Oh, goodness. I am exhausted tonight. Here’s a placeholder poem. One of my rules is that the poems don’t have to be polished. I go into the month knowing, especially in November, that I will have some evenings when I struggle to function, and can only publish a little bit of fluff.
How the Day Closes In by Beth Weaver-Kreider
my brain is fogged in caught in the mists not even the foghorn not even the lighthouse not even the grim shadows can guide me tonight my ship is enharbored for the foreseeable future
Gratitude List: 1. Cats who want to be next to me 2. Thanksgiving Break is coming up 3. A brisk after-dinner walk 4. Salmon patties 5. The satisfaction of a good stretch May we walk in Beauty!
Yes, I know I wrote a “Spell to Tumble the Tower of Patriarchy” just a couple days ago. So?
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Heal the girl inside you. Remake the stories, and reel them back and back into time, where the girl, enthralled by Beauty, (not in thrall to power) enters the mouth of the earth, where she chooses her pathway, following the red flower of her own truth, her own permission, her own purpose into the heart of her own realm.
Give her agency. Give her choice. Honor her and listen to her voice. Look into the shadows through her curious eyes. Feel her power rise within you.
This time, when the gods come ravaging, rise with her in the door to the cavern, summon the tribe of fierce mothers of fearsome and raging cave bears, morning sun glinting on your ravening teeth.
Be the raven who guards the boundary between, become the hunter of the predators, take vengeance into your jaws.
Look for the terror to rise in their eyes. Growl. Give chase. Howl. An older magic than theirs lives here. A wilder wisdom feeds this older story.
They may not pass into your secret places. They may not enter your guarded door. Their reign of terror will shatter, shards scattering, raining down upon them.
Gratitude List: 1. Laughter 2. How my succulents are growing even in the dark season 3. The sun through clouds 4. Colored pencils 5. A little full-spectrum light to tide me through the season May we walk in Beauty!
Finding the Way Through the Poem by Beth Weaver-Kreider
All these keys at my fingertips. Which will open the door of the poem? Which combination will turn this moment from a frenzied search through random rooms to a purposeful path through the maze?
Most days, I just begin opening them, door after door. Try this one, then this. Sometimes, I find a rhythm, a pattern to follow, a repetition, a thread of idea.
Or, like now, I feel myself reaching the dead-end of the hallway, time is running out, the patterns are tangling, and I have missed the essential clue.
I’m not looking for a way out. I’m looking for the way through.
Gratitude List: 1. My students. They’re witty, charming, thoughtful, wise, intelligent, brave, resilient. . . I have so much to learn from them. 2. Livestreams from African water holes. 3. I’m trying to keep my glucose levels under control. Today I realized that one savored bite of a Stroopy is actually almost as good as snarfing down a whole one. 4. Feeling more confident in my body. 5. Painting with watercolors. May we walk in Beauty!
I will not be in timidated by the pat riarchal posers
I will not be des pairing over the lies dis persed by wannabe
dictators and syc ophants groveling in ab ject obsequious
ness I will be dis orderly and ungovern able as the moon
Gratitude List: 1. The sleeping giant is awakening (and she is seeking justice) 2. The moon the moon the moon the moon 3. Four-part harmony 4. Crocheting with a friend 5. Weekends! May we walk in Beauty!
Today was my day to write for the Way of the Rose Annunciation Novena: THE ANNUNCIATION NOVENA Day 5, Sorrowful Mysteries
There’s something so inexorable about living. One thing happens, and then the next, chain reaction following chain reaction, and one domino topples, so the whole damn line just cascades, one thing after another, until it’s all a pile of rubble on the floor.
You hear the rumble of thunder, lightning strikes the tower, and before you can think what to do, it’s all just tumbling down around you, crumbling to dust and ashes. Sometimes it just feels as if all life does is happen TO you, you know?
And yet, sometimes right there in the pile of debris, among the wreck and the ruins, in the quiet moment when the dust is settling through shafts of light falling all around you, or sometimes it happens in the dew-bright garden when every possibility seems to be in bud, or in the roar of traffic when you are on your way from hither to yon, just trying to keep up: sometimes you can hear the Angel’s voice, asking
“Will you carry the light? Will you carry and share the mystery of seed and egg and birthing star? Will you be the hands and feet of something beyond your current kenning? Will you use your heart, your strength, your cunning, help to make the new thing within you, in the service of Love?”
I keep forgetting that I get to choose, that even between the crazy race and the cascade, even in the dawn garden, even in the rubble, I can choose when and how I participate, how I collaborate with life to co-create a destiny beyond my imagining. No longer is it simply that I am made for this moment, but I make myself for this moment, and for the next, and for the next.
