The prompts today were Quirk and Earth–lovely little sound play there! This happened while I was out walking:
Sentience by Beth Weaver-Kreider
What is this being human, but the quirk of birth into this form of organism here on Earth? Are you more person than the plants who daily give you grateful breath, receiving yours in sacred reciprocity? Am I more being than the stones made of the minerals that map my own bones and blood?
What is sentience, but knowing oneself within one’s place? And that flat rock up on the hillside does it with much more grace than either you or I. Rocks and rivers, ibises and spiders, fish and fox— all inhabit their beingness with as much instinct and awareness as you or I could hope to muster.
What is the human drive to settle always at the top, to strive for dominance, defining us as something always more complete, more comprehensive, more masterfully apt, than ape or aster?
Hasn’t this been the root of our disaster, the lines we draw between ourselves and the living, breathing world around us? Thus we place ourselves outside of place, when we refuse to acknowledge other knowing, other forms of growing into personhood and being.
Better we should recognize the neighborhood of beings who surround us, each with their own song and story, each with their own wisdom, if we knew only how to notice.
“The earth, the air, the fire, the water: Return, return, return, return. . .” –Libana song
Contemplative Research Journey for Earth Day: Contemplate the earth you walk, right in your yard, your neighborhood, your town. If you can, put your bare feet on earth today. Think about the people who were here before your, and before them. Do you know who were the indigenous peoples who lived on and hunted and farmed and fished on the land where you stand? What do you know of the soil and the rocks and minerals of your place? What feeds the life of the place where you are?
Contemplate the plants of your neighborhood. Can you name three trees? Five? Twenty? Who is in bud now? Who is in bloom? There is so much more than grass in the grass. Do you know the names of all the plantfolk who provide the green carpets you walk on?
Contemplate the wingfolk and the four-footed people who share this space with you. Can you tell one shining bird from the other? Can you differentiate their calls? Can you see evidence of the night wanderers? Who might be visiting your yards and gardens and alleyways while you sleep? And the tiny insect people that try so hard to live inside our houses. Have you watched them make webs, tend to their own business, seek the dark spaces?
What about the waters of your place? Where does it come from and where does it go? If you have wild water running near you, take some time today to trail your fingers through it.
Touch earth. Touch water. Touch bark. Listen for the messages in birdsong. Smell the rising spring. Breathe wind. Take ten deep outside breaths. Greet the Beings of your place with love and gratitude.
Gratitude List: 1. The guarddogwoods are beginning to bloom. Even though I no longer hang poetic laundry on their branches, I always feel like poetry itself is blooming when they start to throw pink at the sun. 2. Wangari Maathai, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, Greta Thunberg, Berta Caceres–and all the fierce and joyful activists around the world whom they represent. 3. The many Beings of Skunk Hollow. The shine and the flutter. The wafting and the whoosh. The verdancy. The brilliance. 4. Golda’s Lake and Goldfinch Creek and Ezilie’s Spring and Cabin Creek and the Susquehanna River, and the Chesapeake Bay. 5. The promise of a new way. The hope of change.
May we walk, so joyfully, in Beauty!
Earth Day Words: “The world is, in truth, a holy place.” —Teilhard de Chardin
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” —Henry David Thoreau
“You are your own cartographer now.” —Ralph Blum
“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke
“Every creature is a word of God.” ―Meister Eckhart
“The forest for me is a temple, a cathedral of tree canopies and dancing light.” ―Dr. Jane Goodall
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.” ―The Onceler (Dr. Seuss)
“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” ―Rachel Carson
William Stafford: “I place my feet with care in such a world.”
