birthday

The Happy Heretic Hits 56

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

But, first things first: My book is born!

Ten years ago, I ventured into the world of self-publishing. I created my own little imprint called Skunk Holler Poetryworks (we live in a dip between the arms of Pisgah Ridge casually known as Skunk Hollow). Then I published a book of Poetry called The Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird. It’s a mouthful of a name, which is often the burden of first children. A year later, Skunk Holler Poetryworks published a second volume: Holding the Bowl of the Heart. Then I dithered. The company I use to publish the books can print a single copy or dozens, as demand requires. That means no up-front capital for me unless I buy a batch of author copies. The downside of this marvelous situation is that the company is an Amazon company, and I feel like I am working within the belly of the beast. So for years, I just didn’t publish anything. I haven’t been able to find another company with the incredibly user-friendly design system, the marketing potential, and the one-off printing. So I didn’t publish for almost a decade.

But then last year happened. I became The Heretic. I wrote some of my best poems. And The Heretic’s Book of Prayer was born. I wanted to publish it, but I am essentially an unknown poet, and I like having total control of everything from font to layout to organization to cover design, so I jumped back into the belly of the beast.

This is definitely my best book so far. The poems are stronger and more confident. The organization tells a story that I want to tell. The focus is crisper. And in the sorting and editing of poems, I actually found that I have enough poems for a second book, possibly titled Seasons of the Witch.

You can buy The Heretic’s Book of Prayer on Amazon. My dream is to eventually set up a page on The Mockingbird Chronicles website where you can order all of my books directly from me, but I am not that smart yet. I’ll need some tutoring to manage it, and my IT Guy is leaving for college in two weeks.

Shameless ad: Buy my book, please!

And. It’s my birthday! I’m turning 56. I’ve done my yearly research, and there doesn’t appear to be anything mathematically interesting about the number 56. There’s something about it being the sum of the first six triangular numbers, making it a tetrahedral number, so there’s that.

The angel number and numerology people all seem to agree that 56 is a number of transformation and change. I’ll take that! As I have been praying along with the current Way of the Rose Novena, I have been asking for focus and determination, and somehow that seems to have translated to the focus I needed to get this book done. Also, I recently asked my doctor how I can deal with the exhaustion and aches. She suggested, I start eating a careful Mediterranean diet, and exercising more. Exercise has always been my bugaboo, but then I thought about the fact that I am already spending 30-40 minutes a day saying my rosary–What if I would walk during that time? So I’ve added a brisk walk every day. In a week and a half, I am feeling a change. So maybe the transformative aspect of 56 can help me continue to develop greater health in the coming year.

I asked if I could write the blurb about the saint for today on The Way of the Rose novena page. I chose St. Harriet Tubman. You should be able to read it by clicking here.

Gratitude List:
1. How people circle ’round to protect the vulnerable.
2. Examples of people who offered their lives for justice for others.
3. Goldfinches along the roads these days, how they fly up twittering so joyfully.
4. The little fairy birds that flitted ahead of me on my walk today. I think they must be field sparrows, but in the dusk they looked tiny and fairy-like.
5. Aging. Yes, really. Despite the aches and the hormone shifts and the new and edgy anxieties. I love how we change and ripen, how our faces begin to show the art of our living. Birthdays remind me that I am always on the turning wheel, and what a glorious ride it can be!

May we walk ever in Beauty!

“Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.”
― Tom Robbins

Even
after
all this time
the sun never says to the earth,

“You owe me.”

Look
what happens
with a love like that —

It lights the whole
world.
—Hafiz

“The Seven of Pentacles”
by Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

“Life…is a wonder. It is a sky laden with clouds of contradictions.” —Naguib Mahfouz

“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” —Coco Chanel

“By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.” —Teilhard de Chardin

“Soul of my soul … be water in this now-river.” —Rumi

“You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe, and your name is Love.” —Rumi

“There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even human, has achieved, in the centre of one’s sphere, what the bee has achieved on her own: and if intelligence from another world were to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation, I would offer the humble comb of honey.” —Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life Of The Bee, 1924

“If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.” —Rumi

“In these cataclysmic times, living in what Michael Meade calls the ‘slow apocalypse,’ despair can be dangerously seductive. Our lives may feel inadequate to the terrible momentum of our times, but it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief.

