Oranges

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I have oranges in the dogwood tree for Oriole, but he seems uninterested.  He prefers the sycamore fluffs at the tops of the trees.  The dogwoods have lost their pink in the three days since I took the photo.

Gratitude List:
1. Cool May–whenever I start to kvetch about being too cold, I remember the beastly heat at the end of the year last year, and I am grateful.  I have not started up my classroom air conditioner at all this spring.
2. Deep, flowing conversations.
3. Your heart.  My heart.  The strands of love and compassion that connect those dots.
4. White fluffy clouds in blue sky.
5. Passing on the Flame.

May we walk in Beauty!

Walking on Air

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I guessed yesterday when my seven-year-old was playing with some other children during the Little League game, running up a dirt mound and jumping off, that he was feeling that flying feeling.  I asked him, and he confirmed that it did feel like he really was flying.  I remember running down the sloping front yard of our house in West Virginia, and knowing that my feet were actually skimming the earth, not really touching down.  Or sliding my feet down the steps, knowing that I was actually in flight mode, not really bound completely to gravity.

But there’s more to it, because even lately, in my middle age, I have had moments when something in the back of my head believes that gravity has less hold on me than it appears.  It’s not just whimsy, and it’s not that I am losing touch with reality.  It has to do with the staying power of dreams.  These days I rarely have the dreams where I am swooping and soaring, but I frequently have the skimming dreams, the walking on air.  And each time it happens, there is a skeptical place in me that tells me it is impossible,  but the wondering place in me reminds me that it has to be possible if it is happening, and so I wake up with a sense of knowing deep inside myself that I can walk on the air.  I don’t know if it’s a vestigial memory of early learning related to walking, or whether it’s a deep internal awareness of inner capacities–that I dream these things when I am about to break through some barrier in waking life, to do something that seems impossible.  I am fascinated by the way that the dream logic leaks into the waking world, the way that back part of my brain takes a moment to wake up and realize that the dream-reality and the waking-reality are different realms.

Gratitude List:
1. Walking on Air
2. Standing firmly on Earth
3. Being Immersed in the day
4. Being on Fire with an idea
5. Carrying on

May we walk in Beauty!

Where there is love there is life

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Gratitude List:
1. The boys’ choir yesterday morning.  Sound surrounding us.  Their songleader, Jim, and his delight in the music they made.
2. The little purring sound my car makes when I open the door, which is to say, I am grateful for whimsy.
3. Love wins.  It is always the answer.
4. The things-come-together part of that cycle in which things fall apart and are rebuilt.
5. My students.

May we walk in Beauty!

Reaching Out With Stories

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The Tin Man considers. . .  York, PA.

Gratitude List:
 1. The spirited participation and joyful interaction of teachers at my kids’ school.  I teach at a private school, and I love the education my school provides.  You must know, too, that public education in the US is not dead, and is not soulless.  There are great teachers out there, pouring their hearts into their work, which is children.  And there are good teams of teachers, good schools where people work together in the best interests of the children they teach.
2. The way people reach out with stories.
3. Spring tea with elderberry syrup and ginger tincture.  I hope it can keep helping me to keep the allergies at bay.  Nettle, dandelion, dock, two or three kinds of mints, catnip, plantain (both kinds), violet, clover, chamomile.
4. The way the wind makes the leaves shimmer and rustle.
5. My introverted time is coming.  I love the energy and bustle of the school year, and I have enough extrovert in me to meet it.  But I long for the times when I have time to live a little more inside myself, and that time is coming, too.  By summer’s end, I will be longing for the rush and rustle again, and the summer will feed that.

May we walk in Beauty!

Mushrooms and Moss

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Gratitude List:
1. All the life up in the tops of the trees.  We only see a little bit, only hear the loudest voices.  Small folk are slipping silently from branch to branch.  Species of lichen and moss that we don’t see here on the ground are quietly growing.  The poplar tree is a secret city, full of people going about their business, doing the work of their day, and the sycamore is the suburb.  Yesterday, I stood on the hill behind the house with the binoculars, watching my fire bird call to his demure lady, and I felt like a voyeur, looking into my birdy neighbors’ windows.
2. May Day–Wrightsville Elementary is having the May Day party this morning.  The kids can’t wait, and I am kind of excited myself.  It’s a good community experience.
3. Watching the children become aware of the hearts of others.  Our neighbors are moving, and last night a small boy decided to make a card to wish them well.  There have been challenges in our relationship, so to be able to make this small gesture in the way is helpful.  The children lead us toward goodness.
4. “Yesterday when I was talking to the oriole, I think it understood what I was saying, because it kept talking right back to me.”  A small person is beginning to talk to the birds, just like his Pawpaw.
5. All the sounds we can hear this morning: the end of the Dawn Bird Chorus, a cow, a rooster, a peacock, distant traffic, a small boy chattering, cat purr, geese.  Loudest, most insistent sound of all is Oriole.  My eyes are not yet awake enough to see anything with clarity, but the ears can do the work.

May we walk in Beauty!

