grief

Elemental

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Fire Cider

Gratitude List:
1.  Birds.  Kestrel on a Wire.  Snow geese in a corn-stubble field.  Bluebirds muttering in the chestnut tree: “There now.  Everything is going to be okay.”
2.  Music.  So much good music yesterday and today.  Indigo Girls’ CD: Nomads, Indians, and Saints–for some reason I came back to it all fresh again yesterday.  Then the Blossom Hill String Band.  This morning’s singing and tears.
3.  Holding it all in the Bowl of the Heart.  It all has to go in there together, and somehow the mix of it all, all the beautiful and difficult and tender and angry and wretched stories, all in there together–somehow it feels right.  That is how it is meant to be.
4.  Spring, She rises.  The footsteps of Persephone are visible now everywhere I turn.
5.  Fire Cider, Elderberry Tincture, and Kombucha.  Good Medicine.

May we walk in Beauty.

All Souls Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Aunt Lizzie (Elizabeth Weaver) and
Grandma (Marian Weaver) quilting.
Is that Aunt Gladys or Aunt Sharon in the front?

Today is the third day of All Hallows, the day of All Souls, remembering particularly the ancestors, and those we love who have died.   My experience of grief has so often been grieving with people I love who have lost someone.  So today I am thinking of Eli and of Peter, of Julie and Raymond, of Joyce and Elaine and Gerald, of Cory, of Lee, of Harold.  And I am thinking of my grandparents, of Aunt Lois and Uncle Victor and Uncle Irvin, of Uncle John and Aunt Anna Lou, of Uncle Paul.

Today, for All Souls,
A Gratitude List for Ancestors and Loved Ones:
1.  for Ellis Kreider, Jon’s father, gentle and twinkly, earnest and thoughtful
2.  for Grandma, Marian Weaver–I still miss her
3.  for Aunt Lizzie, who could tell you stories all day without a pause
4.  for my blood ancestors and those of my children, for that marvelous branching and intertwining, like feathering tree roots going back and back
5.  for the ancestors of this place, the people who walked these woods and hills, hunting and foraging, traveling, centuries ago

May your memories hold you.

(Oh, and Happy Birthday, Mockingbird!  I missed it.  Yesterday was the birthday of this blog.  I began it last year as a place to put the poems that I write in response to Robert Brewer’s Poem-a-Day Challenge.  I got caught up in the whole experience of the days of All Hallows this year, and missed yesterday’s poem.  Tomorrow I will begin that process again.  I may have to double up my poems for a couple days to catch up.)

The Way You Walk Toward Healing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Brown thrashers on the lawn in the gloaming
2.  The hope of the hummingbird (soon, soon!)
3.  Such pleasant temperatures and cool breezes
4.  Wise friends
5.  The way you walk toward healing.
And I mean you.
So many people I know have lived
through such losses.
Lived, and then chosen
somehow, to put a foot forward
then another, to take the next breath
when your chest has been crushed by grief.
Perhaps you cannot understand this
or perhaps you can:
you have unleashed into the world
such bigness of grace
in those moments of choosing
just the next step, the next breath.
It may have felt like a slog
or like nothing, or hell
but you walked on, you breathed.
Take it for what it is worth:
some learning soul somewhere
has noticed and seen it
for the grace that it is.

May we walk in beauty.

Gratitude for the Open Bowl

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

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

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

Not just that.  Not only that.

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

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

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

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

Here are six shiny stones for your consideration:

Gratitude List:
1.  Green, green, oh the green!  Green says, “Have you been watching?  Have you been paying attention?  Surprise!”  Oh, yes, yes, and. . .
2.  Hello, Little Daffodil, whose name is full of goofy whimsy and whose cup overfloweth with sunshine.
3.  The spaces between.  I will gaze into them, breathe into them.
4.  Doubt.  And the places where faith and trust and safety rest even within doubt.
5.  An afternoon with my parents and uncles and aunts.  Putting puzzle together with Mom and Uncle Henry.  My father and Aunt Ruth and Uncle Harold playing harmonica trios to old hymns while the rest of us sang and hummed.  (“When through the woods and forest glades I wander and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees, when I look down from lofty mountain grandeur and hear the birds and feel the gentle breeze. . .”)
6.  The Navajo People, whose sacred phrase I have borrowed for my little daily prayer:
May we walk in Beauty.  So much Beauty.

