Lay Down Your Heart

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

fins
By Monday, the gills have expanded and developed, the underside of the universe.

Working up a poem that I wrote a year ago:

Lay down your heart, sister
for one mist-laden moment
on the bank of the river
where your ancestors wandered.

It will not end the clamor
or stop the blood that spills
over rocks in the deserts.

It will not offer you answers
to the why of war
or end the stench of battles.

Still, the waters may offer you
questions instead, questions
that will create the riddles
to draw you onto the path again
despite the darkness
that surrounds you.

Gratitude List:
1. I have been given this day in which to do my work.
2. How emotion settles in the body. I know this can be unsettling, too. I read something yesterday by Darshana Avila, about sensing the way that happiness and sadness settle in the body, noticing where they are, what they do in the body, not judging them or their presence as “good” or “bad.” She noted that when we reflect on the way emotions are sensed in the body, happiness and sadness don’t always feel that different.  They just are.  It reminds me of Rumi welcoming all comers to the guesthouse.
3. New questions. I have to ask Anne Marie sometime to remind me of the entire list she offered in church on Sunday, a series of questions that comes from the peacebuilding work of the Great Lakes Initiative in eastern Africa.  The ones that stick with me are, “What do you lament?” and “What does joy look like?” I like the way the questions are phrased, instead of simply asking what makes you sad or happy–which are equally valid questions.
4. This one feels a little petty because it’s so material, but it has wider implications for me: Yesterday I found some dresses at Columbia Re-Uzit, and then I drove past my friend’s farm stand, and she was also having a yard sale, and I bought some of her clothes. So now I feel like I have the outfitting necessary for the coming school season. It’s one more thing off my plate, accomplished with minimal effort and thought–that’s the piece I am grateful for. That, and the lovely colors and textures, and the thought that I will be wearing some things that my beautiful and gracious friend has worn. In that context, clothes are more than just clothes, you know?
5. What shall I pull out for this last one? I do not yet have a Thing of Beauty on the list, other than my lovely new dresses. Oh, here it is: the bouquet of lisianthus blossoms my mother brought to me yesterday to have on the table today as I am working on my class preparations. Deep purple-violet and vibrant red-violet. (My parents brought me flowers, AND they are caring for my children for a couple days so that I can focus solely on the preparations for school.)

May we walk in Beauty.

The Specific and the Universal

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Mushrooms
Left on Saturday, Right on Sunday.

Do you know the Starfish Story?

A girl was walking along a beach, and ahead of her were thousands of starfish, washed up along the beach with the tide, slowly dying in the air.

She began to walk along the beach, picking up starfish, one by one, and throwing them back into the ocean.

An adult came along and said to her, “Why are you doing that? Don’t you see how many there are? What you are doing can’t possibly make a difference.”

The girl picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean.  “It mattered to THAT one!” she said.

Gratitude List:
1. The Starfish story, orally told. “It mattered to THAT one!” Sometimes you see a story so often it loses its teeth, but when someone speaks it out loud into the electric waiting of a roomful of people, it lives again with a whole new brightness. Oral storytelling is not a lost art.
2. The whole hymn, but particularly this verse from Fred Kaan’s “For the Healing of the Nations” text:
Lead us forward into freedom,
from despair your world release,
that, redeemed from war and hatred,
all may come and go in peace.
Show us how through care and goodness
fear will die and hope increase.
3. This hymn, too, set to “Finlandia”
4. Reminders of why I stay an Anabaptist: the hymns, MCC, the emphasis on being the hands and feet of Christ, active peace building, the contemporary work to transform the historic work of peacebuilding into a living philosophy that deeply understands reconciliation as well, listening to the words of Jesus.
5. Holding the specific within the universal. How the specific grounds the universal.  How the universal keeps the specific relevant.

May we walk in Beauty!

Reason and Mystery

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lazy
This is why we sometimes don’t make the bed.

