Poetry

Two Kinds of People

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Two Kinds of People
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

There are two kinds of people:
the ones who cannot sleep at night
because of the blood on their Instagram feed
and the ones who go on,
eating their pizza—
so sad, they say.

The ones who cannot pull their heads
out from under the covers
when the con man wins
and the ones who shrug,
and walk the dog,
and get on with it.

The ones who cannot stop crying
and the ones who get on the bus
to go shopping downtown
and grab a coffee with a friend,
who say, If I can’t control it
I might as well roll with it.

I
am
two kinds of people.

“Are you waiting for the next shoe to drop? Are you anticipating the worry even before it happens? If so, you may be wearing yourself out. Rather than worry about what might happen, why not help make something different happen: an alternative, a positive change, a softer impact. Many of us are working on that right now. So when you get tired of waiting for the shoe to drop — come catch it in midair.” —Steven Charleston

“The ability to sit with mystery and explore the dark but fertile realms of infinite possibility is crucial to the work of inhabiting a meaningful life. We have to learn to stay rooted in the midst of chaotic obscurity, in the shadow-haunted wild places of the psyche. We need these rootings more than ever during the bone-deep metamorphosis that is menopause.” —Sharon Blackie

“To see where you are going, look behind you. The clues are there. Mistakes you have made, patterns you have followed, breakthroughs you have had, ideas that did not turn out as planned: your experience is your guide. It tells you what you may expect on the road ahead. The key is in how much you have learned from the past and how those learnings shape your decisions for the future. Look before you leap: look back to see what may come.” —Steven Charleston

“Revolution means reinventing culture.” —Grace Lee Boggs

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”
—Nelson Mandela

For a day, just for one day,
Talk about that which disturbs no one
And bring some peace into your beautiful eyes.
—Hafiz

“Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence.” —proverb

“All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light.” —Rumi

The magic of autumn has seized the countryside;
now that the sun isn’t ripening anything
it shines for the sake of the golden age;
for the sake of Eden;
to please the moon for all I know.
—Elizabeth Coatsworth

“Revolution means reinventing culture.” –Grace Lee Boggs

Trans Day of Remembrance

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Trans Day of Remembrance
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Hold a lit flame in the palm of your hand
Quanesha, Strawberry, Honee
Kassim, Redd, Vanity
Tai’Vion, Dylan, Monique, Pauly
listen as the silence gathers wings around you
Kenji, Shannon, River Neveah
Liara, Jazlynn, Yella, Africa
Michelle, Tayy Dior, Reyna
their faces like wisps of smoke and mist
looking over our shoulders
Kita, Andrea Doria, Kitty
Sasha, Starr, Meraxes, Chevy
Diamond, Alex, Tee
These are just the names we know of those
who lost their lives this year to violence.

Hold your flames high and give them light,
let light shine into their memories,
let light pour through the scrim of their stories
that we may hear again their voices.
We have a right to be here.
We have a right to exist as ourselves.

Hold your flames higher still,
for their number is greater than thirty.
Hosts of beloved ones join our circle,
lives lost not at the hands of another,
but at the hands of society,
at the bitter end of despair,
caught in the crosshairs
of some preacher’s sanctimonious condemnation,
some politician’s pandering to the puritans,
some school board member’s unctuous dissembling.

Rise up like smoke, they tell us, their voices
like ashes caught in the arms of autumn wind,
spilling into our circles. Stand up,
step forward, speak out, so that the ones
who come after us may live.

Gratitude List:
1. Pileated woodpecker, towhee, shadow of vulture
2. The white breast of the yellow-throat catching the afternoon sun among the red leaves of the Japanese maple
3. Beginning to feel good again after feeling rotten
4. Cinnamon tea
5. How hearts reach out. Can you feel it?
May we walk in Beauty!

