There in the church of poetry
beneath fluorescent lights
on a makeshift stage,
one naked heart
after another came to the mic
and through words and breath
they turned wound into blossom
again and again until the evening
became a giant bouquet
of the unbearable being borne.
It is a terrible gift to make beauty
out of suffering,
and this is the gift we most need.
But what stays with me, too,
was how each time a poet was called up,
a woman in the middle of the audience
with a voice made of equal parts
midnight and salve
would croon low and smooth,
Let’s go, poet.
Each time she spoke it,
she made a red carpet out of sound,
a generous path for the poet to step onto.
Each time, she spoke it,
I felt my whole being soften and open
through the alchemy of encouragement.
This, too, the gift we most need—
to dare to turn toward
what makes each other bleed.
This, too, transforms wound into generous bloom,
the gift of hearing and hailing,
honoring each other’s humanness,
saying yes, I see you, I see you.
Posts Tagged ‘humanness’
The Spreading
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, daisies, humanness, kindness, love, monks, wounds on February 10, 2026| 6 Comments »
There’s a place in my brain where hate won’t grow.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Jerusalem”
Sometimes a seed of compassion
slips into my brain and lands in a place
where before only anger could grow.
These seeds appear
when I stop seeing humans
as only our actions and start
seeing all of us as walking wounds.
They appear when I see others
finding ways to be generous, to be kind.
If I offer the seed the barest scrap
of attention, it begins to grow roots.
Then a stem. Then seed leaves.
More leaves. A bud. But what allows
for this growth is far beyond me—
rather some gift that comes through
when me and my story get out of the way.
This is how I sometimes come to find
a whole field of inner daisies thriving
in a place I once torched to the dirt.
At first, they needed my constant care.
Then they reseeded again. And again.
They spread into such unpredictable
places. Sometimes outside my inner world.
The same way the seeds arrived in me.
Through kindness. Through love.
It’s beautiful.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Dear friends,
Today was day 120 of the monks walking from Texas to Washington DC to bring awareness to mindfulness and peace, compassion and connection. Today, after 2,300 miles, they arrived. What an amazing way to shine light on what is good inside all of us. How do we embody peace instead of arguing for it? What a question to live into.
Creatures, All
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged animal, body, delight, humanness, prayer, sound on August 18, 2025| 6 Comments »
I love the small sounds of pleasure
people make when taking the first
sip of coffee, or when sitting, at last,
after standing for hours. That soft
hum of delight that escapes the lips
when someone presses a thumb
into the arch of our foot and makes
small circles on the sole. That sigh
that flies out when we step into shade
on a relentlessly sunny day. Bless these
moments when the mind can’t outbrain
the animal living inside us, when
our untamed self slips through the cage
of decorum and groans or purrs
or moans or gasps and reminds us
that beneath all our fancy syntax
and pretty words, we’re creatures.
Every triumphant roar and ecstatic howl
is proof of our common primitive tongue.
Fluent in human, we praise in squeals,
blissful giggles, grateful throaty grunts.
A Brief, Incomplete and Disordered Entry on Humanness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged humanness, rhyme on April 25, 2024| 4 Comments »
inspired by a line from Gwendolyn Brooks
We real. We feel.
We rise. We loss.
We stall. We fall.
We candle. We moth.
We flag. We tune.
We plunder the moon.
We wish. We rash.
We ravage. We crash.
We cry. Retry.
Forgetful, we why.
Why? We pray.
We star. We clay.
We find. Remind.
We shed. We climb.
We slip. We heal.
We hurt. We real.
Going Deeper Into the Mystery
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blame, failure, grace, grief, humanness on October 23, 2023| 18 Comments »
I don’t know why I did not see
my son’s choice to take his life as a failure.
Not as his failure. Not as mine.
Not the failure of the world.
Not the failure of his friends.
It’s not as if I’m a stranger to failure—
I who can endlessly beat myself up
just for failing to remember to return a call.
I don’t know why I did not need to blame.
Don’t know why I didn’t rail at God.
Why I didn’t contract
into a crumpled ball of shame.
I don’t know what grace stepped in
and turned my heart again and again
toward compassion, toward humanness.
Don’t know why it only occurred to me
to love him. To be gentle with myself.
I don’t know why the world
met my broken heart with such generosity,
obliterating any walls of failure
before I could even fashion the bricks.
I don’t know how it works,
this mystery of acceptance,
but it saved me,
never trying to rewrite the story,
asking nothing of me except
that I let myself be led through every moment
by what I cannot know.
At the Market
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged farmer's market, humanness, kindness on July 1, 2023| 13 Comments »
Now when I walk through the market,
I think of how someone else here
beside the stir-fry cart and the tie-dye tent
has just lost a beloved
and is hiding tears behind sunglasses.
Not knowing who they are,
I try to treat everyone with kindness.
Meanwhile the day is beautiful
for everyone, no matter how broken,
how whole our hearts. It gathers us all
in a grand blue embrace.
Part of me resists calling it a miracle.