“While despair traps us in the bog of despondency, grief carries us into life. Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty.

“If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings, and slip the poetry between our words.

“Rumi says, “All medicine wants is pain to cure.” And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude, our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation that medicine might reach through and towards us.” —Toko-pa Turner

Fifty-Five

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Today is my birthday. I’ve been here 55 years now (<–link),
beginning at a hospital in Nairobi, Kenya.
To Shirati, Tanzania, when I was ten days old, where I met my father for the first time.
To York PA, back to Shirati, to Philippi WV, to Ephrata PA, and then to the messy all-over-the-placeness of young adulthood, and now back in York County, PA, for 20 years.

Here are some 55 Facts and Notes:
The number given to asteroid Pandora is #55. I am Pandora’s progeny–I can never leave a box unopened.

The number 55 is apparently a lucky number for the astrological sign of Leo. Roar!

In Mathematics:

  • 55 is the product of the smallest sexy prime pair (although I do not know what this means, I too am small, and sexy, and in my prime.)
  • 55 is the largest triangular number in the Fibonacci sequence (again, I know not what this means, but I am large, and I like triangles.)

The element Caesium has the number 55 on the periodic table. According to Wikipedia, Caesium is “a soft, silvery-golden alkali metal with a melting point of 28.5 °C (83.3 °F), which makes it one of only five elemental metals that are liquid at or near room temperature.”

In Numerological terms, my soul number is 5 (add the digits in 8.10.1967, and keep adding digits together until you get a single digit), so 55 (five and five) feels like a good strong year for me. In the tarot, the fifth major arcanum card is The Hierophant, which symbolizes the passing on of knowledge and traditions—I like to think of that as the Teacher. So I am going to take that as my personal charge for the coming year and double my efforts to be an effective and compassionate teacher.

The number 5 breaks out of the stable solidity of the 4, offering new opportunities for growth, but also the potential for conflict and instability. I go into this double five year with my life shaken and stirred (boy howdy!), ready to find my new balance, eager to grow and change and Become more me.

Gratitude List:
1. My father’s relative health. July was a difficult month for our family. I am reminded to treasure every moment with the people I love.
2. Walking with a good friend on woodsy trails this morning: Hackberry trees, smell of fox (pervasive in those woods), teasel, wild mugwort, wild hibiscus, the Little Conestoga Creek, and dogbane. Mostly: good, easy conversation and companionship.
3. Monarchs. I know they’re heading onto the Endangered Species List. Grateful to see so many here where we live.
4. Scent of fox is a reminder of the story of Foxwoman, told by Martin Shaw. Reminder to know myself, to know my wildness, to trust my dreamingself.
5. So many delicious birthday blessings! I feel delight and strength and hope, and such a connection with so many people whom I have known, both in person and online. So much love!
May we walk in Beauty!

Even
after
all this time
the sun never says to the earth,

“You owe me.”

Look
what happens
with a love like that —

It lights the whole
world.
—Hafiz

“The Seven of Pentacles”
by Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

“Life…is a wonder. It is a sky laden with clouds of contradictions.” —Naguib Mahfouz

“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” —Coco Chanel

“By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.” —Teilhard de Chardin

“Soul of my soul … be water in this now-river.” —Rumi

“You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe, and your name is Love.” —Rumi

“There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even human, has achieved, in the centre of one’s sphere, what the bee has achieved on her own: and if intelligence from another world were to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation, I would offer the humble comb of honey.” —Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life Of The Bee, 1924

“It’s not only those who have succumbed to hate who have to change. We need to learn to love bigger, to bring them back.” —Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.” —Rumi

“In these cataclysmic times, living in what Michael Meade calls the ‘slow apocalypse,’ despair can be dangerously seductive. Our lives may feel inadequate to the terrible momentum of our times, but it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief.

