gratitude

Finding Family

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write a poem about family. I am blessed in family. I do not know how I would have managed the past eight months without my family: my family of birth, my cozy little family of four, my chosen circles of friendfamily. Those feelings have been riding so intense in me for so many months now, that I don’t know how to distill it into the language of poetry. Perhaps because it is so deep right now, I fear that I could only write shallowly about it. And so, instead, I chose to create a found poem about family, to make it a game, an intellectual exercise.

I chose five quotations about family, printed them out and physically cut them up, which was a different experience in my brain than cutting and pasting on the computer, then arranged them into a poem. Here are the quotations:

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“I sustain myself with the love of family.”
― Maya Angelou

“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”
― Frederick Buechner

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
—Mary Oliver

“My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn’t a social construct but an instinct.”
― Jodi Picoult

And here is the poem:

I.
the family skeleton
used to tell me:
over and over
you can kiss your mind goodbye
your stomach isn’t a social construct
but at the same time
if you cannot get rid of time
make it dance
and put miles between you but because you do not
you may as well
just live in a world
announcing your place
with the love of family the world offers itself
and instinct
harsh and exciting

II.
my mother
calls to you:
a world lives in you
like the wild geese
your family and friends that you carry them
being a family
to your imagination
no matter how lonely I sustain myself
in the family of things
with you in your heart but that when push
comes to shove
whoever you are
you always know
who to turn to

Gratitude List:
1. Re-membering, recalibrating, renewing, re-viewing, rewilding
2. Finding poetry
3. Making things
4. How the prayers shift and transform themselves–and me
5. The fox who paused this morning underneath the treehouse, to sniff the wind and feel the first rays of morning sun.
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

The Answer is Love

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write a Love/Anti-Love poem.

Face it.
An act of hate doesn’t begin
when a hate-addled man
picks up his AR-15
and walks into a crowded bar,
like the start of some sick
and twisted joke.

When that man walks into the bar,
he walks with the priest, the imam,
and the rabbi. He walks with the politician
and the school board member,
with the teacher and the parent
and the angry uncle, with everyone
who offered him permission,
tacit or explicit, to exclude and disdain,
to give up his soul to hatred.

We know how the trail of hate
leads from language to violence,
how the rhetoric of the pulpit
and the political speech
becomes the action on the street,
the rock thrown through the window,
the young lovers beaten,
the gun in the nightclub.

We must refuse to let
the narrative of hatred dominate.
We must create new languages for love,
new analyses, new sermons and speeches
that reach beyond the binary way of thinking,
that actively teach connection, inclusion, belonging.

In the end,
the way to combat hate
is to begin with the rhetoric of love,
is to live as though love is the answer
in the end.

Gratitude List:
1. An incredible assembly at school today for Grandfriends’ Day
2. Decking the halls with my colleagues
3. All the people who really do believe that the answer is love
4. Break has begun!
5. That sliver of a moon
May we walk in Beauty!

“The ability to sit with mystery and explore the dark but fertile realms of infinite possibility is crucial to the work of inhabiting a meaningful life. We have to learn to stay rooted in the midst of chaotic obscurity, in the shadow-haunted wild places of the psyche. We need these rootings more than ever during the bone-deep metamorphosis that is menopause.” —Sharon Blackie

“To see where you are going, look behind you. The clues are there. Mistakes you have made, patterns you have followed, breakthroughs you have had, ideas that did not turn out as planned: your experience is your guide. It tells you what you may expect on the road ahead. The key is in how much you have learned from the past and how those learnings shape your decisions for the future. Look before you leap: look back to see what may come.” —Steven Charleston

“Revolution means reinventing culture.” —Grace Lee Boggs

Spell to Renew the Heart’s Magic

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Brewer’s prompt today is to use three or more of the following random words in a poem: button, gather, hold, not, sweep, toxic

Gather the strands of the story again
into your fingers and weave a round cloth.
Sweep the corners to find the lost button
to stitch upon it, a button which will draw it all together.
When you are finished, it will hold a stone
in the shape of your bitter heart.

Dip it in the river.
Say: Grandmother River, carry my pain.
Hang it from a tree branch.
Say: Sister Wind, cleanse and purify my heart.
Set in on freshly dug soil.
Say: Mother Earth, cause me to grow and green.
Place it in the ash of a new moon fire.
Say: Flame Daughter, cause me to rise up
on red-gold wings like the phoenix.

Speak to your heart. Tell it:
I will not turn my pain inward
where it will suffocate me.
I will not turn my pain outward
where it will renew itself in bitterness.
I will welcome it to my table,
feed it the medicine of my story,
and send it away healed and transformed.

