Musings

Balancing Act

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Recently, my pattern is to write these lists in the mornings, before the children wake up, as a way to reflect on the previous day before I start the new one.  So each day I catalog the possibilities for gratitude before I go to bed, so I have something to work with in the mornings while my brain is beginning to emerge from sleep.

Sometimes that stew of anxiety-producing news and political analysis that mixes with the personal anxieties of the daily can stir up to a rather potent brew.  This week, in particular, I have felt how the practice of gratitude has helped to ground me in the midst of anxiety, how it keeps bringing my mind to a solid perch amidst the what-ifs that want to shake me loose.

Does it seem to be against the point to say that a daily gratitude practice has helped me understand my challenging emotions more fully?  Why do something that gets me in touch with anxiety or fear or fury or despair?  But this has truly been part of the grace of this practice for me.  Particularly in this past year, I feel as though I have owned some of these strong emotions.  Throughout an anxious day yesterday, each time I picked up a thread of gratitude, that brought me to a quiet and grounded place.  When I went back to the emotional tasks of the day, I found myself saying, “Oh, that thing I was feeling was fear.  I was afraid I would not be equal to this task before us.”  Because I could hold on to this grounded gratitude piece, I could be more present in the moment during anxious times, and name the challenging feelings I was feeling.  I think.  I hope.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be gratitude that does it.  I have been trying to live in a more mindful and conscious way for years.  Mindfulness is a powerful practice.  For me, in these recent years, practicing gratitude has helped me move to a deeper level of mindfulness.  I have a long way to go, but it’s nice to be able to look around and notice a little bit of a forward shift on the journey.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Voices that encourage me/us to be listening for the Wind of change, to keep loving hearts open
2.  Fireflies rising in the dusk
3.  In the middle of the Old Bridge, several of the new lights are veiled in cobwebs that shiver and glimmer in the river breeezes
4.  Working together to find solutions to challenges
5.  Circles upon circles of community.  I love my people, all of you, in all these many circles.

May we walk in Beauty!

A Sense of Place

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Here is an exercise that I haven’t done in a while, one that helps me to put myself in the perspective of the world.  It helps me to remember how small I am in such a vast world, but it also makes me feel special, here in my own particular spot in that vast world.  Anyone can do it.  Just start where you are, and work outward, including anything you think is important.  Sometimes I sort of backtrack, in order to make sure I have all the geographical features that are important to me.  Most of these places do actually have unofficial names, but you can name things whatever you like, eh?

Here I am, in Grandma’s recliner, in the living room of Arbor House, under the poplar and sycamore trees, on Goldfinch Farm, by Cabin Creek, on Schmuck Road, in Skunk Hollow, between two wings of Mount Pisgah, in Lower Windsor Township, along the Susquehanna River, in York County, in southeastern Pennsylvania, in the northeastern United States, in North America, in the western hemisphere, on Planet Earth, Terra, in the system of the star Sol, in the Milky Way Galaxy, in a small corner of the Universe, of the Multiverse.

There.  Now I know where I am.  Whew.

Gratitude List:
1.  Even more of the Tiny Bright Folk: praying mantis, katydid
2.  Thermal delight.  Sometimes it feels as though I could always find something to complain about regarding the weather.  Not this week.  This is weather that makes me feel alive and crisp and wakeful.
3.  Fred the Cat is much better now.  He was looking pretty miserable, and I wasn’t sure I could handle losing two cats in a season.  Changing flea control methods has worked wonders.
4.  The glowy golden orange color of the Orange Blossom tomatoes
5.  Getting projects completed before I open up the new world of my new job in less than a month

May we walk in Beauty!

Step Away from the Gates

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Yesterday was perhaps a bit of a let-down day after the high of Luna Moth Day, full of barely maskable crabbiness and low-grade anxiety.  Sigh.  I suppose we can’t always live in the realm of the sublime.  The mundane has lessons aplenty.

Worn out by the anxieties and slog of the day, I lay back in the recliner for an evening catnap, and the first part of this just sort of fluttered into my head.

Don’t sit so close to the gates of Despair, sister.
I don’t need to to tell you how the gates open inward,
suddenly drawing the shuffling masses inside the yawning arches.
I don’t need to tell you how easy it is to be carried along in the wave,
or worse, trampled by feet of those who are eager
to prove their dark visions and those who cannot
relinquish their lifelong addiction to fear.
You know them too well, these shadows.
You’ve been in that land.

