We’re Not Alone

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


I haven’t seen any toads this year.

I wrote this on a Gratitude List last year:
“We are not alone. The world gets so heavy sometimes, but it’s at the heavy times that you can look around you and see all the people who are stepping out to the front to get the Work done. Sure, there’s a lot of fluffy and ranty clamor that distracts, but keep your eyes and ears open. They’re there, stepping into the fray, holding people, presenting clear and thoughtful ideas, loving their neighbors and the world. Often, they’re keeping their mouths shut, though sometimes they are the ones writing cogent and articulate pieces that help to shape the conversation. Listen and watch. The Workers are out there.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
*
“To disobey in order to take action is the byword of all creative spirits. The history of human progress amounts to a series of Promethean acts. But autonomy is also attained in the daily workings of individual lives by means of many small Promethean disobediences, at once clever, well thought out, and patiently pursued, so subtle at times as to avoid punishment entirely.” —Gaston Bachelard
*
“Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” ― Linda Hogan (Always a favorite)

Gratitude List:
1. Being in a body. Sensory experiences. I think we have more than five senses. I remember talking about this with Ellis when he was five. I think he came up with twenty or so. Sense of direction. Sense of individual self. Sense of heat. Sense of impendingness. . . What other senses have you honed?
2. Ice Cream. Even while I am trying to be a little careful in my middle age about what I eat, I cannot give up ice cream, especially when it’s Turkey Hill’s Natural Homemade Vanilla. This sounds like an ad. Sorry. But there are only four ingredients! I could eat it for breakfast.
3. Tomatoes. And basil. And dill. The flavors of summer.
4. Having too much to do is better than being bored.
5. Speculative fiction: how it makes me look at what it means to be human, what it means to exist in the context of human society

May we walk in Beauty!

Dear Friends

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment


Lime-kiln on the bike path, and bikes in the truck (no more little kid bikes)
I posted this poem on this day last year, after a magical evening with a community of people who have held each other and listened to each other and played together for thirty years:

“Try this:
Sit in a circle at dusk with people you love.
Let it be when the swifts are flying.
Let there be a catbird with a whiskery voice in a spruce tree.
Speak your stories into the bowl of the space between you:
stories like a rich meal, the bitter, the savory, the sweet.
Let it get dark. The darkness will listen, too.
You can hear people listening when you speak in the dark.
You may light a candle if you have a candle.
Laugh together. Cry.
Let there be occasional questions,
occasional grunts, occasional exclamations of oh-I-hear-that!
Make a meal of the stories before you,
and eat your fill. Be nourished.
Be together in your stories.
Know that all these stories are your story, too.
Let there be a benediction,
words sung or spoken into the full dark,
accompanied by the chittering of bats,
good words to keep you always
in this circle where you belong.”
—Beth Weaver-Kreider

“Each of us faces a time when the holy well within needs tending. When we’re no longer able to bestow blessings on others because we’ve overgiven, or when something precious has been taken from us, or life’s demands are too great on our fragile system. But when the moisture goes out of our lives, and we’re no longer able to see beauty or converse with magic, we must ask ourselves how we can replenish our well-ness.” – Dreamwork with Toko-pa
*
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” –Dietrich Bonhoeffer
*
“We never belonged to you. / You never found us. / It was always the other way round.” –Margaret Atwood
*
“Would you like to have an adventure now, or would you like your tea first?” –JM Barrie
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“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” ~Zora Neale Hurston
*

“…The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth…” -Carl Jung
*
“Listen. . .with the ear of your heart.” –The Rule of St. Benedict
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“One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world.” –Malala Yousufzai

Gratitude List:
1. Biking in the woods with my boys–yes, again. Cool under the trees, cooler crossing the creeks.
2. That new vacuum cleaner! We can see how much dust is picked up when we vacuum a room. Thank you, Linda!
3. Sharing quiet moments in the morning with a smallish boy
4. Peaches! And ice cream.
5. The trees in the holler that help to keep the coolness in

May we walk in Beauty!

