The times are feeling fearful to me. After listening to a discussion on the radio on the way home, in which People Who Seem to Know Things suggested that there’s a possibility of uprisings and violence after this election, I offer a slight paraphrase of the Rune of St. Patrick:
At Pisgah in this fateful hour, I place Earth and Heaven with their power, And the sun with its brightness, And the snow with its whiteness, And the fire with all the strength it hath, And the lightning with its rapid wrath, And the winds with their swiftness along their path, And the sea with its deepness, And the rocks with their steepness, And the earth with its starkness: All these I place, By divine help and grace Between myself and the powers of destruction!
Gratitude: For the golden leaves of autumn and the golden eyes of the cats. For darkness, of rest, of birth, of preparation for the new thing coming. For the inquisitive and curious minds of teenagers. For the web of beloved hearts that yearn and work for justice and peace, for true equality and for functioning and healthy communities. For you, beloveds. For you. For you.
May we walk humbly, loving mercy, doing justice, ever in Beauty.
This past week, I posted the first of two Found poems that I wrote using the help of friends on a Facebook post. You can find that first poem here: Finding Poetry, Part 1.
Here is the second one I did.
That Which is Indestructible (A Facebook Crowd-Sourced Found Poem) by Beth Weaver-Kreider and Friends
There is a time and place for a child to grow up, playing between scrabbly hibiscus bushes, but the best way to tell about a town, any town, is to listen deep into the night, long after midnight, after every screen door has been slammed shut for the last time.
When he stood in his room in the tower, looking out over the invisible city spread below, he found that he could justify his inquisitiveness.
He came in about supper-time with his sketchbook and his mud-bespattered boots. In reflex, she stepped back against the safety of the wall, began climbing, using both hands, all white eyes, a flickering lamp, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud.
Yet she grew to like him, for he was always kind and gentle to her. A little flame of hope had been lit. He saw that it was not in the object of desire that lasting satisfaction resided but in the absence of that desire.
I think I know why porcupines surround themselves with prickly spines: White throat, dark chest-patches or nearly— If you tear down the web, I said, it will simply know.
There is no question in my mind that these men have had a terrifying experience. I was responsible for all of them and would mourn every life lost in my name. We cannot fear it, play games with it, or manipulate it—the Path just is, and the nights are full of nightingales, even though they would like to die. The prayer wheel ceaselessly cadences the pilgrim’s path. The sound of the new color console—Zenith— rose and fell, sounding like the babble of running water.
Welcome To The World, Baby Girl. Did you hear that? (We are in a book!) Oh, my. I read that years ago. Sorry, I forgot: Thanks for the memory. PS—I love all of this!
Okay, later, with the book on my bedside table, which has quite a history: This is a third re-read. These sacred rituals involve prescribed traditions. So here are three short phrases: I. Lay all the items on your altar for about an hour, just to let them “cure,” soaking up and charging with sacred energy.
II. To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.
III. We must become friendlier with our dark emotions in order to use their energies for healing and transformation.
The cares and preoccupations of life draw us away from ourselves. Look, money’s an engine and it’s out there running day and night, whether you like it or not. Destroying things is much easier than making them. Fire is catching, and if we burn you burn with us! Fire is catching, and if we burn you burn with us! Fire is catching, and if we burn you burn with us! Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.
I needed a mental health break. I wasn’t feeling the burn of an emerging poem, but I needed the fix of a poetic experience without having to go deeply into the trance state of poetic midwifing. So I posted a request: I asked my friends to open a nearby book to a random page, put a finger at a random spot, and type in a short sentence or phrase near to where their fingers landed. I took all their lines and crafted a poem. It was playful, whimsical, and deeply satisfying.
Here is the result of the first one I did (yeah, I have done more):
The Impermanence of This Floating World (A Facebook Crowd-Sourced Found Poem) by Beth Weaver-Kreider and Friends
Pray for us, O Mary. Show us the face of your Son. Then she spoke to me. “There’s nothing to figure out. I am who I am. The way I see it, all children are our children. Mature souls are more comfortable being vulnerable— all feeling is born in the heart.”
I looked up and saw the beauty, looking upward into its mighty boughs. Still, we know who’s swaying: outside there is quiet in the dark.
Sleep is, I know now, impossible when skylarks are in song. . . Did we fly swiftly toward the stars until our wings tired? While the vault of heaven rings, it appeareth about Easter, when Alleluia is sung again, a drawing together of any kind: that isn’t sacred?
