Musings

Wild and Precious

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

–Mary Oliver

I woke up this morning with this line from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” running through my head.

Gratitude List:
1. The new bright gold of the freshly re-painted Goldfinch Farm sign.  Sometimes a pop of color can be intensely satisfying.
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2.  Yesterday when I walked around the front of the house, I was caught by the shoulders and wrapped in a huge hug by the scent of the lily of the valley out back on the hillside.  I love the smell of lily of the valley.
3. Listening to Joss singing his pre-school songs as he played in the sandbox yesterday.  I want to cherish and respect his shyness, but I have worried that it might lead him to loneliness or a sense of being disconnected from others.  Instead, his quiet observation of what goes on around him seems to give him a sense of belonging and participating.  May it always be so.
4. The gravid peonies and poppies, buds like eggs, waiting, swelling, stretching.
5. Mary Oliver.  Her words inevitably lead me to deeper places.  Secretly (not anymore, I guess) I think of her as my–as our–priestess.  Her words mediate a connection between the mundane me and my deeper self, between me and the Universe, and Beauty.  Oh, what will you do with your one wild and precious life?

May we walk in Beauty!

the trees obscure the water towers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I am entering a poem in a contest.  Robert Lee Brewer, the host of the Poetic Asides blog, has initiated a contest using his book as the basis.  Take one of his poems, and re-craft or respond or re-work it in some way.  I love the conversational nature of this.  It’s part of what I want poetry to be–conversation.  I don’t know if it’s ethically kosher to type up his poem and put it here next to mine without having asked him first, especially since I don’t have the know-how to indent his lines the way he did.  His is titled “the horizon is marked by water towers overlooking trees,” and the first line was “i’m through with you.”  Mine is a response, and I have patterned it pretty exactly after his, though with a rather different tone.

the trees obscure the water towers
by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider

you may think you’re through
you with your stoic eyes
building elaborate fences

to escape my rabbit heart
last october and recite elegies
to fierce women pregnant with desire

but you’re not through with me
and my fine road to hell
paved with change and intention

and change has escaped your professorial eye
your old man’s disillusion
there’s so much we could’ve

but you can’t be really through
because tonight when I am out dancing
alone in fields under the moon

releasing the story of what was
you will come to me like leaves swirling
like the wild geese over the meadow

 

Gratitude List:
1. Poetic conversation
2. How ideas spark ideas, how creative thought fires creative thought
3. The peaceful faces of sleeping children
4. Awakening to birdsong (even if it gets me up way too early these days)
5. You.  You hold me and the rest of us so beautifully in your bowl of heart.  You teach me how to ask for help.  You show me light through the brambles.  You remind me to shoulder my ax, to notice the bright birds, to be careful on the path.  Mostly, you remind me not to despair because the world cannot be on the brink of disaster with helpers like you in it.

May we walk in Beauty!

Riff

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I’m just going to riff on some sounds this morning, I think, get a train of thought going down the track and see where it goes.  Don’t mind me.  It all began when a friend posted a photo of a coyote on my FB page this morning.  Who knows what will come of it?  Sort of like the day that is being born at the moment.  I might just try to riff my way through the day a little bit, too.  Here goes:

when you post the photo
of that lonesome fellow
coyote on the go

when you know
how that long road
leads to nowhere
to nowhere

when you venture
through the veils
in the center of your dreams
in the very seeming center
of your dreams

then you believe
then you know
that the answer
will not show itself
in words

 

Gratitude List:
1. Word play
2. Sense of impending rain
3. Good solid sleep
4. More than one possibility
5. Writing on the porch

May we walk in Beauty!

Who is Pushing them in?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

My father, a physician, used to give talks about healthy diet and lifestyle.  One story that he used to tell has really stuck with me.

Once there was a little town located beside a wide and perilous river.  Occasionally townspeople would rush to the aid of someone who had fallen in upriver.  At great risk to their own lives, they would mobilize and save a hapless stranger from drowning.  As time went by, and more and more of these rescues began to occur, the little town developed an excellent rescue aid society.  They had their own boats and equipment.  They held fundraisers to support the River Rescue Society.  Volunteers trained long hours.

Over time, more and more people came floating by, in peril of drowning, and the town’s rescue crew grew and grew.  They began to post watchers on the shoreline because the numbers of people in need of rescue had begun to increase monumentally.  It was all the little town could do to keep up with the work.  But they were proud of their River Rescue Society.

One night, at a town meeting, the topic on the table for discussion was (once again) the need for more money to fund the Rescue Society.  They were now in need of full-time watchers on the shore and more money for training and research into the best techniques for safely pulling people out of the river.  Finally a quiet woman who had been knitting in the corner stepped up to the microphone and asked, “Perhaps we ought to send someone upriver to discover who is pushing all these people in?”

