A small pool in the base of twin trees along the new trail.
Today’s Prompts were Spider and Exotic. I don’t know if re-mything Spider Mystery is exotic or not, but this is what I came up with.
Spider by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Not all stories start the same. Try this one: In the ending. . . We’re bending the tale around a whole new fulcrum, following Hansl’s trail of crumbs from wicked witch to angry stepmother, or over other paths not yet traversed within the standard myth.
In the ending was Spider, marking her eternal spiral, spinning her infinite web, wrapping her magical bundles (don’t become one of those).
You wonder how she got to this moment, your mind on the lines that connect from beam to sill, from ledge to beam again. You want to know the structure, sense the essence of the plot, the way from there to here.
But when you live within the spin of infinity, beginnings become irrelevant. Endings, too, for that matter, fade to insignificance. The middle, that’s the place where twist and whirl tingle, where living blossoms out of nothing, and you catch the sticky thread of the moment, knowing you can shift from arm to arm of time, like Spider, who even now is watching you from the center of her web.
In the middle. . . Now there’s a thread to hand a tale by.
The prompts today are “bar” and “The Last _______.” Yesterday, I was mulling what the lore of these days might be, and the word Apocalypticon floated through my brain. It turns out there’s already a book by that name, but I thought it might be a good name for a poem.
The Apocalypticon: The Last Revelation by Beth Weaver-Kreider
One That spring, Grace found her first morel on the west-facing slope of the ridge. Everyone was finding them, actually, that spring. Everyone was eating morels, and Emily planted a gangster garden. Bootleggers and mob bosses graced her green. All we had seen before was somehow new now, more verdant.
Two One of us began receiving messages from a golden koi who circled slowly beneath the lilies of a lake. She would not tell us what the Lady told her, only: “Take what you need. Too much is at stake.”
Three I did battle with poison ivy that spring, apologizing a hundred times a day for cutting her thousand arms, but ivy laughed in crimson leaves and grew like the Revolution was at hand.
Four Some of us sat with our demons, telling old tales of battles long gone, bellying up to the bar of lost memories, or singing them to sleep with old songs, while Clare chanted exorcisms in the sleet on windy mountains pushing back the forces that threaten to submerge the story. I know of two who nearly lost the trail, wandering far into the shadows.
Five We stopped using the word normal, re-wove older linguistic threads, spun ancient stories into the chapters we were writing. We re-worded our vocabularies, re-ordered our syntax, re-discovered voices we thought had forgotten how to speak.
Six We caught our own flocks of wild yeast, planted potatoes in neat rows, learned new words for magic and for prayer, exploring layer after layer of mysteries, parting the curtains, and watching the ways of the moon.
The grumbling is getting louder. The anxiety is rising. People are starting to toss the words “rights” and “freedom” around. People are afraid that this is all power-plays by the leadership to cow us, subject us, hold us in our places. And why shouldn’t they be afraid? When have we ever known the (mostly) rich (mostly) white (mostly) male ruling class to work on behalf of the people, to remember their sweetly quaint little title of “public servant”? Who should we trust?
The doctors. And scientists. We can, hopefully, trust the scientists and the physicians. And the story. Trust the story. Watch how it has played out across the globe. Remember Italy. Remember China.
It’s very likely that some of the governors are working out of self-interest and electability, that some are too cautious and timid, that others are hungrily consolidating power in a time when people are vulnerable. So I will trust the leaders who seem to be trusting the doctors and the scientists and the story. It hasn’t been difficult to find an example of a leaders who isn’t trusting the science, who is inexorably manipulating the narrative to feed his own ego and his own power. And if you want to start talking about freedom and rights, let’s begin with the ways in which he has been harming the freedom and the rights of the common people since the day he took office. I’m going to cast my lot in with the governors on this one.
This doesn’t have to be an American frontier epic contest between your fear and your freedom. That’s an old and worn-out trope, and it’s a false dichotomy, a fairy tale told to us by end-stage capitalism. The governors are not Big Bart riding into town with all guns blazing, ordering the women and children to cower in their homes. In this story, we make the choice to stay home, to wait, to isolate, in order to protect the vulnerable ones among us, in order to protect our health care workers.
As far as I know, my parents and my immuno-compromised beloveds are all safe. But if we resume business as usual too soon, they may all be in danger, and those you love, too. It’s not about whether or not you or I personally fear death. It’s about whether we have the deep communal compassion to do something that protects the most vulnerable among us. Remember, this is the Exile for the Good of the Realm.
Gratitude List: 1. The Iron Lady Trail. My Project Manager says I shouldn’t call it that, that it’s still unnamed, but he initially called it the Iron Lady, and so I’m calling it that for now. Josiah is marking and clearing a series of deer trails in the woods above the pond. He calls himself the Project Manager, and her has enlisted his progenitors to assist with the cutting of poison ivy and brambles. Yesterday after our schoolwork, we cleared a side trail that links the Iron Lady (I mean Unnamed) Trail to a second entrance to the fields. This one emerges from the woods beneath a curving limb of a cherry tree. For too long, the poison ivy has kept us out of the woods. We are going to try to keep the trails maintained so we can have some passages through the woods. 2. The passion with which my kids follow their interests. It can be tiring to listen to hours of discourse on the minute differences between the Tesla models, or how to build a very detailed something-or-other in Minecraft, or the many reasons why a particularly obscure piece of technology is either illegal or shady or brilliant. Still, I love that they can be passionate about things that have near-zero interest for me. 3. Homemade oatmeal protein bars. I don’t know why I got away from making them. And of course, I have no recipe, so I have to go back and recreate it. The ones I made last night are too crumbly. But they taste good! 4. The veils of green appearing through the woods. 5. I am loving the poetry-writing process right now. It’s very much like the energy of April 2012 (I think that was the year), when I felt something click and sizzle. This is perhaps less giddy, more grounded, but it tingles. I’m especially grateful for my poet-community right now.
