Tag: words

Words and Wilds

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

I’m getting a late start today, and I need to go get ready for school in a moment. This morning, first thing, I took a cup of my wild yeast, mixed in a cup of water, a Tbsp. of salt, and then added flour until I had a good kneadable dough. It’s rising now, covered by a damp cloth, for six hours. Then I’ll knead it again and form it into a loaf or two, let it rise another two hours, and see what happens!

Gratitude List:
Words I am grateful for today.
1. Winsome: curious, dreamy, innocent, fool-ish
2. Wild: untame, free, safe, creative
3. Weird: eccentric, magical, fate, unpredictable
4. Woods: inscape, numinous, serendipitous, shining
5. Windy: scouring, shriving, re-vivifying, inspiration

Walk Wildly!

“Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession. . .but about securing a portal.” —Laura Miller

“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” ―Shannon Hale

“I can promise you that women working together―linked, informed, and educated―can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.” ―Isabel Allende

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” ―John Muir

“When we went to jail, we were setting our faces against the world, against things as they are, the terrible injustice of our capitalist industrial system which lives by war and by preparing for war.” ―Dorothy Day

“What is not acceptable is silence in face of oppression. Boycott if you want, or participate if you want. But do not remain silent in face of injustice.” ―Omid Safi

“When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.” ―John O’Donohue

“Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. What ails us is our sense of beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all the best.” ―D. H. Lawrence

“Poems are maps to the place where you already are.” —Jane Hirshfield

“Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is to draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.” ―Barbara Kingsolver

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” ―Hermann Hesse

Poem a Day: 19

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

One of today’s Prompts is Month. The other is to use these six words in a sentence: bump, embrace, fixture, howl, lonely, resolve (all created by Shakespeare).

Song for a New Way
a sestina of Shakespearean words
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Coyote is something of a fixture
in the myth of the landscape, a lonely
figure trotting atop the ridge. A howl
echoes into the hollow, an embrace
of wildness and winsome, where we bump
against our own internal resolve

to enter wildness, our stout resolve
to live less burdened by the fixtures
of modern existence, in the bump
and whirl of the rat race, this lonely
place in the crowd. Today we embrace
our freedom from form with a wild howl.

Set free from the commute, the howl
of the markets that weakened our resolve
to fight the forces that tempted us to embrace
acquisition and consumerism, that fixture
of capitalism that is the root of our lonely
longing for stuff that stops us, a bump

on the road to enlightenment. We bump
into the stuff, the stuff, the stuff. We howl
with the frustration, knowing we’d be less lonely
if we could only find our inner resolve
and let our inner existence be the fixture
that would lead us to a stronger embrace

of what matters. For example, we would embrace
kindness and empathy, the places where we bump
against each other would be the fixture
of our ideals. We’d learn to how to howl
our deep longings and we would resolve
to make each other less lonely.

Only in the search for connection will our lonely
lust for power be ended. When we embrace
all beings as siblings, and resolve
to avoid the stumble and bump
of collecting more trophies. The howl
of lost enchantment no longer a fixture.

We can resolve that we will no longer be lonely.
The fixture of our new story will be the embrace.
We’ll bump fists and hips, and howl.

Gained In Translation, Again

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

Three years ago, I ran a couple of my short poems through Google Translate to see what would happen. From English to Pashto and back again. From English to Pashto to Hindi to Javanese and back again. How does meaning become fractured through the algorithmic translation process? Last week, I tried it again. I started with:

Long have I longed for
and dreaded
this moment
of darkness,
belonging to silence,
sure of my shadows.

Then I ran it through
Sinhala —> Tajik —> Swahili —> Malayalam —> Pashto —> back to English

Here is what happened. Look how it pulled a rhyme in there for me (afraid/shade), and the meaning has definitely shifted, but I’m really happy with it. I added punctuation at the end for clarification. I actually like it better than my original.
I’ve been waiting a long time.
Don’t be afraid.
At this point:
Dark,
In silence,
I believe in shade.

