Poems

Dreamtime 5: Day of Solitude

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today I will be alone. My parents are taking the children for the day, and Jon is going to work, and I get to be just me by myself. There’s tidying to do, and grading, possible baking projects, and all sorts of other things to distract me, but today, I am mostly going to write. I am going to plan to get five or six solid hours of writing done. Maybe a nap. Maybe some reading, some quiet contemplating, some yoga.

Last night’s dreams included the one about the treehouse. This is a recurring setting in my dreams. You climb up to the tree house, and then there are two possibilities for how to get into the treehouse: You can squeeze through a claustrophobic little window (I only tried that option once or twice) or you can balance across the very slippery top. Last night, I scooted across the top backwards on my backside, and it was easy. Usually, crossing through or over the treehouse is the only way to get to one or two of the rooms in the hotel–and I am usually assigned to one of those rooms when I have this particular dream.

In last night’s dreams, I meet a group of friends on the porch of the hotel. One friend, whom I haven’t seen for a long time, has lost a dire amount of weight. He says that some signal coming from his television has turned the fillings in his teeth toxic. Shortly after telling me his story, he gets a surprised look on his face and comes across to sit next to me. Something emanating from me has reversed the process, he says. And he IS looking healthier suddenly.

In the last couple of days, I have done a lot of processing about the way I have become weighed down in the past month or so, wondering whether it’s a mild depression, a seasonal affective disorder, a little of both. . . I’ve been thinking about my style of working, how I approach the Impossible Tasks (or avoid them, rather). I think the ease with which I crossed the bridge-roof of the treehouse is a metaphor for the shift I am making, not just pushing right into the first tight hole and getting stuck, but looking up and outward at other possibilities, putting aside worry, and just crossing to where I need to go.

Gratitude List:
1. Solitude
2. Quiet
3. Sunshine
4. Cats
5. Words on a page

May we walk in Beauty!

Words for the Second Day of Kwanzaa:
Today’s word is Kujichagulia. Self determination.
(Even if you don’t know Swahili, it’s a fun word to roll around in your mouth. Try it. Emphasize the second and second to last syllables.)

“For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

John O’Donohue:

In out of the way places of the heart
Where your thoughts never think to wander
This beginning has been quietly forming
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you
Noticing how you willed yourself on
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

“Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.” ―Carrie Fisher

“Be somebody that makes everybody feel like a somebody.” —Kid President

Into the Dreamtime, Christmas Morning

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Inner and Outer Worlds, Sunrise

Blessings to you this morning, whether you are spending it in quiet contemplation or amidst the chaos of children and relatives, whether you are filled with a sense of longing or a sense of belonging, whether you are satisfied or whether you are wishing to change your lot. May your heart find the light. May your soul be restful in the shadows. May you know yourself to be a part of the web of things.

Gratitude List:
1. The inner and outer worlds
2. Darkness and light
3. Peppermint meltaways
4. Mary’s Canticle
5. You. Always You.

May we walk in Beauty!

“From the halls of power to the fortress tower,
not a stone will be left on stone.
Let the king beware for your justice tears
every tyrant from his throne.
The hungry poor shall weep no more,
for the food they can never earn;
These are tables spread, ev’ry mouth be fed,
for the world is about to turn.

My heart shall sing of the day you bring.
Let the fires of your justice burn.
Wipe away all tears,
For the dawn draws near,
And the world is about to turn.”
—Rory Cooney, from “Canticle of the Turning”

Making the House Ready for the Lord
by Mary Oliver

Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but
still nothing is as shining as it should be
for you. Under the sink, for example, is an
uproar of mice–it is the season of their
many children. What shall I do? And under the eaves
and through the walls the squirrels
have gnawed their ragged entrances–but it is the season
when they need shelter, so what shall I do? And
the raccoon limps into the kitchen and opens the cupboard
while the dog snores, the cat hugs the pillow;
what shall I do? Beautiful is the new snow falling
in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly
up the path, to the door. And still I believe you will
come, Lord: you will, when I speak to the fox,
the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering sea-goose, know
that really I am speaking to you whenever I say,
as I do all morning and afternoon: Come in, Come in.

