Musings

Job Description

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I am feeling a little uninspired, poetry-wise, these days.  There’s lots going on in my head, but this is one of those times when I walk after a thought into the green mist of my brain, and everything scatters.  When I get my hands on one rascally idea, another goes bleating by, and I lose my grip on the first while I reach to grab the next one.  I’ve lost the sheep dog for my poet-brain during these days.

This is not a bad thing.  I’ll call it incubation time, let things grow in their own way for a while, like that insufferable mile-a-minute weed out on the hillside behind the house.  One of these days, I’ll wake up the sheep dog, or pull out the weed whacker, or whatever metaphor I need to open the next new poem.

Meanwhile, dream.  Meanwhile, work and hope.  Meanwhile, rage and grow, rest and mend, edit and nurture.  Meanwhile, Love.

I have been thinking about love a lot lately.  About the friends who say, “They’re all our children,” and then take children into their home, one after another, knowing that the better they do the work of loving and tending in the moment, the more their hearts will break when the time comes to say goodbye.  And children come and find a haven.  They receive at least one bright and shining period of love and care in their lives.  These people are changing the world.

I have been thinking about the woman who opened her heart to grief, to the searing pain of listening to the way the Earth and her creatures are being destroyed.  Because of Love.  She turned all that tenderness and fierceness, that deep love and that deep rage, into powerful words.  Words like needles and thread, to stitch up all our broken hearts together.  The shattering grief has become a tool of mending and healing.  She is changing the world.

I have been thinking about people who, when faced with a tragedy or a need or a loss or a hope, somewhere in their world or community–the ones who step forward without hesitation, knowing that they have love enough and heart enough to patch the gaps, to be part of the solution.  Confidently they come forward, but humbly, too, to make the world a better place.

I wonder what difference it would make, were we to stand still in this moment, look back at the lives have lived up to this point, and call that Training.  Every terrible thing, every mistake, every good choice, all of it–it has all gone into making us the exact people we are in this moment.  We have been trained by our lives to be the people we are now.  And we’ve been chosen, every one of us, for an important job.  We have the best training life could supply.  Now we have a job description: Love.  And we might not know the exact tasks before us, but we know that we have this one skill, hard-won through our years of training, that we can apply to whatever is thrown in our path.  Love and love and love.  Though we know our hearts will break.  Though we know we’ll make more mistakes (more training!).  Though we don’t know in this moment the shape our loving will take.  And I know that whatever work I am doing for Love, you are there, doing yours too.  And I know that your work strengthens mine and gives it extra purpose, as I hope mine will do for you.

Let’s get to work!

 

Gratitude List:
1.  The scent of wild honeysuckle and multiflora rose.  I know they’re a little bossy, that they’re trying to take over the world, or at least the woods’ edge.  But they smell so sweet.
2.  Oriole.  Yes, I know, I am still obsessed with him.  In recent weeks, he’s been working on a family.  More hidden in the green of the treetops.  A little less vocal than he was when he was singing his courting songs.  But here.  And this morning while I have been writing, he came hunting through the little oak tree on the hill, a bright flicker of flame leaping from branch to branch, sun on his feathers, and then down through the viney patch on the hillside.  That bird tends my heart.
3.  Fresh Strawberries!  I have waited all year for this.
4.  Foraging on the compost pile.  A garlic scape and a large handful of lamb’s quarter leaves.
5.  The work ahead.

May we walk in Beauty!

World Environment Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today is World Environment Day, declared by the United Nations Environmental Program.  What will you do today, tomorrow, next week, to pr0tect the environment?  Walk in the woods with a child and listen for the birds, plant a tree or a garden, refuse to buy that over-packaged thing that you really don’t need, don’t make that extra car trip to town, read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, open new doors in your heart and your brain for possibilities.

We owe it to ourselves and to the next generation
to conserve the environment
so that we can bequeath our children
a sustainable world that benefits all.

–Wangari Maathai

Gratitude List:
1. Schemes and dreams
2. Rain and more rain
3. Surprise and awe
4. The poplar and the sycamore
5. The penultimate day of school

May we walk in Beauty!