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” —Mary Oliver
“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” —Barry Lopez
“With every action, comment, conversation, we have the choice to invite Heaven or Hell to Earth.” —Rob Bell
“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” ―Albert Einstein
“Love will find you, wherever you are. It will seek you out in the most hidden places of your heart. It will search the crowded cities and walk the empty hours after midnight. It will overcome any obstacle placed before it, even those you create for yourself, to find you and to bring you its gift. No matter how far from love you feel you have drifted, it will never give up on you. Love is the Spirit, watchful and persistent, enduring and forgiving, the steady presence of a reassurance that will keep you safe whatever chance may bring you. If you are a believer, then believe this: love will always find you.” —Steven Charleston
“I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside.” ―Rumi
“How monotonous our speaking becomes when we speak only to ourselves! And how insulting to the other beings – to foraging black bears and twisted old cypresses – that no longer sense us talking to them, but only about them, as though they were not present in our world.
Small wonder that rivers and forests no longer compel our focus or our fierce devotion. For we talk about such entities only behind their backs, as though they were not participant in our lives. Yet if we no longer call out to the moon slipping between the clouds, or whisper to the spider setting the silken struts of her web, well, then the numerous powers of this world will no longer address us – and if they still try, we will not likely hear them.” ―David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
In the Sufi way of seeing it, longing is a divine inclination, drawing us towards the Beloved. Just as lover and beloved long to be in each other’s arms, so too is it between us and the life which is meant for us. Like a plant growing towards the sun, longing is nature inclining us towards the light we need in order to be fruitful. But also, as Rumi writes, “that which you seek is seeking you.” So longing is not only the quality of seeking reunion, but the sound of something in search of us: the calling homeward.” —Toko-pa Turner
“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky.” —Kahlil Gibran
“I believe dignity emerges in the way you finally carry your own story. Through your painstaking reframes to write yourself as the heroine of your own life, your losses cease to consume you. They are not forgotten or made invisible, but rather aggrandised in your telling, eventually passed down through the line of mothers and daughters as the mythical ‘obstacles to flight’ that they were. But dignity also lives in one’s willingness to step wholly into a new life of love, even as its first strands are being woven together to create a shape that will warm you.” ―Toko-pa Turner
Sunday Morning Prayer
hope like a seed buried deep within the earth; hidden covered by layers, disappointment, struggle, pain; buried yet stretching, growing and becoming. hope like a seed becoming new life.
Today is the last day of November’s Poem-a-Day. As always at this point, I am ready to be free of the daily discipline of poeming for a little while. And today was long, filled with beauty and good family time celebrating the life of my Aunt Gloria, and many hours on the road. So I’m happy to finish the poem process today.
Tomorrow, however, I will begin a new series, suggested by the Advent materials we received at church last week. Every day for the next 25, we have been given a word (one each day) to meditate on and to illustrate with a photograph. So I might post some or all of those here.
Here is today’s poem: First Lesson of Poeming by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Grasp the idea, I mean the corncob, firmly, but not so firmly that you harm the tender kernels inside, and pull it firmly, but ever so gently, downward and away from the stalk.
Holding it in your palm like the golden treasure it is, begin to pull away the layers of husk. Some people tear the husk down in two or three neat strokes, but you should take your time, noticing the way the tough and weathered outer husk gives way to tender green beneath, the way the silk shifts with each layer you remove, the grass-sweet corn smell released, and finally, the rows of sweet kernels, golden and waiting.
Gratitude List: 1. Cousins and aunts and uncles 2. Aunt Gloria’s wise words: “Go with the flow.” 3. Cousin Karen’s wise words: “Stay curious.” 4. Traveling with my parents to the Shenandoah Valley, on a golden day. 5. Cherry Delight May we walk in Beauty!