Jean asked Maxwell not to utter another word until he heard her side of the story. So long a journey confirms that work, his blue figure struggling. . . Imagine how easy it is for me. Monitor the type of risks you’re taking, for this is the Lia Fáil, the stone of destiny— must need both hands to pick them up.
Pentacles are work, money, and security, a degree of understanding. Looking back, she did not regret the making love, a welcome relief from the daily drudgery of life, having effected this disguise so completely.
The dermatologist was, in his own eyes, an artist beyond reproach (g to return to. Excerp t the futhe r he goes, t he smaller t he hallway). Knowing Hollywood, they probably would have whitewashed it anyway. Moral theories are wanted to explain what makes an action right or a person good Guilt is another common reaction, particularly among parents.
The children of your servants shall continue the duet, flush with possibilities that produces a continuous pitch; the most important and familiar among them is the common Buttercup of the meadows.
Remove the air joints, then the grease line from the left bearing cap: fourteen hours of driving ahead. Nourish faith— there are many ways to reach the goal. What we have to eat and drink together, we usually mean traveling, waves, ice-cold waves arched up into walls. The impermanence of this floating world I feel over and over. Is sorrow the true wild ?
Again, you’ll have to trust your senses and be very focused as you use this technique. The visions are so terribly distinct that I almost imagine them to be real. “Most people don’t burn to death,” I said.
Gratitudes: 1. The forthright golden gaze of a black cat. 2. Titmice and nuthatches at the feeder. 3. The way the sky glows blue through the clouds at this season. I think Chagall must have been a fan of autumn. 4. Health. We had an emergency this past weekend. The story is not mine to tell, but all now appears to be well. And I am very grateful for everyone’s health. Also for adrenaline. 5. I stood in the center of a faerie ring of mushrooms today. Felt my skin dissolve and my hair turn gray. Felt my senses being released into something greater–my hearing drawn outward like a bowl in a potter’s hands, my sight turn deep into the well of me. Felt wind rush through my branches, and sunlight raining like droplets all around me. Then I breathed and stepped out into the world again.
May we walk in Beauty!
Please vote, friends. Please consider your values, what you want for your country, what you expect of democracy, and Vote. Don’t let anyone convince you to be cynical or despairing about this basic tool of democracy. Yes, things are broken, and powerful people are taking advantage of the vulnerabilities in our system, and our history has been whitewashed and sugar-coated, but if we believe any of the better ideals our country was founded upon (no matter whether we were ever true to their deepest intents), then we must Vote. Let’s make this country not great–but Good, not again–but for the first time, let’s live into the ideals the founders expressed. But this time, let’s live them for everyone.
After nearly a month of silence here, I find it difficult to pull out particular threads of thoughts to put down in a blog post. Or perhaps it’s more a function of the times we live in, existing as we do within so many layers of challenge and crisis and change. So today’s post will be more of a smorgasbord than usual.
I am at odds with myself. There’s a Cackler in me who is rubbing her hands with satisfaction at the way karma has finally alit upon powerful people who have minimized the danger of the coronavirus. At the same time, my internal Monk is saddened to contemplate anyone’s suffering, and wants to wish ill upon no being, no matter how brutal and selfish that being is.
Message to self: It’s okay to be human. It’s okay to experience a sense of relief when an out-of-control train that has already been responsible for the deaths of many is suddenly slowed and perhaps side-lined. I’m letting the Monk and the Cackler work together here, working to avoid feeling and expressing glee at this turn of events, but allowing myself to feel relief: This could signal a shift that could save lives in the end.
This is a moment for the type of complexity I have been attempting to integrate since I began working with the Bowl of the Heart several years ago: All of it goes in there together, painful and tender, vengeful and compassionate. We’re many-faceted creatures, we humans, and we have the capacity for myriad responses. While I want to always be appealing to my better nature, I cannot deny the Cackler her space. And I can learn from her. The quiet Monk in me was trying so hard to respond with light and wisdom that I almost missed the essential message of the Cackler–that it is okay to be relived that this bit of suffering being visited upon those who inhabit the White House may be a pathway toward mitigating the suffering of thousands.
A few days ago, I checked in with the faeries about a couple things I’ve lost. One was pretty urgent and timely. The other is a necklace I haven’t seen for over a year, a treasured piece I made myself from various shiny and dangly things I’d received from beloved friends.
Within a couple hours, I found the first, most urgent thing, but I still haven’t found the necklace, although I have been searching all the place that suddenly popped into my head.
