I think that's a mistake that we've been told, maybe that we're not supposed to hurt. What does healing mean? Does healing mean that I'm not going to hurt anymore, that I'm going to be fine with it all? That doesn't seem right at all to me.
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 Watola Traumer, the co host of the Emerging Form podcast on creative process and Secret Agents of Change. A Surreptitious
Kindness Cabal and also Soul Writer's Circle. Her poetry has appeared on a Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, OH Magazine, American Life and Poetry, on Carnegie Hall Stage, and on many river rocks she leaves around town. Since two thousand and six, Rosemary has written a poem a day, which has forged her belief in poetry as a spiritual practice.
Hi, Rosemary, Welcome to the show.
Hey Eric, thanks for having me.
I am really excited to have you on. As I mentioned to you beforehand, I am a fan of your poetry. I do an episode each week that I give to members of our program called Teaching Song and a Poem, where I do a little teaching, I read a poem that I love, and I play a song that I love. And your poems have featured multiple times over the last number of years as we've done that. So I'm happy to get a chance to talk with you, and we'll be talking about your latest book of poetry, primarily which
is called All the Honey. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do, with the parable There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second, and 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.
Well, maybe I'll start by saying it's probably very different in my life and in the work I do in some essential ways. But I also was wondering if you were going to do a grandparent, a grandfather, or a grandmother with me, and I love that I got the grandparent. Here's the thing I notice first of all that they're wolves. They're both wolves, and I just think that's interesting. Why are they so ferocious? You know, it's just interesting that they're wolves as opposed to why not snakes or why not?
You know, it could have been any number of animals that could have attacked each other. So I think that's interesting and that maybe I have an inherent fear of wolves in the first place. So, but the other thing that I notice is that I haven't always in my life known which one was the good wolf, in which
one was the bad wolf. And there have been times where I think I've been feeding the bad wolf, believing that I was feeding the good wolf, which is to say, especially in my story, perhaps the bent toward perfectionism, which maybe was taking good too far, and when good got too good then it became a real problem. So isn't it interesting that a simple, simple story can create such a complex array of responses? Yeah, I think the other thing in my other response is I would like to
think that I feed the good wolf. I wish that were true. I know that even when I do my very best to feed the good wolf, bad things happen
still and despite my best efforts. So knowing that, the other thing I suppose I've learned is that even so maybe I don't want to feed the bad wolf, I don't want to turn my back on it either, And I feel, especially in the last year and a half, I've learned how important it is to at least turn and face the bad wolf, to not try to deny the bad wolf, to not try to vilify even the bad wolf, and to notice what do you have to teach me?
I love what you just said there because it made me think of something, which is that like even feeding the good wolf, you could give it too much food, right, Like I mean, feeding something is good, but stuffing something, on the other hand, is you know, until what did my accountant once say, like, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Right to use an unfortunate animal metaphor. I've shared this story from time to time, but it just came to me.
I was interviewing Peter Singer, who's like the famous animal rights activist hess a well known ethicist, and I use the unfortunate phrase of killing two birds with one stone, which did not slide past him unnoticed. So I hope the pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. But that point being that, you know, I think often about the middle way, right, like that anything we take too far one direction becomes problematic, whether it be feeding the good wolf avoiding the bad wolf.
I mean all these things, there's a time and a place.
Yes, yeah, And I think in poetry maybe that is one of the places. Like with poetry, a poem loves tension, right, which is why this parable is kind of sweet, because this parable is based on tension, right, and all poems thrive on it. Why because life is full of tension, and a poem wants to speak to what does it mean to be alive? If you only fed the good wolf in a poem, or if you only fed the bad wolf in a poem, that poem would be boring. It would either turn into a rant or it would
turn into Hallmark fluff. So in a way, a poem really desperately wants you to feed them both to some degree, to at least honor them both to some degree.
That's really interesting. I never thought of that in relating to poetry, but I think that you're right. If I think about the poems I love, there is an element of that. And honestly, if I think about the literature that I love or the TV series is that I love, or the music that I love, there is that tension. There's both, you know, it's always there, and that is what I'm drawn to.
Right, because it's what's true. Yes, I used to be so angry about it. Why can't there just be a pretty poem? And it's because they're boring?
Yeah, I was just thinking of Wordsworth's poem about the daffodils, and even that poem, which seems to be incredibly hopeful, he's still at the end, you know, in sort of a down mood, recalling the daffodils, you know, And then you know, so even in a poem that's largely about daffodils dancing along the water, there's that element of it.
And if that element weren't there, I'd suggest we would forget that poem right away.
We probably would. We probably would. All right, So let's talk a little bit about the new book. And primarily I was thinking we could talk about what brought this book about and what's the heart of all the honey.
