After the Fool studies under the tutelage of the magician or medium, they begin an apprenticeship in lore and knowledge and wisdom with the High Priestess. I’m trying to unthread some of these roles from the gender binary, so for now, I am calling this person the Secret Keeper. On any spiritual path, there are stages and steps in the journey toward wisdom and maturity, and the Secret Keeper represents that careful opening up of understanding as the Fool absorbs new things.
Why might it be important for the Fool to absorb knowledge and teaching slowly and carefully rather than dashing immediately into the inner sanctum? I think of the people I watch on the national scene, celebrity preachers who, heady with the sense of power they feel with their shallow understandings of biblical “truths,” begin to preach a gospel of prosperity or nationalism, people who develop immature and twisted ideas of purity based on rule-based dogma, and then try to pass off pat and glib salesmanship as faith. A surface glance at a holy text or a shallow absorption of a spiritual principle will not help the Fool to deepen and grow, and in order to face the coming challenges, the Fool needs to go deep.
To use the churchy word, the Fool needs discipleship, the careful study and application of spiritual disciplines, in order to be grounded in the power learned at the Medium’s knee, and the knowledge offered by the Secret Keeper.
What are your spiritual disciplines? Here are some of mine: 1. I love the Search for Beauty, or as Mary Oliver puts it: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” 2. I find Gratitude Lists to be really helpful, especially when I find myself cycling into complaining and despair. 3. Writing poetry. Writing in general. 4. Trying to envision everyone as a beloved child of Godde or the Universe. I don’t do this lightly, and I would never require it of anyone else. In situations where I am trying to understand someone who hurts other people, I try to meditate on the fact that they, too, are beloved. It’s not about forgiveness or about tolerating injustice or evil, just about not losing sight of the other’s essential humanity. 5. Meditation with images, like a piece of art or a photograph or a tarot card.
Gratitude List: 1. Blue grosbeak 2. Cardinal 3. Goldfinch 4. The green flowery smell of mid-May 5. Always something new to learn. 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!
After setting out on the journey into the woods, or to the cliff’s edge, or through the deep and shadowy valley, the Fool encounters a series of individuals, wise mentors who offer the Fool help, advice, skills, and wisdom.
The first of these is traditionally called The Magician or Mage. I like the term Mage, because it reminds me of the three Magi of the legends that came from the “wise men from the east” who visited the Christ Child. I am also enamored of Madeleine L’Engle’s Happy Medium, who can see into the patterns of the cosmos. For now, I am calling this one the Medium. This advisor to the Fool has ready access to all the tools of water, earth, air, and fire, and has a deep spiritual capability to visualize the change they wish to see in the world, and then the inner fortitude to make it happen. The Mage or Medium doesn’t just let life happen to them; they happen to life. So the Fool, who has set out without any real planning or purpose other than adventure, receives here the training to develop a vision, to make a plan, to create what they want in the world.
I feel a little like I am the Fool seeking the Medium’s wisdom right now. How can I use the skills and tools that I have to draw to myself the Next Thing? How can I put my own thoughts and ideas into the world, envision a future, plan for what I want, and make it happen? All while maintaining the winsomeness of the Fool.
Here is a poem about Magic, for the Magician:
The Magic of Language by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Listen to the wisdom of the sage. “What is language, but a kind of magic? Here am I, in my own organism, my tower of Self, and you there in your own lonely keep, and how shall we bridge the gap between us but by language? These webs of sound we string together, we cast them through sky, drawing out threads of meaning, as with a wand, fiery threads of sense.
“We build this bridge on air, scratch symbols on a page with feathers, and stories flow like water between us, borne on gossamer strands of word on word on word. We manage and tend our loneliness by weaving cloths of language. How can we find each other in the shadow but for the flow of speech we offer and the magic of these words upon the page?
Gratitude List: 1. Well duh! That was no indigo bunting! It was a blue grosbeak. I should have known that. I’ve seen and identified both in recent years. But my brain blipped, much as it does when it mistakenly equivocates unequivocable things in math-world. So yay! Blue Grosbeak! 2. I love Kindergarten! I love the stories. I love the shining eyes. I love the wiggliness. I love the dreaminess. I love the restfulness. I love Miss Nikki and Miss Abby, and I love being Miss Beth. 3. Putting Difficult Things behind me. No, I’m not going to start repressing Big Feelings, but you can only spend so long looking at the devastation of the wildfire before you start to clean up and replant and rebuild. 4. Foreacre Furfamily! We HAD to do something about the barn kittens yesterday. This is the second time a cat has given birth in the barn (that we know of). I think people drop off their cats at farms, and then the feral population burgeons. Last night we had a near tragedy involving some of the kittens and a mower, so we put out the call for someone to come take the kittens and the Foreacres responded! They have all five kittens safely cared for, and they even took the mama after we trapped her, so she can be fixed. I love people who care for animals. 5. Energy. Today is the first time in a long time that I haven’t felt a pressing need for a nap. May we walk in Beauty!