Roll up your mat, gather your books,
pick up your bucketful of bright yellow flowers,
and walk twenty paces east of the gateway
to the place where a sapling grows patiently
out of the moss-covered pavements.

From this spot you will hear the faint whisper
of breezes, from faraway places
where courage is dawning.

From this breathable vantage point,
you will hear the distant shushing
of waves on the beaches
where hope will awaken.

I know why you choose your perch,
there, on the doorstep.
I know why you watch them so carefully,
tending the crowd like a garden,
why you believe yourself safe,
you, with your books and your flowers.

I know, too, how you belong there,
in that waiting crowd of restless people,
how some days your flowers turn lifeless and ashen,
how the words in your volumes, on grayest of days,
run down the pages like ink-bled tears.

Pick up your mat, I say, now before the gates open.
Turn your back on that archway.
Follow the pathway of bright white pebbles
that I laid there myself one gray day.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The way words come together to make meaning
2. The holiness of the everyday
3. Tomato sandwiches
4. Cool summer morning breezes (“. . .blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”
5. This web that we belong to.  And I don’t just mean the www, though that one has its contribution.  Can you feel how the strands connect us, how the energy runs between us?

May we walk in Beauty!

Day of the Luna Moth

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Some of my favorite moments of poetic creation have been when I take seemingly unrelated images and ideas and pack them together into the same poem to create a new thing.  It’s like the satisfaction of making a really good collage or a quilt–when you put together things that don’t seem to have any relationship to each other, and suddenly when they come together, a kind of alchemy occurs.  A shiny new layer of meaning is created.

Yesterday was a collage of a day, a quilt of a day, a poem of a day for me.  In the morning, as I was cleaning out the market room and setting up bins of vegetables and bustling about in the morning work of the day, I kept getting that feeling you get when you know someone is looking over your shoulder, or watching you from a distance.  I actually turned around–several times–to see who was there, but everyone was still up in the fields harvesting.  At one point when I turned around, I thought I saw someone slip behind the sycamore tree, but when I looked in the reflection of the shop window behind the tree, no one was there.

A few hours later, when the harvest rush was over, my children came running to tell me that they had discovered a “milkweed moth” on the swing set.  (Last year, we had seen a Luna Moth resting on a milkweed plant–it made quite an impression on the boys.)  They showed me, and there she was, fresh as the beginning of the world, wings still unfurling.  We watched her over the course of the next couple of hours as her wings filled out to their full glory and she opened them up.  She was still there, in the rain, when we went to bed last night, but this morning she is gone.

Luna1 Luna2 Luna3 Luna4Luna

Gratitude List:
1.  Luna
2.  Magic and wonder
3.  Presence
4.  Listening deeply
5.  Meaning

May we walk in Beauty!

Fishing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

I don’t fish in the actual sense, but I have been thinking about poetry and fishing for the last few days, and this morning I read something about how poetry is both art and craft, both inspiration and work.  Sometimes, it’s like the fish are just jumping out of the water, waiting for me to hold out my net and catch them.  I love it when that happens.  Sometimes I have to have two nets available to be catching them all as they rain past.  It’s important not to get too attached to every fish I catch in this manner.  Some are real stinkers, but occasionally I can catch a nice rainbow trout this way.

But more often than not, I just have to show up at the river, day after day, with my fishing rod, and sit there in the hot sun or under a shady tree, and wait and wait and wait.  Lots of times, I’ll hook an old boot or funny piece of wood.  Most of these things I’ll toss back, but some of them I can use.  It’s particularly rewarding to catch a beautiful fish this way–the wait and the work of it makes it especially satisfying.

When I first started writing poetry as a teenager, I didn’t have time for revising or perfecting.  I ended up throwing away most of that stuff when I reached my twenties.  Then I got into a phase where I didn’t believe anything was truly good until it had been worked over and wrangled repeatedly.  I sucked the life out of many a good poem that way.

I think sometimes really good poems do just drop out of the sky with little need for change.  Most of the poems I write need a little more tweaking, though.  During those times when they’re just jumping out of the lake, I need to just write it down like dictation without thinking about whether this is the perfect word, or whether the sounds work together or the rhythm is compelling.  Then, when the rush and whoosh is done, I can go back and see what I have, and organize it into a more complete form.

The other night, half a poem jumped out at me that way.  Had I not been on my way to an appointment, perhaps it would be complete, but now that I’ve lost the moment, I need to go back and sit by the river with this one, wait for inspiration to strike on the next line.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Milkweed everywhere
2.  Quiet mornings
3.  Super moon, though it does cause some sleeping difficulty
4.  How inspiration strikes
5.  Crafting

May we walk in Beauty!

