for Linda Keetch
In a room where I have never been,
I walk in to find a small brown teddy bear
sits on a couch. Envelope in his lap.
On the envelope, my name.
There are thousands, maybe millions
of ways people show up to say
I am here to help you carry
the weight of your life.
This is how a light tan bear
who sits at eight inches tall
is big enough to embody
a forest-sized compassion.
This is how the soft plush of his belly
becomes a wide portal
through which love can reach
to meet us exactly as we are,
which changes nothing
and everything.
Archive for April, 2025
The Bear
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, friendship, gift on April 30, 2025| 2 Comments »
This moment I want to remember,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bathing, friendship, joy, seeing, vulnerability on April 29, 2025| 4 Comments »
when my friend filled the giant
white stone resin tub with great mounds
of frothy eucalyptus lemon
scented bubbles and water as hot
as she could stand and I walked in
to find her laughing, laughing!
head thrown back and eyes alive
with her great luck to find herself
here “in a millionaire’s bathtub,”
her giddy giggles ricocheting
around the tiled room, radiating
gladness and naked joy, and though
only her head was visible above the bubbles,
I saw her, really saw her as herself,
the uncurated version—that glorious
creature we so seldom chance to glimpse
in each other. As I walked away, her voice
followed me up the stairs, full-throated
and citrus bright as she sang out
her bliss, the words indecipherable,
the tune a tune I’d never heard before
but somehow knew by heart.
Sitting Beside the Meyer Lemon Tree with Sherry
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, identity, legacy effect on April 28, 2025| 8 Comments »
I wasn’t thinking about the roots.
I was thinking of the intensely sweet
perfume, both heavy and bright
in the cool spring air.
I was thinking how much scent
comes from such small creamy flowers,
and how I wanted to save this floral
fragrance like a portal for remembering Sherry
in her black and white boots,
her red poppy necklace, her red spectacles,
and the conversation we had earlier
about what she called “The Legacy Effect”
in which we honor how events
and actions from long ago
still affect who we are today—
like the way she longs to find
the woman from college
who scrunched down her ankle socks
instead of folding them neatly down.
Sherry wants to write her a thank you letter
for changing the way she saw the world—
starting with her socks!
Enamored as I was with the lemon tree scent,
only later did it occur to me to thank not just
the flowers but the roots—shallow and fibrous.
How many roots are inside each of us,
spreading way beyond our own canopy?
How long would the thank you list be
if we named everyone and everything
that made us who we are? How invisible
and essential. Our perfume is their legacy.
The Gathering
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, glass, laughter, sea, softening on April 27, 2025| 3 Comments »
for Ali and Sherry
Laughter, it softens us,
just hours ago I was
broken glass, but now
after giggling through
dinner and flopping
on the unmade bed
it’s as if I’ve been tumbled
in a warm and shallow sea,
waves of laughter doing
what waves do—
rubbing my sharp edges
against the grit of life
until I feel like a treasure,
like something that belongs
here in your hands.
Water Speak
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged goodbye, language, lovers, river, water on April 25, 2025| 4 Comments »
When you say goodbye
fill each syllable with the sound
of the river as it kisses the shore
just beyond our window,
then, no matter what words you say,
I will hear the unending waves,
will smell the musty,
earthy scent on my skin
long after the words are gone.
There is home in the way
your words cling to me
like water beads on my skin.
This is how I remember
where I am from.
Then What Might I Do?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hope, hummingbird, inner wisdom, migration on April 24, 2025| 5 Comments »
There is nothing more hopeful
than hearing the whirr of the first black-chinned
hummingbird returning to the feeder,
knowing he has flown five hundred miles
to arrive at my porch within hours
of the same time the black-chinneds arrived last year
and the year before and the year before.
What inner directive is still intact,
despite the chaos that breeds all around?
I want to show up that faithfully.
Want to listen to the wisdom within
that says This is the way, now go,
go, go, and trust I have the strength
to do so, though the way is long,
though the world is vast, though
the trip must be made alone. If
this tiny bird can fly through cold fronts,
headwinds, hard and heavy rain.
If it can wing across vast open waters.
If it can arrive and make a new nest.
What I Heard Her Say
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, immensity, pep talk, self actualization, self awareness on April 23, 2025| 7 Comments »
with thanks to Kayleen
It is true, you are too much for some—
especially those who have not yet learned
they carry the sea inside them. Especially
those who still want to fit their lives
into small, dry boxes with tight-fitting tops.
But there will be some who desperately need you
to show up every bit as immense as you are,
not one drop smaller, need you to be unashamedly
vast and deep and full of strange things
neither you nor they can understand.