2013 April 016

The Song of the Toad and the Little Birds

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I am playing around with throwing some random pieces together to see how they fit.  This is a collage I will likely cut apart again and re-formulate at another time.  Perhaps.  Unless it seems to live as I live with it a little.

This is the blank page, the tabula rasa
the cloudless blue sky waiting to see
how the weather will fill it.
Sleep shrouding sense
muted and whispering.
This is the field in the springtime
ready for planting.

I cannot tell you everything.
I cannot tell you anything.
How can I be more explicit?
You disturbed the bee at her labor.
Your dreams broke the silence
of my garden.

We do not come this day bearing flowers.
We do not come this day singing songs of victory.
Weaving our silence
Bearing our candles
These are the gates we will enter
Bearing the weight of the war in our eyes.

What is the job of this poem?
So many things conspire to keep me asleep.
The heart is the vessel of response
not the information-gatherer.

There it is.
There it is again.
Coming back to the story
–always–
of the toad and the little birds.
Glittering.  Hard and cold.
Be watchful.  Be bold.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  There was a dairy farmer “who loved the land and his animals, and took very good care of them. . . .  He was a loving person with a very kind heart.”  For his kind heart and the gentle daughter he raised.
2.  For the beautiful Pequea Valley and a fierce wind to scour the worries away.
3.  For the silent and tricksy activism of my husband.  I cannot tell you what it is, for then it would no longer be his silent revolution.  Just know that behind the scenes he is making the world a better place for us all.  (No, he is not the real Banksy.)
4.  For the serious and earnest nature of my people, for their singing, their love of conversation, their care of the bereaved.  You sit in a Mennonite funeral and you can smell the food cooking downstairs and you know that everyone will be taken care of.
5.  For love, because we can love each other even when we don’t agree.  Because when it comes down to it, love is really what we need.

Much love.  So much love.

“Oh look!” said Joss.  “Roxanne [the car] has a mustache!”

2013 March 060

Look for the Helpers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.” — Mister Rogers

Look for the helpers.
I cast a line from me to you.
You cast it outward to those you love.
Fill that web, that basket, that nest, that bowl
with our open wounded hearts,
our prayers, our stones,
our candles, our feathers,
the white hair of our grandmothers.
Something to hold the children,
the mothers, the fathers,
a bowl that will witness and hold the grief.
We will be the helpers.

Through the Same Door

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

despise not small things

Day 29 Poem-A-Day Prompt: Write a Birth Poem.

We all came in through the same door.
The young ones just beginning to learn
what their bodies can do,
the new crones bidding the blood farewell.

And all those rounding bellies.
There were more of them than any of the others.

I sensed the wolf the moment I walked in the door.
I almost looked around to see her,
before I realized the shadow was my own.

Of course.

I stepped across the carpet
carefully toward the desk,
past the pair who sat together
with heads bowed in wonder
over the full bowl of her womb,
willing them not to look at me
lest they sense the blood on me,
lest some contagion contaminate
their innocent joy,
lest the wolf turn her face their way.

Me, I had walked this way before
with my strange and dark companion,
carrying my empty bowl.
I was only there for confirmation
this time.   I knew what I had come to hear,
knew how to follow this particular path of grief.

Walking out again, afterward,
the fresh-faced ones were still there,
and the wolf and I again took pains
not to taint them with our shadow.

We left by the same door
and closed it quietly behind us.

When He’s Gone

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Day 9 Prompt: Use the phrase When he’s gone. . .  Twelve hours in the car gave plenty of time to ruminate.  This, from the napkin scribble:

When he’s gone, they will sing their songs into the silence to fill up the empty rooms.
When he’s gone, they will tell his stories around fires in the wilderness.
When he’s gone, someone will place lanterns along the pathways where he walked.
When he’s gone, the fields will explode into yellow flowers.

When he’s gone, you will hear the sound of bells and be filled with wonder.
When he’s gone, a single rose will bloom in December.
When he’s gone, dances and children will be named in his honor.
When he’s gone, all my poems will say Remember, remember, remember.

When he’s gone, we will raise our glasses in toast after toast
to his great good humor and his kindness.
When he’s gone, we will laugh through our tears.
When he’s gone, our hearts will shatter like the breaking ice in springtime.