Pity Party

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Leonardo da Vinci cat sketches.

Dreams:
In one dream, I am looking at a pile of wooden bits and pieces, sort of frustrated at the mess, when I realize that it’s all the parts to a spinning wheel, and a really fine wheel at that.  All I have to do is put it together.  (I think I should get out my spindle this summer.)

In another dream, I standing outside with friends when there is a shimmering in the air nearby, like some tiny creature slipping through the veil between worlds.  “That’s a hummingbird!” someone says.  We keep watching it flitting around.  It still looks more like a creature of faerie to me.

Today is a challenging Gratitude List.  I have been having an allergy-stricken pity party for the past 18 hours.  It’s hard to create a Gratitude List in the midst of self-pity.  I considered not even doing this this morning because this one–wracked as it is by self-pity–feels self-absorbed, but it is also part of my process of growing.  Perhaps this will help me to move beyond myself.

Gratitude List:
1. (What is comforting?) A snoogly kid next to me in the big chair.
2. (What is comforting?) Seven hours of not sneezing.
3. (What is comforting?) While the day ahead has lots of work, I can schedule it myself.
4. (What pleases you?) The green light of morning touching the tops of the trees in the hollow.
5. (What do you anticipate?) Rest, solitude, clear sinuses

May we walk in Beauty!

Hymn Sing

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Gratitude List:
1. The poetry of old hymns.  John Ruth (may he live forever) articulated this beautifully last night.  I have been itching to find words for why I keep returning to the oldest hymns, even when the patriarchal language and theology send part of me into a tizzy.  It has to do with the fact that we’re singing poetry together.
2. The resonance of a hymn-sing in hardwood-floored gallery.  A perfect space for four-part harmony.
3. Singing and reading poetry in a gallery.  The hymns and poems and paintings all have a deep sense of structure beneath the surface vibrancy and color.  While we sang, while I read, I gazed at Freiman Stoltzfus’s mandala painting on his Symphony of Spring wall.  We sang “For the beauty of the earth”–this line caught me: “for the mystic harmony linking sense to sound and sight.”  Holy moments.  (If you get into Lancaster, you must check out Freiman’s gallery on Prince Street.)
4. Roma and John Ruth.  What lovely people!  They must be nearing 90, but they’re as crisp and playful as ever, she leading the songs with vigor, he giving vignettes and thoughts on each song, on the state of singing, on how moving it is to watch youtube videos about interspecies interactions.  And here is the amazing thing: After I introduced myself to him, I mentioned that we had talked about my great-grandfather 25 years ago.  He remembered the conversation (better than I did).  He’s written a 1000+-page book in the intervening years, met hundreds of new people, traveled the world, and he could still remember meeting a kid just out of college and researching her family history.  What a brilliant mind.
5. Words and word-lovers.

May we walk in Beauty!

Somewhere in the World

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Shere Khan of Skunk Hollow (we watched  The Jungle Book last night)

Somewhere in the world
there must be a house
where you will find safety,
a place where maybe
you will find the grace of wholeness.

Somewhere in the world
there must be a word
that holds your truest name,
a word that is a haven,
a shelter for your aching.

Somewhere in the world
there must be a table
set for soothing, set for aiding,
a table that will make
a new way for your healing.

Gratitude List:
1. Dreams
2. Metaphors
3. Symbols
4. Poems
5. Laughter

May we walk in Beauty!

Exploring What it Means to Be Human

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In the dream, I am giving a lecture to a group of prospective students and parents, and the moment they walk in for my presentation, I forget everything: what I was planning to say, what I am supposed to be talking about, why we are even here in this room.  I am in a complete and utter panic, so I just begin speaking about whatever comes to mind.  We always live in the context of our emotional lives, I tell them.  In the reactive world of daily existence, we don’t often remember to stop and examine what it means to be human.  We aren’t born with the training to step back and explore what it means to be creatures of emotion.  Stories give us that–they take us out of the auto-pilot realm of reactions and give us a slow and thoughtful opportunity to look at what it is to be human.  Like looking at insects held on a pin, literature lets us closely and carefully examine the human condition, and to reflect on ourselves as participants in the human condition.  That is why we study literature.

