solstice

Waiting for the Dreams

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Each year, during the long nights between Winter Solstice and Epiphany, I carefully watch the dreams and pictures that appear to me, gleaning ideas and images that might be helpful to me in the coming year.  This year I am impatient.  I have been cataloging my list for the past two weeks and I want to solidify it and crystallize it.  But it’s also delightful to anticipate what these last few nights might show, so I will wait, and perhaps nudge some of my list into a poem:

While I wait for the dreams to be complete
while I sit at the feet of winter
listening

waiting for the little bell to ring
for the sound of rushing wings
for the things born in darkness
to take form
to rise up–

while a vulture flies across my window
red root and plantain nourish and heal me
a lynx crouches by a granite outcrop in the meadow
the storyteller raises her voice in a chant of longing
and a silent girl turns the corner ahead of me

I sit down to work
and sleep overtakes me:
One more vision for the road
One more message for the journey

Hush

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

The sun is setting out of the hollow now on this day before the the shortest night.  At about this time tomorrow (6:03 EST to be exact), we reach our furthest point on the outbreath of this trip around the sun.

Pause. Regroup.  A moment of holy hush.

These are the days for dreaming and contemplation, for listening for the messages.

What words, what images, will you glean from your dreamings to take with you into the coming wheel around the year?

 

Gratitude List:
1. The night has secrets and messages to offer.
2. Sunreturn is upon us.  I have made it to the center of another season of darkness. Now for the journey back around.
3. Anticipation
4. People believing that their work makes a difference.  It does, you know.
5. Blessings. Benedictions. Beannacht.

May we walk in Beauty.

Longest Day Is Here!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Sense of Wonder Camp for Girls.  All those girls: wiggly giggly, serious and silly, poised and awkward and graceful all at once, thoughtful and playful and full of light.  The women who put it together, the mothers and mentors who were there to celebrate their girls.  I felt like I could see the silver webs, like a veil of light, that connected us all.
2.  Leaving a place with a sense of dissatisfaction, not because events were dissatisfying,  but because there were so many people there whose words I wanted to feel settling into the shells of my ears, and there was not time for it all.  I drove home surfing a love wave.  “Oh, and then there was her!  I could have talked with her all night.  Oh, and her!  I just love her.  Right, and then her!  What a tender and kind heart.”
3.  A new green T-Shirt with a Rachel Carson Quotation:   “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
4.  Josiah, though still a little warm, is acting like himself again after a couple days of fever.  He refused the Ibuprofen last night and let the fever do its work on its own.
5.  Longest day.  Summer’s here.  Happy Solstice to you!  May the sun warm you all the way to your bones, fill you with life and health and radiance.  Every day the world begins anew.

May we walk in Beauty.