dusk

Duskwalking

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Goldfinch Farm, February 2023

I’d gotten into a rhythm, waking up in the mornings, putting on my sneakers, finding my prayer beads, greeting the dawn, and walking. It takes me about 30-40 minutes to go through the beads, and walking at a fast clip actually seemed to enhance the meditation while I followed my doctor’s orders to get more regular exercise.

But the new school year came along, and in order to get in that 40 minutes, I would have to wake up before 5. That just wasn’t going to happen. So I’ve started doing my walking meditations at night. The timing is a little less specific, and it can get pushed off in favor of last minute lesson prep or other obligations, if I’m not careful, but I am finding that duskwalking brings its own kind of magic.

Duskwalking Gratitude List:
1. Bats. I used to keep daily tabs on the bats when we were farming. There were two who roosted under the barn overhang for several years. Perhaps these are their descendants.
2. Owls! There really is nothing sweeter than the whinny of a screech owl in the dusk.
3. Lightning bugs. Still around in August!
4. Evening breeze.
5. The moon. For years, I have been keeping track of the moon’s cycling, but as I walk every evening, I see the shifts in her position from night to night as she changes shape.
May we walk in Beauty!

“Anyone who feeds on majesty becomes eloquent. The bee, From mystic inspiration, fills its rooms with honey.” ―Rumi

“A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.” ― John Ciardi

“The heart must be at rest before the mind, like a quiet lake under an unclouded summer evening, can reflect the solemn starlight and the splendid mysteries of heaven.”
―McDonald Clarke (1798–1842) New York poet

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors.

But today we kneel only to truth,
follow only beauty,
and obey only LOVE.
—Kahlil Gibran
****”
“How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

A Goal is a Dream With a Deadline

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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.

The Great Mother

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This is an older poem, one that I have pulled out again to put into my book.
Great Mother

I am the scent of dawn that rises from the owl’s feather
to awaken the floating moon.
I am the fingers of frost that vanish from the budded
branch, transformed by wren’s song.
I am the child of thunder, sinking into a purple
couch of sky.
I am the seed of the mountain that waits in the
memory of the hummingbird.

I am the tufted ears of the vixen, yearning to the footfall
of the field mouse.
I am the snakes of flame which slither through the dark
doorway of the ring of stones.
I am the lustful sermon of the bees,
earnest and ardent.
I am the wild eye of the star, silently observing
the wayward dance of the planets.

Have you seen me slip between the stones of the grotto?
Have you seen me winking in the coals of your sacred fire?
Have you seen me flash through the electric air of your dreams?

Oh search for me among the brambles and sharp stones on the hillside,
within the bubbling heart of the spring.
Listen for my name in the bluebird’s chortle,
in the whisper of wind through the milkweed.

I will be found.
I will be found.

Open your hands and search
within the wrinkled webs you carry there.
Grasp the shattered ray of light
which passes through the crystal’s heart.
Drink the shadows which surround you
as the day scampers away over the fields.

I am here.
I am here.
I am always here.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Honey Lemon Ginger Tea
2.  The gloaming.  The way the trees come alive in the dusk.
3.  People who care deeply about the Earth and Her creatures.
4.  Freshly vacuumed rugs and freshly mowed lawns.
5.  The fresh faces of dandelions.

May we walk in beauty.