Today’s Tiny Tale:
There once was a boy who could become invisible as the wind. He would vanish without a word, without leaving a trail, and slip through the cracks in the walls, underneath doors, between lines of lazy type across a page.
Gratitude List:
1. Sundogs
2. The robust and muscular figure of a hawk in a skeletal winter tree
3. Stories
4. Snuggly cat
5. Sleeping and dreaming. This is the season.
May we walk in Beauty!
Doorways beckon.
Today’s prompt is to write an imitation poem. I am going to imitate Robert Frost’s “My November Guest.” I will work loosely with the theme, and try to copy the abaab rhyme scheme and the Frostian rhythm.
My November Guest
by Robert Frost
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
My Autumn Visitor
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
My Melancholy, visiting
this bitter cold November day,
thinks that the hours of autumn bring
an apt and honest offering
of chilly winds and shades of grey.
Routine demeanor laid aside,
the autumn brings her full awake.
Her silence shed, her arms thrown wide,
she talks about the ebbing tide,
the dismal field, the frozen lake.
Her strength returns as cold winds blow.
She revels in the shorter days,
how the shadows build and grow,
a crippling frost, a blinding snow,
how all will pass, how nothing stays.
She may not be the kindest friend,
but she is winter’s company,
returning every autumn’s end
and my spirit will attend
her joyful, aching misery.
*Wow. There is something really satisfying about imitating Frost. I love to feel the rhythm of it, to catch the almost jazzy (because of the abaab) end rhyme, to feel the sense of the piece fill itself out within the structure.
Gratitude List:
1. Napping, resting, sleeping, dreaming:Is it possible to live a fully creative life when you don’t get quite enough sleep, when you don’t get deeply into dream-life? I love the restful time of a break, so I can find my way deeper in the the realm of dream.
2. Making a little headway on the poetry editing. How did I let myself get this far behind? I do love the editing bit.
3. Daily disciplines. I know that’s such a loaded word, but it also feels right to me–practical rhythms that I strive to be accountable to each day.
4. Pumpkin pie. Of course, right?
5. Layers. Layers of clothes on a chilly day. Layers of color and texture and line in a good work of art. Layers of relationships. Layers of meaning in a poem or a story.
May we walk in Beauty!
Bringing my vulture back to symbolize the wing and the prayer.
Today’s Prompt is to take a common phrase and make it the title and the theme of the poem.
On a Wing and a Prayer
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
What does this day ask of us?
What do the spirits of the time require?
To find that inner sight that will not settle us to sleep
nor keep us in the constant throes of rage and riot.
To be creatures of the air, wing-powered momentum,
lifted by prayer, held aloft by the voices from within.
A life of contemplation, inner knowingness,
fueling outward action, emboldening our activism.
To throw ourselves, like crows, bellyfirst into the gale,
and beat our wings against the wind,
aloft upon both wing and prayer.
Gratitude List:
1. Winds of change
2. A crow sitting in the top of a windy tree. Crows in the sky buffeted by wind.
3. How the leaves came suddenly walking down the wind yesterday afternoon. The moment the wind came. And all is wind-scoured, wind-shriven, wind-blasted.
4. All those people on Facebook yesterday who spoke about the wind, how the shift to windy autumn was a sudden awakening, how the wind brought them alive. So many friends went outside and embraced the wind. I will, too.
5. That cloud on the way home from church this afternoon, full of blue. Not the Prussian Blue or Indigo of shadow, but an otherworldly, pregnant Maryblue. Like the corner of the Mother’s robe pushing through from beyond this world.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. The little zen sandgarden that my mother gave me years ago. I keep it on the desk in the front of my room and students often come up and rake it and talk to me. Some are incredibly careful and thoughtful, making order. Others come up and scrape and scratch with the little rake until I want to grind my teeth, but they’re working something out, too, as much as the order-makers.
2. Yesterday’s restorative circle work. It was painful and hopeful. There’s individual work to be done yet, but they’re moving toward healing. I now feel that this story is linked to my own, and I have a responsibility to keep my eye out for these particular students.
3. Being at a school where the work of restoration is taken so seriously. There was at least one other restorative conference yesterday, and I know that others occur regularly throughout the week. This is a community where I know that all students will be taken seriously and cared for, even when they mess up. Especially when they mess up.
4. I got home yesterday from school to see two pages of comic sketches that Joss had done after we left for school in the morning. I was really hoping that the graphic novels we have been eating up would inspire him, and they did.
5. Windy weather. Adventure weather. We’re going to my friend Marie’s sale today–that will be our adventure.
May we walk in Beauty!
Two nights ago, my sleep was broken up by an anxious child who couldn’t get back to sleep, so I slept on the floor of his room with him. The broken sleep led me to remember my dreams much more clearly.
The one about the car accident was so real that, on the way to church in the morning, I showed my family an intersection similar to the one where the accident occurred, and when I walked out to the car after church, I experienced a momentary but real dread because I didn’t want to see the scraped-up side of the car. I was relieved when the split second passed and I realized it had been only a dream.
