Musings

Before

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Before we wandered these hills, other feet stood on the rocks, walked these woods, heard the way the breezes played through the poplars, watched the sun shoot its borning rays down into the hollows.

Before the parking lots and asphalt roads.  Before the houses and the malls, like a million million mushrooms gathered in every valley and on every hilltop. Before the tearing machines, the industrial fumes, the buzz and rumble of commerce.

Before the barbarians came, before the savages appeared with their guns, with hearts of stone seeking halls of gold.

This is not a new story, but somehow we keep missing the point, keep calling the wrong ones the savages, keep stepping up to the bench of divine justice, lawyers defending the mass murderer.  Before the first (or not the first) one sailed the ocean blue, before him, yes, there was war here.  Yes, sometimes there was famine and disease.

But before the big boats began to appear here, there were functioning and thriving societies here.  Families in villages and longhouses, in townsful of people.  There was hunting and fishing and foraging.  There was knowledge and wisdom.  There were councils and songs, dances and dreamings.  There was art and society, law and leisure.

Today I will not celebrate the ending of that world.  Today I will mourn for the world that was lost when “first contact” was made.  I will walk in the woods with my children.  I will forage for something to make into tea or supper.  I will stand on these stones with my feet and re-member what stories I can.

Gratitude List:
1.  The ancestors.  Of me.  Of this land.
2.  Telling the truth
3.  Re-wilding
4.  New dreamings
5.  Robins in the bosque

May we walk in Beauty.

Do Something That Won’t Compute

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“So, friends,” says Wendell Berry in The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, “every day do something / that won’t compute.”

The politicos and the war-mongers and the marketing gurus and the ad execs and the creators of glitzy trash and junk, they all think they’ve got us figured out.  They think they know what we want.  We’re the consumers, and they’re going to give us something to consume, whether it be a genetically engineered piece of sweet junk filled with high fructose corn syrup, a mindless screen diversion or a satisfying show of martial power.  And if we’re the consumers in the equation, they’re the ones who are raking in the dough.  At an ever-increasing, alarming rate of speed.

Every day, let’s choose to do something that doesn’t fit that model.  Let’s be the Makers, the Creators, the Designers of our own health, happiness, well-being.  The Crafters of our own delicious world.  Let’s make our own entertainment, be responsible for our own health, learn to love the taste of real unprocessed food, design our own lives according to our own stories.

“As soon as the generals and the politicos / can predict the motions of your mind,” says Wendell Berry, “lose it. Leave it as a sign / to mark the false trail, the way / you didn’t go. Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction. / Practice resurrection.”

Gratitude List:
1.  A little sun and blue sky yesterday.  A day without rain.
2.  The bright and earnest energy of the activists at the anti-GMO rally.
3.  Natasha’s spot-on speech from the rally: Kill the Beast
4.  Stuffed shells
5.  Snuggles

May we walk in Beauty.

Haiku and Tanka

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2013 October 044

I am snuggling a boy and a cat in my lap at the moment: benefits of a cool morning.   Makes typing a challenge, though.

Here are a couple poems that walked into my head yesterday.  The first is a tanka, inspired by my friend Mara.  I thought the second was going to be a tanka, too, but while I was waiting for the last two lines to emerge, I realized it was already a haiku.

 

TANKA
See there! In your palm
are the rivers of story,
of constellations,
dragonfly wings, the pathways
of the heart: love, grief, desire.

HAIKU
The now-naked arms
of the walnut tree cradle
the newly-born moon.

Gratitude List:
1.  Autumn birdsong in the hollow
2.  Listening
3.  Constructing my own life
4.  Breakfast
5.  Tiny Poems

May we walk in Beauty.

The Story Roars

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

When I wake up in the morning, parting the cobweb veil between dream and day-consciousness, I often find that some piece of that world hovers about me as I enter the morning.  A fragment of song.  An image.  A phrase.  The tone of the voice or the name of the person who was speaking my dream-name.  The answer to a question.  The Question itself.

This morning’s phrase: The Story Roars.  I love all the places this can go, the way it opens doors into so many passageways in my life.

There, standing just behind the curtain, is my Muse, reminding me to get to work.  To write, to write, to write.  The story is impatient, roaring to be crafted and written.

