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

Psalm for the Slightly Tilted

This is not

a good year.

But it has

witnesses.

They came with

the wrong shoes

for revolution.

Still,

they showed up,

like flagpoles outside the courthouse

after a nor’easter.

Comfort, Lord,

their bodies—

each a question mark

doing time

as a coatrack

hung with borrowed jackets.

When you see them protest the powerful,

since who else

protests the powerful—

Your legion

of bent spoons.

They are the only

ones who showed up—

with their orthopedic flair.

I saw my people lean—

not towards hope, but toward each other.

They chant off-rhythm

and mean it.

These are my kind of people:

no tears—just

steam from a kettle

that never quite boils.

In times like these don’t forget us:

the lopsided

leaning on one another,

like sodden paperbacks left out on the stoop—

nobody opens

these books.

But they still insist

on carrying the plot.

Comfort us standing up—

half scarecrow

half saxophone

with a squawk.

Comfort us sitting—

in that collapse called calm.

In the year they come for us

watch my people

make protest signs

out of old pizza boxes.

Children write their names with fingers

wet with saliva.

Watch—

there are no boring people

which is unfortunate.

You’d think statistically

we’d get at least a few—

one speed-souls

with just meh stuff to do.

But none of them are dull.

Each—

a suitcase held together

by duct tape.

These are your coffee-stained saints

who rise not with trumpets

but with Advil.

They stand

and wait

creased like maps

of a country

that doesn’t exist anymore.

--Ilya Kaminsky

Places I Long to Go

Every time we pass this spot on the dusty river trail, 

my daughter gazes across the water to the other side, 

shaded by cliffs, where moss grows thick and deep. 

I would love to sleep on that moss, she says, 

as her eyes go gauzy, her voice grows soft.

Living in high desert, as we do, mossy places are few.

As a girl, I had in my bedroom a whole wall covered 

with a mural of a Japanese garden, its gray rocks

mostly covered in green. I, too, dreamed of stepping 

into in a place so lush, so verdant, so alive even rocks 

proved fertile ground. To find that kind of fertility inside me—

inviting what is sensual, vital, to flourish in the barren, 

desiccated places in my heart—that is my new dream. 

But it is not always easy to let in the dark. Not always easy 

to let what is hard in me be broken down so something 

might grow. There are places I long to go with my girl. 

Some are nearby, just across the stream. 

Some, breath close, are much harder to travel to.  

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

In These Dark Days

From what darkness in its center

does the amaryllis call forth

the tall green stalk, the muscular bud,

the voluptuous petals pealing back

from the center like radiant red bells?

What impossible sun shines

inside the rough-skinned bulb

to generate such lushness,

such extravagant beauty?

I want to know it, to trust it,

this bright immensity that pulses through

what is darkest in me, this life force

that cannot fit inside, that thrusts

through the desiccated skins

of my exhausted hopes to reveal itself

vulnerable and soft, vital, astonishing,

belonging to no one, alive within us all.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

What Joins Us

At last the river is covered in ice,

a vast white sheet from bank

to bank. A woman, or a rabbit,

could use to cross what usually

feels uncrossable. I think

of William Stafford standing beside

the frozen Methow river, asking a question.

The silent river was his answer.

Later today I will put on my old navy coat

and my big old rubber boots and walk

to the shore with my satchel of questions,

the ones that writhe and twist in me,

the ones that make me tremble.

Perhaps, you, too, will bring your questions

to a shore where winter has hidden the song.

If you have no river, any quiet space will do.

We can stand there together

at the edge of no separation

to see which questions spill out.

No matter where we stand,

we can listen to the silence

that crosses all boundaries, listen,

together, and wade into the current

beneath all listening.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

One or Two Things (excerpt)

The god of dirt

came up to me many times and said

so many wise and delectable things, I lay

on the grass listening

to his dog voice,

crow voice,

frog voice, now

he said, and now,

and never once mentioned forever.

~ Mary Oliver;

Heart Medicine

To stay open 

 is what I wanted.

  Though winter and war

   have taught me 

    the importance of refuge. 

