What I Believe

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
This quilt was made by my great aunt, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Nolt Weaver.

What I Believe
after Michael Blumenthal

I, too, believe there is no justice,
but that the deer moving slowly
through the woods are a message.

I believe that something moves the leaves
that quiver on the red oak on a windless afternoon,
and that my heart is blown open
by the winds rushing over the hillside.

I believe that the whirring
of a thousand starling wings filling the hollow
might shake me from my torpor,
if I am brave enough to feel it.

I believe that not all moths make it
out of the cocoon. Don’t promise me
everything will be okay unless you’re certain.
But I believe in the perilous pumping
of cecropia’s wings in the moonlight.

I believe my grandmother was stitching the future
with her needle, pulling threads through the layers
of a quilt of scraps from everyone’s old clothes.

Gratitude List:
Just one today: My colleagues. I love how people just offer their best selves. Usually on Mondays, we have crocheters and knitters club for anyone who wants to attend. We weren’t able to get the regular book club going this year, but this year we’re going to have a book club where we get together and read the book together. There’s a Wellness Committee that reminds us to eat our vegetables and to walk. Today our resident Plant Nerd gave us a workshop in plant therapy, and taught us to pot up houseplants. I went to that, which it was after a short tutorial in running the 3D computers on campus. Some people managed to go to both of those and squeezed in 15 minutes of chair yoga in the meantime. (Usually there aren’t so many things going on on one day.) One colleague always marshals the upstairs folks to decorate the halls for winter holidays together. Another colleague set up an ofrenda and invited us to remember our loved ones we’ve lost by putting them on the altar. Some of them help students tap the maple trees and actually boil the sap down for maple syrup every year. We have a standing breakfast date on Fridays for as many as can make it. Oh, and on top of that, they’re all skilled teachers. I am becoming a better person in this place.

“We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.” —Terence McKenna

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” —Audre Lorde

“Don’t operate out of fear, operate out of hope. Because with hope, everything is possible.” —Winona LaDuke

Our deepest fears are like dragons
guarding our deepest treasure.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Praise Song
by Barbara Crooker

Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there’s left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn’t cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.

“Look at everything
as though you were seeing it
either for the first or last time.
Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.”
—Betty Smith

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to breaking of bread.” —James Baldwin

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” —Nelson Mandela

For a day, just for one day,
Talk about that which disturbs no one
And bring some peace into your beautiful eyes.
—Hafiz

“Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence.” —proverb

“All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light.” —Rumi

The magic of autumn has seized the countryside;
now that the sun isn’t ripening anything
it shines for the sake of the golden age;
for the sake of Eden;
to please the moon for all I know.
—Elizabeth Coatsworth

“. . .fairies’ gold, they say, is like love or knowledge–or a good story. It’s most valuable when it’s shared.” —Heather Forest, The Woman Who Flummoxed the Fairies

Setting the Intention

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Setting the Intention
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

my magic will not change the world
my prayers will not avail
unless
the intention begins
with changing me

Gratitude List:
1. Leaves Falling
2. An afternoon of magic with magical people
3. Reminders to breathe: “breathe in, breathe out”
4. Clean slates
5. My family
May we walk in Beauty!

“Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor.
It’s not a metaphor. It’s how the world is.” —Jeanette Armstrong

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the Earth seeking the successive autumns.” —George Eliot

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.” ―Hermann Hesse, Demia

“Did you ever hear a tree pushing out of the ground or the snow falling? Great things happen in silence.” ―Mother Angelica

“Everything belongs, even the “bad” and dark parts of yourself. Nothing need be rejected or denied. No one need be hated. No one need be excommunicated, shunned, or eliminated. You don’t have time for that anymore. You’ve entered into the soul of the serene disciple where, because the Holy One has become one in you, you are able to see that oneness everywhere else. Almost like magic!” ―Richard Rohr

“In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busily sawing off the limb on which it is perched.” —Paul Ehrlich, 1973

“You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.” —Fannie Lou Hamer

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow

“Silence is a frightening thing. Silence leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.” —Joan D. Chittister

