You don't see something just because you want to see it. It's only when you are able to see it that you can see it. So just keep practicing. We are simply strengthening the natural ability of the mind to see for itself. We are supporting the right conditions for insight to arise naturally.

--Sayadaw U Tejaniya

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass

Thus with patience I will strive with diligence.

For in such diligence enlightenment is found.

If no wind blows, then nothing stirs,

And neither is there merit without diligence.

-- Shantideva

The Allowing

What trust it takes to meet a day,

to say to each new moment: Yes, you

too belong here. We carry a village

inside ourselves, and everyone

is welcome. Hello, fear and doubt,

those twins who often travel together

hand in hand; hello, delight in the

awakening of a daisy on this smoke-

hazed, broken morning. Hello, sorrow

for all those no longer with me,

for this precipice on which I stand

for as long as it takes to fall into

the abyss of tears and longing. Hello,

ragged breath of rebirth. Hello,

relief after the passing storm, growing

as green in me as moss over stone.

—James Crews

Yes, That's When

I like my body when I'm in the woods

and I forget my body. I forget that arms,

that legs, that nose. I forget that waist,

that nerve, that skin. And I aspen. I mountain.

I river. I stone. I leaf. I path. I flower.

I like when I evergreen, current and berry.

I like when I mushroom, avalanche, cliff.

And everything is yes then, and everything

new: wild iris, duff, waterfall, dew.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Excerpt from 'A Morning Offering'

I place on the altar of dawn:

The quiet loyalty of breath,

The tent of thought where I shelter,

Waves of desire I am shore to

And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today

To the invisible geography

That invites me to new frontiers,

To break the dead shell of yesterdays,

To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today

To live the life that I would love,

To postpone my dream no longer

But do at last what I came here for

And waste my heart on fear no more.

--John O'Donohue

Three

‘no’

might make them angry

but it will make you free.

If no one has ever told you, your freedom is more important than their anger.

*

and I said to my body. softly. ‘I want to be your friend’. and it took a long breath, and

replied ‘I have been waiting my whole life for this.’

*

If

the ocean

can calm itself,

so can you.

We

are both

salt water

mixed with

air.

--Nayyirah Waheed.

Do not love half lovers

Do not entertain half friends

Do not indulge in works of the half talented

Do not live half a life and do not die a half death

Do not accept half a solution

Do not believe half truths

Do not dream half a dream

Do not fantasize about half hopes

Half a life is a life you didn't live,

A word you have not said

A smile you postponed

A love you have not had

A friendship you did not know

You are a whole that exists

to live a life not half a life

--Khalil Gibran

Minimalism is not the answer to domestic hardship, but learning to understand and accept limitations and live within our capacity is. Loving stuff is one of the most anti-consumerist positions we can embody, because consumer culture depends on our chronic dissatisfaction. Owning way less stuff that we love way more is how we access fulfillment and a sense of having enough. You can adopt this minimalist principle without adopting the whole lifestyle or puritanical vulnerabilities that frequently bypass class literacy. The point of decluttering is to remove the excess that prevents you from knowing the abundance AND prevents you from being in the grief of not having what you truly need to feel socially or spiritually well fed.

--Alyssa Allegretti

Chicken and Dumplings

All of a sudden the clouds

arrayed themselves like

dumplings across the sky,

and there I was in the hot tub,

bubbling away, the chicken

in the pot. OK, a tiny chicken,

really not so much as

a slice of carrot or celery,

not even a pea,

but for a moment I stopped

regarding myself as the chef.

I was looking up from the pot,

and the moon was looking down,

and since then I have been wondering

what it would take for me

to be a little more tender,

a little more savory,

some needed ingredient

for this stew we're in.

-Lynn Ungar 1-13-21

You Are Invited

Today, a party, and the whole world

is invited. No written invitations,

but the occasion? It’s Wednesday.

And here we are, all of us, in the same place

at the same time. Might as well

get to know the person standing

next to you—learn their name,

shake their hand, discover

all you have in common—

the party goes on tomorrow, too.

Bring your own. Bring something

to share. No RSVP, just show up.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

When someone brings more intensity, vision, claim, or demand than their actual capacity, regulation, and relational skill can carry, reality does not meet them with momentum. It meets them with friction, delay, and non-response.

Understand: that friction is not punishment.

It’s calibration.

What reality is asking is the same request, over and over, in different forms:

“Can you scale this down enough to be real?”

“Can you hold this without overwhelming others?”

“Can you take feedback without turning it into a story?”

“Can you accept limits without moralizing them?”

