Musings

Encountering Mystery

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

lily pond

Today’s gratitude list is unashamedly entirely based in the natural world, though perhaps I am speaking of other things as well, as is so often the case, even when I don’t know it.  I find that often the things that catch my attention in waking life are not so far distant from the mythic images and ideas that meet me in the dream world. There are layers of meaning in those images, ideas reaching out to be met and understood. What if we were to see the wakeful, open-eyed world in the way we looked at the dream-world? As though it were a place to encounter Mystery, as if each moment were an opportunity to be spoken to by the sentient soul of creation, which some people call Goddess or God, which I often call Mystery or Beauty (I recently discovered that naturalist John Muir did the same).

In this recent post on her blog, psychologist Sharon Blackie quotes James Hillman: “Psyche, Hillman said, is not in us; we are in psyche. And I believe that if psyche is shaped by myth, by mythical images and symbols, then myth is not in us: we are, in some deep and indefinable sense, in myth. ‘It is not we who imagine, but we who are imagined.’ What if we are not imagining myth, but myth is imagining us?” I love this.  Can you sense Myth, Mystery, God/dess, Beauty, imagining you, offering you a hand at every turn, inviting you to See, to Experience, to Encounter?

The dream worker Toko-pa Turner, in this blog post, titled “Courting the Mystery” (in which she, too, quotes Hillman) writes, “I believe one of the great challenges of our time is our coming back into relationship with mystery. Rather than making an expectation of our needs being met, let us make a courtship of that which we admire. Let us make our lives alluring enough that the mystery might become curious of us! Let us stand with a respectful distance and make an invitation of ourselves, such that wildness might decide to approach us. Let us find ways to pray ourselves to the forest, even when we hear nothing back. Let us keep returning to that silence and allow ourselves to be shaped by our yearning for answers.”

Sometimes prayer is simply the act of paying attention, of noticing the way the world calls out to us, begs for us to respond and interact and participate.  Yesterday was full of those moments for me, those callings, those shining yearning standing-in-the-doorway holy places. And I didn’t go out searching. There they were to be grasped, between the moments of bickering children, of making plans for my coming year, of getting the quotidian work done.

Now the trick is to find them even when the butterflies aren’t flying, even when the hummingbird is not dipping her head to look at me from her nest, even when the day is grey or hot, even when I am emotionally drained or angry or frightened. Beauty is still there.  Mystery is always surrounding us, just waiting to be noticed.

Gratitude List:
1. Listening to the bluebirds welcoming the morning, the song sparrow, the surrounding chorus of birds, the various clubs of cicadas powering up their drones from several corners of the hollow, and suddenly, like a shift in air pressure, the dzip-dzip-thrrrim-dzip of the hummingbird finding the perfect angle into her bottlecap of a nest.
2. Indigo buntings calling to each other across the fields.
3. Monarch and swallowtail and buckeye. Did I say monarch? Yeah, I saw one, dipping her fiery wings as she surfed a breeze over the pear orchard toward me, and it made my heart happy. So happy.
4. So many tiny frogs on the lily pads on the pond, yeeping in terror when we walked too close, croaking in the rushes. The air above the pond was electric with the movement of dragonflies and damselflies darting, and tiny frogs hopping across the lily pads.  And further up, the swallowtails made lazy lines and loops in the sunshine, spiraling all the way to the top of the tallest poplar.  I must have seen two dozen or more yellow swallowtails at the pond yesterday.
5. Watching the bat again, darting impossibly fast in her circling beneath the poplar and sycamore trees. She was so quick, my eyes couldn’t scan her. I could imagine she was winking in and out between worlds. At one point, she came and circled twice around Joss and me where we were standing snuggling. So add to this one the wonder on a small boy’s face at being recognized by a bat in flight.

In Beauty may we walk.

Instructions to Myself

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

fort2
Just two kids playing in their fort.

Instructions to Myself:
1. Make eye contact.  Even with the people you live with.  Especially with the people you live with–it’s easy to take their solid presence for granted and forget to look them in the eye.
2. Give people the smile they need.  Only some people need the broad and open smile.  Some need a quiet I-see-you smile.
3. Cultivate curiosity, not only about ideas and facts, but about people.
4. Ask.  Don’t tell. This is hard for me, because I like to tell. Learn to draw people out in conversation.
5. Don’t hide your awe. Sometimes people are just waiting for someone to show them the doorway into wonder.

