gratitude

Re-Member

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Re-Member
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I remember me
when in the company
of women who sigh
when they hug,
who throw their heads back
and laugh, who pause
in the middle of a story
to look you in the eye
and shake their heads
at the ridiculousness
of it all, at the crazy way
it all falls apart,
and all comes together.

Gratitude List:
1. Making art with others
2. Telling stories with the help of tarot cards
3. Yogurt-covered pretzels
4. Woodpeckers: this morning, downy, hairy, and red-bellied were all at the feeder at the same time
5. Watching the herd of deer in their dark winter coats crossing through the bosque this morning–I’m pretty sure two young ones are the twins I saw throughout the summer
May we walk in Beauty!

“The winds will blow their own freshness into you,
and the storms their energy,
while cares will drop away from you
like the leaves of Autumn.”
—John Muir

“Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls. ” —Ursula Le Guin

“The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting.

It is written, but not by scribes and secretaries for posterity: it flies from the mouth on the breath that is our life and is gone, like the outbreath, utterly gone and yet returning, repeated, the breath the same again always, everywhere, and we all know it by heart.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

“Who would I be if I didn’t live in a world that hated women?” —Jessica Valenti

“The heart is right to cry
even when the smallest drop of light, of love, is taken away
Perhaps you may kick, moan, scream—in a dignified silence,
but you are right to do so in any fashion…until God returns to you.”
―Hafiz (Ladinsky)

“All water is holy water.”
―Rajiv Joseph

“The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.”
―Arundhati Roy

“Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness.
Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.”
―Scott Adams

“You know what breaks me, when someone is visibly excited about a feeling or an idea or a hope or a risk taken, and they tell you about it but preface it with: “Sorry, this is dumb but—.” Don’t do that. I don’t know who came here before me, or who conditioned you to think you had to apologize or feel obtuse. But not here. Dream so big it’s silly. Laugh so hard it’s obnoxious. Love so much it’s impossible. And don’t you ever feel unintelligent. And don’t you ever apologize. And don’t you ever shrink so you can squeeze yourself into small places and small minds. Grow. It’s a big world. You fit. I promise.”
―Owen Lindley

“The bond of our common humanity is stronger than our fears and prejudices.” ―Jimmy Carter

“The reality is we have more in common with the people we’re bombing than the people we’re bombing them for.” ―Russell Brand

“Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. ”
―Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire

Trans Day of Remembrance

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Trans Day of Remembrance
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Hold a lit flame in the palm of your hand
Quanesha, Strawberry, Honee
Kassim, Redd, Vanity
Tai’Vion, Dylan, Monique, Pauly
listen as the silence gathers wings around you
Kenji, Shannon, River Neveah
Liara, Jazlynn, Yella, Africa
Michelle, Tayy Dior, Reyna
their faces like wisps of smoke and mist
looking over our shoulders
Kita, Andrea Doria, Kitty
Sasha, Starr, Meraxes, Chevy
Diamond, Alex, Tee
These are just the names we know of those
who lost their lives this year to violence.

Hold your flames high and give them light,
let light shine into their memories,
let light pour through the scrim of their stories
that we may hear again their voices.
We have a right to be here.
We have a right to exist as ourselves.

Hold your flames higher still,
for their number is greater than thirty.
Hosts of beloved ones join our circle,
lives lost not at the hands of another,
but at the hands of society,
at the bitter end of despair,
caught in the crosshairs
of some preacher’s sanctimonious condemnation,
some politician’s pandering to the puritans,
some school board member’s unctuous dissembling.

Rise up like smoke, they tell us, their voices
like ashes caught in the arms of autumn wind,
spilling into our circles. Stand up,
step forward, speak out, so that the ones
who come after us may live.

Gratitude List:
1. Pileated woodpecker, towhee, shadow of vulture
2. The white breast of the yellow-throat catching the afternoon sun among the red leaves of the Japanese maple
3. Beginning to feel good again after feeling rotten
4. Cinnamon tea
5. How hearts reach out. Can you feel it?
May we walk in Beauty!

