Tag: blue

Being a Good Citizen

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

The CDC seems to be recommending mask-wearing if/when we open schools again in the fall. I will wear a mask if that is the recommendation by scientists and health care workers. I will do whatever I can to keep my students and their families a little safer. I’m exploring scarf-mask fashion. I have a couple elastic headbands, and I can fold a scarf around my neck, pull the headband down around that, fold the scarf down over that again, and I have six or eight layers of cotton fabric that I can pull up over my nose. I just need to get it tucked in around my neck. I’ll make some fitted masks in different patterns, too, just to make it fun. Maybe I’ll try to make some with funny faces.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate wearing masks. I’m a claustrophobe, and that extends to extended mask-wearing. I don’t like the suffocating feel of a mask. I also hate that we can’t see each other’s full expressions when we’re wearing masks. I actually can’t quite imagine how I am going to teach a full day of classes through one of these things. I might have to start trying out hijab styles and see if I can make that work more comfortably. But if mask-wearing to teach is the recommendation for safety and mitigation, I will do it.

I don’t wear my mask when I am walking on our road. That’s a privilege I don’t take for granted. If I lived in a busy urban area where I couldn’t move at least six feet away from passers by, I would wear it. Maybe I would want even more distance, since I pant when I walk fast, and so do the joggers on city streets, and that spreads more droplets. If I was walking down a quiet city street, I might carry my mask with me in case I met an unavoidable situation, but I wouldn’t wear it unless I felt it was necessary to normalize mask-wearing in that context.

Any time I enter a building that is not my home, no matter how few people are there, I think I will wear a mask. When I was cleaning out my classroom last month, I wore my mask in the building, but I was so overheated while I was packing up books in my classroom that I took it off while it was only me or my family in the room. It was probably okay to do that, but really–I should have worn it. It sounds like there’s much less chance of contracting the virus from touching something that’s been breathed on by an infected person; still, it would have been respectful of me to try harder.

So no. I am not suggesting we be unreasonable. I just think that mask-wearing shouldn’t be a source of tantrums and uncivilized behavior. Perhaps the media is latching onto a few isolated cases of immature tantrum-throwers and most people are being mature and community-minded. However, I see people out in close public situations without masks when I make one of my rare forays off the farm. I see people minimizing and scorning mask-wearing on social media. I hear friends’ stories of walking out of places where they went for essentials because so few people were wearing masks and they didn’t feel safe.

Have you heard of the Shopping Cart Test? There is no law that says you must return your shopping cart to a designated place. You can leave your cart in the middle of the driving lane of a parking lot with little likelihood of a consequence. But the vast majority of people know the system and work within it to make it go more smoothly for everyone. Most people are Good Shopping Cart Citizens. Some people suggest that one’s shopping cart etiquette might be a good indicator of their sense of citizenship and civic-mindedness.

Even though it is a governor’s mandate to wear a mask in public places, it appears that there’s not real consequence if you don’t. Most of the stories I have heard suggest that people are not throwing non-mask-wearers out of stores. You can probably get away with it. It’s kind of like choosing to leave your shopping cart behind someone’s car.

If you are resisting the public mask-wearing guidelines, I encourage you to carefully read some CDC literature about how face masks slow the transmission of the disease. I encourage you to look at your motivations for wearing/not wearing. Think about the kind of community you want to live in. Imagine that you might possibly be an asymptomatic carrier and that elderly woman you whose space you’re encroaching on in the line at Lowe’s is your grandmother. Slip a little “do-unto-others” into your pocket. And put on your mask when you go into public places. Let’s be good citizens.

(If you refuse a mask because you just want to “stick it to the Man,” I think you’re woefully misdirecting your rebellion. If you really want to start a Revolution, let’s talk. I’ve got some good ideas. But I’ll only meet you if we can do it outdoors, and we both wear masks.)