“I am a hole in a flute
that the Christ’s breath moves through
listen to this music
I am the concert from the mouth of every creature
singing with the myriad chorus” —Hafiz

“May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.” ―Mary Oliver

“We’re all just walking each other home.” —Ram Dass

“I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel.” ―Mary Oliver

Stepping into Time out of Time

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today we slip into time out of time as we begin our journey inward again, slipping closer to our star for the next twelve weeks or so. There’s something unaccountable about the coming days, something watchful and waiting, something shifting. In the coming days, between now and the glorious morning when we welcome the newborn sun–the light streaming in–on Epiphany, I watch my dreams extra closely, mining them for the rich ore of words and images that will be the precious stones I carry with me into the coming year. Last year, it was vultures, mostly. I’m not sure I am ready to let the vultures go, but we will see what this year’s dreams will bring.

Here is a shining gift of a poem by one of my best beloveds. May the light that comes to you this day, and the shadows that settle beside you, be filled with revelation and blessings.

Revelation
For Beth, Winter Solstice 2018
by Mara Eve Robbins

Born into bodies.
Steeds with spirit of storm
gallop habits
holding us back.

Sun and moon
with reins.

Leading us to light.
Leading us through darkness.

Born into riddles
with no stone.
Wings often hidden.
Scattered seeds.

We breathe to light.
We breathe through darkness.

Born into purpose.
Wavering faith
in conviction.
Truth countering accuracy.

We move to light.
We move through darkness.

Born watching waves
break generation, revolution
into revelation.

Revealing light.
Revealing darkness.

Gratitude List:
1. A friend who offers a poem to carry me through the shortest day.
2. Revelation
3. Revolution
4. Poetry
5. Shadow and Light

May we walk in Beauty!

And something I wrote one other Solstice:

How the Light Returns

Breathe deep the light-filled air.
Feel how the new sun touches you.
Remember the stars that circled you
through the long hours of darkness.
Sit within the circle of the dwindling dark
and feel the way it bathes you with memory.
Walk the bridge between dream and daylight.

These are the nights of the dreamtime. The tender new sun is born into the hush of midwinter, and we can hold the quiet light within us as we walk, careful step by careful step, out of the labyrinth. The inward journey into the darkness has stripped us of our crucial identity, piece by painful piece. And now, as we step outward, the darkness offers us new gifts, images that come in dreams. As the days gradually lengthen, and the dark nights wane, what words and images will the journey offer you to put into your pockets for the coming year?

“No matter what they ever do to us, we must always act for the love of our people and the earth. We must not react out of hatred against those who have no sense.”
―John Trudell

May you grow still enough to hear the small noises earth makes in preparing for the long sleep of winter, so that you yourself may grow calm and grounded deep within. May you grow still enough to hear the trickling of water seeping into the ground, so that your soul may be softened and healed, and guided in its flow. May you grow still enough to hear the splintering of starlight in the winter sky and the roar at earth’s fiery core. May you grow still enough to hear the stir of a single snowflake in the air, so that your inner silence may turn into hushed expectation.
―Brother David Steindl-Rast

“When someone mentions the gracefulness of the night sky, climb up on the roof and dance.”
―Rumi

“Be who you were created to be, and you will set the world on fire.” —St. Catherine of Sienna

Into the Dark, December 19

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Every year at this time, I feel the anxiety and restlessness begin to rise within me, and the cold settles into my bones. Every year, I need to consciously ease my spirit into the season. This year, from the beginning of December until Epiphany, I will set it down here on the blog. May we journey into the darkness with intention and tenderness.

Do you feel how it approaches?
The shift?
The transition? 
The time of the change is nearing.
In each of our whirling dances about the sun, we have two moments when we spin furthest from our star: the solstices. While I feel it in the summer’s languid play of days, I am more keenly aware each year in the quiet dark of winter. Just two more days and we will be at one of our furthest points from the sun, and here in the northern hemisphere, our face is tilted away. 

Today, my word will be unclench. My shoulders, mostly, but my breathing, my forehead, my gut, as well. I have noticed myself naturally doing it in the past week–stopping, pausing, sighing, letting the tensions drain downward and away.

