Tag: birth

Welcome, Spring!

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems

We are two days in to the season of Awakening, of Hatching, of Breaking Open. Two days in, through wind and sunshowers, through gusting rain and rushing cloud. Last year, on the second day of spring, a foot of snow fell in the hollow. This year, a seemingly endless drench of rain.

In the season of Brigid, back in February, we felt the Earth stirring, noticed the sap rising, watched pull toward birth and sprouting. Now we feel the promise, watch the winter aconite drop seeds for next years golden cups, and Persephone’s footprints–all shades of crocus–springing up across the lawns, uncontainable by flower beds.

What, in you, is hatching now? What thing, which has lain long and silently within you like a seed in the darkness, now seeks the sun and breezes? Hold that thing within you, like a seed. See the rough, hard casing which has protected it in its dreamstate. Breathe in the sun of spring, the chill air biting as it enters, and feel your lungs, your belly, your capacity, expand. Watch the casing of your dreamseed break open, and feel the roots push downward within you. Feel the sprout nosing upwards to the light and warmth of spring. What is being born within you? What new capacity? What new heartspace? What plan and purpose? Blessed be your seeds. Crack open. Seek the sun. Feel the rains of spring caress your growing roots.

Gratitude List:
1. The groundhog who is nosing around on the hillside behind the house
2. A day off, to ponder and paint, and catch up on the work
3. The fog of winter is lifting
4. Watching the children grow and become so gallantly themselves
5. The seeds which are sprouting

May we walk in Beauty!

Did You Not See?

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Musings, Poems

 

Wise Words for Wednesday:
“The only time incorrectly is not spelled incorrectly is when it is spelled incorrectly.”
***
“There is no such thing as one-sided generosity. Like one ecosystem, we are each at different times receiving or purging, growing or pruning. In those moments when you believe you aren’t receiving enough, consider what you most want to receive might be the thing you need to give away.” —Toko-pa Turner
***
“Long you sat and wept,
feeling the bars of the cage
that held your spirit fast,
until one bright May morning
when you raised your eyes
toward the sun and saw
how the bars were only shadows,
each one a pathway
showing you the way out.”
—Beth Weaver-Kreider
***
“Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.” —Henry David Thoreau
*
“Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Yet we so easily take this gift for granted. That is why so many spiritual traditions begin with thanksgiving, to remind us that for all our woes and worries, our existence itself is an unearned benefaction, which we could never of ourselves create.” —Joanna Macy
***
“What if the Creator is like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s God: “like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence”?

What if the Source of All Life inhabits both the dark and the light, heals with strange splendor as much as with sweet insight, is hermaphroditic and omnisexual?

What if the Source loves to give you riddles that push you past the boundaries of your understanding, forcing you to change the ways you think about everything?

What if, as Rusty Morrison speculates in “Poetry Flash,” “the sublime can only be glimpsed by pressing through fear’s boundary, beyond one’s previous conceptions of the beautiful”?

Close your eyes and imagine you can sense the presence of this tender, marvelous, difficult, entertaining intelligence.” —Rob Brezsny

This Is Your Birth

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts


I was reading the other day about the Scottish term caim, the circle of magic protection that you draw about yourself. I got to thinking about how I could use the idea as a drawing meditation, incorporating the protection prayer/spell into a mandala drawing. In a mandala, I always begin in the center, and then work outward, often referencing the energy points that I make note of in meditation. Here are a couple mandalas I drew today with the purpose of drawing a circle of protection about myself. The first was very enclosed, safe. Perhaps because the first established such secure boundaries, I was freer to whirl outward in the second.

Today’s Poetry prompt is to write a transformation poem. I am over-tired myself today, and am putting this tiny tanka here as something of a place-holder.

Begin in silence.
Draw your attention inward.
Feel the power grow
within your bones, your spirit.
Hold the image in your mind.

