Tag: Kwanzaa

WORDHOARD

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

I said I wasn’t going to choose a specific word or theme for this year because I had so many words I wanted to work with, and that in itself became a word and a process. Of course. So my word for 2023 will be WORDHOARD. In the past week, I’ve been foraging for words (and hoarding them) to make into little cards to represent lots of ideas and themes that have lingered in my inner rooms.

I’ve been painting the insides of cereal and food boxes with gesso, then cutting them into 4×5 cards, then painting and collaging and drawing on them, and pasting a word from my wordhoard–these are the words that I have already foraged and printed from a document. I really like the Courier New font for a project like this. I already have several dozen words in my hoard. I have lots of little cards to make!

After all the recent years of metaphors and symbols and inspirations that I have chosen for my Word of The Year, it feels a little strange to move to something so nearly concrete. It’s my hoard of words. But it has also been–already–a really energizing creative process, both linguistically and visually. I’m including the animal symbols that have been meaningful to me, and words that have been previous Word of The Year words. I’m studying Swahili, so instead of Bridge, I will make a Daraja Card. And Spider will be Buibui.

It’s going to be a chance for me to do some experimental work with artistic processes. I find myself thinking about different ideas I want to try for laying on paint or embellishing.

We usually tend to celebrate New Years Eve at home, and with three of the four of us down with Covid this year, we aren’t going anywhere. Some of us will probably be going to bed in a couple of hours.

Gratitude List:
1. The challenges. I don’t want to do this year again. But I am grateful for the things I have learned through the challenging times.
2. The sighs of relief. I know that good news does not always follow bad, but this year’s run of bad news was frequently followed by sighs of relief.
3. Making things, coming up with ideas and then making them happen.
4. Moments in time when we look backward and forward, like the god Janus, who sees both past and future, and integrates them into the work of the now. New years, new months, new eras in our lives. How the future reflects the past.
5. You. All my Beloveds. I can’t imagine how I would have moved forward this year without the amazing community of people who surround me. I am grateful. Sometimes it’s just a nod or a little word of encouragement or commiseration that makes the difference.
May we walk ever 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

“The web of life both cradles us and calls us to weave it further.” —Joanna Macy

New Year Poem
by May Sarton

Let us step outside for a moment
As the sun breaks through clouds
And shines on wet new fallen snow,
And breathe the new air.
So much has died that had to die this year.
We are dying away from things.
It is a necessity—we have to do it
Or we shall be buried under the magazines,
The too many clothes, the too much food.
We have dragged it all around
Like dung beetles
Who drag piles of dung
Behind them on which to feed,
In which to lay their eggs.
Let us step outside for a moment
Among ocean, clouds, a white field,
Islands floating in the distance.
They have always been there.
But we have not been there.
We are going to drive slowly
And see the small poor farms,
The lovely shapes of leafless trees
Their shadows blue on the snow.
We are going to learn the sharp edge
Of perception after a day’s fast.
There is nothing to fear.
About this revolution…
Though it will change our minds.
Aggression, violence, machismo
Are fading from us
Like old photographs
Faintly ridiculous
(Did a man actually step like a goose
To instill fear?
Does a boy have to kill
To become a man?)
Already there are signs.
Young people plant gardens.
Fathers change their babies’ diapers
And are learning to cook.
Let us step outside for a moment.
It is all there
Only we have been slow to arrive
At a way of seeing it.
Unless the gentle inherit the earth
There will be no earth.

Someone Should Start Laughing
A Poem by Hafiz (Ladinsky)

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?
I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
What is God?
If you think that the Truth can be known
From words,
If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening
Called the mouth,
O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly Laughing—Now!

Mary Oliver:

The poem is not the world.
It isn’t even the first page of the world.
But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.
It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.

