Layers of Dream

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Gratitude List:
1. Good, thoughtful, life-giving, enriching conversations
2. A day mostly to myself
3. That nap.  Full of those dreams where I kept waking up, and then realizing that I was only waking up within the dream.  And I could just swat that little gnat of Waking Self and say, “But nobody needs anything from you today.  You can stay ten layers down in Dream, if you want.”  And so I did.
4. Sacred Clowns.  (Keep your heart-light on the ones in your life, though–they carry more weight than they let on.  That’s what makes them sacred clowns.)
5. Color and texture and pattern.

May we walk in Beauty!

Fierce Compassion

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I have been trying to figure out how, in the midst of my rages and furies, to find compassion, holding it all in the bowl of the heart.  That is my primary practice.

But now, I think that the work moves forward to a discipline more grammatical–in which order shall I place my adjectives and my nouns, my adverbs, my verbs?  It makes a difference, see:

Shall I be a keeper of a grave grace?  Or shall I practice grace within my gravity?  Shall I continue to seek for compassion in my rage and my anger?  Or shall I actively practice fierce compassion?

How will that look when I walk into a story in which I see harm being done? Sharing compassion fiercely rather than sharing anger compassionately?  Being gravely graceful rather than being gracefully grave?  The order matters, and it will happen differently in different situations, I think.

My story keeps beginning again.

(Thanks to The Story for the “Grace in Gravity” reference and to my friend Lisa Walker LeFevre for opening my heart to the phrase “fierce compassion.)

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Tree spirit.  (Photographed with a mirroring app.)

Gratitude List:
1. Fierce compassion.
2. Butterflies everywhere.  They belongs on the list again and again and again.
3. Milo Zen Puppy.  I haven’t written a gratitude list since I met him a couple days ago, and he is likely the cutest person to ever walk on four legs.  Really.  This is not hyperbole.
4. Radiance.  I mean the shop this time–it was such a pleasure to be there again, in the scents and the colors and all of it.  Seeing Sarah again.  Touching all the stones.  Coming home smelling like Radiance.
5. Radiance.  Yours, this time.  Yours and yours and yours. You shine.  You help me want to keep growing and being a better person.  You push me toward Love.

May we walk in Love.

Spiders and Space

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Gratitude List:
1. Watching children wake up.  They’re like spiders, beginning all curled in on themselves, and then there’s the release of the limbs and suddenly they’re all elbows and knees and long limbs flailing and twisting.  I think there are only four limbs per kid, but I wouldn’t be surprised some days if there were eight.
2. August suppers: corn on the cob and tomato sandwiches and blueberries.
3. Making spaces: I spent yesterday in my classroom, puttering and making spaces, getting ready for my students.  The excitement is beginning outweigh the worries about not being ready enough.
4. Sweaty little hands in mine.  I feel time passing, feel their childhoods slipping by at a rate that makes me uneasy.  I want to hold onto those little hands as long as I can.
5. Butterflies everywhere.  The flowerbeds are alive with all manner of swallowtails and commas and question marks (English teachers have their own butterflies!), and I keep seeing monarchs whenever I am driving anywhere.  Fly safely, little ones!
(6. Bonus: In last night’s dream, Billy Collins came to visit, and we recited his poetry together.  I even recited some Mary Oliver for him, and he was impressed.)

May we walk in Beauty!

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Jon holding the mastodon vertebrae and rib, directions, my boy shows his wings, weaving light at the science museum, Kalamazoo Promise, Jon’s great-grandfather’s tractor, boys and their new stuffed animals (where am I going to sit?)

Gratitude List:
1. Safe home from Michigan
2. Snuggles from a happy cat
3. The Wind in the Willows–good travel reading, but my voice is hoarse (I think I read aloud for about six hours today)
4. Screech Owl whinnying a welcome when we arrived home
5. Clouds

May we walk in Beauty!

Lake

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Gratitude List:
1. Osprey and great blue heron wheeling high above the lake
2. Dragonflies flirting and darting above the lake surface
3. Swallows skimming the lake surface
4. Sun sparkling and shimmering across the surface of the lake
5. Children shining in the waters of the lake
6. The best ever seafood taco

May we walk Shining in Beauty!

Gratitude Haiku

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A Gratitude List
Focuses My Inner Space
On the Essentials

1. I dream of a blue
blue sky–blue as Mary’s robe
or the Farmer’s eye.

2. The roadside teasel–
abloom among Queen Anne’s Lace
and the Sweet Joe Pye.

3. This is how I’ll find
my way in the dark forest:
I’ll seek your heart’s light.

4. I am finding time
to fill a bag of silence,
a bag of patience.

5. Careful summer work
today finds its quiet end:
time to change the gears.

Let’s walk in Beauty,
and joyfully together,
on this path forward.