Gratitude List:
1. The Donor. Yesterday, we learned that someone has donated a sum of money to begin the process of updating our oldest classroom building. I love this building, but teaching in August and late May can be nearly impossible as students melt into their desks. This money will begin the renovations which will bring my hall some air conditioning.
2. Geese raggedly embroidering the sky
3. Magenta clouds
4. Strong female characters in books. In my reading lately: Antigone, Katniss Everdeen, Jane Eyre, Cordelia
5. Rhythm

May we walk in Beauty!

“…and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” —Emily Dickinson

Never Broken

I am my own Home, now.
Wherever I move
the Light –
It moves with me.
I open all of the windows and the doors
so that God can come and go easily.
I don’t know why God takes such delight
in this House I call “Me”.
This place
where hearts come to be broken.
At the end of the Long Day I always ask.
“God? Why, hearts to be broken?”
And God always replies,
“Never broken, dear Lover _
only Opened.”
—Em Claire

“Find the antidote in the venom.” —Rumi

“Only two more days of the walk into the darkness. I am so grateful for the way the light kept finding me today. I’m not really on the edge, and I am not losing it, but I feel the edges of the panic, the sense of claustrophobia. I like the darkness. I love the inward-turn of winter, but always, at the edge, there’s the. . .well, the edge. So. There’s the Sun. And Stars and a growing Moon. And Mother Darkness. Comfort me. Disturb me.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider (from several years ago)

Into the Dark, December 15

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 5 Comments

Every year at this time, I feel the anxiety and restlessness begin to rise within me, and the cold settles into my bones. Every year, I need to consciously ease my spirit into the season. This year, from the beginning of December until Epiphany, I will set it down here on the blog. May we journey into the darkness with intention and tenderness.

This week in Creative Writing class, students have been presenting poetic forms of their choice, and we’ve been exploring writing in each one. I particularly love working with poetic forms and ideas that fracture meaning by re-arranging words, like in Billy Collins’s joke form, the Paradelle, which uses two repeated lines, and then re-mixes the words in those lines. Abstract poetry, too, often makes use of fractured and oddly mixed words to create a sense of meaning that transcends the direct line of thought. As intentionally goofy as Collins’s form is, it does something sort of exciting to the brain to shift words around and break up their linear meaning.

Habits and rhythms can become ruts. When I have my winter blinders on, trudging through the muck of dark and cold just to get through it, I find that the linear tracks I am making sometimes become deep and worn ruts, making it hard to find meanings in the days and moments other than the ones that make the direct and prosy sentences of my days. I need to rearrange things on the pages of my days, step out of the worn tracks, break the sense of the sentences, shift the meanings. Add a new thing today, even if it’s a new stretch in my yoga routine. Drop another habit, perhaps the quick check of email or FB when I get home from being away.

Here is an attempt at a Paradelle. I’m not sure if it works to put serious thought into a joke form, but it feels satisfying to use the fracturing of the the form to break up the mental trudge:

Walking through the haze of winter days.
Walking through the haze of winter days.
My feet step in the same weary tracks.
My feet step in the same weary tracks.
Through the step of haze, the weary feet,
my winter tracks in same walking days.

I’ve worn a rut both long and deep.
I’ve worn a rut both long and deep.
Confined myself to pooling shadows.
Confined myself to pooling shadows.
To a rut I’ve both shadows confined,
pooling deep both worn and long myself.

And made myself a hidden prison.
And made myself a hidden prison.
Of raw endurance and force of habit. 
Of raw endurance and force of habit.
Force. Prison. Endurance: myself of raw,
and made of hidden and a habit.

Winter and a force of  endurance,
walking in a haze, same feet, shadows:
the raw and hidden habit, long and confined,
both to step through the weary prison rut
worn tracks of my pooling deep, 
I’ve made days of myself. Myself.

Gratitude List:
1. Long, deep mornings to write
2. Tree-shadows against the sky
3. Hunger that wakes me up
4. The way my students react with a natural aversion to injustice in literature.
5. Twinkling lights

May we walk in Beauty!

“How does a woman know? She listens. She listens in. Like light on waves.” —Margaret Atwood

“Every moment is a gift of life.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

“Only a fool knows everything.” —African proverb

“Note to self: If you want to have loving feelings, do loving things.” —Anne Lamott

Into the Dark, December 13

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Every year at this time, I feel the anxiety and restlessness begin to rise within me, and the cold settles into my bones. Every year, I need to consciously ease my spirit into the season. This year, from the beginning of December until Epiphany, I will set it down here on the blog. May we journey into the darkness with intention and tenderness.