“If the Rhine, the Yellow, the Mississippi rivers are changed to poison, so too are the rivers in the trees, in the birds, and in the humans changed to poison, almost simultaneously. There is only one river on the planet Earth and it has multiple tributaries, many of which flow through the veins of sentient creatures.”
—Thomas Berry
*
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” —Kurt Vonnegut
*
“For a Star to be born,
there is one thing that must happen;
a nebula must collapse.
So collapse.
Crumble.
This is not your Destruction.
This is your birth.” —attributed to Noor Tagouri
*
“After the owl booms in the sycamore at dawn,
after your eyes adjust to the darkness,
after you stumble through the washing and dressing,
after the flicker of lights,
after the coffee,
after the tree pose,
after the quiet reading of O’Donohue’s poem,
you arrive with your heart at the blank page.”
—Beth Weaver-Kreider

Gratitude List:
1. Sunday Evening Hymn Sing at Freiman Stoltzfus’s gallery. Words and music and poetry and art all intermingle. Sound reverberates through the room, and you can almost feel the intensity with which people are concentrating on the sound. You’re held in a web of sacred sounds.
2. The stories of the morning. Welcoming new members of the tribe.
3. Autumn is stripping down to the essentials. Bare branches frame the sky. Clouds bustle across the blue. Leave skitter through the hollow.
4. Red beet eggs
5. Circles of protection

May we walk in Beauty!

We Bleed

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Poems

This may be premature, to post it while it still feels unformed, lacking structural soundness, but the point of a poem is to speak, and I feel the need to send this forth now. So here it is for this moment, perhaps still in process. A note on all the rivers: I asked friends of mine to tell me their rivers, hoping to hear the names of five or six from around the country. I added only a couple to the list that my friends gave me–people love their rivers.

We Bleed
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Indeed, Mr. President, we bleed.
There is blood coming out of our ears,
blood coming out of our noses,
blood coming out of our eyes,
blood coming out of our wherevers.
There is blood coming out of our faces,
our faces lifted long in anger,
our faces we have raised in rage.

We bleed, you see. We bleed.
We bleed, and yet we do not die.
Blood pours from our angry eyes.
Blood flows from our vaginas
(there’s the real word for it,
if you would care to know.
We’ll take it back, if you please–
and even if you don’t).

Women’s blood is our revolution.
We’re bleeding rivers of blood,
the blood of life and death–
menstrual blood, flowing
from our red tents, flowing
down the river valleys of this nation
to where you sulk and natter
in your great white house.

Your mother, too, gave her blood to these rivers,
when she gave you birth. And your wives
gave their blood to bring children to life.

Our blood flows down the wide and gentle Susquehanna,
down Columbia, Patuxent, down Delaware and Myakka,
down the Dan, the Mississippi, the Arkansas, and Conestoga,
down the Flat, the Tar, the Eno, down the gentle Shenandoah,
down the Snake, the Hoh, the Wabash, and the blue Atchafalaya.

Our menstrual blood is running in the deep, deep waters of the Deep,
down the Wissahickon, down the Schuylkill, Neuse, and Monoshone,
down the Cape Fear, down the Waccamaw, and down the Olentangy,
down Santa Ynez, French Broad, the Roanoke, Missouri,
down the Guadalupe, Anacostia, Blackwater, and the Pee Dee,
down Yadkin, Catawba, Nantahala, and Clatskanie.

Our blood courses down our grand unwalled Rio Grande,
down the Pullayup, Colorado, down Kanawha and Snohomish
down the fiery Cuyahoga, down the Brazos, and Skokomish,
down the Nooksack, the Nisqually, the Pecos, the Sammamish,
down Sciota, down Ohio, the Snoqualmie, and Duwamish.
We bleed down the chemical-drenched waters of the New,
and the Red, red as our blood, down the Elkhart and Potomac.

Even from Elsewhere, our rivers are everywhere:
the Moselle, the Mara, the Danube, the Afton, the Nile.
Our blood flows down rivers to the White House
where you tweet and twitter on your golden bed,
to the halls of power where dried up old white men,
withered husks with no blood of their own,
think that they decide our futures.

