Musings

Thunder Snow

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Let it be known
that the chickadee and sparrow
were singing songs of spring today
as I dug myself out the tail end
of that first blizzard.

Gratitude List:
1.  Towhee at the feeder
2.  Mockingbird hanging out on the balcony
3.  Thunder snow–I know I have experienced it before, but the green lightning sort of threw me.  That was pretty exciting.
4.  The egg incident.  It’s on my gratitude list because it made me laugh today.  I started to shovel the drive this noon after I fed the hens and gathered the eggs.  There were four eggs, and somehow I forgot about them in the five minutes it took me to walk down the hill, and they were in the coat pocket on my right hip where I get a little extra leverage for tossing heavy loads of snow.  Yeah.  Egg soup in my pocket.  My coat needed a washing anyway.
5.  Reading Narnia with the boys.

May we walk in Beauty.

Gracious Goodness

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Gratitude List:
1.  Strong boundaries
2.  Compassionate hearts
3.  The balance of boundaries and compassion
4.  Morning mist rising from my River.  When I say “my” River, I don’t mean it as mine alone.  Nor do I mean that it is my River exclusive of all other rivers.  But it can be my River and one of my rivers and still belong also to you and to all of us in the way that I can say you are my Friend, and yet you are not exclusively mine, nor are you my only friend, but that I love you in a particular way that is particular to our relationship.  My River.  The mist rises from it in the red morning light, and there is so much magic in it.  And also in you.
5.  And this: Goodness.  There is so much goodness in people, in strangers even.  And I know too many stories, especially in recent days, of people who fell to the lowest pitches of bullyhood and meanness and real evil when left to their own devices.  But this also is true, so gloriously true: that so many people are simply good, simply full of heart and tenderness and compassion.  That you do not have to bang on the doors or scratch very deeply at all before goodness oozes out all over, fresh and raw and sweet like honey.  I have seen it just today, how you can look into a stranger’s eyes and see it and know it is there, and follow it.   The guy who drives your tow truck may be a philosopher to rival the ancient mystics.  The woman who sells you groceries may have some rich wisdom about human nature that even the respected psychoanalysts have yet to figure.  So many wise ones to discover.  So many namaste moments to explore.

May we walk in Beauty.

Write Your Own Lexicon

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Gratitude list first today, and then a task:

Gratitude List:
1. Words, dictionaries, semantics
2. Romance
3. A day of not-snowing
4. Sourdough bread
5. Lovey-dovey cats.

May we walk in Beauty!

Today’s task is to start your own dictionary.  I think I am going to call mine Words of Power, or Word-Hoard, or maybe Crazy Beth’s Lexicon.  It’s a project that will take more than today, of course.  I think I’ll put the words in the book that I put together every year (I can’t bring myself to say scrapbook,  but that’s essentially what it is.)

I haven’t yet read all of Kathleen Norris’ Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, but the idea has inspired me for some time now: to think about words that hold particular meaning for me in my own spiritual wandering and wrangle the semantics.  These are my own personal T.A.R.D.I.S. words: like Doctor Who’s time machine, they are bigger on the inside than they appear from the outside.  As I have carried them about with me over time, they have taken on nuances and shades of meaning that may not have been there when I first picked them up.  They’re luminous and numinous (and those are both words that ought to make my list), shining from the inside, and suggesting that there is Deeper Meaning in the world.

Noticing:
This is the one I have chosen to define my spiritual story.  I want to be a Noticer.  It’s not a new idea, not my own, just a word that I have picked up and tinkered with.

Be conscious, be awake, be observant.  Live in the present moment.  Be here now, said Ram Dass.  Don’t walk past the color purple in a field and not notice it, says Alice Walker.  Be mindful.  Notice the white gull in a wintry sky, the way dawn creeps up over the river, the sound of the bluebird in the maple tree, the smell of gill-over-the-grass when you walk upon it.