When you walk in the the rooms
where Mystery waits with an indigo hum,
listen for the thrumming
of hummingbird, feel the brush
of moth wings across your cheek,
watch for the scoop and swish
of a small brown bat
through the rooms
of your heart.

Unless you seek to see her,
you will not find her,
and the rooms where you wander
will appear empty
and devoid of beauty.

Gratitude List:
1. Walking back in time. I took my boys to the Infamous Unstoppables Parade in Lancaster’s southeast yesterday. We parked on King Street and walked up to South Ann. As we got to S. Ann, I could feel the body memories of place begin to kick in again. All those afternoons walking home from the YWCA after yoga or weight training, twenty years ago before we hiked the Appalachian trail, the sounds of people talking in Spanish, the glorious front yard gardens, the music drifting out of windows, the loud bass of a car driving by. Even the slope of the hill beneath my feet. We stood across the street from the house where we lived. I didn’t recognize anyone.
2. Learning to ask for help.
3. Doll-making. It has been a while since I have made a doll, taking the materials that come to hand and crafting a small being out of fabric or clay or wire or wood, working for those moments when the personality begins to develop. I have been wanting to make a Dream Maker doll for some time, and realized that if I am going to manage it this summer, I should get started now, working in short spurts each evening. I have taken more time with the face on this one than I ever have before, and I am feeling satisfied.
4. Reason, intellectual rigor, that which can be thoughtfully and wisely explored.
5. Mystery, magic, that which cannot be known or spoken, but only sensed or felt.

May we walk in Beauty.

Hawk and Heart and Hummingbird

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Heart

Working with gratitude helps me to situate myself in time and place.

During these times of reflection, I am often hyper-aware of being here in this moment, right here, where I listen to the birdnews of the moment, the sounds of the day waking up, the thumps and bumbles of the smallfolk upstairs waking up.

This moment, where I look around to see the way the sun leans in or yawns behind grey haze.
This moment when I sit in expectation of the bright yellow falling leaf, the flash of birdwing across my window, the way sun sparkles on spiderweb.
This moment, in which yesterday’s movement is written in the aches and quirks of my muscles, the curve of my spine.

From the anchor of this moment, reflecting on the list takes me backward and elsewhere, to the color and shape of yesterday, to the shining white pebbles of moments past. I can pick them up and examine them, say, this one and I remember. I can watch how those pebbles are spun into golden strands sustained over time: The presence of a tiny impossible bird in this span of days. The season of the tang of tomato and the sweetness of basil. The long lazy days spent with the exploring feet and minds of my children.

The dailiness of the list also takes me forward into time. This has become my homework, the job I carry with me into each day. It is one of the anchoring ropes which I hold as I step into uncertain future, feeling my way in the grey mist as I go. Stepping forward with the search for gratitude on the agenda means I must go with an open heart, an open mind, searching not only for things, for items to check off my list, but for connections. It means walking into the future as into a puzzle, looking for five pieces of the coming day that will help me to shape the meaning of the picture that surrounds me.

I have been wondering lately at how this has become a habit, how I feel anxious and unmoored if I miss my daily list. For years, it was a thing I would do on occasion, as the mood hit, but in the past several months, it has become a deeper spiritual practice. I shift it from time to time, asking myself questions, or writing the list as a poem. Still, instead of becoming boring or tedious, it has become ever more a place where I can talk to myself, remind myself who I am, where I am, what I am doing here.

