Musings

The Doorway of the Dark

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

young

Now we enter the doorway of the dark, step across the threshold of the year into the dreaming time, the time of release and letting go, the time of journeying to the underworld.

In spiritual and community traditions across the globe, this is the season of remembering, of bringing to mind the ones we have loved who are no longer with us. It is a time to hold to our griefs close to our hearts, and to release them to the winds, like leaves. Some say that these are the days when the veil between worlds is thin, when our connection to those we’ve loved and lost may we stronger, more real.

Yesterday in my church, this took the form of a ritual of memory and grief. We came together and we spoke of loss, and we remembered together. We lit candles and we heard story and we sang.

For the past couple weeks, the robins having been settling in at the dusk each evening here in the hollow. There’s a wild chattering in the treetops, and the wingfolk draw a complex web of lines across the hollow, sailing short distances from tree to tree, tree to tree. It’s like a playground full of excitable children.

What would our webs look like, were they all made visible? Connecting point to connecting point–what lines are drawn between ourselves and those who have gone before, between ourselves and others in the world today?

I draw a line between myself and my first immigrant ancestors, the Weavers leaving persecution in Germany and settling on farms in the Weaverland Valley, invited to grow crops and flourish in this good soil, the Schlabachs making a similar move to Ohio’s fertile plains. What did they know of the ones who had farmed the land before them?

I draw a line between myself and the Water Protectors on the Dakota plains, from the Susquehanna, river of my heart, to the Missouri, whose waters are endangered by the black oil snake that approaches nearer with every passing day. I draw the line to their ancestors, the First People on these lands. This line travels through broken treaties, through colonial suppression, through Wounded Knee, through Little Big Horn. Their work today looks oh-so-frighteningly similar.

What does it mean to come from a persecuted people? To identify as the descendant of those who were forced to leave their homeland in search of safety? That is the story I live by.

What does it mean that those very travelers, those refugee wanderers seeking safety and freedom to baptize as they believed–what does it mean that they settled land where others had lived and hunted and wandered?  Did they have words or concepts to explain Manifest Destiny, Doctrine of Discovery?

Today as I stand on this threshold of the season’s darkness, I will remember back before my memory. I will hold the connection between myself and those hopeful refugees from the pain and trial of the old world to the new. I will not excuse or explain away their settlement of fertile valleys, their claim of land which had once been free.  I will neither take one the shame nor dismiss it. I am their distant daughter, as the ones who stand for Water in the Dakotas are the distant children of those who moved across these lands, belonging to the land rather than claiming it for themselves.  Today we draw new lines. We make new patterns, new webs firmly anchored to the old ones. We wing our way into the dusk, like those robins, connecting point to point, idea to idea, memory to memory, grief to grief, until we have a web that will hold us as we move into the season that approaches.

Gratitude List:
1. Tears of joy and relief
2. Tears of sorrow and release
3. How the trees are letting go
4. Circles and webs of caring
5. Community rituals

May we walk in Beauty!

A Little Confession

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

new-doll
Yesterday’s dollie as interpreted by the Dreamscope app.

Here’s a little confession: I haven’t been such a good monk-in-the-world lately. I keep letting my equilibrium get thrown. I tell myself and others that it’s the election. I tell us that it is because I am so terribly busy. I tell us that it is the season for a different sort of looking at the world.

I still write my gratitude lists, and I still try to pay attention, but I have let myself sharpen up the edges. I know, I know. No one is perfect. No one can be balanced and thoughtful all the time. Monks get angry, too. Sure, I will give myself a break. Still, I think the whole point of living this examined life is to examine–non-judgmentally–how we have been living and responding to the world.

Perhaps it was making that little corn dollie that reminded me. I have walked quietly away from my intuitive self. Finding a moment to make some art, to let my hands and heart lead the way into a process, has given me a chance to bring myself back into reflection.

Here’s to St. Benedict and beginning again. Always. Every day. Every morning.

Gratitude List:
1. One of my former teachers was walking the halls yesterday–Janet Gehman, who lit the literature fires for me. It was a treasure to see her and to invite her into my classroom, to tell my students that this was MY teacher.
2. Macaroni and cheese. Comfort food.
3. Warm layers on a blustery day.
4. Long weekend coming.
5. Small person on my lap.

May we walk in Beauty!

