World Environment Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today is World Environment Day, declared by the United Nations Environmental Program.  What will you do today, tomorrow, next week, to pr0tect the environment?  Walk in the woods with a child and listen for the birds, plant a tree or a garden, refuse to buy that over-packaged thing that you really don’t need, don’t make that extra car trip to town, read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, open new doors in your heart and your brain for possibilities.

We owe it to ourselves and to the next generation
to conserve the environment
so that we can bequeath our children
a sustainable world that benefits all.

–Wangari Maathai

Gratitude List:
1. Schemes and dreams
2. Rain and more rain
3. Surprise and awe
4. The poplar and the sycamore
5. The penultimate day of school

May we walk in Beauty!

Keep Breathing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I can’t see through green,
through this pollen-misted air
to the other side.
These are the step by step days.
Meanwhile, I just keep breathing.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Communities of women.  Light and gentle chat turns a corner into a story, a birth story, tears, smiles, oh-yesses, I-remembers.
2. The world feels washed clean this morning after that lovely rain.  I’m still a little anxious about venturing outside while the poplar is in bloom, but breathing is a little easier this morning.
3. Poppies!  Did I say poppies?  I have a clear memory of being six years old, looking at a book of flowers of the world with a group of kids at boarding school, and everyone was saying their favorite flowers.  I really liked the rose mallow.  Then someone turned the page and there was a rich crimson bloom with a velvety black center.  That one.  And it has been my favorite ever since.
4. Ruby Bridges.  I was talking about her story with a friend yesterday.  There was a moment in our story when the world depended on the courage of a child to confront evil, to be the tide-turner.
5. Last night’s dreams. Reunions, balance, mysterious pathways, reconciliation.

May we walk in Beauty!

Berries and Lettuce and Wholeness

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Gratitude List:

1.  Mom’s cottage pudding with the last of last year’s frozen strawberries.  How did they last all year without being devoured?  Time to finish them up.  Jon brought the first of this year’s berries down the hill for us last night.
2. Speaking of Jon, he brought me a lettuce yesterday.  A beautiful, ruffly lettuce, which he put into a green mug like a bouquet and set on the table.  The dining room and kitchen smelled gently of lettuce for the evening–cool, spring green.
3. You know that feeling when you’re talking to someone and they reflect back to you something you’ve said, and you know with a flash of delight that here is someone who “gets” you?  That.  My cousin Karen provided that for me yesterday, and it filled me.  Sometimes when you meet someone out of the blue on the path, you get sweet little friendly chatter, and that is good, but this conversation left me with words and ideas to play with, to integrate, to ponder, and a comforting sense of being known.
4. It’s hard to live out of my deepest center sometimes.  But I am grateful for that to strive for, to keep moving inward.  But knowing how that inward journey is a journey outward as well.  I don’t know if that quite makes sense when it finds its way into words, but I am grateful for it.
5. Somehow, when I see you striving for wholeness, it makes me more whole.  That mystery.  I am grateful for that.

May we walk in Beauty!

Peonies and Poppies

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Gratitude List:
1. Shaggy white heads of peonies–family heirlooms passed down from Jon’s mother, and from his grandmother.
2. Deep red petals of poppy with its deep black center
3. Little yellow flags opening amidst the spikes of leaf
4. Buttercup and bladderwort
5. The shy, downward-facing blossoms of the comfrey.

May we walk in Beauty!

Downer

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

I needed a downer.  My body had ratcheted into code red, defenses up against the yearly assault from the tulips on the poplar tree, all systems working full-tilt to expel the enemy.  Sneezing, wheezing, itching, weeping.  One antihistamine dose and a 10-hour night of sleep later, I’m sitting in this fuzzy bubble of calm.  My arms and legs feel like they belong to a gorilla, and it just doesn’t seem worth the effort to drag my body around from place to place.  The world is coming at me through a veil this morning.  But oh, the relief.  I haven’t sneezed once yet today.

I try to tend to the allergies with nettle and plantain tea, mostly.  But every once in a while, my body panics and assumes that the poplar tree is out to kill me.  Then I need a little something else to calm it down so I can get on with my life.  Thing is, I am in love with that blooming tree that brings my oriole here each spring, that opens green buds to reveal their tangerine hearts.  Dangerous beauty.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Beauty all around
2. Honey Locust trees in bloom–honey vanilla scent hovering about
3. Sleep
4. Rites of Passage and Blessing: pre-school graduation
5. Plan B

May we walk in Beauty!

bref double

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Experimenting with form.  This is a bref double, a French form.  No one seems to agree exactly about the rhyme scheme, except that there need to be three rhymes.  Rhymes a and b appear twice in the first three quatrains and then complete the couplet.  Rhyme c ends the first three quatrains.  Let’s see what happens.  (I am choosing o try axbc, xaxc, bxxc, ab).  The children are starting to stir upstairs, so this is a toss-off.

Here.  Hold this, he said.
Then left the room.
And there she stood
holding his stuff, alone.

It bound her to him, you see,
this cord of obligation, this red
bond.  Hold my stuff. And he
was free as a bird.  She should have known,

perhaps, how it could come to no good,
how it would bind her to him.
And he would take no responsibility,
while her heart turned slowly to stone.