Gratitude List:
1. Getting into the “zone,” that headspace where you get so wrapped up in the work that you don’t notice time passing.
2. Situating myself in time and space.
3. Hummingbird. Please bear with me, but this lives with me as a constant thrill of electric delight in this season. Almost every time I walk outside my house these days, I see her. If she is not on her nest, I can wait and watch quietly, and I will hear her dzipping a zigzag through the air, or I’ll catch a flash of movement through the bright spaces between the leaves of the sycamore. Always. My heart is so full of hummingbird.
4. Hawks. The youngster who lives here in our hollow has begun to settle down and accept her emergence into independent adulthood. Her cries have become more purposeful, less demanding and sulky. She’s finding her way. At the same time, friends of mine on temporary sojourn in a hospital hours to the south of me have been watching a hawk from the hospital window. She has become the Guardian, the One-Who-Watches. In these days, when my heart is here in this place and also in that place, I find comfort in our taloned watchers, a sense of the thread that crosses distances. My heart is full of hawk.
5. The powerful truth of thread, of yarn. How ideas and love and dreams are spun like yarn, twisting people and thoughts together, expanding and lengthening through time and space, connecting, always connecting. How threads are woven and knitted together to make cloth, unifying, incorporating different people and ideas together, connecting, always connecting. How diversity of color and texture within a cloth is part of what makes it beautiful. The image that keeps returning to my mind these days from Madeline L’engle’s Wrinkle in Time, of the distance from one end of the thread to the other, but how a wrinkle brings the ends together–I think this applies to distant hearts as well as to tessering through space. When we tune our hearts to each other (an act which I call prayer), we create a wrinkle that brings us together, no matter what sort of distance in time or space or belief separates us.

May we walk, always, in Beauty.

Encountering Mystery

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

lily pond

Today’s gratitude list is unashamedly entirely based in the natural world, though perhaps I am speaking of other things as well, as is so often the case, even when I don’t know it.  I find that often the things that catch my attention in waking life are not so far distant from the mythic images and ideas that meet me in the dream world. There are layers of meaning in those images, ideas reaching out to be met and understood. What if we were to see the wakeful, open-eyed world in the way we looked at the dream-world? As though it were a place to encounter Mystery, as if each moment were an opportunity to be spoken to by the sentient soul of creation, which some people call Goddess or God, which I often call Mystery or Beauty (I recently discovered that naturalist John Muir did the same).

In this recent post on her blog, psychologist Sharon Blackie quotes James Hillman: “Psyche, Hillman said, is not in us; we are in psyche. And I believe that if psyche is shaped by myth, by mythical images and symbols, then myth is not in us: we are, in some deep and indefinable sense, in myth. ‘It is not we who imagine, but we who are imagined.’ What if we are not imagining myth, but myth is imagining us?” I love this.  Can you sense Myth, Mystery, God/dess, Beauty, imagining you, offering you a hand at every turn, inviting you to See, to Experience, to Encounter?

The dream worker Toko-pa Turner, in this blog post, titled “Courting the Mystery” (in which she, too, quotes Hillman) writes, “I believe one of the great challenges of our time is our coming back into relationship with mystery. Rather than making an expectation of our needs being met, let us make a courtship of that which we admire. Let us make our lives alluring enough that the mystery might become curious of us! Let us stand with a respectful distance and make an invitation of ourselves, such that wildness might decide to approach us. Let us find ways to pray ourselves to the forest, even when we hear nothing back. Let us keep returning to that silence and allow ourselves to be shaped by our yearning for answers.”

Sometimes prayer is simply the act of paying attention, of noticing the way the world calls out to us, begs for us to respond and interact and participate.  Yesterday was full of those moments for me, those callings, those shining yearning standing-in-the-doorway holy places. And I didn’t go out searching. There they were to be grasped, between the moments of bickering children, of making plans for my coming year, of getting the quotidian work done.

Now the trick is to find them even when the butterflies aren’t flying, even when the hummingbird is not dipping her head to look at me from her nest, even when the day is grey or hot, even when I am emotionally drained or angry or frightened. Beauty is still there.  Mystery is always surrounding us, just waiting to be noticed.