“A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.” ―John Sawhill
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” ―Rachel Carson
“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year…the alienation from the sources of our strength.” ―Rachel Carson
“Few words are so revealing of Western sexual prejudice as the word Goddess, in contrast to the word God. Modern connotations differ vastly from those of the ancients, to whom the Goddess was a full-fledged cosmic parent figure who created the universe and its laws, ruler of Nature, Fate, Time, Eternity, Truth, Wisdom, Justice, Love, Birth, Death, Etc.” ―Barbara G. Walker
“Our vitality is inextricably bound up with creativity. Like a tree whose expression is fruit, giving our gifts is what keeps life pushing through our veins. It’s what keeps us feeling alive. As anyone who has strayed too far from their creativity knows, without it every corner of one’s life can fall prey to a terrible greying spread. As Kahlil Gibran writes about trees in an orchard, “They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.” —by Toko-pa Turner
Today’s prompts were Galaxy (or galaxy-type things) and love/anti-love:
Sometimes by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Sometimes when I say I am seeking the Beloved, it is your wise eyes I see, your expectant face, your eloquent and tender hands.
Sometimes when I listen for the humming of the stars, it’s your voice my ears remember, your quiet murmur, your trilling whistle, clear and bright.
Sometimes when I pause in the middle of the trail and catch the aroma of lilac or hyacinth sifting into the clearing, it’s your scent I’m sensing, and I am held in your arms as surely as if you were here.
In honor of Earth Day tomorrow, I have recorded Jane Yolen’s “Earth Day.”
I’m getting a late start today, and I need to go get ready for school in a moment. This morning, first thing, I took a cup of my wild yeast, mixed in a cup of water, a Tbsp. of salt, and then added flour until I had a good kneadable dough. It’s rising now, covered by a damp cloth, for six hours. Then I’ll knead it again and form it into a loaf or two, let it rise another two hours, and see what happens!
Gratitude List: Words I am grateful for today. 1. Winsome: curious, dreamy, innocent, fool-ish 2. Wild: untame, free, safe, creative 3. Weird: eccentric, magical, fate, unpredictable 4. Woods: inscape, numinous, serendipitous, shining 5. Windy: scouring, shriving, re-vivifying, inspiration
Walk Wildly!
“Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession. . .but about securing a portal.” —Laura Miller
“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” ―Shannon Hale
“I can promise you that women working together―linked, informed, and educated―can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.” ―Isabel Allende
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” ―John Muir
“When we went to jail, we were setting our faces against the world, against things as they are, the terrible injustice of our capitalist industrial system which lives by war and by preparing for war.” ―Dorothy Day
“What is not acceptable is silence in face of oppression. Boycott if you want, or participate if you want. But do not remain silent in face of injustice.” ―Omid Safi
“When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.” ―John O’Donohue
“Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. What ails us is our sense of beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all the best.” ―D. H. Lawrence
“Poems are maps to the place where you already are.” —Jane Hirshfield
“Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is to draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.” ―Barbara Kingsolver
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” ―Hermann Hesse
Isolation and the Seven Sins by Beth Weaver-Kreider
The first one is coughing, right? Or. . .coughing without covering your mouth, or coughing into your hand instead of your elbow. Does sneezing belong here, too, or is it just a matter of degree: an uncovered cough goes ten feet while a sneeze blasts twenty-seven.
The second is touching your face. Don’t touch your face! Don’t scratch your nose! Don’t rub your eyes!
Then there’s forgetting to wash your hands, or not using soap, or not singing Happy Birthday twice through while you wash. I’m having a whole lot of birthdays lately.
Getting too close to people who don’t live in your house, that’s the fourth one— sidling up to strangers in stores, saying, “Is this the line?” while they edge away from you as politely as they dare.
Three more? Okay. Here’s one: Not wearing a mask in public. Don’t go to the bank unless you look you’re going to rob the bank. You’ve got to learn how to smile with your eyes.
Number six is definitely hoarding. Nobody needs that much toilet paper, hon.
And the seventh. Sloth? Is that one? I’m pretty sure I heard that one, but maybe that’s a deadly sin. Aren’t these deadly sins, too?