Longing and Belonging

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Gratitude List:
1. Longing and belonging
2. Creating and recreating
3. Brooding
4. Hatching
5. Fledging

Fly well, Bright Ones!

B-O-B, Queen of Plumbers

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The morning glory that blooms more than a week after the vine has been cut off.  And spiderwebs everywhere.)

Gratitude List

1. The morning mist in the hollow, covering everything like a veil.

2. Dozens of dew-bejeweled spiderwebs scattered across the lawn this morning, layer upon layer of gossamer strands, so thickly laid each makes a little cloth of web.
“Mom!  It looks like bits of ice all over the place!”
Like a personal message for me, from the heart of the Mystery: Don’t forget.  Everything is connected.  You are part of the web.  Part of the cloth.

3. The chipping sparrows twittering in their nest.  Fledglings, soon.  One of the benefits of poor Fredthecat’s encroaching arthritis is that I no longer fly into a panic whenever a nestful of little ones learns to fly.

4. Me and my trusty plumber’s snake Nyoka–we conquered the clog in the outside pipe that leads to the septic system, just like the guy showed us four years ago.

Shove, shove, shove, twist.  (Half an hour of twist and shove and grunt and growl.  Okay, and swear.  Just a teensy-tiny little bit.  Under my breath.)

“Hey Mom!  Do you want to be a member of my Animal Rescue Club?”

Twist, grunt, sweat.  

“Sure.”
The water begins to slowly recede–SHOVE, shoveshoveshove, TWIST!  G-glub.  Sigh, in comes the water again, and more to boot.

“Hey Mom!  Your code name in the club is Bee-Oh-Bee.”

Twisttiwisttwist, shove.
Sploot: Nyoka uncoils and splashes kitchen sink goop into my hair.  Um.  Yuck.

“Great!  Bob!  I am Bob!”

“Mo-o-om.  Not Bob.  Bee-Oh-Bee.”

“Oh.  Okay.  But I like Bob better.”

Twi-i-i-i-st.  Shove, shove.

“You can’t be in the club if you change things.”

(“Little dictator.“)
“Okay.  Bee-Oh-Bee.  That’s me!”

Fizzzzzz.  Bubbles on the surface.  Shove?  Twist?  G-g-glug.  Gurgle.  Whoosh.  

Peek.  Yup, the water is gone!

“I AM BOB (Bee-Oh-Bee), Queen of Plumbers!”

5. So, the Animal Rescue Club.  I am grateful for the Animal Rescue Club and its Darling Dictator.

Knocking on the bathroom door, where I am getting out of the shower, having washed the cloggulus from my Super Plumbing Job from my hair and fingernails: “Mom, you need to come see the clubhouse.  If your chair is too small, I can help you fix it with pillows and stuff.”

This is a great club.  They even help you with the seating arrangements.

I am toweling off.  “Can you please come in soon?  Fred is looking around for a lap to sit on.  Even though Fred used to kill animals, he can still be a member of the club because he doesn’t do it very much anymore.  And he kind of likes the red blanket in the clubhouse.”

So far, we have rescued a monarch from the driveway (he didn’t survive for very long, but we tried our best), a question mark butterfly from the spiderweb behind the house (it took a lot of gentle, careful work to get the sticky web off the wings, but we managed, and that one flew away), and a mouse from under the tractor tire (I do not remember this particular rescue operation, but the boys swear we did it).

May we walk in Beauty.  On the web.  Through the veil.  Removing Clogs and Obstacles.  Rescuing.

Witches Being Ducked

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Gratitude List:

1. “When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”  –Virginia Woolf  (I had never read the first part of the quotation before.  Thank you, Christine Lincoln!)
2. Christine Lincoln and the Witches Being Ducked.  What a powerful Sisterhood.  I have fallen in love with you all.  Your magenta hair is a halo, an aura of  Shine, matching the passionate person within.  I am in awe of you.
3. All those images.  I want to write them all here, but they don’t belong to me.  I will carry them with me, deep, deep within.  Such story-making.
4. The tenacity of morning glory.  Over a week ago, Jon cut down the vine that was climbing up the dead sunflower in front of the house.  The leaves on the vine that continue on up the balcony have long since withered, but the flowers were still blooming today!
5. The heartbeat of a moth.  I held a small moth on my finger this morning, and I could feel its life force, its heartbeat, like a small motor quivering.

So much love.