nerves

Nervy

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

It’s about halfway through the month and I have hit my first wall. I’m tired and cranky (not in an existential way, just in a simple way), and I don’t want to settle my brain into the poetry groove. And Brewer’s prompt today is to write a nerve poem.

Gratitude List:
1. Meeting a FB friend today who feels like some one I have known a long time
2. Small dogs and how they look so earnestly into your eyes
3. Trying new hard things and beginning to get the hang of them
4. Redbuds
5. Freshly mowed lawn in spring
May we walk in Beauty!

“First is the fall. Then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God.” —Julian of Norwich

“Nothing is more beautiful than the uniqueness that God has created. You don’t have to create the beauty—you’ve already got the beauty. You don’t have to create the freedom—you’ve got it. You don’t have to create the image of God in you—you have it. You don’t have to win over God’s love—you have more than you know what to do with.” — Father Thomas Keating

“An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.” —Henry David Thoreau

“Preach the Gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words.” ―St. Francis of Assisi

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.” ― Mary Oliver

“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.” ―Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin

“True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” ―Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The world is remade through the power of fierce women performing outrageous acts of creative rebellion.” —Louise M. Pare

The Heart Must Hold Them All

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments


I have been thinking again about the quotations I post every day, how they’re like rungs on a ladder for me, steps toward ideas that I am seeking, seeds of ideas that I am watering and nurturing. Sometimes they’re a little harsh and jangly, and that is well and good, because I am feeling a little harsh and jangly these days, full of nerves easily frayed by the next round of cynicism and rudeness and cruelty and tragedy.

Then I find another quotation that blows cooling breeze over the rippling waters of my soul. Or someone posts a picture of a man carrying a pink umbrella to shield his family from the sun, and his wife, with their baby on her back, wraps an arm companionably about his waist. Or a student comes up to me with shining eyes and a world-changing idea. Or the mist lies over the fields of drying sunflowers like a road to Avalon.

And I find myself back at the start again, learning as if for the first time, that my heart must hold them all, both the jangly and the tender.

I watch my skittish cat, the longing in his eyes to be part of the action, and the constant anxiety, the startlement at every tiny sound. He’s so sensitive, so wound up, so completely attentive to it all, that he sometimes gets paralyzed, and can’t function except to flee and hide. When we determine that our Work is to pay closer attention, to increase our sensitivity, to care more deeply, it is possible to become as tightly wound as poor Sachs, and tremble in fear at any change in atmosphere. In days like these, it’s important to me that I remember the pink umbrella and the shining eyes and the mist. If I don’t want to get completely jangled and twitchy, I must keep looking for the feathers and the sparkling morning cobwebs, must listen for the racket of robins in the hollow each morning, must breathe in the scent of autumn in the air.

“The world has been abnormal for so long that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.”
—Madeleine L’Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet
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“People are just trees who have forgotten.”
—William Adams
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“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.” —Goethe
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“My actions are my only true belongings.” —Thich Nhat Hanh
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“If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.” —Erica Jong
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“The women, united, will never be defeated.” —Ubaka Hill
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“Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which themselves are one.” —C. G. Jung
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“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” —John Steinbeck

Gratitude List:
1. Balance
2. Paying Attention
3. Waking Up
4. Beginning Again
5. Sunrise

May we walk in Beauty!