Poems

What’s the Problem?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt at Brewer’s blog is to write a Problem Poem. I was reading Idra Novey’s poem “That’s How Far I’d Drive for It” in the November Poetry journal today during library time, in which she does this short series of three lines near the end of this three-page poem in which she creates a beautiful negation full of relief after bad things didn’t happen. Crises occurred, but the worst-case scenarios didn’t happen. So in my poem today, I am taking the problems and subjecting them to Novey’s negation. (The pond, of course, is metaphor for a different kind of near-drowning.)

Negation

But I didn’t stay at the bottom of that pond.
They didn’t cross the threshold at the Gates of Death.
The sky didn’t open up and swallow us.
The world was not drowned in the great silence.
We didn’t get consigned to hell.

Someone started singing,

the vultures came, and were fed,
the work got done, the children tended,
the bills got paid, the truth got said,
the dream became the dreamer,
the morning star continued shining yet more brightly in the dawn.

Gratitude List:
1. Poetry journal. About a year ago, one of the guest editors suggested reading the journal with a pencil or pen, and marking it up, underlining and responding to the poets. I do that regularly now, and I think I have become an even more careful reader, and I’ve also found such intense inspiration for my own writing as I pause and consider my responses to the poems. I think it helps me learn better how to unpack literature with my students, too.
2. Friday morning breakfast with colleagues.
3. That painting of the ivory-billed woodpecker that my dad made for me.
4. Dreams coming true.
5. I stopped to put some of my culled books in a little free library today, and picked up a copy of Natasha Trethaway’s Monument! What a treasure!
May we walk in Beauty!

“Awake, my dear. Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of light and let it breathe.” —Hafiz

“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan

“The heavens are sweeping us along in a cyclone of stars.” —Teilhard de Chardin

“Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or heart coming from. the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body. Another time, there was the booming voice of an ocean storm thundering from far out at sea, telling about what lived in the distance, about the rough water that would arrive, wave after wave revealing the disturbance at center.

Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark, considering snow. On the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place. I wonder if it will return this summer, if it will multiply and move up to the other stand of flowers in a territorial struggle.

It’s winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” —Linda Hogan

Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison

Joseph Campbell: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”

Catching the Ferry

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Kirumi Bridge, across the Mara River: Ming’aro Pictures Empire

Brewer’s prompt today is to write a Childhood Object poem. A couple days ago, I was scrolling around Tanzania on Google Earth, and saw a bridge over the Mara River where we used to cross by ferry when I was a child. I think the last time I was there in 1988, there was already a bridge, but I was suddenly flooded with memories of waiting for the ferry at the Mara River. There’s even a little video of drone footage of the bridge on Youtube.

I have never seen it, but there’s
a bridge there now across the Mara,
steel and concrete on the Sirari Road.
You used to need to catch the ferry to cross,
waiting on the eastern shore of the river,
bulrushes and papyrus lining the banks.
What crocodile would have been bold enough
to lurk among them, with the rattle and rev
of lorries and garis lined up for the next crossing?
Even fifty years later, and half a world away,
I pass a truck idling diesel fumes,
and I am back again on that riverbank,
the sun sparkling on the water, the hum of Swahili
in the drowsing afternoon, the distant ferry
approaching from from the Mwanza side.

Gratitude List:
1. The threads which connect dreams to waking life
2. My colleagues–daily I am grateful for this thoughtful and caring group of people
3. Ethiopian food–Jon shared his leftovers
4. Origami–I love the meditative nature of paper folding–I have been making zhen xian bao (Google it)
5. Weaving the pieces together.
May we walk in Beauty!

“No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—
November!”
—Thomas Hood, No!

