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Let’s Get Down To Business

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

First, some mulling drawn from today’s Facebook conversations.  Then a poem.  Then a Gratitude List.

Sometimes I don’t know if I can bear the weight of the problems of the world. I get so furious, not just at the military-industrial complex, but at the way corporations have become the ruling classes, the way Monsanto has taken over the USDA, the way our consumer culture is balanced on the backs of slaves and oppressed people elsewhere in the world. I don’t know if we can turn things back. But I know that there are lots of like-minded people out there who want to turn things back. I’m not sure how we do that, but I want to start by putting as much love out there as possible in the meantime.

I don’t mean for that to sound childish or like I am ignoring the problem. I bring it back to the metaphor of the bowl for the heart. I used to think that I could only have one thing in there at a time, either the joyful things full of wonder, or the angry and despairing things. But recently I have pledged to just sit with the bowl open and let it all fall in together. And the whole crazy mix belongs there. The love I have for butterflies and songbirds is precisely why I hate Monsanto so. The delight I take in my children is precisely why the military-industrial complex terrifies me.

How can I maintain the balance in my head when I get so furious and despairing and tired and sad about so much that is happening in the world? Sometimes it feels so schizophrenic to speak of beauty and wonder and delight when something in my heart is cringing in fear of what the future holds for my children. I know that remembering what I love, remembering what holds my heart, reminding myself why I fight, all this helps me to keep doing my work.

If we who care deeply enough to walk the cliffs of despair, if we let ourselves get frozen or lost or broken on those cliffs, then whatever it is that we’re fighting against has begun to win. Maybe that’s it. Instead of just using my rage and despair to fight this thing, I want to find ways to use my love and wonder to overcome it.

Perhaps my work of late has been too passive, too much in the realm of prayer and contemplation. What is the next step, I wonder?

These Are the Words
These are the things that I tell myself, over and over again.
These are the words I use to remember.

Don’t forget to do your soul-work.
Don’t stop because it seems like no one is watching,
because it seems like no one else is doing their work.
They are working.
Ask around. Tell your own story.
Suddenly they pop up like mushrooms,
all over the yard,
like fairy rings that fairly sparkle in the moonlight.

I always say, Be the web. Throw the lines from one to one to one.
Today I say, Be mycelium.
All those underground signals racing through the soil,
through the roots, through the fine hairs so tiny,
so tiny they are more energy than matter.

But that’s what matters.
That’s the heart of the matter.

We’re all doing our work, sending messages to each other,
invisible like energy,
like the sermons of the fungi
traveling those invisible underground highways.

Something is going to pop up.
I say, Something is going to pop up!

One morning you will wake up
and they’ll be there,
not just hiding underneath the leaves
with the shy toads and salamanders,
but spiced throughout the lawn
throughout the lawns
all over the world,
saying

We are here!
We are doing our work!

In the meantime, keep hoping,
keep praying,
keep making magic spells,
like the one my son made today
from dandelions and Virginia Creeper
to bring peace among the chickens,
and from them to their eggs and to us
and then to the whole world.

In the meantime,
keeping speaking the names of the captives.
Your words will set them free.

Keep singing and dancing,
praying and hoping.

Be the Underground Laureate of The Poetry of Waiting.
Be the One who Sings to the Dark Moon.
Be the Dancer in the Sullen Crowd.
Be the Painter of Speckled Eggs.

Oh, I have to say it, though the activists have said it a thousand times,
like Gandhi said it:

Be the change you wish to see.

Until the twining vines of the sacred squash
grow from your heaving heart,
until the song of the whale echoes through your deserts,
until the world is born afresh.
Until the world is born afresh.

This is the song. This is the poem.
This is the story that will heal the world.

Now.
Let’s get down to business.

Gratitude List:
1.  A pair of indigo buntings feeding in the dandelions before the rain.  (Perhaps some day I will write a gratitude list without the wing-folk.  Or perhaps not.)
2.  Ferns.  The ones I transplanted today from the barn wall to the house and walkway were taller than my children.  I think I may just keep adding and adding until the lawn is gone and the children can walk beneath their waving fronds like hobbits.
3.  The feeling of something being released in my spirit as the air pressure changes before rain.
4.  The way people care for your spirit when you ask for help.  That’s what I mean by asking around.  All that good work is being done, all that hopeful energy, all that intentionality, all that tremendous love waiting to spring into action, springing into action even before it is called upon.  Oh, I believe in angels, and some of them take human form.
5.  Conversations about the grandmothers that bring them into the present moment.

May we walk in beauty.  May we walk in love.

Please Don’t Read This Poem If Your Heart Is Feeling Tender

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 6 Comments

Gratitide List:
(first, in case you want to stop before reading the poem)
1.  Breathing in compassion.  Breathing out compassion.
2.  The helpers.
3.  A compliment: I will be the opposite of Cynicism
4.  The red open mouths of the tulips
5.  Getting to decide who I want to be.

I need a labyrinth today for going into the darkness,
and remembering to come back out.2011 June 227

I do not want to write this poem.
I need to write this poem.
That boy who died in the blast,
that one with large wide eyes like my sons,
I killed him.  Well, not him, exactly.
But that other one, the one
who happened to be where a Taliban terrorist
happened–oops–to not be
that day when the apricots were blooming
on the hillsides of Pakistan.
He was watching for his father to finish a race,
for his father to come in from planting his fields,
for his father to return from the next village.

