busy

Yesterday’s News

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I’m flying a little by the seat of my pants these days, trying to maintain all my daily rhythms, and still not get stressed by all the little things to keep up with. SO last night, I just didn’t do my daily April poem-a-day post here. Sometimes I beat myself up a bit for not being the energy powerhouse that so many of my friends seem to be. I need to protect my energy, gather and store.

Gratitude List:
1. The Dawn Chorus these days. Oh, the birdsong!
2. All the different smells
3. Friends and beloveds who invest time and heart in each other
4. How the beauty just explodes all of a sudden here in the spring. One minute you notice the leaves of the bleeding hearts appearing, and then SUDDENLY they’ve bloomed!
5. Movements for peace and justice. The people who are doing the work, whatever their piece of the work may be.
May we walk in Beauty!

“I love to write to you – it gives my heart a holiday and sets the bells to ringing.”
Emily Dickinson

“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

I called through your door,
“The mystics are gathering in the street. Come out!”
“Leave me alone. I’m sick.”
“I don’t care if you’re dead!
Jesus is here, and he wants to resurrect somebody!” —Rumi

“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ―Rumi

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ―Buddha
****”
Some words on my River, from Robert Louis Stevenson:
“I have been changed from what I was before;
and drunk too deep perchance the lotus of the air,
Beside the Susquehanna and along the Delaware.”
―Robert Louis Stevenson

“. . .and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.” ―Robert Louis Stevenson

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ―Elie Wiesel

Rob Brezsny:
Plato said God was a geometer who created an ordered universe imbued with mathematical principles. Through the ages, scientists who’ve dared to speak of a Supreme Being have sounded the same theme. Galileo wrote, “To understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics.”
Modern physicist Stephen Hawking says that by using mathematical theories to comprehend the nature of the cosmos, we’re trying to know “the mind of God.”
But philosopher Richard Tarnas proposes a different model. In his book “Cosmos and Psyche,” he suggests that God is an artist—more in the mold of Shakespeare than Einstein.
For myself―as I converse with God every day―I find Her equally at home as a mathematician and artist.

Advent 15: Finding the Flow

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
An attempt at an automatic drawing. I think, in its purest sense, it’s supposed to be non-representational, but my mind started pulling out that tree, so I went with it. And then, there’s that bird. . .

We’ve considered the element of air as we have drawn in our breath. We’ve considered our fire, and tended our lights. Now, perhaps, it’s time to consider the element of water, as we travel deeper into this winter labyrinth.

Perhaps today’s passage opens onto an underground river, and we can settle ourselves into little boats for this part of our spiral toward the center. Or swim–walk right in and let the water carry you gently in its arms. Today, I want to think about the flow of my life.

So often, here in this dark and inward time of year, when my inward voices tell me to slow down, rest more, begin taking note of the dreams and the silences, the rest of the world turns up the pace to a frantic pitch, with parties and shopping, raucous frenzy and noise. For some of us, the response to the darkness is to push it back with activity and color and sound. I am grateful to have the festival atmosphere to dip into. The Big Party of this season is how many of us cope with the gathering darkness, and I have no quarrel with other people’s festivities. But I need to take great care in this season how I spend my energy.

One of the more common things I hear people express in these days is their exhaustion, how the constant round of parties and gatherings and things to do and prepare for completely wipes them out. In many families, this work still seems to fall to the women. I’m grateful to be part of a family where much of the pressure of holiday preparations is taken on by my partner, or else we do them jointly, together. I’m not sure I could cope with the added stress of the approaching end of semester along with a full load of holiday prep.

One way that we deal with the challenges to the easy flow of our lives in the frenzied season is simply to do less. We buy fewer presents. We have one afternoon in which we all decorate, and only a little. We focus our festivities on the kids’ school events and family gatherings.

Still, my flow in this season is choppy, blocked in places, and racing beyond my capacity to stay afloat in others. I know that my stacks of grading, and my avoidance tactics are the things that clog the passages and keep me from flowing gracefully. Somehow, I need to come to terms with the dailiness of the workload, to steadily chip away at the challenges that hinder my smooth progress. The thing is, the clogged places force the stream in other places to race along at an unmanageable pace.

If your life is a river flowing through a tunnel, what are the things that clog and impede the flow of your stream, causing the water to flow frantically and wildly in other parts of the passage? What do you need to do to shift and clear the blockages? Wendell Berry points out that “the impeded stream is the one that sings.” So perhaps it isn’t necessary to clear all blockages completely, just shift the impediments enough so that we can hear the song rather than the roar. Today, I commit myself to doing several hours of steady, unclogging work. I can already hear the echoes shifting in the tunnel. I can almost hear the song behind the roar.