*#4 is really a rant. Please DON’T abandon your animals at farms in the country. Yes, there are mice in the barn for a feral cat to eat, but there are also bird’s nests all over the woods, and baby bunnies, and we want to enjoy the birds and the bunnies. And when you abandon your cat, someone else will have to be responsible for dealing with the offspring, and for getting the animal fixed.
“The Word is not a pet. The Word is the wildness behind creation, the terror of a black hole, the atomic violence of burning hydrogen within a sun.” —Madeleine L’Engle
“I stand before what is with an open heart. And with an open heart, I dwell in possibility.” —Macrina Weiderkehr
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” ― Ida B. Wells-Barnett
“Somewhere in the world there is a treasure that has no value to anyone but you, and a secret that is meaningless to everyone except you, and a frontier that possesses a revelation only you know how to exploit. Go in search of those things.
Somewhere in the world there is a person who could ask you the precise question you need to hear in order to catalyze the next phase of your evolution. Do what’s necessary to run into that person.” —Rob Breszny
“Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it.” —Stephi Wagner
“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?” ―George Orwell
“Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, that person sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” —Robert F Kennedy
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil it multiplies it.” —Martin Luther King Jr
“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.” —Frederick Douglass
“Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.” ―Jane Goodall
Begin your road at the ending, as the last pathway rounds the bend. Dance to the lip of the chasm– place your foot upon a bridge of rainbow. Keep your eyes upon the distant wood, your ears tuned to the song of undine and dryad.
Remember, your road is a circle, and everywhere you are is the start of your journey. Your road is of water, of vision, of air, of heartbeat, illusion, and wisdom a pathway of fire and smoke.
Feel how the sky under your feet holds you up, how the earth at your back is made only of dreams, how the only way forward is light and color, how a distant harping draws you onward.
Gratitude List: 1. Indigo Bunting at the feeder: Impossible blue 2. New endeavors. I’m heading off to kindergarten in a moment 3. Just now, half a minute after I typed #1, the Bunting flew straight to the window. I was terrified that he was going to crash into it, but he flew up and hovered and looked in at me for several wingbeats! Holy holy holy! 4. Orchard Oriole 5. Silence May we walk in Beauty!
“No matter where you are from, your dreams are valid.” —Lupita Nyong’o
TO MAKE A PROMISE by David Whyte
Make a place of prayer, no fuss, just lean into the white brilliance and say what you needed to say all along, nothing too much, words as simple and as yours and as heard as the bird song above your head or the river running gently beside you, let your words join to the world the way stone nestles on stone the way the water simply leaves and goes to the sea, the way your promise breathes and belongs with every other promise the world has ever made.
Now, leave them to go on, let your words alone to carry their own life, without you, let the promise go with the river. Have faith. Walk away.
“Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women. Unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power.” —Andrea Dworkin
“True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.” —Brené Brown
The Fool Sets Off On the Journey, Brightwing Tarot
In the tarot, that ancient tool for exploring the journey to the center of the self, the Fool sets off on a journey. She’s naive and eager to court adventure. He’s unafraid of dangers that may lie in his path. They dance on the edge of the cliff, follow the trail of butterflies, and seek out that which is fresh and new and exciting. Anything could happen, yes, but anything COULD happen! With Walt Whitman, the Fool sings: “Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, / Strong and content, I travel the travel the open road!”
This is how the fairy tale begins. You are the golden child, innocent, hopeful, full of promise. Tabula rasa, a blank slate. Anything can happen.
You live on the edge of a great wood, a forest beautiful and terrifying. You live in a warm, inviting cottage. In a poor but tidy little hut. In a fine and well-appointed house. In a castle. In a dirty, ramshackle hovel. In a high tower.
With warm, nurturing, and protective parents, or a family struck by despair and dysfunction. With a gentle and forgetful grandmother. With your father, a benevolent but distant king, and his wife, a smothering overprotector. With the vain and hostile wife of your loving but absent father, a traveling merchant. With a terrible witch who stole you from your family. With a kind witch who has rescued you from your suffering.