“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” —Mary Oliver

“Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.” —Muriel Rukeyser

“We discover the Earth in the depths of our being through participation, not through isolation or exploitation. We are most ourselves when we are most intimate with the rivers and mountains and woodlands, with the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens… We belong here. Our home is here. The excitement and fulfillment of our lives is here… Just as we are fulfilled in our communion with the larger community to which we belong, so too the universe itself and every being in the universe is fulfilled in us.” —Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe

Words of Howard Zinn:
“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t ‘win,’ there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

“If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.” ―Jelaluddin Rumi

“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” –Roald Dahl, The Witches

“For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap its’ knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows, the joy, the poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff. You have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.” –Anais Nin

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“On such a day each road is planned
To lead to some enchanted land;
Each turning meets expectancy.
The signs I read on every hand.
I know by autumn’s wizardry
On such a day the world can be
Only a great glad dream for me–
Only a great glad dream for me!”
–Eleanor Myers Jewett, “An Autumn Day”

“Change is not merely necessary to life, it is life.”
–Alvin Toffler

“In the morning I went out to pick dandelions and was drawn to the Echinacea patch where I found a honeybee clinging to one of the pink flowers. She seemed in distress, confused and weak. She kept falling off the flower and then catching herself in midair and flying dizzily back. She kept trying to get back to work, to collect her pollen and nectar to take home to the hive to make honey but she was getting weaker and weaker and then she fell into my hand. I knew she would never make it back to her hive. For the next half hour she rested in my palm, her life slowly ebbing away as a thunderstorm started to brew. I sat on the earth waiting for death with her. The lightening flashed over the mountains, a family of turkeys slowly walked the ridge, a wild dog keyed into what was happening circled past us. The trees appeared startlingly vivid and conscious as the wind blew up and the thunder cracked and then her death was finished. She was gone forever. But in her going she taught me to take every moment as my last flower, do what I could and make something sweet of it.” –Layne Redmond

Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.
–Thomas Merton

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
–Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein

“Learn to tell the story of the red leaves against water.
Read the alphabet of walnut branches newly bared for winter.
Become literate in the language of cricket and of wren,
of the footsteps of skunk and the changeability of weather.

Interpret the text of the wind in the hollow.
Scan the documents of cloud and constellation.
Enter the tale of rose hip and nettle and sassafras.
Study Wisdom and she will find you.”
–Beth Weaver-Kreider

“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” –Khalil Gibran

“Awake, my dear! Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of Light and let it breathe.” ―Hafez (Ladinsky)

“We who hobnob with hobbits and tell tales about little green men are used to being dismissed as mere entertainers, or sternly disapproved of as escapists. But I think perhaps the categories are changing, like the times. Sophisticated readers are accepting the fact that an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce an improbable and hypothetical art. At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

Duskwalking

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Goldfinch Farm, February 2023

I’d gotten into a rhythm, waking up in the mornings, putting on my sneakers, finding my prayer beads, greeting the dawn, and walking. It takes me about 30-40 minutes to go through the beads, and walking at a fast clip actually seemed to enhance the meditation while I followed my doctor’s orders to get more regular exercise.

But the new school year came along, and in order to get in that 40 minutes, I would have to wake up before 5. That just wasn’t going to happen. So I’ve started doing my walking meditations at night. The timing is a little less specific, and it can get pushed off in favor of last minute lesson prep or other obligations, if I’m not careful, but I am finding that duskwalking brings its own kind of magic.

Duskwalking Gratitude List:
1. Bats. I used to keep daily tabs on the bats when we were farming. There were two who roosted under the barn overhang for several years. Perhaps these are their descendants.
2. Owls! There really is nothing sweeter than the whinny of a screech owl in the dusk.
3. Lightning bugs. Still around in August!
4. Evening breeze.
5. The moon. For years, I have been keeping track of the moon’s cycling, but as I walk every evening, I see the shifts in her position from night to night as she changes shape.
May we walk in Beauty!

“Anyone who feeds on majesty becomes eloquent. The bee, From mystic inspiration, fills its rooms with honey.” ―Rumi

“A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.” ― John Ciardi

“The heart must be at rest before the mind, like a quiet lake under an unclouded summer evening, can reflect the solemn starlight and the splendid mysteries of heaven.”
―McDonald Clarke (1798–1842) New York poet

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors.