Downer

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

I needed a downer.  My body had ratcheted into code red, defenses up against the yearly assault from the tulips on the poplar tree, all systems working full-tilt to expel the enemy.  Sneezing, wheezing, itching, weeping.  One antihistamine dose and a 10-hour night of sleep later, I’m sitting in this fuzzy bubble of calm.  My arms and legs feel like they belong to a gorilla, and it just doesn’t seem worth the effort to drag my body around from place to place.  The world is coming at me through a veil this morning.  But oh, the relief.  I haven’t sneezed once yet today.

I try to tend to the allergies with nettle and plantain tea, mostly.  But every once in a while, my body panics and assumes that the poplar tree is out to kill me.  Then I need a little something else to calm it down so I can get on with my life.  Thing is, I am in love with that blooming tree that brings my oriole here each spring, that opens green buds to reveal their tangerine hearts.  Dangerous beauty.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Beauty all around
2. Honey Locust trees in bloom–honey vanilla scent hovering about
3. Sleep
4. Rites of Passage and Blessing: pre-school graduation
5. Plan B

May we walk in Beauty!

Deep Listening

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Sometimes you need to circle back and remember the moment you looked out the window and saw the wolf standing there.  It’s so nice to have people who can take you by the hand and gently lead you there, before you get too far away from it, you know?  If I don’t process the fearful places, then I am in danger of living as though the wolf is still out there, even in the midst of the party and the celebration.

Yesterday, my sister-in-law did this for me.  She is a gifted listener and questioner.  In the midst of all the lovely ways my family has helped to celebrate of how sweetly hopes and prayers have been answered for my family in the past month, she invited me to sit down in a quiet place, and asked gently about the process that led to all this newness and transformation.  “I would like to hear more. . ”

This was also a chance for me to absorb some good modelling, to learn more about listening and asking deep and compassionate heart-opening questions.  So today, this week, I want to practice living from that centered and thoughtful listening place.

Gratitude List:
1.  Listening.
2. Being deeply listened to
3. Cousins, mine, my children’s
4. Baby bunny
5. Books, books, books

May we walk in Beauty!

Found Tanka

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Lorax
Reading The Lorax to the children at The March
Against Monsanto in Lancaster yesterday.  Photo by
Michelle Johnson.

Now for a very random poem.  I am opening up this ninth grade literature book at random pages and pulling out lines to weave together for a tanka:

trunk in the attic
they heard the the goddess Circe
a stillness greatens
from the heresy of rain
stop to look fear in the face

It turned out a little ominous, I think.  Perhaps it has to do with the youthy angst of writing which is chosen for teens.  I did not spend a lot of time sorting and choosing and arranging.  I like to play with random poetic constructions sometimes, to break out of some of my own typical patterns and images.  Exercises like this help me see new possibilities for juxtapositions, new ways to fracture sentences to open up new meanings, new sound and rhythm connections.

line 1: Truman Capote, “A Christmas Memory”
line 2: Homer, “The Odyssey”
line 3: Richard Wilbur, “The Writer”
line 4: James Hurst, “The Scarlet Ibis”
line 5: Eleanor Roosevelt

Gratitude List:
1.  Pianos in the city.  If you want to add fun and liveliness to your city, what better way than to get people to paint a bunch of upright pianos in wild and beautiful designs, and then place them in protected nooks around the city.  Spontaneous parties and songfests arise.  Way to go, Lancaster!  That’s delightful community-building.
2.  The March Against Monsanto.  The good, hopeful energy.  Reading The Lorax to the kids.  Selling tomato plants and talking healthy food with people.  The Amish buggy next to my stand with “Say No to GMO” cahled on its side.  The voice of the people.  Knowing our march was one of many around the world.
3.  Rhythm.  Daily, seasonal, poetic, musical. . .
4.  Books.  I am overwhelmed by all the reading I want to do and should be doing, especially with a house to clean and acres to mow and children to tend and a farm to run.  But I love wading into the stacks of books and opening up a poem or a short story.  The novel I am reading at the moment is Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  I recommend it.
5. The deep red/purple of the Japanese maple on the back hill.  It’s just about big enough now to be a little fort this summer for small people.

May we walk in Beauty.

Creeds

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

(Commercial Prelude: Today is the Worldwide March Against Monsanto.  Very possibly there is one happening in a town or city near you.  We have one happening in Lancaster, PA, today in the center of the city at 2, with a rally and Awareness Fair afterward.  Join us, wherever you are.  For the bees.)

