Trust on Purpose
Are you intentional about building, maintaining or repairing trust with the people in your life? Most of us aren’t, and sometimes important relationships suffer as a result. So much of what is right or amiss in those relationships ties back to trust, whether we realize it or not. We are dedicated to helping you become intentional about cultivating strong trust with everyone important in your life: the people and teams you lead and work with, and your family, friends and community, as well. In the Trust on Purpose podcast, we dive into everything that makes up trust, what supports and damages it. We unpack situations we commonly see with leaders, teams, organizations, and others we work with to show how trust can be strengthened, sustained, and repaired when broken. Listen in for conversations between two pros who care deeply about you being an intentional and masterful trust-builder in your life so you and your relationships flourish. We share pragmatic and actionable takeaways you can use immediately and deepen with practice. If you have questions or situations related to trust that you’d like us to talk about in a future episode, please email charles@insightcoaching.com or ila@bigchangeinc.com.
We'd like to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music that you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for the superpower editing work that he does to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to the smooth and easy to listen to episodes you are all enjoying. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Trust on Purpose
Letting life move through us: poetry, presence and leadership
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What happens when we trust life enough to put down our armour and show up authentically? Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer takes us on a journey through the transformative power of creative practice and how it builds the muscle of trust - in life, in ourselves - that we need in our most challenging moments.
Rosemerry opens our conversation with her powerful poem "Growing Trust," asking why we would ever "slip back into armour" when life itself is waiting to move through us. She shares how her commitment to writing poems daily completely shifted her relationship with creativity, moving from perfectionism to valuing truth and authenticity above all else. This daily practice became about cultivating a way of being present with whatever arises.
The parallels between creative practice and leadership emerge throughout our discussion; when leaders do their own inner work, others can sense it, creating psychological safety without effort. As one of Rosemerry's students expressed, "I trust you because I can tell you've done your work." This embodied authenticity allows leaders to create spaces where vulnerability and creativity can thrive.
Rosemerry's wisdom offers a powerful invitation to trust what emerges when we get out of our own way and open ourselves to the inherent creativity of life itself.
We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
hi, my name is charles feldman and my name is ila edgar, and we're here for another episode of trust on purpose, charles, we have who, what a very.
Speaker 1:We have a different kind of guest today and a very special person we have. Rosemary wakola trommer is a poet and we're going to be exploring the sort of the edges of creativity and innovation as it shows up in the world of writing and creative writing and poetry, and how that also translates over into leadership, into coaching. That also translates over into leadership into coaching. So, Rosemary, welcome. We'll get to a little bit of your background in a moment, but I'm wondering if you would be willing to start us off with a poem.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thanks Charles and thanks Ila. I'm so happy to be here. This poem is Growing Trust. Happy to be here. This poem is Growing Trust.
Speaker 3:Now, since I've tasted trust in life, why would I ever slip again into armor, the armor of an insincere smile, sometimes as dangerous as the armor of a sword? Why would I ever try to know what to say, how to act, how to plan, when, with zero effort of my own, life itself will move through me, will rise up in me to meet itself? Of course, like the child I am, I forget this trust. I slip back into habit. Believe I need protection. Trust I slip back into habit, believe I need protection. Fear. I am isolated, but I have fallen in love with life at a time when that might seem impossible and this strange fact alone seems enough to remind me to ditch the armor, to cast wide my arms, to unsheathe my heart and say yes, life, I serve you. Why would I not trust life? It's like a seed evading the rain, like a sunflower just unfurling trying to avoid the sun furling, trying to avoid the sun.
Speaker 1:That's a powerful poem about trust and life. We often in our podcasts, talk about the strength and power of vulnerability From our perspective. When we trust someone, we are making ourselves vulnerable, vulnerable to their actions, and a lot of people don't recognize that A lot of leaders, in particular in organizations. So they believe that they need to armor up and it really inhibits their ability to be present, to be with the people that they're leading and to be, in that sense, creative in the moment with those people. The thing goes with coaching.
Speaker 1:I know, when I tend to, as a coach, begin to think that I don't know what to say in this moment when I'm working with a client and become frightened by that idea, I begin to, you know, like, armor up and there's a particular way. I know how I do this. You know I start getting very intellectual and so that's the armor that I put on, and I'm getting better at recognizing when I'm putting that on and going wait a minute to the point where I simply will say to my client you know what? I'm not sure where we're going here, or I'm going here let's take a moment, or let me just be with sort of you know whatever. So I'll stop and say that.
Speaker 1:So thank you for this poem. It's, I think, quite appropriate for the whole notion of trusting trusting what's happening. So I would like to ask you to say a little bit about yourself, a little bit about how did you come to take up writing poetry, and also, as we talked about in the conversation before the conversation, you do some. What did you call it? You called it.