“The present moment is the intersection of eternity with time.” ―Beatrice Bruteau

“Only the present moment contains life.” ―Thích Nhất Hạnh

“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful—an endless prospect of magic and wonder.” ―Ansel Adams

“I went inside my heart
to see how it was.
Something there makes me hear
the whole world weeping.”
―Rumi (Barks)

“Our work is to show we have been breathed upon—to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live it out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowledge, from body, from dreams, and journeys of all sorts.” ―Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“We found ourselves in a realm
where dreams are formed,
destiny is chosen
and magic is as real
as a handprint in the snow.”
―Libba Bray

”When we see the Beloved in each person,
it’s like walking through a garden,
watching flowers bloom all around us.” ―Ram Dass

“It is the paradoxical nature of grief to lead us to love. There is a seed planted in loss, an evolution made in breaking, a genius found in separation that is rarely apparent in the heart of crisis. But often what looks like deviation is really proliferation, like satellite initiatives born from a group’s dissolution. Intimacy is forged in the hearts of those who know exclusion. To them is given the gift of tenderness which can mentor another through their own isolation.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa

Regulating

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It’s been a busy day. Here’s a quick poem that expresses some of the conversations I’ve had.

Regulating
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Don’t
tell me
how to feel.

Don’t tell me how to get over this.
No, wait. Tell me how to
get over this.

Tell me
how to feel
and still
keep my
spine straight.

How do I herd the twining snakes
of my central nervous system
into their regulated rhythm
while allowing the wild horses
of my feelings free range
to thunder over the plains
of my heart?

“Expressing our vulnerability can help resolve conflicts.” —Marshall B. Rosenberg

“Our original instructions are to listen to the cloud floating by and the wind blowing by. That’s poetry and prose in English, but it is wakahan in the Lakotan language. It means to consciously apply mystery to everything. Everything is alive and has its own consciousness.” —Lakota elder Tiokasin Ghosthorse

“We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.” —Louise Erdrich

James Baldwin: “To be sensual is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”

“There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” —Samwise Gamgee

“When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.” —Miles Davis

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.” —Frida Kahlo

A little story by Amrita Nadi:
At the end of a talk someone from the audience asked the Dalai Lama, “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?”
The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete, you know.”
Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he added, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back. . .but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.”

“There are moments when I feel like giving up or giving in, but I soon rally again and do my duty as I see it: to keep the spark of life inside me ablaze.” —Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life

“Always there is something worth saying
about glory, about gratitude.”
—Mary Oliver, What Do We Know

Do your little bit of good where you are;
its those little bits of good put together,
that overwhelm the world.
—Desmond Tutu

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” —Jeannette Rankin

When we see the Beloved in each person,
it’s like walking through a garden,
watching flowers bloom all around us. —Ram Dass

“You came into this world as a radiant bundle of exuberant riddles. You slipped into this dimension as a shimmering burst of spiral hallelujahs. You blasted into this realm as a lush explosion of ecstatic gratitude. And it is your birthright to fulfill those promises.
I’m not pandering to your egotism by telling you these things. When I say, “Be yourself,” I don’t mean you should be the self that wants to win every game and use up every resource and stand alone at the end of time on top of a Mt. Everest-sized pile of pretty garbage.
When I say, “Be yourself,” I mean the self that says “Thank you!” to the wild irises and the windy rain and the people who grow your food. I mean the rebel creator who’s longing to make the whole universe your home and sanctuary. I mean the dissident bodhisattva who’s joyfully struggling to germinate the seeds of divine love that are packed inside every moment.
When I say, “Be yourself,” I mean the spiritual freedom fighter who’s scrambling and finagling and conspiring to relieve your fellow messiahs from their suffering and shower them with rowdy blessings.” —Rob Brezsny

“The root of joy is gratefulness…It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.” ―Brother David Steindl-Rast

The Lost Song

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Today’s poem began as an intellectual exercise. Perhaps I will come back to it another day and tend it with a little more care and reflection, but for now, I’m going to call it done. Here is the exercise I set for myself: to write a pantoum-like poem, but to let the first stanza be what it wanted to be, and then to modify a pantoum-form from there. So instead of four lines, the stanzas are five lines each, and the second and fourth lines are repeated as in a traditional pantoum, but the fifth line in each stanza is a repetition of the poem’s first line.

