From“Woman Built of Stones: A Mother Tries to Write”

Sometimes during the harried first years of raising toddler, then preschooler twins, one with Down syndrome, I escaped through our woods to the creek, Briery Branch, and stacked rocks.

Sometimes I scratched patterns in the sand with sticks. I tried to breathe. I brought a few flat pebbles home for the window ledge above the kitchen sink. 

I thought things were getting better. And then it all toppled over.

In a Zoom session, faces are stacked in a grid with the bottom row smaller but centered. For the first years of the pandemic, we stayed home and lived in Zoom. Jason and I took shifts working in our guest room office and supervising the twins’ Zoom school.

With Sallie, I Zoomed therapies and enrichment sessions. Around teaching, putting the finishing touches on 10-year reaccreditation materials and our institutional quality enhancement plan, and leading my university’s general education revision, I helped Sallie complete each assignment, one painstakingly sounded-out word at a time.

We told Irene she could skip school for the year if she wanted, but she wanted to keep her school iPad, where she illustrated little stories and created long journal entries.

People I loved died.

And Jason’s father Harold had his first stroke. We spent our weekends packing his things and renovating a damaged house next door to us so that he could move in.

A septic system replacement turned our side yard and field into a pile of rocks from our cobbly soil. The towers I built there were huge and heavy, and I was afraid they would smash the children’s toes if they fell awry, so I stopped.

Instead, we danced. Each morning, I opened my laptop, and the girls and I added our faces and bodies to a grid of dancers from around the world.

My colleague Katie Mansfield, who started this community, specializes in embodied strategies for building resilience. Years in, we still dance with Katie almost every day.

We often end with the song, “Resilience,” by Rising Appalachia, a meditation on staying centered in action. The song ends with a glorious roar, and the girls always come running to join us, jostling for position to show their teeth and claws to the camera. 

The tagline for our group is borrowed from a 2013 essay by Alice Walker: “Hard times call for furious dancing.” Walker writes about finding optimism in the face of suffering, loss, environmental devastation and challenging times “beyond the most creative imagination.”

In the essay, she considers the importance of dance to her community, and says of her own dawning awareness of it, “It isn’t that I didn’t know how to dance before. . . . I just didn’t know before how basic it is for maintaining balance.”

Each pandemic morning, we shook the weariness or rage or frustration or anxiety out of our bodies. Balance, shift, find a new balance, keep moving. 

When the twins remember the pandemic, they will remember that we danced every day. And they will remember their mother doing push-ups. After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, I added push-ups to the dance, in honor of her iconic workouts.

I grew up associating exercise with body hatred, so it seemed healthier not to exercise. But now I needed to live a long time, for the girls, for the fights to come. I stacked up the push-ups, a few more each week. Now I do 40 on a good day. 

Maybe it was the dancing; maybe it was strong biceps. Maybe the girls were growing up. I felt a little less out of control. In spite of the chaos. In spite of my mornings and evenings doomscrolling through the newsfeed.

Each day, I balanced the necessary things and let the rest lie scattered all around. Writing seemed unnecessary in the face of everything else.

From“Simple”

I have a clear picture of The Granola Mennonite Dream in the back of my head. In fact, I have a mental Granola Mennonite Dream Scorecard, with bonus points for doing more with less, saving the planet and living a life of service; negative points for fast food and Amazon Prime.

There are no bonus points for dancing on the Granola Mennonite scale. There are no negative points for dancing. Dancing is not really part of our equation. It’s something we can joke about — an act of rebellion against older Mennonite cultures, maybe: Sex might lead to dancing! — but most of our experiences of dancing, if any, come from connections with different cultural contexts. Like one of my colleagues, who says he only dances south of the border. Or my mom, who might still occasionally dance a few steps of thecumbia if the right music came on, remembering her year abroad in Colombia.

One of the dancers in our group shared that she didn’t know how she would have gotten through the pandemic without the dance, waking up to days of “dread and isolation.” 

Post-pandemic, these are the things I think about when I wake up in the morning:

— Climate change.

— Structural racism.

— Genocide and human rights abuses, and how I’m implicated in them as an American.

— Protections needed for immigrants and trans kids.

— Ableism.

— The books my local school board has banned.

— All the women and girls in the country who have lost their bodily autonomy.

— How many guns are in this county.

— Mass societal delusions perpetuated by algorithms, money and the worst parts of human nature.

— That these acres I live on aren’t really mine, and that given the privilege of existing here, I should be taking better care of them, making them more productive while at the same time enriching the soil and diversifying the native plants and creatures.

— That the curriculum I curate at work could make a difference.

— That it could hurt some people.

— That I’m not going to get it right all the time, but it would be far worse not to try.

— That I have more power than I sometimes want to admit, and I shouldn’t hide from it.

— That I need to make a difference, that it’s more than my job to make a difference, it’s my reason to exist, that the things I do need to count. 

It’s the orthopraxy, my friend Aili observed. She grew up granola, then came to the Mennonites, so she has some perspective on these things. Mennonites are deeply focused on correct deeds, on what we need to do to be good. Her diagnosis rings true.

When it comes to faith, I’m happy to leave the details feathery. Does it even matter if God is a person or an idea, as long as They’re part of a good story? Does it matter what faith tradition we come from, as long as we’re rooted in it, drawing the good from it, conscious of its shortcomings, having wise conversation with other traditions?

Butworks! Friends, this world needs so much work, and we Mennonites are here to do it. 

I wake up Mennonite every morning. I need to dance for 20 minutes straight, just so that I can face the day.

Kirsten Eve Beachy lives and writes in Briery Branch, Va., and taught at Eastern Mennonite University for two decades. She attends Shalom Mennonite Congregation in Harrisonburg, Va.

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