A New Year, Dreamtime 10

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

Here we are at Janus’ Doorway again. Janus, remember, is the two-faced Roman god who stands in doorways and gateways and openings, his face looking back to where he came from and forward to where he is headed. And on this day we, too, have made a practice of looking forward as we look back: What do I hold in my heart from the past year? What do I want to keep and improve upon? What do I regret? What do I leave behind with relief? And: What am I looking forward to? What do I want to maintain as the thread that continues from year to year to year? What do I want to pick up What can I strive to become as I step through this gate into the next phase?

Some years I make Resolutions. Some years I eschew them. Some years I make them with qualifications or new names like Intentions or Principles. This year, they’re Resolutions again. I can sit with that. Some of these are loftier than others.

Resolutions
In 2019, I resolve to:

  1. Continue banning face and name of the attention-monger on my FB page. No posts of him.
  2. Nourish my body with care, and make sure to strengthen and stretch.
  3. Tend to my inner life with even greater care. Expand spiritual practices and lifelines.
  4. Let the madwoman out of the attic. Give her flowers and colors, nice music and rich scents.
  5. Be actively kinder to my children.
  6. Finish the book. Can I finish the book this year? I think maybe I can finish the book.g

Gratitude List:
1. Closing the book on the challenges of 2018.
2. Opening a new chapter.
3. Blank pages.
4. Supportive, overlapping circles of community.
5. The blue of those clouds on this first morning of the new year.

May we walk in Beauty!

Today’s Quotations list is long. I decided to include two of my own New Year’s poems.

Words for the Seventh Day of Kwanzaa:
 The word for this last day of Kwanzaa is Imani, or Faith. Believe that your dreams have the power to create change in the world. May it be so for you and for me and for all who long for and work for justice in the coming year.

“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering ‘it will be happier.’” —Alfred Tennyson

“Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.” ―Joan Chittister

Walking Through the Gateway of Another Year
By Beth Weaver-Kreider, 2017

Let’s call them New Year’s Revolutions
or Re-Solutions
or Revelations
or Re-evaluations.

Change. Progress.
Uncovering. Assessing.

In the coming year, I resolve to re-solve
my problems and issues every day,
not just on this morning.

For every morning is the morning
of a whole new year,
a bright blank page
in which any thing
can be a new thing.

Let every moment be a moment like now,
when the newborn sun shines
over the ridge
onto the scarlet breast
of a cardinal,
and the eye
for a moment sees nothing
but sparkling red.

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.” —T. S. Eliot

“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”
—William Blake

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.”
―Mary Oliver

“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is How It Begins (a New Year’s poem)
by Beth Weaver-Kreider, January 1, 2016

This is how it begins:
each year, each week, each day,
each golden shining drop of moment
approaches,
full of expectancy,
dawning,
ready for our use.

How will I inhabit the house
of the now that approaches?
How will I wear the cloth
of the day that is given?
How will I wander the story
of the year that has just now
leapt into shining view
through the gray clouds of winter?

I will face this year with resolution
(this week, this day, this moment)
not to wait until this whirling planet
has danced around the sun
to make the new thing new,
but to step into each freshly-birthed now
with eyes that see the golden shine of possibility
and ears that hear the note of each plucked strand of moment.

In the Dreamtime, Day 9

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

It’s all been anxiety dreams again this night, at least what I remember. No visitations by interesting animals or night-time messengers. I suppose I shouldn’t simply ignore the anxiety dreams, but this is supposed to be my rest from teaching, and I’m tired of teaching all night in my dreams as well.

So instead of dreams, here is an image of three trees on a hillside. It felt like an archetypal image when I took it, and the digital distortions give it a dreamlike quality. Three trees on a green hill. Cat-claws slashes of jet trails across the sky. So many mystical traditions around the world, and through time, consider three to be an important number. Something in the human psyche responds to sets of three. Sets of three are dynamic, curious, energetic, satisfying. Three aspects of deity. Three wishes. Tragedies come in threes. Three guesses. Three days. Three challenges. Three trials.

Gratitude List:
1. Holy moments
2. Compelling images
3. Cornbread
4. Sleep
5. Family time

May we walk in Beauty!

