Musings

Changelings

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

To put in the Who-Are-You-And-What-Have-You-Done-With-My-Children? File:
1.  This morning, the one who looks like my four-year-old child named Joss, woke up and got himself dressed entirely by himself.  Without fussing.
2.  This evening, the Joss one ate his supper without asking me to feed him.  Without fussing.  And it was soup! (see #3)
3.  For supper I served eggplant soup.  Both of these people who look like my children said it was the best thing ever, and could I make it every evening?

All I can figure is that there must be faeries about.

2013 July 106
This is a photo from yesterday: Joss eating slices of raw onion.  When he was two, I left him in the market room by himself for a few minutes, and when I came back, he was sitting on the floor munching on a raw leek.  He ate at least four that day, maybe five.  He still likes raw onions, though now he needs to have a cup of COLD water handy, and he does sometimes get a little overwhelmed by them.  Today was the first that he showed an interest in eggplant.

Gratitude List:
1.  Thunder
2.  Jon Weaver-Kreider
3.  Today’s picnic lunch.  The boys decided that we were having a family picnic up at their garden, to eat what they harvested.  Hot as blazes, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
4.  Eggplant soup
5.  Thumbs.

May we walk in Beauty.

Home Again

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I wish I had had my camera.  I wish I could draw well and fast.  Instead, I’ll have to try to give you the picture in words.

It’s a really hot day on the beach.  The elements are all doing their elemental best to claim the day: sand, air, sun and waves.  You have to yell to be heard above the pounding of the surf, and the tide is rising fast, claiming sneakers and chairs and sand pails faster than their startled owners can drag them in.  One dad gets a bright idea to stave off the loss of his space by building a sea wall, and digs a fortification in front of his family’s umbrella: a deep hole with a wall on the side to the ocean.  Suddenly kids from all over have gotten into the act, digging and fortifying.

My boys ran down with their cousins to join in.  Parents came, too, and we built drip castles all along the line of the wall.  And the wall held against the tide, giving the umbrella people another forty minutes of time before the hole behind the wall filled with fresh cold sea water, and the children went from castle-builders to merfolk, dabbling in the pool they’d created and covering themselves with yellow foam.

2013 July 082

Gratitude List:
1.  Family time at the beach
2.  Mama Ocean
3.  Watching Joss devour every kind of seafood he could get his hands on: clams, flounder, shrimp, scallops.
4.  Coming home to Jon
5.  Myotis lucifugus, the little brown bat.  The first one to roost in the barn we called Otis because it seemed more likely that a solitary bat would be male.  The friend who was roosting with him today we will call Lucy, in hopes that they might be a breeding pair.  Fly well, small ones.

May we walk in Beauty.

Spinning Gratitude

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I can’t quite make sense of my motivations for how I want to write today’s Gratitude List.  I’m thinking too hard about thinking about it.  You see, I have been complaining all day.  Really complaining about how many things have been going wrong.  I keep it sort of light, too, whining delivered on a platter of intended humor: “I think all the appliances and motorized things on this farm have had a conference and decided to break down at the same time.”

Pretty lame, actually, but that’s the place where you’re supposed to groan with  empathy, and pity me my breakdowns:  Poor woman can’t keep her food cold or drive her car, and her lawn’s turning to jungle.  But I don’t think I am looking for pity, really.  Well, perhaps a little commiseration.  That’s such a great word, such a great idea.  Let’s be a little miserable together at the unfairness of the world, and it will all seem a little easier to bear.

I have been making an internal list today (not necessarily intentionally) of all the things that have gone wrong.  If I twist that list into my gratitude list in some artful way, I will have had my chance at a rant.  But is that really gratitude?

I think it is.  Yes, because this business of writing a gratitude list is not only about finding the wonderful things that do happen; it’s also about putting the brokenness into perspective, about spinning the story into something positive.  Not for spin’s sake, but for gratitude’s sake.  For the sake of centeredness and peace of mind.

In Pronoia, Rob Breszny talks about how when something goes wrong, we focus on that one or two or five things that aren’t working instead of the hundreds of things that are working.  It’s about where you place your focus.  The clocks still work.  Gravity continues to hold me to Earth.  The plants grow.  The children laugh.  The stovetop cooks my morning egg to perfection.

