Tag: intentions

setting intentions

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings
The Roman god Janus (January is named for him) looks backward and forward, into the past and the future.

Here we sit on the cusp, the rim, ready to tumble into a new year. Yes, time is only a construct, an abstract idea, and a moment like this, which may have once occurred on the Solstice, but is now unmoored from any cosmic significance, is purely arbitrary. Still, we give it meaning–collective meaning–and so it bears meaning. The world recognizes this as the moment; even if cultural and religious years end and begin elsewhere in the Wheel, anyone with a phone or computer will see the numbers change at midnight tonight.

Significance enough. And so, what do we do at beginnings? We review, we close up shop on the things of the past that no longer serve us, and we set goals and intentions for the coming season, something to pull us onward. For me, taking on the aspect of Janus, who looked both backward and forward, assessing past and future, enables me to live more joyfully into the present moment, with more abandon and satisfaction.

I know many people object to the setting of resolutions at this time of year. I know that resolutions can be hollow. They can be self-loathing. They can be shallow and lazy. I know. I know. But I like setting intentions. I NEED to review and reassess periodically, to look back at my life and say, “Yeah, actually, I feel pretty good about this. I want more of this. I want less of this.” I want to live less on autopilot, and more on the guiding of my intentions and intuition.

No, in all the years that I have set the intention of publishing another book, I haven’t yet completed that task. So this is the time to ask myself Why, and to check in about what keeps me from it. Is it procrastination? Laziness? Fear? Lack of self-confidence? Has it simply not been time for this project to be born?

I am happy to live my life somewhat haphazardly. It fits my nature. I’m a Leo, subject to the shifting fires of my creative ideas. I am an Enneagram Seven, enthusiastically picking up the next fun thing. A sanguine personality that flits like a butterfly between beautiful flowers. I need the freedom to pursue the passion of the moment in order to fuel my creative fires, but I can get lost (SO LOST) in the woods. So it helps to have a plan. And these moments in the turning of the Wheel, no matter how random or purposeful, offer me the chance to stop and breathe and look around before taking the next leap.

I do this with a look of deep compassion at the woman who has been holding on and swimming for survival for the past two years, and even finding some joy and hope in the midst of the angst and worry and rage. I HAVE been moving toward becoming my best self in the past two years, but I’ve been in survival mode, and I want to use the gravity of this moment to help gain momentum to move onward with intention and out of some of the ruts which I have fallen into.

So, here are some loose, but thoughtfully processed, intentions for 2022:
1. To breathe and stretch and move mindfully each day. Movement will mostly mean walking, and that will depend on how my feet feel. But I am going to keep the intention.
2. To continue shifting my morning habits to get back to more writing. (Oooh, that’s pretty loosely worded, but it’ll do to kick me out of the starting gate).
3. I’m still assessing my social media use. At this point, it’s a loose intention to be on the phone less. I’ve self-soothed a lot in recent months with daily puzzles (Sudoku and Blockdoku and a Scrabble-style Word game). Facebook and Instagram are also major self-soothers. I feel like the connections have been crucial mental health survival assistance during the pandemic, but now it is time establish new habits, to breathe into new changes.
4. To bring back writing and creative projects as my primary soothers.
5. To give myself grace, and grace, and more grace. To turn my compassionate eye toward myself with more intention.
6. To ask for help. This may be the year I actually find a therapist or life coach or spiritual director who can help me sort out some of the inner tangles.

Gratitude List:
1. Intentions
2. Purple hair. Weirdly, it has lifted my spirits.
3. The earnest goofiness of squirrels
4. A Clean Slate, A Fresh Page, Tabula Rasa
5. Creative Projects
May we walk in Beauty!

Honoring Kwanzaa with those who celebrate it: Today’s Principle in the Kwanzaa celebration is Kuumba: Creativity.

“I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.” —Michelle Obama, Becoming

“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.” —Diane Ackerman

A string of beads has a thread running through all the beads, keeping them together. What we need is a thread too—of sanity and stability. Because when you have a thread, even though each bead is separate, they hang together.” —Sogyal Rinpoche

“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” (From the Talmud)

“The earth has music for those who listen.” —George Santayana

“By our love and our need for love we become for one another midwives of the true self.” —James Finley

“Civility will not overturn the patriarchy.” —Mona Eltahawy

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.” —Bryan Stevenson

“Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.” ―David Bowie

“In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode. The reading of a poem, a poetry reading, is not a spectacle, nor can it be passively received. It’s an exchange of electrical currents through language.” ―Adrienne Rich, 1993

“A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.” ―Adrienne Rich

“More firebrand women. More dragon spirited women. More loud women. More angry women. More hard women. More intimidating women. More history-making women. More rebel women. More rebel women. More rebel women.” ―Nikita Gill

“In the teaching of history, there should be no undue emphasis upon one’s own country. The history of wars should be a small part of what is taught. Much the more important part should be concerned with progress in the arts of civilisation. War should be treated as murder is treated. It should be regarded with equal horror and with equal aversion. It will be said that boys under such a regimen will be soft and effeminate. It will be said that they will lose the manly virtues and will be destitute of courage. And all this will be said by Christians in spite of Christ’s teaching.

