Poetry itself wants to always touch what is difficult and what is beautiful. At the same time, poetry itself loves paradox, and a poem wants to do that.
Wow.
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Rosemary Tromer, who co hosts Emerging Form, a podcast on the creative process, Secret Agents of Change, and Soul Writer's Circle. Her poetry has appeared on a Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour,
oh Magazine, American Life, and poetry and many others. Today, Eric and Rosemary discuss her newest book, The Unfolding.
Hi Rosemary, welcome back to the show.
Hi Eric, thanks for having me back.
I'm excited to talk with you. You have a new book of poems called The Unfolding, and we will get into that in a moment, but before we do, we will start in the customary way, which is to read the Parable of the Wolves. And it goes like this. There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. This in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always
at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
All right, So I brought it up knowing this was going to happen. I brought it up last night with my husband and daughter while we were eating dinner and
they weren't any help. Thought, oh no, So this morning in the kitchen, I was thinking about times when I wasn't actually able to feed anything myself, and how in those times, all of us have had a time when we feel like we can't do anything, whether that it's because of grief or because of fear or whatever it is, something's taken us over illness, and someone else comes and
helps us feed, and I think that that's important. I think about who has come to help me in those times, and how you know, with them offering I think almost completely the wolf that's longing for a goodness and generosity. I guess I'm just thinking about how important a community is, and how when we're not able to feed ourselves, how important it is then that we have those people around us.
I guess maybe I've been lucky enough to have people who are feeding this wolf that was full of graciousness, generosity, goodness, less so people who would come in and complain and say everything was wrong. And I can imagine that if that's the community you have, that'd be a very different circumstance. But so just thinking about how important our community is.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense this idea of the type of community we have around us, because there are people who can say things that are profoundly unhelpful at times, right, and so being blessed to have that
community is really wonderful. I want to talk about grief because you mentioned grief as one of these things that takes us over and I assume for you that's the one that's most present because your book, you say early on, the poems and The Unfolding were all written since twenty twenty one, the year in which my son Finn chose to take his life and my father died of kidney failure.
Yeah, that was a tough year and very much, you know, I was in that state of I can't do anything, and very much felt as if I was carried through that difficult time by friends, by family, and honestly, eric by love itself, which sounds sort of strange, I supposed to say, but I was very aware of love carrying me and doing the work that I couldn't do right.
Right. So why is the book called the Unfolding? There is the title of the book.
Glad you asked, I had I suppose a vision of a flower and it was just opening and opening. And do you know what a renunculus is.
I looked it up after you had that phrase in your book, and I'm glad you just pronounced it because I didn't know how to say it. I probably still can't say it because that's more than two syllables, which is beyond me. But they're a beautiful flower that sort of opens up very wide.
Yes, they have so many petals and they're actually kind of small, but they're pa and e ish, I suppose, and you can just imagine that the sense of more and more pedals opening and opening and opening, and in this kind of vision, they continued to and it was just like as if the heart itself are our lives themselves are like this, this continual unfolding and thinking too then of the universe, right, and how our universe itself
is continually growing expanding. So this kind of sweet connection between the soul and what's happening cosmologically, there is this kind of opening and opening and opening never endingly.
It's interesting. I had an experience one time when I was doing tong Lend meditation. I don't know if you're familiar with it's considered a given and taking practice where you visualize that you're breathing in like someone else's pain in the form of black smoke. And I had this experience where at first it feels like, well, I'm breathing this smoke into this small container, where that's a bad
thing to do, right, the smoke is in here. All of a sudden, I just had this vision of the back of me being the universe, as expansive as the universe, and that smoke just dissipated into absolute nothing out there. And so I have a connection also in my spirit to this idea of the universe in its vastness and the way it continues to expand.
Oh I love that story in that sense of the whole universe you right as you're breathing in all this other toxicity. Yeah, beautiful. What a vision.
The book has a lot of themes, but I would say the core theme is how grief and joy can sit near each other. You say early on, I've been surprised by what's emerging from a broken and ransacked heart. I love that ransacked heart. A growing fluency with love and ever evolving intimacy with the sacred, a sense of communion with others who have also faced loss.
