Musings

Haiku: kigo and kireji

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

star
Reprising an old photo. 

Scholars of the old Japanese form of haiku seem to place less emphasis on exact syllable counts and more on the word-choice. I was reading this morning about kigo and kireji–the season word and the cutting word.

the little bowl is empty–
someone new is sipping
the August flowers

I think that the kireji is perhaps not supposed to be as obvious as the actual month name, but it seemed to add the the poignancy for me, though perhaps the name of the August flower would be appropriate.  Are there any flowers that bloom only in the late season? Somehow empty feels like an appropriate cutting word.

Gratitude List:
1. She made her first flight, although I did not witness. When I left for school meetings yesterday morning, Smallest Bird was sitting on the tiny twig right next to the nest, preening herself and looking proud and very brave. I stood a while and watched, but I was already later than I wanted to be, and I didn’t know if she was planning to take another minute or another two hours getting herself ready to fly. Safe journeys, Bright Bird!
2. Kyla made it through heart surgery without any apparent complications. She now has a Ventricular Assist Device which will help her heart to do its work. May her new heart come soon.
3. Yesterday’s anxieties look so much smaller in the light of a new day.
4. Little Cabin in the Woods with part of my beloved community.
5. I am going to go seek the labyrinth in the woods today.

May we walk in Beauty!

Meet Me at the Bridge

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

bridge
This photo of this bridge feels like a place of meeting between worlds. I come to it when I am holding people I love, and two of my Beloveds are in the hospital today. If you, too, are holding someone tenderly in the nest of you, meet me here today, and we will spread such a web of care and love that the strands will sparkle around our Beloveds.

I have been thinking. . .
(I think I should rename my blog I Have Been Thinking. . .  So many of my posts include the phrase.)

I have been thinking about how caring for our bodies is a holy task: Feeding and nourishing. Washing and tending. Stretching the spine and walking and exercising. I have been thinking about how this body I inhabit, familiar and creaky as it seems to me, is no less a miracle or wonder than the body of the tiny hummingbird in the nest of cobweb out there on the sycamore branch. How the rhythm of heartbeat, the vast deltas of the lungs, the moving and shifting of muscle, how all of this is miracle.

If I believe–and I do–that my own body is part of the body of Earth, and so is part of all bodies that inhabit the Earth, then each act of self-care–each shower, each stretch, each bite of food–is an act of tending to the whole, caring for this one part of the larger whole that is all of us.  And so self-care can be a prayer. I see to the needs of my own body, and send out energy for bodies in distress.

Gratitude List:
1. Yellow walnut leaves spiraling down breezes, down sunbeams.
2. Doing the thing when the time is right. Second Hummingbird still has not taken flight, more than a day after First Hummingbird flew up a sunbeam. She sits on the rim of the nest, holding on with her claws, and tests her wings, like she’s planning to carry nest and branch and tree away with her. Then she settles back into her cobweb pillows. Not time yet. Today. Perhaps today.
3. Holding the bowl. Casting the web. Chanting and rocking and praying and sending energy and holding the Beloveds in the light. Whatever name it goes by, it is a privilege to one of many people on a web.
4. Staff Development Day. Is that weird? It’s still a work day, but a shift of rhythm, and a chance to be with colleagues.  We spend so much of our time in our rooms with our students (as it should be) or skating past each other in the halls with a quick greeting. It’s nice to have a day every once in a while when we do something different, even if the work ahead seems hard or confusing.
5. Those hours when the boys get so involved in an imaginary game that they can’t stop telling each other the story of it, even when they come to the table for supper.  I want them to enjoy each other’s company, to be gathering these memories for the future.

May we walk in Beauty!

Roses and Honey

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Poetry First Song

Here is a revision of a poem I wrote last year. I don’t think it’s quite finished. It was pretty loose and free when I first wrote it, which doesn’t bother me, but I wanted to take it into a more mythic rhythm, if I could. I shaped it into something like a triversen, trying to keep the four-beat rhythm on each line–working with the four beats felt like the Kalevalla, and I want to try working more with that old Scandinavian feel.  I’m not sure yet whether it’s better than the original. I’ll post the original at the end of this post, and you can tell me what you think, if you want to. I’m open to critique–feel free to spill some blood upon the page.