Then I tried Mr. McConnell’s famous Truth: Nevertheless she persisted.
Ran it through Punjabi —> Bangla —> Hmong —> Kyrgyz —> Tamil —> English
Ended up with: The reality is, however, there is more.
This changes the meaning a little more than I really want to, but it is an interesting end.

I tried a third, another of my tiny poems. This time, that fifth line changed anger to sex. Hmmm.
Take a deep breath.
Find the place inside you
that remembers how truth feels;
remember that there
are kinds of anger
that are more effective
than blind outrage.

Tamil —> Javanese —> Cebuano —> Hindi —> Kazakh —> English

Take a deep breath.
Find a place in your stomach
The cruelty of truth is considered;
Remember
Sex is scary
It was very effective
Especially the blind.

Ah, well. I like putting the essence of meaning outside of my control for a moment and seeing what happens.

In Creative Writing classes, many of the exercises I have students do are to encourage us to move behind that space in our brain that controls the meanings. Part of the reason for this is that is helps us to discover hidden wells and springs of words and ideas within ourselves that we didn’t know were there, like finding the secret room in your house in the dream. At a basic level, it helps us learn that there are a thousand ways to say a thing, a thousand hues of meaning. Giving up control in the immediate moment, as with an exercise like this, helps us learn to take control, to refine and define our meanings.

Gratitude List:
1. Singing in the pit for our school’s musical. It’s a rather big commitment, but I love it.
2. Yesterday after I dropped a Big Boy off for tech prep for the play, I had a couple hours just to be by myself. I went shopping, of all things. Hit the Goodwill pay-by-the-pound bins, and A.C. Moore’s going out of business sale. I bought Small Boy a stack of canvases for painting–half price.
3. The Small Boy hasn’t painted for months, but at the moment he is creating a marvelous abstract cloud-like scene with watercolors. Hmm. Now he is adding some acrylics on top of that. Experiment, Kid!
4. Silver hair. When I see photos of myself now, my first awareness is of a middle-aged, grey-haired, gnome-like woman. I’m okay with that. No, I’m actually happy with that. I like being middle-aged, and I like having unicorn hair.
5. The way the sun casts shadows in the bosque across the road when it slides up and over the opposite ridge in the mornings. All those tree-shadows!

May we walk in Beauty!

Muzzy

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

On the way to and from school, on the days when we’re all in the carpool, we listen to audio books. Lately, we’ve been listening to Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle. Her writing is clever and witty without being chummy or manipulative, her stories are compelling, and she can introduce characters who make you wince and cringe, and then make you love them with a deep and unswerving loyalty. It’s narrated by Will Patton, who can create a character with the smallest shift of tone in his voice.

Yesterday, just as we got to school, we came to a little phrase, “the muzzy mist.” I don’t think I have ever heard the word muzzy, but it grabbed me. It means indistinct, befuddled, unclear. In Creative Writing, we are creating Word Pools, collecting words that interest us, and then doing interesting things with them, like taking pictures of things that we label with them, or making poems and short stories with them. So “muzzy” went right into my word pool.

Here’s a little poem I wrote with using “muzzy” and several other words in my word pool. The idea is to push ourselves to use words in different ways than we normally do. I found myself breaking up the sense of sentences with greater ease than normal.

Muzzy

Today I am
a muzzy fuzzle,
brain a-muddle,
all verhoodled.

Yesterday I
was eagle-eyed,
a green rogue,
and wild divine.

Sharp I was, sharp as dash
but now I am dangerous blood,
with an elephant on my chest.

Last week, we introduced ourselves to the class with Acrostic Poems about our names. Some students simply chose a different adjective for every letter of their name, and these were beautiful and tender. Others wrote poems with longer lines and phrases beginning with the letters of their names, and these were elegant and flowing. Some even allowed themselves to practice a little enjambment, breaking up the flow of a phrase across a line. In one of my classes, the first four of us to read ours used the word Anxious for our A. I wonder what the implications of that are. Here’s mine. I used my whole name:

Every time I
Look in the mirror
I see someone different:
Zealous
Anxious
Bold
Eager
Timid.
How can I be all these things
And one person at the same time?
Names and rhythms,
New and intricate rhymes
Work within me.
Each one of us is
An ocean, a
Veritable
Ecology of Adjectives,
Revealing layers of human attributes.
Kindness and
Revolution can
Exist in tandem.
Individual truths are
Defined by complex webs
Experiences within me.
Reality is many-faceted.