“While despair traps us in the bog of despondency, grief carries us into life. Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty.

“If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings, and slip the poetry between our words.

“Rumi says, “All medicine wants is pain to cure.” And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude, our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation that medicine might reach through and towards us.” —Toko-pa Turner

In the Doorway of Another Year

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

My year has turned again to my starting day. Here I am, marking the end of year 54 and the beginning of year 55.

I always like to do the numerology assessment of my birthday. Like my dreamwork at the turning of the year from December to January, looking at the meanings in my numbers gives me something to contemplate and focus on in my inner work for the coming season.

One way to look at the numbers is to take the current date and reduce it numerologically: 8+10+2021 = 14 = 5. It’s a pretty straightforward reduction: You add the digits in each number together, and then add them all together. This is a 14 year for me. In the tarot major arcana, the 14 is Temperance. I can get behind that as a contemplation for the coming year.
How can I create balance in my life?
How can I keep one foot on land (practical) and one in the water (emotional/spiritual)?
How can I create and maintain healthy flow in my life?

The 14 reduces further to 5, which is my Life Number. This is the number of the Hierophant, the keeper/teacher of the mysteries. The hierophant passes on wisdom and knowledge. This feels doubly significant to me this year as I enter my 55th year.
How am I passing on the knowledge and wisdom I have gained from my mentors and teachers?
How can I be more deliberate about when to speak and when to keep silent?
What is the body of wisdom that I have to share?

Affinity Numerology dot com tells me that “54 tends to follow whim. It has an urge to be adventurous, yet is pragmatic and tries to focus and be reliable. . .The essence of the number 54 is continually focused on making life better for people. It isn’t always effective, as it also has an inner urge to express its sense of personal freedom.”

It also tells me that “54 has little, if any, judgement of lifestyles, societal expectations, religious beliefs, and political practices — in fact, it revels in the first-hand experience of a wide variety of cultures.” Unfortunately I have failed in that realm this year. Ugh. I have become the judgiest version ever of myself. I blame Covid and its attendant rage. Sigh. Maybe I can incorporate some of that into year 55.

55, according to the same site, suggests I might extend the adventuresomeness of the 54, to deepen the adventures, to claim my independence. I like that vision. So I sit in the space between reliability and independence, with adventure as the thread that ties them together.

Whatever meaning I choose to take from my numbers, the fact is that I have reached the milestone of another year. My hair is definitely grayer. My aches and pains are cycling through with more intensity. I made it through a bout of Covid, through Jon’s job change, through masked teaching and Zoom/hybrid classes, through the long languish of the pandemic. A year ago, I was pretty certain that this birthday would see us out the other side of the pandemic, yet here we are. I’ll be masked again this fall to teach. The numbers in both my counties (Lancaster and York) continue to rise.
I am, by turns: angry, tired, despairing, eye-rollingly-weary.
I have a low tolerance for people who will neither get the vaccine nor mask up.
I am experiencing a dearth of empathy for people who don’t see this the way I do–I consider this to be a moral failing on my part, but I don’t know if it’s something I can control.
I am really anxious about the rising cases in children.

Still, it’s a new year for me, a chance for a reset, with a chance to be better at balance, at flow, and at choosing how to pass along what wisdom I have gained. It’s a season for adventure, in whatever way I can grasp hold of that.

And there’s this:

While I was gazing at this perfect double rainbow, a branching flash of lightning snaked across half the sky. Moments later, a hummingbird flitted out of the willow tree to the left, and began dancing between raindrops right in front of the rainbow.

