I remember the day I stopped
believing that. Then everything
was sky.
Archive for September, 2025
As It All Comes Down
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, grief, hiking, inner landscape, intimacy, marriage on September 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »
On the day his brother died,
we walked, mostly silent.
The old aspen trees were tall
and dead. In a meadow, we found
a single yellow flower where almost
all else was brown. The air carried
the wild scent of elk, dank, sweet.
And the wind made of dry grass
an epiphany of sound.
But it was the quiet landscape
inside us that was most changed.
In a voice so bare I could hardly hear,
he said, These are the days
that bring us closer together.
Because: Cinepoem from RISKING LOVE
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cinepoem, loving the world, Risking Love on September 12, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Feeling helpless? Hopeless? In every moment, the constant invitation: Be ridiculously courageous in love. As if the world depends on it. “Because” is the fourteenth track on RISKING LOVE, a spoken-word album that explores how we might fall more deeply in love with the world as it is, even when that seems impossible.
This short video of one of my most popular poems was created by Holiday Mathis. PLEASE–SHARE THIS VIDEO. With a friend. With your family. With a colleague.
RISKING LOVE has 15 tracks–this is #14. It’s a collaboration with audio by Steve Law. Video by Holiday Mathis. To purchase RISKING LOVE, visit here. Spotify: here Deezer: here Pandora: here Apple Music: here YouTube Music: here
Adapting
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged adapting, love, loving the world, moss on September 12, 2025| Leave a Comment »
The way moss softens
the edges of what is hard.
The way it thrives in shadow.
Oh heart. The work
of loving the world
can look so much
like moss doing
what moss does—
growing in places
that seem uninhabitable.
It doesn’t even need roots
to survive.
On the Eve of His 21st Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, gratefulness, grief, photo, sadness, tears on September 11, 2025| 18 Comments »
There is a joy that chases sadness
and sometimes overtakes it, as if
the two are racing down a hill,
their shadows sometimes merging—
and this is how a woman looking at a photo
of her son when he was still alive,
his face radiant with elation,
might find herself not knowing
if her tears are made of gratefulness
or sorrow, two parallel emotions
that sometimes twine inside us.
Nor does it matter to her.
Gratefulness. Sorrow. It seems right
she should weep either way.
Both feelings are fashioned from love.
She is here for all of it.
The salt tastes just the same.
Sitting in a Quiet Room
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, silence, worry on September 8, 2025| 4 Comments »
with thanks to Karly Pitman
There is this stark moment
when I see I am not my worry.
When I do not chastise
myself for worrying, nor
do I demonize the worry.
I do not imagine the worry
as a snake or a tick or a nail.
I welcome it into my lap,
uncomfortable teacher,
and pause here
on the hard chair of curiosity.
Softness arrives with conscious breath.
In and around me blooms
spaciousness.
Silence is the tenderest lullaby.
It holds both the worry and me.
It has no tongue, yet the lyric is clear,
There is nothing here you cannot meet.
When Worry Showed Up Again
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged pond, presence, worry on September 7, 2025| 6 Comments »
It slithered in snakelike, the worry,
and hissed in a sinister whisper,
What if you said too much?
Why can’t you just be quiet?
I felt its eyes measure my long, bare throat,
felt its fangs against my skin.
Doubt in my safety flooded in.
But I did not speak back.
Instead, on instinct, my body
took me to the noon-bright pond
to float like a leaf on my back.
I felt the water lifting me.
Felt the summer-warm kiss of sun.
Listened to dragonflies moving
the reeds as they landed
and took off again. Listened to trees
rustled by wind. The more present
I was in my body, the less strangled
by worry I felt. The more I could see
how worry wasn’t everything,
the easier I could breathe.
Hours later, I marvel how the body,
knew just what to do,
an ancient wisdom moving through.
Of course the snake didn’t disappear.
I still hear its disturbing, insistent hiss:
What if, it insinuates. What if, what if …
But it’s harder now to believe the snake
when I feel more aligned with what’s here.
What’s here? The heart ever learning
to open, to trust. The wonder of having
a voice at all. The wondering what I am
here to learn. Dozens of dragonflies.
Reeds. A slender snake of worry. Trees.
Sun. Pond. Wind.
Multitudes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, hiking, self, time on September 7, 2025| 2 Comments »
Over twenty years ago I walked
this same trail to Hope Lake
and crossed the same creeks
and picked my way through
the same talus which is always
falling in the path. I gathered
ripe raspberries and stared
at the red peaks all around.
Who was I then? A stranger
with my same name. I don’t
blame her for not knowing
she was young. As we climb,
I hold her hand. We don’t
say anything, I don’t want
to scare her. And who is that,
waiting for us at the edge?
