ice cream

The Wayfinder

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


Today’s prompt is a What I Learned poem.

What I Learned
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

How much a heart can hold, of fire and of earth,
how wild a soul can feel, how feral, how untamed,
how deep attention causes the spirit to rise,
to break free of its earth-bound chains,
how solid the earth upon which we walk,
and how free it feels to rest upon air,
how fire consumes but does not burn,
how water is its own pathway for journeying.

“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
***
“Gather the dawn and wind.
Breathe in sun and frost and song.
Hold for a moment.
Breathe out birds and words and joy.
Breathe out moss and stones and hope.”
―Beth Weaver-Kreider

Gratitude List:
1. (What was beautiful?) Three geese winging low over golden fields with sky turning to sunset behind them.
2. (What sounds brought you awake?) Students hitting the chimes in my doorway. I have a little chime magnet that hangs from my doorway, and several students hit it on the way in and the way out each day.
3. (What smells enlivened the day?) I can’t smell much through this cold, but the essential oils I wear in the mornings–patchouli and sandalwood, sweet orange, palmarosa, and lavender–got through. Essential oils help to break through the sinusitis.
4. (What was good to the touch?) I brought out my large black and white scarf, so soft and warm. The cats like it, too. They knead it like little kittens.
5. (What is the flavor of the day?) Turkey Hill’s Homemade Vanilla ice cream. It tastes like my childhood.

May we walk in Beauty!

A Bullet Journal and the NYT Crossword

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I found them on the path, lying just like this.

Gratitude List:
1. Bullet Journal. I know it’s trendy, and perhaps it’s a pipe dream of an organization system. I’m trying it for now, anyway. It appeals to my doodly, zentangly impulses. It makes the best of my informal half-system of making to-do lists on random pieces of paper, but it keeps them all in one place, and I can also keep my daily notes and lists of things I want to remember. So far, so good. This week, I have made boxes for each group of five papers to grade, and then I can shade in a box for each little stack. Short, achievable goals.
2. Sleeping under cozy covers
3. NYT Sunday crossword. Jon and I do them together, one of us filling out as much as we can, then handing it over. We can usually finish in a day or two. We haven’t been doing them much since we stopped getting the paper, but I bought one last week. I wish I could buy an ad-free Sunday paper.
4. Ice cream. I love the treat of it, even though I wake up with a stuffy nose afterwards.
5. Dragons. The way they fire imagination.

May we walk in Beauty!

In the Hall of the Old School

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Yesterday I visited the school where I will be teaching, the school I graduated from 29 years ago.  So much is new and different.  So much is the same.  The mural of the hand holding the rainbow still brightens the stairwell (may it always be there).  The old wing still looks much like it did in my day, and it smells exactly the same as it did when I was there.  We opened the door to the classroom where I will be teaching, and one of my own teachers walked out and hugged me.  Did I dream this?  I can hardly believe this is happening.  I used to imagine it, twenty years or so ago, and here it is.

I do have recurring anxiety dreams that take place in a school.  I am trying to find the classes where I am supposed to be either studying or teaching.  I’ll spend the entire dream trying to find where I am supposed to go, going up stairs and through labyrinthine hallways.  I’m always late, sometimes at the end of a semester and realizing that I have forgotten to go to class.  Or I’ll be going to teach the first day of a class and realize that I have forgotten to get a schedule to know when and where it is.  Once, when I was teaching at Butler County Community College, I dreamed that I rushed in late to class only to see my dean teaching the class.  She said since I was always late, she’d decided to take over my schedule.  The thing I realized yesterday about it all was that the setting of the dream is always very similar to my high school alma mater.

In the past ten years, since I have taken a break from teaching, the frequency of those particular anxiety dreams has lessened.  Now that I am teaching again, I wonder if they will increase in frequency again.  And how will it be if the real setting is now overlaid on the dream setting?  And now that the reality has begun to feel so intensely like a happy dream?

Here is little poem that has nothing to do with high school or anxiety dreams:

You must have heard me prescribe hens
for a low self-opinion.
There is nothing like a little chicken worship
to make a body feel like a rock star.

