Tag: moth

The Dance

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

I’ve started ignoring the prompts and just doing my own thing. It’s nice to know the prompts are there when I need them to give myself a jump start. I spent the day doing school work and then went to a play this evening. I decided to work on a haiku on the ride home.

Gratitude List:
1. Sitting under a pear tree on a golden spring morning, sun sparkling through the thousand new leaves
2. As I walked down the road in the morning, a young red-shouldered hawk called my name, then leapt from the branch and circled in blue sky above me three times before wheeling out over the valley and up the far ridge
3. Gifted young actors and singers and dancers–the show miraculously went on during a power outage in a lobby lit by emergency lights
4. Breakthroughs–breaking out of mental blocks
5. Always there are new things to learn
May we walk in Beauty!

Earth Day Words:
“The world is, in truth, a holy place.” —Teilhard de Chardin

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” —Henry David Thoreau

“You are your own cartographer now.” —Ralph Blum

“If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke

“Every creature is a word of God.” ―Meister Eckhart

“The forest for me is a temple, a cathedral of tree canopies and dancing light.” ―Dr. Jane Goodall

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.” ―The Onceler (Dr. Seuss)

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” ―Rachel Carson

William Stafford: “I place my feet with care in such a world.”

“A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.” ―John Sawhill

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” ―Rachel Carson

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year…the alienation from the sources of our strength.” ―Rachel Carson

“Few words are so revealing of Western sexual prejudice as the word Goddess, in contrast to the word God. Modern connotations differ vastly from those of the ancients, to whom the Goddess was a full-fledged cosmic parent figure who created the universe and its laws, ruler of Nature, Fate, Time, Eternity, Truth, Wisdom, Justice, Love, Birth, Death, Etc.” ―Barbara G. Walker

“Our vitality is inextricably bound up with creativity. Like a tree whose expression is fruit, giving our gifts is what keeps life pushing through our veins. It’s what keeps us feeling alive. As anyone who has strayed too far from their creativity knows, without it every corner of one’s life can fall prey to a terrible greying spread. As Kahlil Gibran writes about trees in an orchard, “They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.” —by Toko-pa Turner

“Come under the wing of the Spirit. All of you beneath a threatening sky, working in fields far from home, turn and come now, come under the wing of the Spirit. The protection of the sacred will shelter you. The strength of the holy will surround you. When the time comes, trust your own instincts, and come under the wing of the Spirit. There you can ride out the next storm. There you can renew your energy for the next call to prayer. These are the days for which we were made. This is the moment for miracles. When you hear a distant bell, come under the wing of the Spirit.” —Steven Charleston

That goldfinch out there.
Really—he’s like a little nugget of sunfire.
How can he shine so?
He must be lit from within.
—Moonbat

““What can a tree teach us about self-worth? How it grows only so big as its mothersoil can provide for, how it draws nutrients from her, but then expresses itself in leaves and fruits. How it kindly emits oxygen and purifies the air. How it offers itself as shelter, how it shades, how it sometimes lives to be ancient or not, but always offers its body back to the soil which grew it. How it becomes a nurse log upon which a whole new ecosystem can grow. Reciprocity is the only practice which can heal the alienation we feel from The Family of Things.” —Toko-pa Turner

“You are your own cartographer now.” —Ralph Blum

Luna on the Hill

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Poems

I wrote this poem on 8 October 2014, after seeing part of a lunar eclipse one early morning on my way to work. This morning, again, as we crested Pisgah ridge, the ball of the moon was rolling off over the far hills, a smudge of Earth-shadow beginning to veil her face.

What Moth? What Butterfly?
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

The raucous owls were silent in their bamboo haunts
this morning as I rushed up the hill to meet the moon
emerging from her umbral shadow,
from her ombre ochre cocoon.

What moth will she become?
What butterfly will I?

I sat a moment at the junction where my road
meets the ridge, Mt. Pisgah Road before me,
then the tidy fence,
the dusky hill meadow,
a lacy line of trees across the hilltop,
and the changing moon above in chestnut orange glory
nestled into the indigo dawning.

I caught glimpses of her on my way down the ridge
and then in my mirror as I crossed the bridge
over the water and under the last dusk of night
and I saw then that she was only now just fading into the shadow,
only entering her transformation.

I had to leave her there behind me to do her work
behind the veils of dusky morning
while I drove into the shining pink of sunrise,
Venus riding high before me
and two crows above,
lifting their wings in alleluia.

Witches Being Ducked

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

Gratitude List:

1. “When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”  –Virginia Woolf  (I had never read the first part of the quotation before.  Thank you, Christine Lincoln!)
2. Christine Lincoln and the Witches Being Ducked.  What a powerful Sisterhood.  I have fallen in love with you all.  Your magenta hair is a halo, an aura of  Shine, matching the passionate person within.  I am in awe of you.
3. All those images.  I want to write them all here, but they don’t belong to me.  I will carry them with me, deep, deep within.  Such story-making.
4. The tenacity of morning glory.  Over a week ago, Jon cut down the vine that was climbing up the dead sunflower in front of the house.  The leaves on the vine that continue on up the balcony have long since withered, but the flowers were still blooming today!
5. The heartbeat of a moth.  I held a small moth on my finger this morning, and I could feel its life force, its heartbeat, like a small motor quivering.

So much love.