Even then, like a wild rabbit 

 that is no less soft

  and no less gentle

   inside its dark burrow,

    the heart in its shelter

     finds ways to stay open, 

      if not to the world, 

       at least to whatever

        it is that shines

         through the self,

          and the deep remove 

           becomes a chance

            to steep in tenderness

before re-emerging again 

 into the world 

  with all its threats

   and dangers, 

    with all its green 

     and radiant beauty.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

“Sometimes we cling to our self-criticism. We think to ourselves: “If I stop beating myself up, I’ll get complacent and lazy, and then I’ll never change!” And then we cling to our self-judgments even more tightly - after all, these are moral issues, involving whether you are a good, decent, worthy person or a bad, disgusting, worthless person. We think: “To accept myself as I am would be to accept that I am a flawed, bad, broken person, and to abandon all hope that I could one day be better, that I could one day deserve love.” Remember that beating yourself up is the emotional One Ring equivalent of treating yourself as your own internal lion, experiencing yourself as a threat that needs to be escaped (which is impossible), conquered (which is literally self-destructive), or avoided through shutdown (which is counterproductive, to say the least). And that’s why we need self-compassion.“

- Emily Nagoski, Come As You Are, 2015

Mother's Day

Then the voice came out of nowhere:

Now, you will have to mother yourself.

The words seemed to ride the wind,

rustling the new leaves on each tree-

its own kind of speech-then disappearing

as soon as those tiny green prayer flags

had settled again. I thought of blue eggs

tucked in the robin's nest I'd found

in a hedge just that morning, perfectly

polished and round, like pieces of sky

the mother had taken into her body

and made into a winged thing kept safe

and warm inside the shell beneath her.

Soft as feathers, the words floated off

to touch someone else who needed to be

nuzzled back into this moment, as a doe

will nudge her fawn with her muzzle,

as if to say: Stay alert. I am teaching you

how to pay attention to your life.

-James Crews, from Breathing Room

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen Cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

--Lisel Mueller

Dandelions

It is a risk, isn't it, to give your love

so completely to the hardy yellow heads

of dandelions you can't bring yourself

to pull up from the yard, leaving them

blazing like small stars around which unseen 

worlds keep spinning. The petals arranged

in the shape of a crown so the flower can hear

bees and other pollinators as they fly near,

so it can, in those few slim instants, choose

to sweeten its nectar, making sure that

others learn of this sudden feast over which

you now hover, kneeling before the plant

some would call a weed, missing out on 

these commonplace miracles dropped 

like lucky pennies everywhere at our feet.

-James Crews

Benedicere

A New Year's Day blessing

May your home always be too

small to hold all your friends.

May your heart remain ever supple,

fearless in the face of threat,

jubilant in the grip of grace.

May your hands remain open,

caressing, never clenched,

save to pound the doors

of all who barter justice

to the highest bidder.

May your heroes be earthy,

dusty-shoed and rumpled,

hallowed but unhaloed,

guiding you through seasons

of tremor and travail, apprenticed

to the godly art of giggling

amid haggard news and

portentous circumstance.

May your hankering be

in rhythm with heaven’s,

whose covenant vows a dusty

intersection with our own:

when creation’s hope and history rhyme.

May hosannas lilt from your lungs:

God is not done;

God is not yet done.

All flesh, I am told, will behold;

will surely behold.

--Ken Sehested

 Tiffany got up early and lit the fires. When her mother came down, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor, very hard.

"Er, aren't you supposed to do that sort of thing by magic, dear?" said her mother, who'd never really got the hang of what witchcraft was all about.

"No, Mum, I'm supposed not to," said Tiffany, still scrubbing.

"But can't you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?...I thought you just had to wave your hands about."

"That works," said Tiffany, "but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush."

--Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

Too Late?

By the time we arrive at the cliffside

to watch the sunset, the darkness

has already come. But because

of the ink-ish sky, we see thousands

of yellow lights glitter across the harbor.

And moonlight on the water makes

the blackened surface shine. How often

do I think I’m too late, only to find I have

arrived at just the right moment,

the moment in which there is a beauty

beyond the one I knew to wish for.

Like how, when I thought it was too late

to forgive, forgiveness arrived with its

soft and generous hands. Like how when

I thought I was too late to love, love

bloomed like a sunset, radiant and blazing,

and stayed, the way sunsets never do.

Like how I believed I was here to adore the light,

I came to learn how exquisite, how

lavish, how astonishing, the dark.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer