I’m not saying we shouldn’t be angry

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be angry.

Anger seems reasonable. But perhaps
we will do what I’ve heard the Inuit do—

spend the emotion on walking, walk a line

until all the anger has left our bodies.

The moment the Inuit notice the anger is gone,
replaced, perhaps, by sadness or fear,
compassion or just a quietness,
they mark that spot with an object

to show the extent of their anger.

And perhaps, if we’re lucky, when we walk
this way, it will be a long enough walk
that we arrive at each other’s doors,

object in hand, and when the object

leaves our grip, we’ll be able to use our hands
to greet each other, touch each other’s faces,
point to the horizon to all the other places

we might choose to walk now together.

Rosemerry Trommer

It was never success that transformed us

Though It Is Tough to Choose It

This is the path of failure. We see that our definition of success is what is not working. What is working is deep, unseen. —Joi Sharp

Even a small discontent is enough to shut us down,
convince us that the world is cold and indifferent.
Everywhere there’s evidence of this: The slush

that falls on your car seat when you open the car door.

The carrion eaters with their great black wings
that linger beside the road. You pray for sun,

and it gets darker. Someone asks
you a question, and you see your whole life
fold into one small envelope of failure.

Then one day you hit against the same
impassable wall you always hit and this time you fall
to your knees, not because you are weak,

but because at last you are ready to be opened.

Oh sweet failure, how it leads us.

Any unhappy ending is only an invitation

to crawl into the blank pages
of the next unwritten chapter.

It was never success that transformed us—

always the breaking. Not the breaking itself,
but the mystery inside pushing through us

like bindweed through pavement

making cracks in everything
we think we know, so that the world
can come streaming in.

Rosemerry Trommer

How we stand in the middle of it all, lost. How we love anyway.

Relearning

The world doesn’t want to be saved. It wants to be loved. That’s how you save it.
          -Richard Brendan

And isn’t that the way it is—
the truth that opened me yesterday
now puts me in shackles. Whatever
I knew about saving the world
must be lost. Today, the only truth
is the invitation to fall in love
with the world as it is.

Fall in love with the thorn, the sting, the loss,
the ringing in the ears after the shot.
Fall in love with all I’d rather not.
Easier when it’s metaphor. Harder
when it’s wound. Hate. Anger.
Dark snarl of contempt hurled in the face.
Harder when love feels far away.

There’s only one way then to save
the world. How we stand in the middle
of it all, lost. How we love anyway.

Rosemerry Trommer

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2019/06/08/relearning/  

I carry her smile in my pocket all day

Of Strangers

And so it is that kindness stays with me,
the way the woman in the store smiles at me
when she can tell I might start to cry.

I carry her smile in my pocket all day,
like a coin, something I carry everywhere
with no effort, but sometimes forget, and then,

when my fingers again find the ridged edges,
when I feel the weight of the coin in my palm,
I am struck by how something so small

carries value, carries meaning. All day
the smile stays with me. All day, I touch
it again and again, feel how its weight

tips some invisible scale, how I remember
again to say hello to fate and fall in love.

Rosemerry Trommer

Oh yes. Smiles actually save lives - http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.com/2013/06/i-am-walking-to-bridge.html

Falling more deeply in love with the world...

On the Winter Solstice

...On this longest night, it’s so clear—
the truest reason to write at all is to fall
more deeply in love with the world,

with its trees and its drizzle
and its stubborn shine and its
relentless hunger and its corners
that will never ever see the growing light.

Fall in love with the octopus that can detach
an arm on purpose and then grow it back again.

Fall in love with the elusive lynx
and the crooked forest and the frazzle ice
tinkling in the San Miguel River.

Fall in love even with this profoundly flawed
species that, despite all its faults,
is still capable of falling more deeply,
more wildly in love.

Rosemerry Trommer

And suddenly all that matters

Walking Through the Prehistoric Journey Exhibit

And again I recall how small we are,
how ninety nine percent of all species
that have ever lived are extinct,
how thin our stripe in geologic time,
how remarkable that we are here at all.

And suddenly all that matters
is that I love you—and what are the odds?
How many billion years in the making,
this rush of gratitude, this burgeoning
joy, this thrill in the sheer Cenozoic luck
to feel the concurrent burning and quenching,
the simultaneous bite and salve, the Quaternary
gift of thriving and failing at the same time?

If it feels as if it’s taken forever to get to this place,
lover, it has. Think trilobite. T-rex. Cave bear.
Wooly mammoth. Think how little time
has passed, and how lucky, how lucky we are.

Rosemerry Trommer

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2018/07/08/walking-through-the-prehistoric-journey-exhibit/

Fear

The Thing Is
after Ellen Bass

To trust life, that is the thing.
To trust it even when there are gaping holes
in the walls of your certainty.

To trust it even when your foundation
feels like a strange place filled with strange people
who all feel more at home in you than you do.

