Tag: cats

Deep Dreaming

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

In last night’s Dreamtime, I am at lodge or little village or somewhere. I am working at my friend’s shop, which is sort of like a little kiosk place in the lobby of the lodge. I can’t find anything. People are asking for herbs and homeopathic remedies, and I know what they are and where I would normally find them, but in this tiny space, I can’t find anything. People are nice about it, though. I find a piece of paper, written in my own handwriting years prior, but which seems to be relevant for this moment. In the dream, I can’t figure out how I can be in both times at once, and a whole part of the dream is me pondering that and trying to figure it out.

A little later, I am walking up on the hill behind the lodge/village in the moonlight. I pass a white tree with red and black shadows and patterns running up and down the trunk, and it’s all bathed in moonlight, glowing. It’s a moment of incredible beauty and wonder. I run back to the lodge/farm/village for my camera. On the way back up the hill, I pass the purple okra patch, which is beautiful in itself. I pause to admire the okra, and notice several stalks that are blighted and chewed by some animal. I’m lucky that I have one of those craft razors with me, and I slice off the dead and broken bits. My handy razor glints in the moonlight. I return to the Beautiful Tree, and realize that I have again left my camera behind, so I race back down the hill, which–as you may know–is particularly exhausting in dreams.

Then I am packing up my things and heading home from this place. My friend asks if I can take her puppy Otus (it is spelled like the owl and not the human name) along with me. He’s an adorable little ball of grey-brown fluff, and he loves to be with me. On the way home, I remember that my friend and her boyfriend were planning to move and would be looking at a new house on my route home, so I stop in. Since it’s an Open House, I just walk in. My friend and her boyfriend are singing together. He’s sitting in the living room looking through boxes, and she’s puttering around in the bedroom and kitchen, unpacking. They’ve already moved! They’re surprised to see me just walking into their house. They wonder if I knew the code to get in the front door, but I say it was open.

My friend offers me some art supplies and sets up a board and paper on her bed so I can paint. She introduces me to her new kitten, which turns out to be two kittens, and they’re living breathing animals, but they’re crocheted. They love playing with Otus the puppy. When I am finished with my painting, I clean up, find Otus, thank my friends, and wake up.

Much to ponder today: Layers of time. The White Tree. The need to capture a photo. Nurturing the okra. The colors of the tree and the okra. My shining and helpful razor blade. Otus the puppy (the screech owl, Otus asio, is personal symbol of mine). Walking into my friend’s house despite the combination lock. Space for art. The crocheted kittens.

Gratitude List:
1. Josiah and I just witnessed the most amazing thing! While I was writing my dream, I glanced up to see the raccoon (we’d seen her once before) striding purposefully over the bluff and down to one of the walnut trees in a little circular area behind the house that I call the cauldron. (I hollered “Raccoon!” and Joss was the only one awake to come watch with me.) She paused and looked my way, then climbed the tree. When she reached a branch about house height, she slipped in behind the branch to a place where there must be a hollow place. We watched her take hold of a little one, bring it down the tree in her jaws, and carry it up over the bluff. She was gone for several minutes, anxious minutes for us, while we watched another baby up on the branch, trying to figure out how to follow its mama. Finally she returned and got that one, too. We think she must have already moved at least a third kit before we saw her the first time. What a deep and satisfying pleasure to witness such a moment. My hat is off to this careful and intentional mama. Those little ones will soon be too big for her to carry up the walnut tree in her mouth. I suppose she and the little ones are the ones who ate the duck eggs from the nest by the pond. Such sadness. Such thriving life. The wheel of life is beautiful and terrible.
2. I successfully baked a crusty, tasty, yeasty loaf with my wild yeasts yesterday. It was SO satisfying. Maybe now, instead of discarding my extra starter, I should bake flat cakes to leave out for the raccoon family.
3. That oriole is the loudest voice in the hollow, and constant, and beautiful–an orange flame dancing along the branches of the neighbors’ walnut and flitting from clump to clump of new leaves.
4. I might be emotionally done with school, but if I have to push through, it is nice to do it with a cat snuggled up to my thigh. If I sit on the couch, I usually end up with a cat snuggled up on each side.
5. I watched a short video this morning of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s reflections this morning that helped me recalibrate (her words) a bit, to shift my focus again to living in the moment and not living for the moment of The End of All This. Maybe you want to watch it, too.
6. Dream messages: I think everything is going to be okay, in the end. I will get into the places I need to get into. There will be quiet and gentle community. I will be true to my inner guides. I will do useful work.
7. So many necessary gratitudes today. Last one for today: Our neighbor found her cat. We’d been watching a calico cat in the neighbors’ yard across the street for the past few days. She was hanging out with one of the feral ginger bobtailed cats that we call Gunther and Stumpy Bob. Yesterday we found a paper in our mailbox from the neighbor up the street, asking if anyone had seen her calico cat. I texted her that we had seen her and that we would keep our eyes out. And she texted back that they had found her! It’s interesting how, when one’s heart is bruised and weary, the relief in a small story like this brings such a lightness and lift.