Today I am a Spin Doctor.  Not in search of pity, except as it comes with a little good mojo for all my motorized things to work.

Gratitude List:
1.  My father’s car, and his gracious sharing of it while Roxanne Buick is having herself repaired to pass inspection.
2.  A new (to us) fridge being delivered this week, and the old one taken away with no extra effort from us.  And working substitutes in the meantime.  We’re so fortunate that we have the farm store fridge to tide us over until the new one comes.
3.  The string trimmer works again.  We can at least keep the edges tidy.  And sometimes keep your edges tidy is just the thing.
4.  Spinning.
5.  Perspective.

May we walk in Beauty.

A Blessing and Two Gratitude Lists

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

First, a Blessing for You, if Today Hurts:
I acknowledge that this can be a challenging day.  If a father in your life is lost or absent, inadequate or terrifying, Father’s Day has to be difficult.  If this is part of your story, my wish for you is that you will find surrogate fathers in your life, people (men and women, even yourownself) who fill the gaps you feel, who support and hold and mentor you, who tell you jokes and honor you for who you are.

2011 November 083

Gratitude List for my Father:
1.  . . .who taught me the delight of the Wing-People, how to look for the flashing color of an oriole in the treetops, or the leaf-green flick of a warbler through the wood, how to distinguish the minute differences between hairy and downy woodpecker.  He taught me to listen for their voices.  My aural memory will never be as powerful as his, but he helped me to hone my ear to listen for the sharp whistle of oriole, the whiskery whisper of a blue-gray gnatcatcher, the cluck of a cuckoo.  He keeps the feeders at Goldfinch Farm clean and filled.
2.  . . .who balances heart and head, who values strong thinking and reasoning, scientific thought and processing, but who keeps his heart open to the hearts of others.
3.  . . .who is an example of being flexible and open to new ideas, new people, new learning.  He holds firmly to his ideals, but is not afraid to change his mind.
4.  . . .who treasures his grandchildren.  He thinks about how to honor and bless all their individual differences and gifts.  He teaches them to use their bright thinking minds and their quick, artful hands, to follow their caring hearts.  And always, how to listen for the birds:  “Did you hear that?”
5.  . . .who values his friends.  I’m not sure that our culture has many models for deep and trusting and sharing friendships between men.  I love to observe the intentionality with which my father has carried his friendships, going all the way back to high school, how he continues to build his relationships with others.

2013 June 014
Gratitude List for Jon:
1.  . . .who is a patient and involved father to his children.  Who takes the time in the middle of a busy day to spend ten minutes playing Legos on the floor.
2.  . . .who starts to plot how to make Christmas and birthdays exciting for his children weeks and months in advance.
3.  . . .who respects the bright minds of his children, carefully engaging them in learning–planting and caring for their garden, using tools, building and fixing, drawing and planning.
4.  . . .who makes us all laugh.  Often.  Who loves to see his children laugh.
5.  . . .who enthralls and enchants his children with bedtime stories.

May we walk in Beauty.

And in Memory of Ellis Kreider,
Jon’s kind and gentle father.

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The Busy Season Has Begun

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Farm season has begun.  I am exhausted, and falling asleep in the recliner in the evenings.  But it’s the best kind of exhausted, the kind that comes from good hard work out in the elements, working with great people, and hanging out with our customers.  It will mean that I will not be posting as regularly, likely only a couple times a week.  I’ll keep working at gratitude, keep formulating poems and ideas.

2013 June 051

Gratitude List:
1.  Harvesting conversations, working our way down a strawberry patch.
2.  Share days.  Those are the days when the shareholders come to pick up their weekly produce.  I love to sit and chat, to talk with people about food and recipes and children and education and spirituality and Reiki and growing older and growing up. . .
3.  Providing beauty and nourishment for people.
4.  Sandra and my parents: I always know that someone is seeing to the needs of my children on these mornings when I am seeing to the needs of the farm.
5.  Jane Peifer, Mim Book, and whoever comes next.  Cycles, giving space for grieving, welcoming the next chapter in the story.

May we walk in Beauty.