Not too bad for an on-the-fly, middle of the night dream lecture, though I am a little disturbed by the insect analogy.  I think in the dream I actually said skewered on a pin.  Yeesh.  Anyway, the people nodded and seemed to understand.

Gratitude List:
1. (What makes you curious?) How life-reality seeps into dream-reality.  How they inform each other.  How a dream can inform and settle anxieties: So often my anxiety dreams heighten my anxiety–last night’s dream resolved it.
2. (What is satisfying?) Words and related words: Solve and resolve and dissolve.  Image and magic and imagine.  (Occasionally my mind automatically anagrams words.  The other day, we sat at a restaurant table with a sign that seemed to read, “This table reserved for pirates of 6 or more.”  My mind had anagrammed parties to pirates.  I find this oddly satisfying–pirates and parties are now inextricably linked in my brain.  Like parental and paternal.  Like conversation and conservation.  Reverse-reserve. And the phonetic anagram chicken-kitchen.  Oy–I think I have just officially entered Summertime Brain.)
3. (What is a small thing of wonder?) That toad in the field.  Jon took the picture.  Toads please me, and make my heart happy.
4. (What was fun?) The big yard sale at Lebanon Valley Brethren Home yesterday, an annual event for the family.  Now we have to find a place for all the cords and electronics that one boy has collected, for all the new books, for the games and doodads.  It goes to a good cause, and the boys love it.  They interact with the residents who run the various areas of the sale, and they practice politeness.  I bought a museum-style book on the history of the alphabet and a collection of Whitman’s poetry and prose, along with two Kahlil Gibran books.  And I bought someone’s old cell phone, which I will use as a camera.
5. (What inspires you?) The fledglings standing on the edge of the nest, spreading their wings for first flight.  Today we graduate our seniors.  At Dedication last night, they already wore the aura of the adults they are becoming.  There was still plenty of silliness and bounciness, but it was held within the reverence and earnestness of this Moment of their lives.  Fly Well, Bright Ones!

May we walk, may we fly, in Beauty!

What Thing of Beauty Have you Seen?

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Gratitude List:
1. (What thing of beauty have you seen?) A Bridge that loops stone arches out over a River.
2. (What heals?) Confrontation can lead to new levels of sympathetic understanding.
3. (What touched your heart?) Yesterday before we wrapped up our mini-course, one boy asked if we could get everyone to gather around another boy who is joining the army and pray for his safety.  This is something we can all do, pacifist or not.  He proceeded to pray for his friend, and then for all of us, a spontaneous opening of the heart.
4. (What do you anticipate?) This is the day of the big yard sale at the retirement village where my mother-in-law lives.  For some reason, it has become an Event for our family, and this year it falls the day after all of us have finished school, so we’re even more excited than usual.  It’s in a big barn, so the rain shouldn’t affect our fun.
5. (What makes you marvel?) The way jumping spiders interact and react, as though they’re teeny tiny puppies.  The way they seem to notice me as a person, too.  Mantises and dragonflies also seem to have this awareness, though i haven’t noticed it in other spiders and insects.

May we walk in Beauty!

Grandmother’s Roots

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the peonies have
finally awakened in
the doorway of June
transient blooms and roots that
come from grandmother’s garden

Examen and Gratitude:
1. (Who inspires you?) Harriet Tubman.  Today, I finish my mini-course with my students at the River.  We will talk of dreams and water, of the Underground Railroad that traveled up this River, the walk to freedom.  And I will tell them of the Dreamer, Harriet Tubman–legend says that sometimes she would suddenly fall asleep at really dangerous moments on the journey northward, but when she awoke, she would know the next way to go.
2. (What makes you glad?) Sun on the wing of the red-winged blackbird.
3. (What fills you with deep joy?) The inclusive laughter of teenagers, the way they perform for each other to make each other laugh, the way the laughter catches from one to another and on down the line like a wildfire.
4. (What is your hunger?) For solitude, for silence, for deep quiet.  Even in the midst of loving these last days with my young people, part of me is turning toward the quiet of summer and the deliberate pacing of the long days.
5. (What wakes you up and calls you forward?) Trying on new ways to use words, reading poets who break up language and use it like mosaic and collage artists use broken bits of glass and pieces of paper.

