How will you enter the new world when you get there? How will you even know you when you have arrived? Will a score of gleaming knights on black stallions ride across a causeway, trumpets blaring? Will the forest path end abruptly at the top of a windy cliff high above a roiling green sea? Will there be a hidden doorway behind a veil of vines in the back corner of a neglected garden?
I see how it is with you, Princess. You knock on the door of my cottage— so brave of you to come to the witch for advice. You’ve got all the steps memorized, don’t you?. Admit it.
One: Learn to spin and to weave. Bake bread. Learn to sing. Speak the truth, but in stories.
Two: Take a walk in the woods, though all have warned you against it. Don’t forget to put into your pocket the doll your mother gave you.
Three: Be kind to the Old One sitting at the crossroad who asks for your bread.
Four: Offer your service to the crone who lives in the cottage made of wishes and bones.
You’re a conscientious follower of the tales, you are. No leaf unturned, no story left untold. You have folded your heart into an origami bird, ready for flying.
The only crumb you missed on the way to the house of the witch is this one: The whole point, my dear—the sole purpose of this journey is that you learn one thing— You must relinquish your control. Offer the story to the birds who come to collect the crumbs on the pathway. The Old One who asks bread of you seeks not the loaf you have carefully prepared for the purpose, but the one you’ve been saving for yourself. Your mother’s doll will offer good advice, but the tool you most need you will find on the way.
This story, your story, isn’t intended to follow the formula you studied with such care. The truth you found so dear in all the others will not guide the plot of your own. The Guide you seek might be a tree, or a stone, or a wide shallow river. Find your own signposts. Seek your own star. Learn your own recipes for kindness and bread. And please, close the door on your way out.
Note to Self: Go outside! Feet on earth, hands in water, hands on bark. Fresh air in the lungs. Take a quick moment to notice your body. Are your shoulders up there beside your ears? Breathe in. Breathe out, and let them settle back to where they belong.
Here’s a poem from The Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird: Bridge
Walk barefoot on Earth. Walk, knowing your very being is Her being. Her rocks are your bones, Her rivers your blood, Her Living Soil your muscles and skin. Be a living bridge between Earth and Sky– Earth marries sky within you. Your spine is a conduit. Walk, open and aware. Walk, electric with knowing.
Gratitude List: 1. The dogwood tree is beginning to bloom. The two dogwoods stand on either side of the driveway. I call them my guard-dogwoods. I haven’t hung poems on the one closest to the house for years, but I still think of it as the Poet-tree. It will always be the Poet-tree. 2. Yesterday I walked back to myself. The sadness is still there, but I think now it is riding with me instead of me riding it. 3. The Helpers. You are one. And You. And You. 4. Resilience. 5. And still, that violet. That blue.
May we walk in Beauty!
“We have all hurt someone tremendously, whether by intent or accident. We have all loved someone tremendously, whether by intent or accident. it is an intrinsic human trait, and a deep responsibility, I think, to be an organ and a blade. But, learning to forgive ourselves and others because we have not chosen wisely is what makes us most human. We make horrible mistakes. It’s how we learn. We breathe love. It’s how we learn. And it is inevitable.” —Nayyira Waheed
“To me, it’s all right if you look at a tree, as the Hindus do, and say the tree has a spirit. It’s a mystery, and mysteries don’t compromise themselves—we’re never gonna know. I think about the spiritual a great deal. I like to think of myself as a praise poet.” —Mary Oliver
“When you hold a child in your arms, or hug your mother, or your husband, or your friend, if you breathe in and out three times, your happiness will be multiplied at least tenfold.” —Thich Nhat Hanh
“I stuck my head out the window this morning, and spring kissed me BANG in the face.” —Langston Hughes
“In the morning, wonder and be generous like the sun. In the evening, meditate and be kind like the moon.” —Debasish Mridha
“There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.” —Meister Eckhart
“Every spring is the only spring—a perpetual astonishment.” —Ellis Peters
The Prompts Today are Washing Dishes (which I am choosing to interpret as general quotidian household living) and There was a _______ Who ______. I needed to get away from the brooding abstractions of yesterday and into something decidedly surreal, which is where I am usually most comfortable. I come home to magical realism when I lose my writer’s voice. I feel like I am catching my stride again.