Gratitude:
Blue. Blue is always on my intrinsic gratitude list. Yesterday, a blue grosbeak sat on the feeder for a few minutes, his deep indigo drawing all surrounding color into himself. Then a bunting flashed by, and his feathers both absorbed and reflected the surrounding light. Moments later, a blue jay rowed through, showing off the lighter blue at the base of his tail feathers, and the way the black accents on his wings accentuate the deeper blue there. Bluebirds on the wire really do, as Thoreau said, “carry the sky” on their backs. Even on a grey and rainy day, the sky holds the blue that is behind the veil of rain.

If you ask me my favorite color, I would be quick to tell you that it is orange. Orange wakes me up and makes me happy. It encourages my fire and fierceness. But blue is always there. Always behind it all. With sudden flashings out when the birds fly by.

May we walk in Beauty!

“If you are planning for 1 year, plant rice.
If you are planning for 10 years, plant trees.
If you are planning for 100 years, teach your children.” —Proverb

“Life is wonderful and strange, and it’s also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It’s hilarious and it’s deadening. It’s a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life.” —Anthony Doerr

“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” ―Marcel Proust

Audre Lorde: “When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”

“Want what you already have.” —My mother says that my Great-Aunt Mary Ann used to say this.

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” ―Paulo Coelho

“In a time of destruction, create something.” ―Maxine Hong Kingston

Get Outside

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

Note to Self:
Go outside! Feet on earth, hands in water, hands on bark. Fresh air in the lungs.
Take a quick moment to notice your body. Are your shoulders up there beside your ears? Breathe in. Breathe out, and let them settle back to where they belong.

Here’s a poem from The Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird:
Bridge

Walk barefoot on Earth.
Walk, knowing your very being
is Her being.
Her rocks are your bones,
Her rivers your blood,
Her Living Soil your muscles and skin.
Be a living bridge between Earth and Sky–
Earth marries sky within you.
Your spine is a conduit.
Walk, open and aware.
Walk, electric with knowing.

Gratitude List:
1. The dogwood tree is beginning to bloom. The two dogwoods stand on either side of the driveway. I call them my guard-dogwoods. I haven’t hung poems on the one closest to the house for years, but I still think of it as the Poet-tree. It will always be the Poet-tree.
2. Yesterday I walked back to myself. The sadness is still there, but I think now it is riding with me instead of me riding it.
3. The Helpers. You are one. And You. And You.
4. Resilience.
5. And still, that violet. That blue.

May we walk in Beauty!

“We have all hurt someone tremendously, whether by intent or accident. We have all loved someone tremendously, whether by intent or accident. it is an intrinsic human trait, and a deep responsibility, I think, to be an organ and a blade. But, learning to forgive ourselves and others because we have not chosen wisely is what makes us most human. We make horrible mistakes. It’s how we learn. We breathe love. It’s how we learn. And it is inevitable.” —Nayyira Waheed

“To me, it’s all right if you look at a tree, as the Hindus do, and say the tree has a spirit. It’s a mystery, and mysteries don’t compromise themselves—we’re never gonna know. I think about the spiritual a great deal. I like to think of myself as a praise poet.” —Mary Oliver

“When you hold a child in your arms, or hug your mother, or your husband, or your friend, if you breathe in and out three times, your happiness will be multiplied at least tenfold.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

“I stuck my head out the window this morning, and spring kissed me BANG in the face.” —Langston Hughes

“In the morning, wonder and be generous like the sun.
In the evening, meditate and be kind like the moon.”
—Debasish Mridha

“There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.” —Meister Eckhart

“Every spring is the only spring—a perpetual astonishment.” —Ellis Peters

Time Is a Tangle

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

Gratitude List:
1. The way that talking about it, writing about it, makes it more bearable. It doesn’t go away. It just looms less.
2. Poems I wrote last year and other years are popping up today to help me through the challenges of today. Time’s a circle. Time’s a loop. Time’s a weird tangle of threads.
3. That goldfinch singing on the top of the bird feeder is so bright in the morning sunshine it almost hurts my eyes.
4. And. . .the blue, the blue, the blue: wild hyacinths, violets, gill-on-the-grass.
5. You, finding your groundedness out there, and me finding my roots here. Usually, I think of the world in webs. Today, I think of mycelium, and I know that as surely as the trees in the bosque across our road are communicating through a mysterious underground network of fungi, that you and I, as we find our roots, are also mysteriously and powerfully communicating, and holding things together.

