gratitude

Sunshine Mandala and an Egg of a Moon

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2013 August 299

Gratitude List:
1.  An orange egg of moon resting on the rim of the bowl of hills above us.
2.  Socializing.  Big one, this.  Someone else watched our children this evening so we could talk to adults.
3.  Sharing story.  Even when the story hurts.  It always helps to tell and hear.
4.  End of the first week of school.  Ellis says the thing he likes best about school is School.  Says he’s developing a Stay Ahead Strategy for keeping up with the class when they write things from the chalkboard because he writes more slowly than most of the others.  (“Did your teacher help you develop that strategy?”  “No, I came up with it myself” he said.  “In fact, just now is the first time I have called it that.”)
5.  We’re halfway through the season.  The light’s at the end of the tunnel.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love what we do.  But we get so very tired.  It the Wednesday of the season.  Energy is renewed simply by the awareness that we’ll get a break.  Some day.

May we walk in Beauty.

St. Augustine’s Prayer

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This prayer of St. Augustine expresses so much that I believe about the Divine Love that is at the heart of the Universe, or the Multiverse, perhaps.  How would the religions of the world change if we who seek the Divine would call that Mystery the Beauty Ever Ancient?  Unlike Augustine, I find myself drawn into the realm of the Holy when I live deeply with the “created things,” but I’ll not quibble.  The prayer is so lovely.

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

Gratitude List:
1.  Mystery
2.  Networking
3.  Salsa ready to can
4.  Light in August
5.  Cicadas

May We walk in Beauty.  Ever Ancient.

Prodigal as Love

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yellow walnut leaves
twist and twirl silently earthward
lavishly giving themselves to breeze, to breath
prodigal as love

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Dreams.  And dreams.
2.  Passages, fledgings, relinquishments
3.  Raisin bread toasted
4.  Swallows migrating through
5.  New rhythms

May we walk in Beauty.

Luna, Hen, and Living in the Village

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2013 August 270 2013 August 274

Gratitude List:
1.  Luna Moth
2.  Halo of morning sun around a black hen on dewy grass coming to greet me in the morning.
3. The parenting village–we don’t have to do it all alone, don’t have to figure it out all alone.
4.  Dissatisfaction and satisfaction: a two-sided coin.  Right now, I am exploring dissatisfaction as a means to avoid complacency and getting-stuck-in-a-rut-ness.
5.  Ellis is reading Calvin and Hobbes cartoons to Joss.

May we walk in Beauty, fly in Beauty.

Slumber

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Zentangle 16August13 001

Gratitude List:
1.  Butterflies.  Yes, Mara Eve, there are butterflies!  Even a few monarchs.  All is not lost.
2.  Moments
3.  Coming to terms
4.  Slumber
5.  Tomato sandwiches

May we walk in Beauty.

Katydids and Naked Ladies

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2013 August 175
Phoenix

Gratitude List:
1.  All those naked ladies tiptoeing through people’s gardens right now.
2.  Katydids
3.  Friends who take care of me.  Thanks, Nancy and Abigail!
4.  Mosquitoes.  Okay, not really.  But think of all the wonderful people they feed!  Bats and swifts and swallows and. . .  So yes, mosquitoes.
5.  Night sounds of August
6.  Growing older, growing up

May we walk in Beauty!

Revision

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I used to tie myself in knots with finding the perfect word or phrase for a poem, working and reworking ideas and sounds until things began to sound like something manufactured in a plastics factory.  Then, in November, when I decided I needed to loosen up or let my Poet die a quiet death, I found myself spewing random verbiage all over the place.  This was a good thing: my Poet survived.

Lately, the pendulum has begun to swing back again.  I don’t plan to let myself get knotted into that editorial straitjacket, but I do want to add a little more deliberation to my poetry again.  Here is a revision I worked up on my July first poem.  It’s not significantly different; the biggest change is in the line breaks.  I wanted to create more intention to the rhythm of the lines, with a sudden shift in the final stanza.  I think it works.  I’d be glad of any feedback you have about the differences between the poems.

These are the Days

These are the days when I become
a quiet rock, a quivering leaf,
an ear of lichen listening to the stones grow.

The words have wandered off on tiptoe,
eloquence eludes me, and all my sentences
begin with the word So.

So the wind will sing in my sun-rimed feathers
but my own story waits like a seed in the earth,
like a dream that must rise through mud, a bubble,

the nymph of a damselfly crawling through centuries
up the stalk of a smooth green reed
to be born to the clear blue light.

There is a roaring in my ears
like the sound of a newborn grief or rage.
But it’s only the lazy hum of summer,

of fireflies clicking their aching rhythms
into the velvet indigo of solstice,
communing with the waxing moon.

Another day I’ll dawn,
but for now I will sink
slowly into the pond
with Grandmother Moon
and leave my message with the fish.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Variety
2.  Revision
3.  Sweaters and scarves in August
4.  Balance
5.  Partnership

May we walk in beauty.

I Have Been Circling

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The summer has caught me up in its tangled strings.  Throughout the day, ideas for my gratitude list pop into my head.  I try to grab and secure them, but someone has left the lid off the pot while making this batch of popcorn, and they zing away before I can grasp them.