Today, one of my best beloveds is having surgery on his heart. I cling to words like “routine” and “basic procedure” although I know that anything involving that particular mass of muscle is anything but simple routine. Still, I trust that there will indeed be something normal and uncomplicated about it all, that my beloved one will come through this fine and healthy and as twinkly-eyed as ever. 

Trust seems to be my word of the day. Trust in the uncertainty and unknowing. Trust in the medical folks, in the procedures, in the body’s ability to respond and heal. Trust in time and spirit and the doctor’s good, good hands.

Such an Advent moment, these coming hours of uncertainty. Waiting. Praying. Focusing my heart. Trusting. Today, the words of Julian of Norwich will accompany me: “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” 

Gratitude List:
1. The doctors and nurses and medical staff who are tending to one I love.
2. The heart. 
3. St. Lucia Day. We carry the light.
4. Tenacity
5. Small, busy birds

May we walk in Beauty!

“Everything is holy now.” —Peter Mayer

“I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“The only door out is the door in.” —George MacDonald (Lilith)

Mimesis
BY FADY JOUDAH

My daughter
wouldn’t hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go biking

She said that’s how others
Become refugees isn’t it?

Terry Tempest Williams (from Red: On Passion and Patience in the Desert): “I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure. I write against power and for democracy. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams. I write in a solitude born out of community. I write to the questions that shatter my sleep. I write to the answers that keep me complacent. I write to remember. I write to forget,,,, I write because I believe in words. I write because I do not believe in words. I write because it is a dance with paradox. I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in sand. I write because it belongs to the force of the moon: high tide, low tide. I write because it is the way I take long walks. I write as a bow to wilderness. I write because I believe it can create a path in darkness…. I write because I am not employable. I write out of my inconsistencies. I write because then I do not have to speak. I write with the colors of memory. I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write as a witness to what I imagine….I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient we are. I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.”

Into the Dark, December 9

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Every year at this time, I feel the anxiety and restlessness begin to rise within me, and the cold settles into my bones. Every year, I need to consciously ease my spirit into the season. This year, from the beginning of December until Epiphany, I will set it down here on the blog. May we journey into the darkness with intention and tenderness.

The word I will wear in my spirit today is synchronicity, that joyful coincidence which feels like more of a tug from the Mystery than a simple overlay of two events or ideas that randomly touch each other. When the moment feels like a message. When meaning bubbles out between that moment and this one like steam rising through the crack between the pot and the lid. When a word or an image brings gooseflesh and chills.

Yes, I believe in science. I believe that random events happen in coincidental ways according to predictable, mathematically-verifiable patterns and rhythms. And I know, too, that my life would be stripped of much of the winsome delight and sense of wonder that fills it were I not to accept the gifts of those coincidences with gratitude and awe. Meaning is so often what we make it. You get to form and focus the meaning of the things that happen to you. Why not choose to live with a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, even the seemingly random events? Yes to math and yes to magic.

Gratitude List:
1. Synchronicity
2. The Wingpeople: herons and eagles and wrens, mockingbirds and gulls, vultures and crows
3. Twinkling eyes
4. Gingerbread
5. Candlelight

May we walk in Beauty!

“Once upon a time,
When women were birds,
There was the simple understanding
That to sing at dawn
And to sing at dusk
Was to heal the world through joy.
The birds still remember what we have forgotten,
That the world is meant to be celebrated.”
—Terry Tempest Williams

“He drew a circle that shut me out-
Heretic , rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him in!”
―Edwin Markham, From the poem “Outwitted”

“To the degree that each of us is dedicated to wanting there to be peace in the world, then we have to take responsibility when our own hearts and minds harden and close. We have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid, to find the soft spot and play with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That’s the true practice of peace.” —Pema Chodron

“HIDING

is a way of staying alive. Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light. Even hiding the truth from ourselves can be a way to come to what we need in our own necessary time. Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world: the protective quiet of an icy northern landscape, the held bud of a future summer rose, the snow bound internal pulse of the hibernating bear. Hiding is underestimated. We are hidden by life in our mother’s womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world; to appear too early in that world is to find ourselves with the immediate necessity for outside intensive care.

Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children or even as emerging adults in retreat from the names that have caught us and imprisoned us, often in ways where we have been too easily seen and too easily named.

We live in a time of the dissected soul, the immediate disclosure; our thoughts, imaginings and longings exposed to the light too much, too early and too often, our best qualities squeezed too soon into a world already awash with too easily articulated ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others. What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

Hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others, especially in the enclosing world of oppressive secret government and private entities, attempting to name us, to anticipate us, to leave us with no place to hide and grow in ways unmanaged by a creeping necessity for absolute naming, absolute tracking and absolute control. Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about our selves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed. Hiding is creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control. Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.” —David Whyte

Into the Dark, December 8

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Every year at this time, I feel the anxiety and restlessness begin to rise within me, and the cold settles into my bones. Every year, I need to consciously ease my spirit into the season. This year, from the beginning of December until Epiphany, I will set it down here on the blog. May we journey into the darkness with intention and tenderness.

Making space. Those will be my words for today. Clearing kitchen and floors, getting ready for the Yule tree. If nothing else, getting a Christmas tree into the house each year demands that we rethink our daily clutter and find a way to shift the mess. Last weekend, Josiah decided that since we weren’t yet getting a tree, he would decorate anyway, and decorate he did, forcing us to begin the process of clearing and shifting. He set up the mantelpiece to look like a city street, with the carolers and the nutcracker, the Bavarian gnome from his uncle, and his grandmother’s wooden Santa.

Here is a poem by spiritual director Martha Postlewaite about making space:

Clearing
by Martha Postlewaite

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.

Gratitude List:
1. Space
2. Silence
3. Breathing
4. Spice
5. Solitude

May we walk in Beauty!

“You can’t oppress someone who is not afraid anymore.” —Cesar Chavez

“Among wolves, no matter how sick, no matter how cornered, no matter how alone, afraid or weakened, the wolf will continue. She will lope, even with a broken leg. She will strenuously outwait, outwit, outrun and outlast whatever is bedeviling her. She will put her all in taking breath after breath. The hallmark of the wild nature is that it goes on.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“If a child is to keep alive [her] inborn sense of wonder, [she] needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with [her] the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.” –Rachel Carson

“When women were birds, we knew otherwise. We knew our greatest freedom was in taking flight at night, when we could steal the heavenly darkness for ourselves, navigating through the intelligence of Stars and the constellations of our own making in the delight and terror of our uncertainty.” —Terry Tempest Williams

“But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” —Leonard Bernstein

Into the Dark, December 7

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Every year at this time, I feel the anxiety and restlessness begin to rise within me, and the cold settles into my bones. Every year, I need to consciously ease my spirit into the season. This year, from the beginning of December until Epiphany, I will set it down here on the blog. May we journey into the darkness with intention and tenderness.

In these chill mornings, while we are waiting in the warm car in the dawn for our carpool companion to come out to the car, I watch how the light rises through the trees in her hollow, how the branches cross and tangle, creating loops and circles and triangles and the shapes of eyes. I am a fan of Zentangles, and I find that lately I am am obsessed with putting lines on the page, crossing and intersecting much as the branches intertwine, as though my mind might float away into the grey winter sky were I not to catch it in a tangle of lines on paper.

While I do sometimes use prayer to describe that place I go when I am consciously opening a space within me to communicate with the Great Mystery, I more often find myself thinking in terms of placing myself deliberately on the web of being, of holding my beloveds in the web of energy generated by Love. The dawn trees, the lines on a page, the webs of prayer: I am held, anchored at least momentarily in time and space. So, tangle will be my word for today, a tangle that holds and anchors and communicates along its seemingly random lines.

Gratitude List:
1. Tangles and webs
2. Trees and dawn
3. Stories that nourish my spirit
4. Planning
5. How meaning comes into being

May we walk in Beauty!

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” ― Walt Whitman

I Looked Up
by Mary Oliver

I looked up and there it was
among the green branches of the pitch pines—
thick bird,
a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders and down the back—
color of copper, iron, bronze—
lighting up the dark branches of the pine.
What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
When I made a little sound
it looked at me, then it looked past me.
Then it rose, the wings enormous and opulent,
and, as I said, wreathed in fire.