Gratitude List:
1. (In Tanka)
Impossible things
that actually exist,
like the hummingbird.
how she hovers, how she hums,
how she flies like a whisper.
2. Also bats, which are creatures of impossibility.  How they dart and wheel in the circle of space underneath the poplar and sycamore trees, feasting on the wing, right here where we are, as if they enjoy our company.
3. The crisp, cooling crunch of cucumber.
4. All those owls.  Two or three screech owls whinnying in the bamboo grove, and further off, a great horned owl, echoing through the hollow.
5. The way Beauty surrounds us, taps us on the shoulder, breathes in our ears, wraps us in Her veils of wonder.

May we walk in Beauty.  Beauty ever ancient, ever new.

Presence, Recognition, and Encounter

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Cloud

Yesterday, I wrote about developing communities of spirit while living within the bounds of empire, about challenging the power that empire wields–not by running to safety or to a noiseless desert, but by tending our own inner gardens, building our own inner castles and safe havens, and reaching out to each other to support and strengthen each other in spiritual solidarity.

I have been thinking about communities of spirit in the last day, about how this community is always available in some form. I believe that everyone has the capacity for spiritual depth and inner reflection. The trick is to recognize it in each other, to call it forth in our interactions.

Each encounter with another person is a chance to make that deeper human spirit connection.  So often I just glance off the sides, live alone in my own bubble, think only in terms of getting my tasks done. You know those people who really look you in the eye? Not intrusively or forcefully, but openly and honestly. How you want to smile or nod.  How that thing happens in your brain–perhaps not even consciously–where this person clicks with you, and you know you are of the same tribe? I think that moment is when spirit calls to spirit, when we recognize each other, and we are drawn to being our best and most honest selves. I want to practice and learn to be that person, Present in each encounter, not intrusively, but openly.

Let’s practice the art of Presence and Recognition these days, shall we? When we’re with people, let’s keep the people-moment, the Encounter, at the center, and let the tasks be secondary to our experiences. Let’s call forth the spirit in each other. It’s not that every encounter has to become a deep conversation, but that that depth can be achieved even in a glance of recognition, a smile, a word. We’re the same thing, you and I. We belong in the same tribe. We have vastly different and separate experiences, but we’re parts of the same organism, and we can recognize our connection in the moments that we encounter each other.

Gratitude List:
1. The humming sound of the hummingbird.  I know that I have heard the sound before, but it is always a surprise.  “Like a rubberband thrumming,” I said.  “I think it sounds like Fred purring,” said a boy.  Of course it does.
2. Cool morning.  Cool, cool, comfortable cool.
3. Preparations. Getting ready for school.  Like tilling the soil for a field, imagining the way the small plants will begin to grow, how the green will deepen, the stems will harden, the shoots will dive upward into sky, the small hard buds will form and the flowers burst forth.  How the flowers will fade but the fruit will grow, filling out and finding its color, ripening in the sun.  Now is the time to prepare the rows, to look to the health of the soil and seed, so that the plant may have the greatest chance to grow and thrive.
4. Dark of the moon.  It’s so dark without the moon, especially when the night is hazy. (I tried to do a tree pose last night out in the darkness, and I could not find my balance–in the darkness I simply could not balance. I wonder what that is about?) How our own hearts echo the shifts in the cosmos, ready for the time of waxing to fullness.
5. Resolve. Will. Determination.

May we walk in Beauty!

Living in the Empire

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Tomatoes

Tomato season is upon us.  Those speckled romans in the upper right hand corner appear to have done a little hybridizing with the Amish pastes–so many of them are chunky and round.

I had a conversation with a wise man yesterday (my father).  My book on the desert mothers and fathers caught his eye, and he told me about what he had read about the movement of these communities into the deserts of what is now Syria and Palestine and Egypt–that they appear to have been reacting to the Christianization of empire in the 4th and 5th centuries.  Watching how their spiritual path had been taken and used to unify people under military and nationalistic banners, they chose instead to retreat into the deserts.

