Tag: rest

Conjuring the Eternal

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Riffing on a line from Rilke, day #3:

Gratitude List:
1. Exploring a bookstore with a young friend
2. That dream of the Gardener from several days ago. How it sticks with me, her gentle, nonjudgmental wave, although I had nearly stolen a crystal from her Garden. How the next morning, I found a quartz crystal in my collection which was exactly like the one I picked up in my dream.
3. The Mary Magdalene Mysteries–listening for the Beloved to speak her/my/your name
4. This tender, fragile, open space of now. A space where healing can happen.
5. Sweet rest
May we walk in Beauty!

“You have to really hug the [one] you are holding. You have to make him or her very real in your arms.. breathing consciously and hugging with all your body, spirit, and heart. Hugging meditation is a practice of mindfulness. “Breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms, alive. Breathing out, he or she is so precious to me.” If you breathe deeply like that, holding the person you love, the energy of your care and appreciation will penetrate into [them] and they will be nourished and bloom like a flower.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

“For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.“ —William Blake

We, unaccustomed to courage, exiled from delight, live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.“ —Maya Angelou

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” —Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ―Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Where there’s life there’s hope, and need of vittles.” ―JRR Tolkien

“We are the ones we have been waiting for.” ―June Jordan

“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ―Albert Einstein

“We are all the leaves of one tree.
We are all the waves of one sea.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh

“It is respectable to have no illusions―and safe―and profitable and dull.” ―Joseph Conrad

“I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether they are worthy.” —Thomas Merton

Rilke:
God speaks to each of us as [s]he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

“What if we reframed “living with uncertainty” to “navigating mystery”? There’s more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage. And is our life not a mystery school, a seat of earthy instruction?” —Martin Shaw

Ghost in the Machine

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems
“As If Someone Was Blowing on Feathers,” Beth Weaver-Kreider and AI

I’m experimenting with AI art and poetry these days. I like the surprises. I feel like I can call these things mine to some degree, because I offer the seed and the sense, but then the Ghost in the Machine plays her part and makes magic.

I began this poem with the somewhat bland first line, and then played with the line lengths, and changed a couple words:

The snow fell softly through the night
as if someone was blowing on feathers,
and the branches touched my face
in the coldest breeze I had ever felt.
I awoke with a start
and realized that it was not snow falling upon me,
but tears.

I am filled with wonder at the surprise of that last line. The Ghost in the Machine is delivering the pathos. I then put the first two lines (my own and the first of the Ghost’s) into Wombo Dream AI Art Generator, and received the illustration above.

Gratitude List:
1. A snowy day at home. Breathing Space.
2. The magic and surprise of collaborating with the Ghost in the Machine.
3. We put money down to hold a little green Prius with fewer than 30,000 miles. It’s an old model, but the lowest mileage of any car we’ve ever bought. And the instrument panel and console are almost identical to Pippi Prius, so it’s a seamless learning curve. And the gas mileage is better than Pippi’s. We’ll pick it up early next week, when we’ve got Pippi sold and the dealer fixes the green car’s headlight and hatch latch. I’m excited to drive a reliable car again. Pippi was getting iffy.
4. These cats
5. How the light shines in.
May we walk in Wisdom!

“We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a story-teller.” —Rebecca Solnit

“There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.”
—Zora Neale Hurston

I see her walking
on a path through a pathless forest
or a maze, a labyrinth.
As she walks, she spins
and the fine threads fall behind her
following her way,
telling
where she is going,
telling
where she has gone.
Telling the story.
The line, the thread of voice,
the sentences saying the way.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (from “The Writer On, and At, Her Work)

“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.” —President Franklin Roosevelt

“A condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything…” —T.S. Elliot

Listening for Stirrings of Spring

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems

Happy Groundhog’s Day, Bright Ones! For today, I offer a collage of writings from past Imbolc days:

What do you bring up into the light today?
What has been developing within you during your Winter Sleep?
What does the dawning light tell you about your shadows?
How does the coming sun define the shape of you?
Groundhog’s Day is a modern version of the ancient celebration of the Goddess Brigid, who became syncretized with the Catholic Saint Brigid, whose feast day is February 1 or 2, depending on whom you ask. Brigid asks: What path will you commit yourself to in the coming season?

SONG FOR POETS: A POEM FOR BRIGHID’S DAY
by Beth Weaver-Kreider, Feb 2013

(Today we look for that jolly rodent, and also we commemorate Brighid, triple goddess and patroness of Ireland, Saint of Kildare. Smithcraft, poetry, and healing arts are her realms.)

Sacred wells, undying flame.