But last night, I had a haunting, lingering dream. I kept waking up with images of the two beings in the dream, sometimes with clear recognition of their names, and then falling back to sleep, only to wake up again with their images in my brain. They were two elves, dressed in skinny suits like a 1950s boy band, with white shirts and black skinny ties. They were both dark-haired with piercing dark eyes, very Spock-like.
I woke up, feeling like they wanted to cut some sort of deal with me, like they were looking to draw up a contract. I thought if I could remember their names, I could outwit them, control them, but in the stories, magical names also sometimes backfire, and it’s perhaps best that I don’t quite remember. I do want my necklace back, but I’m not ready to sell my fate to a pair of pushy dream-beings. Still, it couldn’t help to make an offering. . . (I know, I know, no first-born children or anything like that).
I’ve started painting my nails. It’s strange, because I tend to feel like I am a little kid playing dress-up, or like I’m sort of wearing drag when I wear make-up or get my nails done. It’s like it’s territory that doesn’t really belong to me. I identify completely as she/her, and have never had any questions about my gender, but there are myriad ways to express femaleness, and the salon/nails/make-up way has not really been part of my way. I always feel like I’m in someone else’s territory when I do these things.
But I am loving wearing different colors on my nails. I change the color every weekend. A couple weeks ago, I just had to get green. I needed green nails. Today, I painted them RED! My fingernails are red. I needed flames on my fingers right now. Hmmm. I should see about getting some little flame decals. . .
I realized the other day that I almost never find feathers anymore. Perhaps I am not looking hard enough? Or maybe I don’t need them now. Or maybe it’s because we no longer have the glorious owl-perch of the poplar tree anymore.
The day after I began to ponder this, I found this woodpecker feather at the park:
This week two girls stopped outside my classroom to read my bulletin board during my prep period. When I went to say hello, they thanked me for my poster about how all people are valued in this classroom. They said they would like it to include something about how we live on stolen land. I love that they were so ready to add their own pieces, so open to ask for what they want, so intersectionally aware. We talked about how the statements on the poster are all stated in positive ways, and the stolen land piece doesn’t seem to quite fit that tone, but how that’s not quite a good answer even so. I do have a little poster in my room about the people who were first here on the land where we attend school, but I really want to add a line that will respond to their request, if it’s possible. (Or maybe I’ll move that poster out to my hallway bulletin board. One of the girls said she is going to make me a drawing of the hands of many different races gripping each other in a circle, to add put next to the sign.
I would love ideas about how to include an intersectional awareness of the truth of that statement–We are living on stolen land–in the grammatical and tonal context of this. Feel free to offer me your thoughts.
Some Random Gratitudes: 1. Red-breasted hawk on a snag down Schmuck Rd. 2. My wise and compassionate students. 3. The Wheel of the Year. All comes around again. 4. Smoothie for breakfast 5. The treehouse. I spent a couple hours up there yesterday, reading and drawing.
May we walk in Beauty!
“The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas. […] To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out. […] Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.” ―Rebecca Solnit, from: “Men Explain Things to Me”
“The first product of self-knowledge is humility.” —Flannery O’Connor
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” ―Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” ―Barry Lopez
“‘Remember on this one thing,’ said Badger. ‘The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memories. This is how people care for themselves.’” ―Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel
“Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need For this bright morning dawning for you. History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not be lived again. Lift up your eyes upon The day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream.” —Maya Angelou
“With dreamwork, we are endlessly tenderising ourselves to subtletly. When we begin to know its dimensions, pain can no longer envelop us in an indistinct mass. It’s not that we are ridding ourselves of suffering, but rather learning its name, which is the prelude to befriending it.” —Dreamwork with Toko-pa
Humility by Mary Oliver Poems arrive ready to begin. Poets are only the transportation.
“On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.” —W. S.Merwin
“Nature never repeats itself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.” —Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.” —Kabir
Mirabai Starr said, “Poetry is a gateway into unitive consciousness. It knocks on the doors of the heart and the heart opens. Poets speak truth in a very naked way that bypasses the rational mind. Poetry evokes, rather than describes.”
Kathleen Norris writes, “Poets understand that they do not know what they mean, and that is their strength. . . . Writing teaches us to recognize when we have reached the limits of language, and our knowing, and are dependent on our senses to ‘know’ for us.”