There’s something about being in isolation that makes a person want to bake. I started by trying to make hamburger buns for our first isolation birthday. The practice round was so successful with the kids, that I kept making them, and I played around with the recipe, making spiral rolls and garlic rolls. And then, just like that, I was out of yeast. And Giant was out of yeast. And Sue’s was out of yeast. No one has whole wheat flour either.
I complained on Facebook, and a friend who had just received her mail order of a pound of yeast said she would put some in the mail for me this week. What a tender gesture! I never would have let myself accept such an offer in the Before, but now, Yes, please and thank you. And such a feeling of being cared for.
My sister also ran out of yeast. As she was on a walk the other day, a neighbor who was unloading groceries from the car called out and asked her if she needed paper towels. No, my sister called from a safe distance, but yeast–now that’s a difficult thing to come by. Just a couple days later, her neighbor dropped off yeast at my sister’s door.
The sharing takes on a sacramental edge these days. And yeast. Sharing yeast is sharing something even more elemental than a cup of sugar. No matter how much I research and study what yeast is and how it (they?) does its work, it will always be something mystical, something magical, to me. Bread and wine, the elements of sacrament in more than just the Christian tradition, are both yeast-based. I once heard someone talking about the two kinds of plants–monocotyledons and dicotyledons–and how corn is a monocot and grapes are a dicot, and that the elements of bread and wine bring together those two forms of plants with the magic of yeast and fermentation. And I think I won’t try to wrap that up with a nice essayist’s conclusion. It feels like a mystery that needs to stay quietly behind the veil, hinted at, marveled at, unexplained for now.
While I await the precious gift of yeast from Joan, I have begun to capture my own wild yeasts. They say that the yeast of any place is distinctly OF that place. So these are my Goldfinch Yeasts. Is is a flock? A herd? They’ve been bubbling for days, strong and lively, and today they smell sour and yeasty. Yeast Beings, I greet you.
Capturing Yeast: I’ve done this before, but it’s been years, so I watched some videos and read some tutorials. Here’s the process I’ve been using:
In a wide-mouthed jar, I put 3 Tbsp. of flour and 2 Tbsp. of water. Mixed, covered with a special cotton cloth and rubber band (perhaps any cloth will do), and let stand in a warm place for 12 hours.
After 12 hours, I stirred. Then another 12 hours later, I added another 3 Tbsp. flour and 2 Tbsp. water. The tutorials say five days until yeast is ready for baking. This is the morning of day five for me. Tomorrow, I will find a recipe and bake. Maybe pizza dough for supper, or rolls for the boys to snack on. And some day we’ll find whole wheat flour again. Meanwhile, it’s white bread.
That’s the process. Stir every 12 hours, and feed every 24 hours. Though none of the experts have mentioned it, I suspect it might be helpful to sing to them as you stir, or to speak poetry to them. Greeting them and praising them can’t hurt.
Gratitude List: 1. Yeast 2. People who share yeast 3. Bread and wine 4. Awaiting oriole 5. The promise of a new week.
May we walk in Mystery.
“To light a candle is to cast a shadow…” ―Ursula K. Le Guin
“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” ―Claude Monet
“We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.” ―Malala Yousafzai
I called through your door, “The mystics are gathering in the street. Come out!” “Leave me alone. I’m sick.” “I don’t care if you’re dead! Jesus is here, and he wants to resurrect somebody!” ―Jalaludin Rumi
“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.” ―Jalaluddin Rumi
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” ―Anaïs Nin
“Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn’t fear boundaries, but you should not be afraid of destroying them. That’s what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries.” ―Haruki Murakami
“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.” —Richard Rohr
One of today’s Prompts is Month. The other is to use these six words in a sentence: bump, embrace, fixture, howl, lonely, resolve (all created by Shakespeare).
