A Journey of Embracing Grief and Finding Joy with Rosemerry Trommer

Episode Transcript:

00:01:38 – Eric Zimmer
Hi, Rosemerry. Welcome back to the show.

00:01:40 – Rosemerry Trommer
Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me back.

00:01:42 – Eric Zimmer
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, 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 at 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. 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.

00:02:30 – Rosemerry Trommer
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. I 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. Like whether that’s because of grief or because of fear or Whatever it is, something’s taken us over.

00:03:05 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. Illness.

00:03:06 – Rosemerry Trommer
Illness.

00:03:07 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:03:08 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 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 were 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.

00:03:54 – Eric Zimmer
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 in the Unfolding were all written since 2021, the year in which my son Finn chose to take his life and my father died of kidney failure.

00:04:32 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 suppose, to say, but I was very aware of love carrying me and doing the work that I couldn’t do.

00:04:59 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right. So why is the book called the Unfolding as the title of the book?

00:05:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 ranunculus is?

00:05:17 – Eric Zimmer
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 is more than two syllables, which is beyond me. But they’re a beautiful flower that sort of opens up very wide.

00:05:30 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yes. They have so many petals, and they’re actually kind of small, but they’re peony ish, I suppose. And you can just imagine that this sense of more and more petals Opening and opening and opening. And in this kind of vision, they continued to. And it was just like as if the heart itself or 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.

00:06:06 – Eric Zimmer
It’s interesting. I had an experience one time when I was doing tonglen meditation. I don’t know if you’re familiar with. It’s considered a giving and taking practice where you visualize that you’re breathing in, like, someone else’s pain in the form of, like, 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.

00:06:55 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, I love that story. And that sense of the whole universe holding you Right. As you’re breathing in all this other toxicity.

00:07:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:07:04 – Rosemerry Trommer
Beautiful. What a vision.

00:07:06 – Eric Zimmer
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. An ever evolving intimacy with the sacred. A sense of communion with others who have also faced loss.

00:07:32 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 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. 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’s connected. And I was so grateful this book came out because Mark Burroughs, 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, Rosemerry, 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 basso continuo, like there’s this baseline of, you know, this hurts, or 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.

00:08:58 – Eric Zimmer
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?

00:09:34 – Rosemerry Trommer
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?

00:10:20 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:10:20 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 20 year habit.

00:10:51 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:10:51 – Rosemerry Trommer
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.

00:11:00 – Eric Zimmer
Yep, 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 bass 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.

00:11:50 – Rosemerry Trommer
Right.

00:11:51 – Eric Zimmer
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 30 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 difficulty. 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 going to say one last thing, then I’m going to 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.

00:13:40 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 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 peace that allows for that. Can I write a poem about that.

00:14:39 – Eric Zimmer
Please, from the book? Yeah, it’s about time for a poem. So. Nice segue.

00:14:43 – Rosemerry Trommer
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, yay, things 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 they’re more nuanced, more complex expressions of praise. For instance, the poem I’m about to read comes from the second chapter, which is Sarome, which comes from sorrow plus om. 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.

00:16:55 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a beautiful poem. It’s 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.

00:17:36 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 at, you know, 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.

00:18:40 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:18:53 – Rosemerry Trommer
How could it do that?

00:18:54 – Eric Zimmer
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 I.

00:19:06 – Rosemerry Trommer
As do I. Yeah.

00:19:08 – Eric Zimmer
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, Eric.

00:19:46 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 in 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, 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.

00:20:33 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:20:34 – Rosemerry Trommer
If this had 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 arrow 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. If he had a baby. 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.

00:21:45 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:21:46 – Rosemerry Trommer
It was a really conscious choice when it would come up. Okay, stop, stop that.

00:21:51 – Eric Zimmer
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. And I’VE joked before that, like, everything that I teach is just about how not to make things worse.

00:22:19 – Rosemerry Trommer
Right.

00:22:20 – Eric Zimmer
Which is not a great marketing slogan. But when we think about how much of our lives is that second layer of pain. Yeah, 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 things 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.

00:23:05 – Rosemerry Trommer
Well, there it is.

00:23:05 – Eric Zimmer
Like, I did the best I could. And that’s gonna have to be okay.

00:23:09 – Rosemerry Trommer
I did the best I could. Which is different from, you know, like, I didn’t do everything right. I’m not 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 utterly into motherhood from the beginning.

00:23:39 – Eric Zimmer
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 is 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.

00:24:13 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. I mean, that’s where it’s at.

00:24:16 – Eric Zimmer
How do you do that?

00:24:18 – Rosemerry Trommer
Well, I. You know, one of the other words I made up, Vera Luya, is really exactly this. Right. Veritas. Which means the truth. Alleluia. So just putting those two together, Vera Luja, 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 heartache. You can find something wonderful, creative and generative out of. Out of a northworm or out of tree bark, you know, I mean, it doesn’t have to be heartbreak, 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 a 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?

00:25:59 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:26:00 – Rosemerry Trommer
Although it’s not saying that the heartache isn’t there. Of course it is. It doesn’t go away. And there’s the bunny.

00:26:08 – Eric Zimmer
I mean, it’s a real revelation that you can feel multiple things at once. 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 is. It’s a training for me to see.

00:27:15 – Rosemerry Trommer
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. 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 by that tree almost every day. I don’t always leave the house, but every day I leave the house, I go by that tree. How often do I notice it?

00:27:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:27:57 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:27:57 – Eric Zimmer
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, 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 survival 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.

00:28:26 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 to numb out. And I think that longing, that willingness opened 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 longing to.

00:29:14 – Eric Zimmer
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 out 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.