May we walk in Wonder and in Beauty!

“If you feel thirsty, then
drink from your cup.
The birds will keep singing
until they wake up.”
– Franz Wright

“Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” –attributed to Buddha and to Nelson Mandela

“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”
― Junot Díaz

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath

Cats in the Classroom

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems
My classroom has cats. I think Sachs would approve of the look this filter gave him.
Because this is how we live now.

Gratitude List:
1. Slowly, but surely, I am catching up on some of my pre-Friday-the-13th work. It has been really difficult to adjust schedules and plans to fit online learning. I’m beginning to carve out spaces for big grading in the midst of the daily tasks.
2. Maybe it’s the fat coffee (cream and butter, coconut oil and protein powder), or maybe it’s the new schedule, but I realized yesterday that I don’t feel run down and exhausted anymore. Even though I am working almost all the time, I feel charged and up to the tasks of my day.
3. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Josiah and I finished that one yesterday, and I love the reminder that the real adventure is the one that takes you inside yourself. That adventure is always available.
4. Goldfinches. They’re going to show up a lot on here because they’re my constant visual companions right now, and getting shinier by the day. I live on Goldfinch Farm, and we named it that for a reason, and in these challenging days, that reason has become one of my grounding delights.
5. Yesterday I saw the phoebe! Sitting on a branch above the bluff, dipping her tail. I have been hearing them, but there’s something about catching that glimpse. . .

Take care of each other!

“Let us keep courage and try to be patient and gentle. And let us not mind being eccentric, and make distinction between good and evil.” —Vincent van Gogh

“Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.” —Albus Dumbledore

Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
and with the young, and with the mothers or families,
re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
and dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
—Walt Whitman, from the Preface to Leaves of Grass

THE OLD WISDOM

When the night wind makes the pine trees creak
And the pale clouds glide across the dark sky,
Go out my child, go out and seek
Your soul: The Eternal I.
For all the grasses rustling at your feet
And every flaming star that glitters high
Above you, close up and meet
In you: The Eternal I.
Yes, my child, go out into the world; walk slow
And silent, comprehending all, and by and by
Your soul, the Universe, will know
Itself: the Eternal I.
—Jane Goodall

“If you believe peace is the absence of war, you’ve missed the mark. There will never be full peace until we treat each other the way we want to be treated. Peace is allowing an individual or group of people to command their space in the way they know how without the violent intervention from another.” —Leymah Gbowee

Angel Over the Hollow

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems
Sky over Skunk Hollow: Dove, or angel, or ashy wisps of phoenix after the egg is laid and the transformation is set in motion?

Gratitude List:
1. Community
2. Cats
3. Morning coffee
4. There is always another poem
5. Puzzles

Take care of each other.

Friday’s Finds:
“We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms, whether of sex, race, country or condition. If one link of the chain be broken, the chain is broken. A bridge is no stronger than its weakest part, and a cause is not worthier than its weakest element.” —Anna Julia Cooper

“…now is all there ever is…”
—Eckhart Tolle

The moon is most happy
When it is full.
And the sun always looks
Like a perfectly minted gold coin
That was just polished
And placed in flight
By God’s playful kiss.
And so many varieties of fruit
Hang plump and round
From branches that seem like a sculptor’s hands.
I see the beautiful curve of a pregnant belly
Shaped by a soul within,
And the Earth itself,
And the planets and the Spheres–
I have gotten the hint:
There is something about circles
The Beloved likes.
Hafiz, within the Circle of a Perfect One
There is an Infinite Community
Of Light.
—Hafiz

“The church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta.”
—Eduardo Galeano

“It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox.

“T. S. Eliot said that in poetry there is ‘a perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations.’ It is perpetual; it cannot be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and controlled.

