story

Whose Eyes?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

 

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Robert Brewer suggests a “We’re Being Watched” Poem today:

When you walk in the fields,
when you wander in the woods–
sometimes you will feel it.

When you are looking closely
at the way the fern curls or
at the obscure twittering bird
hopping just out of sight
in a leafy bower or
at the way the ladybug
race-waddles around the tabletop,

when you are in the act of noticing
the way the minnows dart
in seemingly random chaos
before they form up
into an ordered school or
the way the sun illuminates
the golden of an autumn afternoon,
or the way one piece of quartz–
just one of thousands–
suddenly sparkles from the field row

Have you also noticed
that you are being noticed, too?
How the looking goes out
while drawing other looking in?
How the inner knowing eye
of all that is
is bent upon observing
the awe-inspiring creature
that is you?

 

Gratitude List:
1. The shining faces of those students last night after the play, thoughtfully and fervently discussing race and change, personal accountability, and the power of a good story to make us more deeply, compassionately human.  I am so proud to know them.
2. Story.  The power of story to bring us all to the table.
3. Grace.  Restoration.  Redemption.
4. Rose hips
5. Systems

May we walk in Beauty.

Reading Wisdom

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sumac

Learn to tell the story of the red leaves against water.
Read the alphabet of walnut branches newly bared for winter.
Become literate in the language of cricket and of wren,
of the footsteps of skunk and the changeability of weather.

Interpret the text of the wind in the hollow.
Scan the documents of cloud and constellation.
Enter the tale of rose hip and nettle and sassafras.
Study Wisdom and she will find you.

(Proverbs 3:13-31)

Gratitude List:
1. Firelight
2. Recommitment to purpose
3. Circles
4. Doorways
5. The magic that is all around us.

Bright Blessings!

A Whole World in a Teeny Tiny Story

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

Beauty

Gratitude (no list today, but this):
Some days, the lesson plan sort of dissipates in the face of something else that takes over.  That happened today.  A couple times a week, I offer my students short, ungraded writing exercises at the beginning of class, just to keep the writing muscle toned.  Today, we wrote micro-fiction, trying to get a story into 6 words, but letting ourselves go up to 15, or maybe 20, and even more in a few cases.  In every class, there were teeny-tiny stories that took my breath away.

During 8th period, the stories kept coming, and people kept sharing, and it felt wrong to cut it short.  Something in the back of my head kept saying, “Umm.  We were planning to work with Dependent and Independent Clauses, and Participial Phrases and. . .” and another part of my brain (fortunately) told that first part to please sit down and be quiet a while.

One boy, who had been out of class for a couple weeks, told his tiny story.  Immediately a couple of the others raised their hands and wanted to talk about what they thought it meant.  Suddenly students were doing deep literary analyses of their classmates’ micro-stories.

Then a girl wrote a tiny story and explained that it was about race, and about how, even when you are successful in this culture, if you’re black, there’s a sense in which it’s never quite enough.  Nobody raised a hand to tell her differently.  They listened.  Oh, how they listened.

And then a boy raised his hand, the same one who recently returned to class, and he began to speak powerfully about resilience.  I worried for a moment that the girl might think he was telling her how she ought to feel, that because she didn’t know his story, she might think it was directed at her.  When he was done, she said, “I get what you are saying.”  Their eyes were shining as they left class today, and I didn’t do a thing but witness.

I am so glad that we did not study Participial Phrases today.

May we walk through our stories in Beauty!

The Contemplative Muscle

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Not much time to focus on poems these days.  A small boy needs Mama time.  A cat needs a snuggle that cannot handle a computer.  I feel a need to keep working the contemplative muscles, so here is a little bit of free association for the morning.

In my head every poem begins
“This is the story. . .”
Inside my heart every story starts out
“She lived at the edge of a great, dark forest.”

What did you do when the song began?
Did you huddle beneath the leaves in the bears’ den
or step into the sunny clearing,
trusting the shining threads that fell upon your ears?

Gratitude List:
1. Sleeping in past 6:30
2. My current reading stack: Ruth Gendler’s Book of Qualities, Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water, and Mary Oliver’s Felicity.
3. Sweater weather
4. Embracing the transitions
5. Story

May we walk in Beauty!

Witches Being Ducked

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Gratitude List:

1. “When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”  –Virginia Woolf  (I had never read the first part of the quotation before.  Thank you, Christine Lincoln!)
2. Christine Lincoln and the Witches Being Ducked.  What a powerful Sisterhood.  I have fallen in love with you all.  Your magenta hair is a halo, an aura of  Shine, matching the passionate person within.  I am in awe of you.
3. All those images.  I want to write them all here, but they don’t belong to me.  I will carry them with me, deep, deep within.  Such story-making.
4. The tenacity of morning glory.  Over a week ago, Jon cut down the vine that was climbing up the dead sunflower in front of the house.  The leaves on the vine that continue on up the balcony have long since withered, but the flowers were still blooming today!
5. The heartbeat of a moth.  I held a small moth on my finger this morning, and I could feel its life force, its heartbeat, like a small motor quivering.

So much love.

Spring Spell

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Spring Spell

Bee.
Crocus.
Hocus-pocus!

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Music: Yesterday’s Beyond Ourselves concert (Good job, LMH Campus Chorale!)
2. More swans
3. Grapefruit
4. The Story continues (Yesterday’s sermon: Telling stories.  Remembering that there is always more to come.)
5. Bees!

May we walk in Beauty!

Found Poem

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I found this poem on page 40 of the September 2004 issue of Sojourners Magazine.  In an article by Danny Duncan Collum about Michael Moore’s then-new movie Fahrenheit 911, I circled some words and blacked out the rest.  Here is the result.  It’s a little more disjointed than I want it to be, but it’s really about playing around, seeing what sense I can make out of seeming nonsense, what happens when half-random words and phrases are created and strung together, what meaning is suggested.

