The Mockingbird Goes On Break

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

I’m not flying south for the whole winter,
not disappearing from the groves and fields completely.
Hunkering down perhaps,
ruffling my feathers in the cool fall breezes
and settling deeper inside myself for a bit,
to a place where there are fewer words.

Not sulking, not anxious, not despairing,
just settling, shifting the patterns,
changing up the rhythms a bit.

I’ll see you back here again
someday soon,
when I have had a chance
to find a new rhythm,
to identify new patterns.

I’ll draw and sing,
write my secret poems,
gather dreams and images,
stories and feathers.

As always, I’ll be holding my part of the web,
feeling the tension and tug as you do your work
on your own part of the web.
I’ll trust that you are there,
and you can know I will be here,
and I will return, soon enough,
when the winds blow me back again.

Meanwhile, Walk in Beauty!

Breathe and Push

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A lovely script we found in an old book. I need to practice my general calligraphy.

Gratitude List:
1. Sibling games and songs in chapel today. Sweet, sweet.
2. Josiah’s first Christmas concert tonight, playing cello in the third grade orchestra. He was so excited. He made sure to invite his grandparents a week ago. He was counting down the hours until it was time. He was so proud to be part of it.
3. Valarie Kaur’s quote: “What if this is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?” Images of an America in transition, in the final stages of labor, and we can hear the midwife saying, “Breathe!” and finally, “Push!”
4. How the future steps ever so carefully toward us.
5. You and you. I haven’t put you on my gratitude lists recently,  but you’re always there in some form. The fact that I can know that you’re out there, doing your work, changing the world, holding out the truth, narrating the story–that gives me hope, and reminds me that I am not alone.

May we walk in Beauty!

Always a Trail to Follow

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Here is a tiny story-thing I wrote last year on this day:

In the days when the people had begun to keep their lives in great boxes, living less and less on the land, a girl was born who could read the scripts and runes in the landscapes.

When a frog leaped into the pond with a startled “Eeep!” the ripples and circles in the surface of the pond read, “Splash!” of course, but also something about the day being green, the waters cool on the gills, and the polliwogs growing hale and hearty.

In a branch burrowed and tunneled by bark beetles, she could read the insect-runes: “Chronicle of the Year of Our Lady Wingshine: We are preparing for another winter. Tunnels and fortifications are underway and a healthy grub population is thriving. No woodpeckers spotted in three cycles.”

The branches on the trees crossed and curled to make whole novels of story, revealing the secret lives of owl and warbler, the gossip of squirrels, and the wisdom of ancient oaks.

Across a vast tangerine sunset, she read the letters and lines created by flocks of migrating geese and calling swans: “When your heart has two homes, you will always be a wanderer.”

And much more subtle, but as real as the words in water or bark or sky, the musky tang of a fox in the undergrowth wove through the lines and curls of autumn grasses, which she read as, “There is always a trail to follow, if you will give your heart to the moment.”

Gratitude List:
1. Chicken Pot Pie for supper. Jon’s a great cook!
2. One of my students, who is an artist, talks about how she sees beauty in every person. Yes.
3. Settling into the darkness of winter. It’s not easy for me. I have to talk myself through it every year. I love the womb of dark. I love the comforting raven’s wings about me. Still, I feel as though I am losing time. I want to sleep and eat and sit and dream. I am finding my winter rhythm. Don’t ask too much of me right now.
4. Mist in the morning over the bridge. We all imagined where we wanted to be when we came through the mist on the other side of the bridge. We were still in Columbia, but that’s okay. Sometime I really do want to come through the mist into Avalon or Hogwarts or Iceland.
5. The dreamtime. My brain begins to gather dreams in its cobwebs in these long nights. There was snow in last night’s dream.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Dreams of Trees

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Gratitude List:
1. The black arms of trees reaching up into a magenta sky
2. The white arms of the sycamores with the ginger ruff of autumn leaves against the deep grey of woods along the river
3. Al the many varieties of oak
4. The two triplet birch trees in front of my parents’ house
5. The rusty feathers of the larch and dawn redwoods

May we walk in Beauty!