“Can you metabolize disappointment without inflating?”

“Can you face yourself without enlarging claims?”

Reality doesn’t respond to intensity.

It responds to proportion.

Proportion is the relationship between:

- the force being generated, love, insight, ambition, energy, vision, 

and

- the structures available to carry it, embodiment, ethics, pacing, collaboration, accountability, consent.

When those are mismatched, what moves is not reality, but the story.

--Sadee Whip

The Quiet Teacher

I breathe better here. 

Here where sand meets sea, meets sky, 

meets setting sun. Here where I am released

from the burden of trying. 

What seemed so convincingly worthy 

of worry yesterday 

sifts like warm sand through open hand. 

The quiet teacher inside and all around,

invites me to hush. Invites you too. To hush everything 

that is somewhere else, everything 

that is anywhere other than 

here.

- Julia Fehrenbacher

Pledge

Lately, I’ve been thinking about

the spray can of lemon-scented

furniture polish my mother used 

to carry with her through the house— 

how she aimed, then easily wiped 

away the film of dust that had

gathered on every surface that week. 

We owned nothing fancy—no cedar

or mahogany—but she made those

particle board shelves and scuffed

Goodwill tables gleam with a few 

swipes of her cloth. Now, when 

steadiness and reason seem to have 

faded from our world like the ink 

on old photographs, I find a cloth 

of my own and get to work, this 

cleaning a kind of pledge I make:

I still care enough about this place 

to try and help it shine.

—James Crews

She Couldn’t Have Planned It This Way,

to arrive right here on this February morning

with the wind gently shaking the dried grasses

of the field and the chickadees flitting up and down

the empty cottonwood branches, and the river

barely a whisper beneath the ice. But all of it, since

long before her birth, has led her to this moment of winter

sunshine warming her cheek at the same time she

feels the tight clench in her chest that has

not released for a week. Hello clench. Of course,

it is here, the anger, the fear. What is here?

What else is here? Today, she opens to touch it all,

the way a child might touch both a smooth stone

and thorn. More truly, she is touched by the world.

Already this moment is different from the moment before.

And right now, she is here for it. For the ache. The birds.

The cloudless blue sky. All unfolds as it will. She feels

her own unfolding, too, opening to the surprise that though

unplanned, this moment could not have been otherwise.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

The Spreading

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

Please

If you are one who has practice

meeting the pain of the world,

we need you. Right now we need you

to teach us it is possible to swallow

what is weighty and still be able to rise.

We need you to remind us we can

be furious and scared and near feral

over injustice and still thrill at the taste

of a strawberry, ripe and sweet,

can still meet a stranger and shake

their hand, believing in their humanness.

We need you to show us how

we, too, can fall into the darkest,

unplumbed pit and learn there

a courage and beauty

we could never learn from the light.

If you have drowned in sorrow

and still have somehow found

a way to breathe, please, lead us.

You are the one with the crumbs

we need, the ones we will use to find

our way back to the home of our hearts.

- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

We Are Living Now

We are living now

our regrets and our failures,

the ache of what we

wish could be again,

now while we have it.

We are living now

with the ghosts of those

we love, in their corporality,

while they have bodies

of flesh, their desires ahead

rather than behind.

We are living now with

the opportunities to change,

to make amends, to

kiss the preciousness

which life has placed here

in our hands.

We are living now

with what we still may

become, with what we are

as we hold our hands

before us in the sunlight.

We are living now

with all we have lost,

that will never come again,

that our tears wash

in the desire to hold one

more time, now, while

in this moment they are ours.

--Richard Wehrman

Holding the Door

If you haven’t held the door open

for someone lately, try it today

at the dentist’s office, the bank,

or the gas station where some impulse

pulls your gaze upward to meet

the eyes of a stranger with a smile.

The small fire of that single gesture

will stay kindled in you for hours,

and soon you’ll be finding other doors

inside yourself, admitting the pleasure 

of sending a letter to a friend, creamy 

white envelope like an invitation, 

raising the hand of the little red flag

on the mailbox. Or pausing to hear

the mating calls of two barred owls

hooting to each other before dusk

in a neighbor’s yard while you stand 

on a gravel road sinking in the mud 

of early spring. Suddenly, you notice 

doors everywhere in need of opening, 

and you know this is your new job, 

welcoming whomever, whatever

passes through.

—James Crews

"If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it,

I should not mind a bit. but if a friend of mine had a sorrow

and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly.

If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me,

I would move back again and again and beg to be admitted

so that I might share in what I was entitled to share.

If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him,

I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation."

Oscar Wilde