Yesterday, I found out that yet another friend of mine has cancer.  Leukemia.  Two friends of mine are walking with their mothers through the rocky terrain of breast cancer at the moment.  I find it alarming and disconcerting, the way we just accept that cancer is a way of life for us now.  I’m glad that we’re working so hard on the rescue side of this story.  I am so grateful for the treatment options for my friends, for my friends’ mothers, for your friends and family members.  It seems to me that in recent years, the number of people floating down this particular river has increased rather dramatically.  What are we going to do about figuring out who is pushing them in?

We can start, I think, by letting the dandelions grow.  Refusing to put chemicals on our lawns and gardens.  Cleaning our houses with soap and water and vinegar instead of chemicals.  We can pay attention to the food we put into our bodies, where it comes from, what practices were used to grow it.  We can stop drinking out of plastic containers.  These things will not ensure that we don’t fall in the river ourselves, but they might begin to slow down the numbers of people who do.  We need to take a look upriver, and find out who has been pushing all these people into the river.

 

Gratitude List:
1. A lovely day yesterday with my mother-in-law
2. Singing together–I love that my son joins in with the hymns in church
3. Community–how it falls together sometimes, how we can also work to build and maintain it intentionally
4. Anticipation (as edgy as it can make me, I love having possibilities to dream)
5. Language and the gifts it offers to our reasoning brains

May we walk in Beauty!

All Our Children

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

How would it change things if we saw them all as our children?  A friend of mine asked me this this morning.  She’s a wise woman, with a kind and strong heart, a foster parent.

What if we really believed in that web of all connection, really treated them all as though they were our own?  What would happen if I let my heart break for my kidnapped daughters in Nigeria?  For my refugee children in Syrian?  For my son, the baby crying in the car-seat while his desperate mother gets high?

I am not talking about giving our hearts over to despair.  I wonder if we can train our hearts, intentionally, like athletes who train for a marathon, to bear the load without crumpling under the weight.  I think that’s what the children need from us, for us to bear them, bear the stories, hold them as though they were our own, to be prepared to act at any moment for any one of them within our reach.  I think the times call for hearts strong enough to be tender, to bleed without weakening, to rage and protect and pray and hope without numbing out.

I don’t think it has to be a choice.  We don’t have to choose between the closed heart and the broken heart.  We can be awake and yet not despair.  It’s worth a try.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Good, heart-awakening questions
2.  Jim’s good words this morning about filters, about seeing
3.  Bright red cardinal in morning sun
4.  The flowers my mother has in little bouquets all over their house
5.  Breathing.  In, out, in out.  This moment.

May we walk in Beauty!

Elegy

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today, an elegy.  Sigh.  I don’t really want to go that direction.

I feel like I have really overblown the good memories of earlier Poem-a-Day experiences.  Looking back on that first November, I feel like every poem was a hit, or nearly so.  And I feel like I am pulling out my own teeth to get the words to flow this month.  Of course, not all my poems back in that first experience were winners, and I think that this month I at least have some good fodder to work with at the end of the month.

Mockingbird says, “Sometimes it’s like that.  Sometimes you don’t feel inspired or inspiring.  Write anyway.  Get out the dreck so you can let the pure clear waters flow.”  Ack.  Mockingbird.  Maybe I liked your growling better.

Elegy

I have not named it yet, this distance,
this door that stands between us.
Or I have, actually, I suppose,
but when a dragon sheds its skin
it takes on a new name befitting its changes,
and perhaps our story is like that,
needing a new naming
for each of the skins we have scratched off.

First, I called it Waiting.
Me waiting for you to call out
from your side of the door,
to say you needed me now,
to say you would be taking visitors again.

I made forays, you cannot say I didn’t,
and you met me, and that part
was called Wrestling and Wrangling.
I thought we were making progress
at opening that heavy door.

But it stays closed.
And I have sat here on this side of it,
worrying and brooding, and frustrated and sad,
for years, perhaps, and the cobwebs are heavy
upon me.  So heavy.  They weigh like shame.

I sat here so long simply waiting,
wondering whether I ought to just leave,
that I didn’t hear you tiptoe
off into the distance on your side of the door.

I think this is an elegy.
What comes next
will not be part of this story anymore.

Perhaps we’ll meet again,
newborn and fresh,
somewhere in Rumi’s field,
and that will be a new thing,
and I will bless it heartily.

(Now I will brush the cobwebs aside.
Now I will stand and step away from the door.)

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The view from High Point to the bridges.

Gratitude List:
1. Pink-nosed calf frolicking in the field and its careful mama keeping watch
2. Pink trees blooming everywhere
3. Snowball guineas on Ducktown Road
4. Putting it to rest
5. More and more poems on the Poetree

May we walk in Beauty!

How the World Began

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Welcome to National Poetry Month!