Gratitude List:
1. Listening to the bluebirds welcoming the morning, the song sparrow, the surrounding chorus of birds, the various clubs of cicadas powering up their drones from several corners of the hollow, and suddenly, like a shift in air pressure, the dzip-dzip-thrrrim-dzip of the hummingbird finding the perfect angle into her bottlecap of a nest.
2. Indigo buntings calling to each other across the fields.
3. Monarch and swallowtail and buckeye. Did I say monarch? Yeah, I saw one, dipping her fiery wings as she surfed a breeze over the pear orchard toward me, and it made my heart happy. So happy.
4. So many tiny frogs on the lily pads on the pond, yeeping in terror when we walked too close, croaking in the rushes. The air above the pond was electric with the movement of dragonflies and damselflies darting, and tiny frogs hopping across the lily pads.  And further up, the swallowtails made lazy lines and loops in the sunshine, spiraling all the way to the top of the tallest poplar.  I must have seen two dozen or more yellow swallowtails at the pond yesterday.
5. Watching the bat again, darting impossibly fast in her circling beneath the poplar and sycamore trees. She was so quick, my eyes couldn’t scan her. I could imagine she was winking in and out between worlds. At one point, she came and circled twice around Joss and me where we were standing snuggling. So add to this one the wonder on a small boy’s face at being recognized by a bat in flight.

In Beauty may we walk.

Instructions to Myself

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fort2
Just two kids playing in their fort.

Instructions to Myself:
1. Make eye contact.  Even with the people you live with.  Especially with the people you live with–it’s easy to take their solid presence for granted and forget to look them in the eye.
2. Give people the smile they need.  Only some people need the broad and open smile.  Some need a quiet I-see-you smile.
3. Cultivate curiosity, not only about ideas and facts, but about people.
4. Ask.  Don’t tell. This is hard for me, because I like to tell. Learn to draw people out in conversation.
5. Don’t hide your awe. Sometimes people are just waiting for someone to show them the doorway into wonder.

Gratitude List:
1. (In Tanka)
Impossible things
that actually exist,
like the hummingbird.
how she hovers, how she hums,
how she flies like a whisper.
2. Also bats, which are creatures of impossibility.  How they dart and wheel in the circle of space underneath the poplar and sycamore trees, feasting on the wing, right here where we are, as if they enjoy our company.
3. The crisp, cooling crunch of cucumber.
4. All those owls.  Two or three screech owls whinnying in the bamboo grove, and further off, a great horned owl, echoing through the hollow.
5. The way Beauty surrounds us, taps us on the shoulder, breathes in our ears, wraps us in Her veils of wonder.

May we walk in Beauty.  Beauty ever ancient, ever new.

Presence, Recognition, and Encounter

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Cloud

Yesterday, I wrote about developing communities of spirit while living within the bounds of empire, about challenging the power that empire wields–not by running to safety or to a noiseless desert, but by tending our own inner gardens, building our own inner castles and safe havens, and reaching out to each other to support and strengthen each other in spiritual solidarity.

I have been thinking about communities of spirit in the last day, about how this community is always available in some form. I believe that everyone has the capacity for spiritual depth and inner reflection. The trick is to recognize it in each other, to call it forth in our interactions.

Each encounter with another person is a chance to make that deeper human spirit connection.  So often I just glance off the sides, live alone in my own bubble, think only in terms of getting my tasks done. You know those people who really look you in the eye? Not intrusively or forcefully, but openly and honestly. How you want to smile or nod.  How that thing happens in your brain–perhaps not even consciously–where this person clicks with you, and you know you are of the same tribe? I think that moment is when spirit calls to spirit, when we recognize each other, and we are drawn to being our best and most honest selves. I want to practice and learn to be that person, Present in each encounter, not intrusively, but openly.

Let’s practice the art of Presence and Recognition these days, shall we? When we’re with people, let’s keep the people-moment, the Encounter, at the center, and let the tasks be secondary to our experiences. Let’s call forth the spirit in each other. It’s not that every encounter has to become a deep conversation, but that that depth can be achieved even in a glance of recognition, a smile, a word. We’re the same thing, you and I. We belong in the same tribe. We have vastly different and separate experiences, but we’re parts of the same organism, and we can recognize our connection in the moments that we encounter each other.