But today we kneel only to truth,
follow only beauty,
and obey only LOVE.
—Kahlil Gibran
****”
“How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Artemis at Midlife

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

I have been doing magic to enhance my focus and intention in these flowing days of wibbly-wobbly summer time, in this larger season of my life which has lost its focus and drive, when I have left so many of my little (and big) dreams lying somewhere along the path. Every summer for the past nine years, I have told myself I would organize my poetry into another book, and September always slides in and I have nothing to show.

Call it fear of failure, or of success.
Call it undiagnosed ADHD.
Call it setting aside my own needs for the needs of others.
Call it laziness and procrastination.
Call it addiction to distractions.
Call it the overwhelm of having TOO MANY poems to sort through.

Whatever it is, I have stood behind this wall of it for nearly a decade now, and I am ready to move on. This summer something shifted. Here I am in the vestibule of July, and I have two very messy collections of poetry that I am working on. Oh, they’re nothing like ready. I have arranging and editing and cutting to do, and maybe something to add here or there. But I have TWO actual pools of poems headed toward publication. I’m not entirely sure what brought about the change.

Call it the magic spells.
Call it the recent 54-day novena in which I told the Mother my heart’s desire was to finish another book.
Call it finally crawling out of the psycho-spiritual constraints of existing within a Mennonite institution.
Call it the new fire of midlife.

Whatever it is, I am grateful.

Today begins a new 54-day novena with The Way of the Rose, and I don’t mind making public my plea. I am asking for Focus. I have been imagining the Goddess Diana with her bow, focused laser-like on her object. This morning during my prayers I got an image in my head of Artemis at Midlife. I came down from the pear grove and wrote that poem:

Artemis at Midlife

One of her greatest attributes is vibrant youth,
like her bow, like her swarm of leggy hounds,
like her fierce protection of the wilds
and of her own wild autonomy.

She was never supposed to get old.
Her eyes have blurred and softened, so now
she relies upon her sense of her body in space,
her inner eyes, to find the target.

Her weight has settled and gathered
in her belly and her thighs, and so
she hides no longer in the slender saplings
but among the tumbled rocks.

The whip-quick Alani who swirled
like mist around her thighs, barking
and racing to confront the wayward hunter
in the green wood, rest now in grassy hollows

like sleepy bears in the moonlight,
raising their heads as the goddess
rises to cool herself in the stream
after one more inexorable hot flash.

There was a day when she ran fleetly
through the forest, leaping from rock
to log, and lightly across ravines. No more.
Her body has found its home in gravity,

and she wanders quietly, no longer
baying the wild stag with hounds,
but waiting, silent, under a great oak,
for the regal beast to come to her.

Gratitude List:
1. Finding Focus, though with softer vision
2. Breakthrough and Shift
3. The wide-open splendor of a summer’s day
4. Making friendship bracelets with kids
5. The way a poem helps to shape meaning
May we walk in Beauty!

“The doors to the world of the wild self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door. If you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the Sky and water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.” —Aldo Leopold

“Recognize the invisible hands that guide you, the breath that breathes you, the walls and roof that keep cold from chilling you, the water that magically springs from your taps, the long line of ancestors whose every step made your incarnation possible. You belong to these holy helpers. You have undisputed membership. In your recognition of this wealth, your own life cannot help but become an offering back to that which feeds you.” —Toko-pa Turner

“The very form of our thinking has to be re-formed from “thinking about” to “thinking within,” and Silence is the teacher. . . . Silence is intelligence. . . . As we enter into Silence, we enter into Wisdom. We do not become wise but enter into the objective Wisdom of world processes. Judgment, as the primary mode of our thinking, ceases or is taken up only when needed for our practical life. As we enter into the Wisdom of Silence, we allow ourselves to be taught by the things of the world.” —Robert Sardello

