Gratitude List:
1. Something I had been hoping for has come to be.
2. The medical technology that saved a friend’s life this weekend.
3. Truth and Beauty. All you need to know, says John Keats.
4. Sleep
5. Jicama
May we walk in Beauty!
beauty
Witches Being Ducked
Gratitude List:
1. “When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” –Virginia Woolf (I had never read the first part of the quotation before. Thank you, Christine Lincoln!)
2. Christine Lincoln and the Witches Being Ducked. What a powerful Sisterhood. I have fallen in love with you all. Your magenta hair is a halo, an aura of Shine, matching the passionate person within. I am in awe of you.
3. All those images. I want to write them all here, but they don’t belong to me. I will carry them with me, deep, deep within. Such story-making.
4. The tenacity of morning glory. Over a week ago, Jon cut down the vine that was climbing up the dead sunflower in front of the house. The leaves on the vine that continue on up the balcony have long since withered, but the flowers were still blooming today!
5. The heartbeat of a moth. I held a small moth on my finger this morning, and I could feel its life force, its heartbeat, like a small motor quivering.
So much love.
Dear Bright Soul and Blessings (Two)
Dear Bright Soul:
Those demons and addictions do not define who you are.
They do not define you.
They only serve to sharpen your focus,
to teach you what is your heart’s desire.
In this place where you are recovering your spirit:
Don’t forget to breathe. All the way to your toes.
Put your roots deep and deeper still, into the earth.
Listen for the birds. Watch for wings.
Seek your waters. Drink lots and lots of water.
Cleansing water. Clear water.
Find your fire. Fan those coals.
Forgive yourself.
Over and over and over again.
Keep making art of your life.
Be safe. Be strong. Be well.
I love you. Oh so much.
Walk in Beauty!
Blessing from My Students (two)
The best summer is right around the corner.
We are not sure about tomorrow,
so take on the challenges of today.
You never know what might come the next day.
We all deserve the best the world has to offer us.
May the Lord bless us to graduate.
May the force be with you!
May you never have a bad hair day.
May you always have a strong hair game.
May things work out for you.
May you not procrastinate.
May you follow the plan God has for you.
May you be happy in whatever you do.
May you live with love in your life for others to see.
May you wake up every day with a smile.
I hope you’ll step out into the world
with your shoulders back and your head up,
not giving in to the world’s stressors.
May you enjoy life.
Don’t worry about time.
May you never step on a Lego.
May all your stress fade away
and may your dreams become life.
Happiness shall start your day,
and peace shall start your night.
Never say things are impossible,
because God only puts you through things
that are possible to get through.
May trouble neglect you.
May angels protect you,
and heaven accept you.
God says: “We are in love always
if we never give up.
We are tough always
if life is tough.
We are different always
if life is always wonderful.”
May life offer you not so much challenge
that it knocks you down, but just enough
to make you know you are strong.
May you laugh a lot with friends.
May you find happiness in the little things.
May you live without regret.
May you remember to be unafraid of questions.
May you learn to dance in the rain.
And may you remember the stories they told you,
and be brave enough to write your own.
Like a tulip take root
and unfold in the light,
baring your colors to the world
like a tiny little sunrise.
Dea Ex Machina
Dea Ex Machina
What we speak
we create.
Writing, we make
meaning into existence.
These words, cogs
and gears, shift
meaning to matter:
“Let there be. . .”
And there is.
And it is good.
Gratitude List:
1. The social lives of my children. Friends.
2. All that dies and decays so that new life may rise and be nourished
3. Chocolate oatmeal cake with caramel icing
4. How words shape meaning
5. Bees
May we walk in Beauty!
Complicit
I have been brooding today about Bill Cosby. Does it really matter whether a farmer/schoolteacher/mother/poet forms an opinion about the Bill Cosby rape story? I can just ignore it all, say it’s none of my business, and move on. It’s a mark, perhaps, of our shallow culture that we get wrapped up in the lives of celebrities to the point that uncovering a celebrity’s history of sexual predation would throw me, would cause me such a sense of intermingled fury and grief. Perhaps. Still, I think when someone is lively or delightful or thoughtful or beautiful in the wider culture in which we participate, we do feel a connection that goes beyond the merely mundane. I wept when violinist Isaac Stern died, when the poetic voice of Maya Angelou passed on, when Robin Williams left us with only memories of his laughter. So I supposed this response isn’t preposterous.