Gratitude List:
1. Enough. Enough work to keep me occupied. Enough time to do what needs to be done (I do not feel this one deeply, but I am trying to live it).
2. Live choral music
3. How stories interact in my own personal narrative, shifting my interpretation and experience of my own unfolding tale.
4. Christmas cookies, especially those peppermint ones a student brought to school on Friday.
5. The flight of birds, high-flying flocks, and the furtive dashes of little birds seeking seeds in the chill. Be warm and filled, little ones!

May your day have warmth and light.

Am I too busy?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

While media images of women these days seem to be startlingly and aggressively belittling, I have been delighted to watch the growing backlash, the awareness-raising which reminds girls and women not to pay attention, to step outside the story that the media tells us we are and should be.  Even after years of working with body image and railing against the media storm, I still find myself nodding or agreeing in those conversations where people are talking about weight-loss, “Yes, I should lose a few more pounds.  Oh, I know, my body is shamefully unwilling to be thin and svelte. . .” It’s constant work to step out of that cultural narrative, to question the underlying assumption.  Stop and breathe.  Ask, “Am I really too fat?”  No?  No.  Okay.  Move right along.

Yesterday as I was trying to keep myself calm in the face of all the things that I have to accomplish, it hit me that I have been buying into another culture and media-generated story, totally without questioning the underlying assumptions.  It goes something like this: “You are too busy.  You have too many things to do.  You will not be truly happy until you buy this product that makes your work seem easier, or until you take this pill that relaxes you, or until you take this vacation or buy this wine.”  It hit me that while I have constantly questioned the advertising response to this, I don’t know if I have ever truly questioned the underlying assumption.  Am I really too busy?

For years in my life, I couldn’t answer that “Am I too fat?” question with a comfortable No.  There have been a few times when I really was heavier than was healthy for me, but for years I was answering the question wrong, following the script the media offered, and hating the way my body looked, despising my soft squishiness instead of being satisfied and even happy with how I look.

Now, I ask, “Am I really too busy?” and a little piece of liberating intuition is on the cusp of saying a hesitant little no, but I’m still pretty steeped in it.  If I say No to that question, then I have lots of other questions to unpack.  Why is my house cluttered?  Why haven’t I yet painted over that spackled mess on the wall?  Why is the faucet still leaking?  Why is the hillside back there covered with vines and pokeweed?  I can keep going on here for a few more hours.  The fact is, I do feel too busy.  I think I am too busy.

But what if that’s a state of mind, too, instead of a state of fact?  As I step into this next stage of my life, with all the many new demands it holds, perhaps I can try to go into it challenging the assumption that I will be overwhelmed and tapped to the limits.  There seems to be an underside to the “Am I too busy?” question, and that is the assumption that if you aren’t feeling completely stressed out and overwhelmed, perhaps you aren’t actually working hard enough.  I think that’s a dangerous assumption.  When I am feeling my most overwhelmed, I am a much less productive and effective person.  I am thinking that one of the gifts that I can give my students (if I can remain conscious and aware enough to manage it) is to model a healthier answer to the question.  “Am I too busy?”  Umm, no?  No.  Okay then.  Move right along.

 

Gratitude List:
1. That fascinating dream, just now, in which I was reading a poem about examining a screech owl’s pellet to a very attentive black bird with bright eyes and yellow wings and yellow wattles that hung down low over each side of its face.  (After a night of difficult dreams, it is lovely to be left with this image as the final story.)
2. Listening to the boys giggle and guffaw while Jon reads them Winnie the Pooh stories.  These days they’re so quick to reject so many things as “Baby stuff!”  I was afraid that Pooh Bear might be relegated to that category.  I am grateful that they can style shift between Lord of the Rings and Winnie the Pooh.
3.  The way ideas build upon ideas when you let them.  Sometimes I feel so dry, like I’m afraid to try to put new ideas for writing or projects together.  What if this is my last good idea?  I want to hoard it, hold onto it.  The more you let them flow, the more they flow.
4.  Deciding not to be too busy.
5.  Being a strand in the web.  Sometimes I don’t know what else I have to offer but my place in the web.  And sometimes, perhaps, that is enough.  It seems like an odd thing to be grateful for, for grief, to grieve the heart-wrenching loss that a friend is experiencing.  But that’s part of being part of that web that connects us.  I am intensely grateful for that connection, even when the web is shaken by grief.

May we walk in Beauty!