We forge our words on your anvil,
listening for the sweet ping
of hammer on metal,
watching the sparks fly outward,
shaping and crafting.

We seek them like wild herbs
found only on the side of a mountain
for a short season each year.

We search under bracken,
through briar and thorn,
stepping through bogs,
listening for the birdsong
that tells us we have arrived
at the proper place.

We give ourselves to words,
not waiting for inspiration,
but chasing it like skuthers of fog
over the misty hills.
Seeking the solace and healing
that words offer,
and turning our minds
to do that healing work.
Crafting our words
into tools and enticements.

A year and a day
the old ones would pledge
to your service.
So may it be.
One year of poetry,
making it, reading it.

Oh Lady, give us poetry.

Questions to Contemplate in the Season of Brigid:
This is the season of sunlight and shadow:
What is the shape of my shadow?
How does it hamper me?
How does it hold me?
How does it tell me the shape of my soul?

Brigid is the Smith, she who works the forges:
What within me is being tempered this season?
What is being shaped and shifted?
What sacred patterns are being traced along my edges?
What useful tool am I being forged to become?

Brigid is the Healer.
The waters of her well bring wholeness.
What spaces within me need the touch of her waters?
What dis-ease drains my vitality?
How can I offer the waters of healing to others?

Brigid is Patroness of Poets.
How do words shape my reality, like iron is shaped in the forge?
How do my words bring healing, like water from the well?
How can I speak poetry into the cold and the shadows
of the season which is upon us?
Can I offer my daily words with the care and the artfulness of the poet?

Gratitudes:
1. My neighbor and his snow blower. We got some good exercise shoveling about a third of the driveway, for about an hour. Then Ron brought his snow blower over and finished up the rest in five minutes.
2. We might be covered in a foot of snow, but the birds are singing spring songs.
3. Breathing out. Starting afresh. My new semester is feeling like a field of unbroken snow, waiting for us to cover it with our little birdy tracks.
4. Two snow days right when I need them.
5. Professional development. I learned a new thing–sort of by accident–about how to design Google Slides this morning. And I’ve listened to Sonya Renee Taylor talking about Accountability vs. Cancel Culture. Take a deep, deep breath. Yes, Call people out, when the situation warrants. Call people in when you can. But, she says, let’s call on each other. Don’t be “bound to the binary” of calling out or calling in. “Your amygdala is your business.”

Walk in Beauty, Beloveds!

“Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.” —Albert Einstein

“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” —Cornel West

“It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox.
“T. S. Eliot said that in poetry there is ‘a perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations.’ It is perpetual; it cannot be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and controlled.
“The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize terms, to freeze them into strict denotations; the poet’s tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings.” —Cleanth Brooks, “The Language of Paradox”

“Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.” —Borges

“Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.” —Neil Gaiman

Emptying Myself

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Poems

I am emptying myself, a little at a time,
settling in to the laze and the loaf,
stretching my spine like an elastic band
and letting it ease back into a loose curl.

Oh, I have Lots of Things to Do.
But here I am, and that goldfinch
out there is shining
like a liquid drop of pure sunlight,
and a cat needs a human hand
in just that spot between his ears
and I am happy to oblige.

I’ll practice breathing.
How does it go?
In. And out.
In. And out.
In.
And out.

Grateful:
For the summer stretch before school begins, in whatever form it will begin.
For that golden finch, and the fierce pink of the wild peas on the hillside behind him.
For making things. Right now my obsession is the sewing machine.
For my bike, which I have sorely neglected for years, but which I ride 2-3 times/week now.
For anticipation of time with beloveds, masked and distanced, of course.

May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!

“Choose to be in touch with what is wonderful, refreshing, and healing within yourself and around you.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh

“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.” ―Meister Eckhart

“Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh

“No matter what the fight, don’t be ladylike! God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.”
―Mary Harris Jones

A Small Bird in My Heart

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings
Erebus loves to play Mousetrap. One of the blocks in the game says, “Big fat cat! Go back 3 spaces!” He loves that he has a specific role in the game. Also, he loves to knock the diver off the table.

Toko-pa Turner: In the Quechua tradition, when you feel grateful, you say, “There is a small bird in my heart.”

Gratitude List:
1. Looking forward to Good Work
2. Having time do focus inward and do inner work
3. A restful pace
4. I got a lovely view of a female Baltimore oriole yesterday–such a beautiful gentle orange, and that means that the lighter greenish-yellow oriole I have been seeing must have been a female orchard oriole.
5. Playing games with the family yesterday, even if it was Monopoly (which I really don’t like).

May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly–in Beauty!