I am so tired of all my murdering.  So tired of killing.
I am tired of this poem already, and I am only beginning.
Some days I see the blood everywhere:
on my hands, on my pillow, in the fields
where the spring onions are growing.

I pay my taxes, don’t you see?
That’s the whole story.

I have murdered my own children.
Well, not my sons exactly.
But sons.  I have killed so many.
And mothers.  So many.

Just like Mr. Obama has murdered his daughters.
He sent bombs from the sky
to kill them, to maim.
Well, not his own daughters exactly.
But daughters.  So many daughters.
And fathers.

Please stop me.
I don’t want not to write this poem.
I am so weary of killing,
of writing this poem, I mean.

I keep doing it, keep killing.
Keep sending my finches and bluebirds,
my tender little toad,
keep sending my taxes.
To kill people, children,
in faraway places.  My children.
Eyes so large, they want to take in the whole world.
“No more hurting people,” they all say.

I pay my taxes, don’t you see?
I need to stop writing this poem.
I am so weary of it, so very weary.

Yes, I know it was I.
I was the one who plotted and schemed,
who planted those bombs
like I plant my tomatoes.
Well, not those bombs exactly,
not those very bombs.
But bombs.  The ones raining death
from the blue sky to the hills
where the apricots are blooming,
raining down killing on children.

My own children.
Not my own.  Not mine.
But my children.

Please.  I need to stop writing this poem.

March Monday: The Way of Trees

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I was hoping that by giving myself a few days I would have something more polished to put up here, but this one feels like it needs a lot more work.  But the Mockingbird says to put it out there anyway. 

A teenaged boy drives his loud car
through the hollow at midnight
on his way from anger to angst.
Ribbons of red sparks catch
on the thorns of the locust trees.

Golden flowers of a woman’s hope
settle into the branches
of the towering sycamore
as she sits in its shade
and speaks her story.

The poplar, too, and the walnuts,
grasp the thoughts and dreams
of people passing through,
the green streamers of a new love,
the fierce orange flames of betrayal.

At night, the trees feed our dreams
with the colors they have harvested.
In the hollow, we dream with the trees,
our sleeping stories tangled
with the strands the trees have gathered.

 

March 3 Gratitude List:

1. Sunlight sparkling through whirling snow.
2. The way shadows hold the shapes of things. the way the snow stayed in the shadow of the poplar tree on the roof while all the rest melted away in the sun.
3. The quest and the questions. Yearning for the Ineffable Mystery.
4. Sea-tumbled, egg-shaped granite.
5. Stories. Love stories, family stories, personal stories.
May we walk in beauty.

From Angh to Ma

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 5 Comments

2012 November 144

This morning when we were playing with our gnomes, Joss decided that the gnome house was on fire, and he raced to get a group of gnomes to put it out.  “Red!  We need all the red gnomes!”  Exactly–to put out a fire, it takes lots of red gnomes.  Ellis chimed in, “And Minus!  We need the Minus Gnome!  Because a house with fire Minus the fire is just a house!”

Sometimes I sure would like to use some of Minus Gnome’s magic on me.  An anxious Beth Minus anxiety is just Beth.   Angst-ridden, anger-struck Beth Minus angst and anger?  Beth.  So that’s a nice little thing to do with meditation.  Of course as soon as I began to work with the idea, it hit me again that the angers and angsts are so often born of compassion and caring, and for those I have been seeking the services of Multiplication Gnome.  I need to untangle the compassion from its attendant anger at injustice, its partner anxiety at losses to those I love.

Wow.  Look at those words that I wanted to get rid of: Angst, Anxiety, Anger. . .I looked them up, along with their sister Anguish.  There at their root is angh-, which comes from the Indo-European language tree, and generally refers to distress of some sort.  That lovely vowel–ah–cut short in the back of the throat, closed up along with all hope of breath: Angh!

Fear, shame, anger, distress: what sound emerges when you truly feel them?  Angh!  Choke.

But still, that lovely vowel–ah–the first we say in so many languages: Mama, Abba, Baba, Dada, Nana, Papa.  The opposite of the choke, our family names, our names for the Ineffable Mystery: they release the breath in a tender sigh.  Ah.  There we go.

When I get really stuck in the Angh, I can dislodge that choke with a little Hahaha, a great belly laugh to force the air back through, a little spiritual CPR, so to speak.  Or skip down the street with a Tra-la-la, a little song to start up the rhythm of breathing again.  Or a little eureka, a bright discovery with a great Aha!

So the next time I wake up at three in the morning, suddenly filled with the dread of what is happening to this world that I have brought these light-filled children into, or choked with shame for some harshness I have spoken to their tender hearts, I think I will apply the Ah!, the Mama, the Ha! and see if that breath can be a lullaby to take my spirit back to sleep.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Moving out of Angh to Ma, Aha! and Hahaha!
2.  A shining piece of quartzite, white as ice, in the field by the henhouse.
3.  The things the gnomes teach us.
4.  A swept and dusted house (partly, anyway)
5.  Love, love, love: oh, you, and you and you!
May we walk in Beauty!