beauty

Only Love Will Guide You

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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There is no other answer.
Not purity.
Not righteousness.
Not power.
Not rules.

No book or map.
No speaker.
No leader.
No thing you can buy.
No magic elixir.

Only love will guide you in the end.

Gratitude List:
1. (What do you hear?) Wren calling, coffee bubbling, cat purring, child playing with gnomes
2. (What do you see?) Green, rain, orange fur, deep shadow, reflections
3. (What do you smell?) Clean clear air, earth after rain, coffee
4. (What do you feel?) Chill on my skin, dampness of air, morning aches, tickle in my nose
5. (What do you remember?) Birds in the rain, nap with a warm cat, laughing children, chocolate bar

For all these I am grateful.  May we walk in Beauty!

Following Your Task

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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A little poem after reflecting on Mary Oliver (“You do not have to be good.”) and Caitlyn Siehl (“[Being pretty] is not your job.”).  This is an interesting draft to begin, but I definitely want to craft this one and perfect it.

When you crossed the threshold
into the indigo shadows of the Old One’s hut,
she took hold of you with her bony claw
and gave you three impossible tasks.

But none of them were beauty.
None of them were goodness.
She does not demand of you
what your stepfamily expects,
out there beyond the forest’s reach,
in their comfortable cottage
covered with vines and flowers.

The crone can see that your path leads
away from pleasantries and loveliness.
She knows the world will demand your strength,
the full force of your determination.
She knows that sometimes the most arduous task
is to turn your face away from the mirror
the others have given you,
the one in which you see
what they want you to see.

Seek the needle in the haystack,
catch the wind in a bag,
find the golden flower that grows
on the farthest mountains
beyond the lands of comfort.

When you return,
the mirror will be truly yours,
to see yourself as only you can see.
Then you will sit in the quiet shadows
waiting for a young one to coming humming
along the forest path to ask you for fire.

Gratitude List:
1. Students performing Shakespeare.  I knew they could manage the comedies with flair and finesse, but I had no idea they could do Julius Caesar with such incredible power.  A gender-fluid cast.  Brutus stayed male, but Caesar and Antony were female.  As always, they made it utterly accessible.  This could definitely be an award-winning performance.
2. One of the little jobs I get to volunteer for at school is Apple Pie Judge (I came back to this to capitalize it).  And the teacher in charge actually thanked ME for participating.  Heh.  No, that was all my pleasure, thank you.  These kids can bake a mean apple pie.  And it’s just one more way for students to get recognition for their abilities that go beyond the traditional boundaries of sports or music or academics.  Those were some fine pies.
3. Remembering this: You don’t do it all at once–you go step by step by step.
4. The baby green on the sycamore and poplar trees.
5. Today is Wrightsville’s Poem in Your Pocket Day.  I am going to rush home from school so I can go with the family around the town so the boys can read their chosen poems at participating businesses.

May we walk in Beauty!

Camels on the Brain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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My brain is all a-fuzz this morning.  It wants to keep attaching itself to that image from my dream last night, the one that kept me sleeping through the four o’clock hour (finally), of a camel lying in the bed of a truck, wearing sunglasses.  But I don’t have that manic inner edge on this sleepy morning that would enable me to make such a surreal poem.  Why don’t you try that one?  (Edit: Okay, so I did manage a little of that poem down below.)

Tomorrow is National Poem in Your Pocket Day, though your local town may have chosen a different day, so look it up.  Wrightsville is doing it on April 29.  But if you’re at my school, you need to have your poem ready to read to me tomorrow.  I will bring the chocolate.

I have five minutes for this poem:

The ghost of a dream
will inhabit the foggy
pathways of my brain
for ages.
I will spend today
driving to Kabul
behind a camel
or lurking in the hallways
of a grand hotel,
searching for lost memories.