We got to talking about how our own direct spiritual ancestors, Mennonite Anabaptists in Switzerland in the 1500s, were also confronting the ways in which faith and spirituality had become a tool of empire and state-building. They refused to baptize their babies into the state church, choosing to untangle their spiritual story from the story of the religious city-states.  Many of them paid with their lives.  Many of them fled that empire for the new world.

Today, I think we also live in a time of empire-building, when the engines of state appropriate and exploit spiritual dogmas in order to consolidate power.  We have no desert to flee to, no new world that holds the promise of a life lived according to principle outside the boundaries of empire.  And perhaps flight is not what is called for in these days.  Perhaps the work of today demands that our desert monastic cells and our new world communities be villages of spirit, grounded inside ourselves.  Perhaps our work is to build and strengthen what St. Teresa of Avila, in the 1500s called the Interior Castle, the spaces inside ourselves that experience the life of the spirit in deep communion with the Great Mystery, a place where political and empirical powers hold no sway.

And then, how does the tending of our own inner gardens inform our daily living in the empire?  How will I explore my anxieties and concerns about things like elections and drone warfare and poverty and refugees in light of my inner journey?  How will I act in the outer world, if I am informed by my own inner amma in her quiet desert cell?  What will our communities of spirit look like here, within the belly of the empire, if we do not set ourselves apart in desert communities or sail away to a new land?  How do we keep our circles wide and inviting, our conversations holy and uplifting, our actions principled and full of resolve?

The movement of spirit that I see today is not defined by a singular religious group or sect.  It crosses religious boundaries.  The Muslim seeker and the Christian seeker, the Sikh, the witch, the Buddhist, the agnostic, and the universalist–it is one spirit community, working together to live with intention and purpose, with compassion and wisdom, calling forth that longing to experience the life of the spirit within each other and with everyone they meet.

Gratitude List:
1. I found the hummingbird nest yesterday.  It’s been a couple years since I found one.  I just happened to be looking at the right place at the right moment when she flew in and settled on her nest.  What a miracle of existence is the hummingbird.
2. This seems petty, but it’s a biggish deal to me: the warning lights in the Prius went off.  I decided to drive her for small errands yesterday because we couldn’t get a car appointment until this morning.  After two or three stops, she stopped giving me panicky lights.  My mechanic says to just keep watching for the lights and hope she was just resetting something.  I was afraid of a huge repair bill.
3. The inner work.  Knowing you’re out there, and so many others are with us, tending our inner gardens, building and connecting communities of spirit.
4. How sleep refreshes.  I felt really run down yesterday.  Jon said maybe I didn’t eat enough.  I thought maybe it was the humidity.  My bones ached.  I thought I might never feel rested again.  A good sleep has done the trick this time.
5. Inter-species friendship.  Here’s Fred, talking to me about breakfast.  I had to give him my attention and respond to his questions and snuggle and feed him.  Now he has settled quietly into the chair right beside me, companionably.  What a great guy.

May we walk in Beauty!

Suggested Readings

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

peacock

In the wake of the political conventions, I’ve been looking at what has been happening inside myself.

Because of the sense of doom that I feel about Donald Trump as a political candidate, I have allowed myself to fall again into snarky and mean talk about the candidate.  It’s so easy, right?  And somehow it begins to feel that if I say it all loud enough and long enough, the people who are supporting him will listen up.  But that’s how he himself maneuvers his own agenda onto the landscape–repeat, loud and long, and repeat again.  We aren’t going to bring about a revolution of respect and justice and simple goodness by standing around blustering and yelling, no matter how cathartic it feels.  This article by Omid Safi (click here) on the On Being blog spoke to me about keeping the discourse on a high level.  As Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.”