Well, I had a fabulous thing happen. Almost exactly a year ago. I got a call from a publisher and they said, we'd love to do your next book, and come on for a poet. That was maybe for anybody, but especially for a poet. What a sweet call to get.
And so I was talking with the publishers, two of them, Steven Nightingale and Elizabeth Dilly, and they said, you know, we were thinking you could do a book that contained a broad spectrum of poems, that it would be poems about grief, that it would be poems that were full of joy, and maybe put them all into one book.
And I said, I really can't imagine that. That feels impossible, And for people who don't know, about a year and a half ago, my son took his life and there were many poems that have come out of that, and I couldn't imagine putting those poems next to some of the more lighthearted you know, mister clean showing up to seduce me in my kitchen and pretending I'm Dolly Parton while I'm making my kids breakfast, Like, how could those
pasts inhabit the same spine? I told them I'd think about it, and a couple of weeks later I had a vision, which isn't a normal thing for me. Eric, although after Finn died it happened with some regularity. I'm just not going to pretend it didn't happen. Even so part of me is like, I'm a little more practical
than that. But here it was this vision in which my father, who died just months after my son and my son, carved into my bedroom wall these words in all caps, we love you, and then right beneath it, all of the honey, and I knew that they had given me the title for the book. That felt like a transmission of sorts, and I thought, well, what does
that mean? And thought about it all day. I went skiing with my husband in the woods, and I eventually arrived at this that all of the honey that's ever been made came from the sweetness of nectar and from the bitterness of the pollen that feeds the bees, and that that's really what's asked of us at all times in our lives, is to meet that broad spectrum. So I called the publishers with this kind of elation and said, you were right, Yes, of course it has to be
all of it. Of course all of it, because that's what it is to be alive, is to meet at all. So that was the genesis?
Was there going on in you? Still? The positive? The joy? I'm curious about, you know, having gone through a grief of that magnitude, which by all reports is the greatest grief that can be imagined. I'm just curious about the process of finding your way back into not even I'm not even talking necessarily about healing the grief, right, but finding even the sweet parts of things. Were you able to find those? And how were you able to find those?
Oh, Eric, that's a good question. I'll start with maybe just a report that even the day that Finn died, that terrible day, I laughed and fell in love with people, with life itself, even in that most devastated moment. I'm not saying the very moment, but that evening I remember
walking in the Georgia night. We were in Georgia at the time, helping my parents move into their new home, and I was talking on the phone with my beautiful friend Wendy Videlock, and it was this warm evening and Wendy said to me, he has given you his love light to carry. And in that moment she said that this firefly lit up right in front of my face. And it was magic, right, It was this zing of illogical beauty. There was no way to say how that
could have happened. It felt important, and it felt whimsical. It was lightning bug for Heaven's sakes, right, and it felt like he was there. It felt fantastical. It filled me with wonder and even in devastation, I felt very open to a larger spectrum of possibility. And why is that? I think it's because, well, I think it's a few things, but at the very least it has a lot to
do with showing up every day. I've had a daily poetry practice since two thousand and six where every day I show up and I say, well, what's here, what's here? Whether it's something that's devastating, nothing ever is devastating, of course,
as losing Finn. But I think that daily practice of showing up and saying what's here, and exploring what's happening inside me, what's happening in the world outside me when the stakes were much lower, allowed me, when the stakes were the highest they've ever been, for me to stay very present.
Yeah. That's a beautiful story. And I think it speaks to this idea that even our emotions in the worlds of times are not these monolithic entities, right. They wax and they wane, and other things filter in if we're open to looking for them. If we're not paying attention, it can seem very much that it's monolithic. There's only this,
you know. I know, like, even on a day where I might be feeling like okay, depression is worse than it might normally be for me, even if I look at that day closely, There's going to be moments in there where I was amused, where I heard something that made me smile, where I heard a piece of music that lifted me up. I mean, there's nuance in there. And I do think that what you're talking about with your daily practice of showing up is looking for that nuance.
Oh yeah, you know, looking more closely at things that probably did serve you well when the time came.
Oh, you're so right, and I love this word you've chosen, nuance because that feels very right to me in terms of the monolithic as you say, that great stone of sorrow. It reminded me actually when you said that that, I had a profound physical feeling of what that was, like, that enormous monolith of grief.
Right.
And then it was I think a day after Finn died. It was the next day when I felt it this kind of ridiculous tsunami of love that kind of rushed at me, and I had this sense of that is way, way, way, way, way too much, like I was resisting, like I pushed, I was like that, don't even and it just kind of crashed over me and obliterated all that no, and just kind of infiltrated all of me. That's what it felt like. It felt like I just got infused, carried, buoyed,
met with love. But what the sensation was was that the love somehow broke down the monolith of grief into the smallest possible atom and surrounded every single one of them with tenderness and yeah, compassion and a beauty connection. I could meet each of those motes of grief in the smallest way, not as a monolith, but as a bite sized, a bite size piece, something that was meetable, especially because it was surrounded with so much goodness.