Once upon a time, Child, when you were caught in the swirling fog–
remember how it held you, how it caught your arms and legs like brambles,
until you saw the wild rose bush beside the pathway in the woods–

remember how the roses dropped their scarlet petals on the ground,
how the tender centers swelled into ripe red berries,
a little sharp, a little sweet, and how they fed you, how they healed you–

remember how the golden bees swarmed around you as you wandered,
how you cried out in fear, how suddenly the wakeful sun
broke through the buzzing cloud: all was golden, all was sweetness–

remember how you heard the howling in the distance, closing in,
how the beast emerged from the wood, all teeth and claw, all hiss and fury,
how you quelled the urge to run, how you looked it in the eye,

how you spoke into its raging, “What is your name?”
I remember now, how you walked that day out of the mists,
a rose in your hair and honey dripping from your fingers.

Gratitude List:
1. Sorting sea glass, stones and shells with Josiah
2. Getting to bed early and only waking up twice before 5
3. Revising: poetry, plans, ideas
4. Wise people
5. Everything is going to be okay

May we walk in Beauty!

***
First Version of the poem:

Once upon a time, Child,
when you were caught in the fog–
remember how it held you, how it
caught at your arms and legs like brambles,
until you saw the rose bush
beside the path in the woods–

remember how the roses
dropped their tender petals on the ground,
how the center swelled
into those ripe red berries,
a little sharp, a little sweet,
and fed you, healed you–

remember how the bees
swarmed around you,
how you cried out in fear,
how the sun broke through the buzzing cloud
and all was golden,
all was sweetness–

remember how you heard the howling
off in the distance and closing in,
how the beast emerged from the wood,
all teeth and claw,
how you quelled the urge to run,
how you looked it in the eye
and said, “What is your name?”

I remember now,
how you walked that day
out of the mists,
a rose in your hair
and honey dripping
from your fingers.

August Gold

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

sunfloers

Sometimes I have been fortunate enough to see the moment a spider launches outward into incomprehensible space, spinning out a thread and trusting the wind to carry her on to some distant new world where she can re-anchor, can start building her bridge between known and unknown. I have often thought of spider strands as prayers, cast outward across those chasms between myself and the world’s pain, or the aching heart of a friend. This morning, however, a new thought arises: The spider travels with her silken strand. She anchors herself to a branch or a wall and she leaps, undaunted and fearless, into the void between.

What does it mean to commit to our prayers like spiders, throwing ourselves outward, trusting our anchors, sending something of ourownselves with our words and our thoughts and our dreamings?

Gratitude List:
1. August Gold: The sunflower fields that surround Liza’s house, how they lift their golden faces to the sun. Also, the emerging goldenrod blossoms along the roadsides. Did you know that if you are an August sneezer, it’s likely not the goldenrod?  I always thought it was until I heard about ragweed. Goldenrod leaves and buds actually make a tasty tea that can help to lessen the symptoms of seasonal allergies to ragweed.
2. Feathers. Wings. Wind.
3. Going to the Hellam Carnival with the family. We finally convinced the boys to stop longing to play the games where one in a thousand people wins a gigantic ugly unicorn. Instead, we played a game near the food concessions, where a local church had set up one of those tables with glasses and bowls and vases. You stand around the ring and try to toss dimes into the items, which you can take home if you get a dime in them.  The boys loved it, and we now have an interesting assortment of wine glasses and ice cream dishes. Cheap fun. Plus, we bought used books at the library stand, and I met a local family who does T-shirt design, and I want to see if I can use them for my school club T-shirts rather than some company far away.
4. How everything connects. Your heart  and mine. The hummingbird and the vulture. Poems and stories and art. The thin spidersilk of prayer, spun out across impossible chasms.
5. Time. I need to stop fighting it, stop racing it, stop seeing it as my enemy. We live in it, swim in it, exist in the arms of time. Children grow and change, sleep happens or doesn’t, the work will get done if we trust and engage in it.

May we walk in Beauty!

Visitors

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

IMAG1733
Yesterday, just after Ellis and I got home from school, all four of us were hanging out at the picnic table, talking about our days, when a vulture (I think turkey) flew low above the poplar tree and settled on the telephone pole at the end of the drive. I managed to grab my camera, and just as I  raised it and got into position for the photo, she opened her arms and turned her head like this. Like someone from an ancient Egyptian papyrus.  Holy moment.