The other part calls it what it is
and strolls through the miracle
of Friday morning surrounded by arugula
and strawberries, muffins, lilies,
and all these other fragile hearts,
all of us saying excuse me, good morning,
how are you, I’m fine.
Analog
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, humanness, science, wave on June 16, 2023| 9 Comments »
for Craig
It’s so human, the hand,
how it rises
to wave to a friend,
as if it is a direct extension
of the heart. Perhaps
that is why, in these days
of emojis and AI,
when you write to tell me
you wave each time
you drive past my house,
my hand rises to wave back,
though I don’t know where you are
or when’s the last time
you passed by my home,
but, here, friend,
wherever you are,
here’s my hand,
palm open, arm high,
not electromagnetic
but no less full
of song and light
this wave reaching
across the night.
On the Day I Start to Freak Out about AI
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Artificial intelligence, friendship, humanness on March 1, 2023| 10 Comments »
I focus on the gentle words of my friend,
how I hear her smile come through her voice,
even if my eyes are closed. I focus
on how soft it is, the scarf I am swathed in,
how it warms my bare neck.
I think to myself,
I will remember this moment,
standing in this movie theater lobby,
where the scent of popcorn triggers my hunger.
I will remember feeling unsettled, thinking wow,
that was the moment I understood
how irrevocably the world had changed.
And when, later, we walk outside,
I fall in love with the snowflakes
that hit our face the way no pixel ever could—
and how, when my friend hugs me goodbye,
I fold into her body, tender and strong,
and I inhale the scent that is uniquely hers,
feel it flood my memories.
And later, when I cry, because every day I cry,
I feel so damn grateful to grieve, to hope,
to love beyond what any algorithm could predict,
my heart breaking every rule-based parameter,
yes, thank you for this stubborn and unruly heart
thudding like a storm inside my human chest
as I move through the storm, the wind cold on my cheeks.
Dear Heather,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, humanness, longing, loss, parenting, time on December 13, 2022| 11 Comments »
on William’s birthday
There was a time before we lost our sons,
a time before the long walks in the frozen woods,
a full-bellied time when we cherished how they grew.
Today the snow came again, at last,
though it was more sifting than deep drift.
I notice I want more.
It’s so human to want more, I tell myself.
More snow, more time, more love,
more memories of making fires in winter,
tasting summer s’mores, feeding hummingbirds,
making cookies, speaking silly languages,
skinny dipping in the river, singing to Rusted Root.
It feels right their birthdays should feel heavy—
heavy as the snow that didn’t fall today,
heavy as the bodies they didn’t grow into.
Oh, the weight of love—light as the sunshine
that slanted through the room between squalls,
substantial as the tractors our boys are not driving.
I think of how much we’ve grown in their absence—
which is to say how much we’ve grown
in the company of heartache, the company of love,
how powerfully loss has stretched us.
Somehow, these boys linger in our being.
They arrive through song, through silence.
In this after time, we feed them with memories—
some true, some more than true.
Each time we say their names, they grow.
It’s so human to want more, no matter
how reconciled we are to what is. Oh,
for more time, somehow, between forever and now.
The Bidding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged humanness, mortality, opening, time on August 13, 2022| 3 Comments »
Again, I am ruled by it, this invitation to be wildly open the way a day is open, this invitation to be porous the way birdsong is porous, this invitation to feel it all the way skin feels it all when I slip into a blue alpine lake. Again this urge to fall all the way into the mystery and refuse any rope thrown in an attempt to rescue me. Morning comes with the scent of autumn, charged with ripeness and rot and the kinship of everything. What an honor to be mortal, to know the value of a day, to know how vulnerable we are and then give ourselves away. |
Sometimes When I Catch Myself
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, humanness, judgment on July 17, 2022| 4 Comments »
Sometimes when I catch myself
judging someone else—
a stranger or perhaps a beloved—
I imagine my son and father watching me,
not looking down from above,
I imagine them looking out from inside me.
I don’t worry I am disappointing them—
I feel certain they would be generous with me.
See how human she is, they might say,
loving me despite my humanness,
because my humanness.
In that moment of imagining,
I feel myself soften,
feel my heart unfurl like a new leaf in spring,
feel how possible it is to be generous
with the humanness of myself and others
and the relief it brings.
In that moment, it is easy to be alive.
Easy to notice my annoyance
and be gentle with the self who gets annoyed.
Easy to touch my palm to my heart
and know it as the palm of my son,
the palm of my father,
reminding me how truly I want to walk it,
this path of compassion.
Blessings, Blessings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blessing, humanness on July 3, 2021| 4 Comments »
Believing it matters,
today I bless all that seems unable to grow.
I bless the stems of larkspur
broken in yesterday’s storm.
I bless the broken. Bless those in pain.
Bless all who feel as if they are drowning
in the ache of aloneness and betrayal.
I have felt the wide blessing of sky,
cold blessing of rain, green blessing of field,
I have felt the dark, sharp blessing of loss.
How it’s changed me.
For all I cannot fix, I bless it.
