naturalist and say that I find a feather every single day because there are owls in the trees at night eating little birds and crows fighting as they fly above my house and school.  I can say that the Universe is offering me little gifts to remind me that I have wings, that I can fly.  I can say that I just have keen eyes for feathers.  Whatever it is, I am really glad that they keep finding me.
2.  This is a weird one for a gratitude because it’s a difficult story.  But I learned this story this week about how a group of Prussian Mennonites, during WWII, actually sent a letter of support to Hitler.  It was chilling to hear how they unquestioningly thanked the fuhrer for his dedication to the “Fatherland” and to Christian principles.  So sobering.  And a good reminder to myownself to pay more attention to my commitment to my spiritual work than to the work of politics, to keep the political in the perspective of the spiritual.  I am grateful for reminders to be true to the deeper realities.
3.  The laughter of my new friends, my new colleagues.  Belly laughter builds community.  And after the in-breath of focused work together, we need the out-breath of laughter together.
4.  How sleep brings answers.  I went to bed last night anxious about the chapel service I have to prepare for school on Tuesday, not sure what I would say or how I would present my own story.  I woke up this morning knowing exactly (sort of) what I am going to say.
5.  Small kindnesses.  At the end of the day Thursday, I put two bags of trash at my classroom door so I would trip on them and remember to take them out to the big bins.  A student I have never met stopped and peeked in the room and asked it he should throw them away for me.  Little thing, but it made my day.  Probably my week, too.  Or semester.  

May we walk in Beauty!

Reading the Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Yesterday as I was sweeping up my classroom at the end of the day, I got to thinking about leaves and feathers and little paper frizzies.  When my world was centered mostly around the house and farm, I felt like I sort of learned to read the litter of leaf and bark and feather, of stone and seedpod.  Now my association have shifted from the glorious beings of tree and field to the glorious beings of teenagers, and I wonder: can I learn to read the weather of the day through the little bits of paper and pens and pencils, the candy wrappers and strands of hair that I sweep up before I go home?  Teenagers are like trees, I think, dropping little bits of this and that as they go about their day.  I’m listening and watching. . .

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Kingfisher chattering along the MillStream
2.  I’m meeting Mara today!  A dear and wonderful friend whom I have never met in person is coming to see me!
3.  The way the planning of one day gives naturally on to the planning of the next day.  I get stumped about how to proceed with the lesson plans, but then I step back and look at it from a bit of a distance, and suddenly the next thing falls into place.  And the great thing about it is that the planning muscle is one which is strengthened with use, so the more I do it, the less anxiety-producing it will become.
4.  Comfortable shoes (this is a reminder to myself: yesterday’s shoes were not comfortable)
5.  The moment when I get home in the afternoons and see those boys and Jon.  Shiningest moment of the day.

May we walk in Beauty!

Glorious and Difficult

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Sometimes the most glorious experiences are also the hardest.  I haven’t been focusing on the difficulties of the week, partly because I don’t want to lose the momentum, and partly because they’re rather significantly overshadowed by the excitement and the delight of the new experience of beginning a new teaching position.

I am tired.  I cannot wait for the sleep that the weekend brings, the rest and the quiet, the chance to leap from the whirling carousel for a moment.  I have confronted my most regular anxiety dream head-on this week: wandering the halls of my old school, rushing to find a class that may or may not already be over, not sure if the stairs I am on actually lead anywhere.  While I did not get physically lost this week, and I was in all my classes on time, being there brought it all back.  I have taken to carrying a clipboard with all the important information on it: where I need to be and when, lists of phone numbers, seating charts, my lesson plans for the day.  It’s like a lifeline.

Mostly I think I have managed to look the self-doubts in the eye.  Deep down I know that I am qualified and competent to do this job, but repeatedly this week the grouchy little doubties have gotten their tiny feet in the door for a few moments.  Mostly I have been able to shoo them out like the wasp we shooed out the window of the classroom yesterday.  Getting started on a new thing will always entail a bit of a learning curve.  I keep reminding myself that if my students see me make a mistake or change my mind about a plan, perhaps that is helping them to learn flexibility and adaptability.

And my children have been fine!  I was more nervous for their first day of school than they were, and now after two days, they’re pros at the bus ride, confident about getting to their classrooms, chatting about their classes.  Begone, wild anxieties!