There Was a Woman Who Swallowed the Moon by Beth Weaver-Kreider
There once was a woman who swallowed the moon. I will not tell you that I know her. I will not tell you that this is a lie.
I knew a woman who swallowed the moon, felt the ice and the fire of it slide down her spine. (No, not her throat.) How it slid down her spine. How it sizzled. How it burned.
I once knew a woman who swallowed a lie. Felt it explode in her belly like stars. Felt how her own light dimmed and almost went out. Girl, was she ever a mess!
I know a woman who lives in a house, and this is how she exists in that house: She sews things together. She makes knots in strings. She throws words in the air to see which ones fall together. She wanders down labyrinth hallways weaving her fingerprints into all that she passes. She steals words. This woman is a thief of words. Just listen:
There once was a woman who wept a river. I will not say if the river is tears. I will not tell you about the mud, and the stones, and the sycamore. But this I can say: when the weeping was done, the river flowed through her house. The words bobbed in the flow, and the lie was extinguished, and the moon was a boat she climbed into.
There once was a woman who sailed on the moon. This is how she wailed. This is how she moaned. This is how she danced. This is how she trailed a net behind her to rescue the words she had lost.
You think you’ve got your hand on the valve, naming the emotions as they come, sorting and categorizing them, giving them their due. And then something comes along and stops up the pipe, impedes the flow, and all those wild emotions start to splutter and spray all over the place. Your carefully controlled flow becomes a torrent.
And then the pipes are cleared out, the weeping and raging is done for a time, and you’re. . .drained.
I had been holding it all so tearlessly, tending my emotional valves, calling it anxiety and simple sadness. And then the governor announced we wouldn’t be going back to school this year, and I was blindsided by the grief. When I started to let myself cry, I couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t stop pouring it out, couldn’t stop it gushing forth. I knew I had been experiencing sadness, but I had no idea how it would drown me when I started to give it voice. By day’s end, I felt like I’d experienced a death.
And that brings on the guilt. This is not a death. My losses are small. But this grief is not mine alone, and much of what I hold is grief for all the losses my students are experiencing, for those (mine and others all around the world) who will fall through the cracks, who will have to call on every ounce of their resilience to make it through, those who will be marked by this in lasting and terrible ways.
Were I not me, I would tell me that it’s okay to let yourself feel, to experience the emotions that come, to give voice, to weep, to rage, to break down. I would tell me not to be embarrassed or ashamed for the gushing of words and of pain. I would tell me that it’s necessary to open the valves so they don’t really explode. So I will call yesterday a necessary day, gather myself, tend to the work I left undone in the fog of grieving, mend and build and cleanse.
Today is for tending and mending, for quiet feeling.
Gratitude List: 1. These humming people. Jon goes about his work at home, humming and singing. Ellis scats along with the music in his headphones. Josiah bounces into a room humming (his two favorites seem to be the guitar riffs from “Seven Nation Army” and “Burn This Whole House Down”). 2. All the goldfinches! Fluttering through the milder winds of yesterday’s scouring, there must have been ten or twelve at the feeder at once, and so many bright ones! 3. I love the way the purple is wearing out of my hair–it’s fading to blue-grey on the ends where I’m greyest. Right now, I could mail order ALL the colors and experiment. It’s not like I’m going out in public any time soon. 4. This Ethiopian coffee a dear young person brought back from her trip home last Christmas. I have been allowed to go back to the classroom to get essential items that I had left behind, and last time I was there, I put this coffee in my box. It’s a connection to that part of my life, and it has a hint of cardamom which gives it mystery, and it tastes soooo delicious. 5. A four-day weekend. I didn’t get much of anything yesterday in the fog of sadness. Now I have catch-up time, and a chance to begin reconfiguring my long-term plans.
Walk in Beauty!
“Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.” —Hafiz ***** “The problem is that you think you are separate from others.” —Richard Rohr ***** “You have to want a thing enough to reach out for it.” —Lailah Gifty Akita ***** “To wait within the moment for the coming dawn, To breathe the single breath of all that lives, To walk the web on which we all belong, To face the newborn day with love instead of fear. To listen for the whisper of the Spirit’s wind, To feel Creator’s heartbeat in the world around, To hear the grace of the Beloved in my neighbor’s voice, To embrace the sacred space between the past and change.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider ***** “Hope is a dimension of the soul. . .an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. . . .It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” —Vaclav Havel ***** “When time comes for us to again rejoin the infinite stream of water flowing to and from the great timeless ocean, our little droplet of soulful water will once again flow with the endless stream.” —William E. Marks ***** “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It’s been a really difficult day. I knew I would have to deal with it sooner or later, but I truly hadn’t prepared myself for the intense feeling of grief that would follow Governor Wolf’s announcement that all PA schools would be closed until the end of the year. I really thought that this is what would happen, and there’s even relief in no longer having to guess. Still, I kind of thought that we would have a chance to say goodbye. School continues on the virtual plane, but it will not be the same, and I am grieving.
I forget who distilled the idea— that the friendships we build here in the tangible world create actual structures in the spiritual realms, that we must take the utmost care to make our friendships sound and safe. Who knows who will reside there in the spaces we have crafted with our loving attention or callous disregard?
So, now that our classrooms are empty, our hallways ringing with silence, how shall we maintain the soundness of the fine and shining edifices we’ve been constructing in school? We’ll need to trust that our stories, our careful discussions, our scholarly questions, even our sleepiness, our boredom, our grinding of teeth as we wait for the clock to run out, will hold up this house so we can finish the building with elegance and style.
It’s not like a walk in the park, this stepping through darkness from the known space of yesterday into the uncertain places of tomorrow. This moment between past and future is no open doorway with breezes flowing. This now is a tunnel, a constricting funnel, narrowing the horizon to a pinpoint, thinning the potent possibilities to this stretched limbo of waiting.
That’s what I said to Jon before I slipped off to sleep last night. I’m tired of this sometimes overpowering feeling of dread. I’m tired of carrying this bag of tears just beneath the surface.
The virus has entered my circles. People I know, and the beloveds of people I know, are getting sick. I had just heard the news of John Prine’s death, and then an anxious email popped up from someone I know, asking me to pray for his family because his father (who is an essential worker) came home yesterday with a fever. The dread is seeping in deeply. I was relieved to escape the real world into sleep for a little while.
I’m sorry. That’s a lot of heavy to place into this bowl of a space first thing in the morning. But it’s a big part of what I’ve got. So I stretch and breathe, stretch and breathe. I breathe in, and feel all the places where my body is touching a surface. I breathe out and straighten my spine. I breathe in and draw in the blue violet of those wild hyacinths. I breathe out and relax my shoulders. I breathe in and hold the taste and smell of the coffee that I am drinking. I breathe out and notice the quiet cat at the windowsill. In. Out. I can feel myself settling.
The dread is not gone. It’s going to be a long time before it’s gone. And maybe it will never go away. Likely it will mark and shape who I become for the rest of my life. And not all of that will be terrible. Some will contribute to my growth and completeness as a human. But right now? Right now, I breathe, and I notice. I find ways to live through the dread.
And this morning I have strange and wacky dreams to sort through. There was a part of the dream that was part real-life, part animation. A young man in a striped shirt was sneaking around, watching people, trying not to get caught. It wasn’t creepy or terrifying–more like an old-fashioned mystery. We chased him to an open field where dozens of blankets were lying about. He crawled under one, and by the time we got there and lifted the corner, he’d vanished.
And there was a baby bird who fluttered up to me with its beak open. I fed it tomatoes–they’re red like worms, right? It’s back was developing rich golden feathers through the baby fluff. Someone said it was a cuckoo.
And the strangest and most beautiful was the phrase. It’s not uncommon for me to wake up with a song or a phrase in my head, often completely unrelated to anything. This morning’s phrase is “Thou camest to me in sadness. . .and what wilt thou do for joy?” Yes, my Sleep Angels seem to be speaking Elizabethan English. Despite the weirdness of the delivery, it seemed to be a pretty clear response to my expression of pain as I dropped into sleep. And I think of the dreams that I dreamed (there were others, which even now are fading), and I wonder if this is what I can do for joy today and in the coming days: I can let myself experience wonder and surprise. I can tend to those who need me to feed them whatever I have at hand. I can immerse myself in story. I can communicate with my beloveds.