So much to do!  I was away from home all day today, so tomorrow I will inaugurate this year’s Poetree in my dogwood.
Stacia Fleegal of the poetry blog Versify offers a challenge to read a poem a day.  I won’t put all mine on videotape, but here’s today’s attempt.
I think I will try the April Poem-A-Day Challenge again.  Today’s prompt is a two-fer: Write a Beginning poem.  Write an Ending poem.

How the World Began

In the beginning, Spider
launched herself into the spring breeze
from a rattling stalk of dried nettle

toward a skinny maple sapling.
She missed the maple.  Landed,
light-foot, in a heap of leaves

gathered around its base.
A quick scuttle upward, launched again
and through the breeze once more

to nettle stalks this time, and
the gossamer cord caught.
Then launched herself once more

into the gentle breath of wind
until she’d spun herself a world,
until she had encompassed all.

In the end, Spider gathered strands
and wove herself a spirit cloth of silver thread
to catch the wandering dreams

of mockingbirds and wild geese
passing over the chilly meadow,
following tomorrow’s sunrise.

 

Gratitude List:

1.  Flicker calling from the treetops this morning
2.  The golden flank feathers of the pheasant who walked through my parents’ lawn this afternoon, and his squeaky screen-door squawk.
3.  The Fool, dancing on the edge, willing to take risks, to laugh lightly at herself, to seek adventure.
4.  Energy.  Taking responsibility for my own, learning to sense it, to listen for it, to watch, to shift it.
5.  The smoke ring that emerged from the palo santo smudge that Nicky used this morning, how it rose so languidly through the grapevines, twisted, turned for a moment into a baby dragon, and dissipated like a mist, like a wraith.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Dream Keeper

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This one, by Langston Hughes, keeps wrapping itself around my heart these days, keeps wiggling into my brain-space.

Dream Keeper

Gratitude List:

1.  Collaborative art
2.  A fresh novel to read
3.  Free public libraries–what a concept
4.  Words, spoken and sung (today it was Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote)
5.  Featherbed

May we walk in Beauty!

Rock Star

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I am a rock star.  I came down out of the fields today and one of my groupies caught sight of me.  “Book?” she asked.  Another head shot up from behind the compost pile.  “Clook!” she yelled.  And then they were rushing me, “Lookee!  Lookee!  Lookee!”  Little feathery bodies racing toward me, wings akimbo.

If you ever feel down about yourself, get some hens.  You too can be a rock star.

Gratitude List:
1.  The community Potato Pitching Party.  Three and a half tons of potatoes, all de-trucked and sorted and re-packed into waiting pick-ups and cars.  By hand.  Woohoo!
2.  Being a rock star to chickens.  Book!  Clook?
3.  Coconut macaroons, no matter how they look.
4.  Working in the windy fields with spring sunshine slanting down.
5.  Quartzite and shale and the way all the field rocks sparkle and twinkle in the sunlight.

May we walk in beauty!

Equinox

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Jet Star

I spent my earliest years in East Africa, just a few degrees south of the wide belt of this big round ball, in a comfortable climate where the sun rose every morning at seven o’clock and set again at seven every evening, all year long.  Our seasons were marked by the coming of rains and their going away again.  The days were often hot, but the evenings brought cool breezes off of Lake Victoria, and roiling Michaelangelo clouds sailed in across the plains from the lake.

Here, where the sun slips off to the south for a season, where the days get shorter and then longer again, this moment when the day and night reach equilibrium brings me closer to that sense of rightness and balance, though the cold of winter still lingers in my bones.  While I find the cold time, the dark time, still to be a challenge, I have come to love the seasons, to revel in the feel of the shifting, whirling tilting planet we live on, the reassurance that one state of being will inevitably give way to the next.

Tomorrow we come to that place, one of the quarter points we notice in Terra’s dance with Sol.  Equinox.  My head today is full of these complicated E-words: Equinox, Equator, Equilibrium, in-Evitable.  At these equal points of spring and fall, we are ever so much slightly closer to our star than we are on the outward fling of the Solstices.  Do-si-do, Sun.  Swing your partner.  Welcome, Spring, oh welcome, Spring.

Gratitude List:
1. Inevitability and choice
2. Intention and destiny
3. Fate and chance
4. Fortune and opportunity
5. Blueberry pancakes

May we walk in Beauty!

 

 

 

 

Prayer Bundle:  Tonight I am finishing up gathering the items for my bundle.  I don’t have a direct symbolic link for each thing–I included some things because they are shiny or colorful and caught my magpie’s eye.  There is a piece of cloth to wrap it all together, and cord and wire for tying, a broken necklace with sparkly dangles for brightening it up.  I will take pictures tomorrow in a good light, wrap it all up, and then at about quarter to five, I’ll take it outside as the Equinox arrives.  I want it to rest on the earth, to be touched by the fire of the sun, by wind, by rain.  I want all the elements to work on it.  And I’ll place it somewhere where I won’t mow over it six weeks from now, and where it will be safe from curious children.