For all I cannot hold, cannot heal, cannot mend,
blessings, blessings, impossible blessings,
tender blessings, blessings
mighty as wildfire,
blessings as gentle
as tears.
Still Learning About My Mother
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, humanness, mother, parenting, poem, poetry, strength on November 3, 2019| 4 Comments »
It surprises me she is fragile,
this woman who labored for eighteen hours
to birth me, this woman who cared for me
every time I was sick, who coached
my soccer team, who led my Girl Scout troupe.
This woman who went hunting and fishing
and still often comes home with the biggest
catch. This woman who walked ten miles
to raise money for hunger. This woman
who prays for everyone, everyone.
And so tonight when I walk her
to her room and she needs to stop
a moment to catch her breath,
I marvel at how human she is,
this woman who has been more
than human to me my whole life—
a super hero, a champion, a star.
And somehow, knowing this, and
understanding that it’s been true all along,
I fall even more deeply in love with her
as she leans back on the bed, lets out
a long sigh, closes her eyes, and smiles.
For all my talk of surrender
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged desire, humanness, longing, poem, poetry, surrender on March 15, 2015| 1 Comment »
and saying yes to the world as it is,
my body craves what it craves.
Oh this terrible, beautiful bright stitch of longing
sewn into my breath
with red, red thread,
it pulls, tighter and tighter,
then catches on something
deep in my core,
and some voice,
is it mine? insists,
more, more, I want more.
Yet Another Story Problem
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged humanness, longing, math, poem, poetry, solution, story problem on October 25, 2014| 3 Comments »
It always seems as if it should add up,
except it doesn’t. Not like the story problems
did in school. No. In this equation, x
represents the rate at which sweet peas
climb an orchard’s wire fence, and y
is the speed that snowflakes fall without
accounting for wind. And z is the reason
that all those snowflakes never seem to find
your waiting tongue. Don’t take it personally. It’s statistics.
Then s is the way that the low light at sunrise
makes every other variable shine. Which changes
everything. Until f is the sloth-like velocity
of a deeply held sorrow just starting to mend. And g
is the relative effect of one extended open hand.
And h is a pair of seahorses with their tails
intertwined. Or maybe it’s a flock of seagulls
returning to the land. Or maybe it’s crazy
to try to assign meaning to any of this.
It seems obvious. The heart just wants to love.
But then y is the hole the size of Saturn that
you sometimes feel ringing inside your gut.
And g is the swan-like gracefulness
you thought you’d have once you grew up.
But d is the way you are more like a squirrel.
And j is the value of a sand dollar saved
for twenty years. And p is the sweet scent
of strawberries, ripe. And k is the surfboard
you never bought. And o is the way you often feel
like a sidewinder—edging slyly, slantly along.
You dream of straight lines, of answers that work out
neatly, efficiently, sure of themselves. But already,
x is a starfish, and y is just a homophone, and t is
the way you see yourself sometimes, scribbling away
as if it’s all some kind of test. And s is the sweet compassion
you offer yourself, even now as you watch yourself draw up
a new proof, determined to solve it right this time.
the fine print
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fine print, humanness, poem, poetry on June 14, 2014| 1 Comment »
No, it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair and most promises are broken. Everyone and everything that you love can and will eventually be taken from you. You are ultimately alone. Just because you do everything right does not mean that anything good will come of it. Right is more malleable than you think. Good is subjective. There are mind blowing miracles, and they are happening right now all around and inside of you. Peace happens within the greatest upheaval. It’s an inside job. Results may vary. If it could happen any other way, it would. No refunds. No guarantees. Expiration date subject to change. Must be present to win.
Five Humannesses
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged haiku, humanness, love, poem on August 17, 2013| 1 Comment »
holding three flowers
thinking only of the fourth
that lost its petals
*
valentines
in August, a heart-shaped
hole in the night
*
unfolding memories
trying to read through
the creases, the tears
*
staring at the aspen
all those living scars
so beautiful
*
another hole, another
hole, my wounds make it lovelier
this music
Waiting the Diagnosis
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, body, bow, humanness, humility, poem, practice, suffering on June 26, 2012| 3 Comments »
I bow to the ache of it,
the deep inner eating
away at itself, I bow
to the shivers, the gooseflesh,
the waves of nausea and pain.
I bow to the unnamed,
to question, to dark.
And I bow to the fear
that swells in small spaces
and the vast quiet
that dissipates the fear.
I bow to every other human
who hurts and I bow
to the yellow flowers tonight
blooming in the muck
where the river used to be.
I bow to the ache, goddammit,
I bow to it and I bow
to the reluctance to bow to it,
bow to the longing to shove
it all away, and I bow,
hush now, just bow.
Five Petroglyphs, Five Haiku
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Amy Schilling, haiku, humanness, petroglyph, poetry video on May 29, 2012| 4 Comments »
this heavy shell
I sometimes forget it, too
is holy
*
your eyes
everywhere I look
your eyes
*
god needed a flute
tried blowing into me—no note
still too much of me here
*
it sure does make
a lousy guard dog
pride
*
every pore, every
bone, every hair, every cell
an altar