Tag: justice

The Marker

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

At the T, where Indian Marker Road meets River Road, is a Plaque that commemorates the site of Conestoga Indian Town, where the last of the Conestogas lived–the Conestogas, who were the last of the Susquehannocks, a large and prosperous people at the time of the European invasion, tall of stature, who fished and farmed and traded and hunted and built large settlement-towns along the Susquehanna River. By 1763, their numbers were so greatly reduced by war, illness, attacks by colonists, and forced repatriation, that only this small village remained.

Yesterday I visited the marker again, on the 259th year since the genocidal ride of the Paxtang Boys murdered six of the remaining inhabitants of the tiny town. Someone had been there before me. A bundle of dried sage hung from the marker on a red string, new feathers were tucked into the crevices, and fresh roses were laid at the base of the marker. I added my stone, and turned to the east, where Chief’s Hill rises into the winter-grey sky.

Sheehays
Wa-a-shen,
Tee-kau-ley
Ess-canesh
Tea-wonsha-i-ong
Kannenquas

Several years ago, I memorized their names, feeling the new combinations of vowel and consonant slide up my throat and across my tongue, clicking my throat closed at those interruptive hyphens, wondering how close I was getting to the sounds they used for themselves. Then, a year or more after I had memorized their names, I woke up one morning, aware that I had been chanting them in a dream.

Today, in a pouch I often wear around my neck, I carry the list of their names, and of the final fourteen who were murdered on December 27th of that year, when the Paxtang Boys rode again.

I have no doubt that people were shocked and aggrieved and outraged at the murderous acts of the Paxtang Boys. Still, none of them were brought to justice. The murders of the Conestogas, the final act of genocide, went unavenged. Though Benjamin Franklin himself called out for justice upon them, justice was never done.

And today? What does justice look like, for the Conestogas? For other First Nations people here?

And who are the Paxtang Boys of today? Are we stopping them? Are we putting ourselves between them and the vulnerable people they would destroy? Who will speak out and stand up for the ones who stand in the path of the riders?

For more detailed information about the Susquehannocks, their origins, and this story, please buy a copy of Ghost River, a graphic novel with extensive interpretive text. From the web page: “Written by Lee Francis 4 (Sixkiller, Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers), illustrated by the incomparable Weshoyot Alvitre (Deer Woman: An Anthology, Sixkiller) and edited by Will Fenton (The Library Company of Philadelphia), this new graphic novel from Red Planet Books and Comics chronicles the last days of the Conestoga People and brings their story to light; a story of despair and hope, loss and love, ancestors and the ghosts of history that are always with us.”

Gratitude List:
1. Snow Day! (Ice Day, actually) My school does not do Remote learning during snow days, so I am resting and writing and folding clothes and reading. . .
2. The people who work for justice, who truly care about restoration, who believe that people are more important than institutions and structures
3. Boundaries. Good, strong, solid, clear boundaries
4. That one scarlet leaf up there in that bush
5. Fairy ice along every twig of the tiny Japanese maple on the hill.
May we walk in Beauty and Justice!

“We are the nurturers, the encouragers of all the dreams, all the seeds deep in all the hearts where the future of a redeemed and rescued land now dwells. So we hold fast and see beneath the snow, always calling others to recognize their own magnificent possibilities, to see and plant and join our hope with theirs.” —Vincent Harding, Hope and History

“How does a woman know? She listens. She listens in. Like light on waves.” —Margaret Atwood

“Every moment is a gift of life.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

“Only a fool knows everything.” —African proverb

“Note to self: If you want to have loving feelings, do loving things.” —Anne Lamott

“If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I am not interested in or open to your feedback. There are a million cheap seats in the world today filled with people who will never be brave with their own lives, but will spend every ounce of energy they have hurling advice and judgement at those of us trying to dare greatly. Their only contributions are criticism, cynicism, and fear-mongering. If you’re criticizing from a place where you’re not also putting yourself on the line, I’m not interested in your feedback.” —Brené Brown

“God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up. See all I’ve made….the hills, the sea, the blue sky, the stars.” And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me. Lucky mud.” —Kurt Vonnegut

“‪The fact that feathers are naturally occurring objects is beyond awe inspiring.‬” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist

“‪The best poems are owls. A reflection of the landscape, but singular and strange. Smooth and effortless as smoke. A trick of the eye that scatters bones in the underbrush, hard and real.‬” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist

Justice

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

Since I began this project of creating a tarot deck cooperatively with an online AI generator, the AI itself has evolved so rapidly, and the creators of the generator itself have added so many new features that within the six months since I began, the initial artwork is beginning to feel clunky and old-fashioned. I realize that the work I did to create it was a helpful process, not only in terms of my ideas about the the inner journey and about the tarot, but also in terms of my sense of the artistic and poetic process of cooperating with an AI. I find myself wanting to begin again. Maybe this process will never have an end product, but will simply be a part of my own inner growth. Perhaps I will end up instead creating an oracle deck with the characters that inhabit my own inner meditations: The Psychopomp, the Witch, The Dreamer-Mother, the Two Elves, The Gnomes of Beautiful Vision and Music, The Companion, The Golden One, Death, The Bees, Eagle, Six Crows, The Dancing Fox, Running Deer, The Golden-Crowned Tree, The Lady of the Labyrinth, The Darkness. . . Or perhaps, even, they will merge in some inexplicable way.

So here, halfway through the Major Arcana of the Tarot, I will finish this series for now, with Justice.

What does Justice mean to you? Is it the blind goddess holding her scales and a sword? I find it really interesting that Cupid and Justice are both portrayed in blindfolds: Love and Justice–an odd cosmic balance there.

Is Justice a balance of vengeance? Eye for eye? You hurt me, so I get to extract my pound of flesh from your stony heart.

Is it about karma? The bad stuff we do will come back to haunt us, so we can all relax, knowing that our enemies will eventually get their cosmic comeuppance? I know karma is a lot more complicated and nuanced than that, but I think we sometimes reduce it to this little dance of joy over cosmic rebalancing, celebrating the downfall of the evil-doer.

I want the people who hurt people to be held accountable. I want the ones who are injured and harmed to be seen and heard and listened to, to receive apology or remuneration or recompense for their injury. I don’t need an eye for an eye, but I need the harm to stop. I need the tools of the narrative to be wrested from the hands of the ones who do the injury and handed to the ones who were injured.

Restorative Justice has become a bit of a catchword in institutions these days, especially church-based institutions. When understood and practiced with depth and skill, it’s a wonderful tool for healing and returning to balance, offering a circle of story-telling, where the injured party can speak of their pain and suffering, and the ones who caused harm listen, and take account of what they have done to cause harm. In the process, they, too, get to speak, to tell their own pieces of the experience. We enter restorative justice circles with a recognition that harm has been done, and that healing is possible, but only if we meet ourselves and each other at deep, deep levels of accountability can we hope to repair the breaches in relationships.

Saying that you practice restorative justice, but doing the work half-heartedly or simply to score social points only causes more harm in the long run. Institutions, clubs, churches, and organizations that claim to do restorative justice work but only implement the process when the most powerful members of the group want to exercise controls over less powerful members of the group is an abuse of power and is the antithesis of restorative justice.

The Justice card holds us to keep high moral and ethical codes that include ourselves as well as others. We hold ourselves to the standards we demand of others. We offer others the grace and mercy we would show ourselves. Sounds a little like the Golden Rule.

Tomorrow is November. I am hoping to do a poem a day for the month.

Gratitude List:
1. My compassionate and tender-hearted and fun-loving colleagues. They made Halloween so special and magical and fun for the kids (while also managing to keep things educational).
2. The turning of the wheel. We step into a new season. We can change, metamorphose, transform.
3. Presence. Accompaniment. Companionship.
4. Cats
5. Golden, golden, golden: light and leaves and hearts.
May we walk ever in Beauty!

The wheel turns.
The harvest is in.
The veil parts.
We walk into the dark time.
Dream well.
Bright Blessings.
—Beth WK

“The moon has awoken with the sleep of the sun, the light has been broken; the spell has begun.” —Midgard Morningstar

“A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.” —Rebecca Solnit

“Turn inward: If you’re asking ‘why’, also ask why ‘why’? If your power is to question, also question the questioner in you.” —Shunya

“Everybody is trying to make their journey till death comfortable. In the process they are missing the moments that can open the door to immortality.” —Shunya

“Walk through the veil of the season.
Carry your own little light into the dark time.
Celebrate the inward spiral.” —Beth WK

Advent Images: Truth

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

The art teacher at my school worked with a group of her students to come up with a word for each of the twenty-five days leading up to Christmas. Members of the school community are then asked to post a photo that represents the idea of that word.

