This prayer inside me
for the riotous world
trembles like a leaf
in the barest of breezes—
almost unnoticeable, but …
ask any leaf about how,
when the time is right,
it takes so little
encouragement
to let go of all it knows,
and oh, the freedom then.
The prayer thinks it knows
what it wants.
The breeze, it will do
what it will do.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged leaf, prayer, surrender | 1 Comment »
Nov. 10-15
Zoom, online, free
I’m excited to invite you to join me for a remarkable free online event: No Regrets: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, presented by our friends at HeartMind.
During this shared experience, you’ll discover perspectives and practical guidance for navigating the profound questions that emerge in every human life: how to continue growing and contributing, care for those we love, move through loss, and cultivate greater resilience, meaning, and connection along the way.
This is an exploration in flourishing as we age—inviting us to consider how we can live our life with greater awareness, love, wisdom, and fewer regrets.
Join me online November 10–15, 2026, for a very thoughtful event and learn from 25+ experts how to:
- Continue to grow, contribute, connect, and flourish as our bodies, identities, and roles change across life’s later stages
- Care for aging parents, ill partners, and changing families with compassion, resilience, and honesty without losing ourselves in the process
- Grieve fully and without suppression, without allowing loss to close our hearts or sever our connection with life
- Reduce confusion, conflict, and unnecessary burden for those we love through compassionate and practical preparation
- Cultivate wisdom, legacy, and completion so that our final chapter reflects the awareness, love, and integrity we have practiced throughout life
Presenters include: Kristen Neff PhD, James Hollis PhD, DaeEss 1Dréa Pennington Wasio MD, Stephen Jenkinson MTS MSW, Marci Shimoff, Dan Siegel MD, Parker J. Palmer PhD, Debra Poneman, Jason Prall, Master Mingtong Gu, Brian Vaszily, Rick Hanson PhD, Margaret Paul PhD, Gay and Katie Hendricks PhDs, Fred Luskin PhD, Ocean Robbins, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Richard Tedeschi PhD, Michael Stone, Harry S. Margolis JD, Bridget Sumser MSW, Ira Byock MD, Roy Remer, Brad Bogue, and more…
No Regrets: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life is available with 24-hour free viewing access to each day’s presentations. The entire line-up is incredible. I will be part of DAY 4’s Grief, Loss, and the Practice of Letting Go program along with Kristen Neff, PhD, Fred Luskin, PhD, Ocean Robbins, Richard Tedeschi, PhD, and Michael Stone.
Conversations about later life often focus on one challenge at a time.
This event explores something more integrated:
How resilience, love, grief, preparation, and wisdom come together to shape how fully and intentionally we live life’s later years.
See you there,
Rosemerry
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
As if there is nothing more important to do,
Mom and I play cards. For hours, we shuffle
and deal and keep score. We scowl. We gloat.
We shuffle and deal again. A portrait of my great
great grandmother looks down at us. She is
a round-faced German woman with thin oval
spectacles. Her eyes somehow smile, though
her lips do not. I want to invite her to join us,
this woman who raised on her own a daughter,
this woman whose choices equal the reason
my mother and I are here at all in a small room
in northwestern Georgia playing cards and laughing
and letting the game do its work, which is play,
which is an essential way two people become closer
despite distance, despite difference, which is,
of course, the most important work of all.
In a hundred fifty years, I hope there’s a photo
of my mother and me in some other room
where my great great grandchild is playing
cards with her mother. I hope the look on my face
says, bless you, family, for playing together.
There is nothing right now more important to do.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cards, daughter, family, generations, mother, play, portrait | 1 Comment »
Dear Dad, I surprised a fisherman this week
when I asked him what he was hoping to catch.
Trout, he said, at least I am wish.
His English was halting, but our smiles connected.
You taught me, that, Dad, how two strangers
can easily connect on a shore or a pier.
It takes so little, really. A small question
opens us to our common humanness and
can lead to easy warmth. Last night I was walking
alone in the dark and noticed a small,
strange glowing in the leaves. And there
on the road, another small glow.
Pulling out a flashlight, I discovered
the shine belonged to a black sluggish
beetle creature, such an unlikely source of light—
a creature I would never have noticed
had it not been night. How often
do I look at someone or something
else and fail to see their glow?
So today in the airport, I looked for it, and
found the glow in the face of the man who looked up
from his paper at 4:35 a.m. to toss me
a radiant grin. Saw it in the young girl
dancing giddy circles around her grandma.