Yeah. I mean I think that grief is certainly there's no way I wouldn't be writing about it, I guess, just because it's been so present for me sure, you know, in the last three years. And the thing I suppose that anyone who read the book would see is that this is really a book of praise. You know that in almost all of the poems, that there is some opening to what's sacred, what's beautiful, what's mystical, what's love,
what connected? And I was so grateful this book came out because Mark Burrows, who's my editor, called me one day and said, hey, we'd love to do your next book. And I said, fine, sure, let's think about it. And I started pulling things together and he's the one who, when I finally submitted it all said, Rosemary, this is a book of praise. I was so glad eric that he saw that, because that's I think where I would
want to focus. To know then that even though it's a book that's very much steeped in grief, that there is also this. I guess the way that I like to think about it is that if grief is the boss will continue, like there's this baseline of you know this is hurt, so this is heartbreaking, but that the melody itself is the melody of praise, That it's a wonderful thing to be alive, that it is an incredible
gift to be alive. And these two together inextricably. I like the way that the book brings them both in.
I was going to ask about that because in almost all of the poems, as you said, at least the ones that are talking about grief, there is a turning point in there where there's a little bit of light that comes in. And poems are a reflection of our experience,
but not a direct reflection. And I'm curious in your own experience of grief, is that always the way it happens or are there times where it's just grief and grief and grief and some more grief before the light or the turning or the praise comes in.
Interesting, So in a linear way, I like that you use this word turn. Turn is a poetic word that we use, right, you know, it could be it's hard, it's hard, it's hard, and then the turn and it's beautiful. I'm taking this question really to heart, friend, I want to be really honest for me it is almost always very hand in hand. Eric. There have been moments where it was an unbearableness that I couldn't see out of. They didn't last long. I can think of, honestly, just
a handful where I was so destroyed. I remember reaching out to a friend both times. And is even that reaching out is the reaching out itself knowing you know that there's something there. I wasn't not able to reach out for me. And maybe it is because of poetry, because poetry itself wants to always touch what is difficult and what is beautiful at the same time, poetry itself
loves paradox, and a poem wants to do that. And I think that it's possible that a practice of sitting down every day and wondering what's here and being open to this much larger potential doing it with a page, I think has a way of allowing it to be
possible in any given moment over time. Right, we're talking about a twenty year habit, Right, It's not something I started last week, or you know, I'm wondering about that because I don't know that I'm unusual in this, but I do know that this is what's true for me.
Yeah, I think you might be unusual in that I think that there is a human tendency to view our experience monochromatically and not notice, to use your phrase, that the underlying base note is this, and there may be a melody that has some other things going on, but not to not be paying attention to it, and to
describe our experience along that monochromatic baseline. And the thing I'm always cautious of on this show is being what would I say, overly aspirational, meaning I don't want people who are going through a difficult time and aren't having the same experience to feel bad about themselves because their experience is different, right, That's kind of why I ask.
But I do agree with you that this is the reason that long term investment in creative practice or personal growth or awareness practice or all these things, I think pays real dividends. Because I went through something it's been about a year ago. It was really difficult, a lot of grief, a lot of fear. It just really sort of shook me up, and it was really hard, and there was a pervasive sense that ran right alongside it
that I was okay. And I think that is from thirty years at this point of some degree of I never know what to call it, inner work, whatever you want to call it. That did predispose my mind to look for both to look for the difficulty, but also to look for what could be good in it without getting rid of the difficult. And I think that's what your poems do so well. Is it's not that the light is a way of turning away from the difficult, right, It's not a way of making it go away. It's
a way of existing with it. There's the great pain, and then there's the joy goes with it. I'm gonna say one last thing, then I'm gonna shut up because I'm talking way too much and you're not talking enough. And the reason that I think monochromatically often is because I've had depression at different points over my years. And that is a complete blankness, right, there's no up, there's no down. But it makes me think. And I can't remember who said this, Joan Didion, Maybe I don't know that.