“The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize terms, to freeze them into strict denotations; the poet’s tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings.”
—Cleanth Brooks, “The Language of Paradox”

If you must look back, do so forgivingly. If you must look forward, do so prayerfully. However, the wisest thing you can do is be present in the present. . .gratefully.
—Maya Angelou

Themself

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings
Is this a blog entry about petting cats or about getting used to themself?

The problem with writing a blog of random musings is that, over time, a writer is bound to repeat themself.

Here is a little metacognition moment: I woke up this morning with Thor-the-cat butting his head into my hand for a head scratch, and I started ruminating on that idea of the sweet pleasure relationship between human beings and the animals that live with us, how scientists believe the cats and wolves came to live with us because we were a stable food source, and we let them come because they helped us to deal with rodents who ate our own food. How that certainly explains the exchange of energy in a certain way, but how it doesn’t explain the pleasure exchange, how we humans get such pleasure from the feel of fur, and from the sensation of the animal’s pleasure. How my distant cousin David Kline writes in his book Scratching the Woodchuck of encountering a groundhog sleeping in the sun, how he reached out his walking stick to gently touch it, how it leaned into the scratch, how satisfying it was to him. How I saw an online video yesterday of a goose tickling a puppy with its beak: Everyone wants to pet the puppy.

But I am pretty sure I have written that before, and then I started writing it anyway, and I came upon that perfect opportunity to practice the singular “they.” (There’s where the metacognition begins.) So today’s musing is not really about the mutual pleasure cycle between humans and animals, after all, but about the process of shifting their (one’s/our) language to include alien-seeming ideas and structures.

We do it all the time, unconsciously or semi-consciously: pick up new words and phrases and ways of saying things. Teenagers do it at such an alarming pace that sometimes they seem to be speaking another language, and those of us whose synapses are getting hard and calcified find it challenging to keep up, to interpret the cant and the jargon. But we do it too. There’s that but at the beginning of the last sentence. “Never,” my teachers told me, “put a but at the beginning of a sentence.” But I do it all the time now. Too often perhaps. It expresses a sense of the fragmentary thought, how my brain experiments with holding an idea, and then skitters over to its complement or opposite. New words and linguistic patterns have a way of seeping in to enhance and brighten our communication.

The injunction against singular they, however, seems to have a particular staying power. My starting sentence up there feels clunky and awkward to me, not just in the fact that its using a “plural” pronoun to refer to a singular human, but because it actually singularizes the plural: themself. Because I identify as female, it would have been perfectly logical for me to use herself in that sentence. Were I someone who identified as male, however, to use the masculine pronoun in a sentence about a generic human being would have taken on political meaning, a sense of masculine as default.

As a teenager, I took the common practice of identifying every generic human in my writing as the “default” he/him, trying to believe that it meant people of any gender, no matter that I saw a distinctly male person in my mind when I tried to picture the sentence. As my consciousness shifted, I rejected the male default, and began to use he or she for a time, or he/she, or s/he, and there’s a certain satisfaction in that, but it does get clunky in the speaking, especially when you start tossing in the him or her. For a while, I tried the pompous-sounding one, but those sentences can get laborious and babbly and, as I said, pompous.

To return to both the meaning and the revelation of that first sentence, I think that along with writing previously about petting puppies and kittens, I have written about singular they before. Shakespeare did it. According to this Oxford English Dictionary blog entry (click the link), we’ve been doing it since at least the 1300s. They (generic use–I don’t know who I am referring to) discuss the attempts by grammatical structuralists in the 18th century to eliminate the use of singular they. But hey, if it was good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for me, and he occasionally began a sentence with he, and finished off using they for the exact same antecedent. If he’s allowed to be so messy, I’m just going to wade right in.

There is plenty of reason to challenge my discomfort, besides my own feminist consciousness. Sure, I can sprinkle lots of generic she into my writing to startle and inspire, but singular they has become a fight for recognition of identity. As we welcome the blooming sense of personal identity and power that non-binary folx are expressing, it’s important for those of us who identify comfortably (say: privilege) on the binary to let ourselves get a little unsettled in the linguistic world, and then to embrace new forms and structures. Embracing new ways of using pronouns is a way to embrace the people who use them.