Also, because I have been a supporter of Bernie Sanders, I have been feeling a struggle within as I watched the DNC.  On one hand, I relate powerfully to those angry, grieving Sanders supporters who wouldn’t settle down and get on with business.  On the other, I was annoyed at how the booing and the grutzing came across on the national screen as belligerent and fractious–there has to be a better way to carry the revolution into the next stage than through petty disruptions.  I also noticed within myself a real turning toward Hillary Clinton, a sudden eagerness to throw in my towel with her camp, an excited delight to finally vote for a woman for president.  Still, it was extremely helpful to me to have a thoughtful conservative friend question me very politely about how wary of her I have been in the past because of her connections to mega-corporations and her support of Monsanto and big ag.  This morning I got around to reading this really insightful article from my friend Jonathan Matthew Smucker (click here) about how the political polarization these days tends to be along populist/establishment lines rather than simply along conservative/liberal lines.  I will vote for Hillary in November, but I will not do so with a sense of having sold out my progressive values or embraced politics-as-usual.  I will vote for her because a Democratic landscape will offer a more open field for progressive ideas to flourish and grow than the fascist landscape offered by her opponent.  (And I will smile as I do it, because I finally get to vote for a woman, and that, too, is revolutionary.)

Gratitude List:
1. That vaseful of peacock feathers we came home to.  Someone left them on the table in the garage.  If it was you, thank you!
2. Playing up at Sam Lewis State Park with the family, climbing rocks, launching the flying toys we bought at NASA, playing Sharks and Humans on the jungle gym (the sharks always win).
3. This beautiful place where we live, how rolling hill leads to valley and hollow, which leads to rolling hill and rolling hill, off into the distance, with skuthers of mist and fog caught between.  The River.  The broad valley across the way.
4. Re-interpretation.  Finding new and satisfying ways to say old things.
5. That Rose of Sharon bush out there, white and pink and violet flowers shining out all over.

May we walk in Beauty!

Being Unsettled

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Muir

I’m not sure that watching the conventions or reading the analyses of the US election campaigns is helping me to feel any sense of ease about our upcoming vote.  I have lots of random thoughts:

–I feel really bad for the sensible conservatives.  While I don’t agree with people like Kasich on many issues, I think he would have been a really thoughtful person to run.  Respectable.  I wish there were an outlet for conservative people with good ideas to slip out from behind the current wall of bombast and rhetoric.
–I feel really bad for the sensible liberals, too.  I disagree with Hillary Clinton on many issues.  Still, it feels as though I can vote on the liberal side, with the hope that Sanders and Warren will continue to keep the conversation real.  I think it is going to be important for the sensible liberals to hold tightly to their ideals in the coming months.
–I feel especially bad for the sensible progressives.  Still, I think that there is at least a platform for their voices to be heard.
–I hate that my vote is partly an anti-vote.
–I love Brooks and Shields: i trust their analysis of politics.  They don’t get caught up in the rhetoric of either side.
–The Obamas are really satisfying speech-makers: intellectual, thoughtful, compassionate, aware of the world.
–Bill Clinton is an amazing storyteller.  I don’t know if I trust him, but I enjoy listening to his stories.
–I was not particularly impressed with Bloomberg’s speech as a speech, but he did speak to me, and I remembered that I have been a registered Independent.  I think I might do that again.
–It’s hard to listen to the “Greatest Nation” rhetoric, the nationalism and militarism that seeps into most of the speeches.
–As a pacifist, perhaps I cannot ethically vote at all for a commander in chief. I think that this is a tension that I should keep alive within myself if I am to participate in the US political process. Even though I have appreciated quite a lot about Barack Obama as a president, I have been deeply disturbed by his use of drones.
–I like speeches that call us to be our best selves, that remind us of great thinkers and doers of the past.

Gratitude List:
1. Being unsettled: I don’t really like it, but I think the discomfort helps to keep the ideals alive.
2. Children playing in the water together, catching and cooking crabs for their supper, working together to engineer the payload on a hypothetical NASA project.
3. New birds.  The delicate black-necked stilt.  The scarlet beak of the oyster catcher.
4. Our incredible farm crew
5. Bridges, causeways, liminal spaces.  Shall we stand together on the bridges and in the doorways?
6. The names we all choose for the different types of puzzle pieces.  We use different words, but we

May we walk in Beauty!

How He Sees Himself

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How he sees himself
How he sees himself. (The children have been experimenting with the Dreamscope app.)