Gratitude List:
1. How being pushed off center forces me to redefine center, recalibrate, hold fast to my sense of myself, and grow
2. Playing blackjack with high schoolers
3. Break is coming!
4. First trimester grades are done!
5. Tabula rasa
May we walk in Beauty!

“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

“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” —Doris Lessing

“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

Tangled Web

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Today’s prompt is Conflict.

If forgiveness were an act of will
she’d have managed it by now.
It’s not a thing you can declare
and–poof!–the grace appears
and ushers everyone
into the next level of Enlightenment.

She stopped praying for her enemies,
stopped trying on the oversized robe
of forgiveness, not of her own designing.

Now she calls upon their angels
just to join her in her prayers,
to enter her circle and listen
while she says, “Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those
who have sinned against us.”
And, “Deliver us ever from evil.”

The ones who cause us harm,
through malice or through fear,
bind themselves to us,
entangling our destinies
as inextricably as love could ever do,
and forgiveness becomes not a single act,
but a long slow dance,
improvised at every moment,
a careful disentangling.

Gratitude List:
1. Sparkling morning sun
2. Doing things in my own time
3. Portals and doorways
4. The process of becoming
5. Warm boots
May we walk in Beauty!

“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

A Myth of Memory

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

The prompt for today was to write a poem titled “The Myth of ________,”but somehow everything I tried in that vein seemed meh. So I wrote the poem first, trying for mythic-ness (myth-tique?), and then created a title that seemed to resonate and also fit a little into the rule.

A Myth of Memory

*A myth is a story of spiritual import which brings layers of meaning to everyday existence.

Recall the story of the child
who saw the face of an old woman
one day in the shapes and shadows
of tree branches against a hillside meadow
in the fall when snow hung in the clouds.

Remember that year
how the cold came cruel,
rolling down into the valleys
and biting the breath out of travelers,
and roaring down chimneys,
and rattling the windows.

And every day the child
looked out upon the hillside, saying,
“Hail, Grandmother,
take thy rest, and
Love go ever with thee.
Blessed is the earth of thy fields, and
Blessed are the generations
of thy descendants.
Holy Grandmother,
Source of all that is,
save us through winter, and
grant us new life in the spring.”

Recall how the spring that year
rolled a green carpet over the hills,
how the sweet strawberries were fat as plums,
how the oats sprang up suddenly,
how a flock of a thousand white birds
wheeled over the face on the hillside.

Gratitude List:
1. Hymnsings! I’m so grateful to come from a community that values four-part harmony. Tonight’s hymnsing included poetry and art, and a marvelous charcuterie table.
2. Not being the only one wandering certain trails.
3. Morning prayers in the cherry grove.
4. Finding what was lost! I have been sort-of-playfully, sort-of-seriously invoking St. Anthony for months now to help me find something, and today as I was looking for some black paper, I looked in a box, and found what has long been missing! I had to look elsewhere for the black paper.
5. My happy lamp. I think it really does help to sit in front of full-spectrum lights.
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

Not So Funny

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

The prompt for today was to write a funny poem. It isn’t that I don’t like humor, but somehow I don’t like being told to DO humor. Or I was just in a serious mood.

You’re supposed to find it funny,
supposed to take the joke,
laugh with the crowd as it pokes
at difference and oddity,
as it makes someone else’s pain
its own humor-based commodity.

They didn’t really mean it, see?
Why can’t you take a joke?
Broken bones are one thing,
but words can’t harm you,
like the old rhyme goes.
You’re just too sensitive.

It’s your fault, really,
for being offended,
your problem for taking
a joke at your expense
as somehow offensive.

Gratitude List:
1. Good Old Raisins ‘n’ Peanuts
2. Literature
3. Warm cats
4. Great colleagues
5. Being together on the journey.
May we walk in Beauty!

“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

Risk

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is Risk. I’m working out my own internal monologue here, finding my way into my own story.

Will you walk with her into the darkness
where the pathways begin to wander,
sometimes disappearing into deep caverns,
sometimes mere footholds along the cliff face?

Can you keep your heart steady
and your wits about you
when the wind buffets
on the very edge of the chasms?
When no light leads you
through the darkness?
When the opening into the next cavern
is bone-crunchingly narrow?

Will you follow the trails in the undergrowth
where her mind wanders, speaking softly
when you come upon her, soothingly?
Will you offer her a gentle story
to bring her back to the open ways
when your own mind is tangled
in the briars where she has led you?

Can you step out of the numbing fog
of fear that encircles you,
and step into the truth,
no matter how hard it is to hear?
Can you bear to be stronger,
and stronger still,
when you are at your most tender?

If you risk nothing, safe in your bubble,
the story will continue despite you,
the tale will unfold without the wisdom
you know you have to offer it.
To not risk it all now is to risk losing all later.
So stand up, and step out onto the path.
Follow her into the entangling forest.
Find your way outward to find your way home.