I’m intrigued by the possibilities of modifying traditional poetic forms to suit my own ends. For this experiment, I’ll declare here that I have invented the pantoumly, a variation of the pantoum. I’ll try it again sometime when my head is not so full of the grey cobwebs of encroaching winter darkness.

The Lost Song
a pantoumly poem
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I no longer understand
the words of my mother tongue,
no longer remember the voice
that sang through my veins
in the hour of my birth.

The words of my mother tongue
in the mouth of the tyrant
(singing in my veins)
turned to poison.
I no longer understand.

In the mouth of the tyrant,
the people are reduced to dust,
poisoned
by waves of meaningless words
I cannot understand.

The people are reduced to dust,
driven to mad worship
by meaningless words,
and threats, and lust for power
I refuse to understand.

Driven to worship their madness,
they cannot escape the maelstrom
of threats, their lust for power
eating away empathy
which they no longer understand.

I cannot escape this maelstrom
but seek the still point
which feeds empathy,
and the dust rises.
They will once again understand.

Seek the still point,
hear the ancient voices
rising like dust
in the words of your mother tongue:
This you shall understand.

“Disobedience was [humanity’s] original virtue.” —Oscar Wilde

“Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others…
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
—Walt Whitman

“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful—an endless prospect of magic and wonder.” —Ansel Adams

“A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation-robes.” —Alexander Pope

“We must finally stop appealing to theology to justify our reserved silence about what the state is doing—for that is nothing but fear. ‘Open your mouth for the one who is voiceless’—for who in the church today still remembers that that is the least of the Bible’s demands in times such as these?” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear. . . . Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“It is so easy to break down and destroy. The heroes are those who make peace and build.” —Nelson Mandela

“We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is ours not by domination but by invocation.” —Thomas Berry

Playing with Form

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I’ve begun to hit the first bumps in the poem-a-day month. Usually it begins to happen sooner than the mid-point, so I am definitely not complaining. Feeling fresh out of ideas and uninspired, I turned to Robert Lee Brewer’s prompt for the day over at Write Better Poetry (a Writers Digest blog). He suggested writing a form poem, so I decided on a Nonet. Begin the first line with nine syllables, use eight for the second line, seven for the third, and so on until that last line is a single syllable.

Shift
a nonet
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

At first you hardly notice the change
you’re traveling the same old road,
but somewhere along the way,
the colors start to shift,
the images blur,
and the safety
you thought you
knew is
gone.

“We live in a world of theophanies. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can only happen if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure.”
—Macrina Wiederkehr

“It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.” —P.G. Wodehouse

“You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.” —Frida Kahlo

“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream, or a bumpersticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.” —June Jordan

“I touch God in my song
as the hill touches the far-away sea
with its waterfall.
The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.”
—Rabindranath Tagore

Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
“We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?

“One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds beacons, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of of soul in shadowy times like these—to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.”

“Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will become.” —Brooke Hampton

“Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things.
Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God.
Every creature is a word of God.
If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature—even a caterpillar—
I would never have to prepare a sermon.
So full of God is every creature.”
—Meister Eckhart

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could you know. That’s why we wake
and look out–no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
—William Stafford

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” ―J.R.R. Tolkien

Get Back on Track

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Get Back on Track
by Beth Weaver-Kreider, 11/24

step it out, catch a breath
make a space, take a rest
let it go, let it come
carry on, get it done

take a break, break a pattern
blast the rules, what’s the matter?
tune it out, turn it off,
jump down, land soft

watch the sky, pray for rain
quiet your heart, quiet your brain
relax your shoulders, stretch your back
take time off, get back on track