One of my current spiritual practices was given to me by a friend, the work of honing my listening.  I want to take up the work of listening, of drawing out people’s stories, of working together to be fully engaged in the stories we are living.  Our stories gather around us, waiting for us to give them voice.

Here is a Roar: My friend Natasha is now almost three weeks into a daily blog, The Year of Black Clothing, in which she chronicles and gives voice to her grief and rage over the destruction of Earth, of each other.   Her story is roaring, finding voice, gaining momentum, gathering other voices.  Her roar–so gentle, so fierce, so pained and so loving–is reverberating, drawing other voices in, creating a wild and hopeful call to Do.  To Be.  To Act.  To live our stories as authentically as we can on this Earth we call Home.  Go now and read her roar.  Add your voice to the story.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Yesterday I asked my Facebook friends for advice about a parenting question.  I’m uncomfortable with unsolicited advice-giving, and sometimes even asked-for advice can be haughty.  Not so with the amazing people who responded with gentle concern and powerful ideas to my call for help.  I am so deeply blessed by the many circles of community in my life.  So deeply deeply blessed.
2.  Mentors
3.  The Story
4.  The Voice
5.  The Dawn

May we walk in Beauty.

Maintaining Balance

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The gypsy wind came rattling through at 4:30 this morning.  It raised gooseflesh on my arms and the hair on the back of my neck tingled.  No more sleep.  No more sleep.  Down the stairs, some quiet reading, a little coffee and then some yoga tree poses.

In six months of regular morning tree poses, my balance has improved considerably.  I’m happy enough in my body, don’t get me wrong, but physical balance has never really been one of my strong points.  It’s a little startling to me that I can get this rather unathletic middle-aged body to pick up a new trick.  And it’s odd to me how place-oriented my balance is.  When I try the poses somewhere other than my kitchen, I teeter and totter and tumble all over the place.

On the internal front, I have been living with a low-grade fury again.  I have allowed this government shut down to throw me off my internal equilibrium.  I can’t seem to maintain balance,  to keep myself upright.  I want to rant and call names and burn bridges.
Somewhere I’ll find the poetry for this, the way to speak the need for justice in this story.  Right now, it’s still a little blind and crazed.  One thing that seems to help me hold my morning tree poses is the mirror in my kitchen.  When I look into my own eyes, my body suddenly remembers its upright nature and I stop thinking about falling.And oh.  I have not been writing gratitude lists.  I have stepped out of my space, walked away from my internal mirror.  How could I expect to keep my balance?  Here, then, is me back in my place, practicing my balance postures:

Gratitude List:
1.  A weekend with thoughtful, hopeful women.  All the grandmothers we carry with us.  Open hearts, open eyes.
2.  Dragonfly
3.  Autumn bird conversations.  Mockingbird is back at it after a summer of quiet.  Screech owl and great horned owl have been calling  even after dawn has brought the day.  Phoebe is moving through again.  Robin hordes have been amassing in the hollow every evening, and they begin the mornings with a deafening chatter.  I have even heard the kingfisher’s fussy chitter along Cabin Creek.
4.  A community of rebels
5.  Morning solitude

May we walk in Beauty.

Jiggetty Jig

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2013 September 162

Home again, home again, from a lovely five days in Stone Harbor, NJ.  Instead of trying to whittle my Gratitude List from all those days down to five, or even ten, here is a list of general joys from the trip:

1.  Getting the Farmer off the farm.  Watching him relax.
2.  We got there in time to see the massive flock of swallows snapping up insects on a short pit stop on their southward journey.  By mid-day Friday, they’d gone south.
3.  The full moon over my right shoulder, and the sun leaping out of the early morning waves in front of me, and the season changing (certainly at that very moment) to Autumn.
4.  Monarchs.  So few, so few.  But still.  Some.
5.  Sitting.
6.  Trash scavenging treasures: a beach rake, another beach umbrella in really good shape, a boogie board.  Call me a vulture.
7.  Josiah opened the screen door on Friday morning: “Now we’re open for love and business.”
8.  Dolphins!
9.  Dragonflies!
10.  Sylvester’s Fish Market, Nemo’s, Tortilla Flats, Uncle Bill’s Pancake House.  In other words, good eating.
11.  There were no more throwing up incidents after we got there.  We needed to get rid of that old car seat anyway.  Now we have a nice new booster.
12.  Big shovels to dig massive holes with.  As soon as they had a good hole, the boys would start nesting, creating sand shelves for their tools, making roads for the construction equipment. . .
14.  Making drip castles with Ellis.
15.  The way the boys hum quietly to themselves as they play in the sand, as they swim in the pool.
16.  Ellis jumping off the sand ridge into the water, into the sun.
17.  Watching my child’s eyes when he realized that he had just kept himself afloat in the pool.
18.  You know what I mean about the sun-road on the waves?  I love how it always appears to lead directly to me.

May we walk that road in Beauty.

St. Augustine’s Prayer

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This prayer of St. Augustine expresses so much that I believe about the Divine Love that is at the heart of the Universe, or the Multiverse, perhaps.  How would the religions of the world change if we who seek the Divine would call that Mystery the Beauty Ever Ancient?  Unlike Augustine, I find myself drawn into the realm of the Holy when I live deeply with the “created things,” but I’ll not quibble.  The prayer is so lovely.

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

Gratitude List:
1.  Mystery
2.  Networking
3.  Salsa ready to can
4.  Light in August
5.  Cicadas

May We walk in Beauty.  Ever Ancient.

Luna, Hen, and Living in the Village

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2013 August 270 2013 August 274

Gratitude List:
1.  Luna Moth
2.  Halo of morning sun around a black hen on dewy grass coming to greet me in the morning.
3. The parenting village–we don’t have to do it all alone, don’t have to figure it out all alone.
4.  Dissatisfaction and satisfaction: a two-sided coin.  Right now, I am exploring dissatisfaction as a means to avoid complacency and getting-stuck-in-a-rut-ness.
5.  Ellis is reading Calvin and Hobbes cartoons to Joss.

May we walk in Beauty, fly in Beauty.

New Ways, New Ideas

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Mockingbird says:
“Greet everyone in their own language, and don’t worry about your accent.”

Gratitude List:
1.  That moon.  First it wasn’t.  There was rain and there was a nighttime overcast.  Then there was an odd glow.  Then suddenly an orange crescent in the sky.
2.  New ways to organize my mind
3.  Rhythm.  In and out.  Round and round.
4.  New ideas to take the place of old ones that I have discarded
5.  Singing with people I love

May we walk in Beauty.

Revision

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I used to tie myself in knots with finding the perfect word or phrase for a poem, working and reworking ideas and sounds until things began to sound like something manufactured in a plastics factory.  Then, in November, when I decided I needed to loosen up or let my Poet die a quiet death, I found myself spewing random verbiage all over the place.  This was a good thing: my Poet survived.

Lately, the pendulum has begun to swing back again.  I don’t plan to let myself get knotted into that editorial straitjacket, but I do want to add a little more deliberation to my poetry again.  Here is a revision I worked up on my July first poem.  It’s not significantly different; the biggest change is in the line breaks.  I wanted to create more intention to the rhythm of the lines, with a sudden shift in the final stanza.  I think it works.  I’d be glad of any feedback you have about the differences between the poems.

These are the Days

These are the days when I become
a quiet rock, a quivering leaf,
an ear of lichen listening to the stones grow.

The words have wandered off on tiptoe,
eloquence eludes me, and all my sentences
begin with the word So.

So the wind will sing in my sun-rimed feathers
but my own story waits like a seed in the earth,
like a dream that must rise through mud, a bubble,

the nymph of a damselfly crawling through centuries
up the stalk of a smooth green reed
to be born to the clear blue light.

There is a roaring in my ears
like the sound of a newborn grief or rage.
But it’s only the lazy hum of summer,

of fireflies clicking their aching rhythms
into the velvet indigo of solstice,
communing with the waxing moon.

Another day I’ll dawn,
but for now I will sink
slowly into the pond
with Grandmother Moon
and leave my message with the fish.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Variety
2.  Revision
3.  Sweaters and scarves in August
4.  Balance
5.  Partnership

May we walk in beauty.