Be Namers

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Last night, we watched Spotlight. I recommend it, particularly at this moment in history. It is about the Boston Globe team that broke the Cardinal Law story. It’s sobering to be shown how we allow ourselves to be numbed and deadened to the open secrets that are everywhere around us, how we fail to investigate. It was also inspiring to see a good investigative team do its work, and bring truth into the light. It was disheartening in the extreme to realize at the end that, like the perpetrators he moved from diocese to diocese, Cardinal Law was simply moved to another post of high power in the church, where he continued to do damage in the form of fighting against women’s agency in the church.

How can we further commit ourselves in these days to being Namers, Truth-speakers, Light-shedders, so that people will stop listening to the voices of the powerful over the voices of their victims? We may need to see some institutions implode. We may need to help them to do so.

Gratitude List:
1. Jon put out suet cakes, and the woodpeckers have been coming in. This one seems to be a little mutated, with larger white patches on the back of its head. Perhaps a juvenile not quite at adult plumage. It does look a little like it doesn’t know how to comb its feathers.
2. Welcoming the season of Yule.
3. Lights and music and cookies and the smell of pine
4. Vacuumed floors
5. This one boy is always our holiday DJ, setting up his speakers behind or in the tree. Now he is dancing through the house as he plays Pentatonix.

May we walk and dance in Beauty!

Magic Happens

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Gratitude List:
1. I love writing poems in November, and I am always relieved when November is over.
2. Some days, you just let the students hijack the lesson and magic happens as they tell their own stories.
3. Morning mists and magenta sunrises
4. Trying again after you fail
5. The open spaces of a weekend

May we walk in Beauty!

Back in the Day

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Today’s Prompt is to write a “Back in the Day” poem.

Back in the Day
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Back in the morning
when I was young,
when youthful energy
gripped my limbs
and raised me up
to face the adventures ahead,
then I was a dancer.

Back in the day
when I met the Challengers
faced my fears,
and accepted my quests,
riding into battle
the dragons of ignorance,
then I was a warrior.

Back in the evening
when my eyes began
to feel the weight
of the day’s gravity,
and my legs ached
with weariness,
then I was a teacher.

Now at day’s close,
I am old and worn out,
waiting for the moment
when I will close my eyes
and enter the land of sleep,
to wake in the morning
young again.

Gratitude List:
1. Finishing and submitting the manuscript!
2. Sleep to come
3. Not being alone
4. Getting it out in a good, hard rant
5. Tomorrow is Friday.

May we walk in Beauty!

Broken Vessel

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Today’s Prompt is to write a response poem. I’m tired and grouchy, so this might have to be it for tonight–more prose than poem. I have grading to do and a manuscript to edit.

Outrage
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Every day, another outrage,
a rage outside the norms.
And yet, it’s only what we expect
from a man who began
by race-baiting the Mexicans
and took it down from there.

Day by day, the rages get outer and outer.
You think that escalator couldn’t carry him
any lower, but it does,
and he’s jumping up and down
to make it go faster.

Can’t ignore it because it doesn’t go away.
Can’t respond because he begs attention.
Hate and outrage feed the monster,
but silence normalizes, so we’re caught
in this limbo of no right response.

Gratitude List:
1. Fairy Tales
2. Poetry
3. Songs
4. Awakenings
5. Revelation and revolution

May we walk in Beauty!

Which One to Grow

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Today’s Prompt is to write a love and/or anti-love poem.

To Love the Monsters
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I have been going on the assumption
that it is the calling of my soul
to love the ones I want to hate,
to find a way to live with heart so open
that I cannot help but part the veils
of rage and fury that encompass me
to see the tender shoots of something
human that lives within the monsters.

I have begun to doubt the truth of the call,
uncertain whether I possess the character
to turn calling to possibility.

Yet something deep within me knows
that this is the deeper truth:
that hate breeds hate and love breeds love,
and I get to choose which one to grow.