But here’s the thing–
my chickens think that you
are a capital rock star, too.
“Look!” they told me this morning
when I looked in on them.
And I knew exactly
what they meant.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Love is the Answer.  Love is the Answer.  Love is the Answer.
2. That moment when we opened the door to my new classroom, and my own teacher walked out and hugged me.
3. Creating and envisioning new spaces
4. I am going to a book sale today!  I love book sales.
5. Going to vote with the kids.  As cynical as I get about whether this democratic ideal actually has any value in the oligarchy, I want my children to learn and experience the ideal with the hope that one day we will have a truer democracy, disentangled from wealth and corporate influence.  And we stopped at Turkey Hill and bought ice cream on the way home.

May we walk in Love!

The People Seemed as Beautiful as Birds

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2013 September 013

Gratitude List:
1.  This vanilla ice cream
2.  That blooming Rose of Sharon
3.  The screech owls that woke me this morning
4.  Coming home to myself,
which is to say,
becoming the person I think I want to be,
which might be sort of like saying,
starting, perhaps, to sort of grow up,
which could be a little like ripening.
Perhaps tomorrow I will feel differently,
and start to doubt my truth again,
but today it feels pretty satisfying.
5.  My children’s teachers, both the official ones and all you others.

May we walk in Beauty.

Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  That impossible yellow of the sun on springtime goldfinch feathers.  Blazing.  Glowing.  Shining.
2.  All sorts of old friends still returning to the hollow.  A pair of blue jays, red-winged blackbird, and the sweetest little family of chipping sparrows.
3.  Getting the message.
4.  Putting my skills to use.
5.  Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day and a town that celebrates.  Thanks to Near the River Bakery (10% off delicious scones and pretzels and cinnamon rolls), Susquehanna Dodge (goody bags for the kids and a free oil change for me), Jimmy Mack’s (25% off ice cream) and Touch of Italy (20% off supper).  We ate lots today, and Ellis read his poem at each place in order to secure us our discounts.

May we walk in beauty.

Wonder on Tiptoe

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Here’s another stream of consciousness poem from last month:

These are the doorways.  The passages.
These are the places
where wonder enters the soul on tiptoe.

Here is the speedwell,
up from the earth and smiling through snow.
The breath of the wind
on the ice-white wing of the gull.
Gull’s feather.
The beating heart of the honeybee
and the black lace veil of the monarch.
The moment of hush before sunrise.

These are the liminal spaces.
The cocked arm and quiet face
of a sleeping child.
The birth of a new idea.
The rousing of thought to action
and action to hope.

The hope that is borne
on the wings of the wren.
The way the weight of sadness
will slide away from your eyes
to make a little room for joy.

This is the breaking news of the heart.
First the aconite and speedwell,
then windflower and crocus.
These are the vanguard,
the silent scouts.

For the purposes of this poem
I will be equating gratitude with wonder
and wonder with spring.

Wonder enters on tiptoe.
A flash of impossible orange
flickers high in the poplar tree.
From the newest leaves
on the highest branch
comes a rustling, then a whistle
like calling a dog.
The oriole returns to summon the summer home.

And you–you may stand in the doorway
as long as you like.
Let that bright bird
open spaces for new joy
to fill the rooms
where sadness used to be.

Speedwell
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Gratitude List:
1.  Anticipation of the Northern Lights.  Sitting with the family in the car up at Sam Lewis with about 20 other carloads of people, we listened to The Stray Birds house concert on WITF (great music), watched a gorgeous spectrum of a sunset, tried to figure out the source of the funny fire-like lights near the horizon across the River.  Jon did call them the Aurora Boring-all-of-us, but I think he enjoyed himself, too.
2.  Going out for ice cream
3.  Really hot peppers on the beans
4.  Someone added a poem to the Poet-Tree today!  And I don’t know who it was–the boys told me later.  And the tree is a terrible mess–I haven’t gotten it tidied after the last rain.  Thank you for posting, whoever you were!  And sorry it was a mess.  I’ll clean up the context for your wonderful poem tomorrow.
5.  Jimmy Mack’s will give a 25% discount on the ice cream bill on April 26 to anyone who brings them a poem on Poem in Your Pocket Day.  How cool is that?  Local energy for Poetry!  Yay.
May we walk in Beauty!