Musings

Responding to Criticism

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

If you have not yet read Toko-pa Turner’s Belonging, or found your way to her blog, you need to find some quiet time to get there today. I follow her on Facebook, and find that I am often moved and inspired by her writings. This morning, I reread her post from last year, about criticism.

Criticism is essential to our being shaped as creative individuals. Given respectfully, criticism can be one of the most precious gifts in the world. But there are those critics who talk just be contrary, or to parade their own virtue.

Learning to differentiate between cheap and meaningful criticism is a huge part of becoming resilient. You can tell the difference between a critic who is an ally, and one who is a frustrated creative themselves, by how thoughtfully they deliver their reflections. An ally-critic will take as much care in offering you their reflections as you did in creating your offering.

If what they say resonates for you, even in an uncomfortable way, it’s meaningful criticism. Criticism like this will help shape you into a better writer, a better artist, a better person. But if it’s delivered with poison or shame, and doesn’t connect with some similar part of yourself, then it isn’t worth giving your energy to.

Just because the voice of your critics is loud, doesn’t mean it’s valuable. But how do you not let a cheap criticism get under your skin? In a way, you don’t have to. Even cheap criticism can serve you in that it forces you to articulate, even for yourself, what you stand for.

Resilience involves trusting in the goodness of your intention. There is a vibratory signature on everything we create, and this signature will be recognized by anyone who is on the same wavelength as you.

None of us are perfect, but if you are trying your best and putting your imperfect thing into the world, you are already defying the odds.

So be willing to be seen, that others who need what you’re bringing will be emboldened to also give their gifts. You won’t die from criticism. Either it will shape you into a better version of yourself, or give you an opportunity to pivot towards what you really value.

By Toko-pa Turner (toko-pa.com)

In recent weeks, I have been gnawing at a particular critical package that was dropped in my lap. It was in the “People are saying. . .” form. I felt the hit of it, and then I tried to name all the visitors it brought with it: Defensiveness, Anger, Hurt Pride, a Rising Sense of Justice. I talked and listened to wise people. I tried to accept what was mine and lay down what belonged to others. The problem with the “People are saying. . .” criticism is that you cannot respond directly to the original critics. You can only defend yourself to the messenger, who is someone I deeply respect.

I’m not looking for defense or sympathy here. This is all just to frame how deeply Toko-pa’s words hit me this morning, particularly the piece about how, even when criticism is unwarranted, it can bring about helpful changes within. In the weeks that I have been carrying this little load, I have continued to check in with myself, to make sure that I am working out of my deepest and best self, and as I have sorted out what is mine to pick up and change from what is mine to let go and walk away from, I have been more carefully articulating my own visions and ideas about what it means to be an advocate for change. It has set me moving more intentionally into critiquing my own privilege. “Even cheap criticism,” Toko-pa says, “can serve you in that it forces you to articulate, even for yourself, what you stand for.”

And then those last three paragraphs offer me a map for how to proceed with resilience, how to step forward in my truth, without looking around to see whether others are clucking their tongues and wagging their fingers. (Ah. See. I still have some work to do. It felt pretty good to write that last sentence, like a little dig at my faceless critics. It’s easier, when my criticisms come to me secondhand, to make jibes at people I don’t “know.”)

Gratitude List:
1. When someone else’s words come at the moment you need them.
2. It might be cold, but we’re not snowed in like we were last year.
3. I think we’re finally getting the new (used) car today. (We’ve had our quota of deer-related accidents now. No more, please.)
4. Music from the 70s and 80s–really, it’s always a mood boost.
5. The deeply compassionate and concerned hearts of my students. A group of students have been talking to me lately about the Rodney Reed saga. They are researching and reading up on the story, and speaking out. Watching teenagers find their voices and speak with social conscience is one of the incredibly rewarding things about my job.

May we walk in Beauty.

Skid into Winter

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

All those mornings when I danced inside the story of Inanna, writing and rewriting to try to get it just right–more than simple summary, but not quite a short story. And now, I stand at these death-like gates of winter, and say, “Don’t make me go in there. Don’t make me go in there. Don’t make me go in there.”