And when fear enters you like a bear in your basement,
or like three bears, all of them famished,
all of them rummaging through your emergency stores,

yes, when fear offers to give you its name,
when fear brings you a ladders and says, Here,
climb down into yourself, into this chamber

of strangers and bears,
when you would rather go anywhere but in,
that is when you step onto the rungs and go down,

one rung at a time. No gun in your hand.
No bear spray. No knife. There is honey
in here somewhere. And tea. So much here

to offer these hungriest parts of yourself.
And you are ready to make peace.
You are ready to meet them and share.

Rosemerry Trommer

Reaching for each other

That Winter Evening
for Billy Miller

When the man pulled my father
from the icy waters of Lake Michigan,
he did not know years later my step-daughter
would need someone to buy her a sweater
so she would feel nurtured, did not know

that my son would need someone
to make a mosaic with him so that he
could feel loved, did not know
that my daughter would need
someone to tell her that she
was beautiful. When the man

pulled my father from the water
when he fell in while fishing alone,
that man couldn’t know that
years later this daughter
would sit beside her father and hold his hand
and weep at the simple gift
of being able to hold his hand.

The man was doing what he knew to do—
to rush to the person in need of help.
He didn’t think then of the other lives
blessed by the man. Did not think
of the other lives blessed by his hands
when he chose to try, though the odds
were low. He knew only to reach.

Years later, my mother still sleeps
beside the man that was pulled
from the winter lake.

Give us hands that know to reach
for each other—stranger, neighbor,
friend. Give us hands that unthinkingly
choose to save the family
we’ve never met.

Rosemerry Trommer

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2018/02/10/that-winter-evening/

Astonished

In an Hour We Live a Lifetime

Walking the world of dry leaves
and rickety bridges,
there as in old letters,
we marvel at the things
we once knew that we have
just recently discovered—
How new it all is again.

How we orbit the same sun
every day and still
can be astonished
by the way things
shine.

Rosemerry Trommer

On a Day when Hostility Rules the News

And even as the countries aim their missiles at each other
and dangle threats and hurl names, the woman
in the hair salon gives you a deal because
in an hour you’ve shared dreams, shared fears.

And the bus driver helps you find your way.
And the tall man in the grocery store sees you reaching
for a box on the top shelf and offers to hand it to you.

Even as the congress argues and quarrels and stalls,
the little blonde boy you barely know snuggles into your lap
and tells you he loves you. Kindness continues to thrive,
Kindness breeds more kindnesses. Kindness

reminds you again that wherever you are,
you are home, that the world you most want
to live in is right here at the kitchen table,
right here on the noisy, crowded street.

Rosemerry Trommer

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2017/08/27/on-a-day-when-hostility-rules-the-news/

There are thirty-one spells for forgiveness, though

Which one to try first?

In the book of spells
I do not find the one
that helps you forget
what you want
to forget.

There is one for
making the bees
come out midwinter
and another to make
the walls speak what
they’ve seen.

There’s a spell for
making minutes go slower,
and a spell to turn a woman’s
skin green.

But no spell
to forget what we wish
not to know.

There are thirty-one spells for
forgiveness, though.

Rosemerry Trommer

Shine

One Brilliance

frost in the dried weeds—
sometimes it takes the cold
for things to find their shine.

Rosemerry Trommer

Seeds

I am fascinated by them.

On Thin Brown Wings

Perhaps not as many days of sun
as they might have wanted,
perhaps not as much warmth,
perhaps not as much rain—
rain that soaks in like a lover’s
lingering glance, and still
beside the trail in late fall
they are everywhere,

the seeds of next year’s flowers
giving their everything to the world.

Rosemerry Trommer

My Seed Album: https://goo.gl/photos/XQdrC3NDjJ74J5r38

One Way to Spend an Afternoon Together

Our noisy outer world is but a reflection of the noise inside: our incessant need to be occupied, to be doing something.

Three Types of Laziness, Tenzin Palmo

Sit with me. Let’s say nothing at all.
There is nothing that must be said.
The impulse to comment on weather,
we’ll feel it rise and melt away.

The weather will do what the weather does,
will rain, will shine, will hail.
Perhaps we will feel the need
to comment on the light or to wonder

when things will be different than they are now
or to worry about all the problems
that we will never be able to fix.
Urgency only lasts so long before
it disappears. How did we ever

believe we belonged anywhere
but here? Though the rain
is gone, the scent of rain persists.
If we are quiet long enough,
it will say everything that must be said.

Rosemerry Trommer

https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2016/05/16/one-way-to-spend-an-afternoon-together/

The willingness to blossom

Out of the Days

What does that do to the old blood moving through its channels?
Naomi Shihab Nye, 'Fresh'

So much we do not need—
the old t-shirts at the back
of the closet, the secret
ingredient in Aunt Jean’s
tuna casserole, the pity
of strangers, the growing stack
of journals we promise
ourselves we will someday read,
the memorized jingles
from TV commercials
we sang when we were young.

And then there’s the list of what
we cannot do without—
the willingness to blossom
out of our own detritus,
the capacity to laugh a real
unguarded laugh, a joy
in unlearning whatever we
think we know, and
the grace to let our story
re-write itself even as we
fear turning the page.

Rosemerry Trommer