Some future version of me
I can’t quite make out, but
her arms are open. Her smile
says she were expecting us.
And though it’s about to rain,
we all slip out of our clothes
to slip into the deep blue lake.
Quick, I say to all my selves,
and as one, we enter in.
Long after we leave the lake,
inside me, they continue to swim.
A Scrap in Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, dahlia, flower, garden, time on September 6, 2025| 5 Comments »
Something about the relentless beauty
of the dahlias this year makes me forget
lists and calls and news and aches as
I stand beside them in a splendor stupor,
watching them bloom in real time, not
wanting to miss a moment of the long stems
rising, the red color deepening then fading
from the petals as they age. I imagine a time lapse
begins, and the world’s winter white, then greening
again, and now a hundred years pass,
now five hundred, a thousand, and the garden
bed is gone and the fence is gone and
the trees and the ditch and the home
are gone, and there’s no way to know
this was once a place where dahlias grew.
Is it any wonder, then, I call to you, ask you
to come stand here with me to watch
the dahlias open themselves to the sun,
each petal a hymn to the present,
a history soon to be forgotten, a shimmer in time
we might put in a vase and marvel as
all around it the whole world spins.
Changling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, impermanence on September 4, 2025| 6 Comments »
one more thing that doesn’t last—
this wanting things
to stay the same
New Cinepoem from Risking Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cinepoem, Risking Love, surrender on September 4, 2025| Leave a Comment »
What happens when we fall in love with the world without trying to change it? Can we? This poem was written from a first line offered by Mirabai Starr.
“The Medicine of Surrender” is the thirteenth track on RISKING LOVE, a spoken-word album that explores how we might fall more deeply in love with the world as it is, even when that seems impossible.
RISKING LOVE audio by Steve Law. Video by Holiday Mathis. Please, watch the video (above) and share it. We made this for you!
To purchase RISKING LOVE, visit here. Spotify: here. Deezer: here. Pandora: here. Apple Music: here. YouTube Music: here
Video and Audio Releases from RISKING LOVE to Date
Safety Net
The Precious Matter of Love
I Want an Interlude with Mr. Clean
Into the Questions
For the One Who Is Gone
In Case You Don’t Know Already
The Long Marriage
The Broken Heart Goes Dancing
Still Here
Self-Portrait as Tuning Fork
Because My Heart Is Where You Now Dwell
No Longer Empty-Handed
The Medicine of Surrender
Those of Us Who Choose to Turn Toward Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged community, grief, guinea pig on September 3, 2025| 6 Comments »
Somehow we find each other,
though our gathering
doesn’t fix or change the loss,
there is tenderness, even beauty,
in coming together. I have read
in Switzerland it’s illegal to own
just one guinea pig.
It’s considered animal abuse
because they are social beings.
We, too, are social beings.
Perhaps we don’t sniff and nudge
and squeak and rumble strut,
but we cradle, we hum, we hold.
We whisper soft encouragement.
Light candles. Offer tissues. Hug.
There are times when I deeply need
to be alone with my grief. Even then,
curled into myself, quiet in a quiet dark room,
even then I am held by the certainty
I am not alone. What a gift we give
to ourselves, to each other,
when, in our grief, we enter
the circle of those who grieve
and meet each other with open hands
and say I see you, brother, I see you,
sister. I know it isn’t easy. Here I am.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Gesture
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gesture, involuntary movement, long marriage, love on September 2, 2025| 4 Comments »
I love when he puts his fingers
to his lips and holds them there,
as if creating a tiny place to hide.
It’s like a cloud attempting
to hide the whole sky.
When we first met,
I began to do it, too,
hold my fingers to my lips
as if in this way I might become
a little more him. It felt like
trying on someone else’s shoes.
And then there were the years
I wanted nothing between us,
and I felt a small slice of anger
each time he’d cover his face.
This is the way of old love.
What first attracts us then repels,
then one day attracts us again
as we learn to love the other
without trying to change them.
There he is now, on the couch,
three fingers pressed to his lips.
I love the man I see and
the man he tries to hide.
At some point, my longing
to change him became the cloud.
All along, he was the sky.
In the Dark of the Cinema
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged audience, cinema, daughter, film, letting go, mother, movie, snuggling on September 1, 2025| Leave a Comment »
My daughter dangles
her legs over mine.
I rest my head on her
shoulder. Is it true
every film is an exploration
of how growth depends
on letting something go?
Or is it simply the glasses
I wear, lenses grubby
from tears, that make it
seem this way? All I know
is it’s easier to practice
letting go when
we’re curled in together,
her hand pressed into mine,
tears sliding down
both of our cheeks,
scent of popcorn
thick in the air,
and all around us
others sniffling, too,
the light blue against
our upturned faces.