One thread runs through all the tales: You are admonished not to go into the forest alone. There is a set boundary, a garden, a lane, a wall—a line that you must, for your own safety, never cross. For the wood, while full of calling birds and bright butterflies, can also be a place of fear and danger, where a child could be lost or eaten by wolves. Both the beauties and the dangers are very real.
And the wood is exactly the place that your adventure must take you, for the forest is the landscape of your own adult life. Perhaps, like Red Riding Hood, you made your first steps into this wood on your own with the firm and gentle guidance of a loving parent who gently set you on the most known pathway. Perhaps, like Hansel and Gretel or Vasilissa the Brave, you were set into the wood without supplies or direction, pushed out of childhood innocence before you were ready. Maybe, like Goldilocks, you followed a trail of bright flowers or a shining ray of sunlight into the wood, against all the cautions of the adults in your life, and your own curiosity drew you into the trees.
Aunt Eliza’s Advice for Lost Children by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Once upon a time there lived a golden child who followed a trail of bright flowers deep into the heart of the forest.
That’s you, in case you hadn’t picked it up, and the forest is the life you are wandering in. This is the story you chose for your own in those rainbow days before you were born.
Oh, for most of us, and much of the time, the forest is fairly navigable, and not too scary. But sometimes we get caught in the brambles, overwhelmed by the shadows, befriended by suave and creepy fellows in wolfskin.
We forget how to find our way, forget that we are the main character, the child of the glorious day, forget our identity, forget our destiny, our star forget how to follow our guides, forget who they are.
So step into the clearing, Dearies. Have a seat by the fire. Here’s a little advice:
Keep following the flowers, the butterflies, the little birds, whatever drew you in here in the first place.
Go ahead and flirt with the wolves, but don’t give them Grandma’s address.
Breaking and entering is still breaking and entering, Sweetie, even if it’s a cute little cottage. You never know what’s in the oatmeal.
Listen to the doll your mother gave you. Your mother’s voice inside yourself will always lead you true.
Beware of riddling with old women. Always remember your manners, and always be kinder than necessary.
There’s a happily-ever-after right around the bend, but you might have to travel half a lifetime and complete three impossible tasks to reach it.
More Advice from Aunt Eliza by Beth Weaver-Kreider
It doesn’t always have to be so, but it seems to be the way things go:
When the sunny trail ends at that dead ash tree, when the sweet-scented grasses turn to brambles, when the radiant butterfly flits into shadows and out from behind the tree pads the wolf–
That is when the story really gets started.
Epiphany can be those shiny angels, those glittering kings bearing gold, but it also comes in shadows and cobwebs.
One day you are sleep-walking through your dreamy life, not paying attention to where the path leads, and epiphany comes in the form of a crow, calling your name from the topmost branch of a lightning-struck oak.
Or you find the sweet cottage but wake up surrounded by bears or tossed head-first into the furnace.
Or an old woman in tatters and rags swoops into the clearing, chattering, demanding to know who you think you are, demanding your service, your heart.
And that’s the key, isn’t it? Who do you think you are, meddling in this story? Can you give your whole heart to the process? What are you doing here, in the heart of this forest, this landscape of your life? What is your real name? Are you ready to fight for it? To go on a quest, answer the riddle, do the three impossible tasks, risk your own dissolution, your death, just to claim it as your own?
You thought you were so brave, following the path to explore the woods, though you’d been warned, though your skin prickled, though you knew the stories of those who never returned.
Now is the time for bravery. Now is the time for fierce uncompromising joy. Now the real exploration begins.
Gratitude List: 1. Symbols for the journey 2. Good coffee 3. Art-gallery-hopping 4. Adventure 5. Fairy Tales May we walk in Wonder!
“One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.” —K.L. Toth
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” —Oscar Wilde
“Believe me, you will find more lessons in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from masters.” —St. Bernard of Clairvaux
“A woman with opinions had better develop a thick skin and a loud voice.” —Anya Seton
“The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.” —Alexandra K.Trenfor
“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living, I want to know what you ache for. It doesn’t interest me how old you are, I want to know if you are willing to risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine. It doesn’t interest me where you live or how rich you are, I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and be sweet to the ones you love. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and truly like the company you keep in the empty moments of your life.” —Oriah Mountain Dreamer
The Bridge
In a trivial gesture, in a greeting, in the simple glance, directed in flight toward other eyes, a golden, a fragile bridge is constructed. This alone is enough.