I’m not too fussed about it.  This is the nature of summer.  As the cooler weather returns and daily demands of the farm settle into more predictable rhythms, I’ll get the lid back on that wanton kettle of my brain.

Perhaps I have written this before: My friend Sarah and I have talked about how perhaps something about the gratitude list ought to be a little difficult, how for those of us who live fairly closely with the natural world, it would be pretty easy to rattle off a list of five natural things every day, and this might defeat the purpose a little.  This is a temptation for me.  On the other hand, I want my gratitude lists, like poetry, to carry several layers of meaning, as I hope this one will.

Gratitude List:
1.  Hummingbird: Yesterday when I came down from harvest, I let myself drop underneath the poplar tree.  I lay there watching the sun glowing through the pollen-golden wings of a tiger swallowtail wandering among the leaves, when suddenly there she was, wings a-blur in a patch of blue between the branches.  I don’t think I’ve ever observed a hummer in flight from directly below before.  She was a double fan of pure motion and light.  A lemniscate.  No wonder the Hopi and Navajo see her as the messenger between the worlds.  If I see her again today, what message shall I send?
2.  Toad: Yesterday I was with a crew harvesting tomatoes, while Holly and Mary Jo were picking squash.  Suddenly, Holly started to whoop and holler.  A few moments later, as we were loading our tomato bins into the back of the truck, Holly came over, her hands cupped together.  I thought she was wringing out a wet rag: water was streaming from between her fingers.  Instead, she was gently holding the largest toad I have ever seen, and it was performing its natural response to being picked up by a human.  I’m still a little stunned that it could hold that much liquid inside it.  Toads have been a watchful presence in my writing this past winter, so it felt like a doubly good omen.
3.  Pears: Driving the tractor down the hill, I noticed the pears shaping up beautifully on the trees in the orchard.   I can almost taste them.
4.  Tomatoes: Tomatoes satisfy on so many levels.  I have my first six quarts of 2013 sauce on the counter ready to go to the basement shelves for the season.  Fresh salsa with cilantro and lime and hot peppers.  But right now, the thing I love so much is the wanton variety of their shapes and colors when you put them in a bin together.  I didn’t get a shot of yesterday’s bins, but the one attached to this post looks almost the same.
5.  Rilke:  “I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”  Rob Breszny challenged his readers to write their own permutation.  Here’s mine: ” I am circling around the Core, around the Source, and I have been circling since my thousand times began, and I still do not know whether I am a watchful toad, or a wordless prayer, or a cool wind above the fields.”

May we walk in beauty.

Wrap Me up in Spiderwebs

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2013 June 139
Scarlet Pimpernel

Gratitude List:
1.  The bank of wildflowers in that lawn at the edge of Yorkana.
2.  Tomatoes and peppers in the freezer.
3.  Two-year-olds.  They turn my heart to puddles.  They could wrap me up in spiderwebs and lead me off to faerieland without a struggle.
4.  Rest.
5.  Connection.   Interface.  Meeting.

May we walk in Beauty!

Spinning Gratitude

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I can’t quite make sense of my motivations for how I want to write today’s Gratitude List.  I’m thinking too hard about thinking about it.  You see, I have been complaining all day.  Really complaining about how many things have been going wrong.  I keep it sort of light, too, whining delivered on a platter of intended humor: “I think all the appliances and motorized things on this farm have had a conference and decided to break down at the same time.”

Pretty lame, actually, but that’s the place where you’re supposed to groan with  empathy, and pity me my breakdowns:  Poor woman can’t keep her food cold or drive her car, and her lawn’s turning to jungle.  But I don’t think I am looking for pity, really.  Well, perhaps a little commiseration.  That’s such a great word, such a great idea.  Let’s be a little miserable together at the unfairness of the world, and it will all seem a little easier to bear.

I have been making an internal list today (not necessarily intentionally) of all the things that have gone wrong.  If I twist that list into my gratitude list in some artful way, I will have had my chance at a rant.  But is that really gratitude?

I think it is.  Yes, because this business of writing a gratitude list is not only about finding the wonderful things that do happen; it’s also about putting the brokenness into perspective, about spinning the story into something positive.  Not for spin’s sake, but for gratitude’s sake.  For the sake of centeredness and peace of mind.

In Pronoia, Rob Breszny talks about how when something goes wrong, we focus on that one or two or five things that aren’t working instead of the hundreds of things that are working.  It’s about where you place your focus.  The clocks still work.  Gravity continues to hold me to Earth.  The plants grow.  The children laugh.  The stovetop cooks my morning egg to perfection.

Today I am a Spin Doctor.  Not in search of pity, except as it comes with a little good mojo for all my motorized things to work.

Gratitude List:
1.  My father’s car, and his gracious sharing of it while Roxanne Buick is having herself repaired to pass inspection.
2.  A new (to us) fridge being delivered this week, and the old one taken away with no extra effort from us.  And working substitutes in the meantime.  We’re so fortunate that we have the farm store fridge to tide us over until the new one comes.
3.  The string trimmer works again.  We can at least keep the edges tidy.  And sometimes keep your edges tidy is just the thing.
4.  Spinning.
5.  Perspective.

May we walk in Beauty.