Yeah, I mean, that is the flip side of grief to me has always been great love. Yes, you know, you know, I don't pretend to know what it's like to lose a child, and I'm wary of comparing things, so that's not exactly what I'm doing. But you know, I mean I feel like the greatest griefs I've suffered have been having to put my dogs to sleep, like more than losing grandparents. I mean, I don't know what that says about me as a person, but I remember one of my dogs, Ralph, when we were putting in
this sleep. The grief was overwhelming. I mean I was just heartbroken, and right in there there was also just an incredible love, Like it was just so evident to me that to be as heartbroken as I was was also that I must have loved something that much. And there was a beauty in that. Yes, yeah, there was a beauty in that. I wonder if you'd be willing to read a poem from the new book that is early in the book and that I think speaks a
little bit to working with grief. And it's called the Invitation.
Mm hmm, yeah, I will. I love that poem too, because it was the night after he died, and it was such an important changing moment for me. Do you know what page it's on.
Friend, I believe it's on page ten?
Got it? Invitation? Two nights after he died, all night I heard the same one line story un repeat. I am the woman whose son took his life. The words felt full of self pity, filled me with hopelessness, doom. And then a voice came, a woman's voice, just before dawn, and it gave me a new shade of truth. I am the woman who learns how to love him now that he's gone. It did not change the facts, but
it changed everything about how I met the facts. Over a hundred days later, I am still learning what it means to love him. How love is an ocean, a wildfire, a crumb, How commitment to love changes me, changes everyone invites us to bring our best. Love is wine is Trampoline is an infinite song with a chorus in which I am sung. I am the woman who learns how to love him. Now that he's gone, May I always be learning how to love like a cave, like a rough legged hawk, like a son.
It's so beautiful.
Thank you.
You know. There's a line in there, especially in light of our earlier conversation about perfectionism, invites us to bring our best, and I think that my relationship to that line is this. I did really feel like I've been asked to bring my best to this whole time, and part of that for me has been it doesn't mean I have to show up perfect. It means I have to show up. That's what bringing my best means to me is this willingness to really show up and to meet what's here.
I want to be careful here that we don't paint to rosy a picture here of what this experience was like for you. I assume in you know, right, like right, like I don't. I don't want people being like, well, okay, I guess I'm supposed to turn towards love, and you know, like, I just feel like it's important to also have you say something about the enormity of the grief.
Yeah, I think, well, let's not have a rosie picture of this. I'm glad. I'm glad you said that. One thing I'm so clear about, Eric is that everyone's process with grief is so very different, right, and that there is no one right way to do it. In fact, that there as many right ways to do it, as there are minutes, as there are seconds, as there are humans, right, and that what's right in this very minute is very
different in the next. I am exceptionally lucky that I have had a experience that has been ridiculously flooded with love. I don't know how I would have done it otherwise. And maybe the world knew that that was exactly what I needed and rose up to meet me in that way. There was a moment I remember thinking, maybe a week or two after Finn had died, and I knew there were so many people who were writing me letters and sending calls and you know, and I remember thinking, you know,
it's too much. It just needs to be not that much. And then I'd imagine one person, just one person, not thinking loving thoughts toward me, and I was like, nope, nope, Actually it's just enough, like none of you stop, nobody can stop. I need it, I need all of that. I guess to say, what is it then to have that kind of grief and too I don't even know how. I don't even know what to say about it. Eric, I'll say this that that there hasn't been a single day since he's died that I haven't wept. But I
don't mind it either. There is no part of me that wants to push the grief away, and maybe for that reason, because I'm not resisting it. It's the hardest, worst thing, worst. But see here it is there's the wolf. Right. Is this the worst thing that's ever happened to me? Of course it's the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
Gregory Or has this most gorgeous poem that begins like this, not to make loss beautiful, but to make loss the place where beauty starts where the heart understands for the first time the nature of its journey. Right, So, losing Finn is the worst thing that's ever happened to me, Which makes me think of what about the women I know who've lost multiple children? What about the people who lost their child and their home and their car, and like what about you know, like so many people have
so much worse. Right, But for me to not ever try to make anything but what it is, which was the worst, right, and that he was suffering so much that that felt like the best choice to him. Yeah, I meet that every single minute. I meet that every minute, and there has been a thousand blessings that have come
from it too. Every day, just the willingness eric to say yes, even to the hardest thing I've ever had to say yes to, To develop a trust in life now beyond what I've ever had before because of it, Right, because of this worst thing, to have this deepened sense of trust in life itself.
