gratitude

Listing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I am planning my end-of-year mini course for seniors, a Writer’s Contemplative Retreat.  I am thinking that I will begin each day with a gratitude list.  I have been reviewing Mary Oliver’s questions, and also trying to watch my mind as I make my own morning list.  I don’t necessarily think conscious questions into the open space of my brain, but there are trails down which I wander when I am thinking up my morning list.  Here are some questions I might ask my students to get them thinking:

* What is beautiful?  What fills me with wonder?  What images have slowed me down and caused me to pause in the past day?  What slows me down?
* What people do I appreciate?  In the past day, what people have I noticed being extra shiny?  Who does things to make the world a better place?  Who helps me?
* What satisfies me?  What makes me say, “Yes, that’s right”?
* What has surprised me in the past day?
* What helps me make it through?  What helps me to cope?  Life can feel downright difficult and wearisome sometimes.  In those moments, what helps me to hold on and face the challenges?

This last is the one that compelled me to write that list this this morning.  I realized that sometimes when I get to the last point or two–especially during times of high stress–I struggle to finish the list.  My mind begins to drag and complain and remind me that I’m tired and exhausted and crotchety.  But the discipline of the list kicks in–I have to finish the blasted thing, even if I’m grumpy.  So my mind goes to the question of what will help me to get through the challenge and the stress.

It makes me think of the fairy tale archetype of the mentor who tells the lost child what to look for: “There will be a signpost that will show you the way.  When you see the road passing between two hills, you know you are nearing your journey’s end.  Ask the old woman who stands at the crossroads for a crust of bread, and she will feed you.”  If I am feeling stressed, spending a moment in the morning to imagine the signposts that will help me to make it through the next portion of my journey helps me to find my way through without becoming overwhelmed.

Gratitude List:
1. Synchronous connections.  As I plan my mini-course, I contacted a local church with an outdoor labyrinth, and I discovered that the deacon who works with the labyrinth is someone I have met and deeply admired.
2. The music teachers at Wrightsville Elementary.  On Tuesday, The strings teacher couldn’t be there for the concert, and the music department head just leapt in and led the orchestras.
3. Blue herons flying above the highway.
4. Raccoon and deer in the hollow.
5. Making lists.

May we walk in Beauty!

I Have Written This Before

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

spiral

We have been doing some found poems and redacted poems in Creative Writing, magazines strewn about the floor and students sitting on the floor, quietly cutting out words or lying on the floor coloring the parts of the page where the important words aren’t.   Yesterday a student from another class walked by and said, “Ms. Weaver-Kreider, it looks like a day care in here.”  Everyone grinned.  They knew the secret of our creative moment.  Here is one of my redacted poems from a National Geographic.  I haven’t completed the art part of it, so I’ll type it in instead:

I’ve used my years
of good rain
and there has never been
a bright green field

I quickly turned my head
I was too close to feel it all
to know that feeling of gravity

I consider myself
a power line
an unusual oasis
a land where the Hoodoo Mountains stood.

This is a reprise of a blog entry that I wrote in 2013.  Because yesterday was our school’s Day of Gratitude and the idea has been floating near the surface for me these days, I wanted to listen to an earlier version of myself.  On that day, I had written 6 gratitudes, but one was very specific to the day, so I omitted it for this redux.

“I have written this poem before.  The one about the Open Bowl.  How I will hold the circle of my heart to encompass it all.

Not just the little birds singing the dawn into being or the silent toad under her litter of leaves, not just the achingly beautiful green of the fields in spring or the blue eye of the speedwell, not just the snugglesome child or the soft feathers of a hen.

Not just that.  Not only that.

But also the brooding ache of estrangement, and the dull thud of the impossible choice, the anxiety over an ill child, the grieving of a friend.  Also the deaths of the bees, the scarcity of monarchs, the oil-covered ducks.  The deep sadness of all that we are losing so wantonly.  The rage, the helpless and blinding white fury at the destroyers, the greed-mongers, the war-profiteers, the glibly malicious purveyors of illness and oppression.