Bhutan’s Happiness, Poetic Conversations, and Strawberries

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  My dear friend Carol told me today that Bhutan calculates the GNP of Happiness.  I thought she was being poetic.  She told me she was serious, and I looked it up.  Bhutan monitors its GNH: Gross National Happiness.  This gives me intense satisfaction.
2.  Here’s the link to my interview with Carla Christopher, York’s Poet Laureate and all-around amazing person.  It was such an incredible honor.  I could have taken up the whole hour just to keep talking with her, thinking out loud about poetry together.  My part is near the beginning, just after Carla’s own amazing poem, but don’t stop there.  There are other really great poets and artists and musicians coming up after.
3.  We are ready.  Tomorrow morning the curtain will rise on season 2013 at Goldfinch Farm CSA, and we are ready to go.
4.  Picking strawberries in the rain.  Really.  It was a blast, and the crew is such fun, and you have to eat the seconds as you go until you get a stomach ache, but you can’t stop eating strawberries because the season is so short, and you have to stock up on strawberry goodness for another whole year.
5.  Finding myself at home in my own heart.

May we walk in Beauty!

Doves in the Rain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

It’s a little grainy, I know, but I like the way it captures his concentration.  Yesterday afternoon when it was starting to pour, Jon made this little city for the boys, out of a packing insert.  The hours of delight and play and more drawing on the part of the children that has ensued has made this rainy day special.

2013 June 043

Gratitude List:
1.  The way my poets shatter my heart and put me back together again.  I cannot find the reference at the moment, but there is a myth of a goddess who was rent into pieces and then put back together.  It always disturbed me.  Now I think I understand it a little better.  And yes, they are my poets.  I claim them.  Thank you, Leigh and Mara.
2.  The way the mourning dove raises her wings to the rain.  I remember one day in Tanzania when the rains had come late, so painfully late, and the resident flock of doves sat on the packed earth in the new rain and rolled on their sides, each with a wing pointed skyward, letting the water soak them all the way to their wingpits.
3.  All the surfaces in the Market Room are clean and ready.  The curtain will rise in just a few days on the 2013 season of Goldfinch Farm CSA!
4.  A clear-headed day with no sniffles, no sneezing and easy breathing.  This is SUCH a big deal to me, it is worth listing it on a gratitude list.
5.  Watching Jon relax and take a well-deserved farmer nap this afternoon.

May we walk in Beauty.

 

Yesterday’s List–
Gratitude List:
1. Scent of honeysuckle
2. Deep, soaking rain
3. Making new friends
4. A clean house
5. Catbirds

May we walk in Beauty.

The Sacred Work of Raising Children

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

I have always resisted too intense a categorization of genders.  Now, with two boys to raise, I often find myself caught in that tight spot between the noticing of their particular energies and the awareness of cultural beliefs about gender in children.  In some ways I see them behaving in the particular ways that people say boys will behave, and often they defy such artificial categorization.  They are who they are, separate from notions of gender.

Perhaps all children go through the hitting phase, no matter their particular shading of gender identity.  I can only speak to my own family’s experience: My children hit each other.  Often, and without holding back.  We do not hit our children, so they did not learn it from us.  The seven-year-old is developing better impulse control, fortunately, but this puts him more at the mercy of the four-year-old.  Of course, Seven is a master of provoking Four to violence.  There now, have I gone and blamed the victim?

I do not handle their violence well.  I think we need some help.  It hasn’t worked to keep repeating the scripted phrases, “When you hit, I feel worried because I am afraid you might hurt your brother.  I need you to stop hitting now.”  It hasn’t worked to threaten to take toys or video time.

Yesterday, I tried the technique I have heard about of holding the hitter in a chair until s/he calms down.  I could feel his frustration building, could feel the need to lash out rising within him.  Needless to say, it did not seem to be a successful intervention.  I want to do more simple acknowledging of strong feelings, more talking it through.  Too often, I go in yelling too:  “This is not acceptable in this house!  We do not hit each other!  How often do I need to tell you that?”  Umm.  Not helpful.

Yesterday I finally watched the video that everyone has been posting on Facebook in which Patrick Stewart speaks of the work he is doing to end domestic violence in memory of his mother, and now in memory of his father as well as he learns of the role PTSD played in his family’s story:  “Violence is never, ever, ever, a choice that a man should make!”  I often tell the boys that we do not hit each other, but I have started using a variation of Stewart’s phrase for the boys:  “Violence is never a choice we should make.”