Gratitude List:
1. Last night, we had friends over for a farewell party for some of our beloveds who are returning to East Africa after several weeks in the US. We sat at picnic tables in the lawn with a cool breeze blowing through the hollow, and walnut leaves like fairy leaves flashing golden as they drifted down around us. Bittersweet, to say goodbye and to be among people I treasure so deeply.
2. The house is pretty clean. I’m not going to go down the shame-vortex in order to get to this, but needless to say, things had not been very clean for some time. Now they are, and I feel my spirits lifted. We should have company once a month.
3. Also bittersweet, today was my last day at Radiance for the summer. It’s sad to leave, but I can’t be sad when I reflect on the gift of being able to work there, surrounded by good and shiny souls, good smells, and so much to learn. Grateful for the connection to Sarah and Laura, to Chris (and Natasha, although our paths didn’t cross this summer). Grateful for herbs and textures and scents and magic, for all that reconnects me to the Divine Feminine.
4. Sensible shoes. Comfortable, sensible shoes. When my feet feel good, my body feels good.
5. Rain. We just got a thunder-boomer in the holler. The air sparkles.

May we walk in Beauty!

Tuesday’s Quotes (long, but hey, it’s my birthday):
“There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even human, has achieved, in the centre of one’s sphere, what the bee has achieved on her own: and if intelligence from another world were to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation, I would offer the humble comb of honey.” —Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life Of The Bee, 1924

“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” —Coco Chanel

“If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.” —Rumi

“By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.” —Teilhard de Chardin

Even
after
all this time
the sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”
Look
what happens
with a love like that —
It lights the whole
world.
—Hafiz

“The Seven of Pentacles”
by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

“In these cataclysmic times, living in what Michael Meade calls the ‘slow apocalypse,’ despair can be dangerously seductive. Our lives may feel inadequate to the terrible momentum of our times, but it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief.
“While despair traps us in the bog of despondency, grief carries us into life. Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty.
“If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings, and slip the poetry between our words.
“Rumi says, “All medicine wants is pain to cure.” And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude, our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation that medicine might reach through and towards us.” —Toko-pa Turner

Another Year

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 5 Comments
Frosted

Fifty-Two wasn’t a bad year, although it had a pandemic in it. It has also had kittens, so there’s something good to add to the stew. Overall, it was a learning year. All the most joyful moments of this past half of a year have been in the context of knowing how fragile life is. Still, the terrible has not outweighed the abundant and joyful. There was a hummingbird a couple days ago, and there’s been so much poetry. The aforementioned kittens. Time with my family–lots of that! Time with my wider circles of beloveds–not as much or as huggy as I could wish for, but sweet and precious.

Fifty-Two is twice Twenty-Six, so I could say it was a double-marathon year, and this second half has been one long, hilly race, that’s for certain.

Today I enter Fifty-Three. I always have to say it: Because of the way we count birthdays, I am actually entering my Fifty-Fourth year. I get to wear the Fifty-Three, because we label our birthdays by how many we have accomplished, and in a pandemic year, there’s a bit of buzzy edge to that sense of accomplishment. In a pandemic year, reaching a birthday is perhaps something of an accomplishment.

So, at Fifty-Three, I am entering my prime, divisible only by myself and One.

If I reduce my birthday, according to the standard numerological reduction–by adding the month (8) to the day (10) to the year (2020)–this is a Thirteen year for me, a Death year, which sounds terrifying unless you consider the deep implications that Death represents not only the ending, but the preparation for a new beginning. It’s about Big Transformation. Perhaps the losses and grievings of this pandemic time can help me to remove old skins that hold me back from more transformative growth.

Thirteen is also a number the represents the deep female knowledge and intuitive processes that have been driven underground through the centuries, through witch hunts and religious persecutions and patriarchal oppressions. Perhaps this is a year that I can sink into trusting my deep inner knowledge, and learn to more fully trust my instincts, to more fully take up the Work.

