young people

The Greywoman

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In the first part of the dream, there is a premonition of fire. We (I am with a group of people I love) are in a small house in a tiny village high on the side of a mountain in West Virginia. It’s not Philippi, where I spent a couple years of my childhood, but I know it’s WVA. I wake up from sleeping in my dream, my head filled with fire. I see the town, the whole mountainside blazing. In my dream within a dream, the house was engulfed in flames, and I was screaming that there wouldn’t be enough time to get out. I felt the pure knowledge that I was going to die. When I wake up from the dream-in-a-dream, I know that the conflagration will be started by extra rail ties that were stacked up beside the railroad tracks. I can see the initiating spark on the one tie as it tumbles down the mountainside.

But we have things to do, a funeral to attend in the larger town down at the foot of the mountain. I think that town is in Virginia because of who we meet at the funeral. All along the road to the town, I keep looking for signs of fire, keep thinking I smell fire., but nothing happens, and the dream is no longer about fire.

The funeral is for a young woman in her late teens. I don’t know how she died. At the doors of the little church (it’s one of those tiny churches which is basically all sanctuary) stands my Great Aunt Lydia. In life she wasn’t more than 5’3”, but here she is almost six feet tall, ramrod straight, solid, protectively fierce.She is dressed all in grey with a grey hat on her head (though that was not the tradition in her church in real life). I realize that she is the one who is in charge of the funeral. She hugs me, lovingly but business-like: she has a job to do. A tiny woman in green hugs me. I realize she is also a great aunt, but I can’t remember her name. She says she is Aunt Carol (there is no Aunt Carol in my waking life family tree).

In the church, I sit a couple pews behind my grandmother. We don’t greet each other, but it is not awkward or rude–we’re there for a purpose. Most of the people in the church are elders with a few middle aged folks scattered in. The funeral starts, and the youth group comes out of a front room. They’re in charge. They do a series of chants and songs and games, like you’d do in camp or youth group. It’s playful and spirited, and I know Aunt Lydia approves. Two of the younger youth begin a dance battle, and then the elders intervene a little and gently turn it into a sort of line dance or quiet conga line to forestall the energy getting out of control. Everyone understands that this is the youth group’s way of celebrating the life of their beloved friend.

That’s the end of the dream. It’s been a while since I have had such a potent dream. This one feels like something. You know how it is? My mind has been on Maui, so perhaps that’s why the fire dream. Still, I wonder if there was a message about learning to interpret my intuitions. What I love most is the sense of being surrounded by the great aunts and grandmothers, and how they were watching out for the young ones, letting them be their glorious selves and experience their grief in their own ways, but also guiding.

I was aware throughout the walk to the church and while I was seated in the church, of the weight against my waist of the pouch holding my magical doll.

And here am I, in the waking world, with a life that is spent in guiding teenagers to be their best, most fulfilled and joyful selves. I think the spirits and ancestors are offering their help.

The other day, one of my beloveds asked during a conversation, whether the rest of us thought that people are generally acting from their best selves. This has been the conundrum I ask myself when I wake in the middle of the night to try to make myself go back to sleep. Last night, before the dream, during my insomnia hours, I began to think about how, if we’re not examining our inner selves, if we’re not in touch with our own motivations, we’re probably more likely to act in self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, in a bid for attention and fame, or power and domination, or wealth. Or worse, to see others abased or demeaned. Did I experience a little glee last night when I heard about the indictments? Part of me excuses that as human nature, especially because it represents justice being done to a group of people who were actively manipulating others for power and domination. But part of me also asks myself to do a little better. To keep doing better.

Gratitude List:
1. Messages in dreams
2. Help from the ancestors
3. Road trip: Today is my last day of summer and I am going to go to the National Shrine at Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto in Emmitsburg, MD. Before I head west, I am going to drive to Columbia to the statue of Quan Am.
4. The way people circle round to create a bowl to hold each other
5. The morning’s quiet breezes and walnut leaves twirling down
May we walk in Beauty!

