Easter

In the Garden

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

It’s no secret that I am a little obsessed with Mary Magdalene, with her story, her lore, her myth. And in the Jesus narrative, my favorite moments are the Jesus the Happy Trickster moments following the Resurrection, when he reveals himself to Mary in the garden, to Thomas in the upper room, to Peter and friends along the shore, to the friends walking to Emmaus.

I’ve tried, again and again, to capture the moment of Mary’s moment of turning in the garden in poetry. I think I’ve been successful. Yet I return to the moment over and over, as if saying it yet another way will open the story that one inch more fully. There’s that moment when she turns, from the cool shadows of the empty tomb to the glaring light of day. Maybe she already guesses that it isn’t the gardener, or that it is the Gardener. I don’t mean to be glib about one of the most powerful moments of story I know, but there’s a Schrodinger’s moment here as Mary is turning, when she both knows and doesn’t know, when a thousand thousand possibilities bloom in the space between not knowing and knowing, and gnowing.

And in the series of Rilke lines that my friend Tim offered me for poems this week, today’s was the perfect opening line for a deeper reflection on this moment of dawning truth.

Gratitude List:
1. A weekend with family.
2. Making music with my siblings.
3. My church community–earnest, loving, joyful, Present
4. Morning prayers in the grove. The pear trees are blooming.
5. Coming alive
May we walk in Beauty!

“Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul – the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill – this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are “nothing but.” —C. G. Jung

Listen
by Shel Silverstein

Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’TS
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS,
the IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES,
Then listen close to me-
Anything can happen, child,
Anything can be.

If you are a dreamer
by Shel Silverstein

If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!

“It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.”
—Mary Oliver

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” —Once-ler, in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” ―Nelson Mandela

Twelve Things I Have Learned So Far: (1) You do not always have to be right. (2) People can change. (3) Loss comes to us all, but so does grace. (4) We can disagree and still be together. (5) Kindness is the greatest treasure I have to give away. (6) We are all healed even if it does not happen on our timeline. (7) Imagination is a form of prayer. (8) I own nothing. (9) Life is full of sacred signs if only we look to see them. (10) The ancestors are real. (11) Not all of my friends and mentors are human. (12) Now is eternal and it is my home. —Steven Charleston

Poem a Day: 12

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

The prompts today are “spirit” and “eggs.” And it is Easter, so that wants to weave into the mix. One of my favorite moments in all of the New Testament stories is the moment when Mary Magdalene is weeping in the garden, and asks the gardener where they have taken her beloved, and the gardener turns, and it IS her beloved, and he says her name. This feels like one of the holiest stories to me.

Grief is the Egg
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

“Grief is not your problem.
Grief is not the sorrow.
Grief is the medicine.” —Martin Prechtel

There are people who sing when they weep,
who wail for the dead in poems,
chant the wandering spirits into seeds
that will sprout in the new world
as trees, or storms, or whales.

Grief is not the rock that entombs you.
It is the egg of the thing to come,
the precious perfume in the alabaster jar
that finds its way to praise life and living
even as it anoints the dead.
The egg and the seed are the medicine.

Grief is no dead end road.
It is the curtain rent in two,
the woman weeping in the garden:
“Tell me, if you know,
where they have taken my beloved.”

Grief is the egg of the moment,
radiant with sunlight,
just before the gardener turns,
and you hear your name.

The Impossible Truth

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

May you feel your spirit rise today,
rolling away the stone from the entrance
and bursting forth into the shining garden.

May you sense the impossible truth today.
As you huddle in your anguished grieving,
may you hear the Gardener call your name
as you turn into the light.

Gratitude List:
1. A shining morning
2. Making things: clothing and poems and bread
3. All the colors out there: flashes of red and yellow in the trees, blue and green
4. Courage
5. Sunlight in the hollow

May we walk in Beauty!

“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.

In the Doorway of Lost Hopes

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write a sketch poem. Most of my poetry is sketches anyway, imagistic moments, a few lines of spiderweb, a dash of color, touch of light.

Crouching in the doorway
of your lost hopes,
you raise your head.
Morning sun dazzles your eyes
in a wash of gold and green.
Someone’s rooster crows
in the distance,
and a thousand little birds
bring the garden alive.

And then your name,
there in the too-bright light:
an egg, a seed,
planted in the soil
of your confusion, your grief.

Wake up! Do not try
to touch the heart of it.
Not yet.
Breathe it in.
Let it grow within you.
Now go and speak your truth
to those who will listen.