Whatever meaning we attach to numbers, birthdays offer the invitation to introspection, to taking stock of what has been, and envisioning what might be. This has been a difficult and beautiful year, full of pain, full of growth, with lots of small but deep joys. I’m grateful to have walked it with so many beautiful hearts.

(Yesterday, I felt like I wanted to do something sort of big in order to mark the end of Fifty-Two. I wanted to accomplish something in the margins of another year. So I pushed myself to ride further than I ever have, and went the whole distance from Columbia to the Riverfront Park Pavilion seven miles away, and then back to Columbia, fourteen miles total. I know I attempted a long bike ride once when I was a teenager, with lots of stops to rest, and lots of complaining. I don’t think I have ever before ridden fourteen miles without stopping. That might not seem significant to most people, but for someone with my sedentary nature, it was a milestone. I am proud of myself.)

Today’s Birthdays:
Snoopy
Hieronymus Praetorius (composer)
Herbert Hoover
Hilda Doolittle (the poet H.D.)
Jimmy Dean
Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull!)
Mark Doty (poet and writer)
Antonio Banderas
Riddick Bowe (boxer, born in 1967)
and me (also 1967)

Seems like a good cohort. Nobody too far out there, but all steady in their work.

Birthday Gratitude List:
1. A year with kittens in it.
2. A year with you and you and you in it.
3. A year that has included learning to push myself beyond my basic comfort zone, in many areas.
4. So much to reflect on and process, in order to grow.
5. So much to envision and plan, and hope for.

May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!

“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” —Coco Chanel

“By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.” —Teilhard de Chardin

“Soul of my soul … be water in this now-river.” —attr. to Rumi

“You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe, and your name is Love.” —attr. to Rumi

“There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even human, has achieved, in the centre of one’s sphere, what the bee has achieved on her own: and if intelligence from another world were to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation, I would offer the humble comb of honey.” —Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life Of The Bee, 1924

“It’s not only those who have succumbed to hate who have to change. We need to learn to love bigger, to bring them back.” —Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.” —atrr. to Rumi

“In these cataclysmic times, living in what Michael Meade calls the ‘slow apocalypse,’ despair can be dangerously seductive. Our lives may feel inadequate to the terrible momentum of our times, but it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief.

“While despair traps us in the bog of despondency, grief carries us into life. Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty.

“If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings, and slip the poetry between our words.

“Rumi says, “All medicine wants is pain to cure.” And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude, our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation that medicine might reach through and towards us.” —Toko-pa Turner

52

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 5 Comments

I woke up at four-thirty this morning, the morning of my 52nd birthday, to the sound of a coyote howling, deeper down the hollow. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so it looks like I will welcome the dawning of my 53rd year.

Wikipedia reminds me that if you consider the majuscules (capitals) and miniscules (lower case) as separate letters, you’ve got 52.

There are 52 weeks in a year, with an extra day added to make 365. Perhaps this year, I will work on living with that sense of the extra day, the time beyond time.

On a piano, there are 52 white keys. Perhaps now I begin to learn the complexities of playing on the half notes.

There are 52 cards in a deck of playing cards, plus that extra tricksy Joker. Perhaps this year, I’ll be a Wild Card, playing any role I choose in the game.

(In the minutes it has taken me to write this, the sky has gone from the luminous grey of the pre-dawn, to a shining indigo. The dawn chorus is beginning.)

The web page Affinity Numerology tells me: “The numerology number 52 is a number of introspection and expression of a personal sense of freedom. It is studious and is mentally sharp. The energy the number 52 represents tends to do whatever attracts its attention as desirable to experience. But not on a whim. It analyzes what it experiences and what it observes.” I’ll take it.

Isn’t aging a wonderful thing? We grow more into ourselves, year by year. Sometimes I feel like I am a very young person, encountering the same ideas and experiences over and over again as if they were new, but always at a deeper level of awareness. Life’s a spiral–I keep coming back to the same things, but not really at the same place. Looked at from the top down, it could appear to be a solid, repetitive circle; looked at sideways and from a distance, it looks like a straight line. But we keep spiralling on.