Although it is only for a moment, it exists, exists. This alone is enough. —Circe Maia translation from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval
“If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” ―Roald Dahl
“To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” ―Mary Oliver
“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” ―Vonnegut
I’ve been meditating on Rumi’s poem “The Guesthouse” again:
The Guest House by Rumi
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’re 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 whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
And also holding this quotation of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes in mind: “There will always be times in the midst of ‘success right around the corner, but as yet still unseen’ when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.”
Seemingly contradictory. Welcome in each Big Feeling–the anxiety, the discouragement, the despair–as though guests in a guesthouse. What do you have to teach me? What guidance? What treasure? And still. Still, I am also not keeping a chair for despair, not a winsomely hopeful table set as if for the most revered of guests. I will not feed the Big Feelings. They’re here to bring their messages and depart, to teach me what they need to teach, and go on and away.
Deep breathing, art, poetry, good music, anchoring myself in my body and my senses. I need to find the balance between dealing with the anxieties and listening to them. You there! Crawling Thing in the pit of my stomach: Let’s sit for a minute and talk about what brings you here. What is your message? What am I to learn from you? Thank you–now you can be on your way while I ground and center and breathe. And prepare for the next journey, as Dr. CPE suggests.
Gratitude List: 1. Listening for the messages in the Big Feelings, but not harboring them 2. Pondering Purpose 3. Lilies of the Valley 4. Painting again 5. Dreams May we walk in Beauty!
“My ego is desperately. . .trying to get the experiences that I think will fill me up and make me happy again. But no matter how much I try, it doesn’t work—because it’s not in the content of experience that I’ll find happiness, but in the quality of my attention and presence in any experience I have.” —Russ Hudson
“Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.” ―Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
SOMETIMES by David Whyte Sometimes everything has to be enscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” —Margaret Atwood
“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.” —Ella Fitzgerald
“To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.” ―Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
“Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” ―Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
And the Third Circle is the Heart by Beth Weaver-Kreider (from Holding the Bowl of the Heart)
“The eye is the first circle, the horizon which it forms is the second: and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
The heart, too, is a circle, the horizon expanding to infinity or contracting into a small black hole.
The work, you say, is to keep opening, casting that radius wider at every turn of the wheel, to hold everything within its protective arc, the bright flowers and the white-hot stones.
You looked through the windows into the soul and saw.
Saw the round bud of the heart opening, itself a circle, the radius expanding.
When I begin to say that I am you and you are I then the pain that you wear must wound me too.
This is the work, to widen that horizon that lies within to hold the world, if we must.
Speak your story. Let it fall like a stone into the quiet pool of my heart. The circles expand out and outward, not matter but pure energy, more doors opening.
I see you. I feel you. I know you. I recognize myself in you.
These are the doors we step into. These are the circles we enter.
This is the burden we choose to carry:
To be watchers, weight-bearers, to inwardly transmute these stones we are given to bear into gems of great value.
To keep soft, to let the ego slip down into a weightless place.
Gratitude List: 1. Affirmations from strangers 2. Possibilities 3. Cookies 4. Rest 5. The way words and memories and dreams appear from the past, like wrinkles in the fabric of time, so that what happened five or ten or thirty years ago informs the moment. Living in layers. (I managed to quote both Madeleine L’Engle and Stanley Kunitz in that one.) May we walk in Beauty!
“The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example. If they see their mothers and other women in their lives going forward despite fear, they’ll know it is possible.” —Gloria Steinem
“You can learn to be lucky. It’s not a mystical force you’re born with, but a habit you can develop. How? For starters, be open to new experiences, trust your gut wisdom, expect good fortune, see the bright side of challenging events, and master the art of maximizing serendipitous opportunities.” —Rob Brezsny
“There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough to pay attention to the story.” —Linda Hogan
“You choose to be a novelist, but you’re chosen to be a poet. This is a gift and it’s a tremendous responsibility. You have to be willing to give something terribly intimate and secret of yourself to the world and not care, because you have to believe that what you have to say is important enough.” —May Sarton
“There is indeed a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills, and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame and reinventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most important challenge of our time.” —Wade Davis, The Wayfinders
“. . .war against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. . . . [E]very war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac. . . . The essential job is to get people to recognise war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda.” —George Orwell
A Reprise of Last Year’s Words: Today is May Day Eve, one of those special moments in the solar calendar, situated between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. We’ve watched the riot of spring creeping over the gardens and fields, delighted in the shining colors of flowers and the tender greening of leaves, paid attention to what is hatching within us.