What are the ideas and assumptions you live by?  What are the beliefs that give meaning to your life?  I know they change from day to day, moment to moment, but if you fling your butterfly net into the brisk morning air of your spirit this morning, what might you catch in there?  How about writing five to start with, and as fast as you can, without thinking, without trying to find really cool ones, but just the ones that first float to the surface.  It strikes me that “creed” might not be the most accurate term, but somehow that’s the one I want to use.

Here are a few that I found in my net this morning.  Remember, this is just a quick, top of the head free association.  That’s the point.  It will be raw, but hopefully it will catch some meaningful tidbits that my thinking mind would overlook or dismiss.  Try it!

1.  Love.  Whatever promotes and supports deep and faithful and trusting Love.  Wanton Love of all that is around us.  Answer the question with Love.
2.  Notice.  Notice as much as possible.  Every detail.  Color, shape, movement, flickers of energy.  Like Sug said in The Color Purple: “I think it pisses God off if you pass by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.”  I think the converse (or is it the inverse?) is true: I think it makes her intensely happy if you DO notice it.
3.  There’s a place for everyone at the table.  I believe this and I want to live by it, but there are people I don’t want at my table, and I don’t know how to reconcile it.  I think I mean that compassion (not just the broad love of #1) ought to somehow be extendable to all, but I want to have my compassion for the rapists and murderers and frackers and oil executives and warmongers from a distance.  Still it’s an ideal I believe in, even if I can’t live it yet.
4.  Listening.  I work so hard at this, and I still get caught up in telling and spilling and requiring you to listen to me instead.  But I think there is something incredibly holy in the act of listening, something that strengthens and fortifies that web that connects us all.
5.  Treasuring the web of all life.  In one sense, I think we’re all one organism of many parts.  Trying to see the world this way helps with the compassion dissonance of #3, I think.  We are all one.  What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves.  What harm I do to you, I do to me, too.  And when we spread love outward, it heals ourownselves.

So a really interesting thing happened there.  Originally, I wrote ten as the suggestion for a number, but I found that by the time I hit the fifth one, I had started to engage my brain, had started to worry what people would say (“That’s too religious!”  “That’s not religious enough!”), had started to delete and re-type, delete and re-type.  Five seems to be a good number for quick reflection, before the brain gets too involved, too Editorial.

 

Gratitude List
1.  This amazing and perfect spiderweb outside my window.  Thrive, little spider.  May you and your offspring eat well here in the hollow.
2.  The voice of the people.  Daily I become more cynical about whether the democratic process has any more validity in a system where the richest candidate wins, where corporations and lobbyists can donate huge sums of money to campaigns so that the candidates become beholden to their causes.  I get pretty twisted up inside about it.  But I still think the people have a duty to make our voices heard, perhaps now more than ever.  When this chapter gets written, I want it to be noted that people spoke up.  So, today I join the people in the agora.  For the health of our children.  For the bees and the monarchs.  For the future of the planet.  I am grateful for the voice of the people.
3.  Short fiction.  I am finding it difficult to get a good overall view of the English 9 course I will be teaching in the fall, because I have gotten stuck reading the short stories.  I guess I just have to sit down and read them all so I can focus on the big picture.  What a lovely chore to have.
4.  Belly laughing with the kids
5.  Watching my 8-year-old beginning to develop grace and fluidity to his movements.  Body confidence.  Dancing and climbing and jumping and running.  I think even the klutziest among us (like me) probably went through those phases in childhood where we began to live in our bodies with more awareness.  Today, treasure your body and the ways it moves, the way it propels you from place to place, whether you run or whether you hobble.  What an amazing thing it is that those nerves and synapses within us all work so beautifully.

May we walk in Beauty!

Dreamscapes

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

When I dream of beaches, as I did last night, there is often a small mountain or cliff rising out of the ocean 50 or a hundred yards offshore which creates a small lagoon in the shallows between it and the beach.  It’s not usually connected to the mainland–it’s its own formation rising out of the water, sort of like Haystack Rock in Oregon, but the shape and size change from dream to dream.  Last night there was a resort built out over the water right up against it, and my mother and I were searching for a rare red hawk that was known to nest on the cliffs.