Power

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

After nearly two full days without electricity, I want to make all five point on my Gratitude List something about the wonders of electricity and how grateful I am for running water and lights at the flip of a switch.  Part of me, however, is a little embarrassed, a little chagrined with myself, for my dependence on this wonder of the modern world.  Why is it so hard to manage?  Of course, there’s always the anxiety over spoiled food–because we’re so dependent on electricity, we end up with quite a lot of time and money invested in the contents of our refrigerators.  I have a friend who has made the transition away from the use of a refrigerator.  I’m not entirely sure how exactly she manages it, but it does seem like a good choice.  Refrigerators and freezers are real energy hogs.

But aside from the fridge, why does loss of power throw me for such a loop?  I go to bed at dark, instead of staying up later than my body thinks I should.  That’s not a bad thing.  We carried buckets of water from the kiddie pool up to the bathroom so we could flush the toilet.  We had filled the kiddie pool the day before the power died–how lucky was that?  The buckets were heavy.  And it took a lot of trips over the two days we were without power.  So who am I to grumble about carrying water upstairs to my bathroom when women in many places of the world are walking often a mile or more, perhaps twice a day, likely with a baby on their backs or children at their ankles, to get the small amount of water that their family will use for the day.

So now the power is back on.  I am back to wasting electricity and water.  One of the privileges of living in a wealthy nation is that we take our waste for granted and forget that we are wasting.  Perhaps I can use this experience to give me practice, to help me live more mindfully, with more awareness, so that I can be more conservative of Earth’s precious resources, so that next time the power goes out it will be a minor inconvenience rather than a serious frustration.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Those clouds in the evenings after the storms, bunches hanging low into the magenta of the sunset.
2.  The way the shining, fresh-washed blue sky shone out between those clouds, like Mary’s robe.
3.  The Ganesha cloud I saw yesterday morning, looking for all the world like the jolly elephant god riding the winds across the sky.
4.  A day of really moving in to my classroom, beginning to feel myself in the space.
5.  All the power available to me, in so many ways.  May I not take it for granted.

May we walk in Beauty!

After Prayer

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

More a reflection than a poem, this somehow still wanted appear in poetic form:

Prayer is the raw material,
the stuff
the starting point.

Where shall I take it then?

When the quiet,
the intention,
have built
into a swirling ball of light.

When the web hums
with prayer,
like orb-weaver’s web
when she shakes it
in the morning sun.

The time comes
when prayer must be shaped,
molded into form and action.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Watching my children sleep, curled like seeds or sprawled on their backs, one leg cocked like they are about to leap off in the dance or a fencing match.  Or half curled, like they’re mid-stride in a marathon.  One is still in the exact same position I left him in last night.  The other has been moving about in his sleep.
2. The current roadside triumvirate of day lily, Queen Anne’s lace, and chicory peeking like a blue eye among them.
3. Those who care for the children.  People who foster children in need of loving homes, who take that belief that they are all our children into loving action.
4. Gathering, harvesting, filing, preparing–all these ideas for the coming work of the fall.
5. “Song of Peace,” the words set to the tune of Finlandia.

May we walk in Beauty!

Waking to the Rain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Sometimes the things that fill me with gratitude are great and weighty: The deep sharing of each others’ lives that friends do.  The way the Universe sometimes seems to be conspiring to make things work out.  The way things work out after they haven’t worked out.  Change and Permanence.

Sometimes they’re simpler: Rain.  Crows jabbering in the bosque.   The taste of the year’s first fresh tomato.  A small feather and a white stone.  Snuggly children.

I try not to separate them out from each other, not to suggest that getting a job is more important, more gratitude-filled, than a turtle sliding over the grass.  I want them to be jumbled up in there, the feelings and the noticings, the ideas and the bright colors.  That’s how it is in the world–they’re all jumbled up together.  You have to have both the steady warp and the colorful weft to weave the rug.

When I read a poem that grabs me or see a piece of art that really catches me, often it’s the way apparently unrelated things are juxtaposed together that really transports me.  Collaging together the sparkle of dew on a spiderweb with the  support of a family through difficult times offers new meaning to both, perhaps.

As a spiritual and mental health practice, it keeps me noticing the inward and the outward, paying attention to the ways that the inner and outer worlds intersect and inform each other, how some little thing that I might notice in the outer world is really an image for the inner realm.  On days when I get into a broody funk, when I am having inner conversations with my rage or despair or sadness, knowing that I have to find my gratitudes makes me focus on things outside myself and my inner tangles, draws me out of the darkest parts of the labyrinth.  It helps me to keep perspective.

