Tag: hue

Things Work Out

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes
Same photo as yesterday, sent through a rainy filter.

Gratitude List:
1. Wonder. When I was a kid, my teacher had us fill a jar with wet paper towels, and then poke seeds around the edges, and we watched the corn grow roots and sprouts. Last fall, I brought a jar and some corn into my classroom, and set it on my desk, hoping to get around to doing it in my classroom, just to see what would happen. (I’m a high school English teacher, but wonder is wonder, and science belongs everywhere.) Last week, my students were asking me about the jar, and one of them went and filled it with wet paper towels, and I poked the little kernels in, kind of doubting that it would work as I remembered. But the roots have been growing down, long and strong, and several sturdy green shoots are shooting upward. My students are loving it as much as I am. We’re all rooting (ha!) for the little plants. I guess I will have to transplant them soon, and then I’ll have sweet corn this summer! (Next up: beans.)
2. The power of personal narrative. We do a lot of personal narratives in writing classes. It can be a little challenging to keep it fresh, especially when you have the same students in a couple different classes, but it’s part of the deep curriculum at my school: We want our students to be able to self-examine, to understand who they are.
3. Colors. A student of mine introduced me to the game I Love Hue, an app that sets up a grid of colored squares, and then rearranges a bunch of them, and you have to move them back to the right places in relationship to each other. Sometimes I am a whiz at this game, and sometimes I am terrible. My brain is not consistent in its recognition of varieties of hues. I feel like I’m learning and improving my sense of hues, especially as they shift around the grid in relationship to each other.
4. Books. A friend recommended The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog. It came in the mail yesterday. I want to read it with Josiah, and we’re currently into Avi’s Ragweed and Poppy series, so it will wait, but I am excited to get started. (We were reading The Book of the Dun Cow, but I had forgotten that the basilisks killed Pertelote and Chauntecleer’s three chicks, and that was a deal-breaker for us. We stopped the book.)
5. When the planning works out. My brain was so foggy last night that I went to bed without a plan for Speech class, but I woke up with a very clear picture in my brain of the file where I had last year’s plans for the same thing, and I found it this morning, and it’s brilliant. I don’t know what foggy-brained-me was thinking, trying to re-invent the plans all over.

May we walk in Beauty!

Featherbed

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems

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Gratitude List:
1. A field of smiling yellow sunflowers shining through the fog of a rainy morning.
2. Featherbed. Two nights ago, I couldn’t sleep for a while because I was shivering so badly. The weather change hit me hard (not complaining, though!). Last night I pulled the featherbed down from the cupboard, and I was warm and cozy. Makes me want to sing this: John McCutcheon singing “Featherbed”
3. When a new idea for a classroom activity gets them buzzing and collaborating without any pressure or pushing from me. This is not always the case. In fact, it is often enough NOT the case that when it happens, it still feels like magic. AND this one meets the goals of the unit perfectly. Win-win.
4. My classroom. I like this space. I loved the coolness of the science aerie up there on the third floor of Rutt during the heat wave, but I have created this space to be somewhere that I want to host groups of students throughout the day, somewhere that we WANT to be, and it’s nice to be here with a cool breeze blowing in the windows. I missed it.
5. Color, texture, hue, harmony, blending, Beauty.

May we walk in that Beauty!

“We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.” ―Hildegard of Bingen
*****
“Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions,
beneath our religion or lack of it,
we are all vulnerable both to the storm without
and to the storm within.” ―Frederick Buechner
*****
“The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.” ―Simone Weil
*****
Here is how we make the world:
I will say fire and mean wisdom.
I will say wisteria and mean my thoughts are tangled.
I will say the river is flowing and mean that time is passing.
I will say grandmother’s quilt and mean that the work is love.
I will say house and mean your heart.
I will say spiderweb and mean the prayers are holding you.
I will say the eagle flies and mean my thoughts are with you.
I will say the daffodils are blooming and mean you are healing.
I will say song and mean dream.
I will say dream and mean prayer.
I will say prayer and mean poem.
―Beth Weaver-Kreider
*****
“When an elder dies, a library burns.” ―African proverb
*****
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” ―Anne Frank
*****
“But how could you live and have no story to tell?” ―Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Rain

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

Gratitude List:
1. The Women’s Trio this morning at church. Blending of voices, colors, textures, rhythms.
2. Feeling the bass rumbling through the back of the pew.
3. Rain: Making it not-hot
4. Rain: I get to walk around with my cheery yellow duck-headed umbrella
5. Rain: Lying on my parents’ couch, wrapped in Uncle Henry’s red-violet blanket, watching the rain and listening to the murmuring and laughter between my parents and my children in the garage.

May we walk in Beauty! (And may all your basements stay dry!)

Taking the Measure

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Poems

imag2382November hosta

Tomorrow, in mid-afternoon, we are invited to join the Water Protectors at Standing Rock to pray and meditate. I will pray for their safety, for the success of their cause. I will pray with thanksgiving for the work that they have done and are doing, in gratitude for their fearlessness and resolve. I will pray for the continuation of the movement. I will pray that the hearts of those who must hear will be softened, and that the people who have the power to protect them and their lands and waters will have the courage and wisdom to do the right thing.  Join me?

Today’s Poetry Prompt is to write a tape poem.

Taking the Measure
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Along the top of the green shelf my father made when we moved here,
I’ve lined the three jars of herbs the demolition crew found in the wall
of my grandmother’s house, a rambling old Victorian taken down
the month after we bought this place in the hills west of the River.

My great-grandmother’s butter paddle, an ancient pair of reading glasses,
an onyx vase from India full of goose feathers from the pond
near my parents’ house where the children like to look for baby swans,
and a tall, thin ebony carving of a Maasai warrior in a beaded skirt.

Coiling around and through them all, like a frayed yellow snake,
my mother’s mother’s tape measure, which used to wrap around a waist
or along a length of hem to perfect her stitching and mending,
now takes the measure of the memories I’ve collected.

Gratitude List:
1. Senses. Color, hue, and texture–in sight and sound and smell, in taste and touch. How being human is a constant exploration of the complexity of senses. The more I pay attention to color, the more color I see. The more I notice scent and aroma, the more fully I am able to distinguish the subtle shifts and changes in the smells around me. The more carefully I listen, the more easily I can begin to sense changes in the temperature and color of sound. I love this business of being in a body.
2. All those handsome and thoughtful raptor youngsters standing sentinel on posts and poles along the highway today.
3. Crowdsourcing. Whether it’s where to buy local goat meat, how to handle the post-Downton Abbey blues, what poem to read to my classes, or what to do about a flagging Prius battery, I’ve gotten very helpful advice from my friends on social media. We saved ourselves from making a potentially very expensive bad choice by researching the Prius battery situation with friends on Facebook.
4. Sam at Sams Auto. We sent him a Facebook message the night before Thanksgiving, and he responded in five minutes. He is a real expert on the Prius, and perhaps a little obsessed. We are in good hands, and we should finally have our car home a driveable by Tuesday.
5. Reason. Clear logic. But also emotional intelligence. Heart logic. Gut reasoning. Intuitive intelligence. Wise instinct.

May we walk in Beauty!