Take care of each other. Walk in Beauty!
The Soul, it sees by synesthesia Tasting light caressed by song A touch is like a descant fire resonant and strong. —Craig Sottolano
“I’m not as cooperative as you might want a woman to be.” —Carrie Fisher
“The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.” —Adrienne Rich
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. -—Raymond Carver’s Late Fragment, inscribed on his tombstone
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.
The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last.
All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you. —David Whyte
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” ―Mother Teresa
“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
“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” ―Leonard Bernstein
Today’s prompts were fun to mash up: “dream,” and “middle of the week.” Also, I had my Creative Writing students write a list poem today, so I wanted to try one of those, too. Pile on the fun.
Transformation by Beth Weaver-Kreider
On Sunday, she dreamed she was inside an egg, arms and legs curled tight, and light (diffuse) swirling through the veil of shell around her.
On Monday, she dreamed she walked a pathway underneath an overarching fern. Fronds unfurled where dragonflies hovered above, large as dragons.
On Tuesday, she dreamed of thorn and bramble, rose and blackberry sending tendrils grasping, catching clothing, and bright crimson drops of blood.
On Wednesday, the fulcrum of the week, no dream disturbed her sleep, no portents woke her, no messages arrived through the veil between.
On Thursday, the forest of her dreams darkened and wolves prowled just beyond her firelight. Wolves howled in shadows, eyes a-glint.
On Friday, she died in her dreaming, yet stood at the edge of the clearing, watching her body where it lay among mayapples and mushrooms.
On Saturday, the dream spread a wide gleaming sea in her path. She stepped into a coracle boat, ivory, smooth as eggshell.
Today’s Prompts are Sacrifice and Purpose. In this one, I followed where the sounds and rhythms led me rather than working for a particularly tight meaning.
Let Loose by Beth Weaver-Kreider
At what price, this sacrifice? What personal cost, what cross, what losses must she bear, to wear the mantle she’s been handed?
And how much of it is her choice to give voice to all the stories offered her in dreams? What seems to be the answer to the question she’s been dancing since she woke?
What purpose does it serve, this nervous laughter, crafting tales that avoid disaster, trails of crumbs to follow home when all’s played out.
Could she have stayed within the boundaries? Prayed more devoutly? Sounded pious when her soul was out of kilter? Filtered out the deeper truths that led her out beyond the fields?
No, she was meant to wander further than the walls the maps required. She was tired of living tamely in domesticated trance. She had to dance into the open, throw her fancy to the winds, take her chances where she could and race the storm across the wildlands to find the answer to her ache.
The prompts today are “spirit” and “eggs.” And it is Easter, so that wants to weave into the mix. One of my favorite moments in all of the New Testament stories is the moment when Mary Magdalene is weeping in the garden, and asks the gardener where they have taken her beloved, and the gardener turns, and it IS her beloved, and he says her name. This feels like one of the holiest stories to me.
Grief is the Egg by Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Grief is not your problem. Grief is not the sorrow. Grief is the medicine.” —Martin Prechtel
There are people who sing when they weep, who wail for the dead in poems, chant the wandering spirits into seeds that will sprout in the new world as trees, or storms, or whales.
Grief is not the rock that entombs you. It is the egg of the thing to come, the precious perfume in the alabaster jar that finds its way to praise life and living even as it anoints the dead. The egg and the seed are the medicine.
Grief is no dead end road. It is the curtain rent in two, the woman weeping in the garden: “Tell me, if you know, where they have taken my beloved.”
Grief is the egg of the moment, radiant with sunlight, just before the gardener turns, and you hear your name.
May you feel your spirit rise today, rolling away the stone from the entrance and bursting forth into the shining garden.
May you sense the impossible truth today. As you huddle in your anguished grieving, may you hear the Gardener call your name as you turn into the light.
Gratitude List: 1. A shining morning 2. Making things: clothing and poems and bread 3. All the colors out there: flashes of red and yellow in the trees, blue and green 4. Courage 5. Sunlight in the hollow
May we walk in Beauty!
“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ―Rumi
“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ―Buddha
Some words on my River, from Robert Louis Stevenson: “I have been changed from what I was before; and drunk too deep perchance the lotus of the air, Beside the Susquehanna and along the Delaware.” ―Robert Louis Stevenson
“. . .and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.” ―Robert Louis Stevenson
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ―Elie Wiesel
Rob Brezsny: Plato said God was a geometer who created an ordered universe imbued with mathematical principles. Through the ages, scientists who’ve dared to speak of a Supreme Being have sounded the same theme. Galileo wrote, “To understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics.”
Modern physicist Stephen Hawking says that by using mathematical theories to comprehend the nature of the cosmos, we’re trying to know “the mind of God.”
But philosopher Richard Tarnas proposes a different model. In his book “Cosmos and Psyche,” he suggests that God is an artist—more in the mold of Shakespeare than Einstein.
For myself―as I converse with God every day―I find Her equally at home as a mathematician and artist.
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
Mockingbird Chronicles 