That first sentence is awkward in my ear. I am comfortable with singular they in many flowing contexts, but that one up there stopped me. Even Shakespeare didn’t use it so jarringly. But why should I try to rephrase it to make it gentler and more flowing to our ears? Instead, I am going to leave it there, to give us both a chance to begin exploring the possibility of new ways of using singular they. We can handle it. In recent years we’ve absorbed so many new words and ways of putting them together, and we’ve hardly looked up from our screens long enough to ponder the significance of all the changes. We can let themself slip in, too.

One way to make non-binary folx in a room feel more embraced and included is to put our own pronouns on our nametags, so they’re not the only ones with the burden. Another is to start using the pronouns in new and creative, and sometimes jarring (deliciously jarring) ways.

Gratitude List:
1. Expanding the brain by using words in new ways
2. Soft fur and purring
3. Vs of geese enlivening the sky
4. Getting the work done. I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel
5. So far, I seem to be holding this cold slightly at bay. Lots of zinc, lots of elderberry

May we walk in Beauty! (And good health.)

Twelvenight: Synchronicity, Orenda, and the Fool

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

One of the subjects that keeps snagging my poetic attention is the landscape manuscript–how everything around us (not just the landscape) has a “text” that we might understand, if only we could read it. When I’m driving down the road and thinking about a knotty issue I am trying to resolve and I see three crows standing quietly in a winter field, or seven geese suddenly fly overhead in a raggedy V across my view, or something in the way the sun shines on the remaining leaves of that old oak seems to have a message for me–it’s as if there’s a deep text in the world that could be understood if only I knew the letters. And of course the landscape does have messages, and they can be read. It’s what farmers and meteorologists and hikers have done forever. It is what ecologists and environmentalists are doing right now, to save our lives.

And sometimes the visual and aural messages in my environment do seem to align themselves in perfect messages that feel like they’re meant for me, specifically, to read. Again, this is whimsical and playful rather than scientific. And it also captures my attention. I’m not going to make a judgement about whether or not the Holy One Herself, or the Universe, or the faeries, set up yesterday’s little alignment just so my heart could see it, but I will claim the whimsy, say that the synchronicity caught my heart, and then I will use it to construct the next steps of intuitive meaning for the shape my ponderings take in the coming days. I’d rather step into the future making meaning from the rich webs of whimsy and coincidence that surround me than refusing to gather the symbols that dance through my life and live with meaning defined only by the hardest of logic.

I was driving across the Route 30 bridge, listening to the most recent episode of “This Jungian Life” podcast, on the Trickster archetype, because my friend had recommended it to me. I was thinking about the Fool, and how I hoped that this archetype would inform my activism in the coming year, speaking truth through the lies in the way only the Fool can. The theme of the podcast suddenly turned to the way that tricksters throughout history have been challengers of suppression and repression and autocratic rule, how they act as a corrective when a person or a system becomes too rigidly rule-based and oppressive. There was a “click” in my brain at the coincidence of thought and outer message.

At that moment, my eye caught the new Sight and Sound billboard at the end of the bridge—shining purple, it advertised their upcoming production of Queen Esther, and one of my favorite Bible phrases, from the book of Esther, took up the central space in large letters: “FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS.” Again, an internal click.

As I passed the billboard, a large vulture swooped low above the highway. Click.

Yes, it’s whimsy and intuition, poetry and dreaminess, rather than hard science or pure logic or cold reason. While I need the latter, while I value science and logic and reason as important mental processes, I think a world that makes meaning without the more poetic processes is bereft of the spark of spirit.

And so it is settled, this day before Epiphany. My word, my archetype, my guiding principle, for the coming year is the Fool. Sacred clown. Jester. Trickster. I’ve been considering how the Fool subverts the dominant paradigm (to use an old phrase) to speak the truth behind the lies. In a political milieu swimming in falsehoods, how does the Fool speak truth? Lear’s Fool spoke from deep love and tenderness, was not afraid to speak harsh truths right to the king’s face, and kept repeating the truth from various angles until the truth shone in.

Even the travelers whose arrival we celebrate today and tomorrow, the Wise Ones, the magi, have an element of the Fool. Magi, Mages, Magic, Image, Imagination. The truth they first told Herod was too bald, too open, too dangerous, and so, when they were presented with the deep truth of this Child, they disobeyed the king and fled home a different way, tricking the King. Still, the consequences were grave and terrible for too baldly proclaiming the truth to the king in the first place. This is lesson to be deeply conscious of to whom and how the truth is presented. The Fool must be wise.