But there is no way out but through. More layers. More hot drinks. More time in front of the happy lamps. But Inanna relinquished and relinquished and relinquished. What emblems of my own power are required from me during this descent? This one doesn’t feel like a gentle descent, either. It’s a skid and a tumble. One day, the sun came slanting quietly through branches, and the next, the shadows reach out and grab at my ankles. One day, there was a pleasant and bracing chill to the air, and the next, the cold wraps me in steel fingers.

Okay, so I am being a little dramatic, but speaking the inner drama helps me to see it, to not get carried down the drain, but to acknowledge that it’s my feelings. I don’t have to live the whole winter in a cloud. The seasonal shift is much harder this year, harder than it’s been in a long time, but it doesn’t have to spool itself out into numbness like it does when it sneaks up slowly. It’s important to acknowledge that this precipitous dip into winter is hard, but maybe it’s like that clunk in my stomach when the roller coaster dives, and I can settle into this and remember how to appreciate this season. Breathe.

Gratitude List:
1. Remembering that I have done this for forty-plus years of my life. I can survive winter.
2. A new (to me) book came in the mail yesterday. Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Kramer’s Inanna. This one is even signed by Wolkstein herself!
3. The colors of oak trees. The maples have given up, but the oaks persist, and their color is so rich and deep. (I will try to be an oak as I approach this season.)
4. Biscuits. Comfort food.
5. Students and colleagues. Shining lights in the day.

Walk in Beauty!

Unintended Changes

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Yesterday afternoon, I was taking a little break and decided to flip through various WordPress themes and accidentally saved a new format. I suppose that’s as good a way as any to force me to adapt and update and change. I’ll take it. It means that the page might be in flux for a little while as I keep tweaking themes and ideas. I’ll try to settle it over the weekend sometime when I have a little more opportunity to focus on it.

Last evening, I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Leroy Hopkins talk about the Columbia area’s history of resistance to slavery, specifically through the Underground Railroad. Most of the abolitionists who were actively shuttling people north through the area on the Underground Railroad were black, he said. Dr. Hopkins is a rare genius, with a wealth of information and connections to draw from. I really struggle with going out into the dark and the cold in this season of the year, and it was a real challenge for me to actually go, but I am glad I did.

Gratitude List:
1. Historians
2. People who fight for the safety and wellbeing and rights of others
3. The story Dr. Hopkins told last night of a group of 100 African American women from Columbia who marched to the Hotel Bletz in Mountville to rescue a group of enslaved people. This has captured my imagination. There really should be a ballad.
4. Opening: hearts, windows, minds, doors, possibilities
5. Cardigans and kindness

May we walk in Beauty!

Spiraling Inward

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
It isn’t a labyrinth, exactly, although it serves the same prayerful purpose. If you look closely and use your imagination, you can see that I shuffled a spiral in to the base of the maple tree.

November was going to be for morning serious writing sessions for me. I was going to get right down to writing, first thing, before the household wakes up. Somehow it hasn’t quite unfolded with the grace I had hoped for. My mornings have been more frantic and last minute as I try to rearrange my brain from that deep space to the focus of the day. Easier to continue to focus my morning writing on the quick little projects that I usually work on. I don’t feel like this is a failure so much as a recognition that the work that I normally do in this time is all writing practice. It’s just not writing toward a particular end goal. I have to find a different time of day for the goal-centered writing.

And editing. This is not the first time I have been working with the goddesses who descend–with Innana/Ishtar, with Persephone–and I feel a little like I am rewriting, like what I need to to organize what I have already written before I start the new stories.

Today, I am going to set myself a little writing goal. I am going to write Skinny poems: They’re eleven lines long. Line 1 is a phrase that catches your attention. Lines 2-10 are one word each. Lines 2, 6, and 10 are the same word. Line 11 uses the exact same words as the phrase in line 1, and these can be in any order that works for you. Le Hinton introduced us to this form on Friday, and it’s captured my attention, especially since I have gone googling Le’s Skinnys.

Gratitude List:
1. Inner work that helps me to bear the walk into the darkness.
2. I received a sweet gratitude from a student yesterday, something that reminded me of who I am and what my purpose is.
3. Yellow labyrinth-spiral of leaves beneath the maple tree.
4. Reaching small goals.
5. Rice and refried beans wrapped in a tortilla with all the fixings. It’s simple comfort.