“Here is what the elders call a starting point. If we seek to welcome people into community, then mutual respect must be our foundational practice. We commit ourselves to respect the dignity of every human being. It does not mean agree, authorize or approve. It does mean treat others as we would have them treat us. Respect is the gate we open to all those looking for a place to belong.” —Steven Charleston

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” -Oscar Wilde

“Every minute can be a holy, sacred minute. Where do you seek the spiritual? You seek the spiritual in every ordinary thing that you do every day. Sweeping the floor, watering the vegetables, and washing the dishes become holy and sacred if mindfulness is there. With mindfulness and concentration, everything becomes spiritual.” ― Thích Nhất Hạnh

“…when women speak truly they speak subversively–they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
That’s what I want–to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you–I want to hear you.” —Ursula Le Guin

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” —Muriel Rukeyser

“Oh to meet, however briefly, the greatness that lives under our surface. To summon enough bravery to be without armour and strategy, for the chance at meeting that irreducible power. Oh to make of our terrified hearts a prayer of surrender to the God of Love; that we remain safe in our quivering ache to be near that Otherness, even for a moment. To touch that ancient life who will never relinquish its wilderness, who lets instinct make its choices, whose knowing lives in bones and whose song is a wayfinder.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa

“The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.”
―Parker J. Palmer

“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”
―Emily Dickinson

“One of my favourite teachings by Martín Prechtel is that ‘violence is an inability with grief.’ In other words, it takes skillfulness to grieve well, to grieve wholeheartedly. It requires us to bravely, nakedly come to face all that is lost, keeping our hearts open to loving just as fully again.
“When we make war, lashing out in rage and revenge, it is because we are unwilling to make this full encounter with grief. It is easy to enact the same violence which has taken so much from us―including towards ourselves―but the greater work is to let that which is missing enlarge your life; to make beauty from your brokenness.
“Whatever you hold in the cauldron of your intention is your offering to the divine. The quality of assistance you can generate and receive from the Holy is governed by the quality of your inner offering. When you indulge in fear and doubt, you are flooding the arena where love is attempting to work.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa

“Our true home is in the present moment.
To live in the present moment is a miracle.
The miracle is not to walk on water.
The miracle is to walk on the green Earth
in the present moment.”
―Thich Nhat Hanh

“An awake heart
is like a sky that pours light.” ―Hafiz (Ladinsky)

“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.” ―Oscar Levant

Rules

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This one is inspired by Martín Espada’s “Rules for Captain Ahab’s Provincetown Poetry Workshop”

Rules for Aunt Elizabeth’s School for Young Witches
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

  1. No dogmas allowed in the house. 
  2. Keep your karma tuned up at all times.
  3. No reading of others’ auras without consent.
  4. For that matter, do no magic on anyone without consent. This particularly applies to love potions. Go ahead and make yourself lovely and loveable, but refrain from compelling others to love you.
  5. Remember to empty your pockets of crystals and twigs and butterfly wings and feathers and toads and marbles and nails and broken glass before you put your robes in the wash.
  6. Your wands are extensions of your fingers, and it isn’t polite to point fingers, so do not point your wands at others.
  7. Keep your cauldrons clean. Residual spellwork in an unclean cauldron may cause unintended reactions in future potion-making.
  8. Tend to your ongoing spells. Expired spells may increase in potency, resulting in dangerous side effects.
  9. Keep that nose out of the air. No task is too humble for a witch. Sometimes the strongest spells are created in the completion of the humblest of tasks.
  10. Listen when the trees are talking to you. Do not ignore the questions that the rocks put forth. Do not interrupt the speeches of the rivers.
  11. Greet all beings politely, whether human, animal, mineral, plant, or magical.

We are doing 30 Days of Gratitude at school right now, so some of my gratitudes are responding to those specific prompts.

Gratitude List:
1. That pink sky this morning, and the pastel greens of the fields below
2. Three small things: gemstones, kittens, little succulent plants
3. Something in the room: my students
4. A person: Leymah Gbowee ( and her continuing work for justice and human rights)
5. First Trimester Grades are done and submitted
May we walk in Beauty!