Wish I Were

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Here’s a silly something I wrote during a Creative Writing prompt moment this past spring. The prompt was to write a poem beginning “I wish I were. . .”

I wish I were a buzzard,
I wish I were a mouse,
I wish I were a weasel
in a little weasel house.

I wish I knew the story
of the ancient wise baboon
who sailed across the desert
in a rainbow-hued balloon.

I wish I knew the secrets
of a hive of busy bees
or how a goat walks forward
on her backward-facing knees.

I wish I were an elephant,
I wish I were a wren,
I wish I were a weasel
in a weasel’s house again.

I wish I were an octopus
hiding deep in coral caves.
I wish I were an astronaut
afloat in outer space.

Today I am an aardvark
slipping silently through time,
and everything I write
is coming out in rhyme.

Rob Brezsny ft. Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
“Devote yourself to your heart’s desire with unflagging shrewdness. Make it your top priority. Let no lesser wishes distract you. But consider this, too. You may sabotage even your worthiest yearning if you’re maniacal in your pursuit of it.

Bear in mind the attitude described by Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her book “Women Who Run with the Wolves”: “All that you are seeking is also seeking you. If you sit still, it will find you. It has been waiting for you a long time.”

Speculate on what exactly that would look like in your own life. Describe how your heart’s desire has been waiting for you, seeking you.”
*
“Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.”
― Robert Hass, Field Guide
*
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
― Albert Einstein
*
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett
*
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes.”
― Walt Whitman
*
“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

Gratitude List:
(based on Mary Oliver’s Gratitude Poem)
1. What did you notice?
The blue eye of chicory everywhere along the roadsides
2. What did you hear?
Children singing, children laughing, birds always calling
3. What did you admire?
The golden shine of those lilies, how they seem to shine from within
4. What astonished you?
That Wren wove a snake skin into her nest
5. What would you like to see again?
The hummingbird darting through the upper branches of the sycamore
6. What was most tender?
A small boy and his elderly cat
7. What was most wonderful?
Oh, all of it was wonderful. The breezes that wove through it all, they were wonderful.

May we walk in Beauty!

Help One Another

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“Help one another. It is the only way to survive.” –Elie Wiesel
*
“Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.”
–Mary Oliver
*
“I believe that without some inner experience of powerlessness, and the wisdom that potentially comes with it, most individuals will misunderstand and abuse power.” ~~Richard Rohr
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“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” –Anais Nin
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“Let us not become the evil that we deplore.” Rep. Barbara Lee, 9/14/01
*
Book of Hours II, 16
by Rainer Maria Rilke

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing –
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
*
From Terry Tempest Williams:
“We are creatures of paradox, women and bears, two animals that are enormously unpredictable, hence our mystery. Perhaps the fear of bears and the fear of women lies in our refusal to be tamed, the impulses we arouse and the forces we represent….As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.”

Gratitude List:
1. Riding bike on the rail trail. Flat smooth road, cool breeze, woods and stones and water.
2. Weaving, weaving our lives together by sharing our stories
3. Comfortable days in July. Yesterday was my perfect weather
4. The wisdom of Representative Barbara Lee. For seventeen years, she has continued to remind us that the president should not have the power to decide on his/her own to make war. Finally, she has been heard.
5. Hummingbirds, by which I mean magic

May we walk in Beauty!

Trying to Be Found

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Here are three tiny poems from my Creative Writing journal. (I usually wrote along with the students on the writing prompts).

Each day
a new story
of finding my way.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Once there was a little girl
who was trying to be found.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Bluebird on a wire
muttering a gentle question.
No one answers but the hawk.

