Prayer bundle

A Prayer Bundle, Catnip, and Windflowers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


My little bundle of hopes and wishes and prayers is waiting in my little memorial garden. 

Gratitude List:
1. I am so often NOT sick. My stomach has been unsettled all day. I hope it doesn’t turn into something more unsettling, but I am grateful that I so rarely feel like this. (That sounds like a complaint couched in a gratitude, but I am truly grateful for that, and it helps me not to settle into whining about how I feel.)
2. The way the windflower settle all across the lawn
3. More fun with the cat in the catnip patch
4. Warm jammies
5. Grammar rules. And breaking the rules.

May we walk in Beauty!

Opening Bundles and Boxes

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

In March, on the morning of Spring Equinox, I put a little bundle in my garden, made up of papers and beads and cloth and ribbon.  It was to represent the prayer, the magic, the dream I had of finding a job.  I put it out there as a way to work with some of the pretty serious anxiety I was feeling about how our lives were going to take shape in the coming year and years.  I try not to deny my anxieties because I know how they can percolate up through a life and flavor everything, but these anxieties were beginning to take a pretty firm roots.  Here is the bundle after six weeks in my little faery garden:

2014 April 014

I brought it inside on May Day and opened it up.  I let the weathered objects sit on a plate on my counter for a couple weeks, trying to think about how I was going to turn them into an art project.  This step was to further focus my intention and prayer for finding a job.  I really wanted something that would fire me up and get me excited, but I was willing to take whatever came along, to be adaptable and flexible and to learn and grow quickly into whatever role came my way.

I never got to the stage of making the piece of art before the job appeared.  The perfect job.  I am under no illusions–I know it’s going to be hard work, and that sometimes it’s going to be difficult.  But teaching high school English in a setting where I have some academic freedom is about as close to my dream job as you can get.

Yesterday, I made that piece of art with a deep sense of gratitude.  The prayer of it now is that I will be equal to the task.  If you need some of that energy, I send it your way now, too.  Much love.

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The poem is by Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
Someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a
Full moon in each eye that is always saying,
With that sweet moon language, what every other eye in
This world is dying to hear?

Gratitude List:
1. Opening boxes, exploring the ideas and assumptions I’ve been storing in there.  Sorting through.  Sending some things to the burn pile, some to recycle elsewhere, putting some aside to reuse, but perhaps in different forms and different ways.  Some of those old and treasured ideas get re-packed and put away again for later, with maybe a few new ones tucked in around the edges to fill it in.  Just like attics, hearts and minds need occasional sorting, I think.
2. This verse, from a hymn yesterday morning:
Joyful is the dark, spirit of the deep,
winging wildly o’er the world’s creation,
silken sheen of midnight, plumage black and bright,
swooping with the beauty of a raven.
3. The week ahead.  Who knows what might happen next?
4.  Making art with the children.
5.  This little fur-boy purring wildly in my ear.

May we walk in Beauty!

Equinox

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Jet Star

I spent my earliest years in East Africa, just a few degrees south of the wide belt of this big round ball, in a comfortable climate where the sun rose every morning at seven o’clock and set again at seven every evening, all year long.  Our seasons were marked by the coming of rains and their going away again.  The days were often hot, but the evenings brought cool breezes off of Lake Victoria, and roiling Michaelangelo clouds sailed in across the plains from the lake.

Here, where the sun slips off to the south for a season, where the days get shorter and then longer again, this moment when the day and night reach equilibrium brings me closer to that sense of rightness and balance, though the cold of winter still lingers in my bones.  While I find the cold time, the dark time, still to be a challenge, I have come to love the seasons, to revel in the feel of the shifting, whirling tilting planet we live on, the reassurance that one state of being will inevitably give way to the next.

Tomorrow we come to that place, one of the quarter points we notice in Terra’s dance with Sol.  Equinox.  My head today is full of these complicated E-words: Equinox, Equator, Equilibrium, in-Evitable.  At these equal points of spring and fall, we are ever so much slightly closer to our star than we are on the outward fling of the Solstices.  Do-si-do, Sun.  Swing your partner.  Welcome, Spring, oh welcome, Spring.