So. The Fool.
Those black vulture wings are also in my consciousness.
And the echidna, a hybrid creature who survives and thrives because it is more than one thing.
Those mists and rainbows, veiling and shattering, scattering light.
Wading in the water: Do you want to be well?
And Aslan’s words to Lucy: “Courage, Dear Heart!”

There is one more thing, a more abstract word rather than an archetype: Orenda. It comes from the Iroquoian language systems, and it refers to the spiritual power that exists in all things, the energy that we transmit between us, that we can access to change the world.

Okay, and there’s one more thing. My friends. Community. Last night’s dreams were a succession of anxiety dreams. In several scenes, I was trying to find Joss, and just couldn’t make contact. In several scenes, I had little fiddly school details to remember and take care of while I was rushing around trying to do other things. In several scenes I was in a car, constantly missing my exit, needing to turn around, but unable to get around another car or to fit my car into the space of the turn-off. Finally, standing on a sidewalk, about to throw my phone on the ground because I couldn’t get it to make a simple call to Joss, a group of my college friends walked up. Nancy took my phone and got it to dial Joss. Gloria put her hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes, and started to tell me a helpful story. The others gathered around. I could feel everyone’s presence. And I calmed down. Friends. I get by with a little help. . .

What are your messages from the coming year? What words and images coalesce for you? What synchronicities in your inner and outer landscape call to you to listen and follow?

Gratitude List:
1. Friends. How even in my dreams, my beloveds appeared to bring me peace. You. The little connections that are bigger than you know. The way the web of our connections holds us up, and holds the world.
2. The spiritual force within each one of us that enlivens and enlightens and helps us to bring change and goodness into the world.
3. Synchronicity and coincidence and making meaning where it comes.
4. Image and imagination and magic.
5. Being greeted throughout the day by cats.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Twelve Days of Christmas: The Elf, the Fool, and the Lord of Misrule

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Advent, Gratitudes, Musings
“The Lords of Misrule,” by Rima Staines. She publishes her art and writing with Hedgespoken Press, in England. I got her little book Nine Praise Riddles for Christmas.

The song is sort of like the Christmas version of Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall. Will it ever end? It goes on and on, repeating the lists of ducks and swans and rings and dancers and servants until you just want the song to be done already! And it’s always on, in a thousand versions, all during the holiday season. But does anyone really know much about the Twelve Days of Christmas?

Like so many of our modern syncretistic celebrations, the Twelve Days of Christmas is a mishmash that holds within it the tradition of Catholic and Orthodox days of feasting and/or fasting and pagan mysticism and revelling, in this case Yuletide and Saturnalia. Shakespeare used this period as the setting for his play Twelfth Night, in which people take on different identities, and things are never as they seem.

These are the High Holy Days, Time Between Time, another period in which to meditate on the coming of the Light. These are also the days of the Lord of Misrule, when a young person or a peasant would perform the duties of the Lord of the Castle for this season, usually ordering wild parties and feasting and dancing. The Fool is ascendant, and the King takes orders. Having just finished a study of King Lear, I am pondering the strange wisdom of the Fool these days, and the foolishness of kings. No, I’m not making a political jab here. This is more inward, more mystical. We each have our own Ego-Ruler who sits on a golden throne and arranges things as they ought to be in order to maintain meaning and order. We also have an inner Child-Fool, who wants to set things tumbling, to play, to shift the patterns of inner law and order.

Have you ever noticed how much our modern depiction of Santa’s elves and their hats resemble to old Medieval fools and their foolscape? I have a slowly-growing theory that the Fool/Clown is so crucial to our human sense of equilibrium, and that this ancient western Medieval character of the Fool so satisfyingly fulfilled that role, that we have maintained the Fool in the character of Santa’s elves.

The “elf” hat my brother gave me for Christmas twenty years ago would look perfectly reasonable on Lear’s Fool. And here’s another thing: One of our favorite family Christmas movies is Elf. What is Will Ferrell’s Buddy if not the quintessential Fool? He doesn’t fit in “polite” society. He doesn’t know how to behave. He’s embarrassing and childlike. And he’s the wisest person in the story. The father kept trying to order things in his fashion, kept trying to maintain meaning in the only way he knew how: making money and having corporate power creates a safe social order. But Buddy came into his realm and, in that utterly cringey moment, sang, “I love you, I love you, I love you!” And the world began to topple.

