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Posts Tagged ‘parts of self’

Welcome

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 29, 2025| Leave a Comment »


 

 
Hello prickly part of me.
Welcome to my heart.
Look. In a moment
of bravery, I took down
all the exit signs.
Turns out they were
a pretense, anyway. Sure,
there are still doors,
but what I’ve found—
all doors revolve bringing
all parts of me right back
to right here.

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The Choosing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 16, 2025| 4 Comments »


 
 
Sometimes, when picking flowers
from the garden, I choose not
the showiest blooms, but the snapdragon
with the crooked stem or the pink cosmos
with the slenderest petals or the delphinium
stalk with the fewest blue flowers. Aren’t you lovely,
I say to them as I snip at their stems
and arrange them in a vase, placing them
in the center of my home. In these moments
I am aware of the gangly child I was, crooked-
stemmed and awkward, who longed to be chosen.  
I like the way the room feels different
because the flowers are there. I like the way
they change me, too, as if I am saying
to that gawky part of me who felt unlovable,
I choose you. I choose you. I choose you.

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The Big Self Watches the Small Self

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 16, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Look at her, checking her watch again,
worried there’s not enough time. Not
enough minutes or hours to do all the urgent
or beautiful things she longs to do—
a list that unspools out of each second—
all those things she is certain must be done.
She how she squirms, how she bites her lip,
as if her unease will make time open up
like a peony. Oh sweetheart who I have lived
with for years, who I have sometimes mistaken
for myself, I see you. It is so easy right now
to be easy with you, a relief, really, not to judge you
for your worry, but to love you for how deeply
you care, how much you want to be in service.
There is a time outside of time in which
you exist, this timelessness from which
I am watching you–imagine a lake
with no shore. A night with no dawn.
A self with no sense of where she might end.

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Most moments

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on May 18, 2025| 13 Comments »


 
 
it feels as if I’m leaning forward
in my chair on the off chance
I might soon get to leap to my feet
in standing ovation. As if I expect
life to be wonderful. And so often
it is. Like today when my girl and I
made up new slang for friendship,
or when the rain let up and
the highway was once again dry.
Now that I write it, some cynical
sliver of myself chimes in,  
Really, Rosemerry? You’re always
at the edge of cheering
for life? And I turn to that
cynical sliver and leap up and cheer
at the realization that at last
I don’t mind the inner trash talk.
In fact, I love this smirking,
sarcastic vein of myself, and I nod
at her with all my over-the-top earnestness
and clap as she doubts me, I
clap and I clap and I clap.

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Letter to the Parts of Me I Have Tried to Exile

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 27, 2024| 20 Comments »


 
 
I’m sorry. I thought banishing you
was the way to become better,
more perfect, more good, more free.
The irony: I thought if I cut you off
and cast you out, if I built the walls
high enough, then the parts left would be
more whole. As if the sweet orange
doesn’t need the toughened rind,
the bitter seed. As if the forest
doesn’t need the blue fury of fire.
It didn’t work, did it, the exile?
You were always here, jangling
the hinges, banging at the door,
whispering through the cracks.
Left to myself, I wouldn’t have known
to take down the walls,
nor would I have had the strength to do so.
That act was grace disguised as disaster.
But now that the walls are rubble,
it is also grace that teaches me to want
to embrace you, grace that guides me
to be gentle, even with the part of me
that would still try to exile any other part.
It is grace that invites me
to name all parts beloved.
How honest it all is. How human.
I promise to keep learning how
to know you as my own, to practice
opening to what at first feels unwanted,
meet it with understanding,
trust all belongs, welcome you home.

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Self-Compassion

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 19, 2024| 14 Comments »




On a day when I am at war with myself,
when I battle my own humanness
in a longing to be good, to be better
than good, to be perfect,
when I point to myself with a snarl
and a sneer as if I am my own enemy,
then I notice how my whole body contracts
and I’m a crumpled up map, a gray lump in the throat,
a stone in the gut, a crumpled wing in the chest.
And it’s hard to breathe. And it’s hard to move.
That is when I’m grateful to have a body,
grateful for the way it helps me remember
I have a choice to meet this moment with kindness.
It’s as if, mid-combat, I’m delivered a postcard
with a forever stamp sent from my wisest self saying,
Dear woman who thinks she is not good enough,
I see you. It’s okay to feel this way.
And what looked like a battlefield a blink ago
now looks more like a vast green meadow filled
with low golden light where all parts of me
are welcome—the one who makes mistakes,
the one who judges, the one who longs to be good,
the one who thinks she shouldn’t have to learn
the same lesson again. There is no part of me then
that is not welcome, that cannot be loved,
and my body expands like a great alpine basin,
unfurls like an unending white flag.
How easy it is then to stand with all of my selves
in that field and know what it means to be home.

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