“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories . . . water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estés
“Every seed contains the potential to save the world. Each seed can keep millions of people from starvation. Each seed is a mirror and guardian of the world’s future. Each seed is the ecology that can sustain the economy. This is why seeds are sacred…” —His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew
This morning, I woke up from a dream in which I was helping someone to design a pamphlet titled Common Sense. It was like Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, but a point-by-point enumeration of all the reasons not to vote for a second term for this president. And now I feel burdened, like someone needs to do this, in the carefully-reasoned yet passionate style of Paine himself, simply presenting all the pieces. I have neither the time nor the internal bandwidth at the moment to do so. But someone ought to do it.
I’ve become increasingly alarmed in recent days at the worshipful fervor of the diehard followers of this man, at the increasingly cultic adulation by people who seem to be otherwise humane and caring. Every day he reveals more and more of his depravity and lack of human feeling, his selfishness and narcissism, his lying, his racism and xenophobia, his misogyny, his delight in division and violence.
I shouldn’t have read that Atlantic article about QAnon, perhaps, shouldn’t have let myself look at the polls, shouldn’t have listened to the radio yesterday, shouldn’t have let myself brood about the thing I heard someone say about how we need him in office because he is tearing down the broken system from within, shouldn’t have started pondering the cultic nature of his followers.
I’m really worried. Someone should write the pamphlet.
May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!
We are listening for a sound beyond us, beyond sound, searching for a lighthouse in the breakwaters of our uncertainty, an electronic murmur a bright, fragile I am. Small as tree frogs staking out one end of an endless swamp, we are listening through the longest night we imagine, which dawns between the life and time of stars. —Diane Ackerman
“Those that don’t got it, can’t show it. Those that got it, can’t hide it.” —Zora Neale Hurston
“If you are not free to be who you are, you are not free.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“Before you speak to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people; before you tell me how much you love your God, show me in how much you love all [of your God’s] children; before you preach to me of your passion for your faith, teach me about it through your compassion for your neighbors. In the end, I’m not as interested in what you have to tell or sell as I am in how you choose to live and give.” ―Cory Booker
“I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise, it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.” —Nadia Bolz-Weber
“You who are so-called illegal aliens must know that no human being is ‘illegal’. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?” —Elie Wiesel
“Emergence never happens all at once. It is a slow stepping into the expanded capacity of your next self. You may need practice at releasing in those places you’ve grown accustomed to bracing which, like a tight swaddle, was comforting in its limits. But when the time to remain hidden comes to its natural end, you must begin to inhabit your new dimensionality. Breathe into the fullness of your gaining altitude and consider that what presents itself as fear may actually be exhilaration. As your future approaches you, worry less how it may receive you and say a prayer instead for your becoming approachable.” —Toko-pa Turner
“I was often in love with something or someone,” wrote Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. “I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me.”
“Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is the matter with us, we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.” —D.H. Lawrence
Lord’s Prayer: Translation by Neil Douglas Klotz, Sufi O Birther! Creator of the Cosmos, Focus your light within us— make it useful: Create your reign of unity now- Your one desire then acts with ours, as in all light, so in all forms. Grant what we need each day in bread and insight. Loose the cords of mistakes binding us, as we release the strands we hold of others’ guilt. Don’t let surface things delude us, But free us from what holds us back. From you is born all ruling will, the power and the life to do, the song that beautifies all, from age to age it renews. Truly— power to these statements— may they be the ground from which all my actions grow: Amen.
Gratitude List: 1. H, who sort of styles himself as a tough guy came to my room yesterday: “Miss! I thought of you! I was at the library and I saw a book by Maya Angelou. I checked it out. I haven’t started reading it yet, but I plan to this week. It’s full of poetry!” I’m getting chills just writing about it. I have missed this. 2. This web of community that is supporting and praying for teachers and students and schoolfolks and our families right now. I can almost see the golden threads in the air around me 3. My friends’ photos of groundhog babies and hummingbirds and owls and flowers and children. Such a joy to wake up to. 4. My 8th period class, who are so full of energy and presence and joy. I needed that shot in the arm at the end of the day yesterday. 5. The next step–all I have to do is to put one foot down, then the next, then the next. Breathe and step, breathe and step.
May we walk in Beauty!
“You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” ―Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.’” ―Kurt Vonnegut
“I know there are people who don’t read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.” ―Diane Setterfield
“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.” ―Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.” ―Diane Setterfield
“”What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them, only by consciously deciding to fight for change. We need a feminism that teaches a woman to say no — not just to the date rapist or overly insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself. “In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them. “To cite an old, and far from naive, feminist saying: “If you think equality is the goal, your standards are too low.” It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.” ―Barbara Ehrenreich
“People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.” ―Thomas Merton
Kittens don’t worry. They look for the game in everything.
