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

Before I Read the News

How courageous can I be to let all of life in?

                  —Leslie Odom, Jr.  on The Hamilcast with Gillian Pensavalle

I press both hands

to my chest, then

look at the trees

and the road outside.

I imagine the world

beyond what I see,

cities, continents, space,

then close my eyes

to open.

I listen to what is here,

attune to the silence

that holds up all sound.

Feel my heart beat

against my palm.

Hello heart, I say.

Hello heart.

If I am to read the news,

I want to invite not only

my head but my body.

Want to receive it as if

I am river and sky

as much as I am human.

The ache of the news

is no less great,

perhaps greater, but

I know I am not alone.

In the barren branches

of my fear, the chickadees

come to sing.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Break open a cherry tree,

and there are no flowers. 

But the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms. 

--Ikkyu

Hopelessness is impatience in disguise. If you are hopeless, that means you think the game is already over. And I'm here to tell you: the game is NOT over yet. 

--Joanna Macy

Fire

What makes a fire burn

is space between the logs,

a breathing space.

Too much of a good thing,

too many logs

packed in too tight

can douse the flames

almost as surely

as a pail of water would.

So building fires

requires attention

to the spaces in between,

as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build

open spaces

in the same way

we have learned

to pile on the logs,

then we can come to see how

it is fuel, and absence of the fuel

together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log

lightly from time to time.

A fire

grows

simply because the space is there,

with openings

in which the flame

that knows just how it wants to burn

can find its way.

--Judy Brown, from The Sea Accepts All Rivers

Keeping Things Whole

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body's been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

--Mark Strand

(1934-)

The Change

Overnight, the frost

took every pink zinnia

every creamy dahlia,

fading their colors to brown.

The nasturtiums have slumped

into dense wilted tangle.

The marigolds hold themselves tall

in a blackened and upright

surrender. For now,

the bright, fresh bouquets

I made yesterday are still

bright and fresh in their vases.

This beauty, we know, won’t stay.

The message is simple:

All that rises passes away.

I see it in these hands

that planted and watered

and weeded and picked—

my skin now wrinkled and thin

as frost-withered petals.

Here: the chance to witness

my own rising and passing.

How natural to age, to die.

The flowers in the vase will wilt.

With every day, so do I.

Such strange gift. First

the joy of putting the self

in service to making something

beautiful. Then, beyond joy,

the grace in learning to let it all go.

--Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Leaves

Years do odd things to identity.

What does it mean to say

I am that child in the photograph

at Kishamish in 1935?

Might as well say I am the shadow

of a leaf of the acacia tree

felled seventy years ago

moving on the page the child reads.

Might as well say I am the words she read

or the words I wrote in other years,

flicker of shade and sunlight

as the wind moves through the leaves.

--Ursula K LeGuin

We call it letting go,

as if the work were soft-

a gentle unhanding,

a sigh into the dark.

But really, it is labour.

Elbow-deep in what once was,

rolling up sleeves,

turning what we thought was finished

into the start of something fertile.

Rot is not surrender.

It is participation.

The slow alchemy of apple cores, heartbreak,

old selves and half-remembered dreams-

each softened by rain,

each broken open by time.

To compost is to stay.

To lean close when it smells of endings,

and know that endings are only

the earth’s way of rearranging life.

So I do not “let go.”

I kneel.

I dig my hands into the heat of decay

and whisper thanks to the worms

for their silent teachings.

This is how I make peace with change:

not by release,

but by return,

by trusting that the work of rot

is the work of love,

and that what I tend here,

beneath my nails and grief,

will one day feed me again.

- Brigit Anna McNeill

After Samhain

Now, for a while, the dark

stays dark. The long nights

will be long no matter

how you pray for light.

This god will not be rushed.

But she will offer you

the thick black folds of her cloak,

where you're finally free

to lose everything

that can't be kept.

--James Pearson

The birds have vanished into the sky. 

And now the last cloud drains away. 

We sit together, the mountain and I 

until only the mountain remains.

--Li Po

A Little Pep Talk

The swirling ash

doesn’t try

to be become

log again.

The flying leaves

don’t attempt

to return

to the tree.

The girl

can’t untwist

her genome

back into

separate strands.

The flour

in the bread

can’t return

to the sack,

can’t undo

the kneading

of hands.

In all things

lives a memory

of letting go

and the chance

to transform

into what

it can’t know.

What do you say

to that, heart?

Good self,

what do you say

to that?

--Rosemerry Wahtolla Trommer

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the   

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,

the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips aglow in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,   

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.   

I want to go up to them and say Stop,   

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,   

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,   

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty face turning to me,   

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome face turning to me,   

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,   

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I   

take them up like the male and female   

paper dolls and bang them together   

at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

--Sharon Olds

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

--Thich Nhat Hanh

from The Miracle of Mindfulness

Most people try

hard to do good

and find out too late

they should have

tried softer.

-- Andrea Gibson

When I point to the obviously wonderful aspects of my life as the source of my joy, it predisposes me to believing the challenges in my life are what rob me of my joy. As soon as I began exploring the ways I could be grateful for the hard stuff, I no longer felt like the outer-world was the sole dictator of what was happening in my inner-world. 

--Andrea Gibson

Breath, you invisible poem!

Pure, continuous exchange

with all that is, flow and counterflow

where rhythmically I come to be.

Each time a wave that occurs just once

in a sea I discover I am.

You, innermost of oceans,

you, infinitude of space.

How many far places were once

within me. Some winds

are like my own child.

When I breathe them now, do they know me again?

Air, you silken surround,

completion and seed of my word.

--Rilke

There isn't any

It is lovely when there is no next thing.

You are simply doing this

and there is no next thing.

You are not thinking

as soon as I get this finished

I can get started on the next

because there isn't any.

There is simply this.

You are doing it now.

And it is lovely.

--Pat Ingoldsby