Take care of your roots. May we walk in Beauty!

“Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul – the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill – this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are “nothing but.” —C. G. Jung

Listen
by Shel Silverstein

Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’TS
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS,
the IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES,
Then listen close to me-
Anything can happen, child,
Anything can be.

If you are a dreamer
by Shel Silverstein

If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!

“It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.”
—Mary Oliver

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” —Once-ler, in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” ―Nelson Mandela

Chagall’s Blues

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings
I’m having a lot of fun mashing my photos with Chagall paintings to get that blue.

One of my Facebook friends, someone I don’t know IRL, but someone I have come to care about through our network of mutual friends, is in trouble. What do you do when you care about someone, but you aren’t part of their close network, and can’t call or text to check up? I breathe, which is like a prayer. So today I am breathing for my friend who is wandering close to the edge.

Breathe in.
Breathe out.
As you breathe, let your mind wander through the circles of your beloveds.
Who needs your energy right now?
Breathe in, and hold that person in your mind’s eye.
Hold that breath a moment, and hold that person close to your heart.
Breathe out. Breathe out love and compassion and energy and hope.
Breathe in your beloved.
Hold them close to your heart.
Breathe out and cast them a line.
Breathe in and hold your beloved.
Breathe out and offer them love.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.

Gratitude List:
1. A socially distant visit from a dear, dear friend and a gift of tulips! Thank you, Dear One!
2. Those slightly hot yellow pickled pepper rings.
3. Spring peepers. I still remember one summer around the campfire at Camp Hebron when Gloria tried to help me hear the peepers in the midst of the cicadas and the crickets. I thought there was some magic I was missing in the world–my ears don’t sort sound well, and I couldn’t catch it. But now, for whatever reason, the peepers are busy up our street, and I can hear them, and they make me happy.
4. Chagall’s blues.
5. Erebus. We both know it is illegal for him to be up here on the table, but he wants to be right next to me. How can I tell him no?

Take care of each other. Walk in Beauty!

If you haven’t watched Jon Krasinski’s SGN show, take a few minutes today to google it. I think you’ll be glad you did.

“Dear friends, look at the real heroes who come to light in these days: they are not famous, rich and successful people; rather, they are those who are giving themselves in order to serve others.” —Pope Francis

“Remember, the ugly, old woman/witch
is the invention of dominant cultures.
The beauty of crones is legendary:
old women are satined-skinned,
softly wrinkled, silver-haired, and awe-inspiring
in their truth and dignity.” —Susun Weed

“God invites everyone to the House of Peace.” —The Holy Quran

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell

“What a pity that so hard on the heels of Christ came the Christians.”
—Annie Dillard

“The arc of history is long, and what we’re here to do is make a mark. . . . You do the work because you’re slowly moving the needle. There are times in history when we feel like we’re going backward, but that’s part of the growth.” —Barack Obama

“Each moment from all sides rushes to us the call to love.” —Rumi

“You are a co-creator of love in this world.” —Richard Rohr

“Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing out a space where new stories can root; in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.”
—Jeanette Winterson

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.” —Eden Ahbez

Trapped in Blue

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

The prompts today are Trap, and Blue. Instead of doing a mash-up, I did two.

In the Arms of the Beloved
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

You can’t escape the blue,
the windy robe of the Beloved
draped like a veil over the rim
of your living, over the bowl
of your holiest spaces,

and scattered deep within
the indigo arms
of the tree-shadows,
indigo bluer than soul,
pathways striping the
afternoon green, leading
you home to the arms
of your most desired Mystery.

Trapped in the Anagrams
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I am rapt. I start prattling, debating.
I stay apart: No parties. No pasta.
No prattling patter. I’m caught in the strata.
No matter, I rap and I mutter.
This pome can’t escape
the trap and the stutter,
lodged under a tarp of ratatat blather,
of anagram chatter.