You know. Sadness is that everything matters too much, and depression is that nothing matters, right, And what you're describing is an experience where everything matters, not even too much.
But so much that was so beautifully said. That's exactly it. It's that everything matters right. It's not trying to be okay and push away the sorrow. It's saying, here is the sorrow, and here is the beauty right, here is the loss, and here is the love, without trying at all all to push it away, without trying to pretend it's not there, without trying to fix it. And I feel like a huge part of this is self compassion. Eric.
I feel like that's something that is really evolving in me over the last few years, is not beating myself up for having a difficult time, for just really knowing, oh, yeah, this is what we do. Because we're human. We have a hard time. It's just not easy. It isn't easy to be alive knowing that. How do we also see that at the same time, there's something wonderful here And I feel like self compassion is the piece that allows for that. Can I write a poem about that? Please? From the book?
Yeah, it's about time for a poem. Some nice segue.
So the book is in four parts, and each of those four parts are words that I made up for praise, and it was in part I think, because Eric, of what you're talking about, that we tend to think monochromatically. Certainly, our word praise is you know, yeah, you think are great? And so I thought, okay, if this is a book of praise, but the word praise doesn't really seem to touch it. It's a little too monochromatic. So the four words are words I made up because there are more nuanced,
more complex expressions of praise. For instance, the poem I'm about to read comes from the second chapter, which is sorrowm which it comes from sorrow plus Ohm and the idea of it's the kind of praise that can only rise out of the most difficult moments, the kind of praise that only comes when we're in it, struggling, wrestling, being wrestled by life, and in that moment there's this, oh, and this too. So this poem comes out of that
chapter with astonishing tenderness. When in the middle of the night you wake with the certainty you've done it all wrong, When you wake and see clearly all the places you've failed. In that moment, when dreams will not return, this is the chance for your most gentle voice, the one you reserve for those you love most to say to you quietly, Oh sweetheart, this is not yet the end of the story.
Sleep will not come. But somehow, in that wide awake moment, there is peace, the kind that does not need everything to be right before it arrives, the kind that comes from not fighting what is real, the peace that rises in the dark on its sure dark wings and flies true with no moon, no stars.
That's a beautiful poem, is one of the ones I was going to ask you to read, And there's a few lines in it that really jumped out at me that maybe we could discuss for a second. The first is,
this is not yet the end of the story. Like this poem would fit perfect in the chapter I'm working on for my book right now, because I'm talking about this tendency we have to take an event and then end the story there it's a bad thing and boom, without seeing the way things will unfold because we don't know, and so it's hard to but just that recognition often this is not the end of the story can be so healing.
Just that Yeah, yeah, thank goodness. Right, it really does go on, you know. And I think there's another poem in the book in which I remember I put on my son's crocs, which are still sitting outside our door, and I put them on, and I kind of walk around, and I'm like, life went on, and I just look, you know, here I am wearing his shoes, and his body didn't go on, although in some ways, in many ways,
I feel his spirit goes on. But I just look at all the blooming all around me, the trees and how green they are, and the river and how it keeps on flowing, and the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing, and I'm still here too, and life went on. Life went on.
It does The story isn't over.
I want to pause for a quick good wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and a mistake I see people making. And that's really that we don't think about these new habits that we want to add in the context of our entire life. Right, Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life
that we have. So when we just keep adding I should do this, I should do that, I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen, So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove. If you want to step by step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf, go to good Wolf
dot me, slash change and join the free masterclass. That's initially so jarring. I think when you're like in the beginning stages of being wrecked, looking around and seeing that the world is going on, almost feels like the world is cruel?
How could it do that?
How could it go on? Right? But over time, my experience is that moves from something that's painful to something that feels good, which is, oh, yeah, life goes on as do I, as do we do?
I Yeah.