Words for the Sixth Day of Kwanzaa:
 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

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

“The poem is not the world.
It isn’t even the first page of the world.
But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.
It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.”
—Mary Oliver

“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)

From “Dawn”
Lyla June Johnston
Dawn. It is dawn.
The sun is conquering the sky
and my grandmother and I
are heaving prayers at the horizon.
“Show me something unbeautiful,” she says,
“and I will show you the veil over your eyes and take it away.
And you will see hozho all around you, inside of you.”

Someone Should Start Laughing
A Poem by Hafiz
I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?
I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
What is God?
If you think that the Truth can be known
From words,
If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth,
O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly Laughing—Now!

In the Dreamtime, Day 8

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

At one of the moments of waking in the night, I had netted a dream—like catching a fish, and thought I would hold it until morning, but it has slipped away into the shallows of my dream-brain. I think last night’s dreams were mostly the to-ing and fro-ing, the hither-and-yonning, of a mind gearing up to get the necessary work done. No images stand out from the chatter.

From yesterday’s meditations, I have pulled up the image of the Messenger or Page, the archetypal communicator, tasked with carrying messages throughout the royal household and beyond. While my outer life is all about communication and getting the messages across, I think that what has broken down for me in the past few months is the communicative process between my Deep self and my Surface self. The surface me did not quite know or believe that the deeper regions of my psyche were sad and overwhelmed and world-weary. I wasn’t keeping those pages working, moving between regions of my inner household to keep all the important pieces of me informed. I, who can sometimes live a little too intensely in the emotional realm, was getting cut off from my emotional self, not listening to the messages that the Deep self, which usually feeds me, was hungry and cut off. To be completely truthful, I think my Surface self was actually aware that things were getting out of order in the rooms deeper in, but didn’t quite know how to go about the process of daily living while tending to the work that needed to be done. Thankfully, Christmas Break has come along.

That’s a lot of navel-gazing, but the point is: To keep a healthy inner life, it’s really important to maintain regular times for meditation and contemplation and noticing the deepest inner places. It’s important for me to find and practice regular spiritual techniques in order to maintain inner balance. As a teacher, I sometimes get so compartmentalized that I push off my serious contemplative work to my breaks, thinking I’ll recharge and reconnect then, but without regular noticing, that inner space can get pretty messy and uninhabitable. The quick daily gratitude list hasn’t been enough for me to sustain the lines of communication. I am going to need to build in another regular practice in the coming months to keep myself healthy.

If I look back at what I have been writing in the past week, I think that part of what has been rampaging through my inner rooms is the untold stories. One solution for me will be to find focused time to work on this novel in the coming weeks. I need to either take it up or put it down, but I have to stop trying to keep it locked in the attic. It’s too destructive up there.

And sometimes inner turmoil can be symptomatic of other issues, ones we might not be able to see on our own. It might be time to schedule a check-up with a mental health counselor as well. Why don’t our health care plans include regular mental health check-ups as well as physical health check-ups? It would be a good idea to build it into our health care plans.

Gratitude List:
1. Purring Cat. When I woke up at four with the weight of the world on my chest, certain I would never get back to sleep, a little cat sensed my state of mind, settled on my chest, and purred me back to sleep. Never mind that an hour later, he woke me again with an angsty rendition of some teen-cat emo song. It was short, and I got back to sleep again then, too.
2. The Messengers, outer and inner
3. Rest. Such a little word for something so important
4. Grapefruit
5. Listening

May we walk in Beauty!

Words for the Fifth Day of Kwanzaa:
 Today’s word is Nia: Purpose. This refers to the purpose of building African culture through community endeavor. As a white person, this is another reminder to me to take a learning and listening posture, and to use the privilege culturally stamped on my skin to give space and voice to others.