“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
*****
“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.”  ―Gandalf
*****
“A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can’t make people listen. They have to come ‘round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last.” —Granger, in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
*****
“When I stopped trying to change you, you changed me.” ―Rachel Macy Stafford
*****
“When will the change begin? When will it start to happen? We have waited so long and prayed so long, when will the light begin to shine in this conflicted world? Our answer is: when we each begin to see it in ourselves. When we believe and not despair, when we love and not fear, when we give and not take – then we will see the change start to happen, and happen all around us. The answer is already here, within, waiting for us to find it.” —Steven Charleston
*****
“When Teresa of Avila was asked what she did in prayer, she replied, ‘I just allow myself to be loved.'” —Anthony de Mello
*****
“I never lose. I either win or I learn.” —Nelson Mandela
*****
“If you have never been called an incorrigible, defiant, impossible woman… have faith. There is yet time.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Silence

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I only learned today about how the Taliban this August banned the sound of women’s voices in public places. As I searched for poetry by Afghan women, I came across this powerful couplet by a poet who went by the name Muska, a young Afghan woman of Helmand Province. In translation into English, the poem loses the syllabic and sound structures of its form, the landay, which is a 22-syllable folk poem of Pashtun women of Afghanistan. My own attempt at the syllable count is certainly no landay, but seeks to echo it in lament of Muska, who died two weeks after setting herself on fire after her brothers beat her when they discovered her poetry, and the women of Afghanistan, who have had their voices stolen from them.

(I learned about Muska and the landay here: The National Poetry Foundation, Poetry journal.)

Silence
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.
—by the Afghan poet Muska (Zarmina) of Helmand Province, who set herself on fire in 2012 after being beaten by her brothers when they discovered her poetry

Her laughter drifts no more like jasmine
over the garden wall and into the marketplace.

Who will sing the songs of the women
whose voices lie hidden at the bottom of the well?

The moon is rising over the wall
silently as the woman sitting in the courtyard.

“Through a process of perpetual discernment and “prayer unceasing” we may dive into the well of each faith and emerge with the treasure that connects us all.” —Mirabai Starr

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” —Carl Sagan

“If the Rhine, the Yellow, the Mississippi rivers are changed to poison, so too are the rivers in the trees, in the birds, and in the humans changed to poison, almost simultaneously. There is only one river on the planet Earth and it has multiple tributaries, many of which flow through the veins of sentient creatures.” —Thomas Berry

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” —Kurt Vonnegut

‪”So much of bird flight is really expert falling, slipping into that delicate space within the argument between gravity and air resistance. That natural alchemy transforms a plummet into a glide. Someday, I hope to learn to fail like birds fall.‬” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist

“Reading and writing cannot be separated. Reading is breathing in; writing is breathing out.”

“For a Star to be born,
there is one thing that must happen;
a nebula must collapse.
So collapse.
Crumble.
This is not your Destruction.
This is your birth.” —Zoe Skylar

Mysteries of the Dark

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Today is the last of my three days of posting reflections on the Mysteries of the Dark Novena for Way of the Rose. Here are my thoughts:

Mysteries of the Darkness Novena

Day 41. Sorrowful Mysteries:

Walking in the Dark.

I have always felt compelled towards shadow work, looking deeply within, trying to understand my impulses and compulsions, my vices and my rages, the way desire flows and obsession grows.

Mystery, mysticism, paradox, counterpoint, magic, surrealism—that which is beyond the ken of daylight sight. Like the way you have to look to the side of the Pleiades to see them clearly.

When I was a teenager, if I was the last person downstairs at night, I used to hate those seconds after I had turned off the light before I got to the top of the stairs. The darkness behind me was too overwhelming. But today, when I get up in the night, I like to find my way through the dark house by feel, sensing where I am in the room, honing my dark-sight.

Even so, I struggle with the encroaching darkness of the last few weeks before the Winter Solstice. I just can’t make my peace. My energy flags with the dying day, and my brain gets dull and fuzzy. In a season when grades need to be updated for students and Thanksgiving plans made, and then Christmas and Yule, I want to emulate the bears, go underground, feel the quiet rhythms, be still and silent. And so instead I groan when the day dies early, when the light has left like the wild geese for the south.