I have a city dream, too, and the city is often the same one.  How is it in dreams that the fantastical is so recognizable?  Yes, I know, Mr. Jung.  These are the symbols of the things that happen deep in my subconscious all through the day, so of course I would recognize that those two vastly different places are part of the same city.  Or that the labyrinthine series of rooms and staircases in another recurring dream are all part of my grandmother’s old rambling Victorian house.

There are those school dreams, where I am always late and running ragged through unfamiliar halls and stairways to find a class I might or might not have even signed up for.  But there’s another school, too, a boarding school, deeper in my psyche, I think.  Those school dreams are not about time and responsibility, but about finding people I might know.  They come to me in clusters, like the anxiety school dreams–none for years, and then several in a month.  They don’t feel anxious, though.  More curious.  They seem to be about loneliness and anticipation in equal measure.

There’s a German word, fernweh, that expresses the state of being homesick for a place where you have never been.  Somehow I think it’s connected to these familiar/unfamiliar landscapes in my dreams.  That dis-ease, that sense of unsettledness and longing, grabs me in these dreams of place.  I want to be back there in that place, wandering and exploring, even though the place is nowhere (no physical where) that I have been in my waking life.  Or maybe something in me longs to be back in those half-familiar, half-confusing places of childhood: the boarding school where I went in first grade, the old house we came to when we came to the US from Tanzania, the American schools with their confusing wings and hallways, the family trips to Mombasa or the New Jersey shore.

These places rise out of liminal times from my childhood, threshold spaces where I stood between one place and another, between home and school, between East Africa and the US.  Perhaps that is why the beach dreams are so compelling, poised as they are between land and sea, with cliffs rising high out of the water.  Change, with its odd mix of anxiety and anticipation, is inevitable, and in the midst of shift and transformation, the familiar/unfamiliar places return in dreams, offering a picture of the shift that is occurring.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Dream worlds
2. The way sunlight slants down the hill in the chill mornings
3. The manager at the bank yesterday who helped Ellis set up a savings account.  She took him seriously, asked him questions, complimented him gently without talking down to him.
4. Lunch Bunch day–both kids at school until mid-afternoon!
5. Preparations, plans and anticipation.

May we walk in Beauty!

In the Hall of the Old School

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Yesterday I visited the school where I will be teaching, the school I graduated from 29 years ago.  So much is new and different.  So much is the same.  The mural of the hand holding the rainbow still brightens the stairwell (may it always be there).  The old wing still looks much like it did in my day, and it smells exactly the same as it did when I was there.  We opened the door to the classroom where I will be teaching, and one of my own teachers walked out and hugged me.  Did I dream this?  I can hardly believe this is happening.  I used to imagine it, twenty years or so ago, and here it is.

I do have recurring anxiety dreams that take place in a school.  I am trying to find the classes where I am supposed to be either studying or teaching.  I’ll spend the entire dream trying to find where I am supposed to go, going up stairs and through labyrinthine hallways.  I’m always late, sometimes at the end of a semester and realizing that I have forgotten to go to class.  Or I’ll be going to teach the first day of a class and realize that I have forgotten to get a schedule to know when and where it is.  Once, when I was teaching at Butler County Community College, I dreamed that I rushed in late to class only to see my dean teaching the class.  She said since I was always late, she’d decided to take over my schedule.  The thing I realized yesterday about it all was that the setting of the dream is always very similar to my high school alma mater.

In the past ten years, since I have taken a break from teaching, the frequency of those particular anxiety dreams has lessened.  Now that I am teaching again, I wonder if they will increase in frequency again.  And how will it be if the real setting is now overlaid on the dream setting?  And now that the reality has begun to feel so intensely like a happy dream?

Here is little poem that has nothing to do with high school or anxiety dreams:

You must have heard me prescribe hens
for a low self-opinion.
There is nothing like a little chicken worship
to make a body feel like a rock star.

