It was the boy at baggage claim who started it.
His elation! Each time a new bag would drop,
he would point at the suitcase and squeal,
then turn to his grandmother with incandescent delight.
His grandmother deepened my joy. How she beamed
at her grandson, praised him in Spanish, her words
a bright blur I interpreted more through hunch
than through certainty. And sooner than you’d think,
I fell in love with every single person at baggage claim sixteen.
Didn’t need to know their stories to know
they were worthy of love. Every one a grandchild.
Every one a light. It was like, how on these midsummer
nights, the late sun shines long though the cities and fields
and everything, everything is beautiful.
Oh, people of Iran. Israel. Palestine. Ukraine.
Russia. Somalia. Yemen. Maine. I will never know you,
yet I honor how you carry inside you your own strange
and beautiful spark. How each of you, too, is a grandchild.
Each of you, too, longs to belong. No matter what our leaders do,
the light is right to see how much, you, too, long to be safe,
to be seen, to be kind, to be loved, to be trusted, to be home.
Posts Tagged ‘trust’
The Night I Fell in Love with the Whole World
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged airport, connection, love, trust on June 23, 2025| 12 Comments »
In Times Such as These
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, friendship, trust on May 2, 2025| 6 Comments »
In the night dark room
we sit together and speak
in tones tender enough
for anything to be said,
even vast things
that frighten us most,
even shimmery things
that surprise us,
and the night is a spindle
that twines the honesty
and courage of our words
into yarn, and trust is a needle
that uses the yarn
to stitch us together
so even when we are apart,
I can tug on one of those stitches
and, from half a country away,
I feel you tugging back.
How It Is Now
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, doors, opportunity, possibility, trust on February 21, 2025| Leave a Comment »
In every moment, doors appear—
not literal, of course, with knobs and locks,
but metaphoric, yes, with thresholds and casings
and simple invitations I feel
in my body, an architecture of possibility.
I didn’t used to notice them.
Was it because they weren’t there,
or because I simply had not yet learned
to see them? Now I marvel
at how omnipresent they are,
and all they ask of me is that I choose
to step through them or not.
I recognize them more in my body
than with my mind. As if the body
has spent decades learning, oh, this is what
it feels like when a door appears.
As if the mind is at last learning to say
yes, body, I believe you. Now I trust
that I can change everything with
just one step across that invisible
threshold. Or not. Now I know
once I take that step, I can’t return
to the place I had been. And there will always be
another door. Another door. Another door.
Falling Asleep with My Head in My Mom’s Lap
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged age, daughter, mother, relaxation, trust on December 16, 2024| 11 Comments »
Mom slips her fingers through my hair;
my eyes close, and I am again
a sigh of a girl, a wisp made of trust,
and I don’t know where she goes,
the middle-aged version of me
who works, who carries, who forges on.
It’s not that I ask her to leave,
she just disappears as I curl deeper
into the den of dreams, my body limp
as a kitten picked up by the scruff.
Maybe I purr. I nuzzle in deeper.
I forget to remember there is anything
else to do. It’s a lifetime before I wake.
Request
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, generous assumption, love, trust on December 8, 2024| 11 Comments »
I’m thinking of a woodland chapel
just beyond town standing tall
and straight as it can. Though
the floorboards sag and creak,
its doors open to receive whatever enters,
be it resistance or praise.
Its walls have witnessed
such laughter, such sorrow.
And the songs sung here for years
are now as integral to the structure
as the rafters. This is a place
made of love. I have found my way
again and again into its sanctuary.
I have knelt here to pray in ways
no one has taught me, prayers that rise
natural and primal as moan, as sigh,
never knowing what to expect except
that I will be safe here, that I belong.
Is it possible to make of the heart
such a generous space? A place
that generous, that sacred?
Make of my heart a woodland chapel
just beyond town standing tall and straight
as it can, a place you can enter
somehow certain you are wholly loved
no matter what you do.
I want to offer you refuge here.
Will you trust me to give that to you?