Freedom in the Mind

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

“It is our mind, and that alone,
that chains us or sets us free.” —Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

That quote is one I have had tucked away in the unlikely event that I would end up in jail or in a hospital, or sheltering in place during a world pandemic. Hmmm. Well, here we are. I think quotes like this can be used inappropriately, to make people feel like they’re not working hard enough at the inner life if they’re feeling caught and trapped. On the other hand, I am finding it profoundly liberating to keep reminding myself that the claustrophobia and sense of entrapment in this experience is partly self-imposed, that I can be free, even in confined conditions. And to be honest, I am hardly confined, here on the farm. But that shows me even more deeply how the sense of being chained or free in a situation like this has more to do with my inner work than with my outer situation.

I’ve been posting twice on these April days of Poetry. Once in the morning for musings and quotes and gratitudes, and a second time in the afternoon, when I have written my poem for the day.

Gratitude List:
1. Though I miss Room 206, my current office/classroom is a pleasant, well-lit place.
2. My coworkers and students (present and virtual) are lovely people.
3. Such hope-filled Zooming with beloveds yesterday.
4. I’m wearing my bracelets today. I don’t usually wear them around the house, but I have missed having the clink and the flash of color.
5. In the midst of this terrible uncertainty, there is much to be certain of: love, spring, birdsong, laughter. When I sit on the recliner, I know that within ten minutes there will be a cat on my lap–that is a comforting certainty.

May we walk in Beauty! Take care of each other.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell

“We must live from the center.” —Bahauddin, father of Rumi

“Some days I am more wolf than woman and I am still learning how to stop apologising for my wild.” —Nikita Gill

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” —Albert Einstein

“Writer’s block results from
too much head. Cut off your head.
Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa
when her head was cut off.
You have to be reckless when writing.
Be as crazy as your conscience allows.”
—Joseph Campbell

“Ask yourself: Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world.” —Annie Lennox

During the Time of the Exile for the Good of the Realm

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings
Yesterday’s walk: The green hill to the right of the photo is the end of the currently-unused landing strip for our former neighbors’ ultra-light. Just to the left of that, in the break between the trees, is the path onto Goldfinch Farm, down into the holler to home. The green path ahead of me (to the left) winds through the neighbor’s ridge-top fields to their farm. I like to walk partway down those fields and back.

I suppose that technically our self-isolation begins today. No church tomorrow. No school for two weeks. Someone whose handle is @Sarkor posted a lovely social media thing yesterday, encouraging people to think of it not as “self-isolation” but as “Exile for the Good of the Realm.” I am taking that on with gusto, while also keeping an awareness that for many people this is an extremely difficult time.

Now is the time to keep our eyes on our neighbors, to check in with working people whose children must stay home, to check in with elders who will be even more isolated. Such care we must take in these days, such deliberation. We wash our hands and we meditate on hope and on goodness. We check in with those for whom this exile is costly, and we wash our hands again.

My up-the-road neighbor works in healthcare. Maybe I will wash my hands and bake her some break this week and leave it at her door. What about our neighbors whose livelihoods depend on People Showing Up? I was glad to hear one of the speakers in the PA governor’s address yesterday talk about buying gift cards from local small businesses to use when we’re back out in society. Also, we need to eat. We will wash our hands and get as much of our needs from Flinchbaugh’s and Sue’s, the local farmer’s market and small grocery, in the coming days, and to Jillybeans Sweet Shop, a marvelous little bakery in Wrightsville. And then we will wash our hands. I might wash my hands and go get a coffee at The Cycle Works’ coffee shop. I’ll maintain exile and precautions as much as possible, while doing my best to support those around me who depend on People Showing Up.

Also, let’s use this time to make our social media spaces places where people can feel connected and involved, places where we can help each other through our isolation and distance. Let’s share photos and poetry and stories. Let’s manage our anxiety so that we can express our worries without Feeding the Fears. That’s easier for me to say this morning than last night, when I was comparing my feelings of direness to the way I felt on 9/11. That’s a little how it felt: out-of-body unsettled. Let’s keep connecting to the deeper rivers of joy and satisfaction and memory and gratitude that carry us through difficult times, and let’s help each other find those rivers.