But here’s the thing–
my chickens think that you
are a capital rock star, too.
“Look!” they told me this morning
when I looked in on them.
And I knew exactly
what they meant.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Love is the Answer.  Love is the Answer.  Love is the Answer.
2. That moment when we opened the door to my new classroom, and my own teacher walked out and hugged me.
3. Creating and envisioning new spaces
4. I am going to a book sale today!  I love book sales.
5. Going to vote with the kids.  As cynical as I get about whether this democratic ideal actually has any value in the oligarchy, I want my children to learn and experience the ideal with the hope that one day we will have a truer democracy, disentangled from wealth and corporate influence.  And we stopped at Turkey Hill and bought ice cream on the way home.

May we walk in Love!

Love Trumps Doctrine

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In honor of civil rights activist and wise man Dr. Vincent Harding, a powerful voice for justice whom the world lost yesterday.  The form is a syllable count style called shadorma (3/5/3/3/7/5).
“Love trumps doctrine, every time.”
–Vincent Harding   (July 25, 1931-May 19, 2014)

Every time
like the ace of spades
like Grandma
like berries
in your breakfast cereal
love will trump doctrine.

The surface of this poem is sweet, and there was great gentleness in Vincent Harding, too.  But it must be noted that his deep love was connected to his work in the struggle for Civil Rights in the United States.  The love he spoke of was not only about simple tenderness, but about willfully choosing to love your enemies.  And then to live by that choice no matter what.

What are the doctrines and dogmas that I hold dear, that you cling to, that keep us from loving as we ought?  It’s just so easy for me to look at someone else and point out the way love gets shredded by creeds.  But then I let myself off the hook.  This week at least, in honor of Dr. Harding, I commit myself to focusing on my own story of intolerance, to seeking those hidden places within me where I grasp ideology more tightly than love.

 

Gratitude List:
1. People who live by love rather than dogma.
2. Even though they both kick, the occasional night when a snuggly boy joins us in bed.
3. Sorting and tidying.  Here, in the mundane realm.  Up there, in the brain.
4. Possibilities.  If the thing you are doing isn’t working the way you want it to, you can change it.  Or not.
5. Buttercups.  I followed my up-road neighbor’s lead and mowed around them.  They shine so happily at me.

May we walk in Love!

Opening Bundles and Boxes

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

In March, on the morning of Spring Equinox, I put a little bundle in my garden, made up of papers and beads and cloth and ribbon.  It was to represent the prayer, the magic, the dream I had of finding a job.  I put it out there as a way to work with some of the pretty serious anxiety I was feeling about how our lives were going to take shape in the coming year and years.  I try not to deny my anxieties because I know how they can percolate up through a life and flavor everything, but these anxieties were beginning to take a pretty firm roots.  Here is the bundle after six weeks in my little faery garden:

2014 April 014

I brought it inside on May Day and opened it up.  I let the weathered objects sit on a plate on my counter for a couple weeks, trying to think about how I was going to turn them into an art project.  This step was to further focus my intention and prayer for finding a job.  I really wanted something that would fire me up and get me excited, but I was willing to take whatever came along, to be adaptable and flexible and to learn and grow quickly into whatever role came my way.

I never got to the stage of making the piece of art before the job appeared.  The perfect job.  I am under no illusions–I know it’s going to be hard work, and that sometimes it’s going to be difficult.  But teaching high school English in a setting where I have some academic freedom is about as close to my dream job as you can get.

Yesterday, I made that piece of art with a deep sense of gratitude.  The prayer of it now is that I will be equal to the task.  If you need some of that energy, I send it your way now, too.  Much love.

P1020179P1020184

The poem is by Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
Someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a
Full moon in each eye that is always saying,
With that sweet moon language, what every other eye in
This world is dying to hear?

Gratitude List:
1. Opening boxes, exploring the ideas and assumptions I’ve been storing in there.  Sorting through.  Sending some things to the burn pile, some to recycle elsewhere, putting some aside to reuse, but perhaps in different forms and different ways.  Some of those old and treasured ideas get re-packed and put away again for later, with maybe a few new ones tucked in around the edges to fill it in.  Just like attics, hearts and minds need occasional sorting, I think.
2. This verse, from a hymn yesterday morning:
Joyful is the dark, spirit of the deep,
winging wildly o’er the world’s creation,
silken sheen of midnight, plumage black and bright,
swooping with the beauty of a raven.
3. The week ahead.  Who knows what might happen next?
4.  Making art with the children.
5.  This little fur-boy purring wildly in my ear.

May we walk in Beauty!