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love.” —Audre Lorde

“We need another… perhaps a more mystical concept of animals… In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” —Henry Beston

“One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found – and it is found in terrible places. … For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963

“Walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy.” —Kate Braestrup

“Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.” —Neil Gaiman

“Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors, but today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.” —Kahlil Gibran

“To write is to ask questions. It doesn’t matter if the answers are true or puro cuento. After all and everything only the story is remembered, and the truth fades away like the pale blue ink on a cheap embroidery pattern.” —Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo

“With guns, you can kill terrorists.
With education, you can kill terrorism.” —Malala Yousufsai

“The wo/man who moves a mountain
begins by carrying away small stones.”
—Confucius, The Analects

“We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?” —Wendell Berry

“She’s a lean vixen: I can see
the ribs, the sly
trickster’s eyes, filled with longing
and desperation, the skinny
feet, adept at lies.

Why encourage the notion
of virtuous poverty?
It’s only an excuse
for zero charity.
Hunger corrupts, and absolute hunger
corrupts absolutely,”
― Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House

What I Believe

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
This quilt was made by my great aunt, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Nolt Weaver.

What I Believe
after Michael Blumenthal

I, too, believe there is no justice,
but that the deer moving slowly
through the woods are a message.

I believe that something moves the leaves
that quiver on the red oak on a windless afternoon,
and that my heart is blown open
by the winds rushing over the hillside.

I believe that the whirring
of a thousand starling wings filling the hollow
might shake me from my torpor,
if I am brave enough to feel it.

I believe that not all moths make it
out of the cocoon. Don’t promise me
everything will be okay unless you’re certain.
But I believe in the perilous pumping
of cecropia’s wings in the moonlight.

I believe my grandmother was stitching the future
with her needle, pulling threads through the layers
of a quilt of scraps from everyone’s old clothes.

Gratitude List:
Just one today: My colleagues. I love how people just offer their best selves. Usually on Mondays, we have crocheters and knitters club for anyone who wants to attend. We weren’t able to get the regular book club going this year, but this year we’re going to have a book club where we get together and read the book together. There’s a Wellness Committee that reminds us to eat our vegetables and to walk. Today our resident Plant Nerd gave us a workshop in plant therapy, and taught us to pot up houseplants. I went to that, which it was after a short tutorial in running the 3D computers on campus. Some people managed to go to both of those and squeezed in 15 minutes of chair yoga in the meantime. (Usually there aren’t so many things going on on one day.) One colleague always marshals the upstairs folks to decorate the halls for winter holidays together. Another colleague set up an ofrenda and invited us to remember our loved ones we’ve lost by putting them on the altar. Some of them help students tap the maple trees and actually boil the sap down for maple syrup every year. We have a standing breakfast date on Fridays for as many as can make it. Oh, and on top of that, they’re all skilled teachers. I am becoming a better person in this place.

“We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.” —Terence McKenna

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” —Audre Lorde

“Don’t operate out of fear, operate out of hope. Because with hope, everything is possible.” —Winona LaDuke

Our deepest fears are like dragons
guarding our deepest treasure.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Praise Song
by Barbara Crooker

Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there’s left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn’t cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.

“Look at everything
as though you were seeing it
either for the first or last time.
Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.”
—Betty Smith

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to breaking of bread.” —James Baldwin

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” —Nelson Mandela

For a day, just for one day,
Talk about that which disturbs no one
And bring some peace into your beautiful eyes.
—Hafiz

“Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence.” —proverb

“All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light.” —Rumi

The magic of autumn has seized the countryside;
now that the sun isn’t ripening anything
it shines for the sake of the golden age;
for the sake of Eden;
to please the moon for all I know.
—Elizabeth Coatsworth

“. . .fairies’ gold, they say, is like love or knowledge–or a good story. It’s most valuable when it’s shared.” —Heather Forest, The Woman Who Flummoxed the Fairies

Setting the Intention

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Setting the Intention
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

my magic will not change the world
my prayers will not avail
unless
the intention begins
with changing me

Gratitude List:
1. Leaves Falling
2. An afternoon of magic with magical people
3. Reminders to breathe: “breathe in, breathe out”
4. Clean slates
5. My family
May we walk in Beauty!

“Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor.
It’s not a metaphor. It’s how the world is.” —Jeanette Armstrong

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the Earth seeking the successive autumns.” —George Eliot

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.” ―Hermann Hesse, Demia

“Did you ever hear a tree pushing out of the ground or the snow falling? Great things happen in silence.” ―Mother Angelica

“Everything belongs, even the “bad” and dark parts of yourself. Nothing need be rejected or denied. No one need be hated. No one need be excommunicated, shunned, or eliminated. You don’t have time for that anymore. You’ve entered into the soul of the serene disciple where, because the Holy One has become one in you, you are able to see that oneness everywhere else. Almost like magic!” ―Richard Rohr

“In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busily sawing off the limb on which it is perched.” —Paul Ehrlich, 1973

“You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.” —Fannie Lou Hamer

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow

“Silence is a frightening thing. Silence leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.” —Joan D. Chittister

“The present moment is the intersection of eternity with time.” ―Beatrice Bruteau

“Only the present moment contains life.” ―Thích Nhất Hạnh

“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful—an endless prospect of magic and wonder.” ―Ansel Adams

“I went inside my heart
to see how it was.
Something there makes me hear
the whole world weeping.”
―Rumi (Barks)

“Our work is to show we have been breathed upon—to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live it out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowledge, from body, from dreams, and journeys of all sorts.” ―Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“We found ourselves in a realm
where dreams are formed,
destiny is chosen
and magic is as real
as a handprint in the snow.”
―Libba Bray

”When we see the Beloved in each person,
it’s like walking through a garden,
watching flowers bloom all around us.” ―Ram Dass

“It is the paradoxical nature of grief to lead us to love. There is a seed planted in loss, an evolution made in breaking, a genius found in separation that is rarely apparent in the heart of crisis. But often what looks like deviation is really proliferation, like satellite initiatives born from a group’s dissolution. Intimacy is forged in the hearts of those who know exclusion. To them is given the gift of tenderness which can mentor another through their own isolation.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa

Regulating

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

It’s been a busy day. Here’s a quick poem that expresses some of the conversations I’ve had.

Regulating
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Don’t
tell me
how to feel.

Don’t tell me how to get over this.
No, wait. Tell me how to
get over this.

Tell me
how to feel
and still
keep my
spine straight.

How do I herd the twining snakes
of my central nervous system
into their regulated rhythm
while allowing the wild horses
of my feelings free range
to thunder over the plains
of my heart?

“Expressing our vulnerability can help resolve conflicts.” —Marshall B. Rosenberg

“Our original instructions are to listen to the cloud floating by and the wind blowing by. That’s poetry and prose in English, but it is wakahan in the Lakotan language. It means to consciously apply mystery to everything. Everything is alive and has its own consciousness.” —Lakota elder Tiokasin Ghosthorse

“We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.” —Louise Erdrich

James Baldwin: “To be sensual is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”

“There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” —Samwise Gamgee

“When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.” —Miles Davis

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.” —Frida Kahlo

A little story by Amrita Nadi:
At the end of a talk someone from the audience asked the Dalai Lama, “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?”
The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete, you know.”
Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he added, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back. . .but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.”