But, dreadful as it may appear, boys brought up in the old way will grow into quarrelsome men who will find a world without war unbearably tame. Only a new kind of education, inculcating a new set of moral values, will make it possible to keep a peaceful world in existence. In the future there will, after all, be plenty of opportunity for adventure, even dangerous adventure. Boys can go to the Antarctic for their holidays, and young men can go to the moon. There are many ways of showing courage without having to kill other people, and it is such ways that should be encouraged.” ―Bertrand Russell,

“Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part.” ―John Lewis

Twelvenight: Happy New Year!

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings
The Fool rides a dragonfly.

On this day when everyone’s attempting to solve and re-solve their solutions, to resolve their resolutions, to tend to their intentions, I’m still waiting on a word. I watch my dreams and inner questions until the shining sixth, Epiphany, until the kings come. Wise ones. Mages. The light pours in on Epiphany and wisdom comes to the house.

It doesn’t really matter which day you embark on the journey. It only matters that you take it. Today we stand with Janus in his doorway, looking back and looking forward. With the double-faced god beside us, we can simultaneously look behind to the road that has brought us here, and ahead to the road we’re soon to take.

How could I live the coming year without that knowledge of the shadow that travels behind me, the road I walked to get here, the person I have been? It’s so easy, when we turn over a new leaf marking a new season in our lives, to simply yank the leaf from its twig, but the what-will-be is built upon the what-was. The new self which is emerging only arrived at this doorway on the persistent legs of the self which brought me here.

Whether you are waiting, like me, for Wisdom to come on Epiphany, or whether you step away from the door this morning to begin the journey of the year, this is the season of the set intention, the forward-moving affirmation. This is the time of the tabula rasa, the blank page upon which you can write whatever you choose.

Do you have a resolution for the coming year? A re-solution, perhaps, to an old and persistent problem?
Or perhaps you need this official moment to end a habit that has you in a rut? Or to begin a new one that will get you traveling a more liberating and exciting road than the one you’ve become accustomed to walking?
Many people I know prefer to call it an intention rather than a resolution. Perhaps an unachieved intention sounds less like a broken promise than an unsolved resolution.

The road to February is littered with broken resolutions and lost intentions, with holy words discarded and new habits jettisoned as old habits creep from the undergrowth and reattach themselves. I don’t think this means we shouldn’t set intentions or resolutions. Perhaps we need to set the intention and then set a second intention: To tend the first. If I set the intention to get 7,000 steps a day, and I succeed for a week or two, but then fall away, I will have had a less sedentary week or two. That’s a good thing. The idea, then, is to come back to it. Perhaps 7,000 is too much to ask, amid all the other things I need to accomplish. So maybe I re-set my intention and say 5,000 steps a day during the weekday, and 7,000 on weekends. And I try again, with fresh will and determination. After all, February first is another new beginning.

And I think we need to take great care in the intentions we set. If I decide that I don’t like the way I look these days, so I am going to whip my body into shape by diet and exercise, that’s a punishing resolution. My body is going to rebel, and the deep-self is going to feel attacked. But the fact is that for my whole life, I have needed to keep re-setting the intention to move more, and to maintain a healthier balance of the foods I eat. I don’t believe in self-denial. I will never entirely give up chocolate or ice cream or cookies, because then I am bound for failure. But I can probably re-set some of my boundaries with the sweet things. Slow down and savor.

Now there’s a good intention for experiencing life in 2020: Slow down and savor.

In the coming year, may you be kind to yourself. May you set reasonable goals that help you meet with success and fulfillment. May you bring out the best you, informed by all the versions of yourself that you have been. May you not jettison old versions of yourself along the trail behind you, but transform yourself in ways that acknowledge all the work you’ve done to get here.

Blessing for the New Year
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

May you be born
fresh and shining
into the new year
and may the old you
continue, too,
a thread that ties you
to past versions
of your truest self,
for we need to be
constantly reborn
while we hold a deep sense
of the shape we create
in the universe.