Gratitude List:
1. The humming sound of the hummingbird.  I know that I have heard the sound before, but it is always a surprise.  “Like a rubberband thrumming,” I said.  “I think it sounds like Fred purring,” said a boy.  Of course it does.
2. Cool morning.  Cool, cool, comfortable cool.
3. Preparations. Getting ready for school.  Like tilling the soil for a field, imagining the way the small plants will begin to grow, how the green will deepen, the stems will harden, the shoots will dive upward into sky, the small hard buds will form and the flowers burst forth.  How the flowers will fade but the fruit will grow, filling out and finding its color, ripening in the sun.  Now is the time to prepare the rows, to look to the health of the soil and seed, so that the plant may have the greatest chance to grow and thrive.
4. Dark of the moon.  It’s so dark without the moon, especially when the night is hazy. (I tried to do a tree pose last night out in the darkness, and I could not find my balance–in the darkness I simply could not balance. I wonder what that is about?) How our own hearts echo the shifts in the cosmos, ready for the time of waxing to fullness.
5. Resolve. Will. Determination.

May we walk in Beauty!

Living in the Empire

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Tomatoes

Tomato season is upon us.  Those speckled romans in the upper right hand corner appear to have done a little hybridizing with the Amish pastes–so many of them are chunky and round.

I had a conversation with a wise man yesterday (my father).  My book on the desert mothers and fathers caught his eye, and he told me about what he had read about the movement of these communities into the deserts of what is now Syria and Palestine and Egypt–that they appear to have been reacting to the Christianization of empire in the 4th and 5th centuries.  Watching how their spiritual path had been taken and used to unify people under military and nationalistic banners, they chose instead to retreat into the deserts.

We got to talking about how our own direct spiritual ancestors, Mennonite Anabaptists in Switzerland in the 1500s, were also confronting the ways in which faith and spirituality had become a tool of empire and state-building. They refused to baptize their babies into the state church, choosing to untangle their spiritual story from the story of the religious city-states.  Many of them paid with their lives.  Many of them fled that empire for the new world.

Today, I think we also live in a time of empire-building, when the engines of state appropriate and exploit spiritual dogmas in order to consolidate power.  We have no desert to flee to, no new world that holds the promise of a life lived according to principle outside the boundaries of empire.  And perhaps flight is not what is called for in these days.  Perhaps the work of today demands that our desert monastic cells and our new world communities be villages of spirit, grounded inside ourselves.  Perhaps our work is to build and strengthen what St. Teresa of Avila, in the 1500s called the Interior Castle, the spaces inside ourselves that experience the life of the spirit in deep communion with the Great Mystery, a place where political and empirical powers hold no sway.

And then, how does the tending of our own inner gardens inform our daily living in the empire?  How will I explore my anxieties and concerns about things like elections and drone warfare and poverty and refugees in light of my inner journey?  How will I act in the outer world, if I am informed by my own inner amma in her quiet desert cell?  What will our communities of spirit look like here, within the belly of the empire, if we do not set ourselves apart in desert communities or sail away to a new land?  How do we keep our circles wide and inviting, our conversations holy and uplifting, our actions principled and full of resolve?

The movement of spirit that I see today is not defined by a singular religious group or sect.  It crosses religious boundaries.  The Muslim seeker and the Christian seeker, the Sikh, the witch, the Buddhist, the agnostic, and the universalist–it is one spirit community, working together to live with intention and purpose, with compassion and wisdom, calling forth that longing to experience the life of the spirit within each other and with everyone they meet.