I want to go back to another part in that poem where you see clearly all the places you've failed, because we were talking about self compassion a minute ago, and you were talking about the self compassion you needed to give yourself to not feel bad that you felt bad, But I think there was another huge dose of self compassion you had to give yourself. And we talked a little bit about this last time around blame of I have a son who took his own life, and what
role do I or did I play in that? How have you worked with that, because that's the sort of thing that can be crushing.
Mm hm, Eric, I don't know why I have been so blessed on this one. Well, I guess I have some idea for me. The blame hasn't been a big part of it. When Finn died, we could say that it was not a surprise and that things had been very difficult for a long time, and I had been very actively putting all of my energy into doing everything I could to keep him here, I suppose, but to help him, to open him, finding him mentors, finding him, help going at you know, taking fencing classes with him,
and taking him on you know whatever. I mean. I was so so active in about every possible arena. I think that that helped me. For me, there was no doubt in my mind that I had given this boy all the love I could give him. If this has been some other person, I would have thought, maybe what else could I have done? But I knew the truth of it was that if there was anything I could have thought of to do, I had done that. I think that helped with the blame and regret that part.
That part for me, there's this beautiful story that I heard not too long ago about the second arrow. You're probably familiar with this story, but for people who aren't, just very briefly, there's the pain that you have that you can't get away from. My son died. That pain is absolutely inescapable. But then there's a second pain that comes from blame or shame, and that pain is avoidable.
And I think I was so lucky that it became almost immediately clear each time i'd find one of these places where this kind of second era would come in, you know, like projection. That was one that maybe I had to work a little bit harder on. You know, oh, I'll never see him, you know, get married, I'll never meet it, if he had a bab I'll never be a grandma to his kids. And it was so incredibly apparent that that pain that was so much, I was like, oh,
I don't need to do that, right. It was a really conscious choice when it would come up, Okay, you stop stop that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that that's the power of that idea, is that that second layer of pain is And I say that people who do this to themselves. We all do right, I'm saying this self compassionately, but it's self inflicted, meaning we are doing it to ourselves, which the good news means then we can stop doing it. Yeah, And I've joked before that, like everything that I teach is just about how not to make things worse, which
is not a great marketing slogan. But when we think about how much of our lives is that second layer of pain, it's a lot of it. And if you cannot do that, your life is immeasurably better because we make everything worse with blame, with shame, with all the thing I shouldn't be feeling this, what's wrong with me? I'm also really happy for you that blame wasn't such a big part of it and that you were able to have that feeling like I've done everything that I
knew to do right. And I think that's to me a sign of some degree of emotional maturity when we can look at situations and go, Okay, this was not the outcome I wanted.
Well, there it is.
Like I did the best I could, and that's gonna have to be Okay.
I did the best I could, which is different from you know, like I didn't do everything right saying I was the perfect mom. I'm just saying that, Yes, if I could think of it to do, I did it. Like, I'm sure I screwed up all over the place, Eric, but that's because I'm a human. But I knew, I just there was no doubt, there was no doubt that I'd done whatever I could to love him, to help him,
to nourish him. Yeah, and not just you know, not just in those last few years, like I really did throw myself, yeah, utterly into motherhood from the beginning.
Yeah. There's another line in that poem, the kind that comes from not fighting what is real, And that is a theme in the book a lot. And if I go back also to I mean, I see it in a lot of poems self portrait as a tuning fork, as if struck by the great hand of what is true. You talk in other places about the invitation to say yes to praise what is And I love this idea of really turning towards befriending and welcoming what actually is.
Yeah, I mean, that's where it's at.
How do you do that?