Today is going to be a departure.  I’m going to post a recipe.  The idea was that I was going to use whatever I could find from our farm share extras table to make a pasta dish, and I wanted to use up the leftover bechamel sauce from an experiment.  I think you could easily mix and match whatever veggies you have on the counter or in the freezer.  This is a good way to work with the veggies in a CSA share. Had I know that someone would leave their broccoli share, I would have added some of that, too.  The only vegetable that did not come from Goldfinch Farm was the onion, which was an aromatic and juicy vidalia.  I have been chopping my vegetables quite finely lately, because the children find it more of a bother to push them to the sides when we are eating.

Jon has been buying hearty pastas: orecchiette and casareese have been our favorites.  I chose the casareese for last night’s supper, but any favorite pasta would do, I think.  I did like the sturdiness of this pasta in last night’s dinner.

It takes three different pans, which is the biggest drawback to this, but they all cleaned up quickly. The process sounds a little complicated, but it did not take long.

Here is what I used:
2 Tbsp. butter, for sauteeing vegetables (you could use your oil of choice instead)
1 onion, chopped
1/4 tsp. cumin (or whatever amount you want)
2 red peppers, finely chopped (green would do)
1 generous handful green beans, chopped
2 summer squash, chopped (I used one green and one yellow)
salt, pepper

2 garlic scapes, minced (garlic cloves would work, too)
2 Tbsp. butter
2 Tbsp. flour (I used white bread flour for this)
2 c. milk (I tend to use less milk than it calls for)
3/4 c. cheddar cheese, grated
salt, pepper
dash of chili powder
dash of paprika
leaves of three sprigs of fresh basil, minced

1 box casareese pasta (or another favorite)

Large handful of cherry tomatoes, halved (we use sungolds, or chopped fresh large tomatoes would work, too)

Chop and prepare veggies.
Cook the pasta according to directions. While the water is heating, begin cooking the veggies.

In a large, sturdy frying pan, heat butter. When bubbly, add onion.  Sprinkle on a bit of salt, and cook until fragrant and almost translucent.  Add peppers and cumin.  Stir and cook a minute longer.  Add green beans and continue cooking on fairly low temp.  When green beans are softening, add squash, and cook until squash is just beginning to wilt.

For sauce, heat 2 Tbsp. butter in a small pan until bubbly.  Add garlic scapes, and stir until aromatic but not scorched. Add a little salt and pepper. Add flour to absorb the butter, and cook on low temp until it turns a gentle beige.  Slowly add milk, stirring after each quarter cup or so, smoothing and thickening at each step.  When all the milk has been smoothed in and sauce is thickening, stir in the chili powder and paprika, then the basil.  Turn off the burner, and fold in the cheese until it is melted throughout.

Toss pasta and vegetables with sauce.  Top each serving with several halved cherry tomatoes.

Gratitude List:
1. Bats! Flitting around in the gloaming, eating up those mosquitos.  Bats. They have changed their roosting spot this year, and I haven’t been able to see them almost daily like I have for the past couple summers.  But they’re still here.
2. Mimosa trees.  The colors keep coming.  I always think of Dr. Seuss when I see a mimosa tree in bloom.  I think the faeries are particularly fond of mimosa trees.  I know the pollinators are, and perhaps that’s the same thing.
3. Pollinators.  I have been sighing at the loss of the honeybee hives this year.  Both hives died out over the winter, and because we had initially planned not to farm this year, we did not rent another set.  I have noticed the scarcity of the Little Sisters this season.  Still, there are many others pollinators, busy in the flowers and the fields, happily abuzz.
4. Wings, feathers, flying things.  Which is to say, healing, on its way to so many whom I love.
5. The Dreammaker.  I think I will make a new doll to personify the dream-vision process.

May we walk in Beauty!

Watch Out for the Gremlins!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

clash
Here is a little bit of a thought experiment I am doing on myself: My mother gave me this visually delicious bouquet of lisianthus yesterday.  I put it on the table with my bowl of prayer stones.  I’ve made my peace with orange/pink combinations and learned to really savor the complexity.  Instead of this image being jarring, I find it full of energy and life. Still, I hesitated to post it because I have a feeling that it’s sort of socially unacceptable.  Funny, isn’t it?  Even posting a photo of a pink flower on an orange backdrop makes some little gremlin in the back of my head start to chatter about being judged.  Those are the sorts of gremlins I am trying to weed out–they pop up in the strangest of situations.