“There are moments when I feel like giving up or giving in, but I soon rally again and do my duty as I see it: to keep the spark of life inside me ablaze.” —Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life

“Always there is something worth saying
about glory, about gratitude.”
—Mary Oliver, What Do We Know

Do your little bit of good where you are;
its those little bits of good put together,
that overwhelm the world.
—Desmond Tutu

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” —Jeannette Rankin

When we see the Beloved in each person,
it’s like walking through a garden,
watching flowers bloom all around us. —Ram Dass

“You came into this world as a radiant bundle of exuberant riddles. You slipped into this dimension as a shimmering burst of spiral hallelujahs. You blasted into this realm as a lush explosion of ecstatic gratitude. And it is your birthright to fulfill those promises.
I’m not pandering to your egotism by telling you these things. When I say, “Be yourself,” I don’t mean you should be the self that wants to win every game and use up every resource and stand alone at the end of time on top of a Mt. Everest-sized pile of pretty garbage.
When I say, “Be yourself,” I mean the self that says “Thank you!” to the wild irises and the windy rain and the people who grow your food. I mean the rebel creator who’s longing to make the whole universe your home and sanctuary. I mean the dissident bodhisattva who’s joyfully struggling to germinate the seeds of divine love that are packed inside every moment.
When I say, “Be yourself,” I mean the spiritual freedom fighter who’s scrambling and finagling and conspiring to relieve your fellow messiahs from their suffering and shower them with rowdy blessings.” —Rob Brezsny

“The root of joy is gratefulness…It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.” ―Brother David Steindl-Rast

The Lost Song

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Today’s poem began as an intellectual exercise. Perhaps I will come back to it another day and tend it with a little more care and reflection, but for now, I’m going to call it done. Here is the exercise I set for myself: to write a pantoum-like poem, but to let the first stanza be what it wanted to be, and then to modify a pantoum-form from there. So instead of four lines, the stanzas are five lines each, and the second and fourth lines are repeated as in a traditional pantoum, but the fifth line in each stanza is a repetition of the poem’s first line.

I’m intrigued by the possibilities of modifying traditional poetic forms to suit my own ends. For this experiment, I’ll declare here that I have invented the pantoumly, a variation of the pantoum. I’ll try it again sometime when my head is not so full of the grey cobwebs of encroaching winter darkness.

The Lost Song
a pantoumly poem
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I no longer understand
the words of my mother tongue,
no longer remember the voice
that sang through my veins
in the hour of my birth.

The words of my mother tongue
in the mouth of the tyrant
(singing in my veins)
turned to poison.
I no longer understand.

In the mouth of the tyrant,
the people are reduced to dust,
poisoned
by waves of meaningless words
I cannot understand.

The people are reduced to dust,
driven to mad worship
by meaningless words,
and threats, and lust for power
I refuse to understand.

Driven to worship their madness,
they cannot escape the maelstrom
of threats, their lust for power
eating away empathy
which they no longer understand.

I cannot escape this maelstrom
but seek the still point
which feeds empathy,
and the dust rises.
They will once again understand.

Seek the still point,
hear the ancient voices
rising like dust
in the words of your mother tongue:
This you shall understand.

“Disobedience was [humanity’s] original virtue.” —Oscar Wilde

“Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others…
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
—Walt Whitman

“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful—an endless prospect of magic and wonder.” —Ansel Adams

“A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation-robes.” —Alexander Pope

“We must finally stop appealing to theology to justify our reserved silence about what the state is doing—for that is nothing but fear. ‘Open your mouth for the one who is voiceless’—for who in the church today still remembers that that is the least of the Bible’s demands in times such as these?” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear. . . . Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“It is so easy to break down and destroy. The heroes are those who make peace and build.” —Nelson Mandela

“We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is ours not by domination but by invocation.” —Thomas Berry

Playing with Form

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I’ve begun to hit the first bumps in the poem-a-day month. Usually it begins to happen sooner than the mid-point, so I am definitely not complaining. Feeling fresh out of ideas and uninspired, I turned to Robert Lee Brewer’s prompt for the day over at Write Better Poetry (a Writers Digest blog). He suggested writing a form poem, so I decided on a Nonet. Begin the first line with nine syllables, use eight for the second line, seven for the third, and so on until that last line is a single syllable.