Speaker 3:Creative consulting.
Speaker 1:Creative consulting. Yes, I love that. So, anyway, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and our listeners, of course, a little bit about yourself that would be wonderful.
Speaker 3:So I began writing poems when I was very young. You know, in fourth grade was when I first fell in love with writing poems, but everything changed for me around a writing practice. Even so, I'd already published several books of poems, but back in 2006, I started writing a poem every day, and it was a little challenge really. Could I do it for 30 days, which I was pretty sure I could not? And what happened then, when I started writing a poem every day, is I understood that first of all, I couldn't write something good every day Like that was hard.
Speaker 3:I'm a perfectionist, and if I weren't going to write something good, I almost didn't want to write at all, which meant that often I didn't write at all. But the beauty, then, of creating a habit, of creating a daily habit, is that it opened it up for me. If it isn't about being good, then what is at stake here? What are we doing? And even within those first 30 days, I started to see oh, if I write something true, that's something I can do every day. So it shifted, for me, from writing something good to something true. It shifted from trying to be perfect to being authentic. It turns out, by the way, that being authentic is something that is ever interesting. That's ever interesting. And if you could be authentic, do you know what will happen? People will say, oh, that's good. But they mean that's true because they feel that resonance within themselves too. So there was this exciting thing that happened after this daily poem began. It's been what, over 19 years now, of writing daily poems, which has evolved my life in the most astonishing ways.
Speaker 3:Charles and Hila, I think that this is where this whole idea about trust is coming from. For me, how do we begin to trust a process by doing it again and again and again, by playing with it again and again, by being beaten down by it again, by being bested by it again and again and putting ourselves in service to it again and again. So I have quite a few books now. I don't maybe 13, 14 books. The most recent one, the Unfolding. The poem that I just read for you is out of a book called All the Honey, and I do this, I put these poems out into the world every day. Talk about vulnerable, right? That's a foolish thing to do. I suppose that's a very non-perfectionist thing to do, but I put my first drafts into the world every day, on a blog and also on an email, and I do a lot of teaching in person and online. And also I do what I call this creative consulting, where I help other people with their own creative practice, especially with writing.
Speaker 1:Eli, it looks like you have about 10 things to say or ask. I'm going to let you do some of that, and then I have a few questions and thoughts as well.
Speaker 2:There's lots of things rumbling around, but actually, as you were sharing this, what I felt actually was not so much in my thinking but in my body, and that the courage, the vulnerability, the trust, the beauty, the curiosity, these emotions were kind of like flowing through my heart and my veins as I listened to a deep commitment that you made to yourself, and that it wasn't about being good or putting out perfect work, and it's got me thinking about where in our lives do we actually make those kinds of commitments to ourselves? And I just happened to be reading this the other day Usain Bolt, masterful runner. There's a quote that he said I trained for four years to run nine seconds Right and that most people give up when they don't see some sort of progress in a relatively short amount of time. And yet, if we want to, I'm going to use my own kind of.
Speaker 2:What I'm deeply committed to right now is, if I don't make the time, and I'm deeply committed to the practice of knowing who I am and the words I'm using these days is tending to my inner landscape, and so that takes commitment, it takes courage, it takes patience, because it's important to me and I hope 19 years from now I'm still tending to that inner landscape and finding treasures in the nooks and crannies. So I'm just, I'm very, I'm deeply grateful that you shared this kind of incredible commitment that you made to yourself and your writing. And just I'm so curious about what, if we each had something that we were so deeply committed to, that we were willing to be that courageous, that vulnerable, that open for 19 years, for 26 years, for more than you know a couple of months and hey, my biceps aren't getting any bulkier, so I'm not going to the gym anymore.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is. It's an astonishing thing, hila, and I like that you have this phrase tending to my inner landscape. That's so much of what I think of as the poetic process, which I think of often as the poetry as a bridge between the inner landscape and the outer landscape. So the outer landscape, anything we access with our senses, embodiment. The inner landscape, anything that we feel or think or wonder. So in this way, a poem is a bridge between these worlds.
Speaker 3:So each time I sit down, I'm wondering what's here, what's inside and what's outside, what's inside and what's outside? And the beauty of that is that it doesn't have to be for anyone else, right, this is a very personal exploration, and I think that the other thing that's interesting I just want to point out that when I started sharing the poems, I was only doing it with two people, so it was a very small step, right? I didn't start by sharing with thousands of people, I started by sharing with two, so that made it a lot easier. And then the other thing that I thought was so interesting about what you were just saying is that this commitment to ourselves over time of showing up. I would have told you in the beginning that I had a poetry practice. We could even still say that that it's a poetry practice, but what I came to see was that the poem was a byproduct of the real practice, which was showing up and wondering what's here.