Well, I you know, one of the other words I made up vera lujah is really exactly this right veritas, which means the truth allelujah. So just putting those two together, vera Lujah is this idea of the praise that comes when we meet the world as it is instead of the way we wish it would be. How do we do that? I mean, poetry is amazing for this eric It really is, because it invites again and again and
again a curiosity what is here? What is here? I think that when we sit down, whether it's you know, to sit down with a pen and paper or to sit down with painting, I'm pulling out the arts because I really do think that the arts are incredible for helping us meet difficult moments and helping us find something generative and creative out of heartache, well out of anything for that matter. It doesn't have to be heard. You can find something wonderful, creative and generative out out of
an earthworm or out of tree bark, you know. I mean, it doesn't have to be hard break, but it can be that too. And I also think that practicing when the stakes are really low, when we have a practice of showing up and wondering, what is here? What is here? What is true? What's true now, what's happening outside, what's happening inside? And by outside, I mean what's happening in the world around me, and what is happening in the world inside of me at the same time wondering these
two things. So maybe that's part of it, right, when the world inside of me is saying everything is heartbreak, heartbreak, heartbreak, and then I managed to make that leap and look outside and see, oh, and the world outside me there's bunny hopping across the yard, and I can just fall in love with this little lump of bunny. And that's all it takes, right to realize, Oh, it isn't all heartache, is it. Yeah, although it's not saying that the heart
ache isn't there, of course it is. It doesn't go away, and there's the bunny.
I mean, it's a real revelation that you can feel multiple things it wants, right, I mean, it really is like that we are capable of that. And I do agree with you that I think poetry can be really helpful in this regard. Now, I am not a poet. I occasionally sketch a few words down, but what I've tried to cultivate and what I like about poetry. The reason that reading poetry is beneficial to me is I
think it teaches me how to see. It trains my ability to look a little bit more closely and to see, and it shows me that even in the most mundane moment, that moment seen through a certain lens is magical. I'll see a poet describe the same scene out my window that I'm seeing, and I'm like, all right, whatever you know, And then I read this poem, I'm like, yes, it is absolutely beautiful. I had no idea. I just didn't
see it. And I think that's the gift that poets like you bring to people who are less inclined that way. It's a training for me to see.
I think it's a training for anyone. I had written poems for years before I started a daily practice, but I remember that was the biggest part of the daily practice was that it required paying attention in a new way.
And I was very aware of that, because, boy, do I know what it's like to you know, I've always called them the busy blinders, where we're just running from one thing to the next thing to the next thing, and we're not paying attention, you know, I have a tree, this gorgeous ponderosa pine at the top of my driveway, and how often do I see that tree? So seldom? And this is I laugh at myself for this, right right,
Like I go buy that tree almost every day. I don't always leave the house, but every day I leave the house, I go buy that tree. How often do I notice it?
Yeah? Yeah, And it's human nature to some degree, right, Like, that's the way the brain is designed to work. If you've seen something before, the brain is sort of like, Okay, I don't need to pay attention because there might be things I haven't seen that I do need to pay attention. It's why the brain is drawn to novelty. Right, There's a survive element to it. So it makes sense. And
I'm glad that the brain can do that. But to your point, when that's all the brain does, we miss our whole lives, right.
Right, that's beautifully said. I don't think we need to be poets, by the way to do this practice. I think it helps. I mean, you don't have to be a poet to want to pay attention. It does take maybe this though, a longing to see what's here, Like I think it does take that. I want to see what's here. Gosh. I was so aware eric after Finn died, especially then, I had this constant prayer, open me, open me, open me. I wanted to stay open and to feel it all. I wanted to feel every bit of that pain.
I wanted to feel all of it. I didn't want to run away from any of it, and I didn't want an amount. And I think that longing, that willingness me, open me, that is what it takes. Maybe whether you're writing, it doesn't matter if you're writing a poem, but to have that long to be open.
That's a great way to think about It is the desire I'm always about, is there something simple I can do here? And I don't think that this practice is simple, because I think it's an ongoing practice of deepening this. But I do think a simple question that I often use, What have I not seen before in this scene? You know, like I've looked out this window. There's no window in the room I'm in. But let's say I was in
a room with a window my old studio. There was a window it looked out, and I looked at that window a million times. I'm exaggerating, but I would look out and I say what have I seen? What have I not noticed? And to me, that's a very simple thing that I can just ask myself anywhere.
Yeah, that's a great question.
