Poems

Memories That Have Not Yet Been

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write a Praise poem. I have been thinking about the way the Future sometimes seems to be coming back toward the present to embrace us, so:

I Praise the Future
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

for she rushes back toward me from the bend in the road,
for she holds out her hands, calling, “Come! I have something
especially for you!” and holds me with her twinkling eyes,
for she embraces me and calls my name, and then
she whirls and races back to the turning,
leaving laughter in her wake–it rustles with the fallen leaves
as her feet stir them like memories that have not yet been.

Today’s Quotations all seem to be about the inside and the outside:
Adrienne Rich: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility of more truth around her.”
*
“Walked for half an hour in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant mountains – a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.”
—Henri Frederic Amiel; 1821 – 1881
*
“Part of the tragedy of our present culture is that all our attention is on the outer, the physical world. And yes, outer nature needs our attention; we need to act before it is too late, before we ravage and pollute the whole ecosystem. We need to save the seeds of life’s diversity. But there is an inner mystery to a human being, and this too needs to be rescued from our present wasteland; we need to keep alive the stories that nourish our souls. If we lose these seeds we will have lost a connection to life’s deeper meaning—then we will be left with an inner desolation as real as the outer.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Gratitude List:
1. That very red oak tree down Ducktown, across from Flinchbaugh’s
2. The way the sycamores along Kreutz Creek raise their white arms upward
3. The Dawn Redwoods and larches, which are turning a sepia brown and getting ready to release their needle-leaves
4. The maples along the highway, which turn orange to red on one side, while staying greenish on the other
5. All the blues of the clouds today

May we walk in Beauty!

A Very Simple Secret

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


Today’s prompt is to write a self-destruct poem:

When you are finished reading this poem,
it will self-destruct. The words
will fly outward, shards of ideas
exploding, lacerating skin,
feelings and notions piercing the soul,
shredding elevated egos
and mangling worn-out theories.
You will not be able to escape
into the house of another poem,
for all poetry is designed to explode,
to burst, to shatter into a thousand colors,
like the fracturing of light.

“The word is the making of the world.” —Wallace Stevens
*
“Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
*
“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” —Albert Einstein
*
“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” —Coretta Scott King
*
“When you feel the suffering of every living thing in your own heart, that is consciousness.”
—Bhagavad Gita
*
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
*
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
*
“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
*
“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
*
“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
*
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.”
―Naomi Shihab Nye

Gratitude List:
1. How dreams keep revealing themselves
2. How the leaves fly down from the sky
3. How children see things that adults miss
4. How the work gets done
5. How starlings move as a single bird

May we walk in Beauty!

The Same Precious Love

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Today’s Prompt is to write a “Whosoever __________” poem. I’ve been having a little fun today with friends doing some predictive text play, so I think this poem will be a sort of controlled predictive text poem:

Whosoever shall shake the valley
Whosoever shall meet at the crossroads
Whosoever shall I inform of the trees that bloom in the fall

Whosoever shall ramble in the meadow
Whosoever shall receive the message
Whosoever shall walk with Beauty

Whosoever shall linger in the forest
Whosoever shall dance with time
Whosoever shall speak the names of the Mystery

To her shall the valley be haven
To her shall the crossroads tell their story
To her shall the trees let down a crown of leaves

To her shall the meadow sing with golden pollen
To her shall the message be a word of grace
To her shall Beauty open its doors

To her shall the forest be golden and green
To her shall time whisper with longing
To her shall the Mystery open its secrets

Each of these quotes has a partner. The pairs sort of dance with each other:

“Both when we fall and when we get up again, we are kept in the same precious love.” ―Julian of Norwich
*
“What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved–what then?” ―Carl Jung
****
“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.”
―Eleanor Roosevelt
*
“If I had influence with the good fairy, I would ask that her gift to each child be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.”
―Rachel Carson
****
“Your problem is you’re too busy holding onto your unworthiness.” ―Ram Dass
*
“In giving of yourself, you will discover a whole new life full of meaning and love.” ―Cesar Chavez
****
“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
―Eugene V. Debs
*
“I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too. Ma Joad: I don’t understand it, Tom. Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.”
―Tom Joad, from the movie Grapes of Wrath