Today’s word is Truth. How do you come up with a visual representation for Truth? I walked outside on my break to try to get an image of a tree without leaves, thinking that Truth is what remains after all is laid bare. But on the way to the woods, I passed this patch of cold-blasted hosta. I love the colors and textures of the curled and skeletized leaves. And here’s a truth: Everything moves toward dissolution and decay, and then moves ’round again to birth and regeneration. But there’s beauty and grace in ALL the stages. The withering reveals patterns and structures that are perhaps less visible when the leaves are full and green.

But I couldn’t stop there, and searched my albums for past photos that might fit the brief:

Gratitude List:
1. Latkes for supper! Thank you, Sonya!
2. The crows are back. I love the massive flocks of crows, dotting the trees, filling the sky, sprinkling the tawny corn stubble.
3. Stories.
4. The inspiring life of Rosa Parks. Today is the 66th anniversary of her decision to stay seated on a bus, disrupting injustice and creating space for change. With what actions shall we commemorate her holy act?
5. The dreamtime of winter.
May we walk in Beauty!

“I had given up my seat before, but this day, I was especially tired. Tired from my work as a seamstress, and tired from the ache in my heart.” ―Rosa Parks

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” ―Bryan Stevenson

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” ―Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Without vision, people perish, and without courage and inspiration dreams die.” ―Rosa Parks

“When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else’s oppression, we’ll find our opportunities to make real change.” ―Ijeoma Oluo

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” ―Audre Lorde

“Nah.” ―Rosa Parks said this when asked to give her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery

NPM Day 21: Justice

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

Today, write a poem about accountability and consequences. Or make an acrostic poem about JUSTICE. Or try your hand at a credo poem, expressing what kind of society you want to be part of. Perhaps write a letter to the future, explaining what future you have been trying to manifest here and now. You could take a verse—like “Let justice roll down like waters”—and use it as your epigraph, or as a repeated phrase in a chant poem. Find a picture of the blind goddess Justice with her scales, or the tarot card Justice with scales and two-edged sword, and write a poem about justice personified.

Gratitude List:
1. Finally, justice. It’s a hard gratitude, not a soft one, like blossoms and birdsong, because a man is dead, and now yet another black child is dead, and we still have so much work to do, but one step toward a change has been made. Now we work.
2. Collage, quilting, mosaics, found poetry, creating a life: taking pieces and fragments and putting them together to create beauty.
3. Okay, blossoms and birdsong. They’re soft, but they’re also–some days–the crumbs on the pathway that help me find my way.
4. Reflections. Light on the windows. The suggestions of worlds within worlds. Worlds beyond worlds. They way you reflect me, and I reflect you.
5. Smoothies. For some reason, I never really want them in the winter, but spring and summer bring smoothie weather. I look forward to berry season.

May we walk in Beauty!

“Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession. . .but about securing a portal.” —Laura Miller

“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” ―Shannon Hale

“I can promise you that women working together―linked, informed, and educated―can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.” ―Isabel Allende

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” ―John Muir

“When we went to jail, we were setting our faces against the world, against things as they are, the terrible injustice of our capitalist industrial system which lives by war and by preparing for war.” ―Dorothy Day

“What is not acceptable is silence in face of oppression. Boycott if you want, or participate if you want. But do not remain silent in face of injustice.” ―Omid Safi

“When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.” ―John O’Donohue

“Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. What ails us is our sense of beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all the best.” ―D. H. Lawrence

“Poems are maps to the place where you already are.” —Jane Hirshfield

“Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is to draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.” ―Barbara Kingsolver

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” ―Hermann Hesse

NPM Day Eighteen: National Haiku Day

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

April first had a sort-of-haiku poem in it, but today is actually National Haiku Day, so we have to write haiku today. The American form of the ancient Japanese tradition is a three-stanza syllable-count poem with lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. At its most basic, that’s it, but there are further rules to follow, if you want to take on that challenge:
Make the theme about nature
Focus on a very specific, clear image, and then add a second very crisp image
Use sensory words
One of the words in the poem gives a sense of the season of the year
The third line offers a surprise or twist or shift (often that second image)

Here’s my attempt for the morning:
Spring sun warms feathers.
Tiny sparrow hops, sees me.
The cat is also watching.

Gratitude List:
1. How sun shines on the green
2. How squirrels suddenly stop, and stand with their hands over their hearts, wide-eyed
3. How invigorating a morning shower feels
4. How everything is in bud, is in flower. Me, too. You, too.
5. How wise words enter the labyrinth of the heart.

May we walk in Beauty!