We do talk about it, and I suppose it is sinking in to the corners of their consciousness.  Yesterday as we were driving, I began to rhapsodize about the Valley we were driving through, and Four perked up from the back seat, “I thought you were starting to say Violence.”  Okay.  So he’s learning the words, at least.

Yesterday someone also sent me this simply-written article from The Huffington Post.  While I am pretty sure I am not like the parents in the story who let their son run rough-shod over another child’s imaginative realm, it was another good reminder of why this work of socializing our children is so crucial to their development.  When people dismiss aggressive behavior in boys as simply the uncontrollable behavior of their gender, how deeply does that become part of their psyche as they grow up and relate to women?

I went into the day weary of the constant tasks related to helping these children learn to interact with each other without violence, and came out of it weavng together the video and the article which remind me that this is sacred work, this work of helping these two boys learn to control their impulses, to name and acknowledge and express their feelings in open ways, to respect each others’ space.  I’m still at a bit of a loss about how to handle the hitting, but more hopeful that each conversation, each interaction, is a moment for learning how to be mature human beings.  For all of us.

 

Gratitude List:
(It’s been a few days, so I am going to break the rules and let myself have ten.)
1.  A sparkling, humming, magical swarm of bees.  I am sorry that the beekeeper was unable to catch them–they settled too high in the tree before flying off, but I will hope that they will establish a powerful and healthy wild colony.
2.  The panicky-sounding “Yeep!” of the bullfrogs when we startle them as we walk by the pond.
3.  Listening to Alice in Wonderland with Ellis, and watching him catch the jokes and puzzles and puns.  It is such fun to laugh with my children.
4.  The enormous Yard Sale at Lebanon Valley Brethren Home.  It was a delight to explore the treasures with the kids.
5.  The temporary grace offered by a little pharmaceutical assistance when the herbs just seemed to be insufficient to help my body cope with the current onslaught of pollens.  I will still hold out as long as I can because I don’t like to live in the mental fog, but it’s nice to know it’s there when my eyes blow up and I can’t stop sneezing.
6.  Someone saw a big black snake at the farm.  It has been a couple years since one has been spotted.  Snakes are a good sign of a healthy ecosystem.  Now to keep my evening eyes peeled for bats. . .
7.  Lupines growing from the stones at the edge of the highway!
8.  Roadside sign that said, “Let us walk Honestly.”  That’s nice.  So often I dismiss those signs because they tend to be consigning people to hell, so this was a lovely change.  And then I saw one that said, “Be ye merciful.”  I like that one, too.
9.  Family expedition to Weaver’s Dry Goods in Fivepointsville.  Mini Doughnuts.  The wonder of exploring the toy section with the children.  And Jon, too–he was like a kid himself.  (But don’t get me started on the prominent display of Roundup in the front of the store.)  In the parking lot on the way out, we saw something you don’t see every day, a plain Mennonite woman driving a tractor, pulling a trailer with a load of supplies and three or four girls in it.  I hope they weren’t going far–it looked sort of dangerous.  But amazing.
10.  Entering Weaverland Valley from Terre Hill (say Turr-eh Hill).  Something sings in my bones at the view of the light playing over the valley, the farms, the green meadows and tidy fields.

May we walk in Beauty.

Back to the Streets

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Several years ago, when our nation was plunging headlong into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself going to street protests sometimes twice in a week.  The level of work and focus and organizing was exhausting, but the community experience of standing silent witness together helped me to get through some of the really shadowy spaces I inhabited during those times.  Still, I burned out.  And when I moved to the farm and had children, and our country settled in for the long haul in these wars, I found myself slipping out of the realm of the activist.

So it was with a little trepidation and a little excitement that I tucked my children into the car today to run to Lancaster for the March Against Monsanto.  My youngsters are really too young to understand the implications of Genetically Modified Organisms, and I don’t want to bring them too close to the shadowy places where I walk in regard to this story: the sense that nothing we can do will change things, that we can have a majority of Americans wanting to know what’s in their food but that we still can’t change the system because it’s not really about democracy, it’s about money.  You see how I spiral down into it?  So I try to protect them from it, let them get the sense that somehow speaking out will make a difference.  And I try to believe that, too.