Speaker 1:what's here?
Speaker 3:And in this way and I think this is probably true with any practice of inquiry that we're doing, that we do over time, is that we come to see that that's what matters the most and that it's the poem. Of course that's nice and I love poems. I love poems. I love other people's poems, I love writing them myself. But what changed me wasn't the poems. What changed me was the way that I started paying attention to the world differently, the way I started paying attention to myself differently, and then the ways that it opened up and started breaking down the stories that I had been telling myself about who I am and what is true about who I am and what is true. That breakdown, I think, is what allows them for that growing trust, right To trust authenticity more than anything else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's so much there that I am drawn to as I listen to you. Part of that, of course, is this idea of a commitment. As you pointed out, you have a commitment to yourself and your own path of discovery, rosemary, and you have a particular practice for that particular process, for that, at the same time, I'm thinking about it on a so for you, it's for you, right, it's a practice for you. I'm thinking about it from the perspective of a leader in an organization of some kind, and there it's not only for the person who is the leader, it's, of course, also for the people they're leading. Applies that this being having a practice of, and a commitment to, looking inside and being open to what shows up and then being able to bring that forward not only in themselves but also in the people that they lead. So that's sort of the next step or sort of another piece of this for leaders is what allows a leader to be effective, to lead in a way that brings the best out of the people that they lead.
Speaker 3:Friend, this is exactly what I've been thinking about lately. Knowing I was going to be coming on this podcast, I've been thinking about trust in all aspects and I've started to bring it up with a bunch of my students. I'm asking them you know, what do you trust? You know what does that look like for you right now?
Speaker 3:With this, I was trying with one student in particular, to talk with her about her own trust in her own process, but what she kept coming back to was I trust you, Rosemary, I trust you, you, Rosemary, I trust you. And because I trust you so much that you have done your work, when you meet me I feel she didn't say it this way, but what she basically said was I feel safe, I feel like I know that you are leading me in a way that I can trust because you have done your work. So that was. That was fascinating. I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think it's just. What you're talking about, Charles, is that if the leader is doing their work, if they are tending to themselves, to their own inner landscapes, they bring that with them everywhere they go, Not just, I mean, in their family. They're bringing that with them, you know, when they're alone and they're bringing it with them at work.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely, that's a great way to put it. Thank you, yeah, few months, and especially since we had a guest on our podcast, amy Elizabeth Fox, who talks a lot about love and leadership. Love, bringing that into the process of leadership and into the organizations that people lead I've been thinking about when someone does like yourself or Elo or some of our clients, do that inner work in a loving way, loving towards themselves. It's going to lead to their capacity to lead with love. And so what does that look like? It looks like generosity, care, deep listening, mutual creativity. That happens when people work together to build something that neither one of them can do alone, just like your teaching practice. Obviously, you and the person you're teaching couldn't do whatever you're doing alone. It takes both of you. And the same thing with a leader in a company or a coach. I mean I can't. I can't coach alone. I mean imaginary client.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that would be quite entertaining yeah.
Speaker 3:I'd love that you brought love into the conversation, charles, in part because that is certainly what was driving the poem that I shared when we started today and I feel like I want to say this that my relationship with what is trust and creative practice, and was that first big turning point, was the daily practice oh, okay, if I do it every day and how it changed everything for me and the fluency, how that opened things up. But the second thing then that changed everything about trust and life and creative practice was about three and a half years ago when my son chose to take his life, and at this point it shattered everything. I thought I knew about everything.
Speaker 3:There was a most astonishing time after that when I felt as if I had no agency, I wasn't capable of doing anything, and yet I I was doing things.
Speaker 3:It was more that I felt life was moving through me doing things, and that was really the essence of the poem when I said why would I ever try to know what to say, how to act, how to plan, when, with zero effort of my own, life itself will move through me, will rise up in me to meet itself? And I had a long-term embodied experience of life coming up to move through me. So then, when I was in fairly difficult situations without going into what they were, but meeting very charged situations with other people and I remember having some anxiety about oh, how am I going to do this, and feeling in that moment that life just came through and did it all for me, not just life, but love. I felt very clear that it was love that was carrying me and moving me and taking charge, and all I had to do was nothing, was nothing, and the more nothing I could do the more I could nothing, the more love and life could come through and do the work.
Speaker 3:This is the most profound trust I've ever experienced in life and that came through then and touched everything else, including a creative practice. So when I say in that poem, I've fallen