May we walk in Beauty!

Drowning, Not Drowning

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

On Saturday, I began a poem as I was sitting in the last of the author presentations at the Millersville Literary Festival. I wrote, “I didn’t even know I was drowning.” It’s true. I knew I was searching for something, trying to break out of ruts, to focus my scattershot writing process, to find others like me. I’ve been resisting settling into my identity of Teacher because there has been this other powerful identity pushing up like a long-dormant wisdom tooth, painfully shoving everything else to the side. I call myself Poet, but I don’t seem to know what that means. I secretly call myself Writer, but I don’t know how to create a picture of that in my life, one that means Me. Here’s the blog, there’s a stack of 200-some poems that are essentially unpublishable because I have already published them on the blog and on Facebook, over there is the half-plotted novel with a couple of messy chapters hanging out of its drawers, and over there another half-formed, half-written book on magic and spirituality and the Wheel of the Year.

I’m not sure entirely what that life preserver consists of, but I felt it within my grasp at the exact moment that I realized I have been sinking. Community of writers, perhaps–the theme of the festival. There are others like me, teaching and writing and parenting, feeling the pressures of all the pieces, and still forging forward. I’ve spent the last six years feeling like I was putting the real Writer in the backseat so I could focus on being the Teacher, and the ten years before that squelching the Writer so I could be Mother and Farmer.

It’s time to begin swimming with both arms, and to kick with my feet. Stop pretending that I am just a pretender. Live into the Writer’s identity, so that I can stop fighting being the Teacher, and let them dance together. Let them both hold me up.

sI didn’t realize I was drowning until I was no longer drowning. Take a deep gulp of air, slip into the circle of that glorious floaty ring, whatever its name is, swim with both arms and kick with my feet. Here we go.

And here are some poets and writers you need to research: Ewa Chrusciel, Julie Doxsee, Maria James Thiaw, Meghan Kenny, Le Hinton, Barbara Strasko, Shawna Stoltzfoos, Tyler Barton.

Gratitude List:
1. Writers. Storytellers. Poets. Visionaries. Thinkers.
2. The life preserver
3. That particular red of certain oak leaves in early November
4. Considering the stories of the goddesses who descend–Ishtar/Inanna, Persephone–and Mother Holle, who mentors the young women who seek themselves within their depths
5. Giving myself permission

May we walk in Beauty!

DIY Mythmaking and a New Poetic Form

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

I’ve been thinking about my poetic process, looking through some of the neglected poems that I want to figure out how to publish, and realizing that quite a number of my poems are myth-making poems. I use poetry as a DIY Mything process, taking my own experiences and observations and transmuting them into myths. This thought is tangling with the threads of my current morning writing project of working with the Inanna story. Storytelling, writing, speaking–this whole language gig–is all about how we make meaning in the world. Art, too, as a communicative process, is about charging existence with meaning.

Gratitude List:
1. Meaning-making, DIY Myth-making, poetry, art, communication
2. Participating in a Literary Festival, listening, learning, absorbing
3. Good writing
4. How the sun shines in
5. Oak trees

May we walk in Beauty!

I’ve been thinking again about the process of poetry. In my AP Literature class recently, I have had the students choose a poetic form, no matter how lofty and traditional or edgy and nonsensical, to teach to the class. We’ve had some delightful lessons this week, learning the Magic 9 and the Nonet and the Rondeau and the Fib, among others. Yesterday, we found ourselves with a little extra time after the presentations, and we were ready to do our own thing, so we spent half the period creating our own poetic form! We developed our own rules for our own Lit Poetic Form. The process was delicious and intensely collaborative. At the end, we came up with this:

Lit Poem
Two stanzas of seven lines each.
It’s a word-count poem, with the following pattern:
Stanza 1: 1, 3, 5, 7, 5, 3, 1 (It makes a diamond shape)
Stanza 2: 7, 5, 3, 1, 3, 5, 7 (This one makes an hourglass form)
When you put them together, they look somewhat like a lit candle. (Get it?)
The rhyme scheme goes like this:
Stanza 1: abcxcba (in which x is random and unrhymed)
Stanza 2: cbaxabc (in which x is also random, and not necessarily rhymed with the first x)

This is how we make meaning. We spent twenty minutes collaboratively creating a world, complete with its order and purpose. Now we have to write the poems to prove its viability.