Sunday’s Messages:
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” ―Thomas Merton

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” ―Thomas Merton

“We see quite clearly that what happens
to the nonhuman happens to the human.
What happens to the outer world
happens to the inner world.
If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur
then the emotional, imaginative,
intellectual, and spiritual life of the human
is diminished or extinguished.
Without the soaring birds, the great forests,
the sounds and coloration of the insects,
the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields,
the sight of the clouds by day
and the stars at night, we become impoverished
in all that makes us human.”
―Thomas Berry

“All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.” ―Joy Harjo

“We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.” ―Denise Levertov

“There are two types of people. Avoid them.” —Mary Engelbreit

Shouldn’t Be Surprised

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Musings

Why am I surprised? Why am I always surprised?

After four years of watching people I thought were philosophically and spiritually interested in wisdom and truth and justice cast off their moral and ethical clothing, shed their philosophical and ideological grounding, I shouldn’t be shocked at the callousness and cruelty, the active denialism and cult-like disengagement with humanity. But I am. I expected people to be better, and I keep holding out hope that the cruelty and denialism have just been glitches.

But I don’t think so.

People who railed against the “holocaust” of children represented by the seed of life in a zygote have been shrugging their shoulders when born children are torn from their parents’ arms and locked in cages–ill-fed, cold, untended, subject to sexual abuse.

People who spoke fervently and passionately about a fertilized egg’s right to life are actively fighting against programs which offer health care and living wages to the families of born children.

People who called themselves pro-life, who dogmatically claimed to stand for the tiniest little possibility of living humanity in a fetus, saying, “It’s only old people who are dying.” Refusing to wear a mask because it somehow infringes on their rights, when wearing that mask could be the difference between life and death for someone they expose.

People who seemed like educated, thoughtful adults absolutely denying the science and the demographics and the numbers of a disease that is killing thousands of people every day, actively passing on the outright lies.

People who talked about a gospel of “Good News” for all the world, ignoring the suffering of a world in the grip of a global pandemic. Laughing at people who take it seriously, scoffing at mitigation efforts, actively encouraging others to behave in dangerous and irresponsible ways.

I have known that there were nominal Christians who fought for power and wealth and white supremacy instead of Goodness and Love and Peace. That’s nothing new. And there are plenty of Christians who are acting like they care about Jesus, who are standing for justice and caring about life. I guess I just thought there would be more who, when confronted with real life-or-death situations–with a global pandemic, with a profane president, with a world of suffering–would actually decide to walk humbly with Jesus, to do justice, and to love mercy.

Unsettled

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings
The pholiota limonella at the center of the Wheel of the Year have gotten expansive. I have given them names, but they’re the names of some elven folx who appeared to me in a dream, and in the fairy tales it’s kind of rude to use the truenames of the fae, unless you’re trying to keep them at bay, so we’ll call them Meadow and Chief for now.

In last night’s dream:
I am reading a poem, by Whitman or Sandburg or someone like that. I see the lines on the page as the images of the dream unfold.

A small girl is walking a path home to her cabin in the full moon light. (Why are small children always out at night in these stories?!?)

As she is passing a field which was a battlefield in the Civil War, she comes upon an old man, dressed in the tattered remnants of a soldier’s uniform, sitting on a stump in the moonlight. She listens politely while he tells her his story of woe and bitterness.

After his telling, she makes her way home, where her mother bolts the cabin door behind her. She tells her mother (the narrator of the poem) about the old man, and they look out the window to see him sitting there, way in the distance, in the moonlight. As she finishes telling her mother the story, suddenly the old man is in the cabin with them.

The poem (dream) ends with the mother reflecting on how sitting in the bitterness of old battles can turn a person into a vampire.

I think it’s a dream about the danger we’re in right now, with a bitter old soldier who lost his battles, stewing in his rage. He’s always been an energy vampire, and now he’s been mostly ignored for days. He’ll be hungry. Telling his story to each other only feeds him.
In the dream, the girl did not invite him in, but he came in anyway, perhaps taking her polite listening as a tacit invitation. Let’s draw our boundaries tightly now, and refuse to let ourselves be drawn in to the old battles again, refuse to listen to his story. We’re in a new place now, a safer place than we were, but we need to be vigilant and aware in order to truly make it safe.

I think that part of what startles me about this dream is that in the fairy tales, you’re supposed to be polite, supposed to listen to the elders, supposed to offer assistance to the poor. This was so clearly not that. Her politeness was all the invitation he needed to enter her space. The time for passive politeness is past. White people, especially, have allowed such evil to blossom through passive politeness, through our lack of confidence in confronting lies and abuse.