“Here is what the elders call a starting point. If we seek to welcome people into community, then mutual respect must be our foundational practice. We commit ourselves to respect the dignity of every human being. It does not mean agree, authorize or approve. It does mean treat others as we would have them treat us. Respect is the gate we open to all those looking for a place to belong.” —Steven Charleston

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” -Oscar Wilde

“Every minute can be a holy, sacred minute. Where do you seek the spiritual? You seek the spiritual in every ordinary thing that you do every day. Sweeping the floor, watering the vegetables, and washing the dishes become holy and sacred if mindfulness is there. With mindfulness and concentration, everything becomes spiritual.” ― Thích Nhất Hạnh

“…when women speak truly they speak subversively–they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
That’s what I want–to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you–I want to hear you.” —Ursula Le Guin

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” —Muriel Rukeyser

“Oh to meet, however briefly, the greatness that lives under our surface. To summon enough bravery to be without armour and strategy, for the chance at meeting that irreducible power. Oh to make of our terrified hearts a prayer of surrender to the God of Love; that we remain safe in our quivering ache to be near that Otherness, even for a moment. To touch that ancient life who will never relinquish its wilderness, who lets instinct make its choices, whose knowing lives in bones and whose song is a wayfinder.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa

“The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.”
―Parker J. Palmer

“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”
―Emily Dickinson

“One of my favourite teachings by Martín Prechtel is that ‘violence is an inability with grief.’ In other words, it takes skillfulness to grieve well, to grieve wholeheartedly. It requires us to bravely, nakedly come to face all that is lost, keeping our hearts open to loving just as fully again.
“When we make war, lashing out in rage and revenge, it is because we are unwilling to make this full encounter with grief. It is easy to enact the same violence which has taken so much from us―including towards ourselves―but the greater work is to let that which is missing enlarge your life; to make beauty from your brokenness.
“Whatever you hold in the cauldron of your intention is your offering to the divine. The quality of assistance you can generate and receive from the Holy is governed by the quality of your inner offering. When you indulge in fear and doubt, you are flooding the arena where love is attempting to work.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa

“Our true home is in the present moment.
To live in the present moment is a miracle.
The miracle is not to walk on water.
The miracle is to walk on the green Earth
in the present moment.”
―Thich Nhat Hanh

“An awake heart
is like a sky that pours light.” ―Hafiz (Ladinsky)

“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.” ―Oscar Levant

Rules

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This one is inspired by Martín Espada’s “Rules for Captain Ahab’s Provincetown Poetry Workshop”

Rules for Aunt Elizabeth’s School for Young Witches
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

  1. No dogmas allowed in the house. 
  2. Keep your karma tuned up at all times.
  3. No reading of others’ auras without consent.
  4. For that matter, do no magic on anyone without consent. This particularly applies to love potions. Go ahead and make yourself lovely and loveable, but refrain from compelling others to love you.
  5. Remember to empty your pockets of crystals and twigs and butterfly wings and feathers and toads and marbles and nails and broken glass before you put your robes in the wash.
  6. Your wands are extensions of your fingers, and it isn’t polite to point fingers, so do not point your wands at others.
  7. Keep your cauldrons clean. Residual spellwork in an unclean cauldron may cause unintended reactions in future potion-making.
  8. Tend to your ongoing spells. Expired spells may increase in potency, resulting in dangerous side effects.
  9. Keep that nose out of the air. No task is too humble for a witch. Sometimes the strongest spells are created in the completion of the humblest of tasks.
  10. Listen when the trees are talking to you. Do not ignore the questions that the rocks put forth. Do not interrupt the speeches of the rivers.
  11. Greet all beings politely, whether human, animal, mineral, plant, or magical.

We are doing 30 Days of Gratitude at school right now, so some of my gratitudes are responding to those specific prompts.

Gratitude List:
1. That pink sky this morning, and the pastel greens of the fields below
2. Three small things: gemstones, kittens, little succulent plants
3. Something in the room: my students
4. A person: Leymah Gbowee ( and her continuing work for justice and human rights)
5. First Trimester Grades are done and submitted
May we walk in Beauty!