This is why I write gratitude lists.  I will hold all of these stones in the Open Bowl of my heart.  Some moments, the bowl is so brimming with the rages and the despairs that I don’t know if I can bear it.  And then comes a moment of pure numinous wonder and delight, not to erase the other things, but to ease them.  To make the bearing of them bearable.

These difficult ones, they are there for a reason.  I hold them, too, because they demand my soul’s attention.  They call me to my work here in the world.  I refuse to walk the world with blinders on.   But there is also so much joy to be found in the midst of it all.  So much joy.  So much love.

I have written this poem before, and I will write it again.  Perhaps every day I will write it, until I understand what I am writing.

Here are five shiny stones for your consideration:

Gratitude List:
1.  Green, green, oh the green!  Green says, “Have you been watching?  Have you been paying attention?  Surprise!”  Oh, yes, yes, and. . .
2.  Hello, Little Daffodil, whose name is full of goofy whimsy and whose cup overfloweth with sunshine.
3.  The spaces between.  I will gaze into them, breathe into them.
4.  Doubt.  And the places where faith and trust and safety rest even within doubt.
5.  The Navajo People, whose sacred phrase I have borrowed for my little daily prayer:

May we walk in Beauty.  So much Beauty.

All Our Children

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EWK 4 001

Gratitude List:
1. I am grateful that my friend’s surgery seems to have gone well.
2. I am grateful that we were able to get a much better interest rate for our mortgage (more of a mundane concern than I usually write about perhaps, but this is a grace that comes at a good time).
3. I am grateful that there are always enough hours in a day, even though it sometimes doesn’t seem like it.
4. I am grateful that the sun will return again.
5. I am grateful that my children have safety and comfort.  My prayer is for safety and love for all our children.  They are all our children.

May we walk in Beauty!

Luxuriate in Love

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EWK 5 001
May your baskets be overflowing.

Today’s prompt is to write a luxury poem.

Today, whatever you do,
take a moment to
luxuriate in love.

Gratitude List:
1. Taking a day to acknowledge gratitude.
2. Reason and logic
3. Magic and mystery
4. Honey and lemon tea
5. You.  Thank you for being in my life.

May we walk in Beauty!

Giving Back

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

 

 

eat veggies

Gratitude List:
1. Giving.  Today is Lancaster’s Extraordinary Give, a community celebration of local groups and organizations that do good work in the world.  Here is the link to my school’s page.  If you click on the title at the top of the page, you can see the other organizations involved.  You can also see that since the giving opened at midnight 6 hours ago, already over half a million dollars has been donated to helpful organizations.
2. My friend Daryl Snider’s chapel presentation at school yesterday.  Open-hearted and thoughtful–the kids were engaged.  And I woke up this morning with his song in my head, “Yours are the eyes I see in the mirror.  Yours are the cries I hear in my sleep.  <I can’t pull out the words to the next bit>  Because you are I and I am you.”  We are all connected.
3. The helpers.  These people often find their way onto my list.  I can imagine nothing more hopeful and sustaining in the face of that which angers and terrifies us than the quiet and powerful work of those who simply step up and into the breach, reaching out their hands.  People in many places will try to use our fear and rage and despair to distract us, but the helpers are ignoring the fear-mongers and getting down to work.  And if our own stories or fears or needs keep us from stepping right up to the front line with the helpers, we can still reach out our hands to hold them, to make a net of support for the work that they do.
4. The coming break.  Fall is a bit of a long stretch for teachers, with fewer natural breaks than the spring.  The challenge is important, but it’s nice to see the end of this tunnel.
5. Late fall crops.  I got home yesterday, and Jon and the crew had set up the market room for the first of our fall pick-ups: broccoli, cauliflower, arugula, radishes, spinach, sweet potatoes. . .  Time to feast.