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Small child marching around the house, chanting: “Always keep your dear teacher happy!”  Apparently it’s a kindergarten classroom rule.  I may take that one into the high school classroom.
2.  The House Fairy Magic that set up another child’s stuffed cats on his bed reading a book.  The boy was so enchanted that he carried book and cats around all evening and could hardly eat dinner for chatting with the cats about “Each Peach, Pear, Plum.”
3.  Sleep.  It’s coming.  No alarm tomorrow morning.
4.  Affirmations.  It is amazing how big a perk a little affirmation can be in the middle of a muddle.
5.  First opus of the Dawn Chorus.  My wake-up is earlier and dawn is later, and now we have converged again and I hear the first mutters and murmurs of the Dawn Chorus, instead of just the later whoops and hollers.

May we walk in Beauty!

Entering My Prime

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today I turn 47.  Forty-seven is a prime number.  According to Wikipedia, it is the 15th prime number, it’s a safe prime, the 13th supersingular prime, and the sixth Lucas prime.  It is apparently a highly cototient number, and it is “strictly non-palindromic.”  Wikipedia also tells me that 47 is a Keith number, a Carol number and a Thabit number, related somehow to the amicable numbers 17296 and 18416.

Well, anyway, I seem to be entering my prime today, and it looks like I have a lots of mathematical research ahead of me if I really want to understand fully what that means.  But here I go.  Whee!

Gratitude List:
1. Aging.  I wouldn’t want to stay one age all the time.  As my numbers go up, it can occasionally be a little startling to me to see how fast they seem to be rising, but I wouldn’t want to stay in one place.
2. Silver hairs.  My friend Elizabeth calls them Unicorn Hairs.  I will wear mine proudly.
3. Fire circle on the hill.
4. Monarchs flitting about.  Fly well, Bright Ones!
5. Great Horned Owl calling in the trees.
6. That moon!

Sunlight and Feathers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

There needs to be a word for that moment
when a particular slant of light
hits a golden butterfly wing just so
as it flutters through the hollow.

***

The feathers.  I am still finding at least one a day.  Yesterday there were five.  Two days ago, I found one at school, on the sidewalk between the parking lot and my classroom building.  One day, before I’d left the house, Alicia brought me three she’d found.  As I was pitching my tent at Nancy’s house last weekend, I found a feather.  Right there.  Last year, it lasted about a month or six weeks, a feather a day, beginning in late July.

We construct the meaning of our lives, I think.  I like to keep lots of meanings in my pockets, and take them out to look at, like bright stones.  All these feathers!  It means that I am favored by birds.  Or it’s a message not to fear the fledging, the flight I am about to take.  Or it’s a reminder to rest in the grace of air and light.  Or it means that bird-life in the hollow is healthy and vibrant.  Or it means that there is an owl who chooses my poplar tree for her feasting.  Perhaps it means that something in me is more observant in August, more apt to notice the tiny feathers in my path.  I don’t need to choose one meaning, to sort out the spiritual from the scientific, to hold one above another as the “right” and proper meaning.  I’ll hold them all, let all those pieces weave themselves into the narrative of my life.  Life’s too full of possibilities to narrow it down to one thing.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The August slant of light
2. Tiger swallowtails
3. Wild geese in flight: You do not have to be good.
4. The mysterious promise of another day
5. Baby snuggle time

May we walk in Beauty!

Questions

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

You say you don’t believe the stories the moon was telling
last night as she rose among the sparkling stars
over the rim of your feather pillow?
You say you’ve forgotten the song she sang,
the way her voice wrapped your heart
in a blanket made of spider silk?
You say you never find yourself lost and alone
and deliriously satisfied in the meadows of a dream?

Surely you have heard the singing when the rainbow arcs the sky?
Surely you have seen the pattern of the swallows’ dance above you?
Surely you can’t have missed the feel of the moon’s fingers
as she caresses your forehead on a summer night?

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Friends, I am on the cusp of a big change, standing at the very edge of the cliff now, remembering that I have wings, but not sure that I am ready to fly.  Oh, I know the wind will catch me, and I know all will be well, but it is right and proper, I suppose, for butterflies to fill the belly in the moments before the leap.

