help

Re-Weaving the Past

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I failed 7th Grade Home Economics.
I would like to say that it is because I was protesting. I was angry, after all, that in 7th grade, we were divided into two classes: girls to Home Ec, and boys to Mechanical Drawing. Really. It was assumed that girls needed this class in the “womanly” arts, and boys needed the heady realm of architecture and design. Sabotaging one’s own grade, however, in order to make a protest, is rather ineffective, not to mention that it never entered my mind.
Perhaps it’s because I hated Home Ec so much? No, actually, I loved the crafts and the cooking then as much as I do now. Nor did I dislike the teacher. She was a gem, kind enough and firm enough.
I failed Home Ec because I didn’t turn in my assignments. I procrastinated on the paperwork for the meals I prepared at home. I did most of the projects, but never followed through to hand in the necessary paperwork.

Here I am, forty-five years later, trying to function as an adult, and still stuck in the procrastination rut, still avoiding the paperwork, resenting the details that take me out of my butterfly brain. The little thing becomes a big thing, and the big thing gets spun together with strands of shame to become a BIG thing, and I just can’t even begin.

Is it an executive function issue? Belligerence? Depression? A poor self-concept? Laziness? Being in the wrong job for my temperament? Simply being human? The thing is, I never feel like I am out of the norm, or that I have a problem, until I’m out of it and back into functioning at a more-than-mere-survival rate. Then I look back and realize that I was in a bad space. I’ve not been diagnosed with depression or an executive functioning disorder. I tend to name it laziness more than anything, which is a bad tape to play on repeat.

I wonder if I need a therapist. Or a life coach? Or a spiritual advisor? When I’m so overwhelmed by The Big Thing, the thought of adding an appointment to my schedule and expense to our tight budget feels like an Impossible Thing. But here I am now, on the other side of the most recent Impossible Task, and it’s a roof-don’t-leak-when-the-rain-don’t-come moment. And so I dither and pass it off. As difficult as it is, I feel like I need to keep telling myself the story of how bad it was so I don’t settle in to another new normal without getting myself the help that I need to keep from getting into that sort of hole again.

This past week, I did a little art therapy to keep me processing and pushing toward making a change, toward getting help. I recently opened a box in the attic and discovered the little embroidery project that I finished in that 7th grade Home Ec class, probably the only assignment I handed in for the class. A mouse had discovered it before me, and had eaten through the musical notes that Snoopy is playing. Had it been whole, I might have thrown it out, jettisoning things that no longer serve me. But something in me said, “Mend it!” And so I did, weaving embroidery thread through the mouse-chewed hole, and re-embroidering Snoopy’s pawprint eighth notes. It’s not perfect, and neither am I. The mend is visible, as are my own torn and shredded pieces, and mended pieces.

As I wove and mended, I wondered whether that was when it began, when I started playing the tapes in my head that I am inadequate to the task, that I am too flaky, too inattentive, too lazy to follow through? Perhaps.

Snoopy needed a little help to be restored, and now I will stitch the piece onto a bag or a blanket or a pillow. Or I will fold it carefully and keep it in a drawer, to draw it out when I need to remind myself that I, too, need help to get through a rough patch, to shift my process so that I can keep from falling into holes I create.

Gratitudes:
1. This morning’s sunrise: A dragon opening a heavy cloud-indigo eyelid over a tangerine iris, shooting burning rays upward, a sundog to the southeast.
2. Mending
3. Making plans, making progress
4. Seeking help
5. Such wise and merry people in my life

May we walk in Beauty!