Next time she’ll break that thread
before it comes to blood.

 

Gratitude List:
1. When not-so-bad scenarios play out instead of worst-case scenarios
2. Shy boy excited to perform in his end of school-year program this morning
3. How the trees reach out to be noticed in this season–they’re just begging for attention
4. Chickpeas bubbling on the stove
5. People.  I like people.  Resilient, friendly, personable, curious, earnest.  (I know that isn’t the whole picture, but really, often people do rise to the expectations you have of them.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Allergies

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how can it be that the poplar tree

in this season
of its most righteous
blooming beauty
is so toxic to me

the poplar
and the honey locust
so popular with the bees
tender tendrils of scent
wafting through the hollow
on a breeze
make me sneeze

 

Gratitude List:
1. Nettle and chamomile and plantain tea (and when that doesn’t seem to cut it, an antihistamine to fall back on)
2. Good, caring, professional teachers for our children this past year
3. Catbird and mockingbird: we got some sass here in the holler
4. Those snakes of wild gypsy wind that rushed down the green hill yesterday in the gloaming
5. Dr. Maya Angelou.  Phenomenal Woman.  She contributed so much to our literary and cultural landscape.  Here’s one of the last things she put out to the world: “Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.”

May we walk in Beauty!

Deep Listening

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Sometimes you need to circle back and remember the moment you looked out the window and saw the wolf standing there.  It’s so nice to have people who can take you by the hand and gently lead you there, before you get too far away from it, you know?  If I don’t process the fearful places, then I am in danger of living as though the wolf is still out there, even in the midst of the party and the celebration.

Yesterday, my sister-in-law did this for me.  She is a gifted listener and questioner.  In the midst of all the lovely ways my family has helped to celebrate of how sweetly hopes and prayers have been answered for my family in the past month, she invited me to sit down in a quiet place, and asked gently about the process that led to all this newness and transformation.  “I would like to hear more. . ”

This was also a chance for me to absorb some good modelling, to learn more about listening and asking deep and compassionate heart-opening questions.  So today, this week, I want to practice living from that centered and thoughtful listening place.

Gratitude List:
1.  Listening.
2. Being deeply listened to
3. Cousins, mine, my children’s
4. Baby bunny
5. Books, books, books

May we walk in Beauty!

Birds in the Sunshine

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I am typing this at my parents’ house, remembering my gratitude list of yesterday.  Outside the window, a little baby bunny was washing her face in the garden under a flowering bush, and a chickadee brought a seed to eat on the perch my dad has set up right outside the window.  The boys and their cousins are devouring bacon in the kitchen.

Gratitude List:
1. Pewee and indigo bunting in morning sun
2. A morning of listening to Chester tell stories.  What a privilege to listen to someone who has lived for almost 100 years.
3. Clear thinking and reasoning
4. Surprises: getting to figure out who left me that beautiful gemstone scarab bracelet in my box at church
5. The Weaver family.  I am so grateful for my aunts and uncles and cousins, my parents and siblings and nieces and nephews.

May we walk in Beauty!

Found Tanka

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Lorax
Reading The Lorax to the children at The March
Against Monsanto in Lancaster yesterday.  Photo by
Michelle Johnson.

Now for a very random poem.  I am opening up this ninth grade literature book at random pages and pulling out lines to weave together for a tanka:

trunk in the attic
they heard the the goddess Circe
a stillness greatens
from the heresy of rain
stop to look fear in the face

It turned out a little ominous, I think.  Perhaps it has to do with the youthy angst of writing which is chosen for teens.  I did not spend a lot of time sorting and choosing and arranging.  I like to play with random poetic constructions sometimes, to break out of some of my own typical patterns and images.  Exercises like this help me see new possibilities for juxtapositions, new ways to fracture sentences to open up new meanings, new sound and rhythm connections.

line 1: Truman Capote, “A Christmas Memory”
line 2: Homer, “The Odyssey”
line 3: Richard Wilbur, “The Writer”
line 4: James Hurst, “The Scarlet Ibis”
line 5: Eleanor Roosevelt

Gratitude List:
1.  Pianos in the city.  If you want to add fun and liveliness to your city, what better way than to get people to paint a bunch of upright pianos in wild and beautiful designs, and then place them in protected nooks around the city.  Spontaneous parties and songfests arise.  Way to go, Lancaster!  That’s delightful community-building.
2.  The March Against Monsanto.  The good, hopeful energy.  Reading The Lorax to the kids.  Selling tomato plants and talking healthy food with people.  The Amish buggy next to my stand with “Say No to GMO” cahled on its side.  The voice of the people.  Knowing our march was one of many around the world.
3.  Rhythm.  Daily, seasonal, poetic, musical. . .
4.  Books.  I am overwhelmed by all the reading I want to do and should be doing, especially with a house to clean and acres to mow and children to tend and a farm to run.  But I love wading into the stacks of books and opening up a poem or a short story.  The novel I am reading at the moment is Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  I recommend it.
5. The deep red/purple of the Japanese maple on the back hill.  It’s just about big enough now to be a little fort this summer for small people.

May we walk in Beauty.