resistance

Tactics for the Resistance

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

vulture
I choose the vulture today because vultures are watchers. And vultures are composters, taking what is dead and decaying and turning it into the energy that gives them flight. May we, too, take the old and decayed and rotten, and use it to create flight and vision. [This particular piece is an altered photo (I took the original from the internet that was labeled for noncommercial reuse with modification).  I love those long primaries.]

In the weeks leading up to the election, a local pastor wrote a regular blog on the theme, “Love is Our Resistance.” That phrase keeps coming back to me these days. I have a sense deep in my gut that these next years are going to demand serious resistance, like the prayerful peaceful protests at Standing Rock, like the life-on-the-line peaceful demonstrations led by Martin Luther King and John Lewis and so many others. Perhaps these are the days for the new revolution. I imagine the call to the movement:

And what shall be your resistance?
Love is our resistance!
And what shall be your revolution?
Our revolution will be Peace!
What will be your tactics?
Open hearts. Prayer. Standing in the gap. Believing in each other. Speaking truth against the barrage of lies.

Peaceful, heart-led revolution is not a new thing. On this weekend when we commemorate the life and ideas of Martin Luther King, it seems perfectly fitting that people around the country are considering what their methods of resistance will be for the coming years. Let us take Martin Luther King as one of our pillars as we walk into the uncertain future.

Yesterday, a thought that has been forming within me since November 9 finally broke through the veil into words. It is this: These times will demand something new of us, and will shape our characters in ways we could have not imagined. As we rise to this work, we will become our best selves in ways we might not have, had we not had to meet the challenges that are coming our way.

I had read Clarrissa Pinkola Estes’ essay “We Were Made for These Times” to my students on Friday, and her words helped me to think this through. It’s not that I am grateful for the way things have gone. I am deeply troubled. Still, we can meet this as an opportunity to grow into our best selves, to let our souls shine. In the end, we will have become stronger, more loving and thoughtful people than we might have if we did not have these difficult days to face.

Keep reaching out. Look for the others who are doing the work of Loving Resistance. When you feel despair creeping upon you, find some small act of resistance you can do to further the revolution. If you know me well, you will hear me talking to myself.
* Tell radical truth. Confront the lies with truth and beauty and art and loving action.
* Encourage someone who is doing the Work.
* Write a postcard, make a call, stand on a street corner with a sign.
* Smile at people. Assume the best of people. Be someone who makes people want to be their Best Selves.
* Pray, in whatever way you pray. Pray in church, in synagogue, at the mosque, in the woods, in your kitchen, on the banks of the rivers. Hold stones. Make magic spells. Cast webs of prayer between you and those who are most vulnerable: the poor, immigrants, people of color, LGBTQI people, women, the Earth.
* Listen more than speaking.
*Live your prayers into being.
* Don’t feel like you always have to take a side. Just do the work. Be present to the situation in the moment, and do the work that needs to be done, whether it be speaking against the lie, or taking hands, or praying, or standing between vulnerable people and hatred.

What are your tactics for resistance?

Gratitude List:
1. Resistance and revolution
2. All those who have gone before. We have such a multitude of people who have gone before us who have practiced this form of resistance, who show us the way. Today I think in particular about the words and actions of Martin Luther King.
3. Awakenings
4. The Best Selves we are all becoming
5. You. We’re in this together, and I know that everything will be fine in the end, because you are there, doing your work, too–loving, praying, helping, holding.

May we walk in Beauty!

Here’s to the Fool!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Today’s poetry prompt is to write about resistance:

I have seen the way the world is weighted,
heard you murmuring the words
distress, despair, disgrace,
marked the way it seems the fates
conspire to place you
underneath the wagon’s wheel.

If I can try one phrase to bless
this wretched space in which you rest
between the gales and squalls,
let it be this:

May your soul be a sail.

Your spirit will resist the winds that drive you
into dusty earth or claw you from the cliff-face.

May you catch that wind and rise.
May you surprise yourself in flight.

Gratitude List:
1. The Chalice Labyrinth.  Balancing my light and my shadow.  Finding my way across the divide between the different parts of me.
2. Six deer silhouetted in the dusky moment just before dawn.
3. And then the sunrise.  I am learning my colors: magenta, chartreuse, indigo, aquamarine, tangerine.  And there’s one that’s not quite peach and not quite tangerine, something I can’t quite name yet.
4. Walking over the fields with my guys: Jon, the boys, and Fred the Cat.  And that bird: peregrine, perhaps.  Or osprey.  Long crooked wings, and white beneath, sweeping over the fields in the spring breeze.
5. Saying yes to the new thing, new growth, new learning.  Trusting, like the Fool, in the grace of wind to catch me in the leap.

May we walk in Beauty!

Resistance and the Giveaway Gnome

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Before I had children, no one told me how sneaky I would have to become as a parent.  How, in order to keep the house from folding in on itself from all the doodads and detritus and general junk accumulated at an alarming rate by the wee ones I would need to make regular trips through the house when the children are away or asleep in order to gather up bits and pieces and odds and ends to toss or give away.  How the sound of that sweet little wonder-filled voice in the breezeway next to the giveaway boxes would strike frustration to the core of me: “Oh!  I remember this!”  This being a hard plastic Garfield tchotchke with a head that rotates on some sort of spring mechanism, only the spring part is broken, and the nameplate on the base has begun to wear off, leaving the letters “arf.”  (Please don’t dig any deeper in that bag, please. . .)

So what a surprise today when we were cleaning and tidying, and all of a sudden my gadget-obsessed seven-year-old was handing me his entire collection of broken calculators, and the four-year-old gave away all the Angry Birds kitsch he scored at a birthday party two weeks ago.

These kids are so often little walls of resistance, using every tool they can create to define their own parameters, to make their choices their own.  I am finding that there’s an exquisite balance here–to nurture and bless their autonomy while also giving them the boundaries they need in order to thrive.  Sometimes my refusal to budge creates greater walls, creates defiance.  And sometimes their resistance is simply rote reaction, and all they need is a little push from me.

I don’t like to be forced to give up my stuff either, but occasionally I would be glad of a little gnome wandering through my house at night and packing off a handful of projects that haven’t seen the light of day for months or years.  She just needs to get them out of the house before I wake up and see them: “Oh!  I remember this!”

Gratitude List:
1.  Being considered for the job, even if it’s not my skill set.
2.  Cleaning out
3.  Clearing up
4.  Seed Catalogs
5.  Nothing is Written in Stone

May we walk in Beauty.