Gratitude List:
1. The marching
2. The community
3. The poetry
4. The speeches
5. The chanting
May we walk in Beauty!
March for Their Lives
Tomorrow, in Washington, DC and all across the country, students–youth and children–will be marching for their lives, asking the adults in this country to do something to keep them safe in their schools. That’s what they’re asking: to be safe in their schools. They’re demanding that we adults find the will and the courage to keep them safe when they gather together to learn.
As an English teacher, one of my primary life goals is to offer students the skills and tools and opportunities to find their voices and to speak their truths. My heart is filled to overflowing as I listen to the young people of today articulate their ideas with clarity and force and determination.
I urge you to join them, to join us, to say Enough is Enough, Not One More, Keep Them Safe. To amplify their strong and powerful voices.
Gratitude List:
(for the students)
1. Their voices
2. Their determination
3. Their courage
4. Their leadership
5. Their playfulness
May we walk with them in Beauty!
The Bridge is Fraying
I remember drawing this five years ago after I had a little dream about a little gnome/elf/spirit-being who chose to be my helper.
Sometimes lately, I feel as though the bridge can’t hold. The gulf between us is widening, and the the bridge is strained almost beyond repair. This cultural divide in the US keeps growing, keeps expanding. What words can we string together into lines and cables to hold the space between us? Or do we just give up? Wave goodbye across the chasm? Accept that we no longer have common ground? It has torn the fabric of my church, torn the roots of families and friendships, of social groups and communities.
I know I am part of the problem. My own ideals and values keep me settled on one side of the chasm. I must speak up and speak out for what I believe to be right and against what I believe to be great wrong. I can no more shift my position than I could leap into air and fly across the widening gulf. But there are places of common ground between us–I am certain of that, and I don’t know how to connect them when the space between us grows so rapidly.
What I think we need to recognize is that when we are torn apart from each other in these ways, something within us is also torn. When you and I can no longer touch or hear each other across this chasm, something within each of us also becomes unmoored, unhinged. If the bridge breaks, we all lose something of ourselves.
Gratitude List:
1. That golden moment of sun touching the snowy tops of the trees as it enters the hollow.
2. The spring songs of sparrow and wren and titmouse.
3. As frustrating as his attention is at 5 am, I love the way this little ginger cat loves me.
4. Catching up. Yesterday brought me a lot closer to being caught up.
5. The threads that hold us together.
May we walk in Beauty!
The Birth of Spring
(Photo taken in 2014, on a shining morning.)
Today, snow or no snow, our planet whirls into another season. Here in the western hemisphere, in the northern temperate climates, the early flowers have been up and blooming, calling to the bees. I have yet to see the early foragers this year, and it makes me anxious.
Someone must awaken the bees!
The crocus have opened their golden throats.
The windflowers have blown awake
out on the lawn.
Where are the Queen’s daughters?
Where are the melissas?
Someone awaken the bees!
On this first day of Ostara, the ancient holiday to celebrate the awakening spring, on the day when night and day are equal in duration, I like to ask myself questions to awaken my spirit:
What are the instincts and drives within me that must awaken, like the bees, to get my work done, to find the food I need to carry me through the season?
What new things are stirring within? What is awakening? What is hatching?
How do the forces of balance and imbalance work in my life? What can I do to bring more elegant balance into my daily rhythms? In what ways can I disrupt the balances which keep me caught in a rut?
This year, I keep coming back to the question of what calls me awake? When I fear that the bees will not awaken, I think about the sleepy spirit within me that likes to settle into sameness. It takes some effort to wake up, and then to wake up again, and to keep waking up, shedding the outer layers, like an opening flower.
Today, I will watch for the bees.
Today, I will keep my eyes open for the People of Feathers, who wing their way across the sky.
Today, I will feel the breezes on my face.
Today, I will keep listening for the voices of the bees, and for the voices of the young people.
Blessed Ostara to you! Happy Equinox! A Joyful spring. Walk in Beauty.
Manifesting
Here’s a meme that’s been making its rounds on social media lately:
The way you are describing your life is the way it is manifesting.
The way you are describing your life is the way it is manifesting.
The way you are describing your life is the way it is manifesting.
Now tell me again:
How are things going?
It’s not a NEW thought, really. The way it catches me is more about how it’s worded. It gets behind my oh-I-know-that-stuff-already defenses. The gratitude work has been immensely helpful to me in breaking some of the old cycles of complaint and self pity that happen when I describe my life to myself as series of burdensome events. Yes, if I look back at my meanderings on this blog over the years, I can see that I have been struggling–successfully and unsuccessfully–with this process in its deeper psychic layers. It’s not that I haven’t read and absorbed Shakti Gawain (she’s a sweet version of the Norman Vincent Peale for the New Age set). What you visualize is what you become, she says. One of the sermons I remember from years ago was one in which my pastor spoke about what we tell ourselves about ourselves. Do I keep telling myself I am exhausted and overwhelmed? (Yes.) Then I feel/am exhausted and overwhelmed. I “know” this principle, but I need to keep deepening it.