When Augusta Showed Us a Two-Minute Video of Starlings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, interconnectivity, starlings, trust on September 9, 2024| 6 Comments »
Though I don’t have wings
and though I cannot fly,
with my whole body, I felt it,
the longing to be so aware
of all that is around me
that I, too, might move through the world
like a starling, veering and rising,
turning and dropping, whirling
and doubling back in an elegant
response to what my neighbors
are doing. Does the starling
harshly judge its neighbor
when it flies the other direction?
Does the starling worry
it’s not good enough
to be in a murmuration?
Is it jealous of how its neighbors fly?
Does it wonder how
to get out of its own way?
Such human questions.
How would it be to wholly trust
we are all moving together
in some great mysterious dance?
Now I can’t stop thinking
of what Augusta said:
When we move together,
we like each other more.
It takes just one thought
to inspire a change in course.
What might happen now
when I walk out my door?
Beyond Sight
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged control, dream, god, hand, surrender, trust on August 26, 2024| 5 Comments »
All around me, the world
was normal—people eating dinner
or walking down the street—
but my world?
Some massive, invisible hand
kept capturing me, then
tossing me into the air.
And I’d somersault
and fall and be caught,
then placed upright again
on the ground. All night
it went on like this.
I’d be walking and then
I’d be flying and then
I’d be falling and then
I’d be caught, until finally,
by morning, we couldn’t say
that it wasn’t disconcerting,
but we could say I
had become more fluent
in this strange upheaval.
We could say I
had begun to trust
the same hand that tossed me
would catch me.
We could say that when
I woke up, I was still myself
and nothing felt the same.
And though my feet
never left the ground today,
I was tossed.
And then I was caught.
Even now, I almost feel them
around my chest,
those great fingers
as they set me on my feet again.
Putting My Daughter on the Plane to Guatemala
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being present, daughter, fear, letting go, parenting, travel, trust on August 12, 2024| 9 Comments »
I would like to say I wasn’t afraid,
but I was. I know too well how a plane
can fall from the sky. How terrible
things happen to innocent people.
How even when we try our hardest
to keep others safe, they can die.
Driving toward home, I was a snail
without its shell, a seed without its husk,
a woman alone in the dark with her fear.
I remember thinking if I needed to,
I could live through any future disaster,
even my worst nightmare.
But what I really needed was
to live in that very moment.
The more I was right where I was,
the more I felt the mystery around
and inside me, swirling until I was bigger
somehow, no less afraid but more spacious,
And though the world did not comfort me,
I felt myself soften as I flowed toward
the inevitable—flowed the way a river flows,
moved the way the wind moves,
grew the way a woman grows
when she meets the world that is here.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Trust
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, openness, rain, trust on August 11, 2024| 6 Comments »
Let the rain fall as it will
and fill the ditches and
flood the paths. Let it
pour from the gutters
and spill from the eaves.
Let the gulleys be gushing
and roiling with rain.
Let it rain. Let it rain as if
it will never stop raining.
Let it rain until everything
glistens and shines.
Even the sunflowers,
gold petals now limp.
Even my longing
for sunnier days.
Even my longing
to push it away.
Remember when
I prayed for rain?
Let it rain as long as it rains.
Let it rain and let me
laugh in the rain,
let me dance in the rain,
let me cry until
my tears rhyme with rain.
And let me be soft
in the rain. Let wonder
be present as rain—
driving rain, gentle rain,
long and relentless rain—
the rain I know by another name.
This poem is not
about the rain.
But because it is about to rain,
let the heart exclaim,
Let it rain.
The Waking
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged marriage, silence, trust, waking on May 16, 2024| 8 Comments »
When I wake, it’s your silence
beside me that invites me
to wake into my own silence,
and I begin the day with listening.
By heart I know the difference
between the quiet of your sleep
and the quiet of you dreaming.
and it is by tuning to the gentle
hinge of your breath that I
relearn my place in the world.
Even before my eyes are open
I greet the dawn-drenched day,
not with an alarm but through a doorway
of trust. How quietly opening happens.