Today is my last Friday of farm harvest for the summer.  While I will continue to fill in the cracks as I am able, Tuesday will essentially be the day I take off the farmer’s hat and put on the teacher’s hat.

I am going to try to continue to be present here on the blog through the changes, to continue to write gratitude lists, and hopefully poems, too.  But the space may get a little dusty and cobwebby from time to time as I work to figure out how my new morning schedule works, and where I can carve out writing time in my new world.

Gratitude List:
1. The morning’s rosy sky
2. Creative community: currently, this postcard project, and how one word or phrase or idea on a postcard I receive becomes the thread I grab for the next two or three poems.
3. Wings.  The fierce feeling of the wind in the eyes in the moments before leaping.
4. Last night the hamster cage was left open.  I am grateful that Jon found Afil before Fred the Cat did.
5. Shuffling.  How the pieces can fit together in many different ways.  Sometimes I get afraid to shift things around for fear I’ll set the whole thing crumbling, but new patterns begin to emerge instead, new ways of making it all work.

May we walk in Beauty!

Changelings

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Yesterday morning, I was pondering how my children have entered another of those changeling phases, when they suddenly look and act like changelings that the faeries have swapped for my little ones.  Suddenly, their teeth seem to be too big for their mouths, their chins are pointy, and their knees and elbows stick out at all angles.  Their shoulder blades stick out of their backs like they’re about to sprout wings.  Their hair seems to grow an inch a day.  They seem to have lost some hearing: they don’t come when I call or answer questions when I ask them.  They get a faraway look in their eyes.  Wild creatures.

Then I noticed that the Faerie Ring mushrooms had popped open in the night.  This is only the second or third year that I have noticed them out by the shop, and there are more now than there have ever been, about ten, in an oblong ring.  I told my youngest changeling that he might want to make a faerie garden down by the ring.  He spent most of the afternoon and evening creating an elaborate faerie village among and around the toadstools.  At one point, he set up four chairs down by the ring and invited the whole family to come sit and watch him work.

My friend Marie Winger, who is a powerful storyteller, and who was here at the CSA to pick up her weekly share of vegetables, told me how someone had once interviewed her about how people can preserve their capacity for wonder and imagination.  She told him, “How can you hope to see the faeries under the flowers, if you don’t notice the flowers themselves?”  That was the third time yesterday that someone had told me very earnestly that noticing, paying attention, is an important practice.  My children might not be very good right now at noticing when I call, but they’re very busy noticing the minute details of their world.

I love these changeling children and their wild wonder, their startling imaginative worlds.  If this cycle goes as the last one did, they’ll soon start to grow back into themselves.  Their feet and hands will seem to match their body proportions again.  Their fighting will become a little less fierce for a time.  They’ll listen better again.  They’ll come to terms with the space around them.  For now, I hope the faeries let me keep these little feral things a while longer.

Gratitude List:
1.  The faerie toadstool ring and the magic that it brings us.
2.  Virginia Sweet tomatoes, golden yellow streaked with pink, and almost two pounds each.  Sweet and juicy.
3.  Noticing.  Paying attention.  Being Here Now.
4.  My wise, wise friends.  That includes you, Bright Ones.
5.  The smell of good bread toasting.  Isn’t that a sort of iconic scent?  It’s more than it is, you know?

May we walk in Wonder!

Please Do Not Read Again

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 6 Comments

Here is my Gratitude List, first today, in case you want to read that and skip the poem.  I went to bed last night, thinking about Gaza, and woke up this morning with terrible images in my dreaming heart.  The poem comes from that.  The Gratitude List is especially difficult on these broody days.

Gratitude List:
1. The image of the labyrinth.  You walk into it, feel the turnings, the changes, relinquish pieces of yourself, and return to the world renewed.  I know I will not always be wandering in the darkness.  I know there is a purpose to the wandering.
2. The people who are doing the work.  I come back to this again and again.  Every bit of work that we do for peace is part of the larger tapestry.  Whatever steps you take will hearten and encourage someone else to pick up a thread and weave.  I have to believe that this work will yield fruit.
3. The ancestors.
4. Morning comes after night.  Again and again and again.
5. Making things with my children.  Ellis and I are making a marvelous bag.  I dragged my feet–“We have this other bag already, which will serve your purpose splendidly!”  Sad face, then: “But this bag that you are going to make for me–I can say that I designed it!”  Okay, Boy, hand me my fabric scissors.