Gratitude List:
1. Weekend!
2. Clear moments that remind me that I am where I should be. Teaching can be rough, especially in the fall and winter, especially when the grading piles up, especially when I am feeling inadequate. Sometimes I wonder if I am where I should be. And then there are weeks where it all aligns, where I can see how even the really challenging bits have led up to a particular moment. How I am changed and transformed by this work. How I actually have some internal characteristics and skills that make this a good fit. (So synchronous: my sister just sent me a text at this moment that added one more little golden thread to this sense of rightness.)
3. A little bit of snow
4. Getting it done
5. Words. Word pools. Word hoards. Word spews.

May we walk in Beauty!

Advent 18: Torpor and Dreams

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Advent, Musings

Such a strange and wakeful night it was. The borders between sleep and unsleep were oddly porous. Toward the end there, I did fall into deeper grooves of dream and sleep. I don’t feel particularly unrested, so there’s that. Perhaps it’s the load of work still to get done this week, or the doings in the House today, or the season, or the excitement of going to play practice again after twenty-five years. Or maybe it was simply cats and digestion.

This season, I have been reading Gayle Boss’ All Creation Waits again, learning about the various states of torpor and hibernation and quiet of various animals throughout a northern winter. I, too, feel torpor taking me, but it’s not always about deep sleep for me. Sometimes, it feels more like a simple need to rest quietly and profoundly, while the stories play out in my brain.

Winter is, for me, the Dreaming Time. I do head more readily toward sleep, if I don’t always actually make it to the deepest waters. After Solstice and Christmas, in the hush of nights when the planet seems to pause in its dance, as she begins the whirl back to exquisite balance, I listen more closely to my dreams, watching for symbols and images and words that I might mine for use in the coming year. Already, my night-brain seems to be readying me for the work of conscious dreaming.

Now comes the work of remembering and sorting the images that come in those half wakeful moments between the dreaming and sleeping and waking. May your dreams bring you wisdom.

Gratitude List:
1. The startling talents of my students.
2. The wisdom of dreams and darkness
3. Break is coming
4. Only 3 days until Sunreturn
5. Little spaces in the coming day in which to breathe

May we walk in Beauty!

Catch and Release

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

Brewer’s Poetic Asides Prompt today is Catch and Release.

Catch and Release

These idea-fish that swirl and swish
through the watery-airy stratum
above my frantic brain, how they
beg my attention, how they flip
their fringed and flowing tails,
how they sparkle in the sunlight.

I would catch them all and keep them,
dance with them in schooled formation,
watch them flow from my pen, from my
fingers, onto the pages, into the flow
of words, of sentences, of stories.

But the rushing streams of my living
have space and time for only a few,
a blue one here, three golden koi,
and a catfish with a mouth as wide
as the world. And then I must swim
with the currents for all I am worth,
hoping my chosen companions
will keep pace with me, while I find
us a quiet pool where we can settle
into the rhythm of the tales they bring.

So many I have had to release
back to the pools of time, hoping
that someone, somewhere else,
will find them, will see their beauty,
will set them flowing onto a page.

I Stole This Poem

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Poems
I drew this back at the end of February, when I finally began to feel that awful weight of winter shifting just the lightest bit.

Today’s prompt on Poetic Asides is to write a stolen poem. Here’s my attempt:

Poetry Prompt: Write a Stolen Poem

I stole this poem years ago, actually,
from a shelf in a corner of that old book shop
on a quiet street down by the river.
Dust motes twinkled in shafts of sun
which slanted through the windows.

I eased the leather-clad book from a high shelf.
I thought I heard it whispering.
My fingers tingled with its electric pull.