May we walk in Love.

Small Ones

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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This was from the first of November.

No poetry prompt yet this morning.  I’ll post that later, but I have to get off to school, now.

Gratitude List:
1. New chapters in the book
2. A murmuration in the hollow
3. Hobbits.  When Tolkien needed someone to place in the face of the great rising evil in his story, he chose the small ones.  You and I are the small ones, friends.  Let’s join hands and stand together.  Let’s work together, speak together, sing and whisper and shout together.
4. Short bursts of energy in the long jog
5. A good story to listen to on the way to and from school.

May we walk in Beauty!

Wait for the Story

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2011 June 227

Today’s prompt is to write a ritual poem.  This is one of my favorite words.  I love internal preparations for sacred and holy moments.  Here is one pathway inward:

It’s a room that you enter, a space you create.
Settle your roots: down, down and deeper,
raising your branches out into starlight.

Breath first, the winds and the breezes,
scent of the morning, shelter of dawn,
many voices calling, whispering, singing.

Feel your fire rising,
energy lifting your spirit like flame.
Burn.  Let desire be the fuel.

The river flows through you, around you, within you:
quiet meandering, raging through rapids.
Gaze deep into pools for the answers you seek.

Stand firmly on earth.  Let it hold you and shape you.
Enter the cave which leads to your center.
Rock is your reason.  Soil is your mentor.

Enter the labyrinth, spiral to center.
You come to the crossroads, the meeting of pathways:
Rest in the shadows.  The story will find you.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Play
2. Work
3. Song
4. Art
5. Well-being

May we walk in Beauty!

Stones for Memory

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Carin

Today’s prompt is to write a poem about memory.

I have always envied others their power of memory.  My own is so fickle, so capricious, unreliable.  My ability to concentrate and memorize poetry or lines for a play in the present moment are, I think, above average.  I’m nowhere close to having a photographic memory, but I feel like I understand the brains of people who do.  This has served me well in the short-term.  I can quickly learn a story, hold a lesson plan, memorize a poem, prepare for a play.  But my powers of remembering in the long-term are, I think, way below the average.  I can remember very few of the teachers in my growing up years.  Even college, even grad school, even my first years of teaching–all are receding, dragged backward out of my memory.  This has always been kind of painful for me.

What I tell myself is that I live in the present so completely, that the butterfly of my personality sits so completely in the now, that I do not take my mind back enough to pull out the pieces of past and examine them, and so they flow out and away.  Perhaps this is not exactly a defect in my personality, but it remains a deep and abiding pain.  I lose the past too utterly, and I do often feel it as a personal deficiency: if only I would get my flightly brain to concentrate more often on what has gone before, perhaps I could keep it, hold on to it.  Still, I cannot make myself hold memory.  My brain is wired for this moment.

I place in the hands of Time these stones:
the story of this day,
the people I have been near to,
the songs the Fates have whispered in my ears,
the colors that haunt me.

See how they turn to mist,
how they glow for a moment–
red, then golden, then blue–
then dissipate like ash blown by a wind
before I can register
that they have lost their substance.

Where does memory go
when it flows out with the tide,
when it slips down the drain,
when it is blown out with the morning fog?

I am still the child in the forest,
walking blind through the swirling mists,
under the shadows of the great trees.
With each forward step on the trail,
a little bird flutters from the pathway behind,
a bread crumb in its beak.

Gratitude List:
1. Memory
2. Longing
3. This moment
4. The shades of dawn
5. Small moments in which to breathe.

May we walk in Beauty!

Following the Path of Grace

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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There is no prompt up yet, and I have to head to school.  I’ll do a second post later today with the poem.

