magic

Believing in Magic

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This one is from a few years ago. We haven’t had a flowering of this particular beauty for a couple years. Last time they came up, Josiah set out a village of tiny houses and gnomefolk around them. I thought that would certainly draw them back again. This is one good reason not to mow too often.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m going through the poems and fragments I wrote with my Creative Writing classes this year. Here’s one that caught my attention:

3-21-17
My rage has tried to build
a concrete wall around
the quiet borders of my heart

and yet

I wander toward truth
skipping from spring into winter
and in my heart, a violin
like an orange bird
plays songs of peace.

“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” ~Roald Dahl
*
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
—Maya Angelou
*
“Doors closing, doors opening. Doors closing, doors I’m opening. I am safe. It’s only change. I am safe. It’s only change.” —chant (I don’t know the author)
*
Vine and branch we’re connected in this world
of sound and echo, figure and shadow, the leaves
contingent, roots pushing against earth. An apple
belongs to itself, to stem and tree, to air
that claims it, then ground. Connections
balance, each motion changes another. Precarious,
hanging together, we don’t know what our lives
support, and we touch in the least shift of breathing.
Each holy thing is borrowed. Everything depends.

—Jeanne Lohmann, ‘Shaking the Tree’
*
Parker Palmer: “The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, “I am all of the above.” If we can’t embrace the whole of who we are — embrace it with transformative love — we’ll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and flee from the world’s complex mix of shadow and light.”
*
“It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.” —Mae Jemison

Gratitude Lists:
1. Organizing and sorting
2. Oh, the rains!
3. Cooking. Sometimes I really love cooking. Last night, we each ate an entire stuffed zucchini for supper, even the kids. They would have eaten more!
4. Anticipating a day doing things I love to do.
5. All the shades of green out there. We’ve really settled in to the heart of midsummer.

May we walk in Beauty!

Castle in the Sand

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Castle in the sand.

“If your religion requires you to hate someone, you need a new religion.” ―Glennon Doyle
*
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
*
Dreamwork with Toko-pa: In the Quechua tradition, when you feel grateful, you say, “There is a small bird in my heart.”
*
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
―W. B. Yeats
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“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
― Patrick Rothfuss
*
“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”
― Sue Monk Kidd

Gratitude List:
1. One cool, breezy day at the beach
2. Feeling ready to resume life at home
3. Winds of change
4. All the longing, wishing, dreaming that draws us onward. Humans are such fanciful creatures, aren’t we?
5. Road Trip

May we walk in Beauty!

Leave a Trail

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my-heart-edited
Heart of Stone. It doesn’t always mean what the song-writers say it means.

“I want to be a mermaid. I’m half-mermaid already. The human half.”  ~~my friend Liza

“I am always aware, when I am trailing an idea–it may be a god in disguise.”  ~~Dr. Martin Shaw, Westcountry School of Myth

I have been thinking of shape-shifting lately, and of myth, and of magic. I have been pondering art and poetry and activism. Pondering hysteria and alarm, contemplation and calm. I have been considering how we can leave a trail for our children and grandchildren, so that when the people of the future look back upon us, they will be able to see the webs of resistance that we created against the tides of hate and insult and discrimination and injustice.

heartstone

She appeared at dawn, her skin shining in the water, the color of the sun rising over the ridge, a tangerine carp-fish large as my thigh, her head breaking the surface for a hush of a moment. Bubbles broke the surface. Fish and womanfish, she spoke: “Leave a trail for them to follow.” And she was gone in a whisk of orange fin, water roiling behind her, the tiny sunfish and polliwogs scattering to the shallows.

A glinting of sunlight shafted through maples, and the air around the pond’s edge filled with sudden electricity. The pond waters boiled forth and a golden bird erupted from the surface. Sunlight lanced and ricocheted through the glade, and I lost the trail of shining feathers in the glare.

The surface of the pond became a still and silent mirror once again, a capricious breeze skuthered a cloud across the sun’s face, and a single golden feather floated lazily out of the hole of sky between treetops.

Later, I climbed the hill to the high fields, pausing to search the pathway for shining quartzite, or the gaze into the blue sky for signs of the bird. Reaching for a shining stone in the path, my fingers found a silky feather, one side golden, one side blue. My ears pricked at a whistle and a calling over the crest of the hill. I topped the ridge, and the golden bird fluttered out of the trees to earth before me. “Leave a trail,” she called. “Something for them to follow.”

Again, she was gone, this time a whisk of a tail into grasses and brambles, ginger-furred fox, fleetfoot. A phantom. Eyes could not avail, but for slight shimmering movements ahead in the meadow, yet scent drew me onward to follow her trail. Down the steep hill of the orchard she led me, up over the hill to the field of the winds.

Two trees stand at the field edge, one tall and graceful, losing its last leaves in the autumn wind, the other broken and twisted, dead for long years. The trees of life and death. Again the sun was shining, a shaft glowed between the trees, and for one brief moment I saw the pointed nose of the fox, and heard one last time, “Leave a trail for others to follow.”

stonehear

Gratitude List:
1. The annual tree-hunt at McPherson’s Tree Farm. Setting up and decorating for the holidays.
2. Exploring the cycle of the coming year with a dear friend, an old soul with a young heart.
3. These webs–sometimes I read or hear a thing that resonates with what has been happening in my head, and suddenly, I see the webs of the idea everywhere. Mindweb synchronicity.
4. I really like our new neighbors.
5. Saturday evening games of Sorry and Farkle.