Wild

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

corn-dollie
It has been a long time since I have made a corn dollie. I think it’s because the preparation process is a lot of work–saving the best of the husks and drying them without letting them mold, then soaking them. Yesterday while Josiah and I were out walking, I started picking up corn husks and flowers, and I made myself a wild little dollie. It was a lot harder to work with the brittle husks that I picked up in the field, but it was extremely satisfying, and I like the wild look of her–my “proper” dollies look really tame and domesticated in comparison. We got back from our walk at dusk, so the photo is a little dark.

Gratitude List:
1. Wildness
2. Wind
3. Warmth
4. Wisdom
5. Watchfulness

May we walk in Beauty!

The Healing Power of Story

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

imag2077

I am overwhelmed by too much to do, but if I can find a spare twenty minutes today, I am going to write a letter to the president to ask him to intervene on behalf of the civil rights of the nonviolent protesters who are trying to block the Dakota Access Pipeline. In early September, the Obama Administration did step in with a temporary injunction which seems to have been completely ignored. Will you join me?

*

You know how sometimes when you wake up in the morning, there’s a fragment of something from your dreamworld swimming around in your brain? A piece of a song, an image of a snake with wise eyes, a voice calling your name. . .  A couple days ago, I woke up with a voice that seemed to be calling me: “Sister!” That was all.  Still, it sits in my consciousness days later. Who is calling, and why?

Gratitude List:
1. The color orange. Spring time is about all the shades of greens and violets. Autumn is the whole range of gold through orange to red.
2. The words of Rumi. This one: “Let yourself become living poetry.”
3. Sleep. I don’t get enough of it, and I don’t want to jinx this long insomnia-free run, but I have been sleeping deeply and well in recent weeks. One of my great pleasures is the moment I can let myself fall into sleep each evening.
4. Circles of friendship and support. The way love flows across invisible lines, holding those who watch and hold the space.
5. The healing and integrating power of stories.

May we walk in Beauty!

Dreams of Flying

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

hildegard-2
Here is another version of the Disibodenberg photo with a parchment paper look. I keep seeing faces in this this one. At first, I didn’t like it because the abbey ruins themselves sort of disappear into the sunlight, but as I consider it, that has become my favorite thing about it.

I am still working the dream from Sunday night. Sometimes dreams dissipate like smoke, and every attempt to grab and hold them down only scatters them further. Sometimes they recede until a random comment by someone in the day-life throws them in the pathway of the day. Sometimes they come back throughout the day, and grab you and grab you again, as this one has done.

In the dream I have been hiking on a trail with two other women. I don’t know them in waking life, but we are friends in the dream. We are resting in a little cafe, and the one woman will not stop talking, will not stop just hanging out. I want desperately to get back on the trail again, to get out in the wild, but they just keep telling me to wait. Finally I tell them that I am going out again, and they can catch up later. They’re as happy to see me leave as I am to get out of there.

I am heading down a precipitous rocky and dusty trail, so grateful to be out in the wilds again, so free. It must be noted that in the physical world, I tend to stumble and trip down mountainsides, but in this dream, I am elated and confident. I take a sort of leap down the mountainside. I don’t fly, exactly, but I catch air. I drift down. I feel air holding me as I glide down to the next dusty shelf. Again I leap and glide and land. Again. Again.

Then I am walking on flat land, in woods. I think this is another of those regular dreamscapes, one of those places that doesn’t look exactly like the previous woodsy dreamscape, but I know now, looking back at it, that it is the same one as in a previous dream.

Scene shift and I am in another cafe/store, gathering supplies to get back on the trail and try to meet up with my friends. I feel delayed again, but this time I want to get to them, not to get away. I walk out of the town, following small back roads through farmland. I cannot find the woods. I stop people and ask, but they say that the wild lands are really far away–how did I get all this way on foot? I stop at a farmhouse, and it happens to belong to friends. They offer me things to read, food to eat, and a lovely skirt and blouse that don’t actually match each other. But they can’t help me find the trail.

My dream is book-ended by impatience and dissatisfaction. But oh! The flight.

Gratitude List:
1. Dreams of flying
2. Wildlands
3. The Water Protectors
4. Deep sleep
5. The last hurrah of summer

May we walk in Beauty!

I Am Not Alone and Hearts Glowing Fire

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

hildegard1
This is one of my favorite views of the ruins of Disibodenberg, the abbey where Hildegard was brought as a girl. I ran it through a Mosaic filter on the Dreamscope app.

This is a poem I wrote several years ago. I am in the process of deciding whether there’s an essential wisdom to the poem that warrants revision and inclusion in my next book. Meanwhile, Google Translate and I are having a little fun with it. The stanzas in parentheses happened after I sent them through several languages in Google Translate.