Notice the way your lover’s eyes twinkle and sparkle when he’s trying to make you laugh, the way your child’s muscles relax as she settles onto your lap while you’re reading, the way your friend’s eyebrows crinkle when she tells you something that makes her worry.  Notice the way energy flows between people, the way the air crackles around someone who is feeling the power of her ability to communicate, the way the shadows creep around someone who is feeling depleted and anxious.

Bridge:
Every Christmastide–those 12 days between Yule/Christmas and Epiphany-ish–I pay extra close attention to my dreams, watching for images and words that I might harvest for the coming season of my life, to give shape to my emerging story.  This year, I woke up one morning not with a dream remembered, but with a single word waiting for me: Bridge.  Last year or the year before, I wrote a poem for an organization called Bridge of Hope which helps to set up community safety nets for women and children who have experienced homelessness.  My Waldorf friends speak of the Rainbow Bridge as the place where the souls of children come from the other world to this place, and where the living pass to the realms of the dead.  We create bridges between people, between places.

Build bridges between myself and my deeper self, between friends from diverse circles, between ideas that feel oppositional.  Build bridges of light and hope, of spiderweb and dreams, build bridges of words that cross chasms where lurk despair and rage and fear.  I’m going to be working on this word for the whole year.

Others I will add: Palimpsest, Graces, Luminous / Numinous, Web

What words will make your list?

How Deep is Your Love?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

2014 January 099

Gratitude List:
1.  Heat
2.  Light
3.  Water
4.  Sitting Meditation
5.  This day*

May we walk in Beauty!

* Oh, this day!  Early morning, playing paper dolls with Joss.  Eight Dolls From Around the World to choose from, three of them boys, and my son chose to play with the the girl from Tahiti with the flowing grass skirt and flowers for her hair.  She was my favorite, too, when I was a child.  Then art projects with the children, Ellis drawing a schematic for his idea for an electricity generator and Joss drawing intricate tangle-monsters, and then all of us creating layered landscapes.

A calm, quiet afternoon with a dear friend visiting, doing paperwork together at the table like we used to 20+ years ago.

Listening to music from our younger days with the kids.  Here’s the playlist:
Michael Jackson’s Beat It
Weird Al’s Eat It
Boy George’s Karma Chameleon
Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
The Bee Gees’ Stayin’Alive
The Bee Gees’ How Deep is Your Love (my favorite of the set)
Abba’s Mama Mia
Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody

Nomads

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We keep reminding ourselves that sometimes after big ice storms, power grids go down for a week, for weeks.  We have been told that we should have power by Sunday.  I keep remembering that there are people who don’t have at least a dozen friends and family offering warm houses, meals, showers.  It is humbling to remember that there are people for whom finding a warm place to stay, to keep their children warm–for some people this is a daily experience, not a response to a storm emergency.  And we have a place to go back to when all is said and done.

Oh, it’s frustrating having to strategize every morning what our day will be like, where Jon will go to keep the children warm while I am at work during the day, when we will go home to that cold house to take care of the cats and the chickens, worrying about whether the pump will freeze, whether the canned goods will freeze, what we’re going to do about the rotting food in the freezer when all is said and done.  But it’s also a bit of an adventure, like going on vacation here at home.  Spending the night with grandparents, eating out as often as we want to.  All is truly well.  What a safety net we have–so many good people offering help.  So much love.

Gratitude List:
1.  Warmth, warm places
2.  Plan B and C, safety nets
3.  Sunlight on snow
4.  The resilience of children
5.  Warmth, warm hearts

May we walk in Beauty.

Clearing, Culture, and Civilization

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A little sun, a slight shift up the thermometer, and I catch my stride again, find my way back into my life.  I’m glad we got all those boxes of Giveaway ready earlier in the week.  I know that packing boxes would not have helped to lift me out of the puddle of winter blues–it requires too much psychic attention.  But carrying them out of the house and putting them in the trunk, taking them to Reuzit–that was a definite pick-me-up.  Now the energy flows through the house with a little more grace.