What you're describing as remarkable, because you're talking about not resisting what happened to some degree, right, which feels almost impossible in that sort of situation. And I'm sure it's not as clean as that like. I'm sure there were moments of like no, no, no, but there was some openness in you to this is what is? You know. It makes me think of that famous I don't know if it's famous, but it's famous to me idea that
suffering equals pain times resistance. Right, and the pain of losing your child is at the very top of any pain scale that could ever be invented. Right, it's there. Right, Let's say it's one hundred out of one hundred, and then resistance is the It shouldn't be this way, you know. It's the fighting, it, it's all the why me, it's all that that comes along, and nobody gets to zero resistance,
I don't think, right. But the thing I love about the way that equation is formulated is it says, if I've got a pain of one hundred and I'm resisting at a level of eight, I've got eight hundred units of suffering. This is obviously not an actual scientific description of what happens, but but you know, you get the point. If I was able just to resist two points less, you know, instead of I'm a resistance eight, I'm a
resistance of a six. My total suffering goes from eight hundred to six hundred, right, like, there's something in this, but God, is it hard? How do you find your way towards that?
So before Fen died for over ten years, probably by then, I've been working with a spiritual teacher, Joy Sharp, she leads that song, and the very first teaching that she gave me was a question, can you say yes to the world as it is? Which is such a profound teaching?
Yes, what an invitation? Right? Yes?
And so that was something certainly that I'd understood, you know, like any teaching, right, first, you understand it in your head. Okay, sure, I can see as to the world as it is. But then the messier things get, and the harder things get, and the harder it is to say yes to that. So I had, for you know, a decade before this, had some practice with that as something that was valuable to me. Yes, right, I had had as a prayer for myself open me. I wanted desperately to be open.
That was something that has been fueling me for a long time. So I think that that kind of daily more than daily, many times daily, question can you say yes to the world as it is? And let's be honest, my son was not an easy human. He was an incredible human. He was so funny and smart and anything he put his hand to he excelled.
You know.
We started fencing and he won the fencing championship, and he built a computer and won the science Fair and he you know, like he built computer's propos friends, like he was just so crazy alive. You know, my friend Catherine used to say he was one hundred and fifty percent alive, right, So here he has this incredible, generous, amazing being who loved to push every single button I had. That was his great thrill in life was pushing every
button right and poke, poke, poke poke. Just you know, he came to the world and screamed for a year. That was there was nothing perfect about that. That was the beginning of the crumbling of the perfectionism right there. But his life had forced me to say yes to the world as it is, because day after day after day of being Finn's mother was an exceptionally difficult thing to do. It was the best thing I did. I
love being Finn's mother. Still I love being Finn's mother, but it was so hard, harder than anything I'd ever done before, and so I think that I had so much practice in saying yes to the world as it is by the time we got to his death. You're right. I mean the very first response was no. But I'll tell you Eric that that didn't last long. That there was only a moment really of no, and it was so final, and so I knew immediately how true it was right and very real. And the death itself was
graphic enough that I knew very well it was real. Right, So it was through a lot of practice I supposed to get to a place where I wanted to. I desperately wanted to meet the world as it was and not say no to his death and say yes to it and find a way to continue to meet the world.
That reminds me of an idea. I don't know who said it, but it was like, practice this why you can for the times that you can't. And they were speaking about spiritual practice. They meant practice now while things are mildly difficult, like every life is mildly difficult. You know.
When I teach my Spiritual Habits program, you know, we talk about this principle and I'm like, don't start on the hardest stuff, Like, don't start with like the things that you know you most can't let go of, like start on the easier stuff, you know, but it is a muscle. I do think that we develop over time where we get more and more comfortable being able to just to say, okay, this is what is what is
my skillful response to this to be? And what I find is that for me, when I'm able to do that, I'm actually better able to do what it sounds like you have been better able to do, which is actually process the emotions that are happening because the resistance, the no, it shouldn't be, the that's all mental.
Yeah.
For me, when I can drop that, then there's just the emotional experience and that can be processed, you know, sort of as you were talking about, I can take these atom sized bits of grief they're everywhere, but one atom at a time. I'm working through it.
You reminded me of something else about that time, too, friend. Is that the word okay that was really what got me through, Like I feel like okay was my mantras for the first month, especially in the day of the day after I heard myself saying it over and over
and over, okay, okay. It was like I affirmed every smallest thing, like I got to the car door okay, and I opened the car door okay, and I sat down in the car okay, Like I literally said okay each time the smallest thing happened, like I met that I met, that I met that. It was only later, as I started to evaluate it, once I I noticed I was doing it, that I kind of fell in love with this word okay because it asks so little
of us. And the truth was that saying yes to the world as it is is way too exuberant for what I was capable of in that moment, right, Like I didn't no. Part of me was yes, but okay isn't no either, right, Yeah. It was enough for it to not be no.
Yeah yeah.