Now I realize
that I must fling myself
into the center of my life
with a fierce intensity
and passionate joy
or risk dissipation.

(I was the center of my life,
and the joy and the pride
or the threat of violence,
I know the voice cast.)

And all while holding the center,
embodying the nature of the tree.
This, too, helps to hold it all together.

(Always occupied the center of the tree.
In addition, all to get together.)

That still small place
cannot exist for me
without the passion that feeds it.
Nor can I maintain the fire
without the quiet and glowing core.

(A small part of this feed
is not available to me without passion.
I am not alone and hearts glowing fire.)

Somehow, “nor can I maintain the fire” became “I am not alone.” I wonder how I can draw parallels between such thoughts. The tense shifts in the first stanza open up some interesting connections, too. Everything has layers of meaning. Does my friend Google Translate help me to elucidate or obfuscate my deeper meanings?

Gratitude List:
1. A day of solitude.  The boys have gone to Diggerland for the day.
2. Coffee, socks, and a hat on a chilly day
3. My new fountain pen. The ink came yesterday, and I just want to write and write and write. I will use it for today’s grading. I am thinking of giving it a name: Kalamu, or Chemchemi, perhaps. (Pen and Fountain, respectively, in Kiswahili.)
4. Crows and blue jays. Messengers.
5. Toast and peanut butter.

May we walk in Beauty!

“The Women, United, Will Never Be Defeated”

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

bird

Two nights ago, my sleep was broken up by an anxious child who couldn’t get back to sleep, so I slept on the floor of his room with him. The broken sleep led me to remember my dreams much more clearly.

The one about the car accident was so real that, on the way to church in the morning, I showed my family an intersection similar to the one where the accident occurred, and when I walked out to the car after church, I experienced a momentary but real dread because I didn’t want to see the scraped-up side of the car. I was relieved when the split second passed and I realized it had been only a dream.

In the other dream, someone had brought a large cardboard box full of  writhing snakes into some sort of social gathering–I think we were going to have a dance. The snakes immediately crawled out and covered the floor. I was really worried that someone was going to step on them, but they took care of themselves. I held a couple, loving their intent and watchful eyes, their flickering tongues. Snakes are symbolic of regeneration, of the cycles of life. I have personally associated them with rising feminine power, particularly in their association with the Minoan snake dancers.  After a day of processing the magnified disgust, I was feeling at the shameless misogyny of one of our political candidates, I think I needed a reminder of the collective power of women. And I needn’t worry about them getting stepped on. We will take care of ourselves.

“The women, united, will never be defeated.” –Ubaka Hill

Gratitude List:
1. Dreams that wander into the daylight
2. Images that empower and strengthen the will
3. Clouds: I never get tired of clouds
4. Voices of reason amidst the craziness
5. Wild wind. It can be almost unbearable, the way it calls to be followed, the way it makes me long to go journeying, rambling, adventuring.

May we walk in Beauty!

Rain and the Promise of Rain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

bowl
Stones today, for all the people and places I hold in my heart. Stones for the people of Haiti. For the Water Protectors. For ones standing for justice everywhere. For friends experiencing uncertainty, illness, and grief. For those who have fled their homes because of war and terror, and for those who want to flee but cannot. For those making new lives in new lands. 

I am having trouble coming up with a gratitude list today. My brain is tired, perhaps, or yesterday was a little too focused on just getting work done, and I didn’t really do my work of paying attention. Attention is the spiritual work that comes before gratitude. If I let myself stay inside my head for a day, then I don’t get into the body spaces that focus my attention.

Gratitude List:
1. Ironing. Ironing means order and tidiness. It’s meditative work, but work I almost never do. Some of my dresses really require ironing, which forces me to do this adult work once in a while. I’ll say ironing and mean: making order and meditating.
2. Rain and the promise of rain.
3. Robins outside the window, discussing the coming flight south, or the movement into the deeper woods.
4. Learning to pay attention.
5. Communities.

May we walk in Beauty!

Gained in Translation

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

oct-words
Mockingbird Words: This is a word cloud of the words on this blog from the first week of October.

I am playing around with Google translate this Saturday morning. I translated a short poem of mine into Bengali and back again. The basic poem was pretty similar, but when we got back to English, giant feather had become hairy giants.  That’s extremely promising for a little bit of fun.  The sentence structure of the original poem was pretty straightforward, so the algorithms brought most of the poem back to at least a sense of the original, even when I sent it through several languages before coming back to English.