“Whenever there is a strong lock used there is something extremely precious hidden. The thicker the veil, the more valuable the jewel. A hoard of treasure is guarded by a large snake; do not dwell on the hideousness of the snake, contemplate the dazzling and the priceless things you’ll discover in the treasure.” —Rumi

“If your religion requires you to hate someone, you need a new religion.” ―Glennon Doyle

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
―Rainer Maria Rilke

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
―W. B. Yeats

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
―Patrick Rothfuss

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”
―Sue Monk Kidd

An Abundance of Caution

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

There’s no shame in using an abundance of caution in times of pandemic. This is new to all of us. If you’ve been instructed to stay home, and if it is at all possible: Stay home. If you must go out, wash your hands, and wash your hands, and wash your hands again. Check on your neighbors and beloveds by phone or email or text. How can we help each other during these times?

Settle in. Get some exercise. Read. Paint. Play games and do puzzles. Write that book.

Read this poem by Lynn Ungar:
“Pandemic”

Gratitude List:
1. We saw both Golda and Gator in the pond today. She’s a golden koifish, the Queen of the Pondrealm. He is a Vietnamese Algae Eater, enormous and hard to spot. They often swim together. I didn’t see Gator last season. I figured he had died. But there he was today, looming in the depths.
2. Long walks. I am pushing my step-count up for the weeks that I am home, trying to use the time to get in shape.
3. Tree-shadows striping the fields and hills.
4. Good rest. I am sleeping better these days.
5. Poetry.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Color of My Joy

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems

Perhaps I have said this before: I don’t get very sick very often. I often live with feeling tired and run-down, but I think my general immunity is pretty strong. I am not particularly worried about the virus for myself or my family. But my parents and many of my Beloveds are in the age range where the danger rises. And many of my students have immune issues of their own. I have committed myself to wash my hands as frequently as possible, to use hand sanitizer, to greet people without touching, to minimizing the possibilities that I could pass the virus on unawares. You too? Let’s do our part to stop the spread.

Gratitude List:
1. Parent Teacher Conferences. It breaks the rhythm, and enlivens the two days, and I love to talk to the parents of my kids about my kids. Over the years, I have had my share of really difficult and challenging conferences, but mostly it’s just a really nice chance for two groups of people to talk about someone they mutually love.
2. Because of conferences, I have a couple extra hours in my classroom today during which I will begin to tidy and organize for The Big Move (we’re moving out of our rooms at the end of the year for summertime renovations).
3. I’m feeling satisfied right now. It might be that deep river of joy, or it might be resting in the inevitability of seasons and changes and things staying the same, but it feels like satisfaction. Simple and comfortable satisfaction. Let’s call it the current color of my joy. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have flare-ups of rage and anxiety about politics and coronavirus and getting the work done. It’s something deeper than the flares, though.
4. I’ve gone back to fat in my morning coffee: butter, cream, and coconut oil. I think it revs me up a bit in the morning, and I feel more ready to get into the day, less in a fog. Plus, it tastes like a gourmet treat.
5. Health care workers. Place of honor on my gratitude list today. And also a plea for blessing their health as they stand on the front lines of a world crisis. A thousand blessings on all who are caring for those who are sick.

May we walk in Beauty!

“Until you can discover and delight in the souls of other things, even trees and animals, I doubt you can discover your own soul.” —Richard Rohr

“Magic is a relationship forged in the ordinary. It is our endurance through the unknown, unyielding times. It is faith in the as yet unmanifest. It is the invocation of the large, but while praising the small. Magic is the redoubling of our vow when disappointment befalls us, a shoulder to the wheel of our intent.” —Toko-pa Turner

Quotidian Mysteries:
“Change the burned-out lightbulb. Water the plants. Take your vitamins. Wash the dishes. Bow down to the Great Mystery. Take out the garbage.”
—Rob Brezsny

“It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.”
―Terry Pratchett

“A Word that Breathes Distinctly
Has not the Power to Die”
―Emily Dickinson

“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: Know more about the world than I knew yesterday, and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.” —Neil DeGrasse Tyson

So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,

one of which was you.
―Mary Oliver

Shiny

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

Gratitude List:
1. The shiny children
2. I finally saw a tiny Priestess gathering pollen for her Lady. And now the crocus and windflowers and daffodils are opening. The tiny narcissus on the neighbors’ bank are open. Lots of pollen for the Little Sisters.
3. A restful weekend
4. Henry and his grandfather flying a kite. It went SO high!
5. The constant murmuring of the bluebirds in the little woods at my parents’ house. I have no doubt that they were telling each other stories about my dad.

May we walk in Beauty!

