Tag: red

Show Day

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

I should be used to it by now: I wrangle ushers for all the shows at my school. I shouldn’t be internally startled that the show opens on Thursday, but somehow it always confuses my days for me. It feels like it should be a Friday. And tonight, I have to train my ushers to do both the usual jobs as well as the intermission and end-of-show jobs because I will be running up to the stage to sing in the pit. I’m excited to be in a show, even if I’m back in the shadows, simply boosting the sound.

Gratitude List:
1. The incredible talents of the young people in my school. They are pulling off a major production this weekend.
2. The organizers and directors and costumers and musicians and choreographers who coach and assist and counsel the students to create the show.
3. Rest, in the between spaces.
4. Red. I am wearing a red scarf today for energy.
5. This not-so-little kid beside me, doing a puzzle and whistling something classical. I think it’s from Grieg. I don’t think we play enough classical music here, but he seems to have picked up some motifs.

May we walk in Beauty!

Red

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

Gratitude List:
1. The red oak down Ducktown Road
2. All of Ducktown, really. Orange and yellow and every shade of fire.
3. Rice and beans.
4. Edgar Allen Poe and James Earl Jones
5. Listening to audiobooks on the ride to and from school with the carpool. Right now it’s Maggie Stiefvater’s Dream Thieves, part of her Raven Cycle series. Such excellent writing. I remember feeling this sort of delight in the writing of Douglas Adams, Patricia McKillip, Terry Pratchett (for different reasons, but the same sort of excitement about every sentence).

May we walk in Beauty!

Red

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

Gratitude of Resistance Six:
Red. Yesterday it was a symbol of a community united to support our wider grieving community. After two students at Warwick were killed in a terrible car accident on Friday, word went out to schools around the county to wear red (Warwick’s color) this week to support our sister school as they come to terms with this great loss. On both Monday and Tuesday, LM’s halls and classrooms were red. The willingness of people to share in the griefs of strangers and acquaintances has been moving and inspiring. People are quick to live out of their best selves when called upon to be present for those who hurt. May it be ever so.

May we walk in Beauty!

Keep Turning

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

IMG_2261 (2)

I am finding the simple three-circuit labyrinth to be really satisfying.  Like a spiral, each circuit brings you one step closer toward the center, yet there’s that unsettling turning at the end of the circuit.  Wait a minute!  I’m now going the other way!  Still, despite the change in direction, I continue to move ever closer to the center.  This hit me yesterday.  Life has sent me reversals.  I have had moments when I have suddenly changed directions.  The whiplash can feel overwhelming, the sense of lost time or futility in what came before–but the turnings also bring me closer to the center.  The apparent about-faces and the changes of plan do not mean that I am going backwards, undoing the past.  I am still moving closer to the center. It all leads toward the center.

Gratitude List:
1. (What feeds you?) The red of the poppies.  I think I could probably live on the food of that red.  Such an impossible color.  That and the orange of Oriole.  And the thousands greens of the last week of May.
2. (What finds resolution?) I now have fewer balls to juggle, fewer plates to keep spinning in the air.  I can look to caring for my children more intentionally, to tidying and cleaning and systematizing.
3. (What images draw you?) The labyrinth.  We used the labyrinth as the structure for the service in church yesterday, and this Wednesday, I will be focusing on the labyrinth for my mini-course with my students.
4. (Who has been helpful?) Walt Whitman, Rachel Carson, Sojourner Truth–I will meditate on the words and lives of these wise ones this week.
5. (What helps you cope?) This little air conditioner.  If I choose to live beneath the branches of a grand tulip poplar, I must have respite during its blooming season.  This magnificent tree draws our orioles to us.  Its leafy embrace cools us here in the hollow during hot summer days.  It stands across from the sycamore like a sentinel.  It is a city teeming with life, vibrant with the flashing colors, the buzzing and twittering conversations, the busy living of its residents. Its buttery blooms are elegant. . .and toxic to me.  We make allowances.  We adjust ourselves sometimes to live with those we love.  For the week or two that it sends pollen to bless the world around, I spend my time at home in these rooms with the air conditioner on, venturing out for short periods to listen to birdsong, to watch the sun shift across the sky.

May we walk in Beauty!

Two Hands

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

DSCN9021

Gratitude List:
1. Two hands: one to hold the terrible, and one to hold the wonderful.  Breathing into the spaces between.
2. How the heart holds stories
3. Shades of red.  Shades of green.  The red buds of leaves popping out on the tree outside my classroom window, against the mossy green of the trunk.
4. Burrito for lunch
5. Transformation

May we walk in Beauty!

From Angh to Ma

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

2012 November 144

This morning when we were playing with our gnomes, Joss decided that the gnome house was on fire, and he raced to get a group of gnomes to put it out.  “Red!  We need all the red gnomes!”  Exactly–to put out a fire, it takes lots of red gnomes.  Ellis chimed in, “And Minus!  We need the Minus Gnome!  Because a house with fire Minus the fire is just a house!”

Sometimes I sure would like to use some of Minus Gnome’s magic on me.  An anxious Beth Minus anxiety is just Beth.   Angst-ridden, anger-struck Beth Minus angst and anger?  Beth.  So that’s a nice little thing to do with meditation.  Of course as soon as I began to work with the idea, it hit me again that the angers and angsts are so often born of compassion and caring, and for those I have been seeking the services of Multiplication Gnome.  I need to untangle the compassion from its attendant anger at injustice, its partner anxiety at losses to those I love.

Wow.  Look at those words that I wanted to get rid of: Angst, Anxiety, Anger. . .I looked them up, along with their sister Anguish.  There at their root is angh-, which comes from the Indo-European language tree, and generally refers to distress of some sort.  That lovely vowel–ah–cut short in the back of the throat, closed up along with all hope of breath: Angh!

Fear, shame, anger, distress: what sound emerges when you truly feel them?  Angh!  Choke.

But still, that lovely vowel–ah–the first we say in so many languages: Mama, Abba, Baba, Dada, Nana, Papa.  The opposite of the choke, our family names, our names for the Ineffable Mystery: they release the breath in a tender sigh.  Ah.  There we go.

When I get really stuck in the Angh, I can dislodge that choke with a little Hahaha, a great belly laugh to force the air back through, a little spiritual CPR, so to speak.  Or skip down the street with a Tra-la-la, a little song to start up the rhythm of breathing again.  Or a little eureka, a bright discovery with a great Aha!

So the next time I wake up at three in the morning, suddenly filled with the dread of what is happening to this world that I have brought these light-filled children into, or choked with shame for some harshness I have spoken to their tender hearts, I think I will apply the Ah!, the Mama, the Ha! and see if that breath can be a lullaby to take my spirit back to sleep.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Moving out of Angh to Ma, Aha! and Hahaha!
2.  A shining piece of quartzite, white as ice, in the field by the henhouse.
3.  The things the gnomes teach us.
4.  A swept and dusted house (partly, anyway)
5.  Love, love, love: oh, you, and you and you!
May we walk in Beauty!