Thank you, my friends, for walking this spiral with me. We were made for these times.

Gratitude List:
1. Coyotes howling in the holler
2. Getting older
3. Dawn chorus
4. My wise, wise friends
5. The fluttery purr of a contented, sleepy cat

May we walk, always, in Beauty!

Whom Shall We Trust?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

During the season of Lent, the worship materials for the Mennonite Church suggest a more ritualized confession time, not particularly about confessing sin, but expanding it to confess what we believe. As part of the ritual, a few people each week are asked to come forward and bring their confessions in the form of a poem or a piece of art or a story or a reflection of some sort. Today, I have been asked to be part of the ritual, answering the question: “Who will trust in God today?” Here’s my poem:

Whom shall we trust?
When hurricanes and charlatans
destroy the weak?
When the meek are set
to inherit a world laid waste by greed?
When human need bats last,
long after lust for money, sex, and power?
Whom shall we trust
in this hour when so much has been lost?
When the cost seems too high
for such a simple thing
as resting in belief
that the Holy One has time
for grief about our trials and tribulations.

The pillars of the past no longer hold.
They’ve had feet of clay all along,
and wrong upon wrong upon wrong
has brought the ancient houses down.
There’s no more room here for illusion.

How, then, shall we trust?
Shall we just ignore the lancing fear
that tears our sense of safety from its moorings?
That bears us outward into territories
we’ve not known before?

Perhaps it’s not a matter
of ignoring what we face,
but rather an attempt
to place our anxious thoughts
within the context of the Greater Power.

I will put my trust in Mystery,
in that ineffable presence we call God,
in the Knowable Unknowing,
and in the One
who put on shoes like us
and trod the roads we walk,
and spoke as one who knew
the course of human suffering.
I’ll trust us to the Holy Wind of Spirit,
who hears our songs and knows our fears,
who causes us to rise, though we resist;
in our resistance fills our sails,
the wind that pulls against the kite
and makes us rise to higher height.

Perhaps nothing can be truly known,
no comfortable future gardens
sown with seeds of certainty.
But we can trust the certainty of seed,
the trusty breeze of Spirit
and the rains of the Creator
on these fields we bear within us.

Gratitude List:
1. The Little Sisters buzzing for pollen among the crocus and anemones
2. A fun afternoon of pond play yesterday with my kid
3. This man who makes the most amazing birthday cakes
4. The opportunities for my soon-to-be-teenager to learn to do the tech things he loves
5. Summer break is on its way

May we walk in Beauty!

Making Family

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

A year ago today, Jon and I went to the Walters Museum in Baltimore. It is now one of my favorite museums. This is a filter-altered photo of a marble lion in the Egyptian antiquities section.

Today’s Prompt is to write a poem about family.

Sometimes it all comes ready-made,
like seeds, like sunshine, like rain.
But sometimes you make it yourself.
Take a little clay, a palmful of water,
sculpt and carve, shift and caress,
with great care and concentration.

And sometimes it all just gets
tossed in your direction,
bits and pieces scattered on the wind,
and you take the threads into your hands
and begin to weave. And you chant,
and you dance, and then it happens.

There’s no single formula for family,
no direction manual, no guide.
Blood’s one sacred element, certainly,
but water will do it, or wind,
whatever hold the souls together,
like laughter, like tears.