May we walk in Beauty.  May we walk in Peace.

2013 October 108

Now for the poem.  Don’t worry about me, please.  I need to walk into this labyrinth if I am to remain honest and true to something at my center.  I am afraid of the darkness, but I am not lost in the darkness.  Let’s hold each other’s hands.

A little over a  year ago, I wrote a poem titled “Please Do Not Read This Poem.”  I suppose this is a second part to that.  I am feeling raw these days.  I want to know what is happening in the world, want to know what my work is, but I cannot bear to read the news, cannot bear the feeling that I am complicit in the feeding of the war machine.

Here it comes again,
this poem I cannot complete,
cannot write,
cannot stop writing.

I am Lady Macbeth
and my hands are stained
with the blood of thousands,
yet I cannot stop my killing.

I am caught in the calculus:
How many chortling wrens
does it take to bomb a hospital?
How many of those fine heirloom tomatoes–
the Golden Girls, the Red and Green Zebras,
the Mr. Slabaughs and the Brandywines?
How many of them are required
to blow up a school
where refugees huddle?

Most days I hear my ancestors humming,
beginning their songs in the hallways of my heart,
lining the spiraling stairways of my DNA.

They accepted death by fire and water,
they received iron bars and stone towers,
they faced the sword,
rather than give their children and their gold,
rather than offer to Caesar
what they believed
did not belong to Caesar
(or to Mars, perhaps,
what did not belong to Mars).

I lack the moral fortitude
to hold back my yearly tithe,
and face the consequence of that.

Instead, I wake in the night
and calculate the costs
of all my killings.
When Caesar receives my birdsong,
my tomatoes and my blue-eyed chicory,
one full fourth of that
is funneled to the war machine.

Every fourth stone,
every fourth feather,
every fourth sunrise
bright over the hill,
every fourth chicken egg
warm from the nest
is feeding the birth of a drone
or a bomb or a rocket,
filling the ravenous belly
of the god of war.

All this murder leaves a trail.
Those bombs that kill
the children of Gaza today
were bought from my country,
from this war-machine
that feeds off my quiet hollow,
my singing stream,
my tiny fledging hummingbirds,
my royal poplar and my sycamore.

Some days,
the singing of my ancestors
is deafening.
Some days,
I hear the pounding of cannon
and see the dust rising,
even here in this place
where sunlight flashes on birdwing.

Am I too busy?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

While media images of women these days seem to be startlingly and aggressively belittling, I have been delighted to watch the growing backlash, the awareness-raising which reminds girls and women not to pay attention, to step outside the story that the media tells us we are and should be.  Even after years of working with body image and railing against the media storm, I still find myself nodding or agreeing in those conversations where people are talking about weight-loss, “Yes, I should lose a few more pounds.  Oh, I know, my body is shamefully unwilling to be thin and svelte. . .” It’s constant work to step out of that cultural narrative, to question the underlying assumption.  Stop and breathe.  Ask, “Am I really too fat?”  No?  No.  Okay.  Move right along.

Yesterday as I was trying to keep myself calm in the face of all the things that I have to accomplish, it hit me that I have been buying into another culture and media-generated story, totally without questioning the underlying assumptions.  It goes something like this: “You are too busy.  You have too many things to do.  You will not be truly happy until you buy this product that makes your work seem easier, or until you take this pill that relaxes you, or until you take this vacation or buy this wine.”  It hit me that while I have constantly questioned the advertising response to this, I don’t know if I have ever truly questioned the underlying assumption.  Am I really too busy?

For years in my life, I couldn’t answer that “Am I too fat?” question with a comfortable No.  There have been a few times when I really was heavier than was healthy for me, but for years I was answering the question wrong, following the script the media offered, and hating the way my body looked, despising my soft squishiness instead of being satisfied and even happy with how I look.

Now, I ask, “Am I really too busy?” and a little piece of liberating intuition is on the cusp of saying a hesitant little no, but I’m still pretty steeped in it.  If I say No to that question, then I have lots of other questions to unpack.  Why is my house cluttered?  Why haven’t I yet painted over that spackled mess on the wall?  Why is the faucet still leaking?  Why is the hillside back there covered with vines and pokeweed?  I can keep going on here for a few more hours.  The fact is, I do feel too busy.  I think I am too busy.

