Growing Up

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Listen for the songs
of the thousand grandmothers
who sing in your blood
whose voices echo in halls
of wakening memory.

2013 October 019

Gratitude List:
1.  That sunset.  Magenta and true orange, indigo and aquamarine.  The sunset-washed clouds were like wispy versions of mammatus clouds.
2.  Volunteer Fire Department.  Our local FDs are all staffed by volunteers.  These people are amazing.  We had a ride last night in a fire engine at the Wrightsville FD Open House.  It was like being inside the Tardis–bigger on the inside.
3.  Aging.  Looking at some photos of myself yesterday, I noticed how my face is showing my age, and I was happy about that.  Something about seeing pictures of myself in my late teens and early twenties makes me a little uncomfortable–I seem so raw and unripe and unseasoned.  Yesterday I realized that I feel comfortable in my skin–creaky knees and achy back and marks of age–in ways that I don’t think I ever have before.  I am incredibly grateful for that.  I just might start calling myself a grown-up pretty soon.
4.  Rain.
5.  Giving myself permission.

May we walk in Beauty.

Haiku and Tanka

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2013 October 044

I am snuggling a boy and a cat in my lap at the moment: benefits of a cool morning.   Makes typing a challenge, though.

Here are a couple poems that walked into my head yesterday.  The first is a tanka, inspired by my friend Mara.  I thought the second was going to be a tanka, too, but while I was waiting for the last two lines to emerge, I realized it was already a haiku.

 

TANKA
See there! In your palm
are the rivers of story,
of constellations,
dragonfly wings, the pathways
of the heart: love, grief, desire.

HAIKU
The now-naked arms
of the walnut tree cradle
the newly-born moon.

Gratitude List:
1.  Autumn birdsong in the hollow
2.  Listening
3.  Constructing my own life
4.  Breakfast
5.  Tiny Poems

May we walk in Beauty.

The Story Roars

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

When I wake up in the morning, parting the cobweb veil between dream and day-consciousness, I often find that some piece of that world hovers about me as I enter the morning.  A fragment of song.  An image.  A phrase.  The tone of the voice or the name of the person who was speaking my dream-name.  The answer to a question.  The Question itself.

This morning’s phrase: The Story Roars.  I love all the places this can go, the way it opens doors into so many passageways in my life.

There, standing just behind the curtain, is my Muse, reminding me to get to work.  To write, to write, to write.  The story is impatient, roaring to be crafted and written.

One of my current spiritual practices was given to me by a friend, the work of honing my listening.  I want to take up the work of listening, of drawing out people’s stories, of working together to be fully engaged in the stories we are living.  Our stories gather around us, waiting for us to give them voice.

Here is a Roar: My friend Natasha is now almost three weeks into a daily blog, The Year of Black Clothing, in which she chronicles and gives voice to her grief and rage over the destruction of Earth, of each other.   Her story is roaring, finding voice, gaining momentum, gathering other voices.  Her roar–so gentle, so fierce, so pained and so loving–is reverberating, drawing other voices in, creating a wild and hopeful call to Do.  To Be.  To Act.  To live our stories as authentically as we can on this Earth we call Home.  Go now and read her roar.  Add your voice to the story.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Yesterday I asked my Facebook friends for advice about a parenting question.  I’m uncomfortable with unsolicited advice-giving, and sometimes even asked-for advice can be haughty.  Not so with the amazing people who responded with gentle concern and powerful ideas to my call for help.  I am so deeply blessed by the many circles of community in my life.  So deeply deeply blessed.
2.  Mentors
3.  The Story
4.  The Voice
5.  The Dawn

May we walk in Beauty.

Maintaining Balance

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The gypsy wind came rattling through at 4:30 this morning.  It raised gooseflesh on my arms and the hair on the back of my neck tingled.  No more sleep.  No more sleep.  Down the stairs, some quiet reading, a little coffee and then some yoga tree poses.

In six months of regular morning tree poses, my balance has improved considerably.  I’m happy enough in my body, don’t get me wrong, but physical balance has never really been one of my strong points.  It’s a little startling to me that I can get this rather unathletic middle-aged body to pick up a new trick.  And it’s odd to me how place-oriented my balance is.  When I try the poses somewhere other than my kitchen, I teeter and totter and tumble all over the place.

On the internal front, I have been living with a low-grade fury again.  I have allowed this government shut down to throw me off my internal equilibrium.  I can’t seem to maintain balance,  to keep myself upright.  I want to rant and call names and burn bridges.
Somewhere I’ll find the poetry for this, the way to speak the need for justice in this story.  Right now, it’s still a little blind and crazed.  One thing that seems to help me hold my morning tree poses is the mirror in my kitchen.  When I look into my own eyes, my body suddenly remembers its upright nature and I stop thinking about falling.And oh.  I have not been writing gratitude lists.  I have stepped out of my space, walked away from my internal mirror.  How could I expect to keep my balance?  Here, then, is me back in my place, practicing my balance postures:

Gratitude List:
1.  A weekend with thoughtful, hopeful women.  All the grandmothers we carry with us.  Open hearts, open eyes.
2.  Dragonfly
3.  Autumn bird conversations.  Mockingbird is back at it after a summer of quiet.  Screech owl and great horned owl have been calling  even after dawn has brought the day.  Phoebe is moving through again.  Robin hordes have been amassing in the hollow every evening, and they begin the mornings with a deafening chatter.  I have even heard the kingfisher’s fussy chitter along Cabin Creek.
4.  A community of rebels
5.  Morning solitude

May we walk in Beauty.

