Tag: aconite

Crocus

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

Some years, the messy beds out front have been filled with crocus by now, and windflowers were beginning. Even though I’ve been panicky about a spring come too early, I think perhaps my sense has been skewed. These two yellow crocus are the first in our beds, though on a drive through a residential neighborhood, we saw some yards just filled with crocus. I am always excited when they overflow the beds, but I have never seen them spill so carpet-like across the lawn. The aconite, at least, have begun to spread. When they go to seed, I will sprinkle seeds along the front bank and hope they come up there next spring. I think crocus spread underground. I will have to look that up.

Meanwhile, let’s spread beyond our bounds just a little bit today, shall we? Breathe in, breathe deeply. Hold it for a brief second. Breathe out. Expand. Send your breath and your roots and your seeds outward, beyond the tidy pathways that block growth. In. Hold. Out–Grow. Expand. You belong in the wide open spaces. What joy you bring to others as they see how you carpet your vast new green places.

Gratitude List:
1. I keep getting chunks of the work done.
2. This is show week. I’m tired already, but also excited to be part of the energy, and I love being part of something like this with my child (he’s on sound; I am singing in the pit).
3. I am applying for a writer’s thing this summer. There is very little chance that I will be chosen, but the daydreaming about it is giving me lots of energy and helping me to hold onto this piece of my identity with more intention.
4. How stretching and breathing work together, literally and metaphorically.
5. It’s 6:15, and the sun is coming up!

May we walk in Beauty!

Rising

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

Gratitude List:
1. Rising. All the little spring plants are rising up. Aconite and hellebore. Onion grass. I’ve been meaning to get a hellebore for years, and last year my friend gave me one. The greenery has been up since Brigid’s Day. May soon we’ll see a shy Lenten Rose.
2. Chocolate. Yeah, I bought “too much” for Young Son’s classroom. The “extras” were yummy.
3. Elderberry and zinc. Crossing my fingers that I can keep this cold at bay. I’m usually fine in the mornings, but I crash in the afternoons. I am going to take my elderberry and zinc along to school. Maybe I should nap during lunch–sleep seems to be one of the best revivers.
4. Homemade pizza.
5. Safety nets. We have yearly mental health screenings for students at certain grade levels at our school. A team of gentle souls from a local counseling center interviews students, giving them a chance to talk about their problems. I dream about the day we could get an ongoing grant or something to be able to screen all kids every year. One thing this does is that it normalizes this kind of conversation about mental health. It’s a check-up, just like a physical.

May we walk in Beauty!

Aconite Awakens

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

Trying to make sense of a dream last night. Buying an old three story house in the city, taller than all the surrounding houses, dozens of rooms. The owners left so much stuff behind, and there was so much to discover: clothes, games, Civil War memorabilia, books, kitchen items. They even left two cats. I think this is a dream of abundance, of sudden knowledge that I have more inner resources than I realized. Now, I need time to meditate in waking life to make the connections.

Gratitude List:
1. The aconite is up, golden buttercups catching the slanting sun rays of a winter afternoon.
2. Walking with Josiah after school. He instigates a walk almost as often as I do.
3. Maybe it’s the season for sundogs? We saw a really sparkly spot of one on the way home again yesterday.
4. I went to bed early last night, and slept all night until morning. Good, solid rest. May my brain be less foggy today than yesterday.
5. My students. All of them, and two in particular, who chose during their Speech class interviews to be interviewed about what it’s like to grow up black or bi-racial in the the US. It’s not their job to teach the rest of us, but they chose to open up their stories, and we learned. Deeply. Most of the best learning moments are not orchestrated by the teacher.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Quickening

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

Continuing to give away a thing a day during Lent. I’m beginning to feel what my friend Katrina Lefever calls “that space and lightness inside” that comes from jettisoning the stuff that clutters my life. I have a long way to go, but I’m energized. Each thing that goes brings me a new burst of energy.

Gratitude List:
1. Coffee with friends
2. Clearing the Clutter
3. The Quickening: Morning birdsong has been decidedly spring. Some of the neighborhood regulars are gearing up.
4. The Quickening: The sap is rising in the trees in Flinchbaugh’s orchards–If you look closely, you can almost see the life force rising.
5. The Quickening: The aconite are up and opening.

May we walk in Beauty!

The quickening is the time of seeing life and growth. When a woman is pregnant and first feels the movement of the child, we say she feels the quickening–she becomes aware in a new way of the life inside her. The Season of Brigid is a time of quickening. Rodents begin to awaken from hibernation, peeking out from their winter-bound burrows. Aconite and crocus poke shy tips above the soil. Bramble and tree show the red and yellow of rising sap.

The sky today is gray and shadowed, pregnant with the snow that will soon blanket the ground again. Still, the Earth is quickening, feeling the new life stirring inside her. Look around you, and you’ll see it. Listen for the change in the song of the birds. Smell the difference, even in the snow-bound air. Persephone is preparing to return yet again.