“Being curious is the most important part of being a journalist. It might be the most important part of being anything.” —Lemony Snicket

“And when I had asked the name of the river from the brakeman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.” —Robert Louis Stevenson, 1879

The New Song
by W. S. Merwin

For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then
there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song

SABBATHS 2000: V
by Wendell Berry

I know for a while again
the health of self-forgetfulness,
looking out at the sky through
a notch in the valleyside,
the black woods wintry on
the hills, small clouds at sunset
passing across. And I know
that this is one of the thresholds
between Earth and Heaven,
from which even I may step
forth and be free.

“We need wilderness and extravagance. Whatever shuts a human being away from the waterfall and the tiger will kill [her].” —Robert Bly

“Know that the same spark of life that is within you, is within all of our animal friends, the desire to live is the same within all of us…” ―Rai Aren

In the Dreamtime, Day 7

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

I went to bed really late again last night, after a couple hours of writing. I was frustrated. I had just realized that the sweet and tender scene I had just written would completely through off the truth of another piece of the story that I am deeply attached to, so I have to rewrite a few pages, and make sure that one character is kept in the dark about her mother’s true identity.

Consequently, my dreams were fragmented and illusory. I cannot remember them. Perhaps I just slept well because of the late hour. So I have no dream images to add to my storehouse of images for the year.

I did do some meditation work yesterday, drawing upon three sets of images that have been in my mind. Pairs of images seemed to play with and inform each other. From this dance of images came three principles I will consider for the coming year:

* In crunchy and conflictual situations, instead of squashing my own feelings and needs or avoiding the stress of conflict, I will strive to be generous with myself and others while setting strong boundaries.

* In response to my weariness and exhaustion about picking up the Impossible Tasks (the looming work that gets bigger the more it gets avoided), I will create gentle life-giving personal rituals that ease me through the challenges and mark the little accomplishments along the way.

* For the sake of balancing my mental health, I will do something that I deeply love, which at this moment is writing. Deep down, I still long for a Writer’s Life, but I have a family to support, so I cannot simply leave my wonderful job to write. But my wonderful job ceases to be wonderful when it feels like it keeps me from doing what I love. If I am to maintain balance, I must make time to write. And it can no longer just be practice and place-holding, but seriously crafted Storymaking.

Gratitude List:
1. Messages
2. Sunshine
3. Homemade bread and soup
4. Following the trail of bread crumbs in a story
5. Twinkling lights and twinkling eyes

May we walk in Beauty!

Words for the Fourth Day of Kwanzaa:
 Today’s Kwanzaa Word is one of my favorite Swahili words: Ujamaa. Cooperative economics. How can we create local systems that develop economic justice for all? How can we share our finances in ways that build up the community?

“Don’t let the tamed ones tell you how to live.” —Jonny Ox

“The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example. If they see their mothers and other women in their lives going forward despite fear, they’ll know it is possible.” —Gloria Steinem

Mark Twain: “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

Frederick Buechner:
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

“A night finally came when I woke up sweaty and angry and afraid I’d never go back to sleep again. All those stories were rising up in my throat. Voices were echoing in my neck, laughter behind my ears, and I was terribly, terribly afraid that I was finally as crazy as my kind was supposed to be. But the desire to live was desperate in my belly, and the stories I had hidden all those years were the blood and bone of it. To get it down, to tell it again, to make something—by God, just once to be real in the world, without lies or evasions or sweet-talking nonsense. It was a rough beginning—my own shout of life against death, of shape and substance against silence and confusion. It was most of all my deepest, abiding desire to live fleshed and strengthened on the page, a way to tell the truth as a kind of magic not cheapened or distorted by a need to please any damn body at all. Without it, I cannot imagine my own life. Without it, I have no way to tell you who I am.” —Dorothy Allison, from “Deciding to Live”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov:
“Love all of God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”

Antonio Machado, Border of a Dream: Selected Poems:
“Traveler, there is no path.
The path is made by walking.
Traveller, the path is your tracks
And nothing more.
Traveller, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Traveller, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.”

Walt Whitman:
“Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
Traveling with me you find what never tires.
The earth never tires,
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,
Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.
Allons! we must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,
However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.”