“You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.” —Brené Brown

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.” —Georgia O’Keeffe

“Nothing good comes of forgetting; remember, so that my past doesn’t become your future…” —Elie Wiesel

“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” —Mitch McConnell, February 7, 2017

“They can shut me up, but they can’t change the truth.” —Elizabeth Warren, February 7, 2017

“Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” —Harriet Beecher Stowe

“You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.” —James Baldwin

“There’s still a lot worth fighting for.” —Dr.Jane Goodall

“You’ve heard it said there’s a window
that opens from one mind to another,
but if there’s no wall, there’s no need
for fitting the window, or a latch.”
—Rumi

“Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Whether through prayer, ritual, poetry, or song, gratitude solidifies our relationship with the living mystery. It rejoins us to the intangible wholeness from which we feel disconnected. As we remember ourselves to the holy in nature, we are forging our own belonging.” —Toko-pa Turner

“Stories surround us like air; we breathe them in, we breathe them out. The art of being fully conscious in personal life means seeing the stories and becoming their teller, rather than letting them be the unseen forces that tell you what to do. Being a public storyteller requires the same skills with larger consequences and responsibilities, because your story becomes part of that water, undermining or reinforcing the existing stories. Your job is to report on the story on the surface, the contained story, the one that happened yesterday. It’s also to see and sometimes to break open or break apart the ambient stories, the stories that are already written, and to understand the relationship between the two.” —Rebecca Solnit

“We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. . . . “We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

Help One Another

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

“Help one another. It is the only way to survive.” –Elie Wiesel
*
“Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.”
–Mary Oliver
*
“I believe that without some inner experience of powerlessness, and the wisdom that potentially comes with it, most individuals will misunderstand and abuse power.” ~~Richard Rohr
*
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” –Anais Nin
*
“Let us not become the evil that we deplore.” Rep. Barbara Lee, 9/14/01
*
Book of Hours II, 16
by Rainer Maria Rilke

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing –
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
*
From Terry Tempest Williams:
“We are creatures of paradox, women and bears, two animals that are enormously unpredictable, hence our mystery. Perhaps the fear of bears and the fear of women lies in our refusal to be tamed, the impulses we arouse and the forces we represent….As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.”

Gratitude List:
1. Riding bike on the rail trail. Flat smooth road, cool breeze, woods and stones and water.
2. Weaving, weaving our lives together by sharing our stories
3. Comfortable days in July. Yesterday was my perfect weather
4. The wisdom of Representative Barbara Lee. For seventeen years, she has continued to remind us that the president should not have the power to decide on his/her own to make war. Finally, she has been heard.
5. Hummingbirds, by which I mean magic

May we walk in Beauty!

Reason and Mystery

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

lazy
This is why we sometimes don’t make the bed.

When you walk in the the rooms
where Mystery waits with an indigo hum,
listen for the thrumming
of hummingbird, feel the brush
of moth wings across your cheek,
watch for the scoop and swish
of a small brown bat
through the rooms
of your heart.

Unless you seek to see her,
you will not find her,
and the rooms where you wander
will appear empty
and devoid of beauty.

Gratitude List:
1. Walking back in time. I took my boys to the Infamous Unstoppables Parade in Lancaster’s southeast yesterday. We parked on King Street and walked up to South Ann. As we got to S. Ann, I could feel the body memories of place begin to kick in again. All those afternoons walking home from the YWCA after yoga or weight training, twenty years ago before we hiked the Appalachian trail, the sounds of people talking in Spanish, the glorious front yard gardens, the music drifting out of windows, the loud bass of a car driving by. Even the slope of the hill beneath my feet. We stood across the street from the house where we lived. I didn’t recognize anyone.
2. Learning to ask for help.
3. Doll-making. It has been a while since I have made a doll, taking the materials that come to hand and crafting a small being out of fabric or clay or wire or wood, working for those moments when the personality begins to develop. I have been wanting to make a Dream Maker doll for some time, and realized that if I am going to manage it this summer, I should get started now, working in short spurts each evening. I have taken more time with the face on this one than I ever have before, and I am feeling satisfied.
4. Reason, intellectual rigor, that which can be thoughtfully and wisely explored.
5. Mystery, magic, that which cannot be known or spoken, but only sensed or felt.

May we walk in Beauty.