May we walk in Beauty!

All the Shades of Green

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See that green and orange tulip bloom against the red barn?  My body thinks that little flower wants to kill me.  When the tulip tree begins to send out its pollens, my body sets up a racket of sneezing and sniffling and eye-watering–whatever it can do to try to keep the pollen out.  Beautiful, though, aren’t they?  I would like to fly above a grove of tulip poplars in May.

Gratitude List:
1. My bright and shiny group of mini-course kids.  Yesterday was much harder than I had expected.  It is exhausting to be the sole entertainment and input for a group of students for an entire day.  A much bigger task than I had thought.  But I love it, and I love them.  Bright and shiny.
2. Murphy found his way home.  (A small dog I know got out of his fence two days ago and spent a whole night and two days away from his people.  He’s back with them now.)
3. All the shades of green.
4. Visuals for the sacred journey: labyrinths, spirals, pathways, stones. . .
5. Conversations that go deep and wide.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Gifts of the Tulip Tree

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Female callosamia angulifera: The Tulip Tree Moth.

Gratitude List:
1. Quiet
2. Coffee
3. Tenderness
4. Yellow iris
5. How every end carries within it the seed of a new beginning

May we walk in Beauty!

Keep Turning

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I am finding the simple three-circuit labyrinth to be really satisfying.  Like a spiral, each circuit brings you one step closer toward the center, yet there’s that unsettling turning at the end of the circuit.  Wait a minute!  I’m now going the other way!  Still, despite the change in direction, I continue to move ever closer to the center.  This hit me yesterday.  Life has sent me reversals.  I have had moments when I have suddenly changed directions.  The whiplash can feel overwhelming, the sense of lost time or futility in what came before–but the turnings also bring me closer to the center.  The apparent about-faces and the changes of plan do not mean that I am going backwards, undoing the past.  I am still moving closer to the center. It all leads toward the center.

Gratitude List:
1. (What feeds you?) The red of the poppies.  I think I could probably live on the food of that red.  Such an impossible color.  That and the orange of Oriole.  And the thousands greens of the last week of May.
2. (What finds resolution?) I now have fewer balls to juggle, fewer plates to keep spinning in the air.  I can look to caring for my children more intentionally, to tidying and cleaning and systematizing.
3. (What images draw you?) The labyrinth.  We used the labyrinth as the structure for the service in church yesterday, and this Wednesday, I will be focusing on the labyrinth for my mini-course with my students.
4. (Who has been helpful?) Walt Whitman, Rachel Carson, Sojourner Truth–I will meditate on the words and lives of these wise ones this week.
5. (What helps you cope?) This little air conditioner.  If I choose to live beneath the branches of a grand tulip poplar, I must have respite during its blooming season.  This magnificent tree draws our orioles to us.  Its leafy embrace cools us here in the hollow during hot summer days.  It stands across from the sycamore like a sentinel.  It is a city teeming with life, vibrant with the flashing colors, the buzzing and twittering conversations, the busy living of its residents. Its buttery blooms are elegant. . .and toxic to me.  We make allowances.  We adjust ourselves sometimes to live with those we love.  For the week or two that it sends pollen to bless the world around, I spend my time at home in these rooms with the air conditioner on, venturing out for short periods to listen to birdsong, to watch the sun shift across the sky.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Shifting Colors of the Day

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Red.

Gratitude List:
1. (What made you laugh?) Listening to Sir Patrick Stewart read pop song lyrics in the voices of British Shakespearean actors on Ask Me Another last night.
2. (What startled you?) The way the scarlet of the poppies seems to reach through from another world into this one.  The way the deeper, more real red of the cardinal keeps catching my eye in the branches of trees.
3. (What awakened you?) The wisdom of friends, the dogged persistence of people
4. (What do you take for granted?) Light at the flick of a switch, water in the pipes, the trust and support of people close to me
5. (What brings you serenity?) The way light sifts through green, the play of breeze through leaves, the shifting colors of the day

May we walk in Beauty!