After Strand

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Here is a poem, written after Mark Strand’s “From a Litany”:

Here in the hush before morning,
I praise the coming dawn which will push back the curtain of night.
I praise the secret shadows in the bamboo.
I praise the first brave bird to sing.
I praise the soft sighs of the cat curled beside the vents.
I praise the tang of pine entering my body through breath.
I praise the clatter of rain.
I praise the fortitude of the early-riser, driving up the hill to work.
I praise the quiet earthworms, deep in the hollows of warm earth below.
I praise the way words tumble from mouth and pen and keyboard.
I praise the thunder of words, their flood and their tempest.
I praise the silent words whispered at midnight,
I praise the tattered remnant of dreams that hover about me like a halo.
I praise the storm of the day as it approaches,
with all its wildness and adventure.

Gratitude List:
1.  Heat!  A new furnace came yesterday, earlier than projected, and we are warm again. This new one sounds different, and the house has a new winter voice.
2.  The deep, secret green of the ferns by Cabin Creek, after everything else has turned brittle and brown, this green holds on.
3.  That verse in Brian Wren’s song “Joyful is the Dark”:

Joyful is the dark Spirit of the deep,
winging wildly o’er the world’s creation,
silken sheen of midnight
plumage black and bright,
swooping with the beauty of a raven.

The whole song, actually.  In these last days before sun-return, the darkness begins to feel claustrophobic.  This keeps the darkness broad and wild and open.
4.  Being part of a community that actively practices restorative justice, and discusses it together.  I am constantly inspired by my colleagues.
5.  The delight of children anticipating Christmas.  I love being on the parental end of the holiday.

May we walk in Beauty!

Poem: Advent 2

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

DSCN7684

Someone has begun
to puzzle the pieces
of the shattered bowl
back into place.

The fractured pattern flows,
a twisted pathway,
across the scarred surface.
The break will always be visible.

Somewhere in the distance
a voice is calling, “Cry Out!”
And what shall I cry?

Hands up!  Don’t shoot!
Black lives matter.
I can’t breathe!
Justice!

I will not cry for an unholy peace
which rests upon your shoulders.
My cry is only my breath,
all I have to offer
until we all can breathe together.

Emerging

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Gratitude List:
1. All of you who are priestess/priests to me, lights in the shadowy places, warm currents in cold places.
2. The Kissing Hand–thanks to Anne for reminding me of this–it’s helping the mama as well as the littles.
3. Audio books–it’s not quite like reading a novel, but it satisfies my craving for story on the ride to school at a time when I have no time for extracurricular reading.
4. The power of the people
5. The winds of change

May we walk in Beauty!

Weary

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

I am so weary.
So furious and weary.
So weary of my fury.

You’ve got your hands in the air.
I’ve got my hands at your back.
They’ve got their hands on your throat,
and our hands are prying at them,
our hands are clawing with all our might.
We are screaming with all the strength
our sob-wrenched throats can utter.

And the hands that hold the gun,
the hands that squeeze the breath,
they look like mine.

The voice that says,
again and again,
in such a tone of reason,
that rings in my ears,
“Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty.”
It sounds like mine, somehow.

 

Poem: Advent 1

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

 

 

 

This morning, church was about despair and hope.
The altar table was covered with the shards of a broken pottery vase.
There was space for grief and rage and confusion,
and also for healing and hope, and good singing, as always.

This poem happened:

DSCN7654

On the table
the bowl is shattered,
the shards are scattered
across the torn cloth.

A city inside me is burning
and the sky is torn by fury
or by the hand of God
and who is to say
which of those names
we shall give it today?

Where shall we go now?
Where shall we find
the threads of the tale
when the wind has blown,
wild,
through the window?
Will the mystery matter
within the wreckage?

Still–

into the silence
a bird on the windowsill
sings a brief note
that sounds for the moment
like hope.

Scandalous Grace

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Sometimes it just feels good to settle into the grumpy places, like a hen, and brood a bit. Then when the time is right, you step out into the sunshine, shake the dust out of your feathers, and run with the flock.

We live in the layers. Part of me wants to be so evolved and conscious in my living that I don’t get into the occasional grumpy snit, that I don’t lose my temper and holler at my kids, that I don’t go on a rant with no reasonable basis in facts, that I don’t buy myself a new pair of boots just for the fleeting happiness of new stuff. But there’s a paradox in there, I think. To actually embrace my humanness, to live in the layered reality of being a being in a body right now, I have to experience those bits of me that I am a little sheepish or ashamed about. Part of the mystery and the delight of being human is the life in the layers–we can be seeking to understand the deep pools of our emotions and the far-reaching paths of spirit and still, when it comes down to it, these are the clothes we wear, these human clothes, and sometimes the emotional bits get a little messy.

Perhaps it’s also partially a function of the Swiss/German DNA that I carry in my human clothing. Even while I am having a rant or a snit, some small voice in the back of my head is saying, “Now is that reasonable?  Is that proper?” Perhaps for me, diving more deeply into the layers, exploring the depth of my humanness, might mean stilling that voice, letting myself have at it, not worrying whether my current rant is grounded in verifiable facts like a college research paper, whether I am going to sound sulky or whiny.