I think what we're trying to do in many ways is outsmart that part of the brain I was just talking about, because in a neuroscience way, in a very real sense, what many neurosciences believe is happening is that you may already know this, but the two things are happening. Our brain is predicting what it expects to see, and our senses are transmitting what is actually seen. If those things match, in a very real sense, what we see never gets to certain parts of the brain because the
brain just says, I don't need to know. I expected to see, exit, what's coming back? Get out of here, right. And so what we're trying to do is just at least what I'm trying to do is force the brain to actually see look again, bypass that prediction mechanism and look again.
That's a fabulous practice, and I love the brain science behind it, because you're right, I mean, how much do we not see because we just predict it and move right past, you know, It's the reason we don't hit the furniture in the house in the dark when we're walking through it. Right, we already, right, already. No, I have a poem about this longing to be open? Could I read that one?
Please your time? That means impeccable. I was just about to say, I think we need a poem.
Okay. So this poem is called the Prayers, and it reminds me of when I was a very young mom and my kids and I were playing in the sand and I'd been going through a very difficult time separately, and I'm was distracted. Well, my kids were playing in the stand and I was writing with little rocks in the sand. I wrote the words open me. And I remember telling my spiritual teacher that I had done that, and she said, oh, be careful, that's a that's a
big prayer. Yeah, the Prayers. When I asked the world to open me, I did not know the price. When I wrote that two word prayer in the sand, I did not know loss was the key devastation. The hinge trust was the dissolution of the idea of a door. When I asked the world to open me, I could never have said yes to what came next. Perhaps I imagined the waves knew only how to carry me. I did not imagine they would also pull me under when I asked the world to open me. I had not
imagined drowning was the way to reach the shore. The waves of sorrow dragged me down with their tides of unthinkable loss. The currents emptied my pockets and stripped me of my ideas. I was rolled and eroded and washed up on the sand like driftwood softened. I sprawled there and wept, astonished to still be alive. It is not easy to continue to pray this way, open me, and yet it is the truest prayer I know, the other truest prayer, though sometimes I long to reject its truth.
This thank you, It's beautiful.
After he died, I remember getting help from lots of people and all kinds of modalities, reiki and acupuncture and massage and just talking to people. And I remember, you know, when people would say, how can I help you, I would just say, keep me open, make me open, help me stay open.
I wrote a song years ago, and one of the lines in the chorus was that you know a broken heart is an open heart. Yeah, And then an open heart can be a broken heart. Also, it goes to both directions, And that's kind of what you're saying here. By being open, I'm more open to the difficult things that come as well as the good. But that seems to be to me a bargain.
Yeah, well you're saying I'll take it all. Yeah, who would want it all? But really don't we desperately want.
It all most of the time?
Okay, I'm with you. This is this is what I said in the poone too. I'd never say yes to that. I'd never say yes to that, of course, no, of course not.
I think what's harder to say yes to, at least for me. Sometimes, the thing that's hardest for me to say yes to, I'm not going to make equivocal statements is the is mundaneity a word, the mundane nature of day to day existence, right, Like, even that I have to be willing to open to. Oh yeah, that's what I don't want open to because I want every moment to be this open, like, wow, I'm seeing everything, But a lot of life is just sort of like it just rolls along. And for me, that's the one I'm
working most on opening to and just going that's okay. Yeah, you don't need to go make every moment spectacular or every moment peaceful, or every moment insight, or every moment poetry, or some moments can just be whatever sort of plano moment they are. And that's the one that's hard for me to open to.
The mundanity. We're in the business with making up wards today, Eric, So we're gonna go with danity.
Yes, Yeah, it's funny. You referenced a book that I had never heard of until recently, but I bought because when I heard it, I was like, I must have this book. And it's what's it called, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows?
Yes, by John Kunnig. I love this book so much. My master's is in linguistic so I'm a word lover, right. I just I love language, and I love what he's done with his book. If anybody doesn't have it yet, it's such a joy because you read these descriptions he has and you see yourself and all of it, like oh there, oh there, I am too, and he just finds these very complex, beautiful moments of what it is to be alive. And it's not poetry, but that book is completely poetry.