This is a season when we recognize that the social order is not cast in stone, that kings fall and fools rise. Buddy the Elf gets a cynical city to believe in Santa Claus. The Fool leads the mad King through the storm and the fens. And, in the story that Christians are celebrating, a tiny baby turns the world upside-down. The child of a poor and insignificant family on the far-flung edge of the empire comes to upset the social and religious order.

Jesus is the Fool. He wanders, he questions, he turns everything upside-down, he tells his listeners, over and over: “You have heard it said, but. . .” This Holy Fool disobeys the law and order that have been set up by the people in power to maintain the power structures. Perhaps some of the struggle that Christianity faces today is that we keep wanting to make him the King. We want the seeming sense of the powerful ruler, and we eschew the seeming foolishness of the Fool. But in truth, the Kings are all mad and the Fool has wisdom to offer, if only we will hear.

His mother knew, didn’t she, when she spoke her prophecy poem while he somersaulted in her womb. He fill the hungry with good things and send the rich empty away. He will cast down the rulers from their thrones and raise up the lowly. Amen, Hallelujah. Here comes the Holiest of Fools.

Dreamwork:
If we keep up the labyrinth metaphor, these are the days of the walk out of the labyrinth–having considered what we lay down and let go on the inward journey, we now look at what we pick up for the coming year. I use Twelvenight for dreamwork. It’s more live Sixteennight for me actually, because I start really paying attention at Solstice. I mine my dreams for words and images that will accompany me into the coming year. I let the Fool of my dream-brain inform the Queen of my waking brain, offering up seemingly disjointed and disconnected ideas and words and pictures to break down the logical-intellectual meanings my day-brain has created.

This year, the valerian in the medicine I took to fend off that cold seems to have kept me sleeping well for days after. I have been sleeping deeply and satisfyingly in the last couple of days. This means I am not remembering much in the way of dreams. But this morning I woke up with this somewhat grammatically-challenged phrase in my head: “There’s more than two ways to think about it.”

My day-brain is a little offended. Duh! I’ve done that one already. I’ve meditated on both/and as a solution to either/or thinking. I’ve read everything by Richard Rohr on non-dual thinking. This is one of my core concepts. But the Fool wants me to learn it again, so who I am to fight it? More than two ways. . .

Gratitude List:
1. Fools and foolishness
2. Wisdom from unexpected places
3. b n v <–Sachs wrote that when he walked across my keyboard. Yes, Fuzzy Friend, I am grateful, so grateful, for the cats and for kitty kisses.
4. Chocolate
5. Days warm enough for me to take a walk.

May we walk in Beauty!

Advent 23: Stretching

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

The inner room is filling with light, with shadow.
More light and more shadow.
Long, quiet, holy darkness.
Short, sparkling light-filled days.

The little shack in C.S. Lewis’s Last Battle, and the Tardis in the Doctor Who television series, have something in common with you and with me. Each structure–shack, time machine, and human–is bigger are the inside than it appears from the outside. Outside, a normal-looking structure, but inside, a whole world of wonders.

Here in these days of quiet and clamor, of enfolding darkness and bedazzling light, we walk through the inner rooms like we walk through the old house that recurs in our dreams, exploring the nooks and crannies, the magical spaces and the dark closets. It’s so big! I never knew this room existed! Look! Over here is a room full of treasures! This one is dark and quiet, and contains only a tiny wooden box. Whisper. Shout! These stairs end in a pantry, and those go up to the roof. Open this door. And this one.

Feel the vast spaces within you, knowable, unexplored, waiting for you to enter and experience who you are in your deepest inner rooms. Stretch your hands up and out. Draw in deep breaths. Stretch and stretch. You are larger on the inside.

As the wise man who left us yesterday reminded us:

“Be here now.” –Ram Dass

Stretch. Expand. Explore.

Gratitude List:
1. Back home with the cats
2. People who do things simply to watch the delight on the face of a child
3. My marvelous father, born on this day. What an example of tenderness and compassion he is.
4. I am pretty sure that seven-bird V that just winged its way above the hollow was snow geese.
5. Today is going to be a work day. I kind of dread hard work–I’d rather be playing with yarn or making cookies or writing poems, but when this day is done, I will feel much more free in my spirit to do those other things.

May we walk in Beauty!