Beth’s Personal Remedies for Winter Blues:
(not guaranteed to work for everyone, but it might be worth a shot)
1.  Make Gratitude Lists
2.  Notice the shadows and footprints on the snow
3.  Do yoga tree poses.  Lots of tree poses.  And king dancer poses.  And warrior poses.  Laugh when you fall.  Keep trying.
4.  Get rid of Stuff.  Being a Manager of Stuff is energy-sapping at the best of times, but in Winter, it’s numbing.
5.  Sometimes: Give in to it.  Wrap up in a blanket on the recliner, read a book, and drink lots of tea.

Speaking of getting rid of stuff, I found this great little list at the Pachamama Alliance:

Not Shopping List     I posted it on my Facebook site, and people began to add to it:

Recycle
Dumpster dive
Joyfully do without
Wildharvest
Re-vamp, re-fashion, create

So many good ideas.
What would you add?
How can we support each other in community
to do these things rather than settling for the easy path of buying more
plastic junk that won’t last and that we don’t really need, and probably don’t
really want, if we’re really honest with ourselves?


Gratitude List:
1.  A good tutor.  I feel much more confident about my computer savvy after just an hour of good help.
2.  Fish tacos
3.  Conversations about grief, sharing stories, opening hearts.  I have such wise, compassionate friends.
4.  Conversations about Culture and Civilization–more good semantic distinctions to be made.  Civilization has gotten us into a peck of trouble, has it not?  How does it differ from culture?  What do we pass on to our children–what culture do we share with them?  I have such wonderful, thoughtful friends.
5.  The light within us all.  I don’t know how to write this one, because it comes out of a really challenging conversation about why people harm other people, even when they know better, about why people engage in bullying behavior.  I recognize too, that I have shadows myself, some unhealthy shadows.  That’s crunchy.  But liberating.

May we walk in Beauty.

Winter Wall

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Today was the day for me.  I hit the winter wall.  I have been able to remain positive and relatively not-whiny so far, but today did me in.  I want to stay inside and sleep.  I had to do an awful lot of self-talk just to get myself out the door to go check on the chickens.

I don’t write this to be whiny or to beg for pity, but to place in context again the fact that sometimes I desperately need to find my way to gratitude.  And having practiced during the easy times definitely helps me to use the muscle in the days when it doesn’t come so easily.

Oh, but there’s always Beauty to find, even when I’m all curled up and cringing inside.

Gratitude List:
1.  Blue shadows on a white field.
2.  Bird footsteps and wing prints like hieroglyphic writing in the snow.
3.  Slippers and layers and the knee socks that I have turned into an extra pair of sleeves (these do an amazing job of keeping me warm).
4.  My many wise friends.  Wise and compassionate.  You.
5.  The sun is returning.  The sun is returning.  The sun is returning.

May we walk in Beauty.

Bad Mama and an IT Expert

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Bad Mama Award for the day: Carrying the mousetrap full of dead mouse through the house without thinking.  We’ve been reading Brambly Hedge, for Pete’s sake!  “Why do you have to kill them?”  Many, many tears.  Shame.  I am so tired of finding mouse poop in my drawers.

Gratitude List:
1.  Heron hunched in the pond.  Here’s the picture: the pond is frozen over, and atop the ice is a fluffy layer of snow.  Except for the corner closest to the hillside, where the biggest spring empties into the pond.  There, in just one corner, is a spot free of ice where the great blue heron crouches for fishing in winter.  I love when it flies low over the house on its way to hunting.  I love the way it crouches expectantly in its pond-corner, like my own heart waiting for spring.
2.  That orange glow that filled the holler at sunset this evening
3.  Our 7-year-old IT guy.  I couldn’t figure out how to save things from the big PC to the cloud so that I can access them on the Chromebook.  “Oh, that’s easy, Mom.”  And he did it.  My seven-year-old has more computer savvy than I do.  As Jon says, he’s tapped into the technological noosphere.
4.  The outpouring of affection and compassion that seems to be bubbling all around.
5.  Finding time for the projects.

May we walk in Beauty.