I need to keep giving myself pockets of intentional retreat, hours here and there where I step out of the bustle to write and reflect, to say the rosary slowly—savoring every word instead of the daily push to make sure it gets done in the schedule, walk or bike on the woods trail, stand under the stars. It’s a form of self-care—spiritual self-care. Not down-time for down-time’s sake (though that is absolutely essential to my mental health), but unlike other forms of self-care in which the intent is to disconnect, the intent here is to re-connect to something beyond myself. Dark-time self-care is about keeping an intentional inner focus amid the outer distractions.

How do you do spiritual self-care in tumultuous times?

The Heart’s Desire Prayer I have been praying during this novena is:

Oh Antlered One who calls me home to live within the garden of myself,
help me to find the still point in the maelstrom of my anxious fears,
to follow where the sacred tug of grief and rages
will guide me to the wisdom I will write upon the pages
of these my croning years.

Tools for the Resistance

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

This was Fun! And a lot of hard work! A few days ago, I asked friends on Facebook to offer their tools for the resistance as we work to meet the challenges of the coming days. I was unprepared for the magnitude of the response. I received 119 comments on the thread. Some comments included several ideas which I unwove into different lines. Others echoed each other, and I wove those together as I could. I decided to let the actual phrasings stand as written in as many cases as possible, though I often only pulled out shorter phrases from longer sentences to make the points succinct. I printed out four pages of about 110 lines of poem, sliced the lines apart, and arranged them in a flow that felt good to me. Here is the finished poem, with great gratitude to my beloved community:

Tools for the Resistance:
A Crowd-Sourced Poem
by Beth Weaver-Kreider and friends

Strengthen yourselves for what is to come.
Set your boundaries, clearly and effectively.
Strengthen your resolve.
Practice resilience.
Stay visible.
Wear black.
Harness that bone-deep disappointment to determination.
Mourn. Invite people to mourn with you.
Scream. Invite people to scream with you.
Use the tool of your voice. Use reason.
Pay attention. Prepare yourself for when you will be needed.
Resist tyranny.
Don’t hide. Don’t obey in advance.
Teach the history of non-resistance and civil disobedience.
Do civil disobedience. Push back.
Refuse to follow unethical instructions.
Carry forward our history of resistance.
Mobilize the angelic warriors.
Get your cell phone camera ready.
Get your boots on the ground.
Put on your pink hat. March!
Find joy in action!

Gather facts and information, knowledge and experience.
Read. Research and read.
Think critically.
Practice intelligence.
Practice bravery.
Educate.
Make sure people know how the system works.
Teach the privileged to be allies.
Unlearn the whitewashing of history.
Disempower ignorance.
Tell the truth. Share it boldly and without rancor.
Confront your elitism and privilege.
Stop recycling old arguments.
Examine your assumptions.
Be humble.
Be an active ally: Say, “What can I do?”
Come alongside. Check in. Hold space.
Greet the ones others look away from.
Actively love the disenfranchised.
Actively listen to them, and follow the marginalized ones.
Follow the directions of the young ones.
Walk with your elders.
Connect. Coresist.

Boycott. Buy local. Buy independent.
Vote with your money. Know where your dollars are going.
Volunteer.
Gather folks who care.
Create adaptable support systems.
Teach basic skills.
Teach people to make things for themselves.
Grow the movement. Draw people in.
Share ideas and plan actions.
Look to your sisters.
Learn the value of true friendship.
Hold on to each other.
Give care to those in your sphere.
Practice breathing together
Share your gentleness.

Aid in the collective healing work.
Midwife one another.
Extend gifts of listening. Listen selflessly.
Listen to and hear each other’s stories.
Tell stories of hope and resistance
Have hard conversations.
Make eye contact.

Make music. Send sound soaring to the heavens.
Make music without words.
Memorize music and poetry.
Sing songs about equity, freedom, and democracy.
Sing songs of peace with children.
Teach music to children.
Use humor: Humor has always been a tool of resistance.
Have fun! Be creative!
Make art, make art, make art.
Dance!

