chickens

Minds Like Still Water

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

“On teaching:…the job seems to require the sort of skills one would need to pilot a bus full of live chickens backwards, with no brakes, down a rocky road through the Andes while simultaneously providing colorful and informative commentary on the scenery.” ―Franklin Habit
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“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.” ―W.B. Yeats
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“We’re all lovers and we’re all destroyers. We’re all frightened and at the same time we all want terribly to trust. This is part of our struggle. We have to help what is most beautiful to emerge in us and to divert the powers of darkness and violence. I learn to be able to say, ‘This is my fragility. I must learn about it and use it in a constructive way.'” ―Jean Vanier
*
“I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire. 
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid, more accessible;
to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.”
―Dawna Markova

Gratitude:
Not so much a list tonight. A recognition, perhaps of the thrumming of the web, the sense of connection and holding spaces for each other. The warmth of face-to-face connections and eye contact. Twinkling eyes. The fierce protectiveness we feel for the ones in our care, and the sense of being cared for just so fiercely by others. The way lines on a page–a screen–can be drawn between us, so that we can come away with a sense that we Know each other, that we Belong in each other’s circles. That mystical sense of knowing that someone is
praying
spelling
dreaming
sending energy
holding the light
carrying stones
on my behalf, on your behalf, on behalf of the world.

May you feel yourself upon the web.

Rock Star

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I am a rock star.  I came down out of the fields today and one of my groupies caught sight of me.  “Book?” she asked.  Another head shot up from behind the compost pile.  “Clook!” she yelled.  And then they were rushing me, “Lookee!  Lookee!  Lookee!”  Little feathery bodies racing toward me, wings akimbo.

If you ever feel down about yourself, get some hens.  You too can be a rock star.

Gratitude List:
1.  The community Potato Pitching Party.  Three and a half tons of potatoes, all de-trucked and sorted and re-packed into waiting pick-ups and cars.  By hand.  Woohoo!
2.  Being a rock star to chickens.  Book!  Clook?
3.  Coconut macaroons, no matter how they look.
4.  Working in the windy fields with spring sunshine slanting down.
5.  Quartzite and shale and the way all the field rocks sparkle and twinkle in the sunlight.

May we walk in beauty!

Words. No, I Mean This Moment.

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2013 August 357

Gratitude List:
1.  The prayerful and thoughtful spirit of Grandma Weaver, who died six years ago today, just shy of her 100th birthday.
2.  Words.  No, I mean tears.  Oh, actually, I mean words.
3.  Being adored by chickens.  Really, I can do no wrong in their eyes.  I am their Queen.  If you gt to feeling chronically bad about yourself, get a small flock of hens.
4.  Comfort food: ham and egg casserole.  Chickens, again.
5.  Not being alone in the questions.

May we walk in Beauty.

I Asked the Chickens

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Feeling unsettled and out of sorts
I asked the chickens what they have to offer me.
All they could give me was their hunger
and insatiable curiosity
and small tender clucks of comfort.

And eggs.
Of course eggs.

And maybe that’s all quite a lot to give
as an answer after all.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Driving through Lancaster County in the late afternoon with my parents.  There is a reason people travel from all over the world to visit this farmland.
2.  An Amishman digging a grave with a shovel.  Why does this move me so much–that the church/funeral home/whoever did not use power equipment, but instead hired people to do the work by hand?  I personalizes it, keeps it from being about the noise and the mechanization, brings it back down to the human scale.
3.  Hearing my parents talk about their own church’s process with end-of-life issues, taking back the role of preparing bodies for burial from the funeral homes, not embalming, creating community responses around the experience of death, not prolonging dying with medicine and out-of-context care.  This is powerful community work.
4.  I feel a shift a-coming.  Big shifts, cosmic shifts?
5.  My new tiger eye ring.  (I had to rip it back into the mundane a moment–though perhaps there’s nothing mundane about this ring. . .)
May we walk the path of compassion.