We write with our blood on the Earth.
We write, “Revolution!” We write, “Resist!”
We write, “Now you have struck the women,
you have struck a rock. Now you have entered a river.”

With our own blood, we write,
“We will not be trivialized.
nor delegitimized by insults
of an overgrown illbred bully-child.

Yes, we bleed, Mr. President, and our bleeding
will overwhelm your smug and violent ramblings.
We bleed from our faces, our vaginas, our wherevers,
and you will be washed in the rivers of our blood.
And justice will roll like the rivers we bleed.

<Please feel free to repost poem and/or image on social media, but credit me: Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider, July 2017. Please ask permission to publish beyond social media.>

Intentions

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

 
A couple photos from the goat-petting party at Sonya’s yesterday. I’m still pretty awkward with the whole selfie thing, but I do like that there’s a rainbow on my face.

Somehow, it feels more like spring because we’re having an actual thaw on this day before the Equinox. That last blast of winter stood right on the doorstep of spring, and this morning brought the sound of water dripping from the trees. When we peeked outside this morning, it looked like sun through a rain-shower, but the rain was falling from the trees and nowhere else. Thaw.

Oh, how I need a thaw! I need to get the juices flowing, get the good mojo moving, get the fierce and raw energies of the season swinging brilliantly into the sunlight. Can you feel the balance approaching?

What is being born in you now? What new thing arises, like the little flowers that are suddenly free of their snowy encumbrance to pop into the sun?

Was it only three years ago that I put a little prayer bundle out into the elements on Spring Equinox, setting my intentions to get a job within the next six weeks?  It was a reminder for me to keep my head and my heart in the process of the job search. And within a couple weeks, my friend Ryan suggested I contact a certain school. Now I work there, and my life is full–so full–and rich in ways I could not have imagined.

I have new intentions this year, new goals for where I want to go with the things that I am writing. And so tomorrow I will place another bundle out into the elements, with the prayerful intention to keep my head and my heart in the process of writing and submitting work for publication.

Gratitude List:
1. Balance
2. Thaw
3. Intention
4. Energy
5. Birth

May we walk in Beauty!

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

DSCN9065
Hello, Speedwell!  Happy Spring to you, too!
Speedwell, tiny bright eye of spring.  Blue of sky, shot through with strands of deep blue threads of Mary’s robe.
Yesterday I saw a patch of dead nettle, such a bright purple against the dry golden grasses and the mud of the field.
And the shaggy forsythia is pushing out yellow blossoms.

May spring come to your spirit,
first the moment of exquisite balance,
when your night and your day have equal play within you.
Then the riot of song in the mornings,
calling you out and outward,
warmth returning to your bones
and sunlight on your hair,
rain that soaks the ground around you,
nourishing your roots.

Look around:
What is ready to hatch?
What is coming to birth in your spirit?
How will the season nurture this new thing
within you?

Gratitude List:
1. Balance
2. Rebirth
3. Transformation
4. Intention
5. Joy

May we walk in Beauty!

Through the Same Door

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Poems

despise not small things

Day 29 Poem-A-Day Prompt: Write a Birth Poem.

We all came in through the same door.
The young ones just beginning to learn
what their bodies can do,
the new crones bidding the blood farewell.

And all those rounding bellies.
There were more of them than any of the others.

I sensed the wolf the moment I walked in the door.
I almost looked around to see her,
before I realized the shadow was my own.

Of course.

I stepped across the carpet
carefully toward the desk,
past the pair who sat together
with heads bowed in wonder
over the full bowl of her womb,
willing them not to look at me
lest they sense the blood on me,
lest some contagion contaminate
their innocent joy,
lest the wolf turn her face their way.

Me, I had walked this way before
with my strange and dark companion,
carrying my empty bowl.
I was only there for confirmation
this time.   I knew what I had come to hear,
knew how to follow this particular path of grief.

Walking out again, afterward,
the fresh-faced ones were still there,
and the wolf and I again took pains
not to taint them with our shadow.

We left by the same door
and closed it quietly behind us.