tiger eye

Live in the Sunshine

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Emerson

Not exactly a poem, perhaps, but I will write it like one:

Just for today,
let all the stories be happy ones,
full of surprise and laughter,
the gifts of the unexpected.

Tomorrow,
we’ll get back to the business
of saving the world,
of figuring out how
to love away the meanness,
how to create a shining space
in the dim and dingy rooms.

But today,
let all the stories be happy ones.

Gratitude List:
1. I really didn’t want to give up a day off for an IU13 conference, but I am incredibly glad I went, inspired to engage students in the written word, full of helpful ideas for sparking interest in the text, and eager to keep learning myself.
2. Back to school.  Back to rhythm.  I admit, it’s hard to get back to the work after a wonderful break, but I do miss it when I am away.  I love having a job I love.
3. Small graces.  A little extra time to do something.  A moment of sunshine on a gray day.  A smile from someone in a distracted moment.
4. Tiger eye–such a shiny stone.
5. The great wisdom of my friends.  I am fortunate to have many wise and compassionate and hopeful people in my life.

May we walk in Beauty.

I Asked the Chickens

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Feeling unsettled and out of sorts
I asked the chickens what they have to offer me.
All they could give me was their hunger
and insatiable curiosity
and small tender clucks of comfort.

And eggs.
Of course eggs.

And maybe that’s all quite a lot to give
as an answer after all.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Driving through Lancaster County in the late afternoon with my parents.  There is a reason people travel from all over the world to visit this farmland.
2.  An Amishman digging a grave with a shovel.  Why does this move me so much–that the church/funeral home/whoever did not use power equipment, but instead hired people to do the work by hand?  I personalizes it, keeps it from being about the noise and the mechanization, brings it back down to the human scale.
3.  Hearing my parents talk about their own church’s process with end-of-life issues, taking back the role of preparing bodies for burial from the funeral homes, not embalming, creating community responses around the experience of death, not prolonging dying with medicine and out-of-context care.  This is powerful community work.
4.  I feel a shift a-coming.  Big shifts, cosmic shifts?
5.  My new tiger eye ring.  (I had to rip it back into the mundane a moment–though perhaps there’s nothing mundane about this ring. . .)
May we walk the path of compassion.

2013 March