Gratitude  List:
1. The Little Prince. Both the book and the movie. I tried not to freak out the children with my weeping tonight when we watched the movie. I guess I knew what the whole snake part was about, but tonight it was so real, and I could hardly watch. Still, it was beautifully done.
2. The autumn sun slanting through autumn leaves of old oaks at the Masonic Home. Stone buildings with slate roofs. The smell of chocolate in the air. (Thinking of you and your family tonight, Miss Jan.)
3. It was warm enough for me to grade at the picnic table for a couple hours this afternoon.
4. A warm hat
5. An extra hour.

May we walk in Beauty!

Mercy and Fear

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write a triangle poem:

Triangle: The Spell, The Sleep, The Waking
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

First is the spell, the incantation, the bright blessing.
First is the curse of the jealous fairy.
First is the vain step-mother, the anxious interloper.
First is the dawn of the golden child.
First is three wishes and a wild, wild wind.

Second is when she loses the golden ball of her voice.
Second, the falling asleep.
Second is ball gowns and tea cakes.
Second is the pampered pedestal.
Second is a red bird in a golden cage.

Third, the clocks booms midnight.
Third, the wolf howls.
Third, the cock crows.
Third, the red rider races across the pathway.
Third, she opens her eyes.

“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” –James Keenan
*
“The heavens are sweeping us along in a cyclone of stars.” –Teilhard de Chardin
*
Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” –Jim Morrison
*
“You need not wade through the mists and bogs to reach the moon.
You need not climb a ladder of cobweb.
You need not ride the stallions that wicker in the sea’s pounding surf.

Draw back the curtain and open the window.
Breathe the bracing air and listen:
The whinny of an owl, the click of the bat,
The grunt of a buck and the distant roar of the train.

The full moon will spill a milky road before you.
That is all the pathway you will need.”
–Beth Weaver-Kreider
*
Joseph Campbell: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”

Gratitude List:
1. Robins gathering in the hollow in the growing dusk
2. Russet. Nice word. Nice color.
3. The steeples of Wrightsville. This really is a lovely little town nestled into the hills of York County.
4. Falling leaves. Rilke’s poem really got into me. There’s nothing quite like translation to put a poet inside your head.
5. Moon moon moon moon mooooooooooooon

May we walk in Beauty!

Door to the Temple

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write a disguise poem.

You stood–still–in the center of the room,
the dancers weaving in and out about you,
a silken mask hid all your face but your eyes.

If they noticed you, they gave no sign.
They whirled about and sipped their wine.
They never took note of your disguise.

Sometimes the simplest way to hide
is in plain view, where the blase few
will never hear your silent sighs.

*(A little dramatic, perhaps, but i’ll work it up a bit later. For now, it’s time for bed.)

“No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds –
November!”
–Thomas Hood, No!
*
“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” –Mary Oliver
*
“Awake my dear. Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the fields and let it breathe.” –Hafiz (I know I posted this one recently. I still need it.)
*
“Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.” ~~ Muriel Rukeyser
*
“We discover the Earth in the depths of our being through participation, not through isolation or exploitation. We are most ourselves when we are most intimate with the rivers and mountains and woodlands, with the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens…We belong here. Our home is here. The excitement and fulfillment of our lives is here…Just as we are fulfilled in our communion with the larger community to which we belong, so too the universe itself and every being in the universe is fulfilled in us.”
~ Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe
*
Words of Howard Zinn:
“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t ‘win,’ there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.
“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.
“If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
*
It may seem harsh, but that’s sort of his point–
Bill Maher:
“Christians, I know, I’m sorry; I know you hate this and you want to square this circle, but you can’t. I’m not even judging you. I’m just saying, logically, if you ignore every single thing Jesus commanded you to do, you’re not a Christian. You’re just auditing. You’re not Christ’s followers. You’re just fans.”

Gratitude List:
1. Saffron yellow is the color of the season, and everyone is wearing it. I don’t usually pay much attention to the colors of the season,but this is a stunning color. I might have to buy myself something in saffron.
2. Moonrise tonight. The moon was like a mist, a ghost, veiled face.
3. Two purrfolk on my lap at once
4. Grace and mercy
5. Sleep

May we walk in Beauty!