00:30:00 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, that’s a great question.

00:30:01 – Eric Zimmer
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 neuroscientists believe is happening is. 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 X. X is 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.

00:30:53 – Rosemerry Trommer
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. Right. We already.

00:31:07 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:31:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
We already know. I have a poem about this longing to be open. Could I read that one, please?

00:31:13 – Eric Zimmer
Your timing’s impeccable. I was just about to say, I think we need a poem.

00:31:17 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 was distracted while 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.

00:31:47 – Eric Zimmer
Said, oh, be careful.

00:31:50 – Rosemerry Trommer
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, is. Thank you.

00:33:28 – Eric Zimmer
That’s beautiful.

00:33:29 – Rosemerry Trommer
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.

00:34:11 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:34:18 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:34:19 – Eric Zimmer
And that an open heart can be a broken heart. Also, it goes 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.

00:34:33 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Well, you’re saying I’ll take it all.

00:34:35 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:34:36 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Who would want it all? But really, don’t we desperately want it.

00:34:39 – Eric Zimmer
All most of the time?

00:34:42 – Rosemerry Trommer
Okay, I’m with you. And this is what. This is what I said in the poem too. I’d never say yes to that. I’d never say yes to that.

00:34:48 – Eric Zimmer
Of course not.

00:34:50 – Rosemerry Trommer
No, of course not.

00:34:50 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:35:12 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, yeah.

00:35:13 – Eric Zimmer
That’s what I don’t want to 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, you know, just rolls along. And for me, that’s the one I’m working most on opening to and just going, that’s okay.

00:35:30 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:35:30 – Eric Zimmer
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 plain old moment they are. And that’s the one that’s hard for me to open to.

00:35:48 – Rosemerry Trommer
The mundanity. We’re in the business of making up words today, Eric, so we’re going to go with mundanity, I think. Yeah.

00:35:55 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:36:05 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yes. By John Koenig. I love this book so much. My master’s is in linguistics, so I’m a word lover. Right. I just 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. You see yourself in all of 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.

00:36:37 – Eric Zimmer
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, it was, I’m ordering this book sight unseen.

00:37:01 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, yeah. I hope you love it.

00:37:04 – Eric Zimmer
Speaking of the mundane and opening to it, I think you have a poem that speaks to this.

00:37:11 – Rosemerry Trommer
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.

00:37:49 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:38:08 – Rosemerry Trommer
Mm. Yeah.

00:38:10 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:38:23 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Yeah.

00:38:25 – Eric Zimmer
That’s the hard part. I think I’m gonna 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.

00:38:39 – Rosemerry Trommer
You know, Eric, I love that you bring this in, then this. Yes, I know it’s there. And there are those moments where we’re just like, I don’t see it and actually don’t want to see it. Is that part of it?

00:38:48 – Eric Zimmer
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. I’m unstirred.

00:39:00 – Rosemerry Trommer
I’m not being stirred. Right. I am unstirable. 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.

00:39:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:39:44 – Rosemerry Trommer
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. All these.

00:39:57 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right.

00:39:58 – Rosemerry Trommer
All these ways meet a moment.

00:39:59 – Eric Zimmer
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 that takes my entire life to learn. I’ve gotten much better at it. Being a Heroin addict at 24 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.

00:40:36 – Rosemerry Trommer
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.

00:40:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And I’m sorry about your friend.

00:40:45 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, yes. Well, it’s been quite a path. You know, we sang together for 30 years.

00:40:51 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, my goodness.

00:40:52 – Rosemerry Trommer
And then at her gathering, it wasn’t a memorial. Right. She was right there.

00:40:57 – Eric Zimmer
Right, right.

00:40:58 – Rosemerry Trommer
So it was. I’ve never been in a situation like this. You know, there were 70 of us gathered, and four of us who’ve sung with her 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 peace 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.

00:41:42 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:41:43 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 in gurgling. It was, you know, at least it was sincere. It was certainly not a performance.

00:42:02 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. No one’s gonna doubt 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.

00:42:29 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah.

00:42:29 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:42:56 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah, yeah. Colorado Newly does. I think it’s only three years old now.

00:43:01 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:43:09 – Rosemerry Trommer
Oh, I’m glad you picked this one.

00:43:11 – Eric Zimmer
I think this is a nice way to sort of take us out.

00:43:15 – Rosemerry Trommer
So this is a poem in a section that’s called Some Union. Sum is a proto Indo 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 sew every piece into the grand cloth. It matters, too, how we sew 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 whole and to do this for as long as we can stitch. That’s how long.

00:44:45 – Eric Zimmer
That’s beautiful. I love this idea of it matters how we sew 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.

00:45:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
Yeah. Right. So we get to struggle and make it up.

00:45:11 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:45:12 – Rosemerry Trommer
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 they do exist if we look for them. I’m thinking now of Mirabai Star, who is just such a 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 Mirabai Star every day, you’re still going to have to figure it out for yourself.

00:45:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. Yeah. I got to go to Taos recently and interview Mirabai in person as part of a trip out there, and it was. 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 reach 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 Viktor Frankl did for us. Right. Because I think the reason that we’re often drawn to people like Viktor Frankl, 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.

00:47:07 – Rosemerry Trommer
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.

00:47:19 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:47:20 – Rosemerry Trommer
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.

00:47:38 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:47:40 – Rosemerry Trommer
We’ll all get those chances.

00:47:42 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:47:56 – Rosemerry Trommer
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.

00:48:05 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:48:13 – Rosemerry Trommer
Thank you, Eric. Thank you so much. I’m so glad to be with you again.