I can’t just visualize myself NOT overwhelmed and exhausted because visualization and belief don’t make the stacks of work go away. Imagination and action have to go together. That, too, has been a principle I have long been working to realize within myself. The contemplative and the activist need to dance together.
When I began this blog six years ago, I decided to move beyond just thinking of myself as a poet, but to DO poetry, to let those strips of words across the page in every gratitude list be little poems where I would daily juxtapose images and ideas that formed little poems of my day. As I began to describe myself to myself as a poet, I found my way into the identity of poet in a more solid way than I had ever done before.
Throughout my life, I have had begun several novels, imagining plot and structure in my brain, thinking through characters, beginning first chapters. And then abandoning them as life took over. A couple days ago, my friend Fern talked about Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book Big Magic, in which she talks about how the ideas come shopping for us, and if we don’t answer them, they go away and find someone else to bring them to reality. I have two ideas that have been knocking at my door for a couple years now. To use the words of that meme up there, I am afraid to describe my life in terms of writing books. That is partly because I have been such a squirrel with the ideas that come knocking. I don’t want to do that anymore. If I welcome one in for tea, then i want to invite it to stay for the weekend, instead of becoming enamored of the next one that comes along and letting the first one drift away in loneliness and rejection.
So I’m putting it out there. The book idea I began working on two summers ago is still hanging out in the corners. I am going to feed it, begin to shape it, help it find its place. And the novel that began knocking a year ago has again begun to catch my attention. I’m grateful that these two friends have stuck around, and I want to facilitate their existence.
Still, I need to tend to the overwhelm of the mundane, or my life will implode. For now, I will catch little spaces in each week to tend to these companions, and plan for a summertime process that might give me time to work more intentionally with them.
I am a little sheepish when I speak about this, because I know what a squirrel I have been, how I have wandered away from the urgent ideas in the past. Oooh. See what I did there? I described my life in terms of a tendency to failure. What if I turned that around? What if, instead, I described my life this way: I have been a seeker of new ideas, a kid in the candy shop of story, a dreamer of books. And now, I am going to see if I can draw some of those ideas out of the ether, begin to describe myself as a writer of books.
Gratitude List:
1. Bald eagle
2. Shooting star
3. The shining talents of our shining young people
4. The sound of Spring
5. Laughter
May we walk in Beauty!
The Light Beckons
“Every day, priests minutely examine the Law
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.
Before doing that, though, they should learn
How to read the love letters sent by the wind
and rain, the snow and moon.”
—Ikkyu
Gratitude List:
1. Mitakuye oyasin: All my relations. That’s you, my Beloveds, and this curled-up ball of ginger fur beside me, and the sycamore tree that holds up the moon, and the moon, and the little mouse that makes a racket in the walls at night.
2. Parent Teacher Conferences: I always feel nervous. It’s a different sort of social situation than normal, and these are the real stakeholders in the work that I do. It’s not the same as a performance review, but I am responsible to these people for the care and nurture of their children, and I want to articulate well my perceptions of their children in my classroom. And it’s always a wonderful time, even when there are crunchy bits in the conversation. It’s an honor to do this work, and an honor to talk to the parents.
3. One daffodil has opened next to the school offices. I want to get a photo tomorrow–maybe it will have some friends by then.
4. The patience of robins.
5. The voices of the young people.
May we walk in Beauty!
Taking Stock
Mine is not a particularly stressful life. My basic needs are met. I know my kids will be fed. I have great support systems: family, friends, colleagues, students, church. My traumas have been few, and my griefs have occurred within the compassionate circles of people who know how to love. My greatest stresses are the ones I put on myself, usually: taking on more than I can accomplish, frittering away too much time that could be spent actually doing things I love.
In the face of stress, I tend to go all British: keep a stiff upper lip and soldier on. Often that serves me well―it keeps me from getting too deep into the circular ruts that I can gouge in my brain. Fall down. Get up. Keep walking. Fall down again. Get up again. Continue. It works. And my gratitude and mindfulness spiritual practices have helped to keep me away from the ruts.
Today, however, my mind began to enumerate all the stressors that have plagued me in the past few weeks. Instead of entering the ruts, as I began to list them all, I suddenly began to feel a weight lifting. The tiredness and crankiness and insomnia and heaviness that have begun to plague me seemed no longer unreasonable. In the past month, I have felt a little buffeted, a little at the mercy of fate. When I can recognize that, accept that it gets me down, maybe I can offer myself a little compassion, take a rest, and move forward.
1. It started several weeks ago, with the shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. How to hold that? How to respond? How do we break an organization with such power and grasp as the NRA?