At the Beginning of Winter
by Tom Hennen

In the shallows of the river
After one o’clock in the afternoon
Ice still
An eighth of an inch thick.
Night never disappears completely
But moves among the shadows
On the bank
Like a glimpse of fur.
Meanwhile
Trees
Grass
Flies and spiderwebs
Appear alone in the flat air.
The naked aspens stand like children
Waiting to be baptized
And the goldenrod too is stripped down
To its bare stalk
In the cold
Even my thoughts
Have lost their foliage.

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”
― Joseph Campbell

Breath flows in, breath flows out,
Traveling always the curving path of the Goddess.
Breath flows spontaneously of its own will.
Thus all breathing beings
Continually give reverence to Her.
Be conscious of this unconscious prayer,
For She is the most holy place of pilgrimage.

She wishes for you to enter this temple,
Where each breath is adoration
Of the infinite for the incarnate form.

Breath flows
Into this body
As a nectar of the gods.

Every breath is a whisper
Of the Goddess:
“Here is the ritual I ask of you —
Be the cup
Into which I pour this bliss,
The elixir of immortal peace.”

—Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, Verses 154 -155
“The Radiance Sutras”
Lorin Roche

Into the Dark, December 2

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Every year at this time, I feel the anxiety and restlessness begin to rise within me, a claustrophobic pressure in my soul. The darkness begins to feel overwhelming, and the cold settles into my bones. Every year, I need to consciously contend with the darkness, to ease my spirit into the season. This year, from the beginning of December until Epiphany, when we proclaim the light really and truly returned, I will set it down here on the blog. Knowing how the season hits me, I will give myself permission for some minimal days, a sentence or two, or soothing words from another poet or writer instead of my own. May we journey into the darkness with intention and tenderness.

I am fascinated by the light reflected in the windows on these just-past-dawn winter mornings. I keep taking photos, trying to look through the reflections back into my world, but an altered version of my world. I am Alice gazing into the looking glass. I am Lucy looking into Narnia. There is a world of possibility out there, but also back in here. The images draw me outward and inward at the same time. There is magic at the very center of our lives. Alice and Lucy and their authors knew it: We are standing in the shining door or window or mirror or lamp post between worlds, you and I. The same vast worlds of possibility that reach outward also reach inward, and sometimes we approach them on the same pathways of light and shadow.

So today’s word is Reflection. Isn’t it interesting how we’ve chosen that word for contemplating our place in the world. We need the mirror or the glass, the light and shadow, the eyes to see the deeper layers.

Here is a poem on light by John O’Donohue. If you like it, you might consider buying yourself a copy of his To Bless the Space Between Us.

For Light
by John O’Donohue

Light cannot see inside things.
That is what the dark is for:
Minding the interior,
Nurturing the draw of growth
Through places where death
In its own way turns into life.

In the glare of neon times,
Let our eyes not be worn
By surfaces that shine
With hunger made attractive.

That our thoughts may be true light,
Finding their way into words
Which have the weight of shadow
To hold the layers of truth.

That we never place our trust
In minds claimed by empty light,
Where one-sided certainties
Are driven by false desire.

When we look into the heart,
May our eyes have the kindness
And reverence of candlelight.

That the searching of our minds
Be equal to the oblique
Crevices and corners where
The mystery continues to dwell,
Glimmering in fugitive light.

When we are confined inside
The dark house of suffering
That moonlight might find a window.

When we become false and lost
That the severe noon-light
Would cast our shadow clear.

When we love, that dawn-light
Would lighten our feet
Upon the waters.

As we grow old, that twilight
Would illuminate treasure
In the fields of memory.

And when we come to search for God,
Let us first be robed in night,
Put on the mind of morning
To feel the rush of light
Spread slowly inside
The color and stillness
Of a found word.

Gratitude List:
1. Sweet Habanero sauce on scrambled eggs.
2. Taking the world a step at a time
3. Creative projects. I need to draw and crochet and knit and take pictures right now. Zentangles, especially, are helping me to meditate and keep my heart open right now.
4. Hot showers and how they wake you up.
5. Yoga. Balancing. Stretching.

May we walk in Beauty!