Gratitude List:
1. Sleeping through four o’clock.  This is a big deal, and I am grateful, no matter how strange the dreams that accompanied that sleep.
2. Anticipating oriole.  Waiting for the orange flash and the whistle in the treetops.  Listen, listen and watch.
3. Inspiration.  Okay, it’s inspiration about how to introduce adjective clauses to the freshmen, but when that’s the soup you swim in, it’s pretty exciting to get a flash of inspiration.
4. Student poetry.  Yesterday the Creative Writers read their poetry out loud in class.  Actually, only a handful were brave enough to do it, but the ones that came out were wonderful, and at one point after one student had read her poem, I saw another student start to scribble furiously on his notebook.  Moments later, he raised his hand to read–he had just written a poem inspired by her poem.  And hers had been inspired by Robert Frost, so we left our own trails in those yellow woods.
5. Compassion.  How heart reaches to heart.  How a moment can suddenly turn to caring, to holding another.  I want to be more and more mindful of how a word or a gesture or a glance can turn a moment among people to an inner watchfulness, a heightened awareness of each others’ tender souls.

May we walk in Beauty!

On Beauty and Love

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I have been thinking about how to help my students develop confidence in their own strength, to help nurture a sense of self-worth that will help to protect them.  I have noticed how the beauty trap persists for young women, the powerful desire to be seen by the eyes of others (especially boys) as beautiful, and how this feed into their own sense of their own worthiness or unworthiness to be loved.  This poem needs lots of organizing and more thought to it, but it will hold the place for now.

Don’t be beautiful.
Be edgy.  Be friendly. Be bold.
Be strong. Be quirky. Be wild.
Don’t be mild.
Be fierce.  Be thoughtful. Be brave.
Be gracious. Be loving. Be You.
Don’t be cute.
Be happy. Be tender. Be funny.
Be raw. Be powerful. Be real.

Gratitude:
I think I will begin doing one item or one paragraph for a little while.  I am feeling an inner shift these days, a readiness for something new.
I am grateful for love: Love wins.  Follow where the love goes.  That’s where the answers are.

May we walk in Beauty!

What is Attention, but Love?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I wrote this after reading Mary Oliver’s poem, “Of Love.”

It’s a process repeated everywhere you look:
the way the beech tree catches and holds the wind in her hair,
the way the meadow grasses gather around the tentative feet of the fox,
the way the hands of the clay hold and guide the flow of waters.

What is attention, but a kind of loving?
Living in awareness is a constant tumble into loves.
The way your eyes twinkle when you tell a story.
The way your listening hands reach outward.
The way a new thought is born in your eyes.
The hearty abandon of your laughter,
the caress of your voice,
the shine that surrounds you.

Gratitude List:
1. The way a tenor line can turn a song from sweet to sublime.
2. The lessons we are here to learn, even when they are tough.  I am finding that I need to step back from trying to protect my children from the pains and problems of life, so they are more free to learn from the things that approach them.  This is hard, hard work, and it is a lesson of my own.
3. The buffy fluff of that mockingbird hunched out there in the brambles.
4. The sense of smell.  Most subtle of senses, I think.  I sometimes realize that I have been reacting to a scent even before I am consciously aware of it.  Like a dream, where you don’t always grasp what is happening until just after it has happened.
5. Persephone rises.  She always does.  Her purple footprints are singing aves in the flowerbeds.

May we walk in Beauty!

Being a Body

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I think it is time for me to start planning my retreat to the monastery when school ends this spring.  I want to go sit under the boughs of the cathedral tree again.

Gratitude List:
1. Gulls by the hundreds flying in the dawn across the River
2. Watching the freshmen really take up the work of deep discussion
3. How one foot just goes in front of the other.  Then the next one.
4. The sense of sight.  As my eyes age, I am more and more keenly aware of how appreciate clear vision.
5. Being in a body.  Incarnation.  There is so much to learn in this body, and I spend entirely too much time wishing it were different in some way, like I just did by wishing that my eyes weren’t aging quite so quickly.  And every moment, every itch, every ache, every noticing, is a chance to learn something about the interaction of spirit and matter.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Holiness of Desire

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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(I’m not sure whether this is quite finished, or whether it says exactly what I want it to say.  But this is my writing space, whether a piece is finished or in process, and this is where I leave this one this morning.)

