Mindy Nolt

National Poetry Month!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

irony

Happy National Poetry Month!

all day I listened
for the small, wild thread
of your song,
like the first notes
of a sparrow
tuning up for morning

Gratitude List:
1. The music in yesterday’s chapel.  I could listen to Mindy Nolt sing for hours.  Sending the students out into their day with the message that everything will work itself out.
2. How things come together even when they seem like they won’t.
3. That impossibly golden forsythia.
4. Morning clouds–layers of colors and shadows.
5. Mercy and grace.  Mercy and grace.  Mercy and grace.

May we walk in Mercy.

The Heart is a Forest

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN8749
I took this back in the autumn, but as I look at it now, I think it looks like a World Tree.

Gratitude List:
1. The UNICEF Social for the Middle School last night.  I was tired from a week of work, and really desiring some introvert time, so I wasn’t quite sure I was up for it, but it was incredibly worth it to see the high schoolers reaching out to the Middle School kids, giving them a great time, and getting a chance to get to know some of those bright and shining 6th-8th graders.  One girl told me afterward, “This was so great!  We don’t often get a chance to just hang out together.”  I’m proud of the UNICEF team.
2. Game Night at church last night.  So I didn’t get to go home and have my introvert time after the social because we had game night at church afterwards.  What fun.  I am so glad that we went.  I felt sort of like that Middle School girl, really grateful for a chance to just hang out with these people.  I agree with Erin–we ought to consider monthly game nights, or at least every other month. . .
3. Movers and Lovers.  I love Mindy Nolt‘s music, and I woke up with “Movers and Lovers” in my head this morning.  Just the soundtrack I need this morning, when I finally get a little introvert time.
4. Lancaster Food Company‘s multi-grain bread.  It’s so tasty.  And they exist with a social purpose.  Check out their About page.
5. Heart.  The heart is a forest that always has more spaces to explore.  Always another grove or bosque, previously overlooked, just waiting to be known.  I love being a human being.

May we always walk in Beauty!

This is How It Begins

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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.

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Dew on Mullein.

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday, the family together celebrating a woman of wisdom and compassion.  Some families celebrate the New Year.  We celebrate a birthday.
2. More conversations with the beloved community, with wise parents and in-laws and out-laws.  How listening well and sharing ideas becomes more than the sum of all the conversational bits that appear. How ideas build upon ideas, and shape the ones that came before, and open up spaces for new thoughts to appear.  How iron sharpens iron.  How certain conversations at certain moments prepare me to do the Work that approaches.
3. Three golden rays of sun yesterday before the sun set, shooting through a rift in the grey cloud.  The sun, the sun, the sun: I saw the sun!  And now, here in the crisp morning, nothing but blue above, and golden shine now slipping over the ridge and into the hollow.
4. I have been listening this week to Mindy Nolt’s Movers and Lovers, deeply and intensely, grateful for each phrase.  Move. Love. Listen.
5. The Work.  I am learning, slowly and in tiny little ways, to stop asking myself what I can get from each moment, but instead what my Work is here in the moment.  And realizing, ever so dimly, that when I am really doing my Work (really doing my Work), I am also receiving what I need.

May we–in each dawning moment of this coming year and week and day–walk in Beauty!