A Sestina for All Saints (2 of 2)

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I plan to write a poem a day again this November, following the prompts from Robert Lee Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog. Today’s prompt is to write a new day poem. I decided to try another sestina, using new and day as two of the six words, and creating a little end rhyme. It may make it a little too bouncy, and a sestina is a little ambitious for my falling-asleep brain, but it’s all in the name of experimentation.

All Saints Day
a sestina
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

As the veil closes on this day,
day between days when I–and you–
go seeking guides and saints, seeking the way
our dear beloveds have wandered through
the parted curtain: Listen, can you hear them say
the names of all the souls they knew

when their own days were green and new?
Now we ourselves slip from behind the curtain of this day
to follow their singing, to hear them say
our own names. Can you feel how they long for you?
How they seek your attention through
this veil that obscures the way?

How silently they guide you when you lose your way?
Our memories are vast pools they bathe in. They renew
their lives within the waters of the dreams we threw
away. Their memories are thin as cobweb, flashing like a day,
then gone. All they have to hold them here is you–
and me–so we must be careful what we say

about the dead, about the ones who’ve gone before. We say
they’re just a vapor, just a mist, a feather that will weigh
less than a living soul. But we know, me and you,
how light is heavy, how old is new,
how they continue to exist beyond their days,
and how the weight of our own memories brings them through.

And so we speak the names of saints and our beloveds, through
the long nights of the Hallowed Days, we say
their names, we keep them real, we mark the days
and help them through the veil to find their way
back to our joyful tables, set with bread and wine and new
candles. Look how they glow and hover around you.

I will keep this night along with you
and listen as the music whispers through
the mists that rise across the veil, new
pathways drawn between us. We can say
that finally we have found our way
between the curtains and into a new day.

Tomorrow you will step into another day,
find the way between, the way through, find your way
into a new dawn, full of light. You’ll have new names to say.

I needed a brain diversion today, and so I pulled up two Rilke autumn poems and translated them into English. I had forgotten how satisfying translation is.

An Autumn day (Herbsttag)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translation by E. A. Weaver-Kreider

Lord: it is time. The summer was so long.
Lay your shadow upon the sundials,
and set the winds loose upon the fields.

Command the final fruits to ripen;
give them yet two southerly days,
urge them to fullness and coax
the last sweetness into the earnest wine.

Whoever has no home, has now no time to build.
Whoever is alone, will stay alone a while,
will awaken, read, write long epistles
and in the alleys here and there
will wander, while the leaves drift by.

Fall (Herbst)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translation by E. A. Weaver-Kreider

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far away,
as if they’ve withered in the distant gardens of the heavens;
they are falling in the gesture of denial.

And through this night the heavy Earth is falling
away from all the stars in lonely space.

We all are falling. This hand falls.
And look at the other one: falling is in everything.

And yet there is One who holds all this falling
in infinitely tender hands.

Women Who Are Tied to the Moon (1 of 2)

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


I usually write a poem a day in November. Today, during a Study Hall when I couldn’t concentrate on grading, I pulled up a couple Rilke poems about autumn and tried my hand at translation. I had forgotten how extremely satisfying it is to translate poems from German. This gives me three poems to post today, so in the interest of blog brevity, I will create a second post tonight in order to post the poems.