Maybe it’s just one person who needs you
to be that big. Maybe that person is you.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Ways to Open
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forgiveness, opening, stuck on April 22, 2025| 10 Comments »
There’s the lilac way, impulsive,
shrugging out of hard bud scales
while the nights are still cold,
then flooding the world
with the sweet perfume of vulnerability.
Or the way a housefly opens its wings,
almost mechanical,
prompted by a pulse that triggers
marionette-like pulleys and hinges.
There’s the wine way, sensual, responsive
to air, like how a glass of sauvignon blanc
opens into a meadow with a fresh cut path
through tall green grass with wet stones,
flanked by asparagus and nettles.
I am thinking now, of how tightly I’ve closed
my mind around a certain thought.
How impossible the unclenching seems,
though all around me are proofs
of how naturally things might open—
open the way a child will open his hand
to his mother when he desperately wants to be held.
Open the way a sky does when afternoon clouds
evaporate and all that is left is blue.
Open the way a life does when,
through what grace, we learn again
we can forgive.
The Third Option
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bathing, frame, middle way, nondual thinking, survival on April 21, 2025| 12 Comments »
We have two options only: bow or break.
— Maria Popova, The Marginalian
I am learning there is a third option: bathe.
—Winifred Nimrod, The Metta Newsletter, April 21, 2025
When Wini tells me the third option is bathe,
my whole body relaxes, as if I’ve just slipped
into the warm tub of the moment and now I am steeping
in the truth of the middle way, submerging myself
in the liminal waters of how it is we live between extremes.
I’ve always wondered how we get clean—
sure, we scrub away at whatever stories we’ve told ourselves,
but then we sit and stew in our own debris.
Still, when Wini said “bathe,” I felt how the word
took my mind out of its deep twin channels and invited
a plunge into something new—that place where
I might soak in the world as it is, full body, part broken,
part bow, soap mingling with grime,
my fingers starting to wrinkle as I slide deeper in.
Lots of Bits of Great News!
Posted in Uncategorized on April 20, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Interview on Loss in Global Heart
How does love continue to grow after loss? I am so grateful for Global Heart for sharing this interview about devastation after loss, about how we speak about grief with others, about writing as a way to meet loss, and the yin and yang energies of writing. Plus four poems from my newest book The Unfolding.
*
Interview with Danusha Laméris on Emerging Form
How is a poetic practice like faith? I was so excited when I asked poet Danusha Laméris what was most exciting for her these days in her creative process and THAT was the question she was asking herself. We talk about this, how she thinks all art comes from an “irritant” we struggle with our whole lives, how a writing practice grows us, the role of trust in creative practice, and the relationship between creative practice and time. You can listen to our conversation on my podcast on creative process, Emerging Form, which I cohost with my bestie, science writer Christie Aschwanden. This episode with Danusha just came out on Thursday—and there are over a hundred more free main episodes you can listen to, too! Plus bonus content for paid subscribers. Find out more here.
*
Poem in ONE ART Haiku Anthology
If you’ve been subscribing to the daily poems for a while, you know I love very short poems, and I am delighted to have one of my haikulings (what I like to call my three-line poems) accepted into the ONE ART 2025 Haiku Anthology. You can read this fabulous collection here.
*
Celebrating Earth Day with Poetry and One Earth Sangha
For Earth Day, I am so happy to have a poem published by One Earth Sangha—a poem that celebrates this world—how unique, how fragile, how singular. What is our work as stewards to this beautiful planet? What lens must we use to see how essential it is for us to do everything we can to care for it? Feel free to share this link with your own Earth Day celebrations and gatherings.
*
Pure Imagination: A Poetry Thoughtshop Drawing on One of Our Greatest Gifts
April 24, 6-7 MT,
Zoom, recording available
sliding scale
The effort of the imagination is to turn the boundary into a horizon because there is no end point for you. The boundary says, Here and no further. The horizon says, Welcome.
—Barry Lopez, Horizons (short film by Jeremy Seifert)
How do we envision a better world for ourselves, for others? How do we dream into the world we most want to inhabit? How can imagination enrich not only our creative practice but our lives? What might happen if we let ourselves think new thoughts and form new ideas beyond what is right in front of us … Let’s find out together. In this one-hour webinar-style thoughtshop, join poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer as she reads and talks about poems that blossom out of the real and welcome us into the realm of infinite possibility. She will then offer invitations for you to do your own writing later. There will be time for questions and responses. After the event, all who register will receive a link to the recording, links to the poems she reads, plus the writing invitations. To register, visit here.