And also that it's not a verb, right, that it asked nothing of me. I didn't have to do anything. I couldn't do anything. I remember calling it at the time autonomic life. The same way that the lungs are, you know, breathed, and the heart beats. I felt like I was just being lived because I couldn't anything. I couldn't anything.
Yeah, yeah, you used to phrase a little while ago. I don't know if this is exactly what you said, but it had something to do with being supported by the world. And I'm wondering if you could read a poem called on a Clear Day, which is page seventeen, that, to me, speaks to.
That on a clear day, the way the field holds the shadow of the cottonwood, this is how life holds me, holds me no matter my shape, holds me with no effort, holds my darkness and knows it as weightless, as transient, as something that will shift, disappear, return, and shift again. It never says no to me. I am still learning to trust life, to trust no matter how I show up, I will be held. Trust that my life is not a problem. Trust that as much as I am the shadow, I am also the field.
There are several things in there that are remarkable. One is the turn right at the end, Right, the turn right at the end, where it's like, okay, I'm being held by this field.
Right.
Oh wait a second, I am also the field as well as the shadow. I mean, as a Zen practitioner, you know we talk about form and emptiness. Emptiness and form, right, you're both those things. But the other thing that I'm curious about in that poem is when you say I'm learning to trust life. I'm always interested in the word trust and what we mean by it, right, because I'm going to put words in your mouth and you can
refute them if you would like. But certainly you're not trusting that terrible things aren't going to happen, because one of the most terrible things that could possibly happen happened. So on one hand, you could very much be like, no, I do not trust life, right, because here's great fear number one. It happened. So what does trust in life mean to you?
You're so right. I wanted so desperately to protect him right and to keep him alive, and was very aware that was a possibility that I couldn't and then my greatest fear came true. So trusting life doesn't mean that my greatest fears don't come true. Trusting life means to me that even when my greatest fears come true, I will be supported enough to be able to show up right that the world is there to hold me as
I stay alive, as I'm alive. Right, if I had to say, what is the word that comes to me again and again and again and again, what is the most interesting word to me right now to continue to explore it is trust, which comes, of course out of the same word is true. And this is what I ask myself every time I sit down to write, I ask myself what is the next true thing? That's how every poem gets written, is what is the next true thing?
What is the next true thing? And so then trust, this willingness to be with what is true, and this willingness to know that it doesn't mean it's what I want, It has nothing to do with what I want. And even then, and especially then, life will show up to meet me and hold me and lift me, carry me, buoy me. All these are words I've been feeling the embodiment of in this time.
Yeah, I have a lot to say on this. What I'll say is that me too with trust. Was working with a spiritual director for a number of years, and I swear every single conversation we ended up at trust. Now, after a while I started to question, is that say more about him than me? I don't know the answer to that question, you know. I kept asking, like, are you a one trick pony? Like is this the only thing you've got in your bag? And everybody gets this
or is this specific to me? But I think trust is so interesting and I love what you said about true it coming from that word. That for me was just an insight that I'm going to really spend some time with because what gets mixed in with trust to me is all so how much of that trust is coming from me? Right? Like I have a tendency to trust myself. I didn't always, right, I was a homeless heroin addict, right, So I I have a history of, you know, there being a lot of time where I
simply could not trust myself, but I kind of do. Now. Some of that ends up asking, well, if I have to do it, is that trust? Right? If I have to be the one that has to put this effort in, if I have to be the one that has to rise to this challenge. This is a quick little piece, But I got sober at the age of twenty four from heroin and in Columbus, Ohio in nineteen ninety four, and twelve step programs were the only thing on tap, and I was desperate, and they said, believe in God.
And this is nineteen ninety four, right, It is not very different now nineteen ninety four. Believe in God and that meant, you know, the God, the you know, capital J God, and I developed this really immature spirituality that was like, if I do good things, then God will protect me. And then some bad things happened to me, you know, after I'd been sober a number of years, and that all fell apart, and you know, I drank again, and when I came back, I was like, Okay, I'm
back to AA It's the only game in town. It still seems there is an element here of turning your will and your life over to a higher power God as you understand what does that mean to me? Like what do I actually believe to be true? You know, instead of trying to make myself believe something, which is
kind of what you're talking about. And where I landed was this idea that there were these spiritual principles that if I lived my life by them to the best of my ability, and I asked for the support of other people, I would be able to meet what life brought me. I mean, it was that sort of basic. I'd be able to stay sober and meet what life brought me, whatever it was. And so that's worked out
to be a remarkably good foundation. The thing in there though, is there is an element of me living by those principles, which is back to that question I was saying earlier about my ability, Well, what happens if that ability gets wiped out? And that's that deeper trust that you're talking about, And that's where I find myself inquiring, Okay, what is that? You know? What does hold me? When I can't hold myself at all?
Yeah? Do we get to know?