Tweaking

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Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday morning’s mist.  As I reached the crest of the ridge, the sun was driving down through the heavy mist, illuminating a bright summer goldfinch on a fence.  Mist and sun both.  And golden bird.
2. The compassionate heart of a boy I know, who is finding ways to help a friend.
3. Riot of color.
4. Friday Faculty hymn sing.  No matter how tired or busy I am, this is one moment that always carries me through a week.
5. Assessing.  This is the time of year when I find myself looking through my work of the year, saying, “This I did pretty well.  This could have been done better.  This was okay, but if I tweak it in this and this way, it will be so much better.”  Even before this semester is finished, I look forward to the tabula rasa of fall.  I love being part of a school rhythm–everything is geared toward improving one’s work, semester by semester.  What is frustrating to me now is what drives me forward to grow and develop my skills and organization.

May we walk in Beauty!

Listing

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I am planning my end-of-year mini course for seniors, a Writer’s Contemplative Retreat.  I am thinking that I will begin each day with a gratitude list.  I have been reviewing Mary Oliver’s questions, and also trying to watch my mind as I make my own morning list.  I don’t necessarily think conscious questions into the open space of my brain, but there are trails down which I wander when I am thinking up my morning list.  Here are some questions I might ask my students to get them thinking:

* What is beautiful?  What fills me with wonder?  What images have slowed me down and caused me to pause in the past day?  What slows me down?
* What people do I appreciate?  In the past day, what people have I noticed being extra shiny?  Who does things to make the world a better place?  Who helps me?
* What satisfies me?  What makes me say, “Yes, that’s right”?
* What has surprised me in the past day?
* What helps me make it through?  What helps me to cope?  Life can feel downright difficult and wearisome sometimes.  In those moments, what helps me to hold on and face the challenges?

This last is the one that compelled me to write that list this this morning.  I realized that sometimes when I get to the last point or two–especially during times of high stress–I struggle to finish the list.  My mind begins to drag and complain and remind me that I’m tired and exhausted and crotchety.  But the discipline of the list kicks in–I have to finish the blasted thing, even if I’m grumpy.  So my mind goes to the question of what will help me to get through the challenge and the stress.

It makes me think of the fairy tale archetype of the mentor who tells the lost child what to look for: “There will be a signpost that will show you the way.  When you see the road passing between two hills, you know you are nearing your journey’s end.  Ask the old woman who stands at the crossroads for a crust of bread, and she will feed you.”  If I am feeling stressed, spending a moment in the morning to imagine the signposts that will help me to make it through the next portion of my journey helps me to find my way through without becoming overwhelmed.

Gratitude List:
1. Synchronous connections.  As I plan my mini-course, I contacted a local church with an outdoor labyrinth, and I discovered that the deacon who works with the labyrinth is someone I have met and deeply admired.
2. The music teachers at Wrightsville Elementary.  On Tuesday, The strings teacher couldn’t be there for the concert, and the music department head just leapt in and led the orchestras.
3. Blue herons flying above the highway.
4. Raccoon and deer in the hollow.
5. Making lists.

May we walk in Beauty!

Birdy

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Gratitude List:
1. Red-winged Blackbird
2. Oriole
3. Goldfinch
4. Bluebird
5. Hawk on the wing

May we walk in Beauty!

Gardens and Islands

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Season of the ferns.

Gratitude List:
1. Goethite, those small brown-black cubes we find in the fields.  Remineralized pyrite.  Philosopher’s stone.
2. The Curious Garden.  A small boy came home from school yesterday, inspired by a book/video his teacher had shown him in class.  He wanted me to help him to create a place behind the house where he would put plants he likes.  Then he took me inside to show me the book on the computer.  As we were finding this, he said, “I think you’re really going to like this one.”  I love that, that he is sharing literature with me, thinking about whether I would like it.  And he was right.  I really did.
3. Meeting the challenges.  I’m really living into The Odyssey right now, looking at the islands of Odysseus’s journey, thinking about the things that derail me, that challenge me, that keep from becoming my truest self, and the challenges that help me to become my truest self.
4. Planning my contemplative retreat.  I’ve chosen dates for my monastery trip.  Today I will call and reserve my little room.  I cannot express how deeply satisfying this is.
5. I also heard orioles on campus yesterday–even one in the tree outside my window!

May we walk in Beauty!

Dropping Keys

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Gratitude List:
1. This poem by Hafiz, from yesterday morning:

The small woman
Builds cages for everyone
He
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck her head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.

2. Hearing oriole’s voice added to the dawn chorus.
3. Becoming more familiar with that inner labyrinth.  Learning to recognize the turnings.
4. Vision.  I complain a lot lately about my glasses, about my shifting vision, but really, I am so glad for my sight: for the ability to read, to see a blue heron in the distance flying across the River, for the way eyes let light in.
5. The rabbits of Palmyra.  They have such personality.  Last night, on the way home from my mother-in-law’s house we saw (again) a game of leap rabbit, where two rabbits square off in a yard: one makes a sudden rush toward the other, who leaps into the air while the rushing rabbit dashes beneath.  They do this repeatedly–I assume it’s a dominance thing, but it’s really entertaining to watch.  But the most engaging story is this: Yesterday morning, my mother-in-law went to open her living room blinds, and there was a rabbit standing with its back feet on her porch couch and its front feet on her windowsill, looking in at her!  It crouched back down on the couch for a moment and then stood up and looked in again.  Then it jumped up on the windowsill and looked in for a few moments before hopping down and away.  I think it was thanking her for all the flowers she has planted for it to eat.

May we walk in Beauty!