In the other dream, someone had brought a large cardboard box full of writhing snakes into some sort of social gathering–I think we were going to have a dance. The snakes immediately crawled out and covered the floor. I was really worried that someone was going to step on them, but they took care of themselves. I held a couple, loving their intent and watchful eyes, their flickering tongues. Snakes are symbolic of regeneration, of the cycles of life. I have personally associated them with rising feminine power, particularly in their association with the Minoan snake dancers. After a day of processing the magnified disgust, I was feeling at the shameless misogyny of one of our political candidates, I think I needed a reminder of the collective power of women. And I needn’t worry about them getting stepped on. We will take care of ourselves.
“The women, united, will never be defeated.” –Ubaka Hill
Gratitude List:
1. Dreams that wander into the daylight
2. Images that empower and strengthen the will
3. Clouds: I never get tired of clouds
4. Voices of reason amidst the craziness
5. Wild wind. It can be almost unbearable, the way it calls to be followed, the way it makes me long to go journeying, rambling, adventuring.
May we walk in Beauty!
Instead of my typical 4:44, I woke up this morning at 5:34, fell asleep again, and woke up at 7:04. My friend Anna tells me that 4 is associated both with the Metal element and with Autumn in Chinese Medicine. Fall is a time of letting go. I think that I am being asked right now to let go of some of my expectations of myself, to realize that I can’t systematize and organize the stress away.
I have to step into the river and start moving the rocks around. Get my feet wet, get my hands muddy.
The number four seems to be my wake-up number. What shall I wake up to in these days when the winds are pulling me to make and create something new, in these days when the weight of work is heavy on me?
Four is also about stability. The square is more static than the triangle. I can rest in the comfort of the four corners of the square, but eventually, I am going to let my balance shift and move into the more dynamic space of the five, which pulses like a star, disrupts the patterns and flow that have been set in the cozy household of the four, and brings a new awareness.
Every step is about waking up, eh?
Gratitude List:
Have you ever noticed
1. How sometimes three or four different leaves will be floating downward through the air, far from the trees, as though they have materialized from some other dimension?
2. How the autumn wind calls, begs for attention, wants you to wander, to go adventuring?
3. How understanding dawns somewhere behind the eyes, how it shifts the eyebrows and the temples upward, how it straightens the spine?
4. How heavier blankets often bring deeper sleep?
5. How new thoughts and ideas flow like streams, little tributaries meandering toward the Big Thought, the new concept, the river of knowing?
May we walk in Beauty!
And here is the tea I made using the three roots I harvested, along with a few others I had in my cupboard, and some slices of ginger root as well. Roots teas are simmered rather than steeped, and my kitchen smelled earthy and wholesome during the process.
I am going to slip out of poetry-writing mode for a little while now, as I begin the summer process of compiling and editing, sorting and weeding the writings that I have now. Today is St. John’s Eve, the day before the feast day of St. John the Baptist. Throughout time and cultural spaces, this celebration has changed and shifted, collected some of the meanings of the Solstice which has passed only days ago.
Midsummer marks the moment in the northern hemisphere when the sun begins to lose its power (though we don’t feel it for many months yet). St. John’s Day carries with it the transformative weight of the symbolic gift of baptism that St. John created, so the dying light is also representative of our own dying lights and our own transformative resurrections throughout our lives. The cycles continue. Change is not only possible, not only inevitable, but welcome.
Paradoxically, while the Sun-king is overthrown as the days begin to shorten, his power continues strong, and flares up for the next season. I think this is the time for me to take the words that I have written and subject them to a baptism, watch them transform. I have read that in some celebrations of St. John’s Day, a snake is one of the primary symbols, the creature who sheds its skin, leaving its dead self behind, while the living part continues on, sleek and shining, transformed. That is what I seek for my words in this season. I will continue to write gratitude lists for daily practice, and occasional poems and ramblings as the Muse speaks.
I found this traditional St. John’s Day poem:
Green is gold
Fire is wet
Future’s told
Dragon’s met.
May you meet your dragon with courage and aplomb in this season as you step into your future.
Gratitude List:
1. Date night was wonderful last night. Friends gave us a gift certificate to the Accomac. I don’t know that I have ever sat down in a restaurant and said to myself that I could order whatever I wanted, with no limits, but this is precisely what we did last night. Jon had a Wild Boar Bibimbap with kimchi for appetizer, and a Petit Mignon with herbed potatoes and scorched asparagus with preserved lemon. I had Chilled Sweet Pea Soup with lotus pods (like Odysseus’s crew members I might have chosen to stay in that land of the lotus forever) and Blackened Swordfish with summer squash and herb sauce, along with the asparagus. For dessert, he had an Accomac version of a hot fudge sundae and I had Bananas Foster (though they don’t flambee it tableside on the wooden porch). We shared a cosmopolitan made with cranberry juice and jalapeno-infused vodka. I think I will be infusing some jalapenos this summer–it seems like such a medicinal thing to use for a fancy drink, but I love that heat.