But there’s another piece of it that’s really bothering me today, and that is that when this recent part of the story broke this past week, I had a moment of deja vu: “Oh yeah. Wasn’t there something about this a few years ago?” As I began to read the account of Scott Simon’s questions and the stories of more and more women coming forward, I remembered that I had read earlier–and damning–accusations a few years ago. Why did I forget? Why did I put that out of mind and go on accepting Bill Cosby as America’s Mr. Funnyman? America’s Everydad, as Mark Morford called him. And that’s the thing that bothers me, because that’s a hallmark of rape culture–that the predator can so often minimize his crimes in the face of his power or celebrity or general congeniality that people either don’t believe the stories of his victims or they participate in the minimization, ignore the true implications of the accusations, and go on living as though nothing has happened, and the victim gets violated again, this time by the world’s refusal to acknowledge her story. Again, why does it matter what I think? Why should I bother to form an opinion on the matter? It troubles me, though, that something in me would have minimized the earlier stories, would have lived in denial that someone who brought such delight and wonder into our homes could be cavalierly destroying people’s lives. I feel complicit in the culture of denial. Sullied.
Gratitude List:
1. Hiking at Sam Lewis State Park. Every time I go there and climb on the rocks with the kids, I am more and more aware of how old I am getting, how clambering over the big rocks is getting harder and harder. Still, it’s worth the scramble up to the top of the rocks pile, to look through the trees to the River, to imagine what it must have been like for the First People who walked here to stand perhaps on the very same rocks looking out to the River.
2. Sharing the awe. Yesterday in my last class, I mentioned something about the morning’s sunrise, and suddenly three or four students were all talking at once, clamoring to tell their experiences of watching the sky that morning.
3. I don’t have to figure it all out. I don’t have to be perfect for every moment. I just need to be Present.
4. The last assignment in the course I am taking was to watch a video on renewing energy, on play and flow and working joyfully. And then to go play for an hour. I took that seriously, and we all spent most of the day with the Legos, sorting and building and playing. It is very satisfying to be assigned to play. My children loved that.
5. Colcannon
May we walk in Beauty!
Power
After nearly two full days without electricity, I want to make all five point on my Gratitude List something about the wonders of electricity and how grateful I am for running water and lights at the flip of a switch. Part of me, however, is a little embarrassed, a little chagrined with myself, for my dependence on this wonder of the modern world. Why is it so hard to manage? Of course, there’s always the anxiety over spoiled food–because we’re so dependent on electricity, we end up with quite a lot of time and money invested in the contents of our refrigerators. I have a friend who has made the transition away from the use of a refrigerator. I’m not entirely sure how exactly she manages it, but it does seem like a good choice. Refrigerators and freezers are real energy hogs.
But aside from the fridge, why does loss of power throw me for such a loop? I go to bed at dark, instead of staying up later than my body thinks I should. That’s not a bad thing. We carried buckets of water from the kiddie pool up to the bathroom so we could flush the toilet. We had filled the kiddie pool the day before the power died–how lucky was that? The buckets were heavy. And it took a lot of trips over the two days we were without power. So who am I to grumble about carrying water upstairs to my bathroom when women in many places of the world are walking often a mile or more, perhaps twice a day, likely with a baby on their backs or children at their ankles, to get the small amount of water that their family will use for the day.
So now the power is back on. I am back to wasting electricity and water. One of the privileges of living in a wealthy nation is that we take our waste for granted and forget that we are wasting. Perhaps I can use this experience to give me practice, to help me live more mindfully, with more awareness, so that I can be more conservative of Earth’s precious resources, so that next time the power goes out it will be a minor inconvenience rather than a serious frustration.