Gratitude List:
1. That glorious moment of sun washing through the window
2. Book clubs–they push me to read things I might not
3. The ExtraGive–Lancastrians trying to outdo themselves every year to give as much as possible: the fun starts tonight at midnight!
4. Thoughtful teenagers who get it: Kindness matters. Peace rather than power.
5. It’s hard to be brave, but there are so many good people who make me want to be courageous
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

Dance the Story

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Brewer’s prompt at Writers Digest today was to write a poem titled: ______ Story.

Dance the story across the page,
pirouette and shimmy
from word
to word
to wandering word.

Thread a conga along the lines
of rising action
and twine and spiral
to the inevitable climax,
then salsa down the denouement
to a slow and stately resolution.

Gratitude List:
1. Warm cat on my lap
2. The morning’s sunrise
3. Saying Yes
4. Getting unstuck
5. Beginning again
May we walk in Beauty!

“We live in a world of theophanies. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can only happen if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure.”
—Macrina Wiederkehr

“It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.” —P.G. Wodehouse

“You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.” —Frida Kahlo

“I touch God in my song
as the hill touches the far-away sea
with its waterfall.
The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.”
—Rabindranath Tagore

Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
“We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?

“One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds beacons, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of of soul in shadowy times like these—to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.”

“Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will become.” —Brooke Hampton

“Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things.
Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God.
Every creature is a word of God.
If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature—even a caterpillar—
I would never have to prepare a sermon.
So full of God is every creature.”
—Meister Eckhart

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could you know. That’s why we wake
and look out–no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
—William Stafford

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” ―J.R.R. Tolkien

Ekphrastic Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Today’s prompt is to write an ekphrastic poem, to take a piece of art, and to write a poem about it. All month, I have been writing a poem, and then creating a piece of AI art to go with it. As I began to create a piece of AI art to use for this prompt, the poem approached. Before I managed to create a piece of art, the poem had found its way to my notes, and so I created the art to go with the poem that went with a piece of artwork that I had imagined. And so it goes: Which comes first?

Which came first:
the image or the word,
the sound or the sense,
the egg or the bird?

Did it happen with BANG or “Begin,”
with the seed or the dream,
with poem or picture,
with to say, or to seem?

A project, a poem, a world comes to be
in the nodes where the lines of word and image cross,
the woven fibers of vision and voice interlocking,
and in the silence and darkness between,
meaning–like water– trickles into the spaces,
into the interstices, of the living, breathing tapestry.

Becoming becomes,
word takes shape and image speaks,
and something new comes into being.

Gratitude List:
1. Every day right now: November Roses!
2. People telling their stories
3. The buck who whuffed at me in the grove
4. Cardinal singing in the cherry tree
5. Words and images
May we walk in Beauty!

“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.” ―Gandalf

Let the rain come and wash away
the ancient grudges, the bitter hatreds
held and nurtured over generations.
Let the rain wash away the memory
of the hurt, the neglect.
Then let the sun come out and
fill the sky with rainbows.
Let the warmth of the sun heal us
wherever we are broken.
Let it burn away the fog so that
we can see each other clearly.
So that we can see beyond labels,
beyond accents, gender or skin color.
Let the warmth and brightness
of the sun melt our selfishness.
So that we can share the joys and
feel the sorrows of our neighbors.
And let the light of the sun
be so strong that we will see all
people as our neighbors.
Let the earth, nourished by rain,
bring forth flowers
to surround us with beauty.
And let the mountains teach our hearts
to reach upward to heaven.

Amen.
―Rabbi Harold Kushner

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.
―Beth Weaver-Kreider

“When I stopped trying to change you, you changed me.” ―Rachel Macy Stafford

Finding Time

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Brewer’s prompt today was to write a poem about the future. I was contemplating the timelessness of praying in the the cherry grove, and on friendships that have lasted and grown over thirty-five years. As I rode my bike this early afternoon along the Susquehanna, I write this poem, stopping every once in a while to write down what had been happening in my head.

Finding Time
for Nancy

Stand in the center of this sacred grove
and feel how past and future
converge upon the miracle of this moment,
how your ancient loves and longings
are stitched with gold and scarlet thread
into the tapestry of the holy Now.
Leave the tattered threads
of future fears behind you
and wade into the waters of this present,
this presence.

You are the soul you have always been,
the soul you all ways have been.
And, you are new now.

And now.

And now.

And now

Gratitude List:
1. A marvelous bike
2. Trees that seem to reach out for human companionship
3. Beloved friends in it for the long haul
4. Strings of prayer flags
5. People who help me to be my best self
May we walk in Beauty!

“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

“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.” —attributed to Noor Tagouri

‪”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.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider