A week before winter solstice,
we explore in our room a spilling
of low-angled sun, a deep pool
of light the darkness has not
yet devoured. Our bodies,
pale pilgrims traversing the night,
wade in, then dive, surprised
by this warm, naked hour.
Our hearts have been wrecked,
but we yet survive, washed up
like flotsam on this radiant
shore, this place we’ve known
thousands of days before.
But somehow, today,
this bright measure of sun
helps us more truly arrive—
sometimes it’s the unremarkable
gifts that keep us alive.
Posts Tagged ‘survival’
December 14
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged light, nakedness, sun, survival, warmth, winter solstice on December 15, 2025| 11 Comments »
I Thought This Was a Poem about a Lemon
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gifts, giving back, lemon, survival on August 21, 2025| 2 Comments »
In the bowl, an old
lemon, shriveled
and hard-skinned,
Still, when I slice it,
the desiccated lemon
gives whatever brightness
it has left to the glass
of water. Oh dried-up
yellow teacher,
thank you for reminding
this dried-up version of me
to value what gifts
I have been given,
to love the world
enough to give
the gifts back.
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.
What You Couldn’t Have Seen
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged appearance vs. reality, grief, survival, walking on January 29, 2025| 6 Comments »
I put on my shoes, friend,
the way I always do, and
opened the door and stepped
into the cold.
If you had seen me,
it would have looked
so normal. Like a woman
stepping out of her home.
Even the part where I talked
to the stars. Everybody
talks to stars sometimes,
right? What you couldn’t have seen
was how every step was an edge.
Sometimes, right there
outside the front door, I
slipped off the cliffs of the known.
It was years before
the ground was even again.
Though truly, sometimes
the cliffs are still there,
and I fall off again.
Isn’t it strange?
It looks just like I’m walking.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
What if, instead of grief,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, flowers, grief, pollination, survival on September 3, 2024| 13 Comments »
we call it pollination,
a process through which we realize
the gold of our hearts must spill out
and if we are to survive as a species,
it requires we somehow exchange
this gold with each other—all our hearts
splayed open, all our hearts needing
what the other hearts have.
It’s messy. Vulnerable.
And this is how we go on.
Your grief. My grief.
The quiet buzz of conversation.
This splitting open. This spilling.
This sharing with each other.
Still Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, healing, survival on February 11, 2024| 18 Comments »
After I did not die the first minute,
I lived the next minute.
More truly, life lived me.
More truly, the thick air,
infused with lake scent and
rosemary and late summer
insisted I breathe. More
that the sun did not let me
not see my beloveds still here.
The thick green leaves
of August reminded me
life pushes through.
There was not a half second
I forgot the horror.
And still I did not die.
After I lived the first day,
I lived the next day,
opened the door and
drove the car and held close
the people I love.
Rain fell and a rainbow
bloomed and the night
was sleepless and long.
And longer. I lived the next week.
The next. The next.
I lived the next year.
And the next. More truly,
the same life that lives
through mushroom, tulip,
magpie, worm, eagle, you,
that same life keeps living me.
The horror, no less real.
And love continues to sprout
like new trees after fire.
Slow, and indisputable. A gift.
What seemed gone is still here.
The way light and dark and
air are still here. Another
day. Another year.
How the World Goes On
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, love, milkweed, softness, survival on October 2, 2023| 10 Comments »
There’s the burr that relies on brittle prickers,
the cheat grass with sharp and spiky barbs,
and then there’s the milkweed
that attaches its seeds to gossamer fluff
and spills forth in an ecstasy of diaphanous floss,
white puffs of wish-downy, dream-gauzy,
breeze-easy lushness. Oh, heart,
this, too, is what survival looks like—
an almost impossible softness
that gathers light in silky froth,
that entrusts itself to the wind.
Survival
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, driving, softening, survival on September 17, 2023| 13 Comments »
At the left hand turn
at the busy intersection,
my fifteen-year-old daughter
tenses in her body,
her fingers grip the wheel,
her breath comes fast.
What do I do? she asks,
voice tight with fear.
My hand wants to clutch at the door.
I do not.
My chest clenches with alarm.
