On a day when the world is weighty,
dark and dense with need,
I want to be the earthworm
that gives itself over to tunneling,
its every movement an act
of bringing spaciousness.
And when minutes feel crushed by urgency,
I want to meet the world wormlike,
which is to say grounded,
consistent, even slow.
No matter how desperate the situation,
the worm does not tunnel faster
nor burrow more.
It knows it can take decades
to build fine soil.
To whatever is compacted,
the worm offers its good worm work,
quietly bringing porosity
to what is trodden,compressed.
So often, in my rush to repair,
I end up exhausted.
Let my gift to the world be
my constancy, a devotion to openness,
my willingness to be with what is.
Let my gift to myself be patience
as I tend what is dense and dark.
Archive for November, 2022
Lumbricus terrestris
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, density, patience, porosity, spaciousness, worm on November 13, 2022| 15 Comments »
At the Church
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged church, silence on November 13, 2022| 6 Comments »
Come with me, he said,
and he led me up the narrow stairs,
then led me up more narrow stairs
until we arrived in the small sacred nest—
a tiny square room with tall stained glass windows
and two small couches and the kind of silence
one longs to meet—the silence that says,
sister, I have been waiting for you
to climb the narrow stairs to find me.
The silence that says, now that we have found each other
even when you leave,
I will come with you.
Soundtrack
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, dark, friendship, light, music on November 12, 2022| 2 Comments »
Sometimes another person knows our heart
so well they offer us a song that becomes,
at least for a moment, our anthem.
In that moment, listening to lyric and melody,
the entire body re-attunes to life,
each cell turning not only toward the music
but also toward the giver,
and we are led deeper into that strange
and beautiful grotto of our heart
with its mosses and echoes,
a place at once strange and familiar,
and the song becomes a shining remover
of darkness, its light bouncing on our inner walls
until we relearn who we are—
the light of a million suns.
Upcoming Events and a plug
Posted in Uncategorized on November 11, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Writing the Body: An Online Poetry Thoughtshop
with Rosemerry Trommer $12, Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022, 6 – 7 pm MST
From the top of the head to the pinkie toe, the body is a full-blown miracle. In this hour-long thoughtshop, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer shares poems that explore what it is to have a body. Poems will touch on sickness and health, body image, carnality, and a complex celebration of all things physical.
No writing or poetry experience is necessary, and sharing is always optional.
This is a virtual experience via Zoom. This offering will also be recorded, with the recording sent out shortly after the live event.
Register Here! (you need a mind/body account to register. If you are confused or need any help at all with your registration, please call 720-486-9798 or email hello@shyftatmilehigh.org with questions.
*
Soul Writers Circle: New MONDAY MORNING circle
Listen from the heart, write from the soul. The SOUL WRITERS CIRCLE, held one Monday a month for six months, is a chance to join in a small, fun, safe, deeply engaged online community co-led by me and mindfulness teacher, author and psychotherapist Augusta Kantra. No prior experience is required. The only requirement: the willingness to “show up and burn brightly.” To register, or for more info, visit here: https://calmlivingstudio.com/mec-events/soul-writers-circle/
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Spoken & Heard Reading with Sandra Gill and Jon Lee
On November 17, 2022, 5 p..m. mountain time, join Rosemerry and two other amazing poets as we share in the acclaimed Stuarts Opera House reading, hosted by the amazing Kari Gunter-Seymour. Accompanied by ASL interpreters. Rosemerry will be the third reader and she will be sharing poems on gratefulness and loss–especially the two together. To register, visit here: https://tinyurl.com/yc3y4s2z
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Do you get The Marginalian?
I love this weekly (actually twice weekly) newsletter from Maria Popova–full of stories and creative thought weavings around artists, poets, philosophers, scientists and more. A thoughtful, curious blog for thoughtful, curious people. You can sign up for the newsletter at this link
Dear Students of West Side School
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, kids, kindergarten, kindness, school on November 11, 2022| 8 Comments »
Thank you for the pep talk.
