Friday, March 28, 2025
In the Meantime
Meanwhile, flowers still bloom.
The moon rises, and the sun.
Babies smile and somewhere,
Against all the odds,
Two people are falling in love.
Strangers share cigarettes and jokes.
Light plays on the surface of water.
Grace occurs on unlikely streets
And we hold each other fast
Against entropy, the fires and the flood.
Life leans towards living
And, while death claims all things at the end,
There were such precious times between,
In which everything was radiant
And we loved, again, this world.
--Tom Hirons
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power.
Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
~Arundhati Roy, ‘The Cost of Living’
The Question
All day, I replay these words:
Is this the path of love?
I think of them as I rise,
as I wake my children,
as I wash dishes,
as I drive too close behind the slow blue Subaru,
Is this the path of love?
Think of these words as I stand in line at the grocery store, think of them as I sit on the couch with my daughter.
Amazing how quickly six words become compass, the new lens through which to see myself in the world.
I notice what the question is not.
Not,
"Is this right?"
Not,
"Is this wrong?"
It just longs to know how the action of existence links us to the path to love.
And is it this?
Is it this?
All day,
I let myself be led by the question.
All day I let myself not be too certain of the answer.
Is it this?
Is this the path of love? I ask as I wait for the next word to come.
~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer,
Family Recipe
All day, I search for it,
the secret ingredient—
something my father
believed in. He always
made stuffing
with something extra
special something,
then made us guess
what the secret was.
All day, I notice
what goes into a day—
a total of 86,400 seconds,
and in every second
a choice of how
we will meet that second.
If the day is stuffing,
then this day has
some unusual ingredients:
a couple dozen folks
in swimsuits on the sidewalk,
one woman with a dying parrot
she has tucked in her sweater,
a whole garden full of lemon trees,
one ripe hour alone
in the sunshine on a rooftop,
a generous measure of laughter
as my daughter and husband and I
climb a near-vertical hill,
and bittersweet tears
as I think of Dad
and his love of secret ingredients.
All day, the world
shows off its flavors.
All day, I revel in the recipe,
this extraordinary day,
something that can never
be made the same way again.
-- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
"It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on."
From "Midnight Library" a fantasy novel by Matt Haig
The world is violent and mercurial- it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love -- love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
--Tennessee Williams
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
--Wallace Stevens
Beannacht ("Blessing")
On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
~John O'Donohue
Don't Hesitate
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
--Mary Oliver
In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
I realized, through it all, that…
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
--Albert Camus
Love, Like Water
We could say the pain
was a block so great
it could not be moved.
We could say love
did not try to move it.
Love simply surrounded the mass
and dissolved it
the way water meets a block of salt,
breaking apart each ionic bond
until every atom of sodium and chloride
is surrounded by molecules of water.
And in this way,
and sooner than you’d think,
the pain was rearranged
into minuscule bits,
and there was no part of the pain
that was not touched by love.
The pain was no less, it’s true.
But mixed with love, dispersed,
the pain became something new.
Something vital that encouraged
a different kind of life,
a substance that supported buoyancy—
a medium to carry me.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.
—Reinhold Niebuhr
Saturday, March 15, 2025
As she stared at the restless pixels on her screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind.
--Ruth Ozeki, "A Tale for the Time Being"
Monday, February 3, 2025
During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn't look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn't feel like we're going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing.
--Dan Savage
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
A Prayer for these Times
When they hate, I will love.
When they curse, I will bless.
When they hurt, I will heal.
I am a servant of the light.
I am not afraid of darkness.
I will carry on with my work
as a steward of this Earth
and of all her children.
When they divide, I will unite.
When they rage, I will calm.
When they deny, I will affirm.
I will simply be who I am: for that is
what Spirit created me to be.
--Bishop Steven Charleston: Elder of the Choctaw Nation
Sunday, January 26, 2025
Forgiveness
May the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.
-- Maria Popova
Sunday, January 5, 2025
Brahmaviharas
Out of the rich soil of good will grows the beautiful flower of compassion, watered by tears of joy and shaded by the great tree of equanimity.
--Longchenpa
Thursday, January 2, 2025
Blessing for the longest night
All throughout these months,
as the shadows
have lengthened,
this blessing has been
gathering itself,
making ready,
preparing for
this night.
It has practiced
walking in the dark,
traveling with
its eyes closed,
feeling its way
by memory,
by touch,
by the pull of the moon
even as it wanes.
So believe me
when I tell you
this blessing will
reach you,
even if you
have not light enough
to read it;
it will find you,
even though you cannot
see it coming.
You will know
the moment of its
arriving
by your release
of the breath
you have held
so long;
a loosening
of the clenching
in your hands,
of the clutch
around your heart;
a thinning
of the darkness
that had drawn itself
around you.
This blessing
does not mean
to take the night away,
but it knows
its hidden roads,
knows the resting spots
along the path,
knows what it means
to travel
in the company
of a friend.
So when
this blessing comes,
take its hand.
Get up.
Set out on the road
you cannot see.
—Jan Richardson
from The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief
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