Gratitude List:
1. Those clouds in the evenings after the storms, bunches hanging low into the magenta of the sunset.
2. The way the shining, fresh-washed blue sky shone out between those clouds, like Mary’s robe.
3. The Ganesha cloud I saw yesterday morning, looking for all the world like the jolly elephant god riding the winds across the sky.
4. A day of really moving in to my classroom, beginning to feel myself in the space.
5. All the power available to me, in so many ways. May I not take it for granted.
May we walk in Beauty!
Grateful
Gratitude List:
1. Cracking black walnuts with my little buddy: “You be the nut cracker. I’ll be the nut eater.” And, “I’m going inside for a moment. Fill that bin up with the big pieces while I’m gone. You can have the little pieces.” Well, thank you very much.
2. Tidy work spaces. My studio room is again clean and tidy and ready to be my office. While I was cleaning, I found the beginnings of a children’s story that I started about 15 years ago–I might have to turn it into something now. And tidiness makes me want to work on projects. Plus, now I have a space to keep my supplies for teaching, and a quiet place to work.
3. The little red Japanese maple tree out back is almost big enough now for a child or two to hide beneath. Like the one at Grandma’s house, which is no more.
4. How one thing leads to another. This can be bad when the one thing is a negative thought that breeds another negative thought. But it can also be forcefully good when one finished project leads to another finished project, when one positive idea leads to another positive idea.
5. Summer morning breezes.
May we walk in Beauty!
Dreamscapes
When I dream of beaches, as I did last night, there is often a small mountain or cliff rising out of the ocean 50 or a hundred yards offshore which creates a small lagoon in the shallows between it and the beach. It’s not usually connected to the mainland–it’s its own formation rising out of the water, sort of like Haystack Rock in Oregon, but the shape and size change from dream to dream. Last night there was a resort built out over the water right up against it, and my mother and I were searching for a rare red hawk that was known to nest on the cliffs.
I have a city dream, too, and the city is often the same one. How is it in dreams that the fantastical is so recognizable? Yes, I know, Mr. Jung. These are the symbols of the things that happen deep in my subconscious all through the day, so of course I would recognize that those two vastly different places are part of the same city. Or that the labyrinthine series of rooms and staircases in another recurring dream are all part of my grandmother’s old rambling Victorian house.
There are those school dreams, where I am always late and running ragged through unfamiliar halls and stairways to find a class I might or might not have even signed up for. But there’s another school, too, a boarding school, deeper in my psyche, I think. Those school dreams are not about time and responsibility, but about finding people I might know. They come to me in clusters, like the anxiety school dreams–none for years, and then several in a month. They don’t feel anxious, though. More curious. They seem to be about loneliness and anticipation in equal measure.
There’s a German word, fernweh, that expresses the state of being homesick for a place where you have never been. Somehow I think it’s connected to these familiar/unfamiliar landscapes in my dreams. That dis-ease, that sense of unsettledness and longing, grabs me in these dreams of place. I want to be back there in that place, wandering and exploring, even though the place is nowhere (no physical where) that I have been in my waking life. Or maybe something in me longs to be back in those half-familiar, half-confusing places of childhood: the boarding school where I went in first grade, the old house we came to when we came to the US from Tanzania, the American schools with their confusing wings and hallways, the family trips to Mombasa or the New Jersey shore.
These places rise out of liminal times from my childhood, threshold spaces where I stood between one place and another, between home and school, between East Africa and the US. Perhaps that is why the beach dreams are so compelling, poised as they are between land and sea, with cliffs rising high out of the water. Change, with its odd mix of anxiety and anticipation, is inevitable, and in the midst of shift and transformation, the familiar/unfamiliar places return in dreams, offering a picture of the shift that is occurring.
Gratitude List:
1. Dream worlds
2. The way sunlight slants down the hill in the chill mornings
3. The manager at the bank yesterday who helped Ellis set up a savings account. She took him seriously, asked him questions, complimented him gently without talking down to him.
