flying

Skimming the Surface

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

It’s a little like flying, but it’s more like falling without touching the ground. When I was a child, I did it frequently enough in my dreams that I was convinced I could do it in waking life, too. Perhaps I could.

I’m trying to get somewhere fast in a dream, usually down a hillside. Instead of the frustrating and dreaded molasses-feet dreams, in which my feet won’t move, no matter how hard I will them, in a skimming dream I am so intent on getting where I am going that I stop actually putting my feet on the ground. Momentum carries me down the mountainside and I just keep my feet off the surface, sort of like skiing on air. Last night’s mountainside was really muddy, and I knew I’d get stuck, so I just coasted downhill through the air. It was a little hairy at moments, getting through the trees, and worrying that I might run into a bear.

It was exhilarating, feeling it happen, remembering how to do it with a body-memory similar to riding a bike. This morning, I feel it like I did when I was seven, that inner knowing that I can ski the air. Perhaps it’s a message from my Deep Self that I can slip the leaden bonds of winter, and move through the world again with more grace and ease.

Remembering How to Fly

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

“You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”  ― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
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“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'” –Kurt Vonnegut
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“I know there are people who don’t read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.”  ― Diane Setterfield
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“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”  ― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
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“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.” ― Diane Setterfield
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(Yesterday, my friend Christi sent me this exquisite poem)
A Small, Soft Feather
by Joyce Rupp

a small, soft feather,
still warm
from bluebird’s wing,
falls onto the receptive
forest floor.

lightly it lands
under a thick-branched oak;
quietly it waits,
unnoticed, unattended,

until a sister of earth pauses,
beckoned by a flutter
of unseen energy.
she bows her kindled heart

stoops ever so slowly,
and the remnant of the blue bird
comes home
to her generous hand.

days later another earth sister
opens an envelope;
resting inside, waiting,
is the blue of sky
in shape of a feather.

from warm wing
to great oak,
to earth sister
to friend,

comes the soft blue signal,
and in a sparkle of recognition
a woman, weighed down
with too many wants,
remembers how to fly.

Gratitude List:
1. One of the four major projects that 3rd graders do at Wrightsville Elementary is a report on an African American historical figure. Josiah had already decided that he wanted to do his report on Ruby Bridges. But we watched “Hidden Figures” last night, and he thinks he might do his report on Katherine Johnson. Can’t go wrong either way.
2. Goldenrod
3. Saturday morning with a talkative boy and a playful cat
4. Walnut leaves dancing down the wind. Mabon approaches.
5. Words

May we walk in Beauty!

Dreams of Flying

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

hildegard-2
Here is another version of the Disibodenberg photo with a parchment paper look. I keep seeing faces in this this one. At first, I didn’t like it because the abbey ruins themselves sort of disappear into the sunlight, but as I consider it, that has become my favorite thing about it.

I am still working the dream from Sunday night. Sometimes dreams dissipate like smoke, and every attempt to grab and hold them down only scatters them further. Sometimes they recede until a random comment by someone in the day-life throws them in the pathway of the day. Sometimes they come back throughout the day, and grab you and grab you again, as this one has done.

In the dream I have been hiking on a trail with two other women. I don’t know them in waking life, but we are friends in the dream. We are resting in a little cafe, and the one woman will not stop talking, will not stop just hanging out. I want desperately to get back on the trail again, to get out in the wild, but they just keep telling me to wait. Finally I tell them that I am going out again, and they can catch up later. They’re as happy to see me leave as I am to get out of there.

I am heading down a precipitous rocky and dusty trail, so grateful to be out in the wilds again, so free. It must be noted that in the physical world, I tend to stumble and trip down mountainsides, but in this dream, I am elated and confident. I take a sort of leap down the mountainside. I don’t fly, exactly, but I catch air. I drift down. I feel air holding me as I glide down to the next dusty shelf. Again I leap and glide and land. Again. Again.

Then I am walking on flat land, in woods. I think this is another of those regular dreamscapes, one of those places that doesn’t look exactly like the previous woodsy dreamscape, but I know now, looking back at it, that it is the same one as in a previous dream.

Scene shift and I am in another cafe/store, gathering supplies to get back on the trail and try to meet up with my friends. I feel delayed again, but this time I want to get to them, not to get away. I walk out of the town, following small back roads through farmland. I cannot find the woods. I stop people and ask, but they say that the wild lands are really far away–how did I get all this way on foot? I stop at a farmhouse, and it happens to belong to friends. They offer me things to read, food to eat, and a lovely skirt and blouse that don’t actually match each other. But they can’t help me find the trail.

My dream is book-ended by impatience and dissatisfaction. But oh! The flight.

Gratitude List:
1. Dreams of flying
2. Wildlands
3. The Water Protectors
4. Deep sleep
5. The last hurrah of summer

May we walk in Beauty!

Dreams of Flying

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

mermaid
During yesterday’s day alone, I took a little time to play with the Dreamscope app. This is younger me as a mermaid.

Gratitude List:
1. Featherbed. The very definition of coziness. (Check out John McCutcheon singing Featherbed.)
2. Yesterday’s solitude. I feel prepared to be back among people.
3. The great-horned owl calling from the bosque.
4. Dreams of flying. In last night’s dream, I wasn’t actually flying, but jumping and gliding. Still, it fulfilled the wild feeling of catching the wind.
5. Stones. Prayers.

May we walk in Beauty!

Learning to Fly

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2012 October 053

Never fight a cloud.
Never grasp the wind
in your fists.  Wind is
meant to be ridden
like a rough colt.
Give yourself to it
as you give yourself
to the salt waves.
Let it buffet you,
twist and batter you.
Rise.  Breathe deeply.
Learn the pathways
of currents and drafts.

(First line found on an online “poetry generator.”  This is a very drafty draft, but I do want to write something about riding the wind, so I will let it be a place-holder.)

Gratitude List:
1. Watching a high school crew create a dramatic performance.  The students at my school and their directors did an amazing job putting together “The Sound of Music” last night.
2. Sleep.  This is a placeholder.  I am running on very little sleep at the moment, and will likely run a little low for the next couple of nights.  But I am grateful for sleep, for the little I can get now, and for the good rest I will get in a few days.
3. That lovely, lovely snow.  Simple frosting.
4. The sense of taste.  Isn’t flavor a marvelous thing?
5. Weaving the threads together.  People.  Meanings.  Ideas.

May we walk in Beauty!

Remembering How to Fly

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Sometimes when the night
is practicing indigo and silence,
I remember what it was like
to fly, to quietly slip
my tenuous grip on gravity
and float
free,
to slide
upward through air.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Nancy’s magical haven of a mimosa tree.  At one moment, I saw in its misty pink-clad boughs half a dozen swallowtails, dozens of nameless little pollinator bugs, a kingbird, a goldfinch, some sort of sparrow, and a hummingbird!
2. My family is safely home from their wonderful African adventure.  Traveling vicariously is so much better than not traveling at all.
3. The peace-builders.  Some of my friends have made careers of peace-building and the work of creating peace.  I feel so inspired, to remember that all of us can shape our own work in the world to be about creating and building sustainable peace, no matter what particular job we take on.  Peace-building is the vocation.
4. Good music, good singing, good composers, good harmony.
5. Dreams of flying

May our stories heal each other.