I don't know.
It's actually just as I said that, it just occurred to me that, at least for me, it's been all kinds of different things. It's actually not a thing. I've been looking for the thing, and it's actually things. Sometimes it's this friend's phone call. Sometimes it's this song, Sometimes it's this poem. Sometimes it's this book I read to me. It seems like support has come in in all these
different places and all these different ways. Sorry to be processing my own trust self, you're own there, But I've had two insights thanks to you here.
I love that you did. I love that you're thinking about it too, And of course it's coming from all over, right, of course it does. That seems so right to me. I don't think, friend, that I have a clue what it is even exactly that I'm saying I trust, right, That's why I say I think I trust the world, I trust the universe. I say things like that I trust life. Maybe that's the cleanest I can say it.
I trust life. And thinking on what you just said, you know here you are saying it comes from this friend, or it comes from this song, or it comes from this which to me says that it's coming from a sense of openness right back to what we were talking about earlier. That you're here, you are, you're paying attention, and when we are in that receptive open space, I think that's when life rushes in to support us, right, because because it can, because it can't.
Yes, yes, that's a beautiful way to put it. I'd like to get a couple more poems before we're done, if that's okay.
I have an idea based on something you said of a poem. Yeah, you were talking about what is true and how hard it can be sometimes to know what is true. And to me, this is one place where poetry really shines is because poetry loves paradox, which is that when two equal and opposite things are both held up is true at the same time, and I have quite a few poems that talk about that.
Yep, I would love for you to pick. I have my list, but I'd love to see what you pull out of the hat here.
Well. I think maybe there's so many that could have spoken to this kind of paradox, but this was one specifically about meeting death. And we were talking earlier about there's so many ways to do it right meeting your death, because there are no clear instructions. I follow what rises up in me to do. I fall deeper into love with you. I look at old pictures. I don't look at old pictures. I talk about you.
Say nothing.
I walk, I said. I lie in the grass and let the earth hold me. I lie on the sidewalk, dissolve in the sky. I cry, I don't cry. I ask the world to help me stay open. I ask again, please let me feel it all. I fall deeper in love with the people still living. I fall deeper in
love with the world that is left. This world with its spring and its war and its mornings, This world with its fruits that ripen and rot and recede, This world that insists we keep our eyes wide, This world that opens when our eyes are closed because there are no clear instructions. I learn to turn toward the love that is here, though sometimes what is here is what is not. There are infinite ways to do this right. That is the only way.
There's a lot in there, And I love that very last line, in particular about there are infinite ways to do that. That is the way. And I think conversations when we talk about dealing with something as profound as dealing with the type of grief you did, I love that you said there's no right way to do this, because I think we get so focused on am I doing this the right way? I mean, some of that is just conditioning, but some of it is we just want to be out of pain, you know, what can
I do to make this pain better? But recognizing that my way is the way right now? You know, I can look to others, I can look for support, I can look for guidance, but I have to trust myself to some degree. And if we take that and scale it down from the really biggest things, I mean, I think that question is always there. Am I doing this right?
Yeah?
You know?
And unfortunately there is no answer to that question, at least to me. There's no answer to that question, because I am not you and you are not me, and we are radically different, and what I need is going to be It's just also slippery, and for me there's been a great comfort in being able to go well, that concept doesn't exist. Am I doing it right? Like if we really understood it, we'd be like that is a nonsensical question, but it is a question that arises in all of us. I think so often.
Well, I have a lot of thoughts about that, friend. One of them is as a recovering perfectionist. You know, am I doing it right? Has been our leader in my life?
Right.
I've certainly wrestled with that in every arena, but somehow not with this. I don't know. It's not that I don't wrestle with it in lots of other places still, but not with this. Yeah, And I have to say that it was interesting for you to say this, how do I make the pain go away? I haven't wanted that. I haven't wanted the pain to go away. It's not like I'm holding onto it either. I wouldn't say that I'm holding onto the pain. But I think that's a
mistake that we've been told. Maybe that we're not supposed to hurt. What does healing mean? Does healing mean that I'm not going to hurt anymore, that I'm going to be fine with it all like that? That doesn't seem right at all to me. To me, I think maybe it means something more like that I'm able to be with the pain and not wish it away. Maybe that's what healing is, is to be able to meet it without wishing it away.
Have you always had that capacity? Oh God, no, okay, okay, I just I didn't know if you were genetically engineered differently than the rest of us. Because I understand exactly what you're saying. For me, there has been a fundamental shift in life. It was the fundamental shift that I had to make to get and stay sober, which was I have to stop constantly trying to change how I feel. Yeah, I mean, because I took that to the ends of the earth, right, I can't do that to the same degree.
And so that's kind of what you're saying. But it is a very difficult thing to say, I'm going to let these feelings be. I'm going to feel at all when what it feels like is so awful and dreadful. So it sounds to me like that's something you have cultivated again over the years.