If you don’t know me, and only read my daily gratitude lists, I wonder if my life might come across as unbalancedly charmed and positive. Five things every day to be grateful for. Happiness, joy, contentment, satisfaction. It really is all there. But every life has its challenges and pain, too.

If this daily practice of inward-looking is teaching me anything, it is that the examined life must name and engage all the feelings and experiences that enter the heart.  And the practice of intentionally naming the gratitudes isn’t about ignoring the pain, or even simply putting the difficult things into context so that I can look away and only focus on the wonder and the loveliness. Sometimes it is about looking the hardest things in the eye and welcoming them in, too. Friendship and love bring us support and companionship and deep satisfaction, but opening the heart to others means that we share their griefs, carry their pain, open ourselves to the risks of broken relationships.  Noticing the hummingbird nest in the sycamore tree brings falling-down-on-your-knees wonder and daily magic, but it also makes heat waves and storms and predators anxious realities when your heart is filled with the fragile life of tiny birds. And wonder is not only the exquisitely impossible hummingbird, but the ancient bald vulture opening her wings in the sun.

My favorite poem on this topic is Rumi’s “Guesthouse”

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

— Jellaludin Rumi,
translation by Coleman Barks

Gratitude List:
1. The vulture visitor
2. Yesterday I finally saw a hummingbird baby peeking a tiny head over the rim of the nest after the mother flew away. First a tiny ruffly wing, then the needle beak, then the round marble of a head–smaller than a marble! My heart fell down on its knees.
3. Welcoming it all, open-winged, like the vulture on the pole
4. Challenges that keep me from complacency
5. Fierce and tender mothers. My sister friends, holding each other through difficult times. Hummingbird.

May we walk in Beauty!

Here We Go!

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IMAG1719

IMAG1722
I can’t remember which of my father’s books this came from. I felt like such a smarty-pants, realizing that I could take a photo of it, rather than interrupting the conversation to write it down, but then I forgot to keep track of which book it was in. I think it was one by John Philip Newell.
“. . .in every human I love something of You.” Such a sense of the Mystery immanent within everyone. Seek and you will find.

Here I sit, in the roller coaster at the very top of that first hill, the very moment of pause before release, and the first thrilling whoosh down the first slope. So much excitement and anticipation. A little anxiety. But I’ve ridden roller coasters before, and this is my third round on this one. This time, I might even be ready to throw my hands up and scream for sheer delight on some of the wild corners I know are coming.

Today is Faculty Day at school, and tomorrow we welcome the Bright and Shining Ones back into the halls. I’m looking forward to this ride. I know myself a little better this year. I’m calmer. Still excited. Carrying Etty Hillesum’s quotation with me into this year, to seek the Source, the Mystery, the Divine, in each of my colleagues and my students and their parents. Hillesum also wrote in her journals that she was seeking to open doors for God in each connection she made with other people. Let’s do that too, shall we?

Gratitude List:
1. Water that comes out of the sky. Soothing rain. Sitting with my parents on their front porch in the rain. Rain on the lisianthus.
2. That dragonfly who zipped back and forth through the heaviest part of the downpour, heedless of the raindrops. I think she was flying between them, actually. And then as we drove slowly away after the rain was gone, she hovered along beside us all the way to the stop sign.
3. The songs. The singing. “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.”
4. Everyone is welcome at the table. Everyone.
5. All those shades of pink and violet on the altar yesterday.

May we walk in Beauty!

Seven Questions

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

2013 March 168

In the last week or two, I have been studying the chakras again, those energy centers located along the spine. I don’t want to do a discussion of the history or meanings of the chakras here–you can google chakra and find out everything you want to know. What I want to do for the next day or two or more is to change up my Gratitude List for a while to an Examen again, to ask myself seven questions each day for a little while, questions that correspond to the essential nature of each chakra:
Root — Survival, support, basic needs
Sacral — Creativity, joy, desire, compassion
Solar Plexus — Will, resolve, determination, personal power
Heart — Love, connection to others
Throat — Expression of self, voice, speaking highest truth
Brow — Knowing, seeing, understanding
Crown — Connection to spirit (God, Mystery, Universe, Life), divine wisdom

Because of English literacy conventions, we read downward instead of upward, but I imagine my questions actually beginning at the root, the base of my spine, and moving upward until they reach the top of my head. As I do for my Gratitude Lists, I will not try to answer my whole life or even my whole day in one question, but to pick one item from the past day that shines out in response to each question.

