gratitude

Self-Portrait

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

The Prompt for today’s poem is to write a Self-Portrait Poem.  It is late and I am so very sleepy.  This will have to do.

I want my heart to be a singing bowl,
drawing forth your resonance,
and sending it back, shining and quivery,
shimmering threads of sound dancing in the air.

I want my ears to be baskets of soft meadow grass,
holding the stories like fragile eggs,
letting the rain trickle through.

My face is the wide sky, round, a doorway.
My face is the guardian, standing in shadow.
My face is a table.  My face is a window.

I will remember your face forever,
but when I turn from this mirror,
my picture will fade, and I will be only
a dream of myself, a lost story.

I want my eyes to be sponges.
I want my colors to pulsate and flash.
I want my hands rain droplets
from the healing river.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  A little help from my friends
2.  Sleep
3.  Resonance and reflection
4.  Challengers and Initiators
5.  The inevitability of spring

May we walk in Beauty!

 

Susquehanna Dawning

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Fred

Today I got a card in the mail from a friend.  There were bluebirds on the cover and it was full of poetry.  These.

The Poetry Prompt for today is to write a poem about Discovery.

Susquehanna Dawning

Stand just there on the sandy bank of the river.
There, where the water laps over the roots
of the ancient sycamore.  There, where the bridge
and the memory of a bridge run over the waters.

Listen for the rustle and murmur of dawning,
the whisper of wavelets, the groan of the trees,
the sudden wild call of robin: thrush of morning,
leading the dawn chorus, unwrapping the day.

What will you discover this daybreak, this borning?
What stories will otter bring you?  And heron?
What are the words that the river will give you
there, as the sun spreads the golden road before you?

 

Gratitude List:
1. A warm purring cat on my lap.
2. Kind words.  Always be kinder than necessary.  People are.  So often.
3.  Watching Looney Tunes with the kids.  How they laugh!
4. Getting real mail in the mailbox.  Not bills or Netflix or checks or flyers, but real mail.
5.  Guides

May we walk in Beauty!

Lost Language

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s Poem-a-Day Prompt is to write a message poem.

Lost Language

A bark-stripped twig along the path
etched with the burrowers’ runes.

Creekside, the wide webbed prints
of heron’s cuneiform stamp.

Overhead, shifting shapes
of scripts in the migrating flock.

A scatter of leaves on the pavement.
The pattern of bees zipping through sun rays.

When did I unlearn this language?
When did I forget how to read this alphabet?

A message that slips out of memory
just as it reaches the back of my throat.

The last hazy image of a dream.
The world is waiting to be read.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Getting out there.  Deciding.  Starting the search.
2.  I found my old resumes, my portfolio, my syllabi and course schedules from when I taught community college fifteen years ago.  That old me, the younger one, wasn’t too bad.  If she could do that, I think maybe the newer me, the older one, can manage it, too.
3.  A new pair of shoes.  I’m sort of saying that to try to mitigate the sadness that the old ones finally gave up the ghost this morning.  Really, a pair of sturdy, stylish and comfortable shoes that lasts for ten years–there’s some deeper meaning there.
4.  Opening doors for the Universe to pour in.  (Oooops.  I accidentally typed “pout” there.  Heh.)
5.  That poem by Mary Oliver about death, about being married to amazement.

May we walk in Beauty, in Amazement!

How the World Began

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Welcome to National Poetry Month!

So much to do!  I was away from home all day today, so tomorrow I will inaugurate this year’s Poetree in my dogwood.
Stacia Fleegal of the poetry blog Versify offers a challenge to read a poem a day.  I won’t put all mine on videotape, but here’s today’s attempt.
I think I will try the April Poem-A-Day Challenge again.  Today’s prompt is a two-fer: Write a Beginning poem.  Write an Ending poem.

How the World Began

In the beginning, Spider
launched herself into the spring breeze
from a rattling stalk of dried nettle

toward a skinny maple sapling.
She missed the maple.  Landed,
light-foot, in a heap of leaves

gathered around its base.
A quick scuttle upward, launched again
and through the breeze once more

to nettle stalks this time, and
the gossamer cord caught.
Then launched herself once more

into the gentle breath of wind
until she’d spun herself a world,
until she had encompassed all.

In the end, Spider gathered strands
and wove herself a spirit cloth of silver thread
to catch the wandering dreams

of mockingbirds and wild geese
passing over the chilly meadow,
following tomorrow’s sunrise.

 

Gratitude List:

1.  Flicker calling from the treetops this morning
2.  The golden flank feathers of the pheasant who walked through my parents’ lawn this afternoon, and his squeaky screen-door squawk.
3.  The Fool, dancing on the edge, willing to take risks, to laugh lightly at herself, to seek adventure.
4.  Energy.  Taking responsibility for my own, learning to sense it, to listen for it, to watch, to shift it.
5.  The smoke ring that emerged from the palo santo smudge that Nicky used this morning, how it rose so languidly through the grapevines, twisted, turned for a moment into a baby dragon, and dissipated like a mist, like a wraith.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Dream Keeper

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This one, by Langston Hughes, keeps wrapping itself around my heart these days, keeps wiggling into my brain-space.

Dream Keeper

Gratitude List:

1.  Collaborative art
2.  A fresh novel to read
3.  Free public libraries–what a concept
4.  Words, spoken and sung (today it was Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote)
5.  Featherbed

May we walk in Beauty!

Wanton

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

For instance, the crocus and anemone
have leaked past the bricks
that line the edge of the bed.

For instance, the wind.

For instance, those people
blew in through the door,
climbed all those flights of stairs,
and sat down to tell me their stories.