Today is the first day of school. I don’t think I have ever begun a year with such a roiling sense of uncertainty, even my first year. My room looks ready. My slideshows look ready. I seem to have lesson plans in place. I have practiced Zooming and recording and publishing the Zoom.
I just have to trust that it’s all there, all in place, because something inside me feels like I am trying to stand on water. Or, as someone posted in a meme this week, building the plane while it’s in the air. Yeah, that.
One thing that I am certain of is this: The support and prayers and good energy I feel from my beloveds is so strong, it is almost palpable. Without that, without the good humored and earnest colleagues and administration and custodial staff, without the knowledge that I will be back among my students today, I don’t think i could do this. But these human circles make it possible, and even delightful, to step in and see what happens. This is my entire gratitude list for today.
If you’re looking for some concrete ways to be energetic support in these anxious times: First and foremost, pray for the safety of students and teachers and staff at the schools in your area, that we and our families will be able to mitigate with enough intention and care that we will not make each other sick.
Then, perhaps just as important, pray that we will FEEL safe, that we will be able to re-establish school as a place of belonging and wellbeing. That we will be able to establish strong and healthy community. We’ll never be able to make it through the twisting pathways of the brain past the protection centers toward the higher level critical thinking skills if we can’t first feel safe.
Then pray that we will learn together, that we will be able to engage each one, especially those who are remote.
Thank you for being part of the village that raises the children of your community. In a year when it seems that every answer is the wrong one, we need to step in and BE the answers.
Blessed Be.
“All the wonders of life are already here. They’re calling you. If you can listen to them, you will be able to stop running. What you need, what we all need, is silence. Stop the noise in your mind in order for the wondrous sounds of life to be heard. Then you can begin to live your life authentically and deeply.” —Thich Nhat Hanh
“When you have to make a choice, and you don’t make it, that is itself a choice.” —William James
“What do you promise your distant ancestors you will bring back into the world? What do you promise our cultural descendants you will bequeath them? Amid the ruins of a dying civilization, let us be clear and intentional in what we plant.” —Sean Donohue (FB post)
“Educating yourself does not mean that you were stupid in the first place; it means that you are intelligent enough to know that there is plenty left to learn.” ―Melanie Joy
“I hold the most archaic values on earth. . .the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude. . . .the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.” ―Gary Snyder
“The words were on their way, and when they arrived, she would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.” ―Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
“The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable.” ―Adrienne Rich
“Be ready to be surprised by the crazy, wonderful events that will come dancing out of your past when you stir the pot of memory. Embrace those long-lost visitors.” ―William Zinsser
“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.” ―Bob Marley
“Bare your soul of all mind, and stay there without mind.” ―Meister Eckhart
Wangari Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya (and now around the world), told a story about a hummingbird.
When the great forest was on fire, and all the animals were fleeing for their lives, the tiny Hummingbird zipped to the river, gathered a beakful of water, and zipped back to release the water onto the raging flames. Again and again, she carried her tiny beakfuls of water to try to put out the flames. The other animals noticed, and told her how futile her efforts were, but Hummingbird kept on and on, believing that it was her duty–no matter what–to do her one little thing.
Perhaps some of the other animals were inspired to get down to work, to do their own little thing, to pass on the hope of a thousand small actions. Perhaps the fire raged on despite their efforts. Perhaps they held it back. Perhaps they even put it out in the end.
During these days which, in the deepest of the dark insomniac nights, feel a little like the Beginning of the End of Things, Hummingbird has been sipping sweetness from the petunia basket outside my window, resting sometimes on the wire, nabbing gnats out of the air, hovering right at the window and peering in at me.
When I brought my first baby home from the hospital more than 14 years ago (a world ended and a world began with his birth), I settled into the recliner, exhausted and full of great satisfaction and wonder, to nurse the tiny person who had entered our world. Looking up from the babe, I saw Hummingbird hovering at the window for what seemed like ten seconds or more (an eternity of seconds), and she seemed to be watching the New Person, and marveling with me. In the succeeding years, I have marveled back at the wonder of her own young, at their tenacity and resilience, surviving lashing storms in their bottle-cap-sized nest. At their first fledgings. At the blur of their wings as they sip sweetness. At the self-contained unself-consciousness of their existence.