Oh yeah, for sure. And let's be honest, I'm not able to do it in every arena, right, like wherever I feel, you know, I'm set with my husband or why, you know, like I let the little shit get to me? You know, why does he have to choose so loud? You know? Like why is that such a big deal for me? No? I mean there's so many places where I have ridiculous amounts of resistance, right, I couldn't tell you why, although I'm really seeing it right now. How different?
Maybe because this is the wolf I've been feeding, right, I can completely go there with this and I want to and I want to, And who could say why I'm so available to it? I don't know, because I love him so much, because it matters so much, because so much is at stake. Whereas with the chewing thing, I mean, it's just annoying.
Right.
If you get that one figured out, I will have you back immediately as a guest on the show.
Okay, if you.
Can figure out the small annoyances like that, I'm all ears, because, believe me, I have looked nobody's writing many books on not being irritated, and it's such a trivial thing, but it's also such a miserable condition to be in.
Oh it is, it is, for sure. I'd make myself really miserable with it. Yeah yeah, but not with this other piece. Maybe, like I say, maybe because I'm willing to give it everything.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I want to bring up something that I saw on your website, and you have a one word mantra and a three word mantra on your website, and I'm curious if these are still current or you know, sometimes we put up a homepage and about us and it's like eight years old. One word mantra is a just the three word mantra is I'm still learning? Do those still feel like? You know, if you had to have a one and a three word mantra? Those the two you're sticking with right now?
Oh yeah, for sure? Okay, Yeah, and they both have I think nice little stories too, and I think about them all the time. The adjust came from my friend Jude Jordan Kaloush. She lived in Southwest Colorado with me for a while and she went out in a time of drought and she said to the trees, what do we do? And the trees said back to her, adjust And I remember in that moment it just went right through me, that kind of resonance of oh, and there
it is right and the word adjusts. Then I got pretty obsessed with it and looked it all up and its etymologies and all. It's related to the word yoga and yoke like you would put on an oxen, and it's literally to yoke ourselves to the moment. To adjust is to allow ourselves to be in tandem yoke with what is I suppose. So I do love that word a lot and find myself needing to adjust, as we'd all do constantly, and I'm still learning. That came from Michelangelo.
Those were the last words he said on his deathbed. And I do feel like that willingness to continue to be open and learn and be kind of like find what's new and be excited, and to even bring that kind of excitement and enthusiasm to things we think we know. Right, Yeah, I think I know so much about not knowing, So you know, I think that every time we have that opportunity to be new and still learning is a good way to feed our soul.
Those are great, good mantras and great stories. Let's do another poem. We'll do the question because it references the friend you just talked about.
Yes, it does the same. Jude. I have to say Eric that I have been deeply, deeply, deeply blessed with some of the most incredible humans in my life. Jude Jordan Calush is one of them. I feel so lucky. You know, who do we meet when we're at our most impressionable moments? And I'm really lucky that I met
Jude for sure. The question, and I'll say this too, that in this poem, the question that she asks, we had been at a dance concert the night before, and we're in this huge auditorium and all around us all this talking, talking, talking, and there's Jude being her kind of Jude self.
She says.
The question I've been asking myself is what is the path of love? And I knew my life changed in that second 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 Suparu. 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 of 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.
I love that just as like an orienting intention.
Yes, yes, And how quickly, how quickly it changes too?
You know.
I just feel like the second I think I know this is the path of love, then I really better get curious about it again. I feel like I can't let myself get too certain about it.
Yep, yeah, well, and also in there the question isn't is it right? Is it wrong?
Right?
Which is we were sort of alluding to a few minutes ago. You know, am I doing it right? You know? Is this the path of love? Is a very great clarifying question.
Oh yeah, yeah, thank you Jude Jordan Klush for that great question.
Well. I think the other piece though, that that poem speaks to is that a great question is great, but not if we don't ask it often, right, right, Like I mean, like if we just go, okay, well is this the path of love? And I think about that one time? Big deal, right, But what you're doing if you're actually able to ask yourself multiple times as you go about your life, at least to me, that's where questions like that become transformative. Exactly, they become transformative when
they filter into the moments of our life. You know, I'm at my mother's right now, I'm visiting, you know. Is what I'm saying and thinking and doing? Is this the path of love? Right here, right now? You know, if I don't bring that question to mind, it can't do me much good. And that's I think one of the hardest things in our current culture is we're so busy we go from one thing to the next to
the next without being able to. Let me say that again, I won't say we're not able to, because actually we are able to without reflecting at all about like what is important about this thing I'm about to do. That doesn't have to be your question if that question doesn't resonate, like there's countless other good ones. For me, it's been about how do I bring these ways I want to be into the world to mind frequently?