I love that book right right. I mean, it's actually a very good teacher of what many psychologists think is an incredibly important skill, which is emotional granularity, the ability to be more precise and nuanced in what you feel. And that book is a great example of it. And the title is just it's too good. The minute I heard the title was I'm ordering this book sight unseen.
Oh yeah, I hope you love it.
Speaking of the mundane and opening to it. I think you have a poem that speaks to this.
I do. This one is actually the last poem in the book, and it goes right to that mundane place. Eric Today's sermon was a single drop of melted snow that clung to the tip of a tight red bud at the end of a naked branch. It didn't have to shout or sing to make me fall in love with the way the afternoon light gathered inside it. Such a simple pulpit, such humble gospel, this radiant preacher, this silence in which the prayer is made of listening.
It's a beautiful poem, and what it brings up in me is the longing to see like that if I'm going to be even more clear. I think the thing that I have a difficult opening up to is the emotional mundaneity. M Yeah, it's the times where I feel like I know that that bud coming out on the tip of that branch should be beautiful or moving or something, but it's not doing anything.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the hard part. I think I'm going to go off and think about what you said, because what I can connect to in that moment that I do think is beautiful is that longing, That that longing is connected to the knowledge of the beauty that's all around me.
You know, Eric, I love that you bring this in then this Yes, I know it's there, and there are those moments when we're just like I don't see it and actually don't want to see it. Is that part of it?
It's I don't see it or I don't feel it, or I don't feel it. It's like, okay, yeah, I know it should be beautiful, but it's just nothing's happening inside me. It's not stirring me, unstirred.
I'm not being starred, right, I am unsteerable. Yeah, which is I guess even different from the other place I was thinking of, I don't want to be stirred right now, which just yesterday I was at a most beautiful, heartbreaking gathering where my beloved friend who has brain cancer is going to die today. She has a death with dignity, and we all gathered and I won't go into that, I suppose, but as I left this most sacred, incredible holy space, I wanted to not be there for a
while anymore. And I told myself, Okay, sweetheart, you don't have to right now. You'll come back, so right now, you don't have to feel it. You just don't have to. So I think, isn't that interesting that there's all these you know, I'm stirred. I don't want to be stirred. I would like to be stirred, but I'm not stirred right right, All these right right, all these ways to meet a moment.
Yep, And it does all come back ultimately to say yes to the world as it is, to praise what is, not what I wish it was, but what is to me. That's the lesson of a lifetime, right, That's a lesson it takes my entire life to learn. I've gotten much better at it being a heroin Addict at twenty four. It shows my attempts to not say yes to control everything, right, Like, I don't want that, I don't want that. I'm going to adjust it. I'm going to fix it. I'm going to change it.
I'm going to change it.
Right. And so since then, it's just been a work of like, okay, what is say yes to it?
Yeah, And I really didn't want to do that either. You know, I spent almost all my life trying really hard to not say yes to the world.
As it is.
Yeah, and I'm sorry about your friend.
Oh, yes, Well it's been quite a path. You know. We sang together for thirty years.
Oh my goodness.
And then at her gathering, it wasn't a memorial, right, she was right there, right right, So it was I've never been in a situation like this, you know. There were seventy of us gathered, and four of us who've sung with her for for decades sang songs that we'd sung with her, and I could hear where her voice wasn't you know. Yeah, it was very very beautiful, very moving. She smiled the whole time. Eric, she smiled the whole time,
and it was beautiful. How at peace she was. She had such a piece about her that allowed for such wrestling with me to know that here it is again, right, what is here? I was really sad? And what else was here? She was so full of peace? Yeah, so thrilling for her and her peace and also you know, meeting my own heartbreak heartbreak, Yeah, at the same time, and of course singing and crying ends up and gurgling. It was you know, at least it was sincere. It was certainly not a performance.