“I don’t always feel like I belong, or like I understand the unwritten rules of certain groups, even though I think I am a pretty good observer of human nature. So when I am in a group whose rules accept everyone’s awkwardness and oddness unconditionally, which loves each one not in spite of our oddities, but because of them, then I feel safe. Then I feel belonging. I am especially grateful to those of you who know how to extend unconditional welcome in ways that make everyone believe they belong.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“To wantonly destroy a living species is to silence forever a divine voice. Our primary need for the various life forms of the planet is a psychic, rather than a physical, need.” —Thomas Berry
“All through your life, the most precious experiences seemed to vanish. Transience turns everything to air. You look behind and see no sign even of a yesterday that was so intense. Yet in truth, nothing ever disappears, nothing is lost. Everything that happens to us in the world passes into us. It all becomes part of the inner temple of the soul and it can never be lost. This is the art of the soul: to harvest your deeper life from all the seasons of your experience. This is probably why the soul never surfaces fully. The intimacy and tenderness of its light would blind us. We continue in our days to wander between the shadowing and the brightening, while all the time a more subtle brightness sustains us. If we could but realize the sureness around us, we would be much more courageous in our lives. The frames of anxiety that keep us caged would dissolve. We would live the life we love and in that way, day by day, free our future from the weight of regret.” —John O’Donohue
“The next time you go out in the world, you might try this practice: directing your attention to people—in their cars, on the sidewalk, talking on their cell phones—just wish for them all to be happy and well. Without knowing anything about them, they can become very real, by regarding each of them personally and rejoicing in the comforts and pleasures that come their way. Each of us has this soft spot: a capacity for love and tenderness. But if we don’t encourage it, we can get pretty stubborn about remaining sour.” —Pema Chodrun, From her book Becoming Bodhisattvas
“Quiet the mind enough so it is the heart that gives the prayer.” —Ingrid Goff-Maidoff
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” —Martin Luther King Jr.
“People are like stained glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within.” —Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“Creative acts of social justice constitute life’s highest performance art.” —Rebecca Alban Hoffberger
“If you will, you can become all flame.” —Abba Joseph
“Become all shadow. Become all light.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“You cannot use someone else’s fire; you can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe you have it.” —Audre Lorde
“The first duty of love is to listen.” —Paul Tillich
“Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith. The opposite of faith is certainty.” —Paul Tillich
“When you go to your place of prayer, don’t try to think too much or manufacture feelings or sensations. Don’t worry about what words you should say or what posture you should take. It’s not about you or what you do. Simply allow Love to look at you—and trust what God sees! God just keeps looking at you and loving you center to center. ” —Richard Rohr
“People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.” —Charles Fort
“O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t.” —Shakespeare, The Tempest
Today’s poem is a grounding liturgy. Reading David Steindl-Rast’s little poem “May You Grow Still” the other day, I felt myself returning to my morning’s grounding, growing still, finding center. I’ve begun using those beginning words in my own daily grounding.
Grounding by Beth Weaver-Kreider (after David Steindl-Rast)
Draw in a long slow breath. Pause. Slowly release your breath.
May you grow still enough to feel the Earth beneath you call forth your roots to burrow deep.
Draw in another breath and pause. Release your breath and listen:
May you grow still enough to feel your roots push through soil through mycelium past bones and underwater rivers.
Draw in another breath and pause. Release your breath and listen:
May you grow stiller yet and feel the pulsing starfire at the center of the Earth.
Draw in another breath and pause. Release your breath and listen:
May your stillness bring home to her heart where you feel your roots absorb her fierce and tender fire.
Breathe in and listen.
May you feel that fire rising into your roots, drawing courage into the seat of your being, drawing love into the center of your being, drawing truth into the crown of your being.
Breathing in and out.
Feel the energy of Earth’s fire fill you to your branches and burst from the crown of your head, sparkling above you and around you like a thousand thousand stars. Feel the life force pulsing through you.
Breathe, and breathe, and breathe.
“Healing comes in waves and maybe today the wave hits the rocks. And that’s ok, that’s ok, darling. You are still healing, you are still healing.” —Ijeoma Umebinyuo ***** “I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, A Left-Handed Commencement Address (Mills College, 1983) ***** “No matter where we are, the ground between us will always be sacred ground.“ —Fr. Henri Nouwen ***** “The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding.” —Gretel Ehrlich ***** “The fact that these words and the jumble of lines that create their letters has no real, inherent meaning outside of a human context, yet they hum with life, is a wonderful reminder that what we imagine can easily become real and powerful simply because we decide it should be so.” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist ***** “Writing at the library. Surrounded by thousands of books, windows into other minds. Some of these writers are living. Some are not. Neatly ordered rectangles of concentrated human life and intellect. A book is certainly a kind of ghost and libraries are pleasantly haunted places.” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist ***** “The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.” —Virginia Woolf ***** I know nothing, except what everyone knows — If there when Grace dances, I should dance. —W.H. Auden ***** “I do believe in an everyday sort of magic—the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.” —Charles de Lint ***** “The innocence of our childhood lives on, in each one of us, no matter how old or battered we may be. Still that original goodness, that simple goodness, remains within us. Our best nature never grows old. What the Spirit first intended us to be is still there, peeping out from wrinkled eyes, caught in a quick glance in the mirror: the laughing, shining, curious child who lives again. And again and again. For we are made of the intention of heaven, a part of the perfect life at the center of all creation. Watch for your inner self, the ageless soul, and see it smiling back at you, like a little child caught beside the cookie jar.” —Steven Charleston
Mockingbird Chronicles 