Presence

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I have been seeing a lot on the internet lately about compassion and empathy, about empathy and sympathy.  That makes me happy.  I’ve been reading Judy Cannato’s Field of Compassion, which posits that these times we are living in are marked by a new upwelling of compassion energy.  And that makes me happy, too.

Today I looked again at that little cartoon video that accompanies Brene Brown’s TED talk on empathy and sympathy.  I love in-depth semantic discussions, the sharp and precise clarification of terms, and part of what I like so much about Brene Brown’s work is that she gives us precise language for feelings.  It’s like those feelings charts that people sometimes use for helping children understand their emotions, but on an adult scale.

So I do not intend to critique Brown’s view of empathy and sympathy here, really.  Nor yours, either.  But it struck me that part of what is moving about the presence of the Bear in the video (go up there and click that link and watch it now, please) is just that: his Presence.  He witnessed the Little Rabbit’s pain, and when the Rabbit fell in the hole, he climbed right down in there with her.  Aside from the label of his approach as empathetic rather than sympathetic, he was Present.  He gave her the gift of witnessing her pain.

I haven’t had much experience in my life of terrible pain and trauma, but in the places and times when I have been hurting, I know that empathy was a great help when it was genuine.  “I know how you feel,” can feel like a great comfort, or a violation: How dare you presume to know how I feel?  “When I went through this. . . ” can be a relief to hear (You walked this road and you survived!) or it can be patronizing.  Sometimes a sympathetic “That must be so hard” is as refreshingly Present as an empathetic “I know how it is.”

I wish I could say I get it right all the time, this business of being Present, being a Compassionate Witness.  It’s hard to be awake enough to one’s self and the Universe to know how to muddle through this bog of the heart.  It’s a challenge to be present when the Little Rabbit is lashing out in her sadness.  I love that the meta-conversations lead us into the discussion.  I’m grateful for the people, like Brown, who are working at the semantics, drawing us all to a deeper understanding of the compassionate heart.

Gratitude List:
1. The sweet, soft brush marks of wings on the snow
2.  Satisfying mechanical tools: my apple peeler corer slicer, for example; an efficient non-electric tool that does its job well.
3.  The way Jon hums to himself all day as he’s doing his daily tasks
4.  Two people whom I love a great deal were in an ice-related traffic accident this morning, and emerged mostly unharmed.  I am so grateful that injuries were relatively minor, and hope for a speedy and complete recovery from the aches.
5.  Napping.  This afternoon, as I was dozing off for a much-needed nap, a small person of the house came and snuggled up beside me and fell asleep too.

May we walk in Beauty.

Landscape Manuscript: An Experiment

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Here is a poem that is sort of off my beaten path, out of my kilter, definitely beyond my safety zone.  I started it over a year ago.  It’s a mash-up between poetry of pure sound and a villanelle.  I abandoned it after two stanzas.  Then this week, after I heard a recording on the radio of Gertrude Stein reading some of her poetry, and realizing how the simple sounds moved me deeply, I returned to it.  Here is Landscape Manuscript:

ancient spectrum glinted speculate
responsive orphan mystery spot green
digest interpret dervish deviate

elocution wild landscape percolate
inscribe revision often sigh unseen
ancient spectrum glinting speculate

wily wonders intersperse ameliorate
and if and when and should and mean
digest interpretation dervish deviate

manuscript within divine yet designate
extraordinary rendezvous eloquent serpentine
the ancients spectral glinted speculate

resist revolve re-grow restore renovate
while verdant hallway wren careen
digesting interpret dervish deviate

rushing flitter whirr beyond palpitate
the doorway opens to a realm between
ancient spectrum glinted speculate
digest interpret dervish deviate

2014 January 018

Gratitude List:
1.  Wingprints in the snow
2.  Wind in the breast feathers of the wren
3.  Family.  The Weaver Family Reunion.  I think Grandma must have been smiling tonight.
4.  Tea with honey and ginger
5.  A veritable flood of poetry on the internet in the past couple of days.  (And bonus: the chance to use the word veritable.)

May we walk in Beauty.