I will my body beside her to be soft.
I speak in hushed tones.
Drive forward. Now wait. Now go.
And the turn is made
and her shoulders relax.
My shoulders relax.
I praise her as again,
she picks up speed
and follows the yellow center line.
Later my friend tells me
that sometimes she fakes being soft
as a way to buy time
until a genuine softness arrives—
she says it’s a way to not do damage
while she regulates herself.
I marvel at all the ways
we learn to survive—
there is fight, flight and freeze,
and there is softening.
Softening, which allows
the next step to be light.
Softening, which leaves space
for goodness to arise.
Softening, which helps us
to meet the intersection
of the next moment
as if it’s an open road.
Fearless
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, falling, fear, life, survival on July 3, 2023| 3 Comments »
One day, perhaps, I will be as fearless
as I was last night in my dream—
when I went careening over the high cliff,
and as I entered free fall, I thought,
wow, this is it, you really did it this time—
and as the air rushed past my face
I thought If these are your last few moments,
can you choose to enjoy them?
In every other dream of falling,
I fell into fear, a deep clenching.
But this time my arms unfurled full length,
my legs spread, my eyes widened,
and I gave myself to the falling.
God, I was free.
When I landed face first on a rooftop,
I was, for a time, motionless, bruised,
breathless, and then, sweet miracle,
thrilled by the fall, I walked away,
so much life in every step.
Learning from the Robins
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, Christmas, community, flock, robin, survival on December 26, 2021| 6 Comments »
It’s Christmas and the yard,
grassy again from unseasonal rain,
is abloom with dozens of robins—
robins flitting and bobbing
and weaving unpredictable paths
with their dark gray wings.
They seem harbingers
of an unexpected spring,
as if life is asking them to be more alive
just when it seems as if
everything is dead.
How could I be more alive?
I love that these birds know
how to survive—love that
come winter, they flock.
Because more eyes means
more chances to spot food.
Because more eyes means
fewer chances to become food themselves.
I, too, have been flocking
this winter—surrounding myself
with other eyes, other hearts,
other wings, other minds.
It feels good to be one of many,
to trust my kind. It feels good
to fly together for this
tenderest time. The truth is,
it isn’t easy. The truth is,
we were made for this.
Choosing Truth
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged choices, survival, truth on January 24, 2021| 2 Comments »
And if I find I’d rather not meet the truth,
then I can notice the little girl in me,
the one who hides in the closet
when she is afraid, the one who plays dead,
the one who ends all her stories with happily
ever after, and I can choose to love her.
I don’t need to drag her out or force her to look
or tell her that sometimes the villain wins in the end.
Instead, I can remind the rest of me how alive I feel
when I meet it all, when I choose to enter the day
eyes open, ears open, hands open
and let the world in. That is how,
on this day when I know the truth
of how cruel we humans can be,
I can lean into that pain at the same time
I watch the sky turn pink behind the white aspen
and feel the cold air kiss my cheeks,
my breath rising in visible prayer
meeting difficult truths I walk right through.
Gravity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged accomplishments, depression, exhaustion, shoulds, survival on September 1, 2020| 6 Comments »
Today it is enough
to pour the orange juice.
To push down the lever
on the toaster.
To feed the fish and the kids
and water the orchid
and return one call.
A woman could be buried
by all the things
she thinks she should do.
It might take her years
to crawl out from beneath that weight.
And so today
I find refuge in the fact
that I made the bed.
That I was a lap
for a cat.
That I caught a mouse
in the carrot row
and I let him go.
One Survival
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, survival on August 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »
One Up a Creek
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged lifeboat, poem, poetry, survival on August 6, 2017| Leave a Comment »
leak in the lifeboat—
some small part of me rejoices
for this excuse
to jump into the waves
and see what these arms can do
In the Nest
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hunger, poem, poetry, survival, syllabics on July 16, 2015| 3 Comments »
Three open
beaks, oddly
pink, bony.
Their silent
hunger pre-
historic.
Some of us
learn it is
safer to
hunger in
silence. And
some of us
learn that with
so many
mouths and so
many hearts
to feed, it
feels safer
not to list-
en.