(Note: Having worked my way to the end of the list, I see how much extra time and meditation this takes. I may have to limit a Chakra Examen to weekends.)

Daily Examen (as Gratitude List and Chakra Meditation):
1. What has supported you? Jon and the children. I sometimes get frustrated that there are so many distractions while I am trying to work and plan, but this is the bowl that holds me, this home of my three. The busyness and activity are part of the work, part of what makes my work possible.
2. How have you encountered joy? Perhaps it’s more amazement than joy–the way some people just Know how to do a thing without ever needing to be taught. We let Ellis take apart the old Chromebook yesterday to see if he could fix it. I truly expected that we would end up putting it in the trash, but it’s working now. His dad made a stand for it to support it because of some of the broken parts, but the screen is working fine.  There’s a Swahili phrase that my mother uses sometimes that expresses it better than I can say it in English: Nimeshangaa. It means something like, “I am filled with wonder.”
3. What resolve is filling you? Balance and Organization. Okay, two for the price of one here, but my resolve to be organized and focused is part of bringing balance into my daily and weekly rhythms in the coming months.
4. What opened your heart? I handed some cash out the window to a homeless man yesterday, and Joss reached up to add a dollar bill of his own.
5. What do you need to say? Pick up each moment of silence and joy, and carry it with you like a jewel.
6. What did you See? The shift in the children–they are so ready to step up to the coming school year, so eager to be part of their class cohort.
7. How did the Mystery meet you? Here she comes again: Hummingbird. I watched her feed her babies again yesterday.

May we walk in Beauty!

I Worried

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worry

Like Mary Oliver, I can worry a lot.
Will the hummingbird eggs be viable?
Will the bats return every summer?
Will the children be safe?
Will the people like me?
Will I be sufficient to the tasks before me?

Have I given birth to children in the era before the end?
Will their adult lives be spent in a constant effort to survive the heat?
Will elephants become extinct in my lifetime?

Will courteous discourse die out?
Will fascism rise again?

Sometimes I can make my way to her last stanza, to see that it all comes to nothing. Simply giving it up is harder. But some days it helps to write it out. I go back to that Little Red Riding Hood image I posted a few days ago. As long as those worries are lurking out in the dark woods behind me somewhere, they could be anything. They become monsters beyond all proportion. Even if they’re big and scary like the wolf in that image, or like the looming monsters of terrorism and climate change, it’s somehow a comfort to finally look them in the eye. “You might be big, you scary old thing, but you have no power over me as long I can see you.”

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday’s Reiki class. My cohort of co-students. Sarah, who teaches with such love and grace. Love and Life Force and the prayerful laying on of hands.
2. One more family hurrah before the end of summer. My marvelous siblings and their spouses. Their kids. My parents. I think that is probably a blessing not to be taken for granted. It’s not just that I love my parents, and my brother and sister and their spouses, but that I really like them. I like to spend time with them and converse with them. And the same goes for the nieces and nephews.
3. New stretches. I am adding some new stretches to my daily yoga movements. They’re harder than they were 20 years ago, even when I was thirty-five pounds heavier than I am now, but in just a week, I am feeling more and more comfort in the new stretches. I may be talking about yoga here, but I think this applies to quite a lot of the middle-aging process. I hate to sound slogan-y, but I think Use It Or Lose It might apply here. So yoga stretches and geography quizzes will be part of my regular established routine now.
4. Racing down the home stretch. Getting the papers and the space and the ideas all in order. Opening the heart to receive the new people and ideas who come my way. Developing and organizing the plans.
5. Sorting tomatoes. The tomatoes were late this year, but when they came in, they exploded off the vines. I haven’t done a lot of the sorting this summer–it used to be one of the tasks I owned, but now others often do it. Today might be the last time I sort them for the summer. I love lining up the colors, putting the paste tomatoes into their own bin, setting the ones with a little disease or damage in their own beautiful rows over on the extras table.

May we walk in Beauty!

Bridge Week

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN8665 bridge2bridge Bridge3
Bridges. One across the Susquehanna (EWK photo); below it, a bridge in the Scottish highlands, a photo found on the internet, which some friends and I have used for a meeting of hearts; and on the right, two bridges across the Mill Stream at my school: on top, a photo from the school website of the footbridge, and below it the road bridge on Mennonite School Road, taken from historicbridges.org

This is the beginning of my final week of summer. It’s a bridge week, from the open rhythms of the summer to the formal rhythms of the school year, from a slow and contemplative pace to a quick and formulated pace. These are not value-judgement statements–I need the macro-rhythm of shift from one to the other, and I am looking forward to daily structure which someone else has created–I only have to fill in the outlines. While I will miss the freedom of the summer schedule, I long for the more formal rhythms and rituals of the school day.