But what if that’s a state of mind, too, instead of a state of fact?  As I step into this next stage of my life, with all the many new demands it holds, perhaps I can try to go into it challenging the assumption that I will be overwhelmed and tapped to the limits.  There seems to be an underside to the “Am I too busy?” question, and that is the assumption that if you aren’t feeling completely stressed out and overwhelmed, perhaps you aren’t actually working hard enough.  I think that’s a dangerous assumption.  When I am feeling my most overwhelmed, I am a much less productive and effective person.  I am thinking that one of the gifts that I can give my students (if I can remain conscious and aware enough to manage it) is to model a healthier answer to the question.  “Am I too busy?”  Umm, no?  No.  Okay then.  Move right along.

 

Gratitude List:
1. That fascinating dream, just now, in which I was reading a poem about examining a screech owl’s pellet to a very attentive black bird with bright eyes and yellow wings and yellow wattles that hung down low over each side of its face.  (After a night of difficult dreams, it is lovely to be left with this image as the final story.)
2. Listening to the boys giggle and guffaw while Jon reads them Winnie the Pooh stories.  These days they’re so quick to reject so many things as “Baby stuff!”  I was afraid that Pooh Bear might be relegated to that category.  I am grateful that they can style shift between Lord of the Rings and Winnie the Pooh.
3.  The way ideas build upon ideas when you let them.  Sometimes I feel so dry, like I’m afraid to try to put new ideas for writing or projects together.  What if this is my last good idea?  I want to hoard it, hold onto it.  The more you let them flow, the more they flow.
4.  Deciding not to be too busy.
5.  Being a strand in the web.  Sometimes I don’t know what else I have to offer but my place in the web.  And sometimes, perhaps, that is enough.  It seems like an odd thing to be grateful for, for grief, to grieve the heart-wrenching loss that a friend is experiencing.  But that’s part of being part of that web that connects us.  I am intensely grateful for that connection, even when the web is shaken by grief.

May we walk in Beauty!

Keep Dreaming

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

This morning as I woke up, a remnant of dream was just wandering out the back door of my brain, too quickly for me to even catch it by the tail, but its words continued to echo through the halls of my head: “Keep dreaming.  Keep feeling.  Keep talking.”

I certainly don’t think of myself as someone who is in need of an admonition to keep talking, but perhaps there’s an honest and deep-wrought speech attached to the dreaming and feeling that I would do well to hone and refine.

Even without a fragment of a dream remaining to pin it to, I have a strong intuition that this is a social admonition.  In all the personality tests I have ever taken, I sit pretty firmly in the center of the introvert/extrovert scale.  Sometimes, perhaps, this is a comfortable balance where I can pick up the best qualities of both, but there are also times when I feel like I live through the most artless aspects of them instead, the light and chatty self-absorbed extrovert and the socially awkward and uncomfortable introvert.  One part of me has no patience for the “small talk,” and the other part of me is anxious about moving past the friendly surface of conversation.  Then I find myself using the breezy chattiness to cover up the feelings of gracelessness.

It is when I can keep myself in touch with my truest dreaming, feeling self that my speech–both the ritual greetings and the deep conversation–is most honest and real.  That feels like a good spiritual practice.

Keep Dreaming.  Keep Feeling.  Keep Talking.

Gratitude List:
1.  My heart is heavy this morning with the story of a vigil that a friend is keeping.  I ache for the pain and the terror, and feel no gratitude for what she is facing.  But I am grateful to be included in the watchers and listeners who hold her in the light, grateful to have that, at least–prayer, energy, hope, loving hearts–to offer.
2.  We made it through harvest and set-up yesterday with Farmer Jon flat on his back in bed, sick.  What an amazing farm crew!  I get by with much more than a little help from my friends.
3.  Crows calling in the wood.  They sound like adventure is at hand on this still, hushed morning.  Isn’t that odd?  The cat is hollering his head off, and the crows are squalling, but the air feels like silence, like impendingness, like waiting.  Adventure is at hand.  That excites me.  What will the day bring?
4.  Dream messages
5.  Long sleep.  Sleep is such a cure.

May we walk in Beauty!