Gratitude List:
1. Inevitability and choice
2. Intention and destiny
3. Fate and chance
4. Fortune and opportunity
5. Blueberry pancakes

May we walk in Beauty!

 

 

 

 

Prayer Bundle:  Tonight I am finishing up gathering the items for my bundle.  I don’t have a direct symbolic link for each thing–I included some things because they are shiny or colorful and caught my magpie’s eye.  There is a piece of cloth to wrap it all together, and cord and wire for tying, a broken necklace with sparkly dangles for brightening it up.  I will take pictures tomorrow in a good light, wrap it all up, and then at about quarter to five, I’ll take it outside as the Equinox arrives.  I want it to rest on the earth, to be touched by the fire of the sun, by wind, by rain.  I want all the elements to work on it.  And I’ll place it somewhere where I won’t mow over it six weeks from now, and where it will be safe from curious children.

Prayer Bundles

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

A couple years ago, as I was traveling down one of the internet’s rabbit trails, following the deeper definition of a word, I came across an idea that caught my attention and fired me up.  Like a dream that slips out of focus and disappears but still hangs at the edges of consciousness with an urgency, begging, “Remember me, remember me,” the word and the web page have eluded me as I have tried to run down the memory, to find the source of this idea.

Here is the basic premise: You gather a small grouping of interesting materials, pack them tightly into a smallish bundle, leave it out in the elements for a period of time, then bring it inside, unpack it, and make a work of art.

I have made little bundles in the past, little magic spells or prayers that help me to carry my intentions, to hold the dreams and visions that I am willing into being.  Then when the vision is complete, when the work is done, the bundle is returned to the elements.  But wouldn’t it be interesting to do a prayer bundle like those little art bundles, so that part of the prayer or magic involves exposing the bundle to the elements while I am working on the intention?

What if I gave my bundle to the transforming power of the sun’s fire as I am giving the vision the fire of my own energy?
What if I released my bundle to the working of water in rain as I release my own emotional attachments surrounding my desires?
What if I offered my bundle to the rich power of earth as I am willing my own dream to manifest itself?
What if gave my bundle to the changeable working of breezes as I am clarifying in my own thoughts the vision that I seek?

So.  Thursday is the first day of Spring, a time when we celebrate the hatchings and the first shoots of plants reaching above soil into sun.  I am going to begin a prayer bundle for this season, to see if it helps me to carry and transform my own vision of what I want to bring into my life in the next few months.  For me, the process will be about finding fulfilling work that uses my skills and creative impulses, and brings in the stabilizing element of greater financial security for my family.  Feel free to join me.  It might be a good way to focus a desire to rid oneself of an addiction, or to make a lifestyle change.  It might be a good way to help focus on the essentials, or on becoming more fully your own free self.  Here are some of the questions I am looking at for myself as I begin.  I plan to do some journal-writing about these in the next few days.

What is my heart’s desire in this season of my life?
Keeping in mind that who I am now is already good, what do I want to change, and why?
Where am I now on the journey?
What are some steps that I need to make in the concrete, real world in order to meet my goals?
I want to brainstorm a word or phrase that I can return to, like a prayer, like a mantra, to keep myself focused on what I am looking to accomplish.

Now, in the next few days, along with meditating and journalling about my goal, I am going to start gathering some materials.  Pieces of cloth to wrap the bundle.  String and yarn.  Images (from magazines or my own drawings) that represent my desire.  Small tokens or symbols.  Because part of my process in the next few months will be to decipher the particular vocational path that I want to follow, I think I will choose some items that represent my teaching certificate, my work history in the college setting, my farming work, poetry, editing, and my work at Radiance.  I also want to find some strong symbols to represent the work-family balance.  And perhaps a little something to represent prosperity.

On Thursday, I will wrap up the bundle and leave it outside for the spring season, to open up on May 1 and create a piece of artwork.  Join me?

Gratitude List:
1.  Liver and onions
2.  Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Spirit
3.  The slant of sunlight in spring
4.  Successful Leprechaun traps
5.  Time to write and mull and brood

May we walk in Beauty.