Gratitude List:
1. Celebrating Chester’s 100th birthday. Harmonica, singing, family, trees, stories, and a picture of Sarah Jane. She was there, of course. I know she was there.
2. Grades are all done and marked ready to submit, and it isn’t even midnight!
3. Reading Susan Cooper’s books with the boys. I love when they get so into the reading of a book that they stand up and start to pace, and talk back to the book.
4. Little bits of tidiness.
5. The warm times are coming. The birds tell me so every morning. I can wait.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Sweet Spot Between Striving and Perfectionism

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


God of Thundering Paws, Thor

The final quotation on this list, from Toko-pa Turner on perfectionism, is powerful for me. I don’t think I present to the world as a perfectionist. My house is messy, I can’t seem to follow a calendar for more than a few weeks at a time, I leave projects unfinished and work incomplete, I make my deadlines at the eleventh hour. Some of us are closet perfectionists, but our perfectionism is perhaps all the more insidious for that. Perfectionism is one of my shadows, the conjoined twin with shame. The never-good-enough twins. Where does that come from?

I’m working on it, steadily and surely, naming it, recognizing how perfectionism is actually at the root of so much of my messiness and time-management trouble and deadline avoidance. Every few weeks or so, I have to remind myself that it’s okay not to be perfect, that my way of being in the world is okay. Like Toko-pa suggests, I need to seek out my eccentricities, acknowledge them, and learn their gifts.

Like so many things in life, it’s a balance. In this case, between relaxing into who I am and striving to be a better person. They aren’t mutually exclusive, but I do need to find out how they inform each other, or they get pretty crunchy inside me.

“Where will you wander today?
What doorways, what thresholds,
what boundaries will you traverse?
Where will your heart find the opening
into the next open meadow?”
–Beth Weaver-Kreider
*
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” ~Leonard Cohen
*
“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” –Robin Williams
*
“One gives one’s life to be and to know, rather than to possess.” –Teilhard de Chardin
*
“A smile starts on the lips, A grin spreads to the eyes, A chuckle comes from the belly; But a good laugh bursts forth from the soul, overflows and bubbles all around.” ~Carolyn Birmingham
*
“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.” –Rumi
*
The Love of Morning
by Denise Levertov

It is hard sometimes to drag ourselves
back to the love of morning
after we’ve lain in the dark crying out
O God, save us from the horror . . . .
God has saved the world one more day
even with its leaden burden of human evil;
we wake to birdsong.
And if sunlight’s gossamer lifts in its net
the weight of all that is solid,
our hearts, too, are lifted,
swung like laughing infants;
but on gray mornings,
all incident – our own hunger,
the dear tasks of continuance,
the footsteps before us in the earth’s
beloved dust, leading the way – all,
is hard to love again
for we resent a summons
that disregards our sloth, and this
calls us, calls us.
*
Even
after
all this time
the sun never says to the earth,

“You owe me.”

Look
what happens
with a love like that —

It lights the whole
world.

–Hafiz
*
Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
*
“There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.”
–William Stafford
*
“Perfectionism is a virus which keeps us running on the treadmill of never-enoughness. It is inherently deadening for how it strives and never arrives. Failure is embedded in its very pursuit, for our humanity can never be homogenised. The only antidote is to turn away from every whiff of plastic and gloss and follow our grief, pursue our imperfections, exaggerate our eccentricities until they, the things we once sought to hide, reveal themselves as our true majesty.” –Toko-pa Turner

Gratitude List:
1. Reminiscing with the leader of the college jazz trio I sang with. I may not be able to sing like that anymore, but that experience pushed me to trust my voice in a way that will never leave me. And maybe now in mid-life, when I am again trying to understand the role of my writer’s voice in the world, I can weave some of that sense of confidence into my forward movement.
2. These two kids–boy and cat–playing toss the mouse. They’re hilarious and very entertaining.
3. This is a momentous day. My dear sister-in-law is being ordained to the ministry this evening. She is one of the most pastoral people I know and has been since I met her thirty years ago in college: she’s a good listener, she’s good at drawing people out, she asks questions that get you thinking more deeply. She has a caring heart, a powerful intuition, and a deep, deep understanding of people and communities. This has been a long journey, and I am excited about celebrating her work in the world. An ordination like this is not so much the beginning of a ministry, but the recognition that she has been doing this work all along.
4. Seeking the sweet spot between striving and perfectionism.
5. All the lovely birthday blessings! I begin my second century buoyed upon the well-wishes of a marvelous community of beloveds.