Though it was dark out, how much light
in Concourse A did I miss, eager as I was to get
to my gate on time? Next time, another chance
to imagine the concourse is not so different
from the edge of a lake and our carry-on bags
not so different from tackle boxes. Who knows,
I might catch delight in line. At least,
as my new friend said, I am wish.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged airport, bioluminescence, dad, fisherman, light, meeting the world, strangers | 2 Comments »
I wish you the grace
to be quiet—the grace and
the time to lie quiet
in the still green grass
on a sundrenched day
and not go for a walk
in the radiant leaves,
and not write anyone back.
Not read a book. Not make
a call. Not plan whatever
comes next. Not do anything
at all but lie still and quiet
in the lush and still green grass
and let the earth do what
the earth does best, which
is receive whatever weight
comes. May you have a friend
beside you whose hand rests
in yours, and may you
say nothing at all, not
a single beautiful word at all.
For hours.
And when you rise, and
rise you will to reenter
the thrumming, clamoring
world, may you carry
within you all that quiet,
all that glorious still.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged exhaustion, self-blessing, stillness | 5 Comments »
for the people who gathered at Kripalu
When someone finds the courage
speak about their hardest moment,
the moment when they learned
they were not in control,
or when someone shares
about the months when all
they could do was lie on the floor
and breathe, then their tears
fall into my heart, infusing me
with the truth I most need to grow.
It is not easy to find such nourishment,
yet there are circles where such trust
is freely given. And who is so brave?
To come, to break open, to honestly
share the most difficult truths?
You are. You are. Today it is you.
Your honesty is the soft rain
that soaks into and softens
the driest, hardest parts of me
helping me fall in love with this life.
It is you, it is you, so open,
so generous, so present, so true.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged broken open heart, community, courage, grief, nourishment | 1 Comment »
In a dream
the old man
teaches me
to gather
any tears I
weep for another
on my finger,
then to touch
the damp tip
to my forehead,
a way to
open
the third eye.
When I wake,
I begin to practice.
The dream
somehow not gone,
I still see his nod,
his smile, honest,
inviting.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged compassion, dream, third eye | 2 Comments »
Everything that is in the heavens, on earth,
and under the earth
is penetrated with connectedness,
penetrated with relatedness.
—Hildegard of Bingen
Imagine
red thread
stitched
through the center
of your being
connecting you
to the center
of all other beings.
If we stopped
seeing ourselves
as separate,
what might
change
?
Let it shock you.
—Cynthia Bourgeault
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged connected, separateness | 2 Comments »
I once thought love was always open, open the way a sunflower is open, bright and lavish and soft. Today the sunflowers are spent, brown, lifeless stalks, and the Stellar’s jays wrestle seeds from desiccated heads, seeds that nourish them in these shortening days. Sometimes I find in me old memories of you. When I rattle them, I discover inside are dried seeds of compassion, seeds of loss, seeds of devotion, seeds of trust. I take them in like the communion they are. Feel how what is hard and dried grows me. Feel how this, too, is love.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged love, memory, nourishment, reframe, sunflower | 4 Comments »
Somewhere inside us is a rabbit
who has not yet figured out
she’s wearing a wolf costume
that her mom dressed her in long ago.
Her mother, of course, was trying
to protect her from the wolves.
But that rabbit is getting hot
and thinking how nice it might be
to sit out in the field
and feel the sun on her back,
the wind on her whiskers.
If she takes off that heavy mask,
she will learn fear.
If she doesn’t, she will never
learn who she is.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged growth, hiding, mask, rabbit, vulnerability, wolf | 3 Comments »
You were curled into yourself,
a tight lump of a woman,
hiding in the corner of the closet.
How long did you scrunch there
in that small tight room beneath the coats,
that room dark as coal, while tongues
of fury and fear and indignation
swirled inside you like blue flames,
blue flames licking, licking and seeking
more fuel to burn. You burned.
What was it that allowed you
to unclench? Exhaustion, of course.
Exhaustion, and an almost imperceptible spark.
You would never call that spark love. But was it?
Was it love that came and found you and gave
you the will to crawl to the door
and push it open just an inch, another
inch. Was it love that helped you stand,
love that fashioned from the char of you a woman?
Was it love that survived the blue flame
and whispered, I, too, am fire?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged anger, burning, fear, fire, love | 3 Comments »
after Jim Harrison, “Seven in the Woods”
Yesterday, I was seven, swimming
in the lake. Thin prickly seaweed strands
winding around my legs. I would do anything
not to touch the silty bottom. Bullheads
lived there with their slimy dark skin
and strange thick whiskers. On the surface,
I was sleek and playful, baring my skin
to Wisconsin sunshine, splashing
and being splashed by my brother,
crawling through waves with wild joy,
my arms slicing through green water,
my strokes strong and quick.
Almost fifty years later, I feel it,
the welcoming warmth at the lake’s surface,
the cooler layers deeper below.
I remember the simple pleasure
of the dead man’s float,
a seven-year-old girl playing with how to die.