Gratitude List:
1. Putting together a chapbook
2. Making little booklets with the staff of Silhouette today
3. The monsters do not define us
4. Compassion
5. Reading The Phantom Tollbooth with Joss

May we walk in Beauty!

Guardian of Dreams

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Today’s Prompt is similar to an earlier one, with a single letter change: ______ of _____

Guardian of Dreams
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

She rises from the shadows
when you wander in the dreamscape.
She stands above the doorway
and awaits your greeting.
She gives you the gift of her name
and stands aside that you may pass inward.

Gratitude List:
1. Enough leftovers for supper. What an odd, delightful mashup it was: Valerie’s lentil and collard soup as the base, with the leftover chicken curry and rice and some leftover noodles. Injera and oatmeal bread.
2. Dreams with messages.
3. Catching my breath. A little.
4. That pink cloud this morning. Breath-taking.
5. Rivers of crows in the sky.

May we walk in Beauty!

Last Night’s Gripping Dream:
We’ve moved to a new house, set on a hill above the barn. From the house, a small row of bushes obscures all but the top of the barn. As we explore the new barn, we’re a little overwhelmed by all the rusty junk and hay bales and mess. Cobwebs are everywhere, and it’s dark and dingy. We hear people walking around upstairs, but we’re too scared to go up there, so I yell, “Get out of our barn!” We go back up to the house.

A little while later, it has snowed, and we see that someone has shoveled all around the barn. We decide we have to confront the squatters. We get in the big red truck and race down the hill, right through the shoveled area and plow into a snowbank.

As we walk up to the barn door, we see a woman crouching in the bushes on the roof area above the barn door. She’s enormous. Heavy, sumo-style, and maybe eight or ten feet tall. She has a Renaissance-style hairdo with a pink rose, and she is completely naked. Her skin is a mocha color and she has enormous and compelling eyes.  I ask her her name. She says it’s Panella. (Or Panadella.) I do not feel threatened or anxious about her–I feel like she is sort of a guardian.

Inside, we are utterly astounded. Someone has, in an incredibly short period of time, completely cleaned the barn. The junk is gone. The hay bales and cobwebs are gone. There’s fresh plaster on the walls, neatly placed between barn beams. It’s gently lit, all over, upstairs and down. There must be fifty or sixty people in the barn. One woman is wearing silver body paint, head to foot. She and the others we first encounter seem a little startling, and not particularly friendly, but not threatening. The others we meet are friendlier, eager to show us around, to talk. It’s definitely my kind of party, no loud noises, sort of hushed conversations, but people everywhere, threading themselves through the space.

It is furnished like a house, and downstairs there is an enormous walk-in fireplace with a sort of ditch in front of the fire, and water running through the ditch. In front of that are lit candles. I am aware of how carefully people have placed the candles within the fireplace area, in order to be safe. They take us outside to show us the incredible compost pile they’ve created. They point up the hill to the other neighbors’ house. “Those are the hippie neighbors,” they say. The hippie neighbors’ house is a pavilion-style despite the frigid weather, and the hippie neighbors have their feet up on a low all, and they’re drinking and smoking.

Actually, the ones who’ve created this space aren’t here. They’ve gone out and left their friends there to have a party. There’s a young woman–I think her name is Elise–who used to go to the Waldorf School. A young man is a graduate of LMS. And there’s a third.

I feel incredibly drawn to this dream. There in my inner world, a space I tend to neglect in the rush of the daily, where I thought there would be clutter and ruin, are inviting rooms filled with energy and innovation. Jon pointed out that two of the Creators are from schools where I have taught, so I am wondering if the third might be a BCCC student. After a challenging morning conversation about some of the issues some of our students are experiencing, I spent a good part of yesterday worrying about my students, wondering if I have been doing enough to educate my students about racism and misogyny, about recognizing their entitlement and privilege.  I feel like this dream was a message from my deeper self that I need to trust that the daily work bears its fruit, that these people will have the creativity and resilience to create healthy lives.  And Panella? I think She is my Guardian.