Some quotations for today:
“Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.” —Etty Hillesum
***
“If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.” —Richard Rohr
***
“The speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.” —Audre Lorde
***
“We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.” —Nikki Giovanni
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“Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.”
―Maya Angelou
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“Rage—whether in reaction to social injustice, or to our leaders’ insanity, or to those who threaten or harm us—is a powerful energy that, with diligent practice, can be transformed into fierce compassion.”
―Bonnie Myotai Treace
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“Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.” ―Lauren Oliver
***
“Take that rage, put it on a page, take the page to the stage, blow the roof off the place.”
―The Script

Vanguard of Spring

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

oakleaf

Gratitude List:
1. Kuub: My new favorite game. We played for a couple hours today. You set up blocks in your yard and then throw stuff at them to knock them down.
2. I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.
3. Beeeeeeeeees
4. Aconite, snowdrops, speedwell: the vanguard of spring
5. It really is all about love.

May we walk in Beauty!

Outrage

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

seaglass-and-sun

I feel like I keep writing the same thing–balance, balance, balance. Reminding myself to keep centered in the midst of complicated emotions.

I’m letting outrage rattle around inside my Bowl of Feelings these days, trying to get a sense of how it looks, how it feels, what it does in there. There’s a certain surge of energy that feels really righteous and powerful and effective in the moment of outrage. It drives me to write postcards and make telephone calls and to put try to get the word out there. I do believe that it has its place. I had been on the verge of writing that I would be rejecting outrage, when that last sentence happened–I think it really is outrage that fuels those good and effective works.  But outrage also has some strange backfires:

* Feeling it and letting it energize me can make me feel as though I have made effective responses when I have actually done nothing.
* When the energy drops off, it drops WAY off, leaving me a depleted husk.
* It leads to incredible self-righteousness.
* When I do manage to sustain the energy of it over time (and the events of these weeks make that easy), it can lead to an overpowering sense of despair.  Or, on the other side of that coin: numbness.

When I get a bad headache, I tend to avoid painkillers for as long as I can stand it. It’s like I want to feel the message my body is giving me, to try to understand what it is saying. After both of my C-sections, I found myself refusing the painkillers I was offered. Perhaps it was partly because after the pain of those long labors, nothing felt painful anymore, but again, it seemed like I needed the messages of pain to inform me of my physical limits.

I think that outrage is sort of like those pains. It’s the call to wake up and listen, the urging to pay attention. We can’t let ourselves get capsized by it. Keep at least some painkillers handy–good music, conversation with loving friends, meditation, a good escapist book, prayer, pictures of otters–so that when the pain takes you out of yourself, you have something to bring you back.

I think I am going to have to make this my spiritual practice for the coming years: to hold the coals of outrage in my hand in such a way that I can just bear it, so that it will keep me awake and aware, but to find my way to hold grace and lightness as well.

Gratitude List:
1. Hundreds of white gulls flying above the bridge.
2. The sun shining through the red tail of a hawk above me.
3. Sun shining through the golden petals of aconite.
4. Grace to help carry and mediate the outrage.
5. Good people. They’re everywhere. Let’s not get ourselves separated into camps–good folks are everywhere. Look for them.

May we walk in Beauty!

February Walk

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

mantis dragon-egg

fred aconite

Gratitude List on a Warm February Day:
1. Mantis case: The Fierce Ones will be hatching in spring to help with the insects on the farm.
2. Imagination: We thought maybe a dragon had hatched in the fields near last year’s squash patch.
3. Even the Mzee (Old Man) went walking with us, though he only went part way up the hill.
4. Aconite: Too early by far, but beautiful, catching the rays of the sun.
5. Rambling with the family.

May we ramble in Beauty!

Are You Dancing?

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Poems

DSCN8962

“Are you dancing?” –greeting from my friend, Saheeb

Are you dancing?
Has your soul found its wings,
caught the rhythms that surround you,
felt the throb of waking earth beneath your feet?

Gratitude List:
1. aconite
2. crocus
3. that wren out there, hailing the morning
4. children playing in the sandbox for hours
5. voices of sanity among the clang and clatter

May we walk in Beauty!

Seeking Spring

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

IMG_0457 (1)

Gratitude List:
1. Friday morning hymn sing with my colleagues.
2. Blue, blue, blue, sky blue as Mary’s robe.
3. The way humor can sometimes make the bleak and difficult breathable.
4. My colleague Amanda, who helped me out of my February Funk yesterday by reminding me that February is the time to be actively seeking the minute indications that the season is progressing.  I came home and found one crocus bud and one aconite bud.
5. The tiny wing-person with the huge voice who is singing songs of spring.

May we walk in Beauty!