It’s fun to imagine that Monsanto execs went into their ivory tower this evening and said, “Well, time to wrap it up, folks.  The people have spoken.  They don’t want us.”  But I don’t think we did anything to frighten the monster today.

I do think that we raised a lot of energy today, all over the world, like a prayer, like a magic spell.  There was deep respect and joy and energy and hope at the march today.  It was a lovely experience, and I was glad that I took my children.  If we can just all grab hold of a little of that energy, spread it around a little, throw out strands of it like a great web, keep raising consciousness tenderly and with compassion, keep remembering that to withhold our dollars from the beast is the best way to starve it. . .then just maybe we can make a difference.

I have to believe that.

Gratitude List:
1.  Taking to the Streets
2.  Watching the boys play together up the hill, discovering the spray of mist leaking from the irrigation hose.
3.  Believing in the future
4.  Our Little Sisters the Bees
5.  Rhubarb Tort

May we walk in beauty.

Story Ramble

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

This week I have been thinking about the layers of stories that I experience.  There’s this story of mine that I am creating with every thought or idea that I latch onto or release, every image I carry with me, each action, each refusal to act.  I create the tone and subtext for my story, and even develop the plot with a certain amount of control.  A fair bit of the plot is beyond my control, and then my role in the story becomes how I respond and shape myself in relationship to the plot.

My story is interwoven with the stories of my husband, my children, my parents and the rest of my family, my friends and community, the folks who work on and who visit the farm, my internet network.  And they shape my story as I shape theirs.  We hone and whittle, we tweak and trigger and tickle each others’ stories.  When your story gets rocky and challenging, it shakes my story, too.  I sort of think that’s the work we’re here to do, to help each other hone and perfect our stories.

There’s the living of story and the telling of story.  Someone told me part of his story this week, and said, “It helps to tell it.  There’s no point in keeping it inside.”  Something in the experience of being present for the telling, being tuned in to the mixture of pain and relief and terror and hope, something in that changed me in a way that I can’t quite understand.  I am glad that telling the story helped him.  How is it that it healed and completed something within me as well?

I think, too, about the religious and spiritual stories that inform our lives, the way they overlap and challenge us, the ways that firm adherence to a story can close and calcify hearts.  The ways that tender adherence to a story can open a heart to acceptance and compassion.

And fiction and myth.  Why is it that we need to talk with other people about Downton Abbey and Mad Men and Six Feet Under?  About The Fifth Sacred Thing and The Hunger Games and Harry Potter?  Why do we get obsessed with Star Trek and Doctor Who?  There’s something in the public, corporate sharing of story that develops and hones community experiences, that helps us explore more deeply what is means to be human, what it means to be community.

We’ve been pretty careful to shelter our children from the frenetic pacing of much of contemporary movies and television shows.  And I will continue to do so, but I am realizing that I also want to be careful not to stunt their opportunities for community-making through story-sharing with their peers.  Of course, I want them to create story with their friends as much as possible, which is what imaginative play is, but I also want them to have storylines to discuss and ponder with their friends.  Shared story is so important to community-making.

I feel a little like Andy Rooney on a ramble, without his skill at wrapping up the free association.  So I’ll leave you with a few pieces of my story from today, in the form of my current gratitude list.

2013 May 027

Gratitude List:
1.  That the elder patriarchs in my life are not The Patriarchy.  Such wonderful hearts, such rich meaning-making and humility and acceptance and tolerance.
2.  That the matriarchs continue to hone their voices, to lead the way into the story.  The ways they lead the charge to defend justice, to admit anger, to fiercely and joyfully protect and nurture.  Their solid practicality.
3.  Spirit, the fifth sacred thing, the wind that makes all winds that blow, the flame, the Center, the Mystery.
4.  The LCCN came for my book.  Conservative estimate is that it will be ready to purchase within a week.  I stated that with much more calm than I feel.  I am extremely excited.
5.  Being in a community where people pass babies around.  Watching the way people’s eyes change, the way their energies shift into such a tender place when they hold a baby.
6.  Bonus:  The way Jon can make me laugh by throwing out some little Jon-ism.  Still.  After more than half our lives.  I still love the way he makes me laugh.

May we walk in beauty.