“Whoever you are,
now I place my hand upon you,
that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear.
I have loved many women and men,
but I love none better than you.”
—Walt Whitman, “To You”

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” —Salman Rushdie

“I used to say, ‘There is a God-shaped hole in me.’ For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.” —Salman Rushdie

“Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.”
—Hafez

“The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.” —Hildegard of Bingen

“Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.” —St. Hildegard of Bingen

“The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.” —Howard Zinn

“Dominance. Control. These things the unjust seek most of all. And so it is the duty of the just to defy dominance and to challenge control.” —Robert Fanney

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.” —Alice Walker

“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.” —Alice Walker

“I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way…I can’t apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to… We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful…We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.” —Alice Walker

“There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.” ―Linda Hogan
****”
“Underlying symptoms that typify the Midlife Passage is the assumption that we shall be saved by finding and connecting with someone or something new in the outer world. Alas, for the drowning midlife sailor there are no such life preservers. We are in the sea-surge of the soul, along with many others to be sure, but needing to swim under our own power. The truth is simply that what we must know will come from within. If we can align our lives with that truth, no matter how difficult the abrasions of the world, we will feel healing, hope and new life. The experience of early childhood, and later of our culture, alienated us from ourselves. We can only get back on course by reconnecting with our inner truths.” —James Hollis

“Having a lover/friend who regards you as a living growing criatura, being, just as much as the tree from the ground, or a ficus in the house, or a rose garden out in the side yard… having a lover and friends who look at you as a true living breathing entity, one that is human but made of very fine and moist and magical things as well… a lover and friends who support the criatura in you… these are the people you are looking for. They will be the friends of your soul for life. Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows.” —Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power.

Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.”
—Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames, The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

Tend Your Spirit

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 6 Comments
Mending and tending

Stop. Sit still. Breathe in and out, in and out.
Now wiggle your shoulders and neck.
Shift and straighten your spine.
Drop your shoulders.
Unclench your jaw.
Breathe and breathe and breathe.
What was that about? What were you holding so tightly in all those spaces and crevices and pockets? Rage? Anxiety? Disappointment? Fear?
Name the Feeling People who inhabit your body. Ask them what they have to tell you about yourself in the world right now.

We need everybody’s voices right now. We need everybody working for change. Racism and white supremacy won’t be dismantled in a day. It’s been the defining principle for way too long, and people have been trying to break it for a long, long time. But there’s a movement afoot, and it need us all on deck, doing our parts. But you have to rest, too, sister. You have to tend your own tender spirit, brother. Now might be a good time to pick up a new spiritual practice that helps to anchor you in the midst of this transformative storm.

Pray. Make energy webs that knit and protect, that send along the message of change and justice. Meditate. Make art. Write poems. Pet a cat. Watch the birds. Drink lots of water. Stretch your body. Take intentional breaks from the streets, from social media, from thinking about it. You know you’ll get back to the work when you’re strong enough. Tend Your Spirit. We need you healthy and whole, working in whatever way you work best to help turn this massive ship in the direction of a just and safe future for all. It’s okay to look away for a little while, and breathe.

Gratitude List:
1. The young people who are galvanizing the movement.
2. Tens of thousands of people are in the streets demanding change. Don’t let the dominator’s narrative hide that fact. Let’s keep our language clear: This is not “The Riots.” This is a social movement demanding police accountability and an end to white supremacy. There are thousands upon thousands of people taking that word to the physical streets and to social media. That’s a great and marvelous thing.
3. Friends checking in with each other. Keep doing that. Keep making sure your friends are okay. Keep the network lively. Take care of each other.
4. All the resources! Books to read, wise thinkers to follow on social media, lists of black-owned businesses to support, ways to attack our own internal biases. Keep passing those around!
5. The graphic pattern of black and white on the back of that downy woodpecker, and the way his head is shining red.

Love Mercy. Do Justice. Walk Humbly–in Beauty.

“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel. . .is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin

“Give yourself to love.” ―Kate Wolf

“So it turns out that the ‘blemish’ is actually essential to the beauty. The ‘deviation’ is at the core of the strength. The ‘wrong turn’ was crucial to you getting you back on the path with heart.” —Rob Brezsny

“For a breath or two, to have been inside this Ka‘ba of the heart,
praying from the inside.
Breathe in God, breathe out God.
The one who adores is the One adored.
The lover is the beloved, is love itself.
Bathed in light
Being with the one we love.” ―Omid Safi

“We become each other’s stories when we listen to each other closely.” —Mara Eve Robbins at TEDxFLOYD

“Come on Mr Frodo. I can’t carry it for you―but I can carry you!” ―Sam Gamgee (JRR Tolkien)

Glinda to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz: “You’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.”

“Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.” ―Maya Angelou

Young People

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude of Resistance Seventeen:
Young adults. My niblings (the children of my siblings), my former students, a whole cadre of young people who are the children of my friends whom I have come to know and appreciate as friends of my own. I am grateful for the earnestness, the twisting humor, the open-eyed awareness, the focus on the work of their creative lives, the care for Earth and her people.

May we walk in Beauty!