“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” –Roald Dahl, The Witches
*
“For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap its’ knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows, the joy, the poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff. You have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.” –Anais Nin
*
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
“On such a day each road is planned
To lead to some enchanted land;
Each turning meets expectancy.
The signs I read on every hand.
I know by autumn’s wizardry
On such a day the world can be
Only a great glad dream for me–
Only a great glad dream for me!”
–Eleanor Myers Jewett, “An Autumn Day”
*
“Change is not merely necessary to life, it is life.”
–Alvin Toffler
*
“In the morning I went out to pick dandelions and was drawn to the Echinacea patch where I found a honeybee clinging to one of the pink flowers. She seemed in distress, confused and weak. She kept falling off the flower and then catching herself in midair and flying dizzily back. She kept trying to get back to work, to collect her pollen and nectar to take home to the hive to make honey but she was getting weaker and weaker and then she fell into my hand. I knew she would never make it back to her hive. For the next half hour she rested in my palm, her life slowly ebbing away as a thunderstorm started to brew. I sat on the earth waiting for death with her. The lightening flashed over the mountains, a family of turkeys slowly walked the ridge, a wild dog keyed into what was happening circled past us. The trees appeared startlingly vivid and conscious as the wind blew up and the thunder cracked and then her death was finished. She was gone forever. But in her going she taught me to take every moment as my last flower, do what I could and make something sweet of it.” –Layne Redmond
*
Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.
–Thomas Merton
*
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
–Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein
*
“Learn to tell the story of the red leaves against water.
Read the alphabet of walnut branches newly bared for winter.
Become literate in the language of cricket and of wren,
of the footsteps of skunk and the changeability of weather.

Interpret the text of the wind in the hollow.
Scan the documents of cloud and constellation.
Enter the tale of rose hip and nettle and sassafras.
Study Wisdom and she will find you.”
–Beth Weaver-Kreider
*
Audre Lorde
“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”
*
November
by Clyde Watson

November comes
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.

With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.

The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.
*
“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” –Khalil Gibran

Gratitude List:
1. Poetry
2. Poets
3. How dreams seep into waking
4. How waking seeps into dreams
5. Form and freedom

May we walk in Beauty!

Through the Veil

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Tonight is the Hallowed Eve, the Holy Night, the opening of the veil into the Holy Days of All Saints and All Souls, a time to reflect on our mortality as we remember those who’ve gone before: the wise and compassionate ones, the givers and doers and makers, and the beloved ones who are no longer with us.

We all reach that doorway, in the end. The tunnel with the bright light, the voices calling, the shedding of the body. And so we remember to enjoy it while we have it, to wear these mortal clothes with as much delight and passion and wisdom and kindness as we can muster. To be like our saints and our beloveds. To carry their legacy within our own mortal bones.

We look the leering skull in the face and say, “Someday, yes. But not today.” Instead of running from the skeletons of memory and loss, we dance with them a while, drink a toast, and bow to respectfully, knowing we too will someday be the memories our beloveds dance with.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses,
And all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” –Mother Goose
*
Marge Piercy:
Forgive the dead year. Forgive
yourself. What will be wants
to push through your fingers.
The light you seek hides
in your belly. The light you
crave longs to stream from
your eyes. You are the moon
that will wax in new goodness.
*
“Surrender is not passively resigning yourself to something. . .it is a conscious embracing of what is.” –Cynthia Bourgeault
*
The wheel turns.
The harvest is in.
The veil parts.
We walk into the dark time.
Dream well.
Bright Blessings.
–Beth Weaver-Kreider
*
“We meet no ordinary people in our lives.” –C. S. Lewis
*
“When you think everything else is someone else’s fault, you will suffer a lot.” –Dalai Lama

Gratitude List:
(Some of these are a little goofy, perhaps, but they were all part of the sweet simple delights of the day)
1. When you’re singing a song to the cats, and when you pause, one of them comes in at exactly the right moment and pitch.
2. When you’re walking down the street in Wrightsville, and a tiny little Elsa-person looks up and says with gleaming eyes and gusto, “Hello, Witch!”
3. This night of the year when whole communities create fun for children.
4. That bush on our walk through Wrightsville, with the yellow flowers, like a bit of the tropics on a cold October night.
5. Tuesdays.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Gate to Heaven