May Day, or Beltane, is about celebrating the freedom from that egg, about jumping into the green of the season, feet first, taking risks, whooping with joy. Dust off your wild barbaric yawp. Wanton is the word of this season. We’re stripping off the constricting cloaks and coats and scarves of winter, and running through the fields, barefoot and maybe naked (I’m going to keep that purely in the realm of metaphor).
What do you need to release and let go of in this season? What are the names of the items of clothing you drop in your wake as you run to the fields? What is the name of the green field before you, the thing you give yourself to with every ounce of your passion?
As we enter the season of Beltane, consider all that has kept you from living fully and joyfully and passionately into your purpose. Name the habits and boxes and dogmas that keep you from living in the world with your Whole Heart. Drop them. And run for the fields.
Gratitude List: 1. The Youngfolk who came to visit yesterday afternoon! Such a treasure! Such a marvelous treasure! And so healing. 2. Book Club–we haven’t been together for a little while, and I am eager to see them again. 3. Dreams with messages from deep inner realms (last night a woman cleaned my glasses for me), and gratitude for all the people who help me to see more clearly in waking life. 4. In a world where a couple people can do an incredible amount of damage, the throngs of good and loving and compassionate people outweigh the meanness a thousand to two. 5. Crossword Puzzles 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
On one of the poem-a-day prompts lists one of my students dug up at the beginning of April, the prompt for the 25th is to write a poem about the word Horizon. The events of my April have meant I have fallen a few days behind on my poeming. (Well, that’s my excuse anyway!)
Horizon by Beth Weaver-Kreider
The horizon lies on the edge of the world
and you never can reach it though you seek with your whole heart.
It is always a day’s journey away from the place where you start.
Gratitude List: 1. The way the horizon always leads onward 2. Guests. Guests require a little housecleaning, and a clean house is nice. Plus, guests are nice. 3. The hostas are coming up! 4. I think I saw my friend the oriole this morning. It could have been something else with the sun hitting it just so. But he should be here any day now. I am listening for you, Friend! 5. How poetry holds feelings. 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
A magnolia leaf from my classroom. Didn’t quite make it safely home. But now it’s here, and you can receive its message too.
I’m behind again on the daily poetry, so I’ll pull another from a previous day. The prompt was to write a 3-5-line poem which was a story of loss and redemption. I cheated (it was my own prompt anyway) and made it six lines. Not sure where the angels came from, but there they were. I’ll receive them.
Rebirth by Beth Weaver-Kreider
The onslaught may feel like it’s carrying you away, but in the morning, though fear remains, though pain, though worry, though the guardian still waits at the gateway, Resolve will awaken within you, and you will have the strength of angels at your back.
Listening to Mamuse’s “We Shall Be Known By the Company We Keep” over and over and over again these days. If that’s the case, Friends, I am in a good place. The company of You is so wise, so tender, so articulate, so compassionate, so justice-serving, so playful, so winsome, so deep.
Gratitude List: 1. “Always we begin again,” said St. Benedict, and I am finding his message a simple and comforting reminder. 2. So many people committed to justice and democracy and goodness and saving the planet. 3. Pink, pink, pink, pink trees! 4. Dawn chorus 5. Wise friends. Such wise friends. 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
This is actually not a rose, but a carnation, I believe.Visual irony?
I wrote this one a week or so ago. It’s a form called a zejel, which requires this rhyme scheme in the stanzas: AAA, BBBA, CCCA, DDDA. I decided to edge it toward a sort of pantoum by actually repeating the A lines in the last three stanzas.
Is a Rose a Rose? by Beth Weaver-Kreider
I’ve always thought a rose is a rose. What you see is what you get, the saying goes, so what a person is ought to be the part that shows.
Each heart must hold its own singular reality and secrets belong to the keeper of the keys of that city, no matter how lonesome or rageful or gritty. Still, what a person is is eventually the part that shows.
Our innermost isness, no matter how hidden, will come out in daily living, often unbidden, to show our deep truths, holy or forbidden. What you see (looking deeper) is what you get, the saying goes.
A secret self that is anchored by Love will, under duress, be inspired to move and to act accordingly, thus-and-such, and thereof: A rose ought to be, in its essence, a rose.
Gratitude List: 1. People who are what they seem no matter what keep private to themselves. 2. The Ones Who Love. Sometimes you leap, and it’s not a net that appears, but a thousand waiting arms. 3. Possibilities. Oh, the possibilities! 4. These sunny days and frothy pink trees. 5. Birdsong, and poems about birdsong. May we walk justly, with mercy, and humbly.
“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.”
Mockingbird Chronicles 