Shift
a nonet
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

At first you hardly notice the change
you’re traveling the same old road,
but somewhere along the way,
the colors start to shift,
the images blur,
and the safety
you thought you
knew is
gone.

“We live in a world of theophanies. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can only happen if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure.”
—Macrina Wiederkehr

“It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.” —P.G. Wodehouse

“You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.” —Frida Kahlo

“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream, or a bumpersticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.” —June Jordan

“I touch God in my song
as the hill touches the far-away sea
with its waterfall.
The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.”
—Rabindranath Tagore

Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
“We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?

“One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds beacons, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of of soul in shadowy times like these—to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.”

“Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will become.” —Brooke Hampton

“Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things.
Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God.
Every creature is a word of God.
If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature—even a caterpillar—
I would never have to prepare a sermon.
So full of God is every creature.”
—Meister Eckhart

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could you know. That’s why we wake
and look out–no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
—William Stafford

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” ―J.R.R. Tolkien

Silence

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I only learned today about how the Taliban this August banned the sound of women’s voices in public places. As I searched for poetry by Afghan women, I came across this powerful couplet by a poet who went by the name Muska, a young Afghan woman of Helmand Province. In translation into English, the poem loses the syllabic and sound structures of its form, the landay, which is a 22-syllable folk poem of Pashtun women of Afghanistan. My own attempt at the syllable count is certainly no landay, but seeks to echo it in lament of Muska, who died two weeks after setting herself on fire after her brothers beat her when they discovered her poetry, and the women of Afghanistan, who have had their voices stolen from them.

(I learned about Muska and the landay here: The National Poetry Foundation, Poetry journal.)

Silence
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.
—by the Afghan poet Muska (Zarmina) of Helmand Province, who set herself on fire in 2012 after being beaten by her brothers when they discovered her poetry

Her laughter drifts no more like jasmine
over the garden wall and into the marketplace.

Who will sing the songs of the women
whose voices lie hidden at the bottom of the well?

The moon is rising over the wall
silently as the woman sitting in the courtyard.

“Through a process of perpetual discernment and “prayer unceasing” we may dive into the well of each faith and emerge with the treasure that connects us all.” —Mirabai Starr

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” —Carl Sagan

“If the Rhine, the Yellow, the Mississippi rivers are changed to poison, so too are the rivers in the trees, in the birds, and in the humans changed to poison, almost simultaneously. There is only one river on the planet Earth and it has multiple tributaries, many of which flow through the veins of sentient creatures.” —Thomas Berry

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” —Kurt Vonnegut

‪”So much of bird flight is really expert falling, slipping into that delicate space within the argument between gravity and air resistance. That natural alchemy transforms a plummet into a glide. Someday, I hope to learn to fail like birds fall.‬” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist

“Reading and writing cannot be separated. Reading is breathing in; writing is breathing out.”

“For a Star to be born,
there is one thing that must happen;
a nebula must collapse.
So collapse.
Crumble.
This is not your Destruction.
This is your birth.” —Zoe Skylar

Tools for the Resistance

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

This was Fun! And a lot of hard work! A few days ago, I asked friends on Facebook to offer their tools for the resistance as we work to meet the challenges of the coming days. I was unprepared for the magnitude of the response. I received 119 comments on the thread. Some comments included several ideas which I unwove into different lines. Others echoed each other, and I wove those together as I could. I decided to let the actual phrasings stand as written in as many cases as possible, though I often only pulled out shorter phrases from longer sentences to make the points succinct. I printed out four pages of about 110 lines of poem, sliced the lines apart, and arranged them in a flow that felt good to me. Here is the finished poem, with great gratitude to my beloved community:

Tools for the Resistance:
A Crowd-Sourced Poem
by Beth Weaver-Kreider and friends