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

final (10)“It’s a matter of talking their language. You have a little feel for tradition and some courtesy, you’d be surprised, you can unscrew the inscrutable.” –Tennessee Steinmetz, The Love Bug
*
“The gate to heaven is everywhere.” ~Thomas Merton
*
“Poets are always taking the weather so personally.” –J. D. Salinger
*
“Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.”
–Simone Weil
*
“Hold your own. Know your Name. And go your own way.” –Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
*
“Wherever you are certain in your knowing takes on a fire. . .a life.” –Bahauddin, father of Rumi
*
“One of the truest signs on maturity is the ability to disagree with someone while still remaining respectful.” –Dave Willis
*
“The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.”
~ Jacques Maritain
*
“To see is that specifically human capability that opens one up to empathy, to compassion with all that lives and dies.
Merely looking-at the world around us is immensely different from seeing it. Any cat or crocodile can look-at things and beings, but only we humans have the capacity to see. Although many of us, under the ceaseless bombardment of photographic and electronic imagery that we experience daily, have lost that gift of seeing, we can learn it anew, and learn to retrieve it again and again the act of seeing for the first time, each time we look at them.
When the eye wakes up to see again, it suddenly stops taking anything for granted.
Leaf, rosebush, woman, or child, is no longer a thing, no longer my “object” over and against which I am the supercilious “subject”. The spilt is healed. It is at once de-thing-ified. I say yes to its existence. By “seeing” it, I dignify it, I declare it worthy of total attention, as worthy of attention as I am myself, for sheer existence is the awesome mystery and miracle we share.”
–Frederick Franck
*
We have
a microcsopic anatomy
of the whale
this
gives
Man
assurance
–William Carlos Williams
*
“What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and unborn? I think it is love. I am perforce aware how baldly and embarrassingly that word now lies on the page—for we have learned at once to overuse it, abuse it, and hold it in suspicion. But I do not mean any kind of abstract love (adolescent, romantic, or “religious”), which is probably a contradiction in terms, but particular love for particular things, places, creatures, and people, requiring stands, acts, showing its successes and failures in practical or tangible effects. And it implies a responsibility just as particular, not grim or merely dutiful, but rising out of generosity. I think that this sort of love defines the effective range of human intelligence, the range within its works can be dependably beneficent. Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous. Desire for the future produces words that cannot be stood by. But love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows.” ~Wendell Berry

Gratitude List:
1. Reminders that rage is not negative, even though it is hard work.
2. How being unsettled moves me into new territory.
3. My delightful and funny colleagues.
4. Quiet and solitude
5. Collage–taking seemingly unrelated bits and putting them together into a unified whole. So, collage, or quilting, or life.

May we walk in Beauty!

This will Be a Memory

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

“Look! Look! Look deep into nature and you will understand everything.”
~ Albert Einstein
*
“The only trap I must beware not to fall into, is to think that each day is the same as the next. In fact, each morning brings with it a hidden miracle, and we must pay attention to this miracle.”
~ Paulo Coelho
*
“In the end, so much of the conflict we feel in our hearts is because we’ve split ourselves off from the very life we are living. We partition ourselves from the things with which we are at odds, treating them as unbelonging even as we live them. We vaguely imagine some other place, some better job, some other lover – but the irony is that so much of what makes us unhappy is our own rejection of the life we have made. Eventually we must take our life into our arms and call it our own. We must look at it squarely with all its unbecoming qualities and find a way to love it anyway. Only from that complete embrace can a life begin to grow into what it is meant to become.”
–Toko-pa Turner
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“There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true.” –Mary Oliver
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“Love is the strongest force the world possesses and yet it is the humblest imaginable.” –Mahatma Gandhi
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“People who talk only to communicate are different from people who talk for pleasure. People who talk for pleasure, as opposed to people who talk to communicate, become wonderful talkers over the years. They have eloquence.”
—Wendell Berry
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“You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.”
–Henry David Thoreau
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“Be curious, not judgmental.” –Walt Whitman
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Out in the dawn, a misty sea
in walnut tree
a silent crow
will dream of snow

will ruffle feathers in the chill
will wait until
the first bright ray
begins the day

then with a final shake will rise
from branch to skies
and this will be
a memory
–Beth Weaver-Kreider

Gratitude List:
1. The blue whale in the clouds, swimming into the sunset
2. Bellyful rainblue clouds
3. The quiet shift between tangerine and indigo in the sunset clouds
4. Layer upon layer of clouds
5. The LMS performance of Radium Girls tonight. What a talented and thoughtful bunch of young people. I am incredibly proud of them. If you’re in Lancaster, you might want to check it out tomorrow or Saturday night.

May we walk in Beauty!