Brene Brown

Taste the Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Today’s prompt offers a choice, to write a Seize the Day or a Survive the Day poem. Here’s my response:

i don’t want to seize the day
so much as to
take it gently in my hands
like a round red and yellow apple
admire its shiny surface
feel the smoothness of its skin
then take a bite
taste the tang
the sweetness
the perfection of it
know that each bite
will be sweeter than the last

Gratitude List:
1. Apples
2. Blankets
3. Red curtains
4. This quote, by Brené Brown: “You will always belong anywhere you show up as yourself and talk about yourself and your work in a real way.”
5. This other quote by Brené Brown: “Strong back. Soft Front. Wild Heart.” I might want to get that as a tattoo.
May we walk in Beauty!

“There are no shortcuts to wholeness. The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, ‘I am all of the above.’” —Parker Palmer

Solace is your job now.”
—Jan Richardson

Joy Harjo:
“When I woke up from a forty-year sleep, it was by a song. I could hear the drums in the village. I felt the sweat of ancestors in each palm. The singers were singing the world into place, even as it continued to fall apart. They were making songs to turn hatred into love.”

“The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.”
―Meridel Le Sueur

“I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.”
―Madeleine L’Engle

“Alas, the webs are torn down, the spinners stomped out. But the forest smiles. Deep in her nooks and crevices she feels the spinners and the harmony of their web. We will dream our way to them …

…Carefully, we feel our way through the folds of darkness. Since our right and left eyes are virtually useless, other senses become our eyes. The roll of a pebble, the breath of dew-cooled pines, a startled flutter in a nearby bush magnify the vast silence of the forest. Wind and stream are the murmering current of time, taking us back to where poetry is sung and danced and lived. … In the distance a fire flickers – not running wild, but contained, like a candle. The spinners.” —Marylou Awiakta, Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom

“Do it right, because you only got one time to walk this earth. Make it good, make it a good thing.” —Grandmother Agnes “Taowhywee” (Morning Star) Baker Pilgrim (1924-2019)

“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.” —Robert Frost

“I believe war is a weapon of persons with personal power, that is to say, the power to reason, the power to persuade, from a position of morality and integrity ; and that to go to war with an enemy who is weaker than you is to admit you possess no resources within yourself to bring to bear on your fated.” —Alice Walker

“The fault dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in our selves.” —Cassius, from ‘Julius Caesar’ by William Shakespeare

“Let your love be like the misty rain, coming softly, but flooding the River.” ––Proverb

“Perhaps too much sanity may be madness.” —from ‘Don Quixote’ by Cervantes

Presence

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I have been seeing a lot on the internet lately about compassion and empathy, about empathy and sympathy.  That makes me happy.  I’ve been reading Judy Cannato’s Field of Compassion, which posits that these times we are living in are marked by a new upwelling of compassion energy.  And that makes me happy, too.

Today I looked again at that little cartoon video that accompanies Brene Brown’s TED talk on empathy and sympathy.  I love in-depth semantic discussions, the sharp and precise clarification of terms, and part of what I like so much about Brene Brown’s work is that she gives us precise language for feelings.  It’s like those feelings charts that people sometimes use for helping children understand their emotions, but on an adult scale.

So I do not intend to critique Brown’s view of empathy and sympathy here, really.  Nor yours, either.  But it struck me that part of what is moving about the presence of the Bear in the video (go up there and click that link and watch it now, please) is just that: his Presence.  He witnessed the Little Rabbit’s pain, and when the Rabbit fell in the hole, he climbed right down in there with her.  Aside from the label of his approach as empathetic rather than sympathetic, he was Present.  He gave her the gift of witnessing her pain.

I haven’t had much experience in my life of terrible pain and trauma, but in the places and times when I have been hurting, I know that empathy was a great help when it was genuine.  “I know how you feel,” can feel like a great comfort, or a violation: How dare you presume to know how I feel?  “When I went through this. . . ” can be a relief to hear (You walked this road and you survived!) or it can be patronizing.  Sometimes a sympathetic “That must be so hard” is as refreshingly Present as an empathetic “I know how it is.”

I wish I could say I get it right all the time, this business of being Present, being a Compassionate Witness.  It’s hard to be awake enough to one’s self and the Universe to know how to muddle through this bog of the heart.  It’s a challenge to be present when the Little Rabbit is lashing out in her sadness.  I love that the meta-conversations lead us into the discussion.  I’m grateful for the people, like Brown, who are working at the semantics, drawing us all to a deeper understanding of the compassionate heart.

Gratitude List:
1. The sweet, soft brush marks of wings on the snow
2.  Satisfying mechanical tools: my apple peeler corer slicer, for example; an efficient non-electric tool that does its job well.
3.  The way Jon hums to himself all day as he’s doing his daily tasks
4.  Two people whom I love a great deal were in an ice-related traffic accident this morning, and emerged mostly unharmed.  I am so grateful that injuries were relatively minor, and hope for a speedy and complete recovery from the aches.
5.  Napping.  This afternoon, as I was dozing off for a much-needed nap, a small person of the house came and snuggled up beside me and fell asleep too.

May we walk in Beauty.