“A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” Jeremiah 31:15

In the Dreamtime, Day 6

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

My primary dream memories from last night are of storm, of rain and wind lashing the windows–of the house where I wandered, of the classroom where I was teaching. Classroom dreams are always anxiety dreams–and this one woke me up to lie and worry once again about my sense of constant insufficiency. And of course the storm was happening outside as well as in my dreams.

Somewhere near dawn, Mrs. Rochester began to walk about in the attic of my brain; whether invoked by dream or imagination, I am not certain. I was in a half-doze. Last night before bed, I finished The Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s exploration of the life of Antoinetta Bertha Cosway Mason Rochester. (There’s a name to sing.) Critics tend to agree that the madwoman in the attic was Bronte’s metaphor for the writer that women keep locked up inside themselves. If she is not allowed out to live in the real world, she is liable to burn the house down–figuratively, of course.

Yesterday, during my solitude, I let the madwoman out to play. Finally. I had kept her locked up so long that I had forgotten how much good material I had already written for the book that’s been churning inside my head. I’m going to trust her to walk about the rooms a little more in the daytime, and see what she can create.

Gratitude List:
1. Letting the madwoman out of the attic
2. Will and determination
3. Today is Friday, and I still have five more days of rest, if you count today
4. Rain and wind
5. The patterns made by leafless trees against a dawn-grey sky

May we walk in Beauty!

Words for the Third Day of Kwanzaa:
 Today’s Kwanzaa Word is Ujima. Here is what a wrote a few years ago on this day:

“Collective work and responsibility. I love that it comes after kujichagulia, self-determination. When we each get our own house in order, our own mojo going, then we can work together to build and strengthen our communities.

“Here in these days of stillness as the earth is poised to swirl back into the Long Light, what a wonderful idea to contemplate: How can I carry my own energies into community-building in the New Year?”

This year’s addendum: And of course, Kwanzaa is an African American holiday, so the question for me becomes: How can I use the privilege I was born with to support and strengthen the community-building work of people of color?

“I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” ―Anaïs Nin

Leave your windows and go out, people of the world,
go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods
and along the streams. Go together, go alone.
Say no to the Lords of War which is Money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees,
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.
―Wendell Berry

“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 fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke

“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

It seems that we Christians have been worshiping Jesus’ journey instead of doing his journey. The worshiping feels very religious; the latter just feels human and ordinary. We are not human beings on a journey toward Spirit, we are already spiritual beings on a journey toward becoming fully human, which for some reason seems harder precisely because it is so ordinary.” ―Richard Rohr

“What if nostalgia is not a fruitless dwelling on those irretrievable moments of the past, as we are taught, but an attempt by sweetness to reach you again?

What if nostalgia is really located in the present, like a scent or ambience which is gathering around you should you avail yourself to it.

As anyone who has been heartbroken knows, there comes a time when, long after loss has been well-lived with, a small melody of love always returns. And to your surprise, you may recognise the tone of that love as the very same love you believed you lost.

It’s then that you know that your love was always your love. And if you let yourself be unguarded to it, nostalgia may find its way back into the generosity of your presence.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa

“Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.” ―Desmond Tutu

“We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.” ―Wendell Berry

Dreamtime 5: Day of Solitude

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

Today I will be alone. My parents are taking the children for the day, and Jon is going to work, and I get to be just me by myself. There’s tidying to do, and grading, possible baking projects, and all sorts of other things to distract me, but today, I am mostly going to write. I am going to plan to get five or six solid hours of writing done. Maybe a nap. Maybe some reading, some quiet contemplating, some yoga.

Last night’s dreams included the one about the treehouse. This is a recurring setting in my dreams. You climb up to the tree house, and then there are two possibilities for how to get into the treehouse: You can squeeze through a claustrophobic little window (I only tried that option once or twice) or you can balance across the very slippery top. Last night, I scooted across the top backwards on my backside, and it was easy. Usually, crossing through or over the treehouse is the only way to get to one or two of the rooms in the hotel–and I am usually assigned to one of those rooms when I have this particular dream.