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love.” —Audre Lorde

“We need another… perhaps a more mystical concept of animals… In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” —Henry Beston

“One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found – and it is found in terrible places. … For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963

“Walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy.” —Kate Braestrup

“Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.” —Neil Gaiman

“Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors, but today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.” —Kahlil Gibran

“To write is to ask questions. It doesn’t matter if the answers are true or puro cuento. After all and everything only the story is remembered, and the truth fades away like the pale blue ink on a cheap embroidery pattern.” —Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo

“With guns, you can kill terrorists.
With education, you can kill terrorism.” —Malala Yousufsai

“The wo/man who moves a mountain
begins by carrying away small stones.”
—Confucius, The Analects

“We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?” —Wendell Berry

“She’s a lean vixen: I can see
the ribs, the sly
trickster’s eyes, filled with longing
and desperation, the skinny
feet, adept at lies.

Why encourage the notion
of virtuous poverty?
It’s only an excuse
for zero charity.
Hunger corrupts, and absolute hunger
corrupts absolutely,”
― Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House

What I Believe

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
This quilt was made by my great aunt, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Nolt Weaver.

What I Believe
after Michael Blumenthal

I, too, believe there is no justice,
but that the deer moving slowly
through the woods are a message.

I believe that something moves the leaves
that quiver on the red oak on a windless afternoon,
and that my heart is blown open
by the winds rushing over the hillside.

I believe that the whirring
of a thousand starling wings filling the hollow
might shake me from my torpor,
if I am brave enough to feel it.

I believe that not all moths make it
out of the cocoon. Don’t promise me
everything will be okay unless you’re certain.
But I believe in the perilous pumping
of cecropia’s wings in the moonlight.

I believe my grandmother was stitching the future
with her needle, pulling threads through the layers
of a quilt of scraps from everyone’s old clothes.

Gratitude List:
Just one today: My colleagues. I love how people just offer their best selves. Usually on Mondays, we have crocheters and knitters club for anyone who wants to attend. We weren’t able to get the regular book club going this year, but this year we’re going to have a book club where we get together and read the book together. There’s a Wellness Committee that reminds us to eat our vegetables and to walk. Today our resident Plant Nerd gave us a workshop in plant therapy, and taught us to pot up houseplants. I went to that, which it was after a short tutorial in running the 3D computers on campus. Some people managed to go to both of those and squeezed in 15 minutes of chair yoga in the meantime. (Usually there aren’t so many things going on on one day.) One colleague always marshals the upstairs folks to decorate the halls for winter holidays together. Another colleague set up an ofrenda and invited us to remember our loved ones we’ve lost by putting them on the altar. Some of them help students tap the maple trees and actually boil the sap down for maple syrup every year. We have a standing breakfast date on Fridays for as many as can make it. Oh, and on top of that, they’re all skilled teachers. I am becoming a better person in this place.

“We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.” —Terence McKenna

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” —Audre Lorde

“Don’t operate out of fear, operate out of hope. Because with hope, everything is possible.” —Winona LaDuke

Our deepest fears are like dragons
guarding our deepest treasure.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Praise Song
by Barbara Crooker

Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there’s left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn’t cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.

“Look at everything
as though you were seeing it
either for the first or last time.
Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.”
—Betty Smith

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to breaking of bread.” —James Baldwin

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” —Nelson Mandela

For a day, just for one day,
Talk about that which disturbs no one
And bring some peace into your beautiful eyes.
—Hafiz

“Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence.” —proverb

“All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light.” —Rumi

The magic of autumn has seized the countryside;
now that the sun isn’t ripening anything
it shines for the sake of the golden age;
for the sake of Eden;
to please the moon for all I know.
—Elizabeth Coatsworth

“. . .fairies’ gold, they say, is like love or knowledge–or a good story. It’s most valuable when it’s shared.” —Heather Forest, The Woman Who Flummoxed the Fairies

Setting the Intention

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Setting the Intention
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

my magic will not change the world
my prayers will not avail
unless
the intention begins
with changing me

Gratitude List:
1. Leaves Falling
2. An afternoon of magic with magical people
3. Reminders to breathe: “breathe in, breathe out”
4. Clean slates
5. My family
May we walk in Beauty!

“Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor.
It’s not a metaphor. It’s how the world is.” —Jeanette Armstrong

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the Earth seeking the successive autumns.” —George Eliot

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.” ―Hermann Hesse, Demia

“Did you ever hear a tree pushing out of the ground or the snow falling? Great things happen in silence.” ―Mother Angelica

“Everything belongs, even the “bad” and dark parts of yourself. Nothing need be rejected or denied. No one need be hated. No one need be excommunicated, shunned, or eliminated. You don’t have time for that anymore. You’ve entered into the soul of the serene disciple where, because the Holy One has become one in you, you are able to see that oneness everywhere else. Almost like magic!” ―Richard Rohr

“In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busily sawing off the limb on which it is perched.” —Paul Ehrlich, 1973

“You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.” —Fannie Lou Hamer

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow

“Silence is a frightening thing. Silence leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.” —Joan D. Chittister

“The present moment is the intersection of eternity with time.” ―Beatrice Bruteau

“Only the present moment contains life.” ―Thích Nhất Hạnh

“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful—an endless prospect of magic and wonder.” ―Ansel Adams

“I went inside my heart
to see how it was.
Something there makes me hear
the whole world weeping.”
―Rumi (Barks)

“Our work is to show we have been breathed upon—to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live it out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowledge, from body, from dreams, and journeys of all sorts.” ―Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“We found ourselves in a realm
where dreams are formed,
destiny is chosen
and magic is as real
as a handprint in the snow.”
―Libba Bray

”When we see the Beloved in each person,
it’s like walking through a garden,
watching flowers bloom all around us.” ―Ram Dass

“It is the paradoxical nature of grief to lead us to love. There is a seed planted in loss, an evolution made in breaking, a genius found in separation that is rarely apparent in the heart of crisis. But often what looks like deviation is really proliferation, like satellite initiatives born from a group’s dissolution. Intimacy is forged in the hearts of those who know exclusion. To them is given the gift of tenderness which can mentor another through their own isolation.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa

Silence

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I only learned today about how the Taliban this August banned the sound of women’s voices in public places. As I searched for poetry by Afghan women, I came across this powerful couplet by a poet who went by the name Muska, a young Afghan woman of Helmand Province. In translation into English, the poem loses the syllabic and sound structures of its form, the landay, which is a 22-syllable folk poem of Pashtun women of Afghanistan. My own attempt at the syllable count is certainly no landay, but seeks to echo it in lament of Muska, who died two weeks after setting herself on fire after her brothers beat her when they discovered her poetry, and the women of Afghanistan, who have had their voices stolen from them.

(I learned about Muska and the landay here: The National Poetry Foundation, Poetry journal.)

Silence
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.
—by the Afghan poet Muska (Zarmina) of Helmand Province, who set herself on fire in 2012 after being beaten by her brothers when they discovered her poetry

Her laughter drifts no more like jasmine
over the garden wall and into the marketplace.

Who will sing the songs of the women
whose voices lie hidden at the bottom of the well?

The moon is rising over the wall
silently as the woman sitting in the courtyard.

“Through a process of perpetual discernment and “prayer unceasing” we may dive into the well of each faith and emerge with the treasure that connects us all.” —Mirabai Starr

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” —Carl Sagan

“If the Rhine, the Yellow, the Mississippi rivers are changed to poison, so too are the rivers in the trees, in the birds, and in the humans changed to poison, almost simultaneously. There is only one river on the planet Earth and it has multiple tributaries, many of which flow through the veins of sentient creatures.” —Thomas Berry

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” —Kurt Vonnegut

‪”So much of bird flight is really expert falling, slipping into that delicate space within the argument between gravity and air resistance. That natural alchemy transforms a plummet into a glide. Someday, I hope to learn to fail like birds fall.‬” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist

“Reading and writing cannot be separated. Reading is breathing in; writing is breathing out.”