Wandering in the Myth

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This morning, I decided to just dive into the myth that has been calling me, and I spent my writing time working on the story of Inanna/Ishtar, pondering the way her descent into the Underworld mirrors my own inward travels as the year turns cold and dark. I think this one will keep me busy for the rest of the week and beyond.

What symbols of your personal power and wisdom and authority are you prepared to relinquish as you circle downward into the deepest realm of your own inner knowing?

Gratitude List:
1. Myths and stories that frame and guide our own daily journeys
2. Small breaks
3. Seeking the fire within
4. Anticipation
5. Layers and layers of warm clothes

May we walk in Beauty!

Combustible

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

On these November days, instead of writing a daily poem, as I have for most of the past eight Novembers, I am writing short pieces of prose: fiction, meditation, dream. This morning’s piece was simply a telling of last night’s dream:

Combustible

The hillsides are covered with loosely growing trees, not quite close enough to be woods, and yet woods, for all that. Some places are woodsy enough that no sky shows through, though there is space enough between to see through them down the hillside to where the paths curve and separate. To the east, the trees open out toward bare grassy hillside and the smell of the sea. In the shade at the edges of the wood, three tidy white-washed Baba Yaga huts stand on stilts in a sandy courtyard, and further off, beyond the first grassy hill, smoke rises from a little village.

The trees are sinewy and resinous, Mediterannean, not pine—more like laurel, if laurel were thirty feet tall. The trunks are thin and many-branched, but open, and the leaves are mostly at the crowns, letting light filter magically through. All is green and blue and twinkling golden. Though there are no people, there is the sense of people, the presence of people doing people things.

In your head, a soundtrack starts to play, a woman’s voice talking about a sudden and catastrophic event, how one moment one notices the short bursts of steam rising from individual trees, curiously taking in the strange phenomenon, and then, suddenly, the whole wood will combust, not a long-burning, raging conflagration, but a whoosh of fire that’s there one moment, and in the next is gone, leaving bare and charred hillsides. You wonder why there are no signs to warn visitors off the paths. And then you notice the explosive bursts of mist and steam puffing from random trees on the hillside below you. Should you start to get nervous? If the voice is correct, it could happen at any moment. But you are entranced, curious, unable to give yourself to fear. You turn onto a path that leads up the hill toward the Baba Yaga courtyard, intending to explore the little huts, to see if anyone lives there. At the edge of the courtyard a long tube suddenly rises, like a cannon being aimed for a blast, and powerful jet of water bursts into the air, raining down on the little houses, raining down on you, sparkling through the sunlight, wetting the trees. Looking back the way you came, you can see several more of the water cannons discharging their spray through the groves and woods covering the lower hillsides.

You wander through the small village beyond the Baba Yaga houses, where people wander, eating foods from the markets, taking pictures beside the quiet houses, murmuring to each other. You look back over the hillsides where you have been wandering, and the trees have vanished. At the edge of the village, the green grass ends at bare soil. Everything is gone. Despite the water precautions, the woods and pathways are gone. An enormous yellow bulldozer rumbles over the destroyed land.

Gratitude List:
1. Dreams and their messages
2. Many sources of light
3. The lull after the grading storm. There’s so much more to do, but after a weekend of fierce grading, I took a break last night and rested.
4. The line of orange light along the horizon at dawn
5. New England clam chowder when it is made well

May we walk in Beauty!

Finding Your Wings

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Gratitude List:
1. Feeling my wings
2. Grades are ready to submit for Quarter 1. How have we gotten here already?
3. Breath. It’s always there when I need it, and more effective than sugar or coffee for a quick lift.
4. Keeping the resolve
5. The tunnel to Faerie up in the orchard, between the pear and cherry trees.

May we walk in Beauty! Breathe.

