Gratitude List:
1. Deer. Listening, unconditional love, the open heart.
2. Robins congregating in the bosque at night.
3. Two-year-olds. I know I have said it before, but they melt me. Utterly.
4. Root beer floats
5. Pattern and design
May we walk in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. Screech owl whinnying at dusk in the bosque. (Isn’t that a sweet series of sounds?)
2. For the few times a year when I can’t seem to cope without them: antihistamines.
3. That vegetable medley casserole my mother made us for supper this evening. Because every once in a while, it’s just so nice to have a mom-made-meal. Thanks, Mom!
4. Medical assistance from Suzy and my dad for my poor little skunk-bit hen. She’s going to be okay.
5. The butterfly bush. I know (now) that it’s an invasive species, and we perhaps should cut it down, but it’s so alive with small pollinating critters that I can’t bear that thought.
May we walk in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. An orange egg of moon resting on the rim of the bowl of hills above us.
2. Socializing. Big one, this. Someone else watched our children this evening so we could talk to adults.
3. Sharing story. Even when the story hurts. It always helps to tell and hear.
4. End of the first week of school. Ellis says the thing he likes best about school is School. Says he’s developing a Stay Ahead Strategy for keeping up with the class when they write things from the chalkboard because he writes more slowly than most of the others. (“Did your teacher help you develop that strategy?” “No, I came up with it myself” he said. “In fact, just now is the first time I have called it that.”)
5. We’re halfway through the season. The light’s at the end of the tunnel. Don’t get me wrong. I love what we do. But we get so very tired. It the Wednesday of the season. Energy is renewed simply by the awareness that we’ll get a break. Some day.
May we walk in Beauty.
This prayer of St. Augustine expresses so much that I believe about the Divine Love that is at the heart of the Universe, or the Multiverse, perhaps. How would the religions of the world change if we who seek the Divine would call that Mystery the Beauty Ever Ancient? Unlike Augustine, I find myself drawn into the realm of the Holy when I live deeply with the “created things,” but I’ll not quibble. The prayer is so lovely.
“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”
Gratitude List:
1. Mystery
2. Networking
3. Salsa ready to can
4. Light in August
5. Cicadas
May We walk in Beauty. Ever Ancient.
yellow walnut leaves
twist and twirl silently earthward
lavishly giving themselves to breeze, to breath
prodigal as love
Gratitude List:
1. Dreams. And dreams.
2. Passages, fledgings, relinquishments
3. Raisin bread toasted
4. Swallows migrating through
5. New rhythms
May we walk in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. Luna Moth
2. Halo of morning sun around a black hen on dewy grass coming to greet me in the morning.
3. The parenting village–we don’t have to do it all alone, don’t have to figure it out all alone.
4. Dissatisfaction and satisfaction: a two-sided coin. Right now, I am exploring dissatisfaction as a means to avoid complacency and getting-stuck-in-a-rut-ness.
5. Ellis is reading Calvin and Hobbes cartoons to Joss.
May we walk in Beauty, fly in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. Butterflies. Yes, Mara Eve, there are butterflies! Even a few monarchs. All is not lost.
2. Moments
3. Coming to terms
4. Slumber
5. Tomato sandwiches
May we walk in Beauty.
Tanzanian Silence (1966)
by Ruth Weaver
White hot noonday sun;
The earth, still;
Cattle and birds, silent at midday.
Later a breeze would come sweeping up from the shores of Lake Victoria;
And children would laugh and call and run home from school;
But in this time and place
And at this hour,
Sometimes,
The sound of sheer silence.
In that stillness,
That absence of all sound and movement,
There would come an awareness of sound beyond sound
Stars incinerating themselves?
Cosmic expansion?
The ongoing music of creation?
“And God spoke. . .”
I experience a knowingness
That beyond all the sounds of life on earth
And beyond all the noise of my own inner world
God still speaks.
In the Cosmos and in the heart,
God can be heard.
In stillness.
In silence.
Gratitude List:
1. Learning the poetry of my mother, Ruth Slabaugh Weaver, and my grandmother, Lura Lauver Slabaugh. Experiencing the wisdom and beauty of the voices of the women who have come before me, my mother and grandmothers, my friends who have paved such incredible pathways. (And for my father, for pulling out this poem for my birthday, for poetically suggesting that my mother may have been hearing my own music emerging as she wrote this poem in the year before I was born.)
2. Cicadas
3. Staying afloat
4. So many words, so many stories
5. The imagination of chidren
May we walk in Music, Silence, Stillness, Beauty.
Mockingbird says:
“Greet everyone in their own language, and don’t worry about your accent.”
Gratitude List:
1. That moon. First it wasn’t. There was rain and there was a nighttime overcast. Then there was an odd glow. Then suddenly an orange crescent in the sky.
2. New ways to organize my mind
3. Rhythm. In and out. Round and round.
4. New ideas to take the place of old ones that I have discarded
5. Singing with people I love
May we walk in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. The birthday poems. Thank you, my friends. What an amazing day of words it has been. I am bee-drunk on the flowers of your poems. (I asked my Facebook friends to send me poems for my birthday, and the result was an ocean tide of poetry. I am adrift in the most marvelous sea of words.)
2. Ice cream at Sweet Willows. Two dips: Salted Caramel Praline Pecan and Whatever She Wants
3. Zentangling with Ellis. What a marvel to watch how the images and the lines drew him into his imaginative dream-world. “Mom, the gnomes taught me the language of the trees. It’s mostly body language. The tallest ones are the most talkative.” And, referring to one of the pictures we were drawing, “Mom. did I tell you who is the fairy? You are. The gnomes use inventions and the fairies use magic.”
4. Growing older, growing up
5. A tender and gentle little birthday party with the people who brought me into this world, the people whom I brought into this world, and Jon Weaver-Kreider.
May we walk in Beauty. Oh, so much, so much Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 