2. Shortly after that, my family started getting sick. Fortunately for us, none of us got the full-fledged flu, or at least our immune systems battled well. But all of us got sick. One child was out of school for almost a week. The parents were both just barely holding on. We probably should have all taken a sick day together and just laid around getting our rest and fluids.
3. Finally we made it through the worst of the sickies, and then we got hit by a wind storm that took out our power, water, and heat for the best part of three days.
4. Monday, the morning after the power finally came on, my eldest son fell up the stairs on his way to class and broke his arm. We finally managed to get him back to school and practicing for a performance this weekend.
5. Today at lunch, one of my students, who sits near my desk, said she heard my phone vibrating behind the desk over and over again all period. I woke it up, and it lit up with phone and text messages saying that my youngest son’s school (his entire district, actually) had been evacuated due to a bomb threat.
6. And through it all, I have continued to try to figure out what my role is in resisting the Death Eaters who seem to be taking over.
That’s a lot of stress. And at each point, I realized how fortunate we are:
1. Comforting community
2. My children are well and healthy for the most part
3. Three days is not very long to be without power, in the grand scheme of things, and we could go to my parents’ house for heat and water and light.
4. A broken arm is not a concussion, is not a chronic disease, is not a long-term problem. Little kid bones tend to heal fast and well.
5. My children have many adults, from family members to teachers and administrators, who are looking out for their safety and best interests. And I know that their classmates whose families have fewer support structures than we do also receive the same benefit of caring and tender teachers and administrators.
6. No one has to resist the Death Eaters alone. We’re all in this together. And it’s been done before.
May we walk in Beauty!
We Can Do It!
Who are the Womyn who inspire you?
Some of the ones on my list include the Nobel Peace Prize winners below, along with:
Harriet Tubman
Rachel Carson
Katherine Johnson
Dorothy Day
Berta Caceres
Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin
My mother: Ruth Weaver
My sisters: Valerie Weaver-Zercher and Anne Kaufman Weaver
Mary Oliver
Joy Harjo
My college friends: Kris, Nancy, Gloria, Anne Marie, and Juji
My nieces: Lara and Keri
The young women who teach me in my classroom each day
You, and You, and You: teachers and wise womyn, thinkers and activists, poets and preachers, raging and tender and hopeful and standing on the edge of despair, young ones and elders
Quotations by Peace Prize winners for International Women’s Day:
“If he [the Talib] comes, what would you do Malala? …If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there will be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others…with cruelty…you must fight others but through peace, through dialogue and through education…then I’ll tell him [the Talib] how important education is and that I even want education for your children as well… that’s what I want to tell you, now do what you want.” —Malala Yousufzai, In a Daily Show interview
***
“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.” —Malala Yousufzai
***
“Don’t wait for a Gandhi, don’t wait for a King, don’t wait for a Mandela. You are your own Mandela, you are your own Gandhi, you are your own King.” —Leymah Gbowee
***
“The world is upside down, it’s going to take a lot of hands to turn it right side up.” —Leymah Gbowee
***
“You cannot enslave a mind that knows itself. That values itself. That understands itself.” —Wangari Maathai
***
“Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven’t done a thing. You are just talking.” —Wangari Maathai
***
“It’s not just about hope and ideas. It’s about action.” —Shirin Ebadi
***
“I maintain that nothing useful and lasting can emerge from violence.” —Shirin Ebadi
***
“Human rights is a universal standard. It is a component of every religion and every civilization.’ —Shirin Ebadi
***
“If you can’t eliminate injustice, at least tell everyone about it.” —Shirin Ebadi
***
“What I treasure most in life is being able to dream. During my most difficult moments and complex situations I have been able to dream of a more beautiful future.” —Rigoberta Menchu
***
“We have learned that change cannot come through war. War is not a feasible tool to use in fighting against the oppression we face. War has caused more problems. We cannot embrace that path.” —Rigoberta Menchu
***
“To be a light to others you will need a good dose of the spiritual life. Because as my mother used to say, if you are in a good place, then you can help others; but if you’re not well, then go look for somebody who is in a good place who can help you.” —Rigoberta Menchu
***
“Peace cannot exist without justice, justice cannot exist without fairness, fairness cannot exist without development, development cannot exist without democracy, democracy cannot exist without respect for the identity and worth of cultures and peoples.” —Rigoberta Menchu
Hope and Zen
The young folk have developed some lovely intricate stacks of wood and stone in the zen garden.
Gratitude List:
1. The Black History Month chapel today. The students lead and teach us.
2. Chocolate ice cream with chocolate chips.
3. The slow blink of cat’s eyes.
4. Sickness seems to be abating.
5. Hope and zen.
May we walk in Beauty!
Hocus-Pocus!
Gratitude List:
1. Moss
2. Ferns
3. Skies full of migrating birds
4. Crocus
5. Aconite
May we walk in Beauty!