When your teacher asked you
to record messages in the phone,
you could not have known
one day your innocent words
would reach this woman in Colorado
and I would sit in my car
and stare at a mountain and press 4
to listen to children laughing
and press 3 to hear a room full of kindergarteners
shouting YOU CAN DO IT,
and it would make me weep.
I imagine you do not yet understand
how something so beautiful
could make a person sob—
a complex, but very real emotion
we don’t have a word for in English.
But perhaps you are already learning
of the ripple effect: How kindness
brings hope. How hope opens us.
How being open can make people cry.
My friend Paula explained it to me this way.
That’s what friends do—
they share the truth with you.
Oh, young friends I have never met,
I thank you for the ripple,
for the way it has recharged in me a tide
so deep that currents leak out.
Thank you for restoring the great inner ocean
that sometimes turns desert, goes dry.
Thank you for reminding me,
pwease, do something you wike,
something that inspiwes you.
I remember now. Oh bless these salty tears.
I remember.
*
If you, too, could use a pep talk, or even if you don’t need one, call anyway: 707-873-7862
Unlikely Camaraderie
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged presence, resistance, separate self, wind on November 10, 2022| 8 Comments »
All day, the wind, the ruthless wind,
unruly, unsettling, relentless wind,
the wind that crashed the leafless trees
and strewed the branches across the streets,
the wind that scraped at my fragile peace
until I was as dismantled as the day—
I notice the part of me that wants
to wish the wind away. I ask it
to sit with me. With little option
except to be present with each other,
we sit together, listen to the wind.
Marvel
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged election, Marvel, movie, peace, villain on November 8, 2022| 6 Comments »
On election night, Thanos grabs some popcorn.
Adds extra butter. Gets cozy in his sweatpants
and sits on his throne of stone. Feels no urge to snap.
He knows he need not do anything but watch
as humanity destroys itself with righteousness, with blame.
He chuckles as he follows the polls, the news.
How the humans cry. They shout. They attack.
What’s a villain to do but sit back and enjoy?
He sips Jack and Coke, keeps an eye on the cosmos.
If there is a song of peace rising in the hearts of some,
he doesn’t hear it beneath the scowling, the jeers.
But I hear peace swelling as if it is necessary, inevitable.
In fact, I am singing it, the way a star sings
hidden inside an apple. And I am not alone.
When the College Propaganda for My Dead Son Arrives in the PO Box
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, loss, mail, mother, recycling on November 8, 2022| 16 Comments »
Sometimes I toss the postcards into recycling
as easily as I would a realtor’s flier.
Sometimes I hold them a long time,
standing in the post office lobby
beside the giant green plastic bin,
staring at his typewritten name—
a name chosen with so much love—
and those glossy squares of paper link me back to a time
when he was here, eager in school,
in love with his brain and what it could do,
dreaming of majors and scholarships.
A woman weeping over junk mail—
that thought is enough to make me laugh
through the tears. The only thing
that makes me more sad
than receiving these letters with his name
is knowing soon they won’t arrive anymore.
There will be nothing in the mailbox with his name.
It’s Going to Take a Long Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, garlic, grief, patience, planting, time on November 6, 2022| 18 Comments »
is what you say when pressing
the garlic cloves into the soil in early November:
five inches down, sprout side up.
But no matter how well one plants them—
preferably six inches apart so they don’t compete
for sunlight or water or space—
it will still be a long time
before green shoots come up.
It’s the same thing I say to myself
as I sit by my husband and weep,
as I’ve done nearly every day
for over a year since our son died.
No matter how well one grieves—
whether the heart is cracked asphalt
or a lush peony—
it’s going to take a long time.
A long time, perhaps forever.
I tell myself, Go ahead,
cry when you think of how he used to race
to the car when you’d come home.
As if I could stop myself.
I cry because my body says cry.
Because I remember the shape
of his body crushed into mine.
Because sometimes my heart
is more dead bird than wing.
Because some things we simply live into.
Winter will come and freeze the dirt.
Next spring, there will be green shoots.
Late summer, we will pull thick bulbs from the earth.
We will welcome the taste, sharp and strong.