May we walk in Beauty!

Reason and Mystery

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lazy
This is why we sometimes don’t make the bed.

When you walk in the the rooms
where Mystery waits with an indigo hum,
listen for the thrumming
of hummingbird, feel the brush
of moth wings across your cheek,
watch for the scoop and swish
of a small brown bat
through the rooms
of your heart.

Unless you seek to see her,
you will not find her,
and the rooms where you wander
will appear empty
and devoid of beauty.

Gratitude List:
1. Walking back in time. I took my boys to the Infamous Unstoppables Parade in Lancaster’s southeast yesterday. We parked on King Street and walked up to South Ann. As we got to S. Ann, I could feel the body memories of place begin to kick in again. All those afternoons walking home from the YWCA after yoga or weight training, twenty years ago before we hiked the Appalachian trail, the sounds of people talking in Spanish, the glorious front yard gardens, the music drifting out of windows, the loud bass of a car driving by. Even the slope of the hill beneath my feet. We stood across the street from the house where we lived. I didn’t recognize anyone.
2. Learning to ask for help.
3. Doll-making. It has been a while since I have made a doll, taking the materials that come to hand and crafting a small being out of fabric or clay or wire or wood, working for those moments when the personality begins to develop. I have been wanting to make a Dream Maker doll for some time, and realized that if I am going to manage it this summer, I should get started now, working in short spurts each evening. I have taken more time with the face on this one than I ever have before, and I am feeling satisfied.
4. Reason, intellectual rigor, that which can be thoughtfully and wisely explored.
5. Mystery, magic, that which cannot be known or spoken, but only sensed or felt.

May we walk in Beauty.

Invisibility

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Scan_20150321
Yesterday as I was walking out of school, a robin began his spring song in the little tree in the parking lot.  This is Josiah’s robin from last year.  He has taped it to our living room wall, and expanded the picture onto other sheets of paper.

You walk on tiptoe,
keeping to the shadows.
Even your voice is hidden
deep in a pocket somewhere,
beneath a layer of gum wrappers,
tissues, and crumbs.

You have practiced the art
of becoming invisible,
of fading into the walls,
until you can step sideways
out of anyone’s awareness.

The trouble with many of the magical arts
is that there comes a point when you don’t know
whether you are casting the spell
or the spell is casting you.

It is time to let this one go.
Walk out of the wallpaper,
stop blurring your edges,
seek your lost voice and speak.

Speak your name into the room,
set your feet firmly on the floor,
and let the world see you.

Gratitude List:
(A list again today)
1. The robin in the tree
2. Digging a hole with a small boy to make a fire pit (though my hands really hurt today from all the shoveling and wheelbarrowing)
3. How you are beginning to let people see you
4. Drawing the line between us, which is to say–making community
5. Opening the bag of this day, to see what it holds inside.  Every day a new thing, eh?  What shall we make of this one?

Moss and Magic

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Gratitude List:
1. Science: The boys watched Bill Nye the Science Guy today.  They learned about mixing moss and milk or yogurt and then painting it on a surface, so we did that tonight.
2. Magic: Ellis used his moss mix to make a carpet for the faerie house under the sycamore tree.  Then they both ran inside asking to fill sea shells with milk and honey as a gift for the faeries.
3. Prayer: I am so sad and disheartened by the continuing medical struggles of a beautiful, wild, and gentle soul that I know.  I feel so hopeless and helpless, and prayer is a line that I hold onto.  Thin sometimes that line is, but real.  And strong.
4. Dreams: Last night’s dream was unsettling.  Still, I think it had a message which I will take to heart, a message for which I am grateful.
5. Poetry: During tonight’s class, three of us read papers on poems we’d read–William Stafford, Madeleine L’Engle, and Mary Oliver.

May we walk in Beauty!

Day of the Luna Moth

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Some of my favorite moments of poetic creation have been when I take seemingly unrelated images and ideas and pack them together into the same poem to create a new thing.  It’s like the satisfaction of making a really good collage or a quilt–when you put together things that don’t seem to have any relationship to each other, and suddenly when they come together, a kind of alchemy occurs.  A shiny new layer of meaning is created.

Yesterday was a collage of a day, a quilt of a day, a poem of a day for me.  In the morning, as I was cleaning out the market room and setting up bins of vegetables and bustling about in the morning work of the day, I kept getting that feeling you get when you know someone is looking over your shoulder, or watching you from a distance.  I actually turned around–several times–to see who was there, but everyone was still up in the fields harvesting.  At one point when I turned around, I thought I saw someone slip behind the sycamore tree, but when I looked in the reflection of the shop window behind the tree, no one was there.

A few hours later, when the harvest rush was over, my children came running to tell me that they had discovered a “milkweed moth” on the swing set.  (Last year, we had seen a Luna Moth resting on a milkweed plant–it made quite an impression on the boys.)  They showed me, and there she was, fresh as the beginning of the world, wings still unfurling.  We watched her over the course of the next couple of hours as her wings filled out to their full glory and she opened them up.  She was still there, in the rain, when we went to bed last night, but this morning she is gone.

Luna1 Luna2 Luna3 Luna4Luna

Gratitude List:
1.  Luna
2.  Magic and wonder
3.  Presence
4.  Listening deeply
5.  Meaning

May we walk in Beauty!

Gratitude List:

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

1.  Libraries and librarians
2.  The 2-sided coin of science and magic
3.  Pickled radishes
4.  That dream of hundreds of happy children eating around a table
5.  Making it myself

Peace to all beings.