“To disobey in order to take action is the byword of all creative spirits. The history of human progress amounts to a series of Promethean acts. But autonomy is also attained in the daily workings of individual lives by means of many small Promethean disobediences, at once clever, well thought out, and patiently pursued, so subtle at times as to avoid punishment entirely.” —Gaston Bachelard

“Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” ―Linda Hogan

“I didn’t mean to tell you,” Mrs Whatsit faltered. “I didn’t mean ever to let you know. But, oh, my dears, I did so love being a star!” —Marlene L’Engle

“Some black cats are witches in disguise. Some witches are black cats in disguise.” —Folklore of Wales

“Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand…the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.” —Alan Lightman

“The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.” —Adrienne Rich

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.” —Adrienne Rich

“Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,” for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.

[…]

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” —Adrienne Rich

Compassion

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

These days, we travel through a landscape mapped out
of trauma and trouble. There, says the boy as we travel the highway,
is where a semi caught fire. Four fire stations responded.

And there, he says a little while later, is where that accident happened
last Friday. You know, when the woman and her baby were airlifted
to the Medical Center? And over there is where that jeep rolled over.

He would tell me, if he ever read my poetry, that this is all wrong,
that I have made up the accidents (and I have), that he told me
not just how many stations responded, but their numbers

and apparatus as well. This is true. I spin and embroider truth into story
while he lives in a world of facts and numbers, of call signs and
response times, first dues, tankers and tillers, flashing lights and sirens.

He’s been at it for over a year now, I think, listening to scanners,
memorizing the station numbers and apparatus for every accident
within three counties. He checks the maps and nearest intersections,

knows every township and borough we drive through,
and can tell you when the local fire department is going to receive
its new tanker truck and how much they paid. I nod and smile,

accepting his avalanche of data as a point of connection between us,
trying to sort through for something I can remember, can feed back
with more than a glazed nod. Yes, I was listening to your voice,

to the thread of the story you spin from the numbers,
of lives picked from the brink of disaster, cared for by humans
rushing to respond, people plucked from the river (living or

dead), children found by friendly searchers in the woods,
lives in the balance. May I tell the story forward a moment,
and backward? How I see how the tiny child who created a club

to save lost and wounded animals and insects has grown into
a watchful observer of tragedy, who may one day grow
into a responder, one who rushes to the crisis, saying,

It’s okay now, someone is here to help. There are so many ways
to care, like you, with your drive to know that someone will always
coming rushing to the scene when a life is at stake.

This feels like it needs lots of revision work.

While I was writing it, he came downstairs to tell me that the same address occurs in two local townships, and that first responders had just been dispatched to the wrong address of a five-year-old who was choking and not breathing, but that they caught the error on the way and went to the correct home. We so rarely learn the end of these stories. All I can do is pray for these fragile lives in the middle of their crises, and hope that help gets there in time.

Gratitude List:
1. Crows
2. White horse in a field of buttercups
3. Scent of fox: this morning in the grove, it was so very strong
4. So much life in the magical sycamore tree
5. The caring hearts of these young people

May we walk in Beauty!

“A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.” —Terry Pratchett

“Oh, God, make me a hollow reed, from which the pith of self hath been blown so that I may become as a clear channel through which Thy Love may flow to others. I have left behind me impatience and discontent. I will chafe no more at my lot. I commit myself wholly into thy hands, for thou are my Guide in the desert, the Teacher of my ignorance, the Physician of my sickness.” —attributed to Abdu’l-Bahá

“Truth is an agile cat. It has more than nine lives.” —Joy Harjo

Silence
by Hafiz

A day of Silence
can be a pilgrimage in itself.
A day of Silence
can help you listen
to the Soul play
in marvelous lute and drum.
Is not most talking
a crazed defense of a crumbling fort?
I thought we came her
to surrender in Silence,
to yield to Light and Happiness,
to Dance within
in celebration of Love’s Victory!