Jiggetty Jig

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2013 September 162

Home again, home again, from a lovely five days in Stone Harbor, NJ.  Instead of trying to whittle my Gratitude List from all those days down to five, or even ten, here is a list of general joys from the trip:

1.  Getting the Farmer off the farm.  Watching him relax.
2.  We got there in time to see the massive flock of swallows snapping up insects on a short pit stop on their southward journey.  By mid-day Friday, they’d gone south.
3.  The full moon over my right shoulder, and the sun leaping out of the early morning waves in front of me, and the season changing (certainly at that very moment) to Autumn.
4.  Monarchs.  So few, so few.  But still.  Some.
5.  Sitting.
6.  Trash scavenging treasures: a beach rake, another beach umbrella in really good shape, a boogie board.  Call me a vulture.
7.  Josiah opened the screen door on Friday morning: “Now we’re open for love and business.”
8.  Dolphins!
9.  Dragonflies!
10.  Sylvester’s Fish Market, Nemo’s, Tortilla Flats, Uncle Bill’s Pancake House.  In other words, good eating.
11.  There were no more throwing up incidents after we got there.  We needed to get rid of that old car seat anyway.  Now we have a nice new booster.
12.  Big shovels to dig massive holes with.  As soon as they had a good hole, the boys would start nesting, creating sand shelves for their tools, making roads for the construction equipment. . .
14.  Making drip castles with Ellis.
15.  The way the boys hum quietly to themselves as they play in the sand, as they swim in the pool.
16.  Ellis jumping off the sand ridge into the water, into the sun.
17.  Watching my child’s eyes when he realized that he had just kept himself afloat in the pool.
18.  You know what I mean about the sun-road on the waves?  I love how it always appears to lead directly to me.

May we walk that road in Beauty.

Shedding the Skin

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2013 September 059
Safe in the hollow of the tree.
You will be sustained and held.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Good humor, light-heartedness, the way laughter heals and draws people together.
2.  Sustenance
3.  The lessons of snake: shedding the skin, renewal
4.  Finding the thread of the story
5.  Study

May we walk in Beauty.

The People Seemed as Beautiful as Birds

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2013 September 013

Gratitude List:
1.  This vanilla ice cream
2.  That blooming Rose of Sharon
3.  The screech owls that woke me this morning
4.  Coming home to myself,
which is to say,
becoming the person I think I want to be,
which might be sort of like saying,
starting, perhaps, to sort of grow up,
which could be a little like ripening.
Perhaps tomorrow I will feel differently,
and start to doubt my truth again,
but today it feels pretty satisfying.
5.  My children’s teachers, both the official ones and all you others.

May we walk in Beauty.

Yellow Leaf, White Horse

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Yellow leaf
The evening breeze
A white horse is walking between the sun’s rays
Cloud on a hill

Because as goodbye approaches
my heart is practicing the hole

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Ellis, our resident picky eater, ate ten green beans for supper.  And we only asked him to eat two.
2.  Conversations about this thing that is and isn’t faith or belief or religion
3.  Cicadas lulling me to sleep
4.  Getting my hair done.  I do it so infrequently, and it feels SOOO good. It’s therapy.  Really.
5.  Hope.  Even if Pema suggests I abandon it.  I can’t.  Won’t.

May we walk in Beauty.

Weaving Words and Dreams

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2013 August 314
Sweet Chick of a Tomato

Gratitude List:
1.  That lightning cloud.  I have never seen anything like it.  No thunder, but over an hour of constant flashes of lightning lighting up the cloud from within, running along beneath it.  Something magical was happening.
2.  Eyeglasses.  Were it not for reading glasses, my life would be diminishing in so many ways these days.  Writing, reading, artwork, looking at all the little treasures that my children bring to me to see.
3.  My poor skunk-bit chicken is surviving beautifully.  Albeit with a naked butt that might never re-grow feathers.  But she will be okay.
4.  The opportunity to weave my words together with those of an an old friend who is no longer here.  Thanks, Louise.
5.  Diana Nyad.  Courage and determination.  Living one’s dreams.

May we walk in Beauty.

Words. No, I Mean This Moment.

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2013 August 357

Gratitude List:
1.  The prayerful and thoughtful spirit of Grandma Weaver, who died six years ago today, just shy of her 100th birthday.
2.  Words.  No, I mean tears.  Oh, actually, I mean words.
3.  Being adored by chickens.  Really, I can do no wrong in their eyes.  I am their Queen.  If you gt to feeling chronically bad about yourself, get a small flock of hens.
4.  Comfort food: ham and egg casserole.  Chickens, again.
5.  Not being alone in the questions.

May we walk in Beauty.