Yeah, how do we do that?
How do we do that? Relqus has live into the questions, right, that's his dictum for us, you know, And I think that that is part at least of why some kind of I think a daily reflective practice is so important.
Yep.
Whether it's sitting or walking or writing a poem, meeting a blank page, there's so many ways to do it right, yep. But some kind of a reflective practice where we aren't running from one thing to another and open up to that willingness to be with a new question or the same question.
Yeah. I've done a lot of thinking about this very question, and it's part of what the spiritual habits is designed to answer. And you know, I think we can look at behavior science to talk about this idea of triggers. We all have triggers for good and bad, you know, and if we can start to build triggers into our day, like, for example, every time I go to the bathroom. Right that there's a trigger. Okay, you know, I'm just gonna in that moment go have I been on the path of love?
What a sweet lad to?
Right?
Just tie it into something like that beautiful.
Yeah, or at a red light or when I go into the kitchen. But the holy grail becomes when we take our emotions as triggers, which they are, they're just unconscious triggers primarily. But when we take our emotions, I'm irritated. Okay, good, I recognize that. Now I can ask is this the path? Like when that emotion becomes the trigger for a reflection, like to me, that's where things for me have really transformed.
Well, that makes so much sense. I love the way you said that. It makes me think by the way that that whole parable which will for you going to feed? Is that right? In that moment of trigger to realize we have a choice, Yeah, that's the moment to remember. Okay, I'm you know, you're chewing so loud, I'm about to fly off the handle. Or is this the path of love?
Is this? Yeah? Yeah? At least for me in those moments, I mean, I don't have the ability to turn the irritation off, No, right, but I can reflect on okay, just relax, Like I mean, I can work with myself so that at the very least I don't make things worse, right, you know, at the very least, I don't make things worse, which irritation often can lead to. You know, right, my father passed recently, and I think I came by my
irritation from him, you know, pretty inherited. I reflect on with him just how painful it must have been to be that way as often. And then also I don't think he really learned the skill of dealing with it well. And so then I think then you add the regret of like, well, you know, I'm also letting my irritation seep out too much, and like it's my least favorite emotion. Maybe yeah, because I know what it's like to be on the other end of someone being irritated, and like
I said, it's an emotion that it is there. I'm just like, well, all right, exactly. So if anybody out there knows how to solve irritation, you can be a guest on the one you Feed podcast. You know of a book, if you know of a you know, is there a method.
Well, I tell you what I do with it. I have my word of the year this year is Hello, and I've just been using Hello as a way to recognize the things that show up, especially things that are not positive I perceive as not positive. Frustration, Hello, irritation, Hello, fear, Hello, stuck. As soon as I noticed that that's what's going on in me, then I read it hello, and I've noticed it doesn't change it, right, it doesn't change it. But I relax.
Yes, yes, I have told this story before, but it was on a silent meditation retreat and there was somebody just all kinds of terrible chewing, you know, and sniffing and snorting and just all kinds you know, and I am getting so irritated, you know, I mean just and but then of course at the same time, I'm like, but you're on a silent retreat, like, you know, so
there's all the judgment and the whole you know. So I was asking the spiritual teacher Adia Shanti about this once, and you know, I was like, well, okay, I know I'm supposed to let it be. So what am I supposed to let be? The fact that that noise is happening, is that what I'm supposed to allow or am I supposed to allow the fact that I'm so irritated? And of course the answer is obvious in retrospect, which is
both right, it's to allow both. But what you said is when that Hello comes along and I go, oh, I'm irritated, and I just go, okay, it's all right, Eric, You're doing the best you can. Just it's okay. Everybody gets irritated, like it gets better, it doesn't go away, but that whole like I shouldn't be feeling this, you know, I'm bad for feeling this way just you know, makes everything worse.
Absolutely. I kind of love that you also have mesophonia. That's the you know, the annoyance that people doing. So I'm high fiving you through the screen.
I have whatever mesophonia's equivalent is with all kinds of sounds. I am just a sound sensitive creature.
Oh that's it. Musophonium is all sounds.
It's a sound f oh okay, yeah, then I am a mesophoniac.
Yes, yes, And by the way, Aja is my teachers one of my teacher's teachers. It's a teacher joy Sharp, just one of her teachers.
Wonderful. I'll have to look her up. Yeah, he has been incredibly influential, and I've had the great gift of being able to sit down with him a number of times with this show and just kind of hang out and spend time together, and so he's meant a lot to me. Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. We're gonna have a brief post show conversation where I'm gonna ask you to read another poem or two listeners if you'd like access to that.
You can get access to that to add free episodes to the teaching song and a poem that I referenced earlier by going to one u feed dot net slash join Rosemary. Thank you so much. This has been really beautiful.
So fun.
Thank you Eric, Thank you.
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