Song for a New Way a sestina of Shakespearean words by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Coyote is something of a fixture in the myth of the landscape, a lonely figure trotting atop the ridge. A howl echoes into the hollow, an embrace of wildness and winsome, where we bump against our own internal resolve
to enter wildness, our stout resolve to live less burdened by the fixtures of modern existence, in the bump and whirl of the rat race, this lonely place in the crowd. Today we embrace our freedom from form with a wild howl.
Set free from the commute, the howl of the markets that weakened our resolve to fight the forces that tempted us to embrace acquisition and consumerism, that fixture of capitalism that is the root of our lonely longing for stuff that stops us, a bump
on the road to enlightenment. We bump into the stuff, the stuff, the stuff. We howl with the frustration, knowing we’d be less lonely if we could only find our inner resolve and let our inner existence be the fixture that would lead us to a stronger embrace
of what matters. For example, we would embrace kindness and empathy, the places where we bump against each other would be the fixture of our ideals. We’d learn to how to howl our deep longings and we would resolve to make each other less lonely.
Only in the search for connection will our lonely lust for power be ended. When we embrace all beings as siblings, and resolve to avoid the stumble and bump of collecting more trophies. The howl of lost enchantment no longer a fixture.
We can resolve that we will no longer be lonely. The fixture of our new story will be the embrace. We’ll bump fists and hips, and howl.
I’ve been slowly reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass over the past few months, taking a chapter at a time and letting it deepen. Today I read her comments on the Potawatomi language (and its cousins) and how the references, even in verbs, differentiate not between animate and inanimate objects, but between Beings and non-beings (like make objects). It’s not anthropomorphism, but a recognition of the Beingness, or personhood, of so much that is not human in the world, the animacy of the Beings around us.
I feel this most palpably with trees, though rocks also seem to have a Beingness which teaches me. And water. How would our world change if we began to consider the Beings around us not as resources to be used, objects to be mastered or owned, but as Beings with something to teach us? As neighbors and helpers and friends with whom we can companionably share a space?
Yesterday, my sister-in-law reminded her friends on social media to take at least ten strong breaths outside each day. I love that. So this morning, I went and stood on the porch, and breathed greetings to my friends and neighbors: Good morning, Sycamore! Thank you, Walnut! Why hello, Willow! Greetings, Ground Under my Feet! Such a shiny twinkle you have, Quartzite on the hillside!
I think this will be my morning practice for a while now: Breath and Greetings.
Gratitude List: 1. The song of the White-Throated Sparrow. Who am I to tell him he’s off-key, really? It’s like telling someone they spell their name wrong. He’s the master of the blue note, and it sound like longing, like desire, like all the loss and the hope in the world rolled into a ball of birdsong. 2. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s reminders. Deep noticing. 3. The ways we keep connecting even when it’s difficult. This morning was Worship Scattered (which I am beginning to call Church With Cats), this afternoon is Gang Zoom, and tonight is Family Zoom. 4. I have created my school/office space here with more clear delineation, more intentionality. It both helps me to feel that my work has a Space here, and that I can put up my little screen in front of the computer stuff and walk away. As I was setting things up, Josiah scuttled off to his room and brought his Xbox and school Chromebook own and set them up on the other end of my table. Companionability. I suppose this corner of the living room is not the Schoolroom. I should print out a photo of the little classroom that came off our porch in the little house where my mother taught me kindergarten and my brother second grade. 5. Trails in the woods. We’ve avoided it for so long because of the poison ivy, but the kid has us out there almost every day now, walking his trails, and clipping poison ivy away from the edges. There are mayapples and shelf lichens, old snags and trees with burrows and dens in the roots. It’s a gnomy sort of place. And everything is coming out in bud.
May we walk in Beauty!