“For a Star to be born,
there is one thing that must happen;
a nebula must collapse.
So collapse.
Crumble.
This is not your Destruction.
This is your birth.” —Zoe Skylar

Tools for the Resistance

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

This was Fun! And a lot of hard work! A few days ago, I asked friends on Facebook to offer their tools for the resistance as we work to meet the challenges of the coming days. I was unprepared for the magnitude of the response. I received 119 comments on the thread. Some comments included several ideas which I unwove into different lines. Others echoed each other, and I wove those together as I could. I decided to let the actual phrasings stand as written in as many cases as possible, though I often only pulled out shorter phrases from longer sentences to make the points succinct. I printed out four pages of about 110 lines of poem, sliced the lines apart, and arranged them in a flow that felt good to me. Here is the finished poem, with great gratitude to my beloved community:

Tools for the Resistance:
A Crowd-Sourced Poem
by Beth Weaver-Kreider and friends

Strengthen yourselves for what is to come.
Set your boundaries, clearly and effectively.
Strengthen your resolve.
Practice resilience.
Stay visible.
Wear black.
Harness that bone-deep disappointment to determination.
Mourn. Invite people to mourn with you.
Scream. Invite people to scream with you.
Use the tool of your voice. Use reason.
Pay attention. Prepare yourself for when you will be needed.
Resist tyranny.
Don’t hide. Don’t obey in advance.
Teach the history of non-resistance and civil disobedience.
Do civil disobedience. Push back.
Refuse to follow unethical instructions.
Carry forward our history of resistance.
Mobilize the angelic warriors.
Get your cell phone camera ready.
Get your boots on the ground.
Put on your pink hat. March!
Find joy in action!

Gather facts and information, knowledge and experience.
Read. Research and read.
Think critically.
Practice intelligence.
Practice bravery.
Educate.
Make sure people know how the system works.
Teach the privileged to be allies.
Unlearn the whitewashing of history.
Disempower ignorance.
Tell the truth. Share it boldly and without rancor.
Confront your elitism and privilege.
Stop recycling old arguments.
Examine your assumptions.
Be humble.
Be an active ally: Say, “What can I do?”
Come alongside. Check in. Hold space.
Greet the ones others look away from.
Actively love the disenfranchised.
Actively listen to them, and follow the marginalized ones.
Follow the directions of the young ones.
Walk with your elders.
Connect. Coresist.

Boycott. Buy local. Buy independent.
Vote with your money. Know where your dollars are going.
Volunteer.
Gather folks who care.
Create adaptable support systems.
Teach basic skills.
Teach people to make things for themselves.
Grow the movement. Draw people in.
Share ideas and plan actions.
Look to your sisters.
Learn the value of true friendship.
Hold on to each other.
Give care to those in your sphere.
Practice breathing together
Share your gentleness.

Aid in the collective healing work.
Midwife one another.
Extend gifts of listening. Listen selflessly.
Listen to and hear each other’s stories.
Tell stories of hope and resistance
Have hard conversations.
Make eye contact.

Make music. Send sound soaring to the heavens.
Make music without words.
Memorize music and poetry.
Sing songs about equity, freedom, and democracy.
Sing songs of peace with children.
Teach music to children.
Use humor: Humor has always been a tool of resistance.
Have fun! Be creative!
Make art, make art, make art.
Dance!

Walk with friends.
Walk in the woods. Sit by streams. Gaze at the stars.
Find stillness in nature. Soak in the beauty.
Save seeds. Share seeds and plants. Plant seeds. Find new seeds.
Plant community gardens.
Use herbs and words together to incant and pray and sing.
Find wisdom from the flowers.
Take inspiration from strong sturdy trees.
Grow your community of trees.
Remember the roots that connect us all.
Keep your eye on beauty instead of disorder.
Keep your eye on peace, standing shoulder to shoulder.
Practice courageous kindness.
Hold onto hope.

Practice resistance as a spiritual act.
Practice gratitude.
Practice radical self-care.
Practice slowness, enchantment, being, and noticing.
Upgrade consciousness.
Meditate. Be fully present in the moment that is.
Practice reflection.
Recharge.
Use magic. Cast spells.
Hold sacred circles.
Create the Yes.
Pray: “Love, make me an instrument of your peace.”
Continue to show up for mercy and peace and justice
Continue to show up for kindness and compassion
Continue to show up for wisdom and safety
Remember: You are not alone.
Let your little light shine. Shine it into the shadows.
Be a beacon of light and hope.