DREAM

I saw Che Guevara on a day filled with omens
we went to lunch there, on the big screen
he won’t go back

I am troubling the dead
I won’t tell you this again

that didn’t happen
today he is lucky to be rooted
in this great global anthem

I pulled a few interesting quotations directly out of the article:
“The war is not meant to be won.  It is meant to be continuous.”  George Orwell
“If you let the world change you, you can change the world.”  from The Motorcycle Diaries

Gratitude List:
1.  Hearing the story through the voices of young people and children
2.  Visual Poetry
3.  Songs of journey, songs of water–“Wade in the water, children”
4.  Gentle guides through the liminal spaces
5.  Community support for unpacking uncomfortable, anxious and difficult questions, powerful questions

May we walk in Beauty!

The Marker

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

(on the day of the massacre of the people of the Conestoga 250 years ago)

Come with me now, Bright Souls
and we’ll sit in a circle together.
Silently a while.  Then we talk.

Light six candles
for the people of the longhouse
who died that wintry dawning.

The air is filled already
with too many words.
The day carries so many mutterings
on the wind, on the wings
of the vulture, drifting
above the broken fields.

Sheehays, Wa-a-shen,
Tee-kau-ley, Ess-canesh,
Tea-wonsha-i-ong,
Kannenquas.

If we are to keep awake,
to live in the place
where the heart stays open,
then perhaps we must look
into the teeth of the story.
Together we gaze at those shadows.
Together we speak their names.
Together we listen for the sparrow’s call.

At the place of the great stone
I did not speak their names.
I left my shell there at that place
in the glittering sun.

Some days I cannot bear the darkness,
but I will close my eyes and sing
while you keep vigil near me.
And when you falter, too,
I will have found the strength renewed
to witness the tale while you sing to me.

Perhaps you will not believe me
when I tell you: As I drove
that road toward the River,
six deer ran across blue shadows
cast by afternoon sun on snow,
over the fields to the road.
They paused a moment to watch
the golden fish of my car approach,
then slipped across Indian Marker Road
and were gone, past the still pond
and into a fringe of wood.

2013 December 105

Gratitude List:
1.  Deer running through blue shadows on a snowy field
2.  The winter slant of light, sparkling on snow
3.  Roasted Brussels Sprouts, and radishes and turnips and potatoes and carrots
4.  Snails.  Who would have thought I would love snails so?  Now that the fish has died, the snails provide much more entertainment than I would have expected.  The big blue one has doubled its size in two weeks’ time.  Their antennae are swirly.
5.  Learning to listen, to wait

May we walk in Beauty.

Always Free

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<Prompt 26: Write a (Blank) Free, or Free (Blank) Poem, or both>

The poem that I wrote yesterday was in a Spanish form called shadorma.  Six lines, 3/5/3/3/7/5.  Today’s poem is also a shadorma.  I love the name.

You are free
to tell your story
as you please.
Always you
are free to shift the plot or
wander off the page.

2013 November 158 2013 November 149
The 1719 Hans Herr House and The Longhouse recreation

Gratitude List:
1.  Naps!  Especially this part: While I was napping on the couch, Joss found a blanket and carefully covered me up, then found another and fell asleep with it on the floor beside me.  When we woke up and I thanked him for taking such good care of his Mama, he walked over to me and kissed my hand.
2.  Parent-teacher conference.  Really, we have lucked out (seriously lucked out) with an amazing teacher for Ellis’s first year.  She likes his smile.  And his careful deliberation in his work.  And she loves to teach.
3.  Two people in my circles who have been on ventilators are breathing on their own, both waking up.  Thanks for all your prayers.  Recovery may be long and arduous, but the first bout of anxious waiting is coming to an end for their loved ones.
4.  Crossword puzzles
5.  Wool sweaters and hot tea

May we walk in Beauty.

The Story Roars

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

When I wake up in the morning, parting the cobweb veil between dream and day-consciousness, I often find that some piece of that world hovers about me as I enter the morning.  A fragment of song.  An image.  A phrase.  The tone of the voice or the name of the person who was speaking my dream-name.  The answer to a question.  The Question itself.

This morning’s phrase: The Story Roars.  I love all the places this can go, the way it opens doors into so many passageways in my life.

There, standing just behind the curtain, is my Muse, reminding me to get to work.  To write, to write, to write.  The story is impatient, roaring to be crafted and written.

One of my current spiritual practices was given to me by a friend, the work of honing my listening.  I want to take up the work of listening, of drawing out people’s stories, of working together to be fully engaged in the stories we are living.  Our stories gather around us, waiting for us to give them voice.

Here is a Roar: My friend Natasha is now almost three weeks into a daily blog, The Year of Black Clothing, in which she chronicles and gives voice to her grief and rage over the destruction of Earth, of each other.   Her story is roaring, finding voice, gaining momentum, gathering other voices.  Her roar–so gentle, so fierce, so pained and so loving–is reverberating, drawing other voices in, creating a wild and hopeful call to Do.  To Be.  To Act.  To live our stories as authentically as we can on this Earth we call Home.  Go now and read her roar.  Add your voice to the story.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Yesterday I asked my Facebook friends for advice about a parenting question.  I’m uncomfortable with unsolicited advice-giving, and sometimes even asked-for advice can be haughty.  Not so with the amazing people who responded with gentle concern and powerful ideas to my call for help.  I am so deeply blessed by the many circles of community in my life.  So deeply deeply blessed.
2.  Mentors
3.  The Story
4.  The Voice
5.  The Dawn

May we walk in Beauty.