I think that what I am saying is that reason and philosophy and spiritual seeking are all good and useful tools, but that a life too focused on being reasonable and rational can divorce us from the emotional part of our fully human selves. Emotions aren’t reasonable. Like any art supply, they’re messy. But they’re colorful, too. Here’s to the art of living in the layers!

Gratitude List:
1. Getting home in the dark and getting out of the car to the hooting of the Great Horned Owl in the bamboo. They’re really active right now. About a week ago, one night as we were putting the boys to bed, the owls were having a regular hootenanny out in the woods–there must have been at least three of them, and they weren’t leaving their usual thoughtful pauses between comments.
2. I finished all my coursework for my class:Building Caring Communities. It has been a wonderful class, and I have found much that I can apply directly to my classroom, so I am grateful for that. But I am weary and eager to have a little less on my plate for a while, so I am grateful that it is over, too.
3. Family time over the holiday. Crazy Uno games with both sides of the family. Thoughtful conversations. Hugs and snuggles and sharing delicious food.
4. Tender justice and scandalous grace.
5. Revolutionary poetry.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Scrooge of Thanksgiving

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Everything I write today feels like it needs a qualification behind it.  I feel as though I should be a sort of priestess of Thanksgiving, carrying my gratitude practice into this day like it is my High Holy Day.  Instead, I feel more like the Scrooge of Thanksgiving this morning.  I start to write “Happy Thanksgiving!” but I feel like I need to discuss that in terms of the history of genocide in the US and in terms of the weight I am feeling about racism and injustice at this particular historical moment.  I want to write about how grateful I am for the unaltering yearly shift from growing season to harvest and then to winter’s rest, but I feel like I need to discuss that in terms of climate change and the anxiety I feel about human alteration of the planet’s weather.  I want to write about how excited I am to spend time with my family, but I am still caught up in the whirlwind of papers to write and plans to make and the sense of guilt that rides me about how I am neglecting my own children.

I’m not depressed.  Just grumpy and out of sorts.  I had a moment this morning when I thought, Maybe it’s time to give up the Gratitude Practice and pick up a different tool for a while.  Maybe it’s time to pick up the practice of the Flaming Sword of Justice again.  Perhaps it’s time to become a Holy Curmudgeon, giving the world a good hearty dose of Harsh Reality.  (Yes, I realize it’s too late–I’ve already done so here.)

Here is the part of the short, thoughtful essay where the writer is supposed to take a sense of ick and discomfort and turn it around into something thoughtful and witty, something hopeful and positive and enchanting.  I don’t have that to offer you today.  Not quite.  Just this: that today, of all days, is not the day to give up this work of Gratitude.  That today, of all days, is the day when I need it most of all.  Perhaps on some sunny spring morning when I cannot bear to write only five things, when my heart is overflowing with gratitude, perhaps that is the day that I can say I am ready to move on to explore another practice.  And of course, I won’t ever actually abandon this tool.  I’ll keep it in my box, along with the Flaming Sword of Justice and some of the other tools I have worked with over the years, and bring it out on days like today when I need it most.

So here is my attempt at today’s gratitude list, unqualified by doom and general grouchiness:

Gratitude List:
1. Coffee
2. Coats
3. Chocolate
4. Children
5. Already the gloom is lifting.  Already the energy of the day begins to enter.  Already the sense of possibility begins to shine over the shadow of too-much-to-do-in-too-little-time.  Already the medicine of this practice begins to do its work.  You don’t know, sometimes, if you’re going to get there until you get there.  And sometimes that is the story that needs to unfold.

May you have a moment of peace today.  May we walk in Beauty.

So here, qualified as it is by a thousand things, from the depths of my curmudgeonly soul: Happy Thanksgiving! (And I mean it this time.)

Complicit

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I have been brooding today about Bill Cosby. Does it really matter whether a farmer/schoolteacher/mother/poet forms an opinion about the Bill Cosby rape story? I can just ignore it all, say it’s none of my business, and move on. It’s a mark, perhaps, of our shallow culture that we get wrapped up in the lives of celebrities to the point that uncovering a celebrity’s history of sexual predation would throw me, would cause me such a sense of intermingled fury and grief. Perhaps. Still, I think when someone is lively or delightful or thoughtful or beautiful in the wider culture in which we participate, we do feel a connection that goes beyond the merely mundane. I wept when violinist Isaac Stern died, when the poetic voice of Maya Angelou passed on, when Robin Williams left us with only memories of his laughter. So I supposed this response isn’t preposterous.