May we walk in Beauty!

Everything is Sacred

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

The Goblin Rumpus began at exactly 2:48 AM with a sweet falsetto yawp from Little Thor. I went out into the hall to see what was happening, and about a dozen cats were zooming through the halls, bouncing off the walls, skittering down the stairs. My daytime brain knows that there are only two cats in the house. My nighttime brain knows that there were at least a dozen cats performing the Goblin Rumpus–a couple of them were indigo gray with shining golden eyes, and the others were orange blurs.

Today I am turning fifty. Growing up. I’ve completed a half-century here.

If you follow the numerological significances of things, five is the number of the hierophant or teacher, and zero is the number of the fool.  Doing a little wizardry with the numbers of my birthday and birth year, my birth number reduces to 5, so it appears that I am coming into my own this year, and carrying the madcap, free-spirited nature of the fool with me. This is the year to focus on my work as teacher and fool. I’ll take it!

I feel like this is my birthday poem:
“The Seven of Pentacles”
by Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
*
“In these cataclysmic times, living in what Michael Meade calls the ‘slow apocalypse,’ despair can be dangerously seductive. Our lives may feel inadequate to the terrible momentum of our times, but it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief.
While despair traps us in the bog of despondency, grief carries us into life. Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty.

“If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings, and slip the poetry between our words.

“Rumi says, “All medicine wants is pain to cure.” And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude, our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation that medicine might reach through and towards us.” —Toko-pa Turner
*
“I have always been spiritually promiscuous, lying down with any God who will have me. When I drop down into these ancient texts, I feel the breath of the God of Love on my face. It makes me crazy. In the very best way.” —Mirabai Starr
*
“By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.” —Teilhard de Chardin
*
“A library is infinity under a roof.”  —Gail Carson Levine

Gratitude List:
1. Fifty mostly satisfying years on this Earth.
2. Okay, even if I am working on less sleep today, the delightful thrill of a springy little cat walking begging for attention in the night–walking all over me, bringing me his new favorite toy, purring and snuggling.
3. Goldfinches: how they fly, how they twitter. Their purpose is joy.
4. Everything is Sacred, indeed. Grateful for the words of Teilhard de Chardin
5. The promise of a massage sometime in the next few months when I really need it. My guys gave me a gift certificate for a friend who is starting up her own business. Win-win! I love it!

May we walk in Beauty!

The Thing About it Is

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Bulletin Board
I still have to figure out what words I will put in the space left over after I put up all the fun stuff. I might begin with a simple Welcome message for the first week or so, and then change it weekly for the first month. I’ll eventually put up something more crisp and “academic,” but I think we’ll begin this year with “creative.”

The thing about it is, is that,
when all is said and done,
beneath the surface
of this pond where our words
float and mingle,
collide and jangle,
lies another realm of thought,
of language and meaning,
where sunlight pierces
through that tangled soup
on the surface
to spotlight a vibrant
world of brilliant fish,
orange and scarlet and green,
where we may learn more of each other
than we ever could on the sunny,
wordy surface.

(Note to myself: When I come back to revise this, I should pay close attention to line breaks.)

Gratitude List:
1. The birthday wishes. My, my, my. I was overwhelmed, in the best of ways. So many thanks to so many friends. So blessed I am in friends. So blessed.
2. Putting the classroom together. Creating space. I realize that I take a lot more time at it than might be necessary, but the slow and quiet work of shifting things in the classroom mirrors the quiet openings within me to the new year coming, the spaces I am creating for all these new people in my heart rooms.
3. The gift my parents gave me of caring for the boyos for a couple days, and the delight of having them home again, back in my morning.
4. Dinner at The River House Restaurant in Craley last night. Shrimp Pad Thai for me. And, of course, Chinese doughnuts for dessert.
5. Sight. Vision.

May we walk in Beauty!