Sometimes the body forgets
how desire is holy,
how the craving, the longing–

for a place that recedes
into the mists of memory,
or the comfort of a restful bed,
for touch, for the answer
to the body’s sweet secret yearnings,
for the way the lungs passionately
embrace the air that enters–

all is echo of the larger ache,
the primal urge for re-union
with the Source of all,
Godself urging us inward
to the primal dance
like the dance
at the center of the atom,
whirling particles held
within each other’s orbit.

Gratitude List:
1. The assembly that celebrated Lunar New Year on Monday.  Dragons, dancers and tai kwon do demonstrations.  I would like to learn to feel that sort of strength and focus in my own body.
2. Two-hour delay.  The resultant daily schedule is a little frenzied for me, but I am happy for the extra time here this morning.
3. Good fair-trade coffee
4. All that draws me onward and inward
5. Following through with the intentions

May we walk in Beauty!

Doing it Myself

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Gratitude List:
1. With a little coaching from a colleague, a helpful Youtube video, and the assistance of my 9yo IT guy, I fixed the wonky Chromebook screen.  Without sending it off to an expert.  I am more than just a little bit proud of myself. . .
2. Online geography quizzes.  It’s never too late for an old dog to learn a little more about the world she lives in.
3. You and I both woke up this morning.  Isn’t that grand?
4. The way the sun shines on the snow, blindingly.
5. Small folks up and busy right away, making things, humming, chattering happily.  (This is one of those gratitudes that can give a wrong impression if you read it as a statement of always-is.  We do have many mornings like this, but there are equal numbers of mornings when there is whining and fussing and complaining, so the gratitude has to do with recognizing the balance moments when they come and not focusing on the frustration of the out-of-balance moments.) {Okay, so in the ten minutes since I wrote this, there has been some more squabbling.  Still, I am holding out for pleasantness this morning.}

May we walk in Beauty!  May we Shine.

Anything is Possible

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Another of Ellis’s funky photos.  This may actually be me, caught in a swirl, against the barn, against the sky.


when the dream has shifted,
sifted away into the mist

will you still find yourself
moored to the rocks of the day

or off in some alternate realm
where anything is possible?

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday’s message: “You are a beloved, precious child of God.”  Pass it on.
2. Chili lunch yesterday, thanks to the Junior Youth.  And there was a delicious vegetarian option.  And Cholulu Chipotle hot sauce.  And both cornbread and rice.  I’m suddenly feeling hungry again.
3. Outlining my classes.  I love the feel of possibility, the sense of organization at the beginning.  I am vowing to hold onto that careful organization more solidly throughout this semester.
4. Staff Development Day.  Sometimes I hate meetings, but Staff Development Day is a school day when I don’t have to be responsible to prepare anything for anyone else.  I can look forward to receiving all day.  I love the bustle of the full group of teachers from all the campuses.
5. Language.  What an amazing gift language is, the web of words that we build between us, to channel ideas and thoughts and dreams and feelings between us, bridging the separate worlds of our bodies.

May we walk in Beauty!

Grace and Balance and Beauty

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Christmas morning dewdrops on a birch tree.

My dreams have been disturbed the last two nights, sleeping in other rooms, other beds.  Last night, I was living by myself in an apartment, and I was moving out, turning over the lease to someone else.  I realized that I was going to have nowhere to live, nowhere to sleep.  I thought of all the many people in the town that I knew, and tried to think of who to call to ask for a place to stay, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Even when I was talking to people I knew, I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Hey!  Could I stay at your house for a couple days?”  I told myself it was because I am an introvert, but I knew that it is because I couldn’t find the humility.  One of my fatal flaws, I think, is the inability to ask for help when I really need it.

Gratitude List:
1. Grace and balance.  (I have been watching my 9-year-old learn to ride his new ripstick.)
2. Beauty all around.  (I have been taking walks with my 6-year-old, looking for interesting things to photograph.)
3. A misty Christmas Day.
4. Fun playing games with the family.  (3-person chess is exhilarating!  And Ticket to Ride is stressful.)
5. You.  Your stories.  The music you make.  The powerful thoughts you put into the world.  The beauty and grace that you notice and share.  The way you are real.

So much love!