I knew it would contain treasures:
words like glisten and linger,
like numinous, mellow, meringue.
I thought it might glow on the page,
hum my name, offer me words to ponder:
tendril, exquisite, winsome, wander.
And words strong and feral,
like flame, wild, and bramble,
courageous, incarnate, sycamore.

I thought it might tell me how not to be afraid,
how to not put so much stake in other people’s opinions,
how not to trust the lure of the the easiest road.

It did not disappoint.
I’ve kept it, concealed,
waiting for the moment,
the right invitation,
to reveal it.

In the Dreamtime, Day 12

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

Last night before I went to sleep, I read an article about hypnogogia, that half-dream state between sleeping and waking where the mind is churning through images that feel portentous and wildly creative. It was a helpful reminder to me about dreamwork, about how to catch those elusive butterflies of dream and story that flitter away in the moment of waking. It makes me grateful that my body wakes me before the alarm, because I have those seconds to try to hold the moments of dream before the sudden noise of the alarm startles them away.

1) In the dream, I am in a grand-looking inn, but we are quickly noticing how poorly the place is built, more like a cheap television set than a truly beautiful space. The opulence is false.

2) In the dream, we are on the second floor of a building, dancing and pounding our feet, enjoying the sound of the echoes. We suddenly remember that there is someone living below us.

3) In the dream, I am standing under an umbrella on a bridge in the dawn, misty rain falling around me. There is a word in my head: trophism. I had to look that one up upon waking. Google says: “the turning of all or part of an organism in a particular direction in response to an external stimulus.” (Ah. I am turning my face to the light, like Kris’s poinsettias in church on Sunday.)

Gratitude List:
1. Words that come in dreams. In this case, “trophism,” like what I do when I turn toward the light.
2. Dream-bridges
3. Making a plan to catch up, and implementing in. Slow and steady, little tortoise.
4. Slow starts. “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow,” said the poet, and it applies to oh-so-many forms of waking.
5. I think, perhaps, I can begin, just a little, to notice the increasing day.

May we wake to Beauty!

“Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God’s will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff’s office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar.” —Barbara Brown Taylor

“He said the wicked know that if the evil they do is of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have only stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.”
—Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing.

“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”
―Parker J. Palmer

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
―T. S. Eliot

We need for the earth to sing
Through our pores and our eyes.

The body will again become restless
Until your soul paints all its beauty
Upon the sky.
—Hafiz

“Perhaps the uprising of women around the world is the earth’s own immune system kicking in.”
—Nina Simons, Bioneers

A poem for the New Year:
Love Your Life

And a voice will come from the stillness
to give these words: Love Your Life.
You will know from its deep urging
to let go your well-worn list
of all you felt you first needed.
Begin here, freely,
from this muddy place.
It doesn’t matter if you are broken,
empty handed, shabby.
Go now, into the day:
the open trails, the markets,
the long trail to the sea.
Find all the ways
a lover loves the Beloved:
each hidden bloom, unspoken wound,
vagary of heart.
Become a brave and willing traveler
in a wild, forgotten terrain~
a realm of intimate, tender relating,
infinite mystery, un-tethered joy.
Now, moving in this world, you know
that love is the greatest fortune.
Only you will not amass it:
you are it.

—Ingrid Goff-Maidoff, Befriending The Soul

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
—Terry Pratchett

In the Dreamtime, Day 11

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

The traditional Twelve Days of Christmas last until January 6, Epiphany. Since I begin my Dreamtime walk on the solstice, I give myself a few more days in Dreamtime, and choose my images and words for the year from the soup of my Dreamtime stew on the sixth of January. Perhaps I throw things off by adding a few extra days to my high holy days of winter. The twelve days have particular cosmic significance, being the number of days’ difference between the lunar and solar years. The twelfth day itself is only a partial day. I suppose I could have my Epiphany tomorrow, and then I’d have committed myself to only twelve days of dreaming. But maybe I need a longer gestation period for my ideas and words and images.