2013 March

Bluebirds and Miracles

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Bluebirds.   When I went out to tend chickens this morning, a pair of them sat in the little tree nearby and talked to me.  The wrens yell, “Here’s where I belong and don’t anyone get into my space!”  The yellow-throat sparrows call, “Here!  I’m here!  Won’t somebody please notice me?”  And other birds sing joyfully and exuberantly.  But bluebirds sing so quietly and sweetly, you could almost miss them: “Everything’s going to be okay, you know?  Here, let me tell you a little story.”  And there’s a bluebird that signals my father when his meal-worm feeder is empty.  But then when it’s filled and the bird has eaten all it wants, it comes back and sits on a little perch my dad put up outside his window–you can’t tell me that bird isn’t there to say thank you.  Oh, and there’s a pair inspecting the birdhouse out back for a potential nesting site.
2.  The laughter of chickens.  Okay, so they don’t actually laugh.  They sort of fuss and dither and clook about the daily fare.  They’re probably a little too simple-minded to get the joke, so they don’t laugh much.  But Jessica thought that’s what I wrote yesterday (see below), and I love the whimsy of the thought of laughing chickens.  Delightful.
3.  Meeting an online friend in person.  These connections we make with other people (in physical life, in computer realms) are like spiderwebs–gossamer, exquisite.  Treasures.
4.  Cerulean.  I’m back to bluebirds.  Isn’t that an exquisite color when the sun shines on their shoulders?  Thoreau said that the “bluebird carries the sky on his back.”  Oh yes he does.
5.  Milagros.  Doesn’t that just sound like a pleasant word?  Even before I looked up the meaning, and having heard it in various contexts without knowing its meaning for sure, it was a word I wanted to carry around for a while.  It’s Spanish: miracle, wonder.  Paul Simon could have just said that these are the days of milagros.  Oh, “the way we look to a distant constellation that is shining in the corner of the sky.”

May we walk in beauty like the bluebird walks on air.

 

February 25, 2013

Gratitude List:
1. The laughter of children
2. The curiosity of chickens
3. The steadfastness of friends
4. The healing powers of the body
5. The nourishment of food
Namaste

2012 August 018
Sunny in the summertime

Jan. 6 Poem, Jan. 7 Prompt, and a Gratitude List

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

I found a Random Word Generator online that spit out eight words for me to choose from in my Ten-Minute Spill. It gave me
hat
cooling
classic
jived
avast
spitefully
motel
thwart

Fine Kettle
Avast! That’s a fine kettle of kale,
she jived, tipping her hat with a wink.

It’s a classic twist on an old saw,
an artful attempt at redirection.

You’ve no idea–
absolutely no idea–
how I have worked to thwart
your bumbling good intentions,
she added spitefully.

And now–
where have you gotten us?
Here in this kettle of kale,
this stew. This mess of fish,
if you will.

Work your way out, if you can,
with your words–
forkful by forkful.

Add sea salt and sesame oil.
Braise until bright green.

And here’s a poem from 1997-1998, the first time I ran across this prompt:

Chasing Chickens

I’ve counted my chickens.
A dozen times or more they’ve dashed–
Dashed, I tell you–
Into blackberry canes,
Wings whirring.

White clouds of dust engulf me.
Their voices chuckle
from the cliff’s edge.

Don’t tell me about chickens.
I’m green, baby. Green.
And I don’t know how
I’m getting home from here.

Prompt for Tomorrow
I am feeling like my poems this round are fluffier and more slapdash than the batch I worked in November. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been sick. Perhaps it’s because the prompts were from outside myself. Perhaps. . .  Anyway, I am going to try a glosa tomorrow. Here are the rules, if you choose to play with me: Choose four consecutive lines of poetry and use that as the epigraph of your poem, crediting the poet. Then write four 10-line stanzas of poetry. The four lines of the epigraph provide the final lines of the stanzas of the poems, consecutively. And the 6th, 9th, and 10th lines of each stanza rhyme. Here is my example from November:  Song for a Change of Heart.  It’s not nearly as difficult as it first appears.  If you’re intrigued, give it a try!

Gratitude List:
1.  Gratitude Lists, to keep me working and processing even when I am tired and cranky.
2.  Clean laundry
3.  The NYT Sunday Crossword is back in the paper this week.
4.  Chapstick
5.  Anticipating busting this cabin fever tomorrow.

May we walk in beauty.

Gratitude List

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

1.  That there are still a hundred shades of green even in the middle of December, and the way the Sun pointed at them for me this afternoon, elegant fingers slotting through the clouds.  See this one here?  And this?
2.  How the chickens skip and bounce out to see me when I go out to the coop.  I am under no illusions.  I know it is because I am the Lunch Lady, but Lunch Lady Love is still good lovin’.
3.  Arugula.  Both the taste and the sound of the word.  I always want to go honk an old-fashioned car horn. . .
4.  More on the Sun, which shone a quick beam through the clouds as I was washing carrots this afternoon.  Orange!  Sweet, glistening orange gems.
5.  Jon Weaver-Kreider, who worked all day, and then cooked dinner when I was too exhausted and wrapped up in kid-mediations to manage.

(I didn’t mention whoopie pies once).
Namaste.