Gratitude List:
1. Co-poeming
2. Taking a group of students to a nursing home today to interview their elders. Beautiful interactions. I am incredibly proud of these young people.
3. Self-care. I had been neglecting my careful lunch creation in the past week (a bit depressed, I think), and so spent some good time this evening cooking a pot of grains, sauteing kale and carrots, and roasting soybeans for the rest of the week.
4. How the little pothos cuttings grow roots, and then push out new leaves.
5. Good stories.
May we walk in Beauty!

In a Garden

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This is the second of three pieces of writing on the rosary, which I am doing this week for The Way of the Rose Dark Mysteries Novena. Today is the Joyful Mysteries.

Mysteries of the Darkness Novena
Day 40. Joyful Mysteries:

Everything seems to begin in a garden.

In the traditional narrative of the Mysteries, both Sorrow and Glory begin in gardens. I imagine the Garden of Sorrows to be an arboretum of sorts, with lined pathways and small groves of trees covering the hillside. And in my imagination the Garden of Resurrection—perhaps its my childhood experience of Easter and its daffodils and amaryllis and sprays of flowering tree branches—is filled with flowers. And I have chosen to place the first step in the Joyful Mysteries, the moment of contact between maiden and angel, in a garden, a Garden of Yes, a place where I, the one about to embark on the journey, get to choose whether I will accept the tasks ahead of me. Because to do inner work, to make my spiritual practices live beyond the mere rote doing and saying of them, is to consent to the constant journey of transformation.

A garden is a space somewhere between wilderness and domesticity, with even the most carefully pruned and shaped garden remaining ungovernable at some level. I like the wilder looking ones, where there is evidence of human interaction with the wild, but the plants also seem to be offering their opinion on how the space should be.

My heart, too, is a garden, a space between the wildlands and the tame, where emotions and dreams grow not entirely wild. I tend them, shape them, and honor their presence, but I do not bully them or subjugate them, at least when I am at my most open-hearted. And they have a say in what my garden becomes.

And these myths and stories of Mystery which we use to anchor the decades of our daily practice are also gardens. As we individually take up the care of them, each one’s garden will look different. Each telling is transformed a little, as when the light hits in just a certain way in a mostly shaded corner of a garden.

In the Joyful Mysteries, whether you call it the Annunciation or Yes or The Budding, we begin again, fresh in the knowledge that while we cannot choose the circumstances of our lives, we do get to consent to the tasks we take upon us for the journey.

I enter the garden. There is a shining light, or a purple shadow against the grass, or a little bird, or a sound of bells, and a Question: Will you take this journey? Will you let it transform you, knowing there will be wonders ahead and discoveries to make, sorrows aplenty, and enlightenment on the other side?

Codes for the Resistance

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

This is a little oracle draw I did yesterday from Nick Bantock’s Archeo deck: The Healer, The Jester, The Trickster. Here we enter the fray as Healers. What do we have to offer as healing? What sustenance and repair can we spread to our communities in this time of anxious uncertainty? And then those two cousins, Jester and Trickster, both! The Jester uses humor and drama to show us our social shadows. The Trickster turns the jesting upon our personal egos. Not only must I take a careful look at the problems of society, but I must look at my own ego-bound nature. And laugh and dance and caper. These capering fools might offend, but in the service of learning and the greater good. What does the Trickster have to teach me, even as I am searching for ways to join the Jester in unpacking our wider social troubles?

I have crowd-sourced Tools for the Resistance on a Facebook thread, and will turn that into a poem. This is not yet that poem. This is just cracking the codes in some words.

Secret Codes for the Resistance
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Take the spa out of despair. At least
don’t pair it with your idea of self-protection.
And unweave the silence from resilience—
share your arc of hope in the bounce-back.

But keep, perhaps, the rage in courage
in this age of rampant anxieties.
Keep both the fierce and fearsome lion
and the summoning bell
inside your bold rebellion,
and oh Dear Sisters and Resisters:
Let love lie lightly (although in reverse)
in this hopeful revolution, like a secret rose,
waiting to bloom.