Gratitude List:
1. Awakenings: Yesterday in a short story, the girl’s boyfriend and his mother offered to help in a chaotic moment at the restaurant.  The dad went out to wait in the car.  This was an incidental sentence in the story, but two of my classes stopped the story and complained about the dad.  They expect more of men these days.
2. Companionship: This bright boy sitting beside me and reading as I write.
3. Redemption. Grace. Restoration:  We don’t always live up to the possibilities.  The people we care for sometimes break or trample the trust we put in them.  Still, we find room for grace.  Today’s grace may be fragile, may be temporary, but I will nurture the hope it offers with everything I can give it, like the tiny, impossible flame we tended at the fire pit a couple weeks ago, giving it our breath, feeding it, believing it would catch.
4. Solitude: Not yet, not yet.  But last night I began my first dreamings for my contemplative solitude retreat this summer.
5. Growth: Sometimes the daily minutiae of teacher-work can make it seem like there is no growth, or that the growth is too small, too slow.  When I step back and look at the progress of students’ work from last year to this, it suddenly becomes clear, like looking at that small oak tree out on the hill.  I cannot see its day-to-day growth, but when I look at it over time, I can see the miracle of its growth.

May we walk in Beauty!

Gratitude and Praise

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1. The first school events for the year are happening today.  First is a computer system training, and I always feel like I can use more training on the computer details.  And it will be delightful to see colleagues again.  In the evening is the New Student Orientation.  I’ll be sorry to miss my own children’s back-to-school night, but I’m really excited to get the room looking welcoming and friendly, and then to start meeting some of my new students and their parents.
2. Richard Rohr’s Mystics series.  I have always been drawing to the writings of the mystics, to their poetry, to the stories of their lives, but it’s only recently, in this series, that I feel as though I am beginning to understand a little of what a contemplative life might look like.
3. The Village that is helping us to raise our children: grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, friends, farm community, and teachers.  Tonight they will meet the teachers who will be with them through this year.  I am trying to get in touch with the anxiety I feel on behalf of my children: Will the teachers like them?  Will they be kind?  Will they understand my kids’ quirks?  Will they laugh with them?  This is one of those turn-around moments: So often, I think in terms of being the teacher that my students need; today, I commit to considering how I can be the teacher that mu students’ parents need me to be for their beloved young people.
4. Old friends and new ones.  I love you all.
5. The hunger, the ache, the longing for Beauty.

May we walk in Beauty!

Here is the second of the Psalms that I am writing for this series at my church.  One of my favorite ways to write poetry is to have an idea that burns in me, and then to suggest to that idea that it has a particular pathway to follow in order to come outside to play, and this project has three.  The parameters of this project are that the poems are: 1) They’re to be Psalms (I am free to interpret that as I choose–I am trying to make the language Psalm-like), 2) They each have a theme (desire, laments, praise, thanksgiving. . .), 3) They fit the Confessional moment in the church service.  Last August I was writing a short poem a day for a postcard project.  I didn’t do that one this year, but I am really grateful for this one: I am discovering that even when life is really busy, having a specific poetic task in the back of my head helps to frame the contemplative work of a season.

Psalm: Praise
10 August 2015

Yours is the music that enters our hearts.
Delight of you enlivens our voices to join in the song.
We are born to worship our Maker.

The world is awash in color and music;
your works are enkindled in sparkle and dazzle.
Every bright bird, each flashing star,
the chirp of the cricket and drone of cicada,
roaring waterfall, quivering leaf–
all of creation sings your glory.

We have only to look up and outward,
and wonder will fill our mouths with praise.

Yet daily our hands reach out
for wealth and power and fame,
instead of rising to praise you.

Our eyes are set on the glitter and shine
of all the distractions that we have made,
and not on your grace and your beauty.

Our voices turn to bitter complaint,
to quarrels and bluster and grumbling,
instead of joining creation’s constant hymn
of praise to the Creator.

O God of wonder and beauty and grace,
open the eyes of our hearts,
awaken our senses to all you have made,
that our spirits may rise in wonder,
that our voices may open in song,
that our days may be filled with praise.