“It is possible to become discouraged about the injustice we see everywhere. But God did not promise us that the world would be humane and just. He gives us the gift of life and allows us to choose the way we will use our limited time on earth. It is an awesome opportunity.” —Cesar Chavez
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” ―Frederick Buechner
“The words you speak become the house you live in.” ―Hafiz
“Humans are the most intellectually advanced animal on the planet and yet, we are destroying our only home. The window of time is very small, but I refuse to believe that we cannot solve this problem.” ―Dr. Jane Goodall
“Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.” ―David Whyte
“Things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance even after the physical contact has been severed.” ―James Frazer
“Which world are we trying to sustain: a resource to fulfill our desires of material prosperity, or an Earth of wonder, beauty, and sacred meaning?” — Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” —John Steinbeck
“Crystals are living beings at the beginning of creation. All things have a frequency and a vibration.” —Nikola Tesla
Today’s poem prompts were “train” and “message.” I was wandering through the long grasses of the long A sound in train, and ended up at the Amazingville Station. One day, years ago, when the poetry was so heady and giddy I could hardly keep from floating away, someone wrote on someone else’s poem, “You are sleeping with everyone in Amazingville,” and Mara wrote a poem beginning with that phrase. I have wanted so terribly to travel again to Amazingville, so I figured out today that perhaps you need to take the train.
Someone in one of my groups said he likes this poem, but he doesn’t really understand it, which it exactly how I feel, too. I responded with this, and maybe it makes a little more sense to me now: “I’m not sure I understand it, actually. My seven and seven is the final two lines that turn the haiku to tanka, so the haiku is perhaps a summoning spell, a way to bring me back to Amazingville, too, and I will finish the incantation with my two lines of sevens.”
Here’s the weirdness, and then a video of last year’s Easter Magdalene poem:
Taking the Train to Amazingville by Beth Weaver-Kreider
When you get off the train at Amazingville Station, send me a message that you have arrived.
Make it a five seven five, American haiku, and let the cutting word be one that sets me free.
Then bring me around with the sweet music, the alluring scent of your season word.
Call me home with haiku and I’ll come to you on the next train, with my seven and seven.
I took these photos in my classroom yesterday. I’m thinking of printing up a postcard to send to my students with one of themse,saying, WISH WE WERE HERE! I’m always a little worried about being cheesy, but maybe that’s part of my function in the lives of teenagers, to be a cheesy eccentric old person. Another option, which might be more comforting, actually, would be this one.
I should make up and order the card today so I can hopefully start sending them out next week. Maybe I’ll do both, and send the serious one to the ones that I think need that boost and the silly one to those who might need a laugh.
Gratitude List: 1. I know they’re always on here, but really that goldfinch out there is the purest yellow I think I have ever seen. He’s radiant. The grey of the rainy day makes it more intense. 2. I’m really grateful that I had a second pair of glasses in the more recent prescription. I can’t seem to fix the eye-piece on the pair I broke, so I ordered a new pair (that was one expensive bag of flour!), but in the meantime, I have these others. I even like the way they look, but they’re really heavy on the bridge of my nose, so I will be glad when the others come in the mail. 3. New things to anticipate: If I have to be home all the time for a while, I am so grateful that it is during the time that the oriole returns. I will be listening every day for his whistle. 4. Capturing yeast. I’m frustrated that we couldn’t find any in the stores we go to (and I am not going to go driving about and searching–it feels like that breaks the spirit of the rules at the moment, even though it’s technically a grocery), so I am capturing some. I’ve done it before, and it’s a great way to connect directly to the science and the livingness of the organisms we use in cooking. This is the third day, and there are little bubbles beginning to form. 5. It’s not just the gold of the finch, but the green also pops out more vividly and verdantly on certain types of grey days. Isn’t that word fabulous? Verdant. I wonder what the original German or Latin version of the word was in Hildegard’s writings. . . I guess there will be a little research in my day.
May we walk in Beauty!
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” ―Thomas Merton
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” ―Thomas Merton
“We see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman happens to the human. What happens to the outer world happens to the inner world. If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.” ―Thomas Berry
“All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.” ―Joy Harjo
“We have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle.” ―Denise Levertov
Mockingbird Chronicles 