Sit in a quiet place, calm and undisturbed. Shift yourself into place. Let your upper body fidget a bit.  Shrug and stretch, stretch your spine upwards, making little breathing spaces between all the bone. Sigh. Yawn. Sigh audibly. Settle your bones, making sure your ribcage is straight, your shoulders are restful, your hips are aligned.

Now begin to notice your breath as it enters and leaves the space of your body. Notice where your body rests on the chair, the floor, the earth. As you hold your awareness on your points of contact with earth, begin to draw the breath into your whole body. Breathe not only into your lungs, but into your stomach.

Feel the breath enliven your ribs and your gut. Breathe into the muscles and bones of your arms. Draw it down over your shoulders, swirling down your arms and down to your fingertips. As you breathe out, feel the breath flow out the tips of your fingers.

Draw breath down your spine. Let it flow out the base of your spine. Breathe it into your thighs and down your legs. Wiggle your toes and ankles as the breath fills your feet and trickles out the soles of your feet into the earth.

Breathe. And breathe. And breathe

Now shuffle your upper body once again, like a bird re-adjusting its feathers, and find your way to stillness, letting the breath continue to circulate through you.

Bring your attention to your back. Sit up a little straighter and pull your shoulders back. Can you sense your shoulder blades back there? These are your wingbuds. Breathe into them and out through them. Shift your shoulders as you need to, to maintain your awareness of them.

Feel or imagine them beginning to itch, to swell, to pulse with life. Feel the moment when a small, folded pair of wings bursts through the surface, like the tiny curl of a plant breaking through soil, or a small bird breaking out of an egg. As they grow larger with each breath, notice their color, their texture. Don’t rush to unfold them. Let them develop. Feel them in the space behind you. Roll your shoulders forward. Shrug. Give them space.

Then, when you are ready, on a breath, lift them upward and out. Feel their strength. Feel the way they lift you. Practice opening them and folding them. Notice how they become invisible when you fold them up, how you will be able to go about your normal life with your wings folded against your shoulders and back, and only those who Know will know.

Now when you need them, to give you strength, to help you move from one stuck place to a new open field—when you need to escape—when you need to see something from a distance, to change your perspective—now they will be there for you. All you have to do is to breathe into them, hear them rustle in the space behind you, stretch, and open.

Rescuing Cassandra

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

Hear the story of Cassandra: She longed to serve the goddess Athena, to give herself to wisdom and law, to craft and mathematics, to courage and strategy and skill. Athena offered her a life filled with the tools and the skills of her own empowerment, her own scholarship. In Athena’s worship, she could follow the trails of her own curiosity and speak the truths she encountered.
Enter Apollo. As patriarchs so often are, he grew jealous of the woman’s devotion to the women’s ways, fearful of truths spoken that issued from sources not under his control. He offered Cassandra music and poetry, promised her the gift of prophecy if only she would serve him instead, a beautiful bird in his golden cage, there to do his bidding and sing his songs instead of her own. Safe. But the safety he promised was his, for her inner knowing, her self-assurance threatened the ego that wanted control of everything. The wisdom of women was mysterious to him, and the mystery disconcerted him and terrified.
So he cursed her. Although she refused him, still he gave her the gift of prophecy he had offered, and she would always speak true. Her voice would ring out in the marketplace, telling the story of what was to be. But the curse was this: her voice would not be heeded. As happens in the belly of any patriarchy, the woman’s voice was ignored and discounted. Old wives’ tales! they scoffed. Cassandra is making things up, looking for attention. Pay her no mind.
And the fire she saw and spoke of engulfed the city. The mercenaries and looters and kidnappers swarmed the streets as she had foreseen. They broke the ten-year siege, and overthrew the city. Cassandra herself became a pawn of the men in their men’s war, a tool of their scheming.
Heed Cassandra, Friends. Listen to her words. Perhaps we can yet rescue her from Apollo’s clutches.

Gratitude List:
1. The Cassandras who will not be silenced, who speak even when threatened, even when they are ignored.
2. Circles of beloveds.
3. Speaking it out loud. Telling the story that itches to get out.
4. The magic of wind and water, fire and air. Everywhere we look, there is magic.
5. Lights at the ends of tunnels.

May we speak our Truth.