And here, on the farm, I will relish the introverted time, the time with the boys, the burgeoning spring, the cat cuddles, the sunrise and the birds calling. As someone who gets wobbly and rudderless without a schedule, the promise of daily school tasks in this work-at-home environment is a welcome diversion. Last night, we saw a daily schedule someone had made for student-people during the Exile. My younger son immediately constructed his own. I am going to make my own, looser, schedule, to include several hours of focused academic work, time exercising and being outside, time for art and making things, tidying time, limits for myself on screen time (while also giving myself a bigger breathing space for blogging/writing).

If you, too, are in Exile for the Good of the Realm, I wish you peace, joyful contemplation, productive work, and moments of satisfying connection with others through computer or phone. Let’s look out for each other. If it gets to be too much, reach out to someone. (If we’re not friends on Facebook, you can look me up there, and check in–I’ll give you a virtual high five and we can help each other to breathe through this.)

Gratitude List:
1. GREEN! The chickweed is up and vibrantly glowing with green life force. The highway medians and fields are shining with verdancy.
2. Blue: The speedwell is up, and parts of the yard are carpeted in blue. And the sky is the shade of a robin’s egg.
3. Coming to Terms. I acknowledge my anxiety. It sits there in the room like a large bear waiting to be acknowledged. (Welcome, Friend. Let’s get to know each other while we are here together in Exile.) If I ignore it, my imagination makes it so much bigger and scarier, but if we sit and have coffee together, we can figure each other out a little bit. This is a time to practice living with that particular friend and learning how to recognize her.
4. While I recognize that this time is really challenging for many people, the truth of the matter is that two weeks of being at home on the farm with the kids and the cats while having structured work to do each day is close to ideal for me. I am grateful.
5. Puzzles. Last weekend after we had brunch at Cafe 301 to celebrate Jon’s birthday, we went down the street to the Re-Uzit shop, where Jon bought several little puzzles. We’ll enjoy putting them together over the next couple of weeks.

May we walk in Beauty! Be safe. Be well. Keep connected.

Brigid’s Day

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

Brigid’s Day is dawning, the indigo shifting to blue and grey over the southeastern hills. A strip of tangerine edges the horizon like a waking eye. From the porch, I heard a rooster from the Tome farm on the western rim of our little bowl of a hollow, and from the east, up in the brush and the treeline, I heard what must have been coyotes mumbling–not the loud yaps or howls, but friendly “look-what-I-founds” and “keep-together-now-kids.” The sound was closer to me than the dog kennel on the other sound of the ridge and it didn’t have the “help-I’ve-been-abandoned” sound of those residents.

This morning, groundhog will see her shadow or not, but spring is on its way. I do hope she slept late this morning, until the coyote family passed through.

Feel Earth stirring. Notice the kicking of the life that is growing this morning, the sap rising, the fresh breath of breeze. What new gestating thing is calling you into your wildness today? What is growing within you? How can you nourish and tend it within you until it grows to be ready for birth?

Blessed be your seeds, your fertile dreams, your deep awareness of that which will awaken, will bud, will sprout, will rise. Dream well. Plan big.

Gratitude List:
1. On Thursday evening, we saw sundogs on the way home from school–they were trying to become a halo, and they managed to be rainbow arcs on either side of the sun. I keep meaning to write them in a list.
2. Brigid’s morning. If you look deeply into the grey, you can see rich and watery blues.
3. Coconut shrimp for supper last night, with stir-fried zucchini, and butter pecan ice cream for dessert.
4. Creating the life I want.
5. All that is waiting to be born within me.

May we walk in Beauty!