But there’s another piece of it that’s really bothering me today, and that is that when this recent part of the story broke this past week, I had a moment of deja vu: “Oh yeah.  Wasn’t there something about this a few years ago?”  As I began to read the account of Scott Simon’s questions and the stories of more and more women coming forward, I remembered that I had read earlier–and damning–accusations a few years ago. Why did I forget?  Why did I put that out of mind and go on accepting Bill Cosby as America’s Mr. Funnyman?  America’s Everydad, as Mark Morford called him. And that’s the thing that bothers me, because that’s a hallmark of rape culture–that the predator can so often minimize his crimes in the face of his power or celebrity or general congeniality that people either don’t believe the stories of his victims or they participate in the minimization, ignore the true implications of the accusations, and go on living as though nothing has happened, and the victim gets violated again, this time by the world’s refusal to acknowledge her story. Again, why does it matter what I think? Why should I bother to form an opinion on the matter? It troubles me, though, that something in me would have minimized the earlier stories, would have lived in denial that someone who brought such delight and wonder into our homes could be cavalierly destroying people’s lives. I feel complicit in the culture of denial. Sullied.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Hiking at Sam Lewis State Park. Every time I go there and climb on the rocks with the kids, I am more and more aware of how old I am getting, how clambering over the big rocks is getting harder and harder. Still, it’s worth the scramble up to the top of the rocks pile, to look through the trees to the River, to imagine what it must have been like for the First People who walked here to stand perhaps on the very same rocks looking out to the River.
2.  Sharing the awe. Yesterday in my last class, I mentioned something about the morning’s sunrise, and suddenly three or four students were all talking at once, clamoring to tell their experiences of watching the sky that morning.
3.  I don’t have to figure it all out.  I don’t have to be perfect for every moment.  I just need to be Present.
4.  The last assignment in the course I am taking was to watch a video on renewing energy, on play and flow and working joyfully.  And then to go play for an hour.  I took that seriously, and we all spent most of the day with the Legos, sorting and building and playing.  It is very satisfying to be assigned to play.  My children loved that.
5.  Colcannon

May we walk in Beauty!

Reminders

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Gratitude List:
1.  All my Facebook friends who write gratitude lists, which reminds me to do my own.
2.  The bolt of magenta that flowed upward from the morning’s tangerine sunrise onto an indigo belly of cloud.  Sounds a little over-done to read it like that, but that’s kind of how it is with these morning sunrises.  Show-offy.  I’m not complaining.
3.  The same tangerine and magenta in the sunset today.  My life feels a little closed in these days, driving into sunrise on my morning commute and into sunset on my evening commute, and indoors for the hours between.  But hail and welcome, Winter, anyway.  And thank you for the colors.
4.  There’s this thing about the crows.  I can’t quite figure out how to work it into a poem.  I want to say that I am a row of bare white sycamore trees with crows in my hair, crows like thoughts above me.  Perhaps it’s crows and sunset.  Crows and sunset and bare trees.  What is the riddle that keeps asking to be noticed when the crows fly?  I love them so.
5.  And sundogs.  Also in the crows and sunset train.  Still, their own thing.  They way they settle gently on top of a cloud.  How they brighten the sky directly outside their arc.  How they suggest a full circle spectrum around the sun.

May we walk in Beauty!

It’s Always About the Bridge

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Last January, during the high holy days that come at the year’s turning, before the 12th Day of Christmas, I had a dream about bridges, and I decided that Bridges would be my image for the year.  Little did I know back then how I would be creating a bridge between two times of my life, between Farmer and Teacher, and traveling every day across the bridges from Wrightsville to Columbia to the place of the Iron Bridge, where it crosses the Millstream.  Little did I know then how desperate I would be right now for language, for images, for ideas which could bridge the gaps between people who cannot seem to see their way across the chasms toward each other.

In my twenties and thirties, I spent a decade away from the Mennonite church, searching for a way to find my own place among my people on my own terms, with language that could hold me in the basket, too.  I have been back again now for another decade, and engaged with people who ask many of the same questions I do, who sometimes walk through the boggy places at the edges of the Village with me, and now we stop and look around at each other through the mists, and wonder how this new gulf could have formed between some of us, and how we’ll find our way to each other again, and whether we have the skills or energy to build a bridge across.

Perhaps we can build a bridge of song, strong four-part harmonies to give it structure, old hymn tunes mingling with a strummed guitar and songs from our family in other lands.  I hear you there, through the mist, across the waters.  Sing louder, please.  Remind me why we need this bridge.  Some days I get so weary of trying to maintain the vision of it in that space between my brows.  Here are my tears, here is my rage, here is my voice like a strand of silver cobweb, thrown out into the darkness, to weave and twine with yours.  How shall we begin?

 

Gratitude List:
1. Ellis combing my hair, like I used to comb my mother’s hair.
2. Bridges everywhere.  I think that the young ones are a bridge.  But will their time ripen soon enough?
3. Thoughtful conversations with friends.  I do not have to brood alone.
4. The thousand thousand crows in the trees along Route 30.  I know that they are a trial for those who live and work there, but the magic and the mystery and the incredible wonder of them filling the treetops and flying through the dusk and the rain answers some sort of question in my spirit that I don’t yet know how to ask.
5. The Number One Ladies Detective Agency.  I have been listening to Alexander McCall Smith books on my commute lately, and enjoying the accents of Botswana.

May we walk in Beauty!