2. All the adults who care for and offer attention to my children. I grew up in such a nest as well, with wise and friendly and funny adults who took time for me, and I am incredibly grateful for the adults who create the same protected space for my own children. I am thinking right now of Sandra, in particular, who has been their summertime companion for years now. Now when they are probably old enough to be required to entertain themselves on farm days, they cannot do without her, and this is as it should be.
3. Cool winds announcing rain. The plink of raindrops on leaves.
4. Cycles and changes. Transformation. Leaving the old skin behind to live in the new and tender and shining skin.
5. Layers of sound in the distance and nearby in the morning. Birdsong mingled with the human sounds of the day’s beginning.
May we walk in Beauty!
My father took this photo of me on Rusinga Island when I was five. A couple years ago, I wanted to take a picture of it for a project I was working on, but I couldn’t get past the crazy reflections that kept occurring. Then I realized I could use the reflections and put myself, 41 years later, into the photo. (This is the same trip where my brother found an interesting stone on the beach and took it for his collection. Forty-some years later, as he was reading about the tools of early hominids, a photo of a particular stone caught his eye and he remembered his Rusinga stone, which he had, still stashed away. He knew how to make the right contacts, and his stone now resides in the Smithsonian Museum, a verified example of one of the earliest hominid tools to be found.)
Today is Easter 2, the day when we look at Thomas, who has come to us down the centuries as Doubter. Something in me admires his pragmatism, his weighing of the truth and facts, his declaration that he needs to see the evidence. He had a scientific mind.
Make space in this house
for all of the people you are.
Make room for the schemer,
the doubter, the cynic,
but open some space
for the credulous child
and the mystic, the dreamer,
the wild one, the quiet one.
Open a space within
for the glass-half-full to dance
with the glass-half-empty,
for the monk to sing songs
of revolution with the fury.
There in those rooms,
the One may enter
and speak your many names,
saying, Peace be yours.
Gratitude List:
1. Wild wind. May I be wind-shriven, too. There’s that song by the Medical Mission Sisters: “Blow, blow, blow till I be but breath of the Spirit blowing in me.”
2. Pink trees
3. Communities and circles of caring. Knowing that other people get it, this work of holding our places in the web. Knowing that you’re out there, doing your work while I am trying my best to do mine here.
4. The hope and promise of the seed.
5. How the answers we seek can sometimes enter through the locked doors and closed rooms of our fearful hearts.
May we walk in Beauty and Blossoms!
Never fight a cloud.
Never grasp the wind
in your fists. Wind is
meant to be ridden
like a rough colt.
Give yourself to it
as you give yourself
to the salt waves.
Let it buffet you,
twist and batter you.
Rise. Breathe deeply.
Learn the pathways
of currents and drafts.
(First line found on an online “poetry generator.” This is a very drafty draft, but I do want to write something about riding the wind, so I will let it be a place-holder.)
Gratitude List:
1. Watching a high school crew create a dramatic performance. The students at my school and their directors did an amazing job putting together “The Sound of Music” last night.
2. Sleep. This is a placeholder. I am running on very little sleep at the moment, and will likely run a little low for the next couple of nights. But I am grateful for sleep, for the little I can get now, and for the good rest I will get in a few days.
3. That lovely, lovely snow. Simple frosting.
4. The sense of taste. Isn’t flavor a marvelous thing?
5. Weaving the threads together. People. Meanings. Ideas.
May we walk in Beauty!
It’s seeding time again! Even though things are changing here, Jon is hard at work, planting seeds for the coming season. We’ll have a short late-season CSA this fall, but he is planning to sell tomatoes and other goodies individually throughout the summer. I keep wanting to call that a la carte,
I am becoming increasingly anxious and nervous about the continued popularity of a certain political candidate, despite his obvious and in-your-face xenophobia, racism, sexism, his narcissism and bullying. I don’t want to live in a country with people who support meanness over substance, who prefer bombast to thoughtfulness, who would rather have a showperson than a statesperson. I see so many potential terrible endings to this fiasco. I am angry and frightened, and more than a little shrill. I’m not sure that right now I can say with Anne Frank that I believe people are really good at heart. Where is the goodness hidden inside people who stand around and watch with glee while the playground bully gets ready to beat up another victim? Is this what we’ve come to? This is not the America I thought I knew.
Gratitude List:
1. Wind–scouring me, scattering me, pulling me out of my safe places.
2. Orange–a waking up color
3. Watching several of our seniors give their senior presentations last night. They tend to balk at the process, and wonder why we make them do this, but they rise so beautifully to the challenge. It’s like they’re stepping out onto the launching pad. See how ready you are to fly!
4. Sunrises
5. Thoughtful discussions with students.
May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 