This is addicting.  I am going to try a poem that begins with a somewhat fractured sentence structure already, send it through several translations, and see what comes back.  Here is my original tanka, titled “Riddle”:

Down halls of dream, through
tattered veils of old stories
no fury, no fear
only the question of where
the next riddle will appear.

Zulu * Burmese * Haitian Creole * Portuguese * Maori * Japanese * and back to English again:

And, the bedroom
It covers the history of his face
Anger do not be afraid
Question
It displays the following password.

“It covers the history of his face” is a fascinating line. I still like my original line, but I wonder how it would go to say:

tattered veils of old stories
cover the history of her face

There’s some possibility there. As goofy as this exercise is, there’s a point here: I sometimes (often?) get caught in certain ways of saying things, stuck in linguistic and imagistic patterns. I worry that my poems sometimes begin to sound all the same. In Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird, I published several poems that were an attempt to break out of my own boxes. The results were several rather surreal poems that I am rather in love with, but which–in hindsight–I think might be somewhat unrelatable to anyone outside my own head.

Here, after some more play with translator, and re-crafting, is “Riddle,” no longer a tanka, and perhaps a little more layered, perhaps a little too clunky:

Down halls of dream,
through tattered curtains of old fairy tales
which cover the history of her face
without eyes, without fear–
only the question of where
the next riddle (this mystery)
will appear.

I was going to stop here, but then I took that last form and translated it into Cebuano and back again, and this marvel appeared:

Dream Hall,
By Tttered Krtens Old fairy tale
He covered his face HISTORY
Vithut Mata, Vithut Fiyr–
Questions included Ware
Next Ridley (Mystery)
The Makita.

Perhaps my next experiments should be to break down even the structure of the words, and play with invented spellings. Vithut for without has captured my imagination. And Mata. Is that eyes? Or matter? I need to simply force myself to stop now, or I’ll be doing this until noon.

Gratitude List:
1. Wordplay. Layers of meanings in words that shift and change color, dash away, and return with whole new meanings. Connections between words and meanings and languages.
2. Imagination. This boy, who is doing his spelling homework here on the floor beside me, suddenly yelled out, “Narwhal!” He had stuck his pencil between his toes (because that’s what you do) and caught the shadow of it on the floor. It did indeed look exactly like a narwhal.
3. Yesterday’s Service of Thanksgiving at my school. Music, speech and story, visuals. Generations. The Moment, for me, was when the choir was coming off the stage. I was one of the first ones off, so I got to watch as members of a composite choir of people of all ages filed into their rows. We all felt a sense of belonging to the choir because we had all been in some form of LMS choir throughout the years. It brought 75 years of time together into one moment.  Deeply moving.
4. Saturday morning sleeping in. I feel so rested and ready for the day.
5. Thermally satisfying weather.

May we walk in Beauty!

Poem: A Minute

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

beach
A few years ago I was working on a project about my younger self, and I wanted to take a photograph of this framed photo that my father took of me when I was six, standing on the shore of Rusinga Island. I just couldn’t seem to get the photo without the glare and the reflection in the glass of myself taking the photo. Suddenly I realized that I needed to put my current self into the photo, too, and set it up to intentionally gt my shadow on the glass.

Here is a poem from October 16, 2013. The form is called a minute, using three 20-syllable stanzas (60 syllables, like 60 seconds, equals one minute):

Out in the dawn, a misty sea
in walnut tree
a silent crow
will dream of snow

will ruffle feathers in the chill
will wait until
the first bright ray
begins the day

then with a final shake will rise
from branch to skies
and this will be
a memory

Gratitude List:
1. My School. Today Lancaster Mennonite School launches its 75th year celebrations.
2. I can’t get over the wreaths and draperies of mist on the fields on the way to school. Even yesterday afternoon on the way home, there was a snake of mist winding down the River along the western shore by Accomac.
3. I made it through the week. I have been having terrible sinus headaches in the last few days, and I kept thinking it might turn into something worse, but it hasn’t. If I am going to have allergy issues in the fall, I would rather have silent sinus headaches than the wild sneezing and sniffling and burning eyes that I sometimes get.
4. The color purple. (You know what Sug says in the book of that name.) Rich, inviting, heart-opening.
5. The poetry of Langston Hughes. One of my students asked me last week if I knew anything about Langston Hughes, so this week has been Langston Hughes week in my class.  This morning will be “I, to, Sing America.”

May we walk in Beauty!