Beating Inside Us

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Monday’s Quotations:

“my god
is not waiting inside a church
or sitting above the temple’s steps
my god
is the refugee’s breath as she’s running
is living in the starving child’s belly
is the heartbeat of the protest
my god
does not rest between pages
written by holy men
my god
lives between the sweaty thighs
of women’s bodies sold for money
was last seen washing the homeless man’s feet
my god
is not as unreachable as
they’d like you to think
my god is beating inside us infinitely”
―Rupi Kaur
***
There are Mornings
even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer, I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot
calls for me to live, be ordinary,
say nothing to anyone.
Inside the house,
the mirrors burn when I pass.
―Lisel Mueller
***
“Keep strenuously toiling along this path,
do not rest until the last breath;
for that last breath may yet bring the blessings
from the Knower of all things.”
~Rumi
***
“A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone’s skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?” ―Oscar A. Romero
***
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.” ―Terence McKenna
***
“Nature is alive and talking to us. This is not a metaphor.” ―Terence McKenna
***
“And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”
—Raymond Carver
***
“Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open, it jumped out the window.” ―Henry James
***
Orientation
by Maya Stein

Just east of certainty. A little south of courage. A hair’s
width from ease. Clicks away from ready. A turn
or two from acceptance. A shuffle from faith. A set of stairs
from achievement. A riverbed from happiness. A handspan from
peace. A wink away from freedom. A few lines until the poem’s
done. A highway, a night’s sleep, a phone call, a touch, a rotation
of gears away from that certain yes that tells you where you are is
exactly where you need to be. I know, the signs can look as if they’re missing,
and the map so distant and unclear.
But I’m telling you, you aren’t lost. You’re never lost. You’re always here.

Gratitude List:
1. Last night as we got out of the car after a day away, we heard a funny squealing sound in the sycamore tree, then another in the dogwood. Finally, clear and perfect, a screech owl’s whinny from the walnut in DiAngelos’ yard. I am almost positive that some babies were talking to their mama. I’m fond of the screech owl wingfolk.
2. The perfect trio of flowers are blooming on the roadsides again. every year I look for them: day lily, Queen Anne’s Lace, and chicory. Probably none of them are natives–sigh–but then again, neither am I, really.
3. These young people. Coffee this morning with an incredibly thoughtful and wise young man who used to be a student of mine, who is as articulate about the nature of the universe and science and spirituality as anyone I’ve heard. And after supper tonight with friends at the Taj Mahal, a chance meeting with one of my Waldorfans from so many years ago–bright and shining soul she is.
4. Women in Black. Meeting with some of the WiB I haven’t seen in a long time.
5. A cool place on a hot night. We’re all sleeping in the living room tonight so we can be near the air conditioner.

May we walk in Beauty!

Strain Train Rain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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“The courageous don’t lose their fear. They simply transform it.” –Climbing Poetry

Here’s a poetic form I found on Robert Lee Brewer’s “Poetic Asides” blog. It’s called diminishing verse. The poem is in three-line stanzas with no rules about syllables or metric feet. You choose an ending word that is able to be diminished from the front, one letter or sound at a time. I am going to try strain-train-rain and see what happens:

For ten long weeks, we have felt the strain,
each thirsty day arriving like a dry and dusty train,
but finally–this dawning brings us rain.

There are some interesting possibilities here. I would like to try some with line endings where the thought continues on to the next line.  Strip-trip-rip might be an interesting one to play with. (The str- word-opening is a good one to use because of the series of three initial consonants.)  Cram-ram-am. It’s a fun little game just to make up the word series. I might enlist my children to help me with that part.

Gratitude List:
1. Kate Dicamillo, writer of short-chapter easy-read children’s books. My boys and I have been reading them this week. We have always liked her Mercy Watson books, but she has taken three characters from Mercy Watson’s stories and given them stories of their own. Leroy Ninker Saddles Up, Francine Poulet Meets the Ghost Raccoon,  and my favorite, Where Are You Going, Baby Lincoln? They are lovely parables for adults as well as for children.
2. Someone once suggested politely that I should not put coffee on my gratitude lists because it is a drug, an artificial stimulant. But of course, I will put on my list whatever I please, and while I recognize its addictive effects on my body and brain, I am really grateful this morning for coffee because of a tossandturn night. For three mornings running, I woke up at 4:44 on the dot. I took my body in hand last night and told it that it had to wait until after 5 to wake up. It could even have a four if it wanted to and wake up at 5:24. Perhaps it panicked–I woke up repeatedly throughout the night, and I am supremely grateful for coffee this morning to set me on the path to wakefulness.
3. Deep breaths. Another good waker-upper.
4. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. It could rain for days now, and I would be happy. My classroom is a pleasant temperature. The air feels clear and fresh. The gentle sounds of rain are soothing. The land is sighing in relief.
5. The open-heartedness of young people.

May we walk in Beauty!