Yeah, No one's going to doubt your your sincerity. That's that's funny. You know, that death with dignity thing is really so I've said this before on the show, like if I was going to get heavily invested in a cause, I think that might be the one for me. Because I haven't had the fortune to go to the sort of event you're describing, but I've heard of them. You know, what a beautiful thing to celebrate your life while you're actually still there and in a place where you're capable
of appreciating it. I've seen the death without Dignity a number of times now, and it really is, you know, undignified. There's a great Jason isbel song called Elephant, which is a heartbreaking song. But he talks about this idea that no one dies with dignity, but we have the chance to give people the ability to do that, and it infuriates me that we don't in a lot of places.
Yeah, yeah, Colorado newly does. I think it's only three years old.
Now we are near the end of our time here. But I thought we could have you read one last poem, which is the Grand Quilt.
Oh, I'm glad you picked this one.
I think this is a nice way to sort of take us out.
So this is a poem in a section that's called some Union some as a proto into European root that means to sing and union. And the poems in this section really are the praise that comes when we understand how deeply connected we are with everything, including the things maybe we'd rather not be connected with. So this is the Grand Quilt. I don't believe we can stitch together only scraps of beauty, squares of light. I don't believe in a quilt that doesn't also have patches of sorrow,
blocks of ache. Such pieces are of course much harder to want to stitch in, but it matters that we do not exclude them. It matters right now, that we don't pretend they do not exist. It matters that we
sow every piece into the grand cloth. It matters to how we sow these pieces in, perhaps using our finest silk thread, perhaps with an elaborate stitch our grandmother taught us, or perhaps we must use a stitch we make up, because no one ever taught us how to do this most difficult task, to meet what at first seems unwanted, wrong, and to incorporate it into the hole, and to do this for as long as we can stitch. That's how long.
That's beautiful. I love this idea of It matters how we sow these pieces in, not just that we include them, but how we go about doing it, and that some of doing that we may have been taught. We've seen other people, and there are plenty of times for different people where no one modeled for us how to do this difficult emotional stuff. We've never seen it.
Yeah, right, so we get to make a struggle and make it up. Yeah, oh this didn't work, Okay, Yeah, No, I think that's a big part of it. I mean, wouldn't it be great if we did have role models for all of this, and to some degree, I think, you know, they do exist if we look for them.
I'm thinking now of Marabi Star, who is just such an lighthouse for all of us, really, especially in this realm that we've been talking about, of everything matters of showing up with what's most difficult and what's most wondrous and being both grounded and ecstatic at the same time. You know, and I think that we do have to figure it out. Even if you sit at the feet of Mirrabi Star every day, you're still going to have to figure it out for yourself.
Yep. Yeah. I got to go to Taos recently and interview Mirabi in person as part of a trip out there, and it was lovely. But I'm happy that you brought up role models because I actually think that what you've done in your last book, in this book is a role model for other people. And I'm going to each here, but I don't think it's a huge stretch your work
to me. What you're doing here, and Mirabai does this also with her grief is a little similar to me to what Victor Frankel did for us, right, Because I think the reason that we're often drawn to people like Victor Frankel. At least I am is that he shows that these ideas about how we can live a better life apply in even the most dire of circumstances. They're good in your day to day life, and they're good
in the most extreme human circumstances. And I think what I love about your work is this showing, in one of the most extreme circumstances, besides being in a concentration camp, is losing your child, how to do that with some degree of openness and grace. And so thank you for that.
Thank you, Eric, Thank you. I'm thinking now too of the poets who are writing, you know, in Gaza right now and doing the same work, which is a horror I can't even imagine, right right, And I think it's true that we will all come to opportunities in our lives where we are asked to wonder, like you say, what am I not seeing? What did I not see here? Or you know, my maybe have my prayer open me, you know, even though it's insanely painful to be opened. Ye, We'll all get those chances.
And I think it sort of takes us back also to where we began, which is what in these moments where you can't, you know others can, and but to flip that, which is that we can do that for other people too.
Oh yeah, thank goodness, right, I mean, I feel like this is what you're doing, all right. That's what this podcast is about. It's what I hope the poems do well.
Thank you so much for coming on again. It's always such a pleasure when I talk to you. I'm just really glad we did this.
Thank you, Eric, Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be with you again.
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