And it also becomes like a prayer.  When I listen to that defiant cawing of the crows and note how deeply it satisfies me on some level, it doesn’t cover up and distract me entirely from the anger at the frackers.  But part of me sends that crow energy, like a prayer, to the people who are fighting the destruction of our natural resources for corporate gain.  When I feel the thrill of watching the impossible flight of a tiny hummingbird, it doesn’t cover up the sadness I feel for a friend in great pain.  But the hummingbird becomes part of my prayer for the lightening of burden and ease of my friend, for eventual joy to break through.

Today, I am grateful for what this practice has brought me, how it helps me to live in the moment, to keep perspective, to hold it lightly, to carry sadness and joy together in the same basket.  May your day be filled with sparkling raindrops and the coolness of rain-filled breezes.  May a bright color grab your soul by the sleeve and say, “Notice me!”  May you feel today the love of someone wrapped around you like an afghan made by a grandmother.

Having said all that, my list today, id filled with outward noticing.  Or is it?

Gratitude List:
1. Waking (after sleeping in) to the sound of rain and of birds singing their rain songs in the hollow
2. Bats!  They’re back at work
3, Giggling children playing hide and seek in their grandparents’ house
4. Helena’s magical mulberry pie
5. Teeny tiny toads.  Teeny, teeny tiny toads!

May we walk in Beauty!

Between

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Life is full and busy these days with the start of the farming season.  I have been wanting to just dash off some quick morning tankas to keep my heart in the game.  And I will.  But there’s a poem boiling inside me at the moment and I keep trying to get it going these mornings, but it doesn’t seem to want to find its full form, or it feels too maudlin, or too angry, or too easily misunderstood.  Poems are like people, I guess.  Some just want to hang by the door for a while before they come in.  This is a percolating time for poems.

Lately I have been listening to Kate Tempest every chance I get.  I’ve always been enamored of the word play and rhythms of hip hop and rap.  The noise of the music that sometimes drowns the words, the sometimes misogynistic or violent lyrics, have kept me from exploring the art form with too much intention.  I know that there are some really bright and revolutionary hip hop artists but I haven’t made an effort to seek them out.  And here comes poet Kate Tempest, who started as a hip hop artist and has taken the stage as a leader in Spoken Word poetry.  I am utterly mesmerized by her words and her style.  I feel like a little kid hearing something for the first time.

Look her up.  Then look up Sarah Kay.  Then Hollie McNish.  Then Andrea Gibson.  Then look up Shane Koyczan, especially his poem “To This Day.”

Gratitude List:
1. Blooming Milkweed!  Blessings on the Monarchs.  Blessings on the bees.
2. The sounds of early morning birdsong, even though it wakes me up and leaves me drowsy for the day.
3. Kids and adults working together.
4. Finishing a puzzle.  I love doing puzzles, the way they make my mind work.  I often feel as though I am solving internal puzzles while I am working on a jigsaw
5. Spoken Word Poets

May we walk in Beauty!

The Way from Here to There

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This isn’t really a poem.  Not in any polished sense.  More like a ramble that wanted to look like a poem.  Consider it a scribble in the writer’s notebook, a placeholder for me to return to and flesh out at some later date.

The little ones wanted to know
at what moment on the bridge
we were in Columbia
instead of Wrightsville.

At what point have we gone
from there to here?

But the bridge is its own thing,
a place between places,
spanning the distance
between town and town,
and time to time.

Everywhere and everywhen
begins here, ends here.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  So much to anticipate
2.  Bridges.
3.  The birds of Goldfinch Hollow.  These weeks, it’s like the Keystone Kops out there.  Cardinal chasing cardinal past the window.  Then back again.  And a third time.  Next flyby is oriole chasing mockingbird.  Then sparrow after chickadee.  Never a dull moment.
4.  Whatever brings relief.  Ice packs.  Cold nettle and mint tea.  Antihistamines.  Sleep.  (This one is sort of a whiny gratitude, I realize.  These days when the allergies are really bad, I tend to get wrapped up in my own misery.  Whatever can give me a few moments of rest and calm, whatever can help me feel closer to baseline again–that I am truly grateful for.  REALLY grateful.)
5.  Community.  Powerful personal healing stories.  The dancing flames quilt banner.  Pot luck.

May we walk in Beauty!