4. Lunch Bunch day–both kids at school until mid-afternoon!
5. Preparations, plans and anticipation.
May we walk in Beauty!
the trees obscure the water towers
I am entering a poem in a contest. Robert Lee Brewer, the host of the Poetic Asides blog, has initiated a contest using his book as the basis. Take one of his poems, and re-craft or respond or re-work it in some way. I love the conversational nature of this. It’s part of what I want poetry to be–conversation. I don’t know if it’s ethically kosher to type up his poem and put it here next to mine without having asked him first, especially since I don’t have the know-how to indent his lines the way he did. His is titled “the horizon is marked by water towers overlooking trees,” and the first line was “i’m through with you.” Mine is a response, and I have patterned it pretty exactly after his, though with a rather different tone.
the trees obscure the water towers
by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider
you may think you’re through
you with your stoic eyes
building elaborate fences
to escape my rabbit heart
last october and recite elegies
to fierce women pregnant with desire
but you’re not through with me
and my fine road to hell
paved with change and intention
and change has escaped your professorial eye
your old man’s disillusion
there’s so much we could’ve
but you can’t be really through
because tonight when I am out dancing
alone in fields under the moon
releasing the story of what was
you will come to me like leaves swirling
like the wild geese over the meadow
Gratitude List:
1. Poetic conversation
2. How ideas spark ideas, how creative thought fires creative thought
3. The peaceful faces of sleeping children
4. Awakening to birdsong (even if it gets me up way too early these days)
5. You. You hold me and the rest of us so beautifully in your bowl of heart. You teach me how to ask for help. You show me light through the brambles. You remind me to shoulder my ax, to notice the bright birds, to be careful on the path. Mostly, you remind me not to despair because the world cannot be on the brink of disaster with helpers like you in it.
May we walk in Beauty!
Where Wonder Enters the Soul
Here is a re-post of a poem I posted last April 14. I can’t believe that Oriole was here already in mid-April last year. But this may have just been me hoping for their return to the hollow. I don’t know.
Through the Door
These are the doorways. The passages
where wonder enters the soul on tiptoe.
Here is the speedwell,
up from the earth and smiling through snow.
The breath of the wind
on the ice-white wing of the gull.
Gull’s feather,
the beating heart of the honeybee,
and the black lace veil of the monarch.
The moment of hush before sunrise.
These are the liminal spaces.
The cocked arm and quiet face of a sleeping child.
The birth of a new idea.
The rousing of thought to action
and action to hope.
The hope that is borne
on the wings of the wren.
The way the weight of sadness
will slide away from your eyes
to make a little room for joy.
This is the breaking news of the heart.
First the aconite and speedwell,
then windflower and crocus.
These are the vanguard, the silent scouts.
For the purposes of this poem
I will be equating gratitude with wonder
and wonder with spring.
Wonder enters on tiptoe.
A flash of impossible orange
flickers high in the sycamore.
From the newest leaves
on the highest branch
comes a rustling, then a whistle
like calling a dog.
The oriole returns to summon the summer home.
And you–you may stand in the doorway
as long as you like.
Let that bright bird
open spaces for new joy
to fill the rooms
where sadness used to be.
That poem appears on page 18 of my new book.
Buy it here.
Gratitude List:
1. A wonderful job interview today at a place where I can happily imagine myself. I know better than to assume anything, but if I do not get the job, I am still extremely grateful for the chance to talk about things that matter to me, and for the boost that this has given to my confidence.
2. The way dreams work their way into daytime realities and help to navigate the emotional landscape.
3. Robin’s eggs. I have found three or four already this spring, and I can see where the careful pecking from inside opened them.
4. Sunlight through ferns.
5. The Birds of Fire. This morning, thinking I was seeing a pair of blackbirds squabbling in the poplar tree, I was amazed to see that they were actually the rusty glowing embers of the Orchard Oriole. A few minutes later, trying to find where the Baltimore Oriole was singing way at the top of the poplar, I suddenly saw that dancing orange flame of a bird, flitting from branch to branch. Then Beauty, she said, “But wait! There’s more!” And this evening after supper, she showed us the dazzle of a scarlet tanager burning away in the pear tree. And whose heart can encompass all that color–all that fire–in one day?
May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 