And now, in a time when I am bending all my mental and emotional and physical will toward resilience and tenacity, when I am terrified for my children, my students, my parents, my self, I have Hummingbird in my days, quietly doing her thing, going about her business, checking on me through the window.
She leaves me with questions. Perhaps you want to ponder them, too: * What, in these days of going back to school, will be your sips of sweetness to fuel you through the moments of high challenge and frustration and worry? * What, as Wangari Maathai asked, is your “one little thing”? What is that thing you will do to stem the tides of destruction, even when it seems like only a beakful of water? * What does resilience look like to you? (For me, I want to picture myself in my classroom BEING tenacious and resilient.) * In the story, Hummingbird simply did her work and did not ask for help. I am not Hummingbird, and she leaves me with that question, too: How will you remember to ask for help when you need it?
So. Whatever our tasks in this time of great trouble, whatever our capacities to meet the challenges before us, let us fly with strength and power, knowing that we are doing our part. Around us are so many who are joining in the work. Let us be resilient and vulnerable, earnest and tenacious, willing to ask for help when we need it, offering to give others a spell when they reach exhaustion.
As the Talmud says: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
Gratitude List: 1. Messages from Hummingbird 2. Help from a friend when I didn’t even think to ask for help 3. Colleagues. I love my colleagues. 4. The custodial staff at my school. They make me feel safe. They care for the building and the spaces we inhabit. And, they’re so good-humored. 5. Air conditioning in my classroom. If, on top of everything else, I had to go into a 90-degree classroom to teach in my mask, I think I would have given up. I don’t think I could have mustered that much resilience. Air conditioning! I have air conditioning in my classroom!
May we all do our Little Thing, doing justice loving mercy, and walking humbly.
“By expanding our self-interest to include other beings in the body of Earth, the ecological self also widens our window on time. It enlarges our temporal context, freeing us from identifying our goals and rewards solely in terms of our present lifetime. The life pouring through us, pumping our heart and breathing through our lungs, did not begin at our birth or conception. Like every particle in every atom and molecule of our bodies, it goes back through time to the first spinning and splitting of the stars.
“Thus the greening of the self helps us to re-inhabit time and own our story as life on Earth. We were present in the primal flaring forth, and in the rains that streamed down on this still-molten planet, and in the primordial seas. In our mother’s womb we remembered that journey wearing vestigial gills and tail and fins for hands. Beneath the outer layers of our neocortex and what we learned at school, that story is in us—the story of a deep kinship with all life, bringing strengths that we never imagined. When we claim this story as our innermost sense of who we are, a gladness comes that will help us survive.” —Joanna Macy
“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.” —St. Augustine (I’m not usually a great fan of St. A, but I find this really moving)
“Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.” —Wendell Berry
“Literature irrigates the deserts that our lives have become.” —C.S. Lewis
“A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire.” —Fred Ross
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. —Wendell Berry
Gratitude List: 1. Hummingbird. I thought perhaps this might be a year without them, but a lovely little female has been visiting the petunias and stopping to hover outside my window and look in. 2. Golden: flowers, people, sunlight. 3. Hope 4. Work 5. Wise friends
May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!
So. You don’t get to post # savethechildren posts and memes and then vote for the man who partied with Jeff Epstein, who said of Ghislaine Maxwell, “I wish her well.” You just can’t.
You can’t post # savethechildren and then support tearing children from their families to be kept in detention centers. You just can’t.
You can’t post # savethechildren and ignore the predations of priests and nuns and church leaders and powerful men. You just can’t.
You can’t post # savethechildren and vote to take away children’s health care, to remove their safety nets at every turn, to cut welfare, to reduce affordable housing. You just can’t.
You can’t post # savethechildren and cavalierly send them back to crowded schools during a pandemic without a thought or plan for how to keep them safe. You just can’t.
“Let my teaching fall like rain and my words descend like dew, like showers on new grass, like abundant rain on tender plants.” —Deuteronomy 32:2
“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” —Thomas Merton (Oh, but I am going to try, Thomas Merton. I am going to try.)
“It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution.” —Alvin Toffler
“What comes, will go. What is found, will be lost again. But what you are is beyond coming and going and beyond description. You are It.” —Rumi
“Though my soul may set in darkness it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” —Attributed to Galileo
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” —from The Talmud
“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.” —George Santayana
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” ―James Baldwin
Mockingbird Chronicles 