Gremlins like this can be pretty insidious, and we don’t always know we are responding to them. This was a fairly innocuous one–easy to identify and easy to quash, but it’s not always that way. Powerful little critters, they weasel into the subconscious workings of the brain, and jump out to convince us that we look really ridiculous or that everyone is going to think that comment just now was completely stupid.  They get really insidious because they start working the other way, too.  They make us care so much about what other people are thinking of us, that we start to judge other people on their crazy criteria.

Part of learning to be whole, learning to be awake, part of walking toward wisdom, is to name the gremlins along with the blessings.  This one that I am looking at is a petty little fiend, and I am a little embarrassed to show him to you, but there he is.  (Next one’ll be a she, I promise. I think she might even be hiding within these parentheses.)  Now to pull out my magic wand and banish socialus awkwardus. . .at least for the time being.

Isn’t that pink flower on an orange background just sort of invigorating?

Gratitude List:
1. Lisianthus
2. The ongoing discussion yesterday, about despair/hope, about holding the furious opposites together, about paradox.
3. My parents, and their continuing dedication to engaging the hard questions, to inviting new conversation.
4. The poets.  All of them, always.  Today: Rilke and Rumi and Oriah Mountain Dreamer.
5. A fresh week.  A clean page.  A shining moment of sunshine.  I can make anything of it that I choose.

May we walk in Beauty!

Interlocking Prayers

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Ent
I want the strength and comfort of this tree these days.  She is one of the ent-folk, I am sure of that, with a gnarled and twisted trunk and veils of leaves.

Oh, Turkey! Friends, we have such a big bowl of hurt to hold these days.
It helps if we all hold it together, I think.
Interlock our prayers like fingers, like bright threads.
This one for Turkey,
this for Nice,
that for your friend who is caught in a cycle of despair,
this for my friend who is waiting for her new heart,
for our cousins and companions who are anxious and worried
as they tend to their loved ones who are ill,
for those who lead us in the fight against racism every day,
for Baghdad, for Bangladesh, for Istanbul again.
For those baby birds who are fledging.
I will add some bright stones that I found in the bean patch today,
some feathers that found me on my walk,
the bright yellow faces of toadflax.
Will you add your rainbow, your twinkling eyes, your hopeful smile?

Gratitude List:
1. (What has awakened you?) Keeping my heart focused on the Noticing, in inner and outer worlds.  Also, laughter.
2. (How have you encountered Mystery?) In the calling of the young red-tail–the cycle of life always continues.
3. (What has given you cause for wonder?) Watching children create ideas in their heads and then make them with their hands.
4. (What has nudged you forward?) The constancy of work to be done, in many different places.  Learning to juggle the work.
5. (What do you offer the day?) More holding, more noticing, more listening.  Laughter.  I will find laughter in the day.  Also, twinkling eyes–I will seek out twinkles.

May we walk in Beauty!

Almost Paradise

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almost paradise

What a gift it is to have lifetime friends, people you can sit with and say, “Remember when you said. . .?  Remember what she did. . .?  Remember how he used to always. . .?”

People you can look in the eye and see not only a reflection of who you are in this moment, but also a reflection of who you have been–a year ago, five, ten, twenty.

People who know too much about you, who remember you before you settled adulthood’s masks into place, and they still love you, love you more for who you’ve been and who you’ve become.

People you can look at and see the butterfly of the now, but in whom can you identify the caterpillar of the past–and you love the butterfly, and the caterpillar, too.

People who know just which questions to ask.

People who help you live in this moment–with their laughter, their thoughtful eyes, their conversation.  People who draw you into the realm of memory.  People who help you envision the future.  People who help you to live in all those layers at once.

Gratitude List:
1. Living in those layers of time (past, present, future) with people I love and trust
2. People who know my warts and rough edges and love me anyway
3. The way the next generation at reunions also gathers with ease and comfort, enjoying each other
4. Peaches and ice cream
5. Crisp, cool mornings

May we walk in Beauty!