“I like sitting at the piano. I like the idea that there are things coming in through the window and through you and then down to the piano and out the window on the other side. If you want to catch songs you gotta start thinking like one, and making yourself an interesting place for them to land like birds or insects. Once you get two or three tunes together, wherever three or more are gathered, then others come.” -Tom Waits
*
“The poem, I’ve always felt, is an opportunity for me to create an integrated whole from so many broken shards.” –Rafael Campo
*
“Which came first, the fear or the gun? The broken heart or the bleeding one? The impulse toward death or the desperate reach for love?” –Mark Morford
*
“A journey can become a sacred thing:
Make sure, before you go,
To take the time
To bless your going forth,
To free your heart of ballast
So that the compass of your soul
Might direct you toward
The territories of spirit
Where you will discover
More of your hidden life,
And the urgencies
That deserve to claim you.”
–John O’Donohue

Gratitude List:
1. I think I am homing in on the nest of Our Lady of the Flowers. I sat on the porch for a while last evening and watched. She seems to return to the same general area of the tree. It’s located at a less convenient spot for gazing this year, hidden higher up and further from the house.
2. Weaving stories together. Listening to people tell their stories and talk about who they want to be in the world.
3. How a good stretch that wakes up the spine wakes up the body
4. The people who do good. I get so tied up in knots about the stupid, greedy, and cruel things that the powerful people are doing. It really helps to balance my heart to keep remembering all the good and wise and compassionate things that you and the others are doing. Thank you.
5. Pesto

May we walk in Beauty!

Believing in Magic

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This one is from a few years ago. We haven’t had a flowering of this particular beauty for a couple years. Last time they came up, Josiah set out a village of tiny houses and gnomefolk around them. I thought that would certainly draw them back again. This is one good reason not to mow too often.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m going through the poems and fragments I wrote with my Creative Writing classes this year. Here’s one that caught my attention:

3-21-17
My rage has tried to build
a concrete wall around
the quiet borders of my heart

and yet

I wander toward truth
skipping from spring into winter
and in my heart, a violin
like an orange bird
plays songs of peace.

“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” ~Roald Dahl
*
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
—Maya Angelou
*
“Doors closing, doors opening. Doors closing, doors I’m opening. I am safe. It’s only change. I am safe. It’s only change.” —chant (I don’t know the author)
*
Vine and branch we’re connected in this world
of sound and echo, figure and shadow, the leaves
contingent, roots pushing against earth. An apple
belongs to itself, to stem and tree, to air
that claims it, then ground. Connections
balance, each motion changes another. Precarious,
hanging together, we don’t know what our lives
support, and we touch in the least shift of breathing.
Each holy thing is borrowed. Everything depends.

—Jeanne Lohmann, ‘Shaking the Tree’
*
Parker Palmer: “The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, “I am all of the above.” If we can’t embrace the whole of who we are — embrace it with transformative love — we’ll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and flee from the world’s complex mix of shadow and light.”
*
“It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.” —Mae Jemison

Gratitude Lists:
1. Organizing and sorting
2. Oh, the rains!
3. Cooking. Sometimes I really love cooking. Last night, we each ate an entire stuffed zucchini for supper, even the kids. They would have eaten more!
4. Anticipating a day doing things I love to do.
5. All the shades of green out there. We’ve really settled in to the heart of midsummer.

May we walk in Beauty!

“Grow, Grow!”

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“Sacred activism is the fusion of the mystic’s passion for God with the activist’s passion for justice — creating a third fire, which is the burning sacred heart that longs to help, preserve, and nurture every living thing. ” ―Andrew Harvey
*
“What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.” ―Frederick Buechner
*
“Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke
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Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.” ―The Talmud
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“Choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance. Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance. You’re going to confuse, piss off, and terrify lots of people, including yourself. One minute you’ll pray that the transformation stops, and the next minute you’ll pray that it never ends. You’ll also wonder how you can feel so brave and so afraid at the same time.” ―Brene Brown
*
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”  ―Joseph Campbell
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“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” ―Elie Wiesel
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“The seduction in the wake of betrayal is to take up a thicker armour, to practice at expecting less of others, or to punish one’s own naïveté. But these are the same refusals from which our world is dying. Never should a judgement be made against one’s willingness to open the heart.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa
*
“I’m so lucky we lived through who we were to become who we are.” ―Neil Hillborn
*
Prayer for Kyla (in Tanka)
Beth Weaver-Kreider (a 2 years ago―grateful today)

breathing in patience
breathing out worry and fear
breathing in silence
breathing healing, breathing hope
breathing light, breathing courage
*
“Grace bats last.” ―Anne Lamott