“Awake my dear, be kind to your sleeping heart; take it out into the vast fields of light and let it breathe.” —Háfiz

“For things to reveal themselves to us,
we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.” —Thích Nhất Hạnh

“Only until all human beings begin to recognize themselves as human beings will prejudice be gone forever.” —Amelia Boynton, Civil Rights leader

“Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” ―Rabindranath Tagore

“It is time for women to stop being politely angry.” ―Leymah Gbowee

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” ―Franz Kafka

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” ―Rachel Carson

“Don’t die ’til you’re dead.” —Mississippi John Hurt

Persist

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

Before I begin the rant, I want to make a point about Vice Presidents, in light of everything I am about to say. The choice of Stacey Abrams or Kamala Harris as a running mate would go a long way toward attracting my vote, if there’s any choice left in this debacle of a primary campaign by the time it reaches Pennsylvania. Elizabeth Warren, too, of course, but the loss of Warren in the race was only the most recent blow in a line of killing the vast diversity of the overwhelming field of candidates. (I’ve never been sure what to do with Gabbard, and I’m not sure she knows herself.) (Also, I know that Sanders, as a Jewish man, still brings a little diversity–it’s not simply two old white men remaining. Just two old men.) (Ugh. And now I sound really ageist. In this context, the default seems to always be old white men, so that’s part of the story.)

I wrote this rant in pieces yesterday between naps as I was resting to fend off the worst edges of a bad cold. That bit was successful, at least, and I am feeling much better today.

Today, I am an enraged middle school girl. I am a third grader stamping her foot at the unfairness. I am a high school girl rolling her eyes at the absolutely stupidity of it, a college girl sighing yet again in defeat. All of these girls in me had their absolutely valid reasons for rage, and I cannot see over my own middle-aged rage to deal with the echoing memories of theirs. Mine. Ours. The layers.

I just have to say it. This has been a triggering experience for me. I find myself flashing back to younger versions of myself, living this fifty-two-year-old experience along with my college self, my high school self, my middle school and elementary school selves. I don’t remember the first time I noticed that a girl could be smart and articulate and shiny and dynamic, but she couldn’t beat out a goofy boy with a sense of entitlement. For anything. She couldn’t be heard above the clamor of an angry boy, no matter how lucid and smart her own ideas.

This is how it’s been my whole life: A brilliant girl tries for something—some honor, some leadership role, some place—and a goofy boy with a sense of kingly entitlement begins to talk about the inevitability of his own winning, and suddenly she has completely disappeared. No matter that she has a plan for EVERYTHING. No matter that she can talk her way around that boy ten times before he has put together a coherent sentence. No matter that she was born for this. And so he wins.

And today the goofy boy and the angry boy win again, beating out the brilliant girl who has been invisibilized and now erased.

I’m just tired.

I can live forward through this. I can “get on board.” Goddess knows, I am experienced at that part of the story. Still, I just get tired of hearing people talk about the inevitability of her disappearance from the story. And when the goofball wins, he gets the brilliant girl to assist him. Or the angry boy gets the nice girl to help him. Because they need her in order to truly succeed. But then everyone says, “Look! She’s got something anyway, doesn’t she? She should be happy now. Satisfied now. Everybody wins.” And she ends up doing his work for him or putting out the fires he starts. And he gets the credit. And the next time a girl is running against a boy, everyone says, “Now don’t be too hasty. She really can’t compete. If we want to keep the bullies at bay, we need a good strong boy to take the reins.”

I will vote for whichever of these boys takes the nomination, but I will do it with the rage of a middle school girl who has repeatedly seen her brilliant girlfriends completely marginalized and ignored for goofy and angry boys who have controlled the process for her whole life. I will be happy if she gets to be a good strong vice or cabinet something. Absolutely. But I will know, with the heart of my 12-year-old self, that she was always the best choice: Elizabeth, Kamala, Amy.

Gratitude List:
1. Feeling better. That first nap–three hours of serious sleep–felt like the most rejuvenating part of the day. Even the tossy-turny nature of last night’s sleep hasn’t thrown me back to the exhausted state of earlier in the week, and I feel like I can fight off this cold.
2. Friday. End of the week. Faculty Hymn Sing before school (every Friday–how lucky am I?), the International Women’s Day chapel planned by students. It should be a pleasant day.
3. Daffodils
4. The crocus are blooming, too, and in some strange and wonderful places, way out of the beds. Crocus always remind me to let myself leak outside the boundaries.
5. Nimbleness. How my child just leapt onto the bench to straighten the curtains. I think that one of my physical goals for the next part of this year will be to develop greater nimbleness. I think I have become more sedentary rather than less, and it is affecting my nimbleness.

May we walk in Beauty!