Dropping Down and Feeling

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

For several years, I’ve been practicing a spiritual discipline that I think of as non-defensiveness. I am not even sure when I first began it. It sounds vaguely Buddhist or Gandhian, and I’m certain those are influences, but I can’t really define where or how I began it as a spiritual discipline. Lately, I’m becoming uncomfortable with the term because it feels so non, so negativizing. And as I try to expand my ability to stay in touch with my feelings, something about the word feels too cold and calculating, too harshly reasonable, too solidly logical.

I think of rage and fury and defensiveness as the vanguard emotions, the frontier responses. They’re out there on the front lines, fighting it out. When I feel attacked, I practice dropping down below the fray, finding the steady place beneath the wild turmoil of the fighting plain (plane). And I have been getting better at that, good at taking that breath, realizing that my instinct is to dash in with my own verbal bombs, and instead dropping down. That dropping down, sinking to center, settling in–that’s the non-defensive posture that I have been learning to take.

I think, however, that there’s a danger of being non-defensively defensive, of sinking into that posture while wearing a mask of cold, hard, untouchable reason. It feels safe to step out of the fray and begin to take apart the arguments with logic. This is the King’s response–to break it down with the force of mind, the sword of reason. It’s not a bad stance, but it needs to be paired with the Queen’s shrewd eye for the inner world, her awareness of the secrets hidden in the chalice, the grail. If I don’t acknowledge my emotions while I drop down, I fail to find the true spiritual depth I’m seeking by not getting sucked into the skirmish.

It’s only by fully acknowledging the feelings that the skirmish brings up within me that I can truly grow from a non-defensive posture. Otherwise, I am just a Tin Man. While I breathe and drop down, I want to tell myself the story of my feelings: I feel hurt; I feel attacked and stalked; this wounds me.

Last spring, in Dr. Amanda Kemp’s course/workshop on Holding Space for Transformation, her emphasis on recognizing and acknowledging your feelings as you interrupt your defensive responses in the heat of the moment really spoke to me. When I mask my inner work with reason, I leave the feelings untended, and the wounds fester underneath my chain mail and my suit of armor.

And, to continue the martial metaphor, it isn’t that I never get into the battle. In these times, I believe that it is of utmost importance that people of conscience stand as a unified and powerful force against the powers that threaten to destroy the earth and the children, that silence the voices of the vulnerable, that exclude and marginalize difference and otherness. But I will not be effective in the big things if I spend my energy skirmishing, if I let myself get distracted from the big story by the little attacks in my individual story. And this big story needs us to be fully-realized humans who are capable workers in the realms of both reason and emotion. So the challenge, in the small skirmishes, is to drop down, but also to feel.

(I acknowledge that the archetypes of King and Queen are deeply gendered. I also find that they’re part of the language of the deep group conscious of my particular cultural background. Certainly, as a woman, I am more than the box that the Queen sits in, and I am more also than the King-Queen binary. I think that the fluid and ungendered realm of the Fool is where we will all be more free, but that’s for another day’s ruminations.)

Gratitude List:
1. Teachers who help me on the path toward wholeness. Thank you.
2. Time off, time out, time between time.
3. Three cats. I think a three-cat house is just about perfect for me.
4. How sleep tosses up bones for the dog of the brain to chew on.
5. That scarlet cardinal shining out in the gray of the morning.

May we walk in Beauty. With intention.

A Goal is a Dream With a Deadline

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

Gratitude List:
1. There’s something to be said for being welcomed into the day by three small furpeople as though one is a long-lost traveler returning home at last.
2. Owls calling through the gloam.
3. I like that word, “gloam,” and “gloaming.” And “crepuscular,” though it sounds a little like a disease. “Dusk” and “dawn,” the grey times of day. The words are pleasant, and suggest the magic present in the liminal moments of the day cycle.
4. The clean white page. Possibility.
5. Onion bagels.

May we walk in Beauty!

Here’s a poem I started working on yesterday. It might still want some revision:

Your Wild Cry
by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider

When the gun of the hunter is trained on your arrow,
on the vee in the sky where you strain your wings
beneath the belly of cloud, call aloud
to your sisters to fly with the wind,
to fly true. Tip your wings through the gap
between beams of autumn sunlight,
shift your shape, shift your seeming.
Turn your goose to crow, to wren. Turn into jay,
into warbler. Dive down, fly low, change your sky-riven cry
to caw, to buzz, to a twittering in the brushy fields.

Don’t let your voice be silenced. Change it.
Don’t let your call be deadened. Let it echo
through the valleys and hillsides. Take a new voice,
more insistent, more urgent, and wilder.