Gratitude List:
1. Vegetable stromboli. So satisfying. I think I am going to make it lots this summer with whatever veggies we have on hand.
2. The sound of the wind singing in my hoop earrings.
3. A clean house and a mowed lawn. Now I want to just be here.
4. The mumbly wuv-yous of bluebirds. All day in the hollow: “There, there. It’s all okay. See here, I wuv you, wuv you.”
5. A roomful of stories: A friend of mine challenged his FB friends to try to tell a story about themselves that no one else on the thread would have done or experienced. I copied him, and the stories that have come from that one prompt are amazing. Funny, terrifying, richly inspiring, mortifying, humanizing. I don’t know if I have ever hosted such a successful party.

May we walk in Beauty!

A Woman Must Be Willing to Burn

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“A woman must be willing to burn hot, burn with passion, burn with words, with ideas, with desire for whatever it is that she truly loves.”  —Clarissa Pinkola Estes
*
“Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.”
—Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
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“I can’t offer justice so I offer just trees.” —Kilian Schoenberger (who photographs trees and woods)
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Make it All a Prayer
Beth Weaver-Kreider

make it all a prayer
each motion, each thought, each step
feel the connection
that silver strand that pulls you
to the heart of another
*
Dalai Lama: “There are only two days of the year in which nothing can be done. One is called yesterday and the other is called tomorrow. That means today is the ideal day to love, to believe, to create and to live.”
*
“We cannot assume the sacredness nor spiritual livingness of the earth or accept it as a new ideology or as a sentimentally pleasing idea. We must experience that life and sacredness, if it is there, in relationship to our own and to that ultimate mystery we call God. We must experience it in our lives, in our practice, in the flesh of our cultural creativity. We must allow it to shape us, as great spiritual ideas have always shaped those who entertain them, and not expect that we can simply use the image of Gaia to meet emotional, religious, political, or even commercial needs without allowing it to transform us in unexpected and radical ways. The spirituality of the earth is more than a slogan. It is an invitation to initiation, to the death of what we have been and the birth of something new.”
—David Spangler

Gratitude List:
1. Rain
2. Bluebirds
3. Fresh berry smoothies
4. Hear/reading people reminisce
5. My friend, the sycamore tree

May we walk in Beauty!

May There Always Be Sunshine

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“I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.”  -Anne Lamott
*
“Morning is the best of all times in the garden. The sun is not yet hot. Sweet vapors rise from the earth. Night dew clings to the soil and makes plants glisten. Birds call to one another. Bees are already at work.” – William Longgood
*
“Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn — and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb. So, let us drink a cup of tea.”
– Muriel Barbery, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”
*
“There is ecstasy in paying attention.”
– Anne Lamott
*
Though I may speak with bravest fire,
And have the gift to all inspire,
And have not love, my words are vain,
As sounding brass, and hopeless gain.

Though I may give all I possess,
And striving so my love profess,
But not be given by love within,
The profit soon turns strangely thin.

Come, Spirit, come, our hearts control,
Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed;
By this we worship, and are freed.
–Hal Hopson

Gratitude List:
1. Little Baby Anya examining her Uncle Dick’s face with such intensity.
2. Preparing songs for Anne’s ordination. Making music with Val and Todd.
3. Kids having fun together in the pool. I still watch closely, but today was the most relaxed I have ever been with my children in the pool.
4. Summer morning rain
5. A straight seven hours of sleep, not waking up even once

May we walk in Beauty!

Shame-less

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One more note on shame: I once wrote a poem on shamelessness. I’m not sure the poem itself is one that stands the test of time, but the idea continues to capture me.

Take one thing that makes your insides curdle into shame shapes when you think about it. I’ll use the messy house. I imagine people who might cluck their tongues and judge me for it–like the women on TV who dance around their houses cleaning and tidying–a whole crowd of them. I imagine them looking at me and my house and saying, “Shameless! Have you no shame?” And then I take a deep breath, and I stand tall within myself, and I say, “No, actually. I have no shame. I am shame-less.” Wear the blessing in the curse when others’ judgments make you start to feel ashamed.