I love that my school uses the bridge as its symbol. It offers a rich metaphor for reflction. As I contemplate the coming season during this last week before school, I wonder how I can make my work at school into a bridge, safe and sturdy, that helps to lead young people from their childhood into their adulthood, toward independent critical thinking, toward compassionate responses to the pain of those they meet, toward trust in their own instincts and ideas.

Gratitude List:
1. I am taking a Reiki class today. I’m very excited.
2. Bridges
3. Family time
4. Harvesting up in the fields just before sunset, when the clouds are big and towering. In the fields, we’re up out the hollow and can see the full sky, how the light from the nearly setting sun in the west hits the clouds to the south, shining golden and white, glowing magenta and tangerine.
5. Morning yoga–waking up the spine, feeling the stretch.

May we walk in Beauty!

Questioning the Wolf

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Little Red
I am a big fan of reinterpreting the wolf, of finding new ways to look at fairy tales. I think that’s one of the great beauties of fairy tales: like dream images, they can hold so many meanings, so many messages. I need my wolf today to be as big and scary as the messages from last night’s dream. I need Little Red to be little and solid as she confronts the creature. (This image is all over the internet, but I cannot seem to find the author’s name, or I would gladly give credit. I would like to see more work by this artist.)

In recent years, my most difficult dreams have been those disturbing anxiety dreams where I can’t find my classroom or I am totally unprepared or I can’t find clothes that fit. It’s been years since I had one of those dreams that wakes you up, paralyzed and sweating, unable to move anything but your eyeballs, months since I have had one of the ones that leave me with disturbing, haunting images that I can’t get out of the back of my head.  This morning, I woke up with an adrenaline shot and a searing image from one of those.

Isn’t that the funny thing about dreams? The lovely ones, the weird ones, the ones that feel like they have thoughtful messages–those I need to capture and hold onto with pen and paper the second I open my eyes, or they’re gone like frost crystals in the morning sun, dissipated like a mist. But the ones that pierce and hurt, the images that haunt and ache, that tell you the stories of your deepest, most panicky fears–those live on like a bad smell, like a poison ivy rash.

I know last night’s dream had messages for me. I used every technique I could think of to erase the image, and it isn’t holding such power over me as it did in the panicky moment of waking, though it’s still there, lurking. Now is the time to look back at it from this slightly safer distance and ask it what it wants to tell me. I am Little Red Riding Hood talking to the Wolf, Vassilissa in the house of Baba Yaga.

Gratitude List:
1. The gentle and fierce ones, the compassionate and powerful ones, the wise ones–so many people I know who work directly with people and communities who have experienced trauma, to explore and understand it, to help people seek for their inner resilience and to heal. These people I know, they work in education–both in the US and internationally, they develop social services to break cycles of trauma across generations, they make songs and music, they write poems, they tell their stories and the stories of others, they listen.  How they listen! And they ask questions. They hold a big, big bowl. You probably know some of these people, too. Let’s stand around them and help them hold the bowl of stories that they carry.
2. History. How we live into it today, wear it like a scarf over the clothes of this moment. Not just our own personal history, but deep history, the history of our ancestors, our nations, our idealistic and philosophical and spiritual pathways.
3. The Sermon on the Mount. That’s revolutionary stuff. I keep coming back to it, seeing it with fresh eyes. One of my favorite poems. One of my favorite spiritual growth essays. One of my favorite revolutionary treatises. It’s all in there.
4. Butterflies! Everywhere. They’re just everywhere. Monarchs flit along the highways and down the River. The swallowtails drift across the hollow all day long. I wish I could see a residual image of their pathways. I bet they’ve flown an intricate dreamcatcher across our life here, a web. (Perhaps it was that dream catcher that caught this morning’s fearsome nightmare before it could settle too deeply.)
5. Cooler days are coming.  Which is a thinly veiled complaint about the current heat. It bothers me so much more than it used to. So I will live with the happy thought of cool autumn days and chilly nights with a warm quilt.

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