Gratitude List:
1. I found the hummingbird nest yesterday.  It’s been a couple years since I found one.  I just happened to be looking at the right place at the right moment when she flew in and settled on her nest.  What a miracle of existence is the hummingbird.
2. This seems petty, but it’s a biggish deal to me: the warning lights in the Prius went off.  I decided to drive her for small errands yesterday because we couldn’t get a car appointment until this morning.  After two or three stops, she stopped giving me panicky lights.  My mechanic says to just keep watching for the lights and hope she was just resetting something.  I was afraid of a huge repair bill.
3. The inner work.  Knowing you’re out there, and so many others are with us, tending our inner gardens, building and connecting communities of spirit.
4. How sleep refreshes.  I felt really run down yesterday.  Jon said maybe I didn’t eat enough.  I thought maybe it was the humidity.  My bones ached.  I thought I might never feel rested again.  A good sleep has done the trick this time.
5. Inter-species friendship.  Here’s Fred, talking to me about breakfast.  I had to give him my attention and respond to his questions and snuggle and feed him.  Now he has settled quietly into the chair right beside me, companionably.  What a great guy.

May we walk in Beauty!

Suggested Readings

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

peacock

In the wake of the political conventions, I’ve been looking at what has been happening inside myself.

Because of the sense of doom that I feel about Donald Trump as a political candidate, I have allowed myself to fall again into snarky and mean talk about the candidate.  It’s so easy, right?  And somehow it begins to feel that if I say it all loud enough and long enough, the people who are supporting him will listen up.  But that’s how he himself maneuvers his own agenda onto the landscape–repeat, loud and long, and repeat again.  We aren’t going to bring about a revolution of respect and justice and simple goodness by standing around blustering and yelling, no matter how cathartic it feels.  This article by Omid Safi (click here) on the On Being blog spoke to me about keeping the discourse on a high level.  As Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.”

Also, because I have been a supporter of Bernie Sanders, I have been feeling a struggle within as I watched the DNC.  On one hand, I relate powerfully to those angry, grieving Sanders supporters who wouldn’t settle down and get on with business.  On the other, I was annoyed at how the booing and the grutzing came across on the national screen as belligerent and fractious–there has to be a better way to carry the revolution into the next stage than through petty disruptions.  I also noticed within myself a real turning toward Hillary Clinton, a sudden eagerness to throw in my towel with her camp, an excited delight to finally vote for a woman for president.  Still, it was extremely helpful to me to have a thoughtful conservative friend question me very politely about how wary of her I have been in the past because of her connections to mega-corporations and her support of Monsanto and big ag.  This morning I got around to reading this really insightful article from my friend Jonathan Matthew Smucker (click here) about how the political polarization these days tends to be along populist/establishment lines rather than simply along conservative/liberal lines.  I will vote for Hillary in November, but I will not do so with a sense of having sold out my progressive values or embraced politics-as-usual.  I will vote for her because a Democratic landscape will offer a more open field for progressive ideas to flourish and grow than the fascist landscape offered by her opponent.  (And I will smile as I do it, because I finally get to vote for a woman, and that, too, is revolutionary.)

Gratitude List:
1. That vaseful of peacock feathers we came home to.  Someone left them on the table in the garage.  If it was you, thank you!
2. Playing up at Sam Lewis State Park with the family, climbing rocks, launching the flying toys we bought at NASA, playing Sharks and Humans on the jungle gym (the sharks always win).
3. This beautiful place where we live, how rolling hill leads to valley and hollow, which leads to rolling hill and rolling hill, off into the distance, with skuthers of mist and fog caught between.  The River.  The broad valley across the way.
4. Re-interpretation.  Finding new and satisfying ways to say old things.
5. That Rose of Sharon bush out there, white and pink and violet flowers shining out all over.

May we walk in Beauty!

Jiggety Jig

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

ship
Ship carved into the wall of the Timothy Hill House, the oldest house on Chincoteague Island.

What songs shall we sing
when the dawn has come creeping
silently over
the ridges and the mountains
through a summer veil of haze?

Gratitude List:
1. Home again, home again. Safely. Settling back in.
2. Seeing Fred again.  We all missed him.
3. Those enormous walnut limbs that fell while we were away didn’t fall on little Pippi the Prius.
4. Vacation.  This one feels like those space trips that use the gravitational force of the moon to go further into space.  This trip to Chincoteague has given me renewed energy to get my work done.
5. Waking up to the sounds of home.

May we walk in Beauty!