Advent 6: Examining Shadows

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Advent, Musings

Every year, I have to talk myself through this. I love darkness. I love the quiet and the rest, the comfort of enveloping night. And–

And the short days and long nights also fill me with a growing sense of panic, a sense of claustrophobia, as the night comes early and the dark lingers late into the mornings. I feel the panic rise, like it does when my clothes are too tight or I’m in a crowd, closed in on all sides by people, or when the seatbelt in the car pulls tight and won’t let go. It takes a conscious effort of will and a lot of self-talk to get myself back to the quiet space where I can sit in the darkness of early evening and remember how good it is to sit in the warm yellow glow of a lamp and feel the gentle arms of darkness around me.

So, here in the sixth passage of this labyrinth walk into December, I want to look into the shadows. Perhaps tomorrow, or another day, I will look into the more metaphorical shadows inside me (they make me claustrophobic, too), but yesterday I was caught up in looking at the blues and the indigos and violets that glow in the edges of the shadows and color the deeper areas. The under-shadow of the clouds was such a blue yesterday that I wondered if my eyes are developing a more acute sense of blue as they grow aged and fuzzy. The indigos beside the blue were richer, more lustrous. I think I know why the search for indigo has been a human obsession.

This morning, the shadows cast beyond the lamplight cross shadows falling through the archway to the kitchen. The lines between create distinct zones and areas, but try to look directly at the borders between light and shadow and doubled shadow, and suddenly the boundaries blur and disappear. Stare too long at the edges of a shadow and it starts to pulse and shift.

Without light, there is no shadow. Yesterday when I got home from work, I climbed onto the picnic table to catch a photo of the glorious shadows cast by the sycamore tree onto the red wall of the barn. The moment I raised my camera, a cloud slipped in front of the sun and the shadow was gone.

On today’s journey into winter, shall we explore the spaces between sun and shadow, consider the ways that light creates shadow, hone our noticing of color and line in the deepening shadows of winter?

Envisioning:
(On Sunday, Michelle asked us to hold the swords-into-ploughshares vision in our heads, to look for stories of people choosing that vision. For the next little while, I am going to look for such stories as my daily morning meditation.)

Yesterday, One of my friends told me of a woman in a retirement center who greets each person she passes with, “God loves you.” This reminds me of a student of mine who would come into class every day with a high five and a “Make it a great day, Ms. Weaver-Kreider!” And of the students who always thank me as they are leaving class. And of the people who look others in the eye, and make the effort to make that powerful human contact for just a moment in the day. Loving interaction which in which we See each other–that’s my vision for today.

Welcome, November

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

This month, I am trying to re-arrange some of my daily practice in order to make more space for writing. I have had two books floating about in my brain for some time, but I can never seem to find the time to work on them, so I thought I would give my first morning moments to the process and see what happens. So far, in the last two days, in the moments before I wake up fully, my brain has grasped a piece of dream-flotsam, and wrangled it into an image or phrase which I have used to begin a dreamy piece of super-flash fiction.

Perhaps I’ll be able to fit these into one of the books. Meanwhile, I am following the Dreamcatcher to see what she offers me.

In the past six or eight years, I have missed very few November Poem-A-Day challenges with Poetic Asides blog. This new process feels a little solitary, even lonely. But it feels like I have stepped onto a pathway, in much the same way that my first forays into Poem-A-Day were steps on a poetic pathway.

Here’s another thing: This week, I opened a Bag of Longing to see what was inside. This one was the idea of getting an MFA. It’s been haunting the deep corners of my brain for some time now. I decided to look at it more closely and see what it might look like this week. It’s so easy to get excited about it, but it’s hard to justify adding debt to debt when we have projects on the farm that must be fed money, and when the first of the children has just entered high school and will be exploring college possibilities himself before we can even catch our breath. Shall I close this Bag and stuff it back into a corner before it starts to eat me? Or shall I let the creature inside it out to roam, hoping it can find its own way home?

Gratitude List:
1. The many varieties of orange
2. That bright scarlet leaf on the neighbors’ orange dogwood tree was actually a cardinal
3. One small person humming quietly to himself in the car last night on the way home from trick-or-treating in town
4. November means cats in the bed, and that’s wonderful, as long as they give each other space and don’t start hissing
5. New practices

May we walk in Beauty!