My friend Anna reminds me to stand within my truth, leaning neither forward nor backward, to feel myself surrounded by a golden light. One of the many helpers who has appeared to me in a dream is an angelic being made of golden light, with great glowing golden wings, so I feel myself surrounded by my dream-friend’s light, like the golden glow of an autumn morning, when the mists are just rising off the fields and everything is awash with light. This standing in one’s truth, Anna reminds me, is like the essential core of nonresistant philosophy, to know what you believe, and to hold to that, not getting caught up in all the rages and distractions of those who oppose a vision of justice.

I am unsettled today. I feel like it’s time to stop celebrating and start looking around, keeping our noses to the wind, not losing our commitment to standing in the center of our own golden light of truth, but all senses alert to the dangers around us. It began with my dream, the sense that some attention paid to the tattered soldier has given him the “right” of entry. On one hand, I want to let the old ghost fade quietly away into the moonlight without giving it any more attention. On the other hand, I have a sense of impending doom settling on my shoulders this afternoon, a feeling of havoc about to be wreaked, chaos to be unleashed.

I know that is his pattern, to promise destruction and wreckage, and then watch in delight as all the worried citizenry gathers to put out the fires. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. I think it’s time to let it go, to believe that someone is watching and ready to give warning out in the dark night, that everyone is positioned to do their very own job.

In the meantime, in the waiting, in the transition,
we give our attention to our work:
we continue to call for justice,
we keep rooting out white supremacy wherever we see it, especially in ourselves,
we dismantle the patriarchy,
we protect the vulnerable,
we care for the children,
we teach critical thinking and analysis,
we starve the vampire.

Gratitudes:
1. The golden light of autumn
2. The golden leaves of autumn
3. The golden pillar of energy that helps us to stand within our truth
4. The golden shine of the mushrooms in the Wheel of the Year mandala
5. The golden heart of you

May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with Beauty!

Breathe and Pray

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

This morning, I wrote this:

Beloveds, I don’t really have much in the way of words to offer this morning, to wade through the bog of my own anxiety to offer hope or resilience. I’m here in my bog, listening. I need to be a teacher today, especially for students who are equally as enmired as I am.

Here in the anxious bog of me today, I sit like an angry old spider. I cast a line from me to you. Catch. Send out webs of your own. While we wait for things to ravel or unravel, we weave and spin and hold our own webs as steady as we may. We are stronger when we are together.

Black lives STILL matter.
Love is STILL love is STILL love.
Your name and pronouns STILL belong to you.
Your body is STILL your own.
You STILL have agency.
The Planet STILL needs us.
The elderly and vulnerable STILL need protection from the coronavirus.
STILL, nobody is illegal.
Justice is STILL important.

This morning felt so dire, so much a repetition of 2016. Jon and I both woke up at 2:30, and made the perhaps unwise choice to check the returns. My heart was racing, and I figured I wouldn’t get to sleep until I saw something to confirm or allay the anxiety. Look the wolf in the eye, they say. I felt in a visceral way how the anxiety and sense of tragedy of the 2016 election had lodged in my body, and how it replayed itself in the night four years later.

This afternoon, there are a few more reasons to hope. The morning, said Vassilissa’s doll in the Baba Yaga stories, is wiser than the evening. Today, the afternoon is wiser than the morning. Get some distance. Get some rest. Get some perspective.

It’s not over, and won’t be for a long time, but it doesn’t feel like we’ve completely shattered the Democracy quite yet. And the popular vote seems to be pretty definitely against the tyrant.

Here’s the one thing that sticks with me, however, like a grief: It wasn’t a clear and obvious win. My neighbors, good people and salt of the earth in so many ways, have not–by and large–passed the test, choosing instead to vote for white supremacy and patriarchy, for homophobia and transphobia, against the poor and the ill and the immigrants. And I do not know what to do with that.

I don’t feel like I can muster appropriate Gratitudes today. Perhaps a couple Commitments might stand in:
1. I commit to not respond smugly if Biden wins. I will express relief and hope if it happens (because I am human and must live my emotions), but I will not be smug, and especially I will try to be open to the pain and confusion of people for whom that is frightening, even though I do not understand it.
2. No matter who wins this election, I commit to standing for justice and compassion, for Black and Indigenous People and other People of Color, for LGBTQ+ folx, for women, for immigrants, for poor and houseless people, for all who are harmed by our systems. I commit to pushing whoever is president for the next four years (and other elected officials) to do right by the people, especially whose who have not been truly free and equal.
3. I commit to harbor no illusions that the lesser of two evils is the savior.
4. I commit to walk this together with you, my Beloveds, and to ask for help when I am sinking.