Walk with friends.
Walk in the woods. Sit by streams. Gaze at the stars.
Find stillness in nature. Soak in the beauty.
Save seeds. Share seeds and plants. Plant seeds. Find new seeds.
Plant community gardens.
Use herbs and words together to incant and pray and sing.
Find wisdom from the flowers.
Take inspiration from strong sturdy trees.
Grow your community of trees.
Remember the roots that connect us all.
Keep your eye on beauty instead of disorder.
Keep your eye on peace, standing shoulder to shoulder.
Practice courageous kindness.
Hold onto hope.

Practice resistance as a spiritual act.
Practice gratitude.
Practice radical self-care.
Practice slowness, enchantment, being, and noticing.
Upgrade consciousness.
Meditate. Be fully present in the moment that is.
Practice reflection.
Recharge.
Use magic. Cast spells.
Hold sacred circles.
Create the Yes.
Pray: “Love, make me an instrument of your peace.”
Continue to show up for mercy and peace and justice
Continue to show up for kindness and compassion
Continue to show up for wisdom and safety
Remember: You are not alone.
Let your little light shine. Shine it into the shadows.
Be a beacon of light and hope.

Gratitude List:
1. Co-poeming
2. Taking a group of students to a nursing home today to interview their elders. Beautiful interactions. I am incredibly proud of these young people.
3. Self-care. I had been neglecting my careful lunch creation in the past week (a bit depressed, I think), and so spent some good time this evening cooking a pot of grains, sauteing kale and carrots, and roasting soybeans for the rest of the week.
4. How the little pothos cuttings grow roots, and then push out new leaves.
5. Good stories.
May we walk in Beauty!

In a Garden

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This is the second of three pieces of writing on the rosary, which I am doing this week for The Way of the Rose Dark Mysteries Novena. Today is the Joyful Mysteries.

Mysteries of the Darkness Novena
Day 40. Joyful Mysteries:

Everything seems to begin in a garden.

In the traditional narrative of the Mysteries, both Sorrow and Glory begin in gardens. I imagine the Garden of Sorrows to be an arboretum of sorts, with lined pathways and small groves of trees covering the hillside. And in my imagination the Garden of Resurrection—perhaps its my childhood experience of Easter and its daffodils and amaryllis and sprays of flowering tree branches—is filled with flowers. And I have chosen to place the first step in the Joyful Mysteries, the moment of contact between maiden and angel, in a garden, a Garden of Yes, a place where I, the one about to embark on the journey, get to choose whether I will accept the tasks ahead of me. Because to do inner work, to make my spiritual practices live beyond the mere rote doing and saying of them, is to consent to the constant journey of transformation.

A garden is a space somewhere between wilderness and domesticity, with even the most carefully pruned and shaped garden remaining ungovernable at some level. I like the wilder looking ones, where there is evidence of human interaction with the wild, but the plants also seem to be offering their opinion on how the space should be.

My heart, too, is a garden, a space between the wildlands and the tame, where emotions and dreams grow not entirely wild. I tend them, shape them, and honor their presence, but I do not bully them or subjugate them, at least when I am at my most open-hearted. And they have a say in what my garden becomes.

And these myths and stories of Mystery which we use to anchor the decades of our daily practice are also gardens. As we individually take up the care of them, each one’s garden will look different. Each telling is transformed a little, as when the light hits in just a certain way in a mostly shaded corner of a garden.

In the Joyful Mysteries, whether you call it the Annunciation or Yes or The Budding, we begin again, fresh in the knowledge that while we cannot choose the circumstances of our lives, we do get to consent to the tasks we take upon us for the journey.

I enter the garden. There is a shining light, or a purple shadow against the grass, or a little bird, or a sound of bells, and a Question: Will you take this journey? Will you let it transform you, knowing there will be wonders ahead and discoveries to make, sorrows aplenty, and enlightenment on the other side?