Gratitude List:
1. Watching deer on the hillside in the bosque across the road with the kid this morning.
2. Family and spending time with relatives we haven’t seen in a long time
3. The many colors of red on the hillside
4. Chocolate as medicine (I think I have said that one already a time or two in recent days)
5. Rhythms and cycles, wheels and spirals, knowing that the turning will always come
May we walk in Beauty!

“We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope.” ―James Baldwin

“Poets are kind of like—it’s a bad metaphor, but—canaries in a coal mine. They have a sense for things that are in the air. Partly because that’s what they do—they think about things that are going on—but partly because they take their own personal experience and see how that fits in with what they see in the world. A lot of people might think that poetry is very abstract, or that it has to do with having your head in the clouds, but poets, actually, walk on the earth. They’re grounded, feet-first, pointing forward. They’re moving around and paying attention at every moment.” —Don Share

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” —Toni Morrison

“…Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.”
—from “How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)” by Wendell Berry

Morning Prayer
by Phillip Newell
In the silence of the morning
your Spirit hovers over the brink of the day
and a new light pieces the darkness of the night.
In the silence of the morning
life begins to stir around me
and I listen for the day’s utterances.
In earth, sea and sky
and in the landscape of my own soul
I listen for utterances of your love, O God.
I listen for utterances of your love.

The Regime Requests

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

This is not intended to shame anyone for feeling despair or numbness or fear. It’s me telling myself to prepare to resist fascism more openly and energetically.

The Regime Would Like to Request
Your Compliance in the Following Matters:
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Curl up in a ball of despair and stay there.
Allow that slow-seeping sense of helplessness
to invade every pore of your being.
Practice extreme numbness.
Scroll mindlessly through your phones at all times.
Do not look out your windows.
Better yet, keep your blinds drawn.
Stay away from nature:
It won’t be around much longer anyway.
Stop making things. Buy stuff. Be good little consumers.
Distrust all your neighbors. Exercise suspicion.
Tell us everything you can about your neighbors.
Stop reading books! Especially history books!
Better yet, join our book-burnings,
every other Thursday on the public square.
Read instead these memes created
by the Russian bots, and listen to the news
vetted by our own minister of liberty management.
Do not complain. Do not organize. Do not resist.

Gratitude List:
1. A golden chilly bike ride this morning on the Rail Trail
2. All four of us under one roof for two nights
3. The people who are stepping up and leading the way
4. Feeling the Big Feelings even when they aren’t fun
5. Bluuuuuuuuuuuuuuue sky!
May we walk in Beauty!

“We must do what they fear— tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon.” —Alexei Navalny

“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” —Carl Sagan

“But this moment, you’re alive. So you can just dial up the magic of that at any time.” —Joanna Macy

“I tell you the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” —Vincent van Gogh

“The most vital right is the right to love and be loved.” —Emma Goldman

“Love imperfectly. Be a love idiot. Let yourself forget any love ideal.” —Sark

“Everything I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything exists, only because I love.” —Leo Tolstoy

“Love is a great beautifier.” —Louisa May Alcott

“Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more.” —Erica Jong

“Fall in love over and over again every day. Love your family, your neighbors, your enemies, and yourself. And don’t stop with humans. Love animals, plants, stones, even galaxies.” —Frederic and Mary Ann Brussa

“I will start from here. That is an interesting spiritual statement when you stop to think about it. It means that whatever happened before, and whatever may happen in time to come, the past and the future are not the sacred space I actually inhabit. That space is right here, right now, in whatever condition I find myself. This is what I have to work with. This is where change and hope begin for me. Recognizing my location on the map of the holy is one more way that I claim my place of blessing and announce to the universe: I will start from here.” —Steven Charleston

” ‘They kept going, because they were holding onto something.’
‘What are we holding onto, Sam?’
‘There’s still good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.’ “
—Frodo and Sam

“Somewhere deep in the forest of grief
there is a waterfall where all your tears may flow
over mossy rocks, under watchful pines.”
—Beth Weaver-Kreider

“Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.” —E. B. White

“There are certain things, often very little things, like the little peanut, the little piece of clay, the little flower that cause you to look WITHIN – and then it is that you see the soul of things.”
—George Washington Carver