It feels like an extension of a thing a friend wrote to me yesterday, when I asked her about her husband, who has a fever and a cough: “Holding grief and joy together is messy and weird.” That has to be one of the defining phrases of these days.
May we all find ways to bring joy into these days when grief and dread can feel all-encompassing. Listen to your dreams. Keep an eye out for blue, for gold, for the thousand shades of green. Hold each other close–in our hearts if not in our arms. And when it just seems like you cannot bear the dread, let someone know. Reach out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Ground and center. There is no way out but through, and it will be easier if we walk it together.
Gratitude List: 1. The messages that come in dreams (even–or especially–if they’re speaking in Elizabethan English) 2. That patch of blue violet wild hyacinth at the base of the bird feeder stand, and the violet Gill-on-the-Grass that spreads from there to the Japanese maple 3. The chipping sparrow in the Japanese maple 4. The sounds of the morning house: cat eating second (or third, or fourth) breakfast, the constant flow of the water fountain (yes, also for cats), the little bits of conversation with Josiah, my own breathing. . . 5. The way a gratitude list becomes a grounding in-the-moment exercise. The dread has not lifted, but I am no longer living in the center of that cloud. I have sunk to a deeper place, where I can find more complexity (for now)–there is joy in the midst of sadness, no matter how messy and weird it is to hold all those pieces together.
Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. May we walk in Beauty!
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” —Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ―Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“Where there’s life there’s hope, and need of vittles.” ―JRR Tolkien
“We are the ones we have been waiting for.” ―June Jordan
“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ―Albert Einstein
“We are all the leaves of one tree. We are all the waves of one sea.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
“It is respectable to have no illusions―and safe―and profitable and dull.” ―Joseph Conrad
“I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether they are worthy.” —Thomas Merton
“After a War” by Chinua Achebe
After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig; its famished roots close on rubble and every piece of broken glass. Irritations we used to curse return to joyous tables like prodigals home from the city. . . . The meter man serving my maiden bill brought a friendly face to my circle of sullen strangers and me smiling gratefully to the door. After a war we clutch at watery scum pulsating on listless eddies of our spent deluge. . . . Convalescent dancers rising too soon to rejoin their circle dance our powerless feet intent as before but no longer adept contrive only half-remembered eccentric steps. After years of pressing death and dizzy last-hour reprieves we’re glad to dump our fears and our perilous gains together in one shallow grave and flee the same rueful way we came straight home to haunted revelry.
“It has happened before—it will happen again.” —last words in The Magic Cauldron by Margaret F. O’Connell
Fortune shifts her skirts. The Wheel of Fate turns. Fire burns the village, but saves the traveler lost in the wilderness.
Death has visited this valley before and, like winter, she will come again. Will you dance at her return as you celebrated her passing? Will you sing the songs on the open plain that you whispered in the hallways of sadness?
What has once been will be again. What you have seen will show itself in seasons yet to come. The bud that bursts from the twig today will burst again from another branch in another place, another year. Do you hear the music now, that echoes over the hill?
The prompts today are Trap, and Blue. Instead of doing a mash-up, I did two.
In the Arms of the Beloved by Beth Weaver-Kreider
You can’t escape the blue, the windy robe of the Beloved draped like a veil over the rim of your living, over the bowl of your holiest spaces,
and scattered deep within the indigo arms of the tree-shadows, indigo bluer than soul, pathways striping the afternoon green, leading you home to the arms of your most desired Mystery.
Trapped in the Anagrams by Beth Weaver-Kreider
I am rapt. I start prattling, debating. I stay apart: No parties. No pasta. No prattling patter. I’m caught in the strata. No matter, I rap and I mutter. This pome can’t escape the trap and the stutter, lodged under a tarp of ratatat blather, of anagram chatter.
The prompts for today are Inspiration, and Moment. I chose to write a Skinny. You can find out more about this poetic form at The Skinny Poetry Journal.
After (a skinny) by Beth Weaver-Kreider
There will be a moment in the After when we hug again when laughter returns when the After will be there in a moment.
Mockingbird Chronicles 