This morning, I woke up with the word “Maferefun” in my head. I had been reading an article earlier in the day about religious traditions around the world, and Maferefun is the Yoruba greeting for the holy ones. It means something like, “I greet you. Praise be!” A nice word, I think, to greet the new year, and a reminder to myself that all about me is holy. All carries the spark and imprint of the Creative Mystery. It is our work to notice and to greet it as we see that livingness in the world and the people around us.

Elderly bench that holds me as I sit in the morning, I greet you. Praise be.
Purring cat who wakes me in the dawn, I greet you. Praise be.
Owl calling your family home from hunting, I greet you, Praise be.
Sun soon to rise over the ridge, I greet you. Praise be.

As Peter Mayer says in his sweet song, “Everything is holy now.”

Gratitude List:
1. Slow Starts–Today is Professional Development, and then two days of classes for the week.
2. Setting boundaries
3. Knitting and Crocheting: Making beauty from a knotted piece of string
4. The Enneagram, a thoughtful tool
5. Reading together as a family. Jon bought us a copy of Danny the Champion of the World to read to us this break because he remembered loving it as a child. I missed part of it while I graded yesterday, but I heard the beginning, and the tender ending last night before the children went to bed.

May we walk in Beauty! I greet you! Praise Be!

Words for Wednesday’s Slow Start:
“The Work. I am learning, slowly and in tiny little ways, to stop asking myself what I can get from each moment, but instead what my Work is here in the moment. And realizing, ever so dimly, that when I am really doing my Work (really doing my Work), I am also receiving what I need.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” —Peter Drucker

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly.” —Margaret Fuller

“Brew me a cup for a winter’s night.
For the wind howls loud and the furies fight;
Spice it with love and stir it with care,
And I’ll toast our bright eyes,
my sweetheart fair.”
—Minna Thomas Antrim

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” —T. S. Eliot

“How do we go on living, when every day our hearts break anew? Whether your beloved are red-legged frogs, coho salmon, black terns, Sumatran tigers, or fat Guam partulas, or entire forests, mountains, rivers, lakes, or oceans, or the entire planet, the story is the same, the story of the murder of one’s beloved, the murder of one’s beloved, the murder of one’s beloved.” ―Derrick Jensen, Dreams

ONE OR TWO THINGS
by Mary Oliver from New and Selected Poems: Volume One (Beacon Press)
1
Don’t bother me.
I’ve just
been born.

2
The butterfly’s loping flight
carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of flowers and the black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower.

3
The god of dirt came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,

4
which has nevertheless always been,
like a sharp iron hoof,
at the center of my mind.

5
One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff
flowers of lightning– some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.

6
But to lift the hoof!
For that you need an idea.

7
For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then

the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said,

and vanished into the world.

How Do You Enter?

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings
How do you enter? How do you come? Photo of a photo on the wall of a retirement center.

Gratitude List:
1. Doorways
2. Dreams
3. Sleep
4. Sun in the holler
5. Hopeful baking

May we walk in Beauty!

Words for a Golden Friday:
“Who would I be if I didn’t live in a world that hated women?” —Jessica Valenti

“The heart is right to cry
even when the smallest drop of light, of love, is taken away
Perhaps you may kick, moan, scream—in a dignified silence,
but you are right to do so in any fashion…until God returns to you.”
―Hafiz

“All water is holy water.”
―Rajiv Joseph

“The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.”
―Arundhati Roy

“Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness.
Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.”
―Scott Adams

“You know what breaks me, when someone is visibly excited about a feeling or an idea or a hope or a risk taken, and they tell you about it but preface it with: “Sorry, this is dumb but—.”Don’t do that. I don’t know who came here before me, or who conditioned you to think you had to apologize or feel obtuse. But not here. Dream so big it’s silly. Laugh so hard it’s obnoxious. Love so much it’s impossible. And don’t you ever feel unintelligent. And don’t you ever apologize. And don’t you ever shrink so you can squeeze yourself into small places and small minds. Grow. It’s a big world. You fit. I promise.”
―Owen Lindley

“The bond of our common humanity is stronger than our fears and prejudices.” ―Jimmy Carter

“The reality is we have more in common with the people we’re bombing than the people we’re bombing them for.” ―Russell Brand