May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly. In Beauty.

Speaking Justice, Enacting Peace

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Musings, Poems

Talking to myself. You may listen in:

Meet it All with Love
Have a care with your words.
Speak justice.
Speak truth.
Words ignite.
Words incite.
Words inspire.
Have a care.

Don’t be afraid.
To act is to risk.
To not act is to risk.
Weigh and measure.

Meet it all with love.
Find joy in every place you can.
Be a prophet.
Be a fool.
Step into the gap
and become a bridge.

Avoid vengeance.
Provoke for change.
Provoke to love.
Provoke for epiphany.
Be a gadfly
and a peace-maker.
Be a prophet and a lamb.
Wise as a serpent,
harmless as a dove.

Enact peace.
Overturn the tables.
Rage and heal.
Meet it all with love.

American Parable:
Once a shepherd brought his sheep back to the fold after a long day of grazing in the high fields. As they entered the fold, he carefully counted each one, until he reached 99.

Oh no! One short! He must have lost one somewhere on the mountain! What would the other shepherds think of him if he lost a sheep? How would he ever live it down?

He stood a while in thought, then said, “Meh. What’s one sheep when I have 99 others? It was probably old or sick or weak anyway. A loser sheep. It is what it is.”

He locked his gates and doors, ate a hamburger from a golden plate, and went to bed.

Good Trouble

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

John Lewis, who is a sterling example of thoughtful and compassionate and fierce and determined political leadership in this country, called repeatedly for the people to stir up Good Trouble. What Good Trouble will you make in his honor today?

Gratitude List:
1. All the people who are making Good Trouble. Keep it up, soulkin! You are making a difference.
2. Exercise. This has never been a priority of mine, but as I notice the current effects of aging on my body, and think about where I want to be in ten, twenty years, I have chosen this mantra: limber, healthy, strong. I’m trying to get a long walk or a long bike ride in every day, sometimes both. I definitely feel stronger.
3. Wise friends.
4. Smoothies with lots of fresh fruit.
5. My tiny tribe of succulents. I repotted everyone a couple days ago, and they’re looking so much happier now. I am trying to start a few new ones with leaves that I culled as I was repotting.

May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!

“Some say you’re lucky
If nothing shatters it.

But then you wouldn’t
Understand poems or songs.
You’d never know
Beauty comes from loss.

It’s deep inside every person:
A tear tinier
Than a pearl or thorn.

It’s one of the places
Where the beloved is born.”
―Gregory Orr

“And the wood is tired, and the wood is old, and we’ll make it fine, if the weather holds. But if the weather holds, then we’ll have missed the point. And that’s where I need to go.” ―The Indigo Girls

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” ―Joseph Campbell

“Friendship … is born at the moment when one says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
―Thomas Merton

“To say ‘I don’t know’ is an unparalleled source of power, a declaration of independence from the pressure to have an opinion about every single subject.
It’s fun to say. Try it: ‘I don’t know.’
Let go of the drive to have it all figured out: ‘I don’t know.’
Proclaim the only truth you can be totally sure of: ‘I don’t know.’
Empty your mind and lift your heart: ‘I don’t know.’
Use it as a battle cry, a joyous affirmation of your oneness with the Great Mystery: ‘I don’t know.’
(To revel in this reverie can be a respite, a vacation. Any time you feel ready, you can return to the more familiar state of ‘I know! I know! I know!’)” ―Rob Brezsny

“Declare amnesty for the part of you that you don’t love very well. Forgive that poor sucker. Hold its hand and take it out to dinner and a movie. Tactfully offer it a chance to make amends for the dumb things it has done.

And then do a dramatic reading of this proclamation by the playwright Theodore Rubin: ‘I must learn to love the fool in me—the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool.'” ―Rob Brezsny

“We all receive water from her, we receive food from her, we receive air from her, anything that is received as a gift from the Earth and from nature has to be a commons, it cannot be privatised, that is why privatisation of life forms through patents or water through privatisation schemes driven by the World Bank, or the privatisation of the atmosphere and the air through carbon trading and emissions trading are all illegal and illegitimate in a legal framework based on the Earth’s rights.” ―Vandana Shiva

“The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him; they crush those beneath them.” ―Emily Bronte

“Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.” ―Susan B. Anthony

“To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.” ―Rudolf Steiner