What did I know of death then,
except that it meant to hold my breath,
to let my body be held, a game,
really, just another way to play,
like Marco Polo, like racing to the raft.
The stakes feel so much higher, now.
Death not a friend, exactly, but
a companion nonetheless.
I channel her back, that seven year old,
remember her fear of the depths.
The bottom’s not so bad, I want to tell her.
You can be playful with death, she giggles back.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged aging, childhood, death, lake, play, swimming | 4 Comments »
Again it rears up, this familiar worry
that I am not doing enough to protect
and honor this world and all who dwell in it.
Worry slithers around my chest and constricts,
writhes in me as if my belly has become a bed
of slow moving snakes, all of them hissing,
You should be doing more. Somehow
I had not let myself see they were here.
No shame there—of course they love to hide,
preferring shadows to sun, and now,
this morning, I see they have multiplied—
as if the cobra of perfection and the cobra
of fear have mated, mated often, and now
there’s a vast quivering inside that will not
be ignored. I have read you should never attempt
to touch, catch, provoke or kill a cobra.
I imagine it’s the same with worry.
What it needs from me is not to tame it,
not to destroy it, not even to soothe it,
but to give it space, to keep myself calm,
and most importantly to not pretend it isn’t there.
Oh worry, I see you. Of course, you make me
uncomfortable. I see how you live in a den
fashioned of tenderness and love for the world
so great I want to be in service. All my life
I’m learning to make room for what I can’t control.
All my life, I am learning to trust
how even the unwanted is necessary,
how it maintains the balancing of the whole.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cobra, control, perfectionism, snake, worry | 7 Comments »
There she is, sitting at my inner desk,
surrounded by spreadsheets and pink
eraser rubbings. She’s scrubbing at her
temples, running the numbers, planning,
preparing, making projections. I just
want to know things are going to be okay,
she says. She is worried. She is always worried.
I do not try to stop her. Her heart is golden,
and her longing to help is born out of love
that has twisted into fear. Instead, I sit
beside her. I do not hum a soothing song.
I don’t tell her a story that ends happily ever
after. Nor do I chastise her. I don’t tell her
she’s doing it wrong or that there is a way
to do life more right. I don’t tell her she’s
supposed to be grateful for whatever she gets.
I simply show up and breathe beside her
and feel how much she belongs. My love
for her does not make her stop worrying.
There is plenty to worry about. We go
on that way, for a day, for a life. The wind always
messing her hair. The chair never right.
The world too fast, too broken, too painful.
She doesn’t have to face it alone.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged acceptance, connection, control, trust, worry | 4 Comments »
for LB
In the dream, I hand him a skein
of evergreen yarn. He cups his palms
below it as if receiving communion,
then squeezes the fine wool,
testing its softness, its strength.
Finding it worthy, he nods at me
as I offer you the half-knitted hat,
the yarn still attached to the needles,
the other end of the yarn held in his palms.
He looks at you, so loving, so tender,
looks at the slender green strand between you
and smiles before unwinding the yarn
to give you more length, more length.
This morning, the dream still wrapped around me,
I imagine you not as Penelope, knitting
and unknitting to prolong your time. Instead,
I see you have made of the yarn a swing,
a pendulum tethered to devotion that allows you
to play and soar between realms, and the god
of swings and the god of skeins, and
the god of play and the god of love and the god
of green and the god of dreams are the same
good god, and every one of them is whispering
bless you, bless you, bless you.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged blessing, death, dream, friendship, god, grief, knitting, love | 9 Comments »
It was beautiful, wasn’t it, the gray of pre-dawn,
the way the horizon was more suggestion than line?
And it wasn’t too cold, was it, the Pacific, as we waded in,
together, not together, two humans drawn at the same
time to walk back into the salt water that long ago
our ancestors walked out of. Last week, I walked
with an ocean scientist on the shores of the Atlantic.
She watches people on the beach, notices
how many of them could be anywhere, unaware
of their surroundings as they chat, powerwalk or sleep,
and I decided that day I would no longer be that person
who stays dry. So there we were, you and I, walking
into the water. And I thought of other people I know
in places far away who walk into the ocean each day.
A seal came by, sleeking its brown body right before me,
flipping before slipping back into the depths. And many
small fish came, streaking above the waves like thin
silver stones skipping themselves. My heart skipped, too.
Swam deeper in. As if it always knew my evolution
would be this: belonging to the world.
Did you feel it, too, how the current tugged at our skin?
Did you hear it, too, the call to go more wholly in?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged beach, evolution, humanness, ocean | 11 Comments »
this candle in my room
lit by the candle in your room
across the world
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged candle, connection, hope, light, miracle | 8 Comments »