“What if we reframed ‘living with uncertainty’ to ‘navigating mystery'”? —Martin Shaw

The Glorious Mysteries

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today is the last day of National Poetry Month. It has been another marvelous month. I have felt like the Muse was active more days this month than not, for which I am grateful. I never know when I begin these things whether I am going to hit a wall by day ten and have to slog through to the end. I’m grateful that there was so much to find and follow this month.

I have four more weeks of school, and then I’ll hopefully have time to do some editing. I really want to commit to going through my work and pulling together another book. But I have said that several times in the past few years, so I need to find the Key in order to make it happen.

The rosary prayers go in a cycle of three sets: The Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries. There is a fourth set that was added by Pope John Paul II, but I haven’t studied those. As I have been praying the rosary since August, I have been meditating on the mysteries as a Path of Initiation to Enlightenment. I believe we are repeating this cycle over and over again in our lives, and the three-day cycle of repetition in the rosary cycle offers a way to meditate on one’s current cycle of transformation.

The Joyful Mysteries are about hearing and accepting the call to transformation:
1. The Annunciation: Hearing the call, meeting the beloved angel being, saying Yes, consenting to the process
2. The Visit with Elizabeth: Mentoring, wise confidante, comfort and counsel
3. The Birth: Stepping onto the path, hatching, the seed bursts forth, the initiation
4. The Elder Blessing: Blessing and commissioning by the priest/priestess, they say: “I have waited my whole life for this!”
5. The Finding in the Temple: Finding the purpose, defining the vision of the initiation story

The Sorrowful Mysteries are about meeting the challenges of the enlightenment journey:
1. The Agony in the Garden: Facing betrayal and abandonment, anxiety about what is to come
2. The Flogging in the Temple: Pain, the reality of betrayal, enduring the torture
3. The Crown of Thorns: Being shamed and mocked, standing shameless in the face of taunting
4. The Bearing of the Cross: Picking up the work that must happen even in the midst of trauma and anguish
5. Death: Death, loss, symbolic death, end of old life and way of being

The Glorious Mysteries are about stepping into the truth of the new way:
1. Resurrection: Symbolic rebirth, restoration, revivifying, re-energizing, re-awakening
2. Ascension into Heaven: Stepping back onto the path with Enlightenment in sight
3. The Descent of the Holy Spirit: Tongues of fire, new language, deep connection to Spirit, recollection of “This is my Beloved Child in whom I am well pleased.”
4. The Assumption of the Virgin: Taking up the priestessing role, putting on the mantle
5. The Coronation of the Virgin: The Summoning to the coronation of the Queen, living in the glory of the Mystery

This past summer, when I felt caught in cycles of unrelenting Sorrowful Mysteries, it was a comfort to meditate every three days on the process of meeting the challenges and then to remind myself that the Glorious Mysteries follow. And of course, while this is a linear telling, there’s also a layering quality, a sense in which we live all the stages at once.

Gratitude List:
1. Denise Levertov’s poetry
2. Writing practice. I long to have a writer’s life, but in the meantime, I can carve out time for a consistent writing practice
3. Circles of beloved community
4. The quiet misty green of the grove in the morning
5. Always new things to learn
May we walk in Beauty!

“Things aren’t so tangible and sayable as people would have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are world of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.” —Richard Rohr

“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.” —Georgia O’Keeffe

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ―Rebecca Solnit

“The child’s hand
Folding these wings
Wins no wars and ends them all. “
―Thomas Merton

“I never sanction violence. Never. But I wonder how we got to the point when destruction of property deserves greater coverage and a greater portion of our attention than the destruction of human life. Since when do shattered windows matter more than shattered spines, shattered voice boxes, and shattered dreams? When did we become a people who mourn the destruction of things over the destruction of lives?” —Omid Safi

What You See

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Today was Lancaster’s Race Against Racism, a couple-thousand-person 5K, in which the community works to raise money for the anti-racism efforts of the local YWCA. I haven’t walked it in six years. Last time, I walked/ran with my then-8-year-old. Today my husband and I walked while the kid, now 14 and a tall leggy runner, ran. He did it in a little over twenty minutes. Jon finished in just over an hour, and I was about ten minutes behind Jon. I walked with a friend who is also somewhat short, and we had a rich conversation while strolling through the city.