Gratitude List:
1. All the birdlife of yesterday! It felt like we were in a legend. Suddenly, after weeks of very little bird activity, there were birds everywhere: bluebirds on the wires, finches and sparrows at the feeders with juncoes and mourning doves catching the windfall below, woodpeckers rowing through the space between trees. On the road, flocks of little birds schooled from grove to grove of roadside trees. Vultures, and maybe an eagle, hung in the updrafts above the Susquehanna. And a kingfisher chattered on Fishing Creek.
2. A good, hard hike/climb on the Mason-Dixon Trail south of Long Level. The trail rises above the river on a steep rocky ridge climb, and you’re on a dragon’s back of up-jutting rocks for a quarter mile or more, the river flowing wide like a lake on your left, and Fishing Creek rushing rapidly down the steep ravine to your right.
3. The hike reminded me of the moment in Prince Caspian when the children and Trumpkin are walking along the gorge, trying to find their way, and Aslan appears to Lucy. She must make a choice to follow him rather than going the way the others are going. She knows what is right, and she must follow that way, even when the others mock her for seeing things they cannot see. Even though he doesn’t say it at that moment in that book, I still heard him say, “Courage, Dear Heart” as we picked our way along the stony pathway. I’ll take that with me into the New Year.
4. We meant to go to Infinito’s for their pizza bar for supper last night, but they had closed early for the holiday. Instead, we went next door to Asian Yummy, and it was beautiful as well as yummy.
5. Again, as I feel the sadness and loss of these long mornings for writing and thinking, I can only be grateful for the gift of them in this Time out of Time. While I have not made headway on any projects in particular, I have stretched my writing/thinking muscles on the blog, and it has been satisfying and fortifying.

May we walk in Beauty!

Last January, I had repeated visitations from kingfisher, in waking life, in dreams, in conversations, in books. I chose kingfisher as one of my symbols for the year. Yesterday, as we were finishing our hike, climbing down the ridge toward Fishing Creek, where it moves slowly in deep pools before rushing down the ravine, we heard a kingfisher chattering in the hollow, over and over again. When I got home, inspired by a friend who is writing Shadormas, I wrote this two-stanza shadorma (3/5/3/3/7/5):

Kingfisher,
who visited me
at the start
of the year
chattered farewell to the year
this cold afternoon.

And vulture
floated like eagle
through currents
o’er the ridge
while last year’s waters flowed down
the Susquehanna.

Dreamwork:
I don’t have much to say about last night’s busy anxiety dreams. In the dream, there is some sort of educational conference going on. It is both at my school, and not at my school. I go into a room, meaning to climb the stairs and go up a few floors, but it’s kind of Escher-like in design. I climb a flight of stair, walk along a landing, and the next flight leads down again into the same room, though I don’t really remember stepping down. Someone tells me I need to find the secret door on the landing. After that it’s possible to find stairs that go up, but each leads to an identical room with the same weird stair situation.

At one point, my colleagues are walking through my bedroom, and I say, “It wouldn’t be so bad if I felt this tired at the end of the day, but I feel like this right after waking up!”

Another of my colleagues, who retired a few years ago, is there, and he has brought his pet echidna. It’s really quite curious and adorable. It keeps sort of morphing into a puppy.

Perhaps I do need to pay attention to the exhaustion bit in here, and the confusion of stairs.

Wishes and Intentions

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

Gratitude List:
1. Sue, who was walking out of Market just before 8 this evening when I arrived to pick up cat food and cat litter. She turned right around and wouldn’t hear of anything but me getting what I needed before she closed up. My loyalty to Sue’s is sealed.
2. That historic yellow house in Wrightsville with the wreaths on the walls, and the lights in all the windows.
3. Winter is the time for root and bark teas. Fortifying.
4. Setting intentions/wishes for the coming year.
5. A day of solitude, and a chance to get my work done.

Much love. Walk in Beauty!

Words

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

 

“The words were on their way, and when they arrived, she would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.”  ― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
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“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
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“I hold the most archaic values on earth … the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude…. the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.” ― Gary Snyder
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“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
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“The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable.” ―Adrienne Rich
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“Be ready to be surprised by the crazy, wonderful events that will come dancing out of your past when you stir the pot of memory. Embrace those long-lost visitors.” ―William Zinsser
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Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. ―Bob Marley

Gratitude List:
1. Fridays
2. Owl calling in the pre-dawn
3. Artists
4. Dreams
5. Words

May we walk in Beauty!