In last night’s dreams, I meet a group of friends on the porch of the hotel. One friend, whom I haven’t seen for a long time, has lost a dire amount of weight. He says that some signal coming from his television has turned the fillings in his teeth toxic. Shortly after telling me his story, he gets a surprised look on his face and comes across to sit next to me. Something emanating from me has reversed the process, he says. And he IS looking healthier suddenly.

In the last couple of days, I have done a lot of processing about the way I have become weighed down in the past month or so, wondering whether it’s a mild depression, a seasonal affective disorder, a little of both. . . I’ve been thinking about my style of working, how I approach the Impossible Tasks (or avoid them, rather). I think the ease with which I crossed the bridge-roof of the treehouse is a metaphor for the shift I am making, not just pushing right into the first tight hole and getting stuck, but looking up and outward at other possibilities, putting aside worry, and just crossing to where I need to go.

Gratitude List:
1. Solitude
2. Quiet
3. Sunshine
4. Cats
5. Words on a page

May we walk in Beauty!

Words for the Second Day of Kwanzaa:
Today’s word is Kujichagulia. Self determination.
(Even if you don’t know Swahili, it’s a fun word to roll around in your mouth. Try it. Emphasize the second and second to last syllables.)

“For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

John O’Donohue:

In out of the way places of the heart
Where your thoughts never think to wander
This beginning has been quietly forming
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you
Noticing how you willed yourself on
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

“Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.” ―Carrie Fisher

“Be somebody that makes everybody feel like a somebody.” —Kid President

In the Dreamtime, Day 4

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings
This is a digitally enhanced fragment of the painting that was on the wall of the restaurant at yesterday’s 
Christmas dinner. I think it looks like the Susquehanna River Bridge.

I don’t know if anxiety dreams should count in the collection of images I gather for the coming year. Last night’s dreams were all about being unprepared, about having to wing it in front of school administrators and donors. Considering how helpful and supportive my school’s administrators are, it’s clear that these dreams are about my anxieties about myself rather than about my school. I suppose it’s important not to ignore the deep truth of these dreams–that I do not feel adequate to the task of teaching. This is not a revelation. It’s part of my every day reality. Whenever someone depends on me, I feel the weight of not performing, not mastering, not being perfectly suited to the task. No matter how much daytime work I do to convince myself that I am being sufficient to the tasks of my life, my dreams always tell me how much more work I have to do. Sigh.

In last night’s dreams, I actually did fairly well teaching a chapter from a book I had never read while administrators (they were clearly from my dream-school, not recognizably from my real life school) looked on. Then I gave a group of very sleepy donors a run-down of the work we do in our Advisory Groups. It actually woke them up and got them participating and laughing, even though I diverged into some topics I really knew nothing about. So maybe I will look at those dreams and remind myself: I am sufficient to the tasks I must accomplish. But today, at least, will be another day of stepping away from the necessary tasks I must complete in order to be sufficiently prepared to return to school next week.

Gratitude List:
1. My Christmas robe. It’s soft and toasty warm–the perfect thing to cope with winter.
2. Family. I know not to take these people in my life for granted. Family can be our greatest joy or our most intimate agony. If the latter is your story, I wish for you the discovery of healthy, joyful family that is formed by bonds not of blood, but of circumstance and friendship.
3. Time out of time
4. Darkness and light
5. Music of resistance

May we walk in Beauty!

Words for the first day of Kwanzaa:
 Joyful Kwanzaa to my friends who are celebrating the first fruits: Today is Umoja, or Unity. Reflect on ways in which we can bring unity in divided situations in the coming year.

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” —Mary Oliver

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” ―Susan Sontag

“People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped; by influence, by power, by us.” —Wendell Berry

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.” —Mary Oliver

“When you understand interconnectedness, it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying.”
—Robert A. F. Thurman

“It’s quiet now. So quiet that can almost hear other people’s dreams.” ―Gayle Forman

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh