Tag: Brigid’s Day

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!

Mirrors and Reflections

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Musings

One of my recent obsessions is taking photographs of light reflected in windows, so that it falls on the landscape outside, or seems to hover between realities, like a doorway or window between worlds. Mirrors, reflections, shadows: light and shadow create images that show us another version of reality, enable us to see things from a different perspective.

At the beginning of the year, instead of choosing a single word for my meditations throughout the year, I felt a nudging on Epiphany day just to keep the three that had risen to the top of my list: Bird, Bridge, Boundary. They’ve been weaving and reweaving themselves through my contemplations in the past month. And a week later, I felt the compulsion to add a fourth: mirror.

The season of Brigid calls us to consider mirrors and reflections and shadows, those otherworldly, deeper layers that offer us images of who we really are in the world. Look. Then look deeper. See, then See again. Open your eyes, and then open your eyes, and then open your eyes. The Groundhog takes on a priestly role, reminding us to examine what reflections we are making in the world, what shape is the shadow that we cast behind and around us.

Two nights ago, I dreamed about going on an adventure with one of my beloveds. I wrote and told her of the dream the next morning. During our conversation, she offered me the gift of mirroring, of showing me the shape she sees me casting into the world. It was a different image than my own perceptions offered me, and gentler. My own sense of inadequacy, my fierce judgement of myself, has cast another layer of shadow into my own perceptions, and made me see myself with too critical an eye. It took the gaze of a friend, the tending perception of another, to shift the view for me.

Light is funny that way. Send it through water, and the image is distorted, shifted slightly. The kingfisher knows this, and automatically corrects for refraction, aiming straight for the minnows despite the tricks of the light. I’ve let myself be seduced by the critical angle of the light, viewing myself with a distorted lens. It helps to have a beloved willing to gently mirror a different perception back to me. My contemplative lens will be clearer now, and perhaps my work will blossom as I view it through another’s eyes.

I’m intentionally mixing the images here: mirror, light, shadow, image, refraction, reflection. Their meanings are like different layers of light viewed in the reflections on a window, each with its own truth to offer, but all part of the layered image.

May your reflections in this season bring you insight into your truest self.
May your beloveds be tender mirrors to guide you to images which help you blossom.
May your inner gaze be kind, offering yourself space to grow and change.

Postscript: This image of the back pages of my grandmother’s copy of The Mennonite Community Cookbook is also a reflection of sorts, a mirror that shows me my reflection in the past, in my own ancestors, or perhaps their reflection/refraction into the image of me. When I am searching for a recipe, fanning the pages with my thumb, there’s a moment when I feel this little arc in the paper, this spot worn away by the years of my grandmother’s own thumb flipping the pages of her cookbook, and I can almost feel her reflected into the moment, into me.

A Brilliant Brigid’s Day

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Musings, Poems

Song for Brigid’s Day
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Do you feel how the world comes alive?
How even underneath its coat of snow,
inside the bright crystals of the ice,
something in the Earth is stirring?

Within your own eyes I see it rising–
in this breath,
and now this one–
the Dreamer is awakening.

The dawn has come,
spreading its golden road before you,
asking, “Will you step upon the pathway?”

As you move out onto the road,
Brigid’s sun upon your face
will trace your outline full behind you,
defining you in the Shadow
which will be your soul’s companion
into spring.

–2018

Brigid’s Day has dawned bright and sparkling. The groundhog and her rodent kin have seen their shadows. The crone can merrily wander through the woods edge and hedgerows to gather firewood for the next six weeks of winter.

And here’s one of the sacred truths of the moment: If I’m willing to look deeply into the reality of my own shadows, if I’m willing to know them, to understand how they reflect me and show my inner realities, then I have nothing to fear from the shadows. I have nothing to fear from the coming weeks of winter.

Yesterday after I got home, I went out to shovel the drive so it would be easier for Jon to get up the slope. My neighbor came out to help me. She loves to shovel snow, she said. She loves winter, especially when it’s cold and snowy. And for those moments with her, shoveling and talking together, I too loved the cold and the snow. For the beauty, for the exercise, but mostly for the neighborliness.

Questions to Contemplate in the Season of Brigid
This is the season of sunlight and shadow:
What is the shape of my shadow?
How does it hamper me?
How does it hold me?
How does it tell me the shape of my soul?

Brigid is the Smith, she who works the forges:
What within me is being tempered this season?
What is being shaped and shifted?
What sacred patterns are being traced along my edges?
What useful tool am I being forged to become?

Brigid is the Healer.
The waters of her well bring wholeness.
What spaces within me need the touch of her waters?
What dis-ease drains my vitality?
How can I offer the waters of healing to others?

Brigid is Patroness of Poets.
How do words shape my reality, like iron is shaped in the forge?
How do my words bring healing, like water from the well?
How can I speak poetry into the cold and the shadows
of the season which is upon us?
Can I offer my daily words with the care and the artfulness of the poet?

Welcoming What Comes

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

It is Groundhog’s Day. That whistle pig is the guide. It’s time to assess: What will I keep hidden in the dark recesses of winter and what will I bring out into the light? As the groundhog is emerging from winter sleep and starting to think about the Farmer’s vegetables, what will I open my own eyes to? What plans will I make for the coming season?  How ill I nourish myself?

It is Brigit’s Day. Her followers committed themselves to keep her fires always lit. What flames need my vigilance and attention in the coming year?  What paths and processes will I commit myself to following?  What will be my contemplative work in these final weeks of winter?

It is Candlemas. Time to tend to the candles, to bless the tools that will give me light in the coming year.

Here’s to February, the longest month.

Gratitude List:
1. The work of the emergency Women’s Shelter in Lancaster at the YWCA.
2. Early morning sun and late afternoon sun casting long blue shadows of trees over the snowy fields.
3. Looking forward.  Looking backward.  Looking inward.
4. Six weeks.  It’s only six weeks.  I can make it through winter.
5. You.  Thank you for all the ways you keep the fires lit, all the ways you bring light, all the ways you lift your candles and say, “Here.  This is the way.”

May we walk in Beauty!

Song for Brigid’s Day

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Poems

Song for Brigid’s Day

Do you feel how the world comes alive?
How even underneath its coat of snow,
inside the bright crystals of the ice,
something in the Earth is stirring?

Within your own eyes I see it rising–
in this breath,
and now this one–
the Dreamer is awakening.

The dawn has come,
spreading its golden road before you,
asking, “Will you step upon the pathway?”

As you move out onto the road,
Brigid’s sun upon your face
will trace your outline full behind you,
defining you in the Shadow
which will be your soul’s companion
into spring.

Gratitude List:
1.  Thaw.  Mini thaw, if only that.  Gets the flow in motion.
2.  Ceremonially welcoming children into community.
3.  This moment (usually in late winter or early spring) when I suddenly notice how the children are shifting into their next developmental and growth stages.  They’re starting to look spidery, all legs and arms and teeth.  Their faces look pixie-ish, like changelings.  I remember this from when I taught school, how there came a point each year when it seemed that all the children had grown just a little beyond their boundaries, like their skeletons had suddenly stretched, how their language and expressions changed.  Today, on the backs of their shoulders, I can see their wing-buds popping.
4.  Mimi’s Banana Bread
5.  All the many different ways we are, how sometimes our challenges actually hide our truest gifts, how the One Thing that is all of us together is enriched and deepened by the individuals who are so varied and diverse.

May we walk in Beauty.