After the Three-Day Retreat
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ephemeral, togetherness, work on November 5, 2022| 8 Comments »
Rubbing our eyes,
we sit in a small circle
in the half-lit room,
drinking whiskey
and eating potato chips,
still high on the glow
of good work,
and for a moment,
I see this night for what it is—
radiant as a Japanese maple in fall
blazing vermillion
against a backdrop of brown—
something so wonderful
it couldn’t possible last,
but my god, while it’s happening,
how astonishing, how right.
Ode to the Echo
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged echo, ode, silence, sound on November 4, 2022| 10 Comments »
Sister of silence, you give back to the world
the shadow of every sound you are given.
You reshape the air to unsharpen the shout.
You unshrill the scream until it’s quieter,
quieter,
then nothing at all.
There is no sound so harsh you can’t soften it.
And come song? You re-sing the melody
so beauty will linger like the rich shimmer inside a gong.
Not once have you said your own words.
Not once have you intoned your own tune.
Not once have you heard your own voice
or spoken your own truth.
Not once have you lied.
Not once have you made a promise
you could not keep.
Sometimes, when I am brave,
I try to echo you, which is to say
I let silence enter my inner walls,
where it bounces in me like sound in a cave
until all I hear is the resonant repeat
of the most ancient of languages you speak—
silence, silence, silence.
There is no part of me uneroded,
no part your waves don’t touch.
Exemplar
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, emptiness, loss, nest on November 3, 2022| 7 Comments »
It hides in the rafters,
this tightly woven nest of grass,
brown and humble,
lined with mud.
I would like to hold
this messy vessel in my hands,
as if to hold is understand.
I would like to know
what the nest knows—
how to hold what is fragile,
how to keep life safe,
how it is to be made to be useful,
how it is to be made to be left.
How beautiful it can be
to hold emptiness.
On All Souls
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged all souls, birthday, cemetery, day of the dead, moon, ohio on November 2, 2022| 8 Comments »
In the woods, in the dark
we stood amidst old gravestones,
their engravings mostly scrubbed by time.
And Jon played gong,
Robin played chimes
and Evie played bass recorder.
And Owl read of the wood,
Melissa spoke of good life
and I hummed and played the breath.
We spoke the names
of our beloveds who have left.
Some names were spoken
only in silence.
The half-moon joined our circle,
as if it, too, knew something
of loss. As if it were showing us
that sometimes what appears to be gone
is simply unseen.
We walked home in that half light.
Change in Perspective
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, body, form, perspective, shape on November 2, 2022| 6 Comments »
Everything is made of simple forms,
said the art teacher—
a car, the body, everything.
And for the first time in my life,
I saw myself as an assemblage
of cylinders, spheres, cubes and cones.
It was thrilling, after fifty-three years,
to break down the body this way—
to see my fingers as stems,
my cheekbones as grapes,
my calves as long pinecones.
And for a moment, it all seemed so simple.
I am a constellation of forms that moves
through a larger constellation of forms.
For a moment, I didn’t think of the shapelessness
of ashes that conform to the cube of a box.
For a moment, I knew that wetness
falling from my eyes as just another sphere.
On Halloween
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Audrey Hepburn, halloween, mask, movie, self on November 1, 2022| 4 Comments »
I wake up as myself, but by 8:15 a.m.,
I am wearing a long black dress and long black gloves,
strings of pearls and my long brown hair piled high.
Once again, I am Holly Golightly, spontaneous and flirty,
eccentric and ambitious. How easily I slip into her world.
How quickly I start calling everyone darling.
How instantly I feel doe-eyed and feminine.
Though I am graying. Though I am no longer reed-like
or innocent. Though in real life I only wear yoga pants
and no one would call me glamorous.
How is it that forty years after I first met her
in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I still fall in love with her?
Confident, yet fragile. Elegant, yet humble.
I balance my long black cigarette holder in my hand
and take a long drag of the fake cigarette—
but it’s life I’m pulling deep into my lungs
getting buzzed on blue sky and white snow.
By noon, I have no idea who I am.
By midnight, though I am in yoga pants again,
the credits have yet to roll.