For instance, it has taken me
three days to clear my yard of branches.

For instance, this joy
wanders into the house
even when the doors are closed
against the last blast of winter.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Sometimes it seems like you have to get attached to Plan B in order for the tricksy Universe to commit to making Plan A happen.  I am grateful for today’s full schedule (Plan A), and a project to do another day (Plan B).  I don’t mean to disparage the Universe by this–it keeps one on one’s toes, eh?
2.  Crocus and anemone leaking all over the yard.
3.  Hey, that snow was pretty!  No, I never thought I would use those two words in a sentence again, either.  At least not this soon.
4.  Reiki tomorrow
5.  The web of interconnection.  How the cards you draw have messages for me, too.

May we walk in Beauty!

Healing Song and Story

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  The way that sharing stories opens the heart to healing.
2.  Songs that hold stories.
3.  Vulnerability and strength together.
4.  Clearing the yard of dead branches in the cool evening as the sun set below the rim of the hollow.
5.  Eggs.  For all the potential they hold, all the mystery, the warmth, the way they settle into your palm.  I once had a postcard of an icon of Mary Magdalene holding an egg.

May we walk in Beauty!

Equinox

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Jet Star

I spent my earliest years in East Africa, just a few degrees south of the wide belt of this big round ball, in a comfortable climate where the sun rose every morning at seven o’clock and set again at seven every evening, all year long.  Our seasons were marked by the coming of rains and their going away again.  The days were often hot, but the evenings brought cool breezes off of Lake Victoria, and roiling Michaelangelo clouds sailed in across the plains from the lake.

Here, where the sun slips off to the south for a season, where the days get shorter and then longer again, this moment when the day and night reach equilibrium brings me closer to that sense of rightness and balance, though the cold of winter still lingers in my bones.  While I find the cold time, the dark time, still to be a challenge, I have come to love the seasons, to revel in the feel of the shifting, whirling tilting planet we live on, the reassurance that one state of being will inevitably give way to the next.

Tomorrow we come to that place, one of the quarter points we notice in Terra’s dance with Sol.  Equinox.  My head today is full of these complicated E-words: Equinox, Equator, Equilibrium, in-Evitable.  At these equal points of spring and fall, we are ever so much slightly closer to our star than we are on the outward fling of the Solstices.  Do-si-do, Sun.  Swing your partner.  Welcome, Spring, oh welcome, Spring.

Gratitude List:
1. Inevitability and choice
2. Intention and destiny
3. Fate and chance
4. Fortune and opportunity
5. Blueberry pancakes

May we walk in Beauty!

 

 

 

 

Prayer Bundle:  Tonight I am finishing up gathering the items for my bundle.  I don’t have a direct symbolic link for each thing–I included some things because they are shiny or colorful and caught my magpie’s eye.  There is a piece of cloth to wrap it all together, and cord and wire for tying, a broken necklace with sparkly dangles for brightening it up.  I will take pictures tomorrow in a good light, wrap it all up, and then at about quarter to five, I’ll take it outside as the Equinox arrives.  I want it to rest on the earth, to be touched by the fire of the sun, by wind, by rain.  I want all the elements to work on it.  And I’ll place it somewhere where I won’t mow over it six weeks from now, and where it will be safe from curious children.

Molding the Conversation. . .

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

So many threads of conversation this weekend, so much to think about.

During a long and intense conversation with friends this morning, one friend’s 12-year-old daughter sat at the table with a pencil and paper, doodling.  Trees and squiggles and a stylized heart.  Eyes and rain and a tree with a hole.  Tangles and webs.  At one point, the conversation turned toward the drawing, and we started asking her to talk about bits and pieces.  “I am molding the conversation into the drawing,” she said, pointing to a tear that she drew when we had spoken of sadness, to a cradling arm with the word Protection within its bowl, to the way the tree had its flaws, just as we all do, to a web that she said represented complexity within each person.  I felt so heard, so understood, so carefully held by this silent and thoughtful witness to our conversation.  What a vulnerable and tender gift to share.

I often doodle, too, when I talk with people, when I listen to others talk, and I think I understand a little of what she meant about molding a conversation into the pictures, though I have never done it with quite the intentionality that she did.  Wouldn’t it be an interesting exercise, with willing friends, to take this thoughtful girl’s idea into conversation with intention?  To have paper and pencils on a table while conversation is occurring, perhaps to pass a sheet around, each adding a piece to the doodle as the conversation moves along, and then to quietly listen as people talk about the ways they were holding the ideas and each other by the symbols and ideas that they drew?

Gratitude List:
1.  Being listened to and heard.  Friends who are honest mirrors.
2.  Ideas flying and soaring.  Heart-expanding conversation.
3.  Taking responsibility for my energy.
4.  The expanded kitchen/dining room to host friends around the table.
5.  Milkweed.

May we walk in Beauty!

All in the Bowl

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Into that bowl of my heart,
along with my rages and furies,
with recent betrayals,
with my crushing self-doubt,
with your anxieties and your tears

(yes, let me keep them there, too
you know as well as I do
and as well as the Universe knows
that when my crying time comes
as it unfortunately and inevitably
comes to us all
you’ll be running to catch my tears
in a bowl of your own, and not because
I hold yours now–no, it will be because
it’s who you are
it’s what you do
it’s what we do)

into just that bowl,
along with all that,
I place

a small white stone
bee, bee, bee, crocus, bee
concentric circles of friendship
the feel of the sun on my hair
deep rumbling rolls of laughter like thunder.

May we walk in Beauty.