light

Sunlight and Feathers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

There needs to be a word for that moment
when a particular slant of light
hits a golden butterfly wing just so
as it flutters through the hollow.

***

The feathers.  I am still finding at least one a day.  Yesterday there were five.  Two days ago, I found one at school, on the sidewalk between the parking lot and my classroom building.  One day, before I’d left the house, Alicia brought me three she’d found.  As I was pitching my tent at Nancy’s house last weekend, I found a feather.  Right there.  Last year, it lasted about a month or six weeks, a feather a day, beginning in late July.

We construct the meaning of our lives, I think.  I like to keep lots of meanings in my pockets, and take them out to look at, like bright stones.  All these feathers!  It means that I am favored by birds.  Or it’s a message not to fear the fledging, the flight I am about to take.  Or it’s a reminder to rest in the grace of air and light.  Or it means that bird-life in the hollow is healthy and vibrant.  Or it means that there is an owl who chooses my poplar tree for her feasting.  Perhaps it means that something in me is more observant in August, more apt to notice the tiny feathers in my path.  I don’t need to choose one meaning, to sort out the spiritual from the scientific, to hold one above another as the “right” and proper meaning.  I’ll hold them all, let all those pieces weave themselves into the narrative of my life.  Life’s too full of possibilities to narrow it down to one thing.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The August slant of light
2. Tiger swallowtails
3. Wild geese in flight: You do not have to be good.
4. The mysterious promise of another day
5. Baby snuggle time

May we walk in Beauty!

You Are Light!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  That reminder: You are the light of the world, the salt of the earth.  Be shiny.  Be savory.
2.  The way the snow defines the shape of the mountains so you can see their contours through their fur of trees.
3.  Making it safely home in that incredibly slippery snow.
4.  Synchronicities / miracles / synergy / magic / coincidence / Universal Intention / Divine Attention: So many words for marveling at the way things come together sometimes.
5.  Heat and light and water.

May we walk in Beauty!

Winter Balances

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

A quick little poem.
I am of two minds about winter.

One moment:
Enough, I say!  Enough
of the suffocating darkness,
of the cold that drives me
into my bed, a-quiver.
Enough of the river
frozen halfway to stone.
Enough of the bone-chilling
mind-numbing ache of it.

Then, sun on the snow,
a-sparkle, a-dazzle,
glinting ferociously:
Here is your light!
Bathe in it, draw it in,
into your marrow,
carry it deep in your heart,
in the depths, in the shadows.

Gratitude List:
1.  The way the winter sun sparkles through the bathroom window at Radiance and hits the Mary Oliver poem about summer.
2.  Talking it over
3.  The gift of vulnerability.  I want to be always strong, strong like you.  And then you open your heart and show me: “Here is the way.  Here are the places that are fearful to look upon.”  I have so much to learn.
4.  Healing energy like that bright winter sun, shimmering all around.
5.  Assessing and tweaking

May we walk in Beauty.

Rocks and Light

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Necessary Conversations: Heavy, beautiful, powerful, sad, life-giving
2.  Music with the Family: Val’s fiddle, “Helpless and Hungry” behind “What Child is This?”, Isaiah’s clear voice singing “No Wind at the Window,” and “The Lord Bless You and Keep You”
3.  Maklubbi.  However it is spelled, it was a delicious Christmas dinner.  And wonderful wine.   And the figgy pudding.  Always the figgy pudding.
4.  Dutch Blitz.  I am getting so slow.  I need to practice, if I am to keep up with these young people.
5.  You.  You.  You.

May we walk in Beauty.  And Light.  So much Light.

Oh, and rocks.  #6 is Rocks.  Susquehanna’s rocks.  Hezza’s rocks.  Goldfinch’s rocks.  The Apache Tear that I wear at my heart.

Motherline

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2013 December 087

Gratitude List:
1.  The light will return, the light will return, the light will return.
2.  Vegetables harvested from right out of the snows
3.  Nate Willing’s hot sauce.  I think this is an appropriate time for an O.M.G.  Sublime.  On scrambled eggs for breakfast and quesadillas for supper.
4.  So much love.  So much light.
5.  The Motherline.
I am Beth Weaver-Kreider,
daughter of Ruth Slabaugh Weaver,
daughter of Lura Lauver Slabaugh,
daughter of Mary Emma Graybill Lauver,
daughter of Elizabeth Shelley Graybill,
daughter of Lydia Gingrich Shelley,
daughter of Elizabeth Light Gingrich,
daughter of Mary Dohner Light,
daughter of Anna Landis Dohner,
daughter of Fronica Groff Landis,
daughter of Susanna Kendig Orendorf Groff,
daughter of Elsbeth Meili Kundig (?),
daughter of Anna Barbara Bar Meili,
daughter of Barbara Biedermann Bar (born 1580 in Hausen, Switzerland).  Thanks for starting up the conversation again, Sarah Preston.

May we walk in Beauty!

Just a Minute

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

After yesterday’s lai, my friend Mara sent me a link to an interview with the poet Cathy Smith Bowers, who worked with another short form, the minute.

A minute is three stanzas in length, each of twenty syllables (60 total, like a minute).  The rhyme scheme is aabb, ccdd, eeff.  And the kicker is that the meter is iambic: ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum.  Sort of like Shakespeare, but with fewer feet.

This one’s tricky.  Even when the meter and rhyme seem to come easily, it’s a real challenge to get it to dance rather than stumble.  But Mockingbird says that you learn to dance by taking those first stumbling steps.

Out in the dawn, a misty sea
in walnut tree
a silent crow
will dream of snow

will ruffle feathers in the chill
will wait until
the first bright ray
begins the day

then with a final shake will rise
from branch to skies
and this will be
a memory

Ha!  Well, that was fun.  Mockingbird says I am not supposed to make fun of it or try to explain its inadequacy, so I’ll let it stand for today’s poem.

2013 October 081

Gratitude List:
1.  Getting a card in the mail!  Just for hello-and-I-love-you.  What a delight.  And there was a tiny picture of an artist’s palette on the back that inspired Ellis to draw and draw and draw.  Thank you, Auntie Mary!  I love you, too!
2.  New soft. warm rug underfoot
3.  Faery-light.  I don’t know another word for it–the way the vegetables glow and shine from within, even when there is no obvious light source nearby.  Yesterday, the tomatoes seemed to glow from within.  Radishes, potatoes, carrots, when they’re wet, take on a light and color that seem to be beyond the capacity of the available light to create.
4.  New perspectives.  Rearranging the furniture, literally and figuratively.
5.  The way frost outlines every leaf, every blade of grass, every bud and vein.  My children say Jack Frost is just a made-up thing, but I’ve seen some of his best work.

Beauty all around us.

Chicken Feathers and Gratitude

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2012 November 203
Pepita’s Feathers

Gratitude List:
1.  Ancestors and descendants
2.  Turning sideways into the light
3.  Yellow Aconites coming up in the garden (Thank you, Marie!)
4.  Sparkly Blue Tanzanian Zoisite
5.  Stories woven with stories
May we walk in Beauty!

Gratitude List

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

1.  Those people up the road who tenderly removed the siding on the front of their house and just as tenderly restored the log cabin front.
2.  Lisa White’s amazing whoopie pies.  Just like the grandmothers used to make, and yet not so. . .
3.  The way the light rays out of the barn through the boards into the fog.
4.  Breathing.  Breathe in suffering.  Breathe out compassion.  Breathe in gratitude.  Breathe out love.
5.  The light is coming back.  It will return, it will return, it will return.  (I am truly grateful for that, though I realize that this last smacks of desperation as much as it expresses gratitude).

Namaste!