Musings

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.

Protecting the Nestlings

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Mockingbird Says:
“Protect your nestlings with every ounce of courage and ferocity you can muster.  Whether it be Monsanto or a kitty cat, zip in in a whir of flashy feathers and nip them on the nether regions–just like this!  Aha!”

–Oh, Mockingbird!  Yes.  I do get your point, and so, unfortunately, does little Miss Winky.  Poor Kitty Cat.

2013 August 116

Gratitude List (the typical 5, plus a few bonus from an amazing weekend with my gang of college friends and their children):
1.  Lasting friendships, powerful in their intentionality and their serendipity
2.  Scott’s rock and sand collection
3.  Awakeners
4.  A happy gang of kids, riding bikes, playing games, swimming, giggling, sharing jokes. . .
5.  Being part of the cold and broken hallelujah (Leonard Cohen)
6.  Late late night conversations around the fire, sharing the bitter/sweets
7.  Walking out of the labyrinth
8.  This moment: We were sitting around in the shade yesterday morning discussing shame and the impact it has on our parenting, and how it is used in schools.  Before long three of the children had gathered with us in the circle, and they started telling us their own ideas about effective and ineffective behavior management in school, about what seems fair and right and what is a violation of their sense of self.
9.  Taking pictures of the fire with Luke
10.  Africa House, where we stayed

May all beings be blessed.

Mockingbird Says

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Mockingbird says:
“Listen well, and your own speech will be enriched.”

Gratitude List:
1.  The trees, those people who grasp the Earth between their toes and grow down toward the heart of the mother, who dream their leaves and needles and nuts and flowers and fruit into the air, who breathe for us.
2.  The spiders, those people who fling themselves with abandon into the air and drift on their own silk to a new anchoring place, who make the connections, who spin and weave.
3.  The birds, those feather people who dash from tree-branch to tree-branch or rest on a hammock of sky–treading wind currents, whose very speech is music, who range in size from the hummingbird smaller than my open hand to the eagle whose wingspan is greater than my own.
4.  Margaret Atwood, who is tearing at my heart with her book, The Year of the Flood.
5.  Fresh corn for supper tonight.

May we walk in Beauty.

I Have Been Circling

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The summer has caught me up in its tangled strings.  Throughout the day, ideas for my gratitude list pop into my head.  I try to grab and secure them, but someone has left the lid off the pot while making this batch of popcorn, and they zing away before I can grasp them.

I’m not too fussed about it.  This is the nature of summer.  As the cooler weather returns and daily demands of the farm settle into more predictable rhythms, I’ll get the lid back on that wanton kettle of my brain.

Perhaps I have written this before: My friend Sarah and I have talked about how perhaps something about the gratitude list ought to be a little difficult, how for those of us who live fairly closely with the natural world, it would be pretty easy to rattle off a list of five natural things every day, and this might defeat the purpose a little.  This is a temptation for me.  On the other hand, I want my gratitude lists, like poetry, to carry several layers of meaning, as I hope this one will.

Gratitude List:
1.  Hummingbird: Yesterday when I came down from harvest, I let myself drop underneath the poplar tree.  I lay there watching the sun glowing through the pollen-golden wings of a tiger swallowtail wandering among the leaves, when suddenly there she was, wings a-blur in a patch of blue between the branches.  I don’t think I’ve ever observed a hummer in flight from directly below before.  She was a double fan of pure motion and light.  A lemniscate.  No wonder the Hopi and Navajo see her as the messenger between the worlds.  If I see her again today, what message shall I send?
2.  Toad: Yesterday I was with a crew harvesting tomatoes, while Holly and Mary Jo were picking squash.  Suddenly, Holly started to whoop and holler.  A few moments later, as we were loading our tomato bins into the back of the truck, Holly came over, her hands cupped together.  I thought she was wringing out a wet rag: water was streaming from between her fingers.  Instead, she was gently holding the largest toad I have ever seen, and it was performing its natural response to being picked up by a human.  I’m still a little stunned that it could hold that much liquid inside it.  Toads have been a watchful presence in my writing this past winter, so it felt like a doubly good omen.
3.  Pears: Driving the tractor down the hill, I noticed the pears shaping up beautifully on the trees in the orchard.   I can almost taste them.
4.  Tomatoes: Tomatoes satisfy on so many levels.  I have my first six quarts of 2013 sauce on the counter ready to go to the basement shelves for the season.  Fresh salsa with cilantro and lime and hot peppers.  But right now, the thing I love so much is the wanton variety of their shapes and colors when you put them in a bin together.  I didn’t get a shot of yesterday’s bins, but the one attached to this post looks almost the same.
5.  Rilke:  “I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”  Rob Breszny challenged his readers to write their own permutation.  Here’s mine: ” I am circling around the Core, around the Source, and I have been circling since my thousand times began, and I still do not know whether I am a watchful toad, or a wordless prayer, or a cool wind above the fields.”

May we walk in beauty.