Also, I recognize that today is the United States independence day. It’s always crunchy for me.

I don’t celebrate war and war “victories.”
I don’t celebrate a freedom that was borne on the backs of slaves.
I don’t celebrate the genocide that wiped out, marginalized and impoverished the people of the first nations.
I don’t celebrate a freedom that ignores our slave-owning and genocidal history to proclaim us all-good and all-powerful, evidence to the contrary.
I don’t celebrate the increasing calls to close us off, to keep out those who seek sanctuary in our borders.
I don’t celebrate throwing candy to the rich while grabbing bread from the poor.
I don’t celebrate the rush to destroy this beautiful part of the Earth, to call her gifts “resources” that must be maximized and used until she is played out.
I don’t celebrate the fear-mongering that I see, the use of fear to keep people in their places, afraid of each other, afraid of their own freedom.
I don’t celebrate “America First.”
I struggle to celebrate when the country itself is in crisis, when those who were chosen to administer our ship of state have instead chosen to rule like the king we thought we had freed ourselves from those centuries ago.

I can celebrate human community.
I can celebrate the spirit that longs to break the bonds of tyranny for all peoples.
I can celebrate the spirit of that statue that stands in our harbor, her lamp held high in welcome for all who seek refuge.
I can celebrate the strong spirit of resistance to tyranny that continues to pull people to demand rights for ALL of us.
I can celebrate the beautiful diversity of us, and the way we find connecting points, the way we so willingly wear each others’ stories.
I can celebrate the music, the foodways, the arts, the dialects, the histories, of us in all our many colors and shades and tones and temperaments.
I can celebrate inTERdependence.
I can celebrate the hope that we will stand up to the greed-mongers and the fear-mongers and the hate-mongers, that we will work to create a nation where all can be free, where all can expect justice.

“If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.” ―Lao Tzu
*
“The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of others. This is where bravery lives, where we’ll find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the presence of power.”
—Terry Tempest Williams
*
“You are something that the Whole Universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that the Whole Ocean is doing…”  ―Alan Watts
*
“You are beautiful, and I have loved you dearly, more dearly than the spoken word can tell.”  —Roger Whittaker
*
“It’s a matter of discipline. When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend to your planet.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupery in “The Little Prince”
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“To cope with losing our world requires us to descend through the anger into mourning and sadness, not speedily bypass them to jump onto the optimism bandwagon or escape into indifference. And with this deepening, an extended caring and gratitude may open us to what is still here, and finally, to acting accordingly.” —Per Espen Stoknes
*
. . .if truth is to be taught, then teaching and learning must take the shape of truth itself–a community of faithful relationships. Education in truth must bring teacher and student into troth with each other, into the very image of the truth it hopes to convey.” —Parker J. Palmer
*
“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
*
“I celebrate independence anywhere it happens. The question here is how. When a diversity of peoples is destroyed or diminished in a holocaust of outrageous proportions for independence, does this truly result in liberty, justice and freedom for all? In a few generations indigenous peoples of America have been reduced to one-half of one percent. Imagine Africa with one-half of one percent Africans. We have been essentially disappeared in the story of America. Our massive libraries of knowledge, rich cultural and intellectual gifts have been disparaged, destroyed and broken by interloper religions and a hierarchical system of thought in which indigenous people exist only as savages. What then does this say about liberty and justice in this country?

“For healing the wound needs to be opened, purged and cleansed. Our stories need to be allowed. Our traditional ways and languages need to be honored. This country needs to apologize and reparations must be made. We all need to come together, every one of us to make a true plan for liberty and justice for all. As long as indigenous peoples are disappeared and disparaged, or surface only in Hollywood movies like The Lone Ranger, this country will remain as a child without parents, who has no sense of earth, history or spirituality.” —Joy Harjo

Gratitude List:
1. Anticipating family time
2. The Statue of Liberty: a national symbol that I can wholeheartedly support
3. Sunny morning
4. Wise thoughts
5. Wild berries

May we walk in Beauty!