A couple days ago, Robert Lee Brewer’s prompt was to write and anapodoton poem. An anapodoton, according to Wiktionary, is “a rhetorical device in which a main clause of a phrase that is not mentioned is implied by a subordinate clause that is mentioned.” I didn’t write one then, but today’s prompt to write about something you see, offered me the “What you see” phrase.

Gratitude List:
1. Lancaster and York Cities and their Races Against Racism. Such important work.
2. Good friends and good conversations
3. My siblings
4. My parents
5. The green glow of trees breathing
May we walk in Beauty!

“To love, my brothers and sisters, does not mean we have to agree. But maybe agreeing to love is the greatest agreement. And the only one that ultimately matters, because it makes a future possible.” —Michael B. Curry

“The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.” —Barry H. Gillespie

“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.” —Ursula K Le Guin

“There is room for you at our table, if you choose to join us.” —Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing

“For beautiful to happen, the beautiful has got to be seen.” —from the musical “Ordinary Days”

“You will be found.” —from the musical “Dear Evan Hansen”
****”
“How do you become the person you’ve forgotten you ever were?” —from the musical “Anastasia”

“The universe is not made up of atoms; it’s made up of tiny stories.” ―Joseph Gordon-Levitt

To all the children
by Thomas Berry

To the children who swim beneath
The waves of the sea, to those who live in
The soils of the Earth, to the children of the flowers
In the meadows and the trees of the forest,
To all those children who roam over the land
And the winged ones who fly with the winds,
To the human children too, that all the children
May go together into the future in the full
Diversity of their regional communities.

Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

“Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you. Unfold your own myth.” ―Rumi (Barks)

“You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.” ―Isabel Allende

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy – the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” ―Bréne Brown, Wholehearted

On the Willfulness of Poems

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

After several false starts today, I just wrote about the difficulty of catching a poem.

Gratitude List:
1. That moment in Math class when we were doing a division drill, and a student suddenly looked up with wonder in her eyes and said, “I get it! This is just the opposite of multiplication!” Yes, oh yes, oh yes! It doesn’t matter that I had already said it and pointed it out over and over and over again–until her brain was ready to make the connection, it didn’t make sense. But today she got it. On her own.
2. Spring rain. I was chilly all day. Still, it feels like this is how spring is supposed to feel.
3. Support systems, webs, communities of care
4. Book sales! Kreutz Creek Valley Library began its sale today
5. All the colors of green
May we walk in Beauty!

“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.” —Diane Ackerman

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.” ―Wendell Berry

“A crone is a woman who has found her voice. She knows that silence is consent. This is a quality that makes older women feared. It is not the innocent voice of a child who says, “the emperor has no clothes,” but the fierce truthfulness of the crone that is the voice of reality. Both the innocent child and the crone are seeing through the illusions, denials, or “spin” to the truth. But the crone knows about the deception and its consequences, and it angers her. Her fierceness springs from the heart, gives her courage, makes her a force to be reckoned with.” —Jean Shinoda Bolen

“Go as far as you can see; when you get there you’ll be able to see farther.” —Thomas Carlyle

“At the end of the day, I’d rather be excluded for who I include than included for who I exclude.” —Eston Williams

“Free me. . .from words, that I may discover the signified, the word unspoken in the darkness.” —Byzantine Prayer

“Father, Mother, God,
Thank you for your presence
during the hard and mean days.
For then we have you to lean upon.
For those who have no voice,
we ask you to speak.
For those who feel unworthy,
we ask you to pour your love out
in waterfalls of tenderness.
For those who live in pain,
we ask you to bathe them
in the river of your healing.
Dear Creator, You, the borderless
sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the
world that which we need most—Peace.”
—Maya Angelou