Strengthen yourselves for what is to come.
Set your boundaries, clearly and effectively.
Strengthen your resolve.
Practice resilience.
Stay visible.
Wear black.
Harness that bone-deep disappointment to determination.
Mourn. Invite people to mourn with you.
Scream. Invite people to scream with you.
Use the tool of your voice. Use reason.
Pay attention. Prepare yourself for when you will be needed.
Resist tyranny.
Don’t hide. Don’t obey in advance.
Teach the history of non-resistance and civil disobedience.
Do civil disobedience. Push back.
Refuse to follow unethical instructions.
Carry forward our history of resistance.
Mobilize the angelic warriors.
Get your cell phone camera ready.
Get your boots on the ground.
Put on your pink hat. March!
Find joy in action!

Gather facts and information, knowledge and experience.
Read. Research and read.
Think critically.
Practice intelligence.
Practice bravery.
Educate.
Make sure people know how the system works.
Teach the privileged to be allies.
Unlearn the whitewashing of history.
Disempower ignorance.
Tell the truth. Share it boldly and without rancor.
Confront your elitism and privilege.
Stop recycling old arguments.
Examine your assumptions.
Be humble.
Be an active ally: Say, “What can I do?”
Come alongside. Check in. Hold space.
Greet the ones others look away from.
Actively love the disenfranchised.
Actively listen to them, and follow the marginalized ones.
Follow the directions of the young ones.
Walk with your elders.
Connect. Coresist.

Boycott. Buy local. Buy independent.
Vote with your money. Know where your dollars are going.
Volunteer.
Gather folks who care.
Create adaptable support systems.
Teach basic skills.
Teach people to make things for themselves.
Grow the movement. Draw people in.
Share ideas and plan actions.
Look to your sisters.
Learn the value of true friendship.
Hold on to each other.
Give care to those in your sphere.
Practice breathing together
Share your gentleness.

Aid in the collective healing work.
Midwife one another.
Extend gifts of listening. Listen selflessly.
Listen to and hear each other’s stories.
Tell stories of hope and resistance
Have hard conversations.
Make eye contact.

Make music. Send sound soaring to the heavens.
Make music without words.
Memorize music and poetry.
Sing songs about equity, freedom, and democracy.
Sing songs of peace with children.
Teach music to children.
Use humor: Humor has always been a tool of resistance.
Have fun! Be creative!
Make art, make art, make art.
Dance!

Walk with friends.
Walk in the woods. Sit by streams. Gaze at the stars.
Find stillness in nature. Soak in the beauty.
Save seeds. Share seeds and plants. Plant seeds. Find new seeds.
Plant community gardens.
Use herbs and words together to incant and pray and sing.
Find wisdom from the flowers.
Take inspiration from strong sturdy trees.
Grow your community of trees.
Remember the roots that connect us all.
Keep your eye on beauty instead of disorder.
Keep your eye on peace, standing shoulder to shoulder.
Practice courageous kindness.
Hold onto hope.

Practice resistance as a spiritual act.
Practice gratitude.
Practice radical self-care.
Practice slowness, enchantment, being, and noticing.
Upgrade consciousness.
Meditate. Be fully present in the moment that is.
Practice reflection.
Recharge.
Use magic. Cast spells.
Hold sacred circles.
Create the Yes.
Pray: “Love, make me an instrument of your peace.”
Continue to show up for mercy and peace and justice
Continue to show up for kindness and compassion
Continue to show up for wisdom and safety
Remember: You are not alone.
Let your little light shine. Shine it into the shadows.
Be a beacon of light and hope.

Gratitude List:
1. Co-poeming
2. Taking a group of students to a nursing home today to interview their elders. Beautiful interactions. I am incredibly proud of these young people.
3. Self-care. I had been neglecting my careful lunch creation in the past week (a bit depressed, I think), and so spent some good time this evening cooking a pot of grains, sauteing kale and carrots, and roasting soybeans for the rest of the week.
4. How the little pothos cuttings grow roots, and then push out new leaves.
5. Good stories.
May we walk in Beauty!