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
—Leonard Bernstein

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.”
—Mary Oliver

“If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” —Harper Lee

“Some days, you don’t know whether
you are stepping on earth or water or air.
Place each foot carefully before you
and offer your weight gratefully to
whatever it is that holds you.”
—Beth Weaver-Kreider

And So

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Usually during a poetry-writing month, I start to lose steam at around the 15th. This month, I have had one or two days that felt like toss-offs, like today, but mostly I have staved off the fretfulness this month. I’ve abandoned the daily prompts at Write Better Poetry more often than not, but I feel like this is a stronger batch than sometimes. Now I’m just going to need to do some editing this summer. Ugh. I say that every summer.

Gratitude List:
1. Catnaps
2.Beads
3. Crochet
4. Chocolate macaroons
5. Anticipating summer
May we walk in Beauty!

“You know you’re on the right path if your capacity for holding paradox expands, your sense of humor broadens, your commitment to justice deepens, your compassion for and protection of life grows, and your love of people transcends race, color, creed, tribe, religion, politics and sexual [orientation].” —Rabbi Rami Shapiro

“It’s not fair,” Linus said, staring off into nothing. “The way some people can be. But as long as you remember to be just and kind like I know you are, what those people think won’t matter in the long run. Hate is loud, but I think you’ll learn it’s because it’s only a few people shouting, desperate to be heard. You might not ever be able to change their minds, but as long as you remember you’re not alone, you will overcome.” —excerpt from The House in the Cerulean Sea, T.J. Klune

“As truly as God is our father, so truly is God our mother.” —Julian of Norwich

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.” ―Anaïs Nin

“Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.” ―William Wordsworth

Forever Oneness,
who sings to us in silence,
who teaches us through each other.
Guide my steps with strength and wisdom.
May I see the lessons as I walk,
honor the Purpose of all things.
Help me touch with respect,
always speak from behind my eyes.
Let me observe, not judge.
May I cause no harm,
and leave music and beauty after my visit.
When I return to forever
may the circle be closed
and the spiral be broader.
―Bee Lake (Aboriginal poet)

“We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.”
―Joseph Campbell

“I can’t tell you why your story is important, only that it is.” ―Mara Eve Robbins

“Time is like dragons.
They are both imaginary, yet can eat you anyway.” —The Cryptonaturalist

Heather Havrilesky:
“The antidote to a world that tells us sick stories about ourselves and and poisons us into thinking we’re helpless is believing in our world and in our communities and in ourselves.”

“Whatever happens to you, don’t despair.

Even if all the doors are closed, there will be a secret path for you,
that no one knows.

You can’t see it yet, but many paradises are at the end of this journey.” —Rumi

Will Return

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Seeking to rewild my spirit, to return to raw instinct, to strengthen my senses, to adventure in those wild inner spaces. . .

Gratitude List:

  1. Jon found my rosary! It’s been missing for more than a week. It will feel good to feel its heft again during my prayers in the morning.
  2. Such a funny moment on the way home today. Driving along Picking Road, we had to stop while a flock of about ten pure black chickens moseyed across the road. And I know why the chickens crossed the road! I have the answer! They were following the turkey! The turkey was right there waiting for them on the other side, and they followed him across!
  3. Chilly spring rains
  4. The greens, the pinks, the yellows, the blue, the blue the blue!
  5. Rosemary bread
    May we walk in Beauty!

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” —Simone Weil

“You can never leave footprints that last if you are always walking on tiptoe.” —Leymah Gbowee

“God speaks to each of us as [she] makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“I do not see a delegation of the four-footed.
I see no seat for the eagles.” —Chief Oren Lyons, Onondaga

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.” —Kurt Vonnegut

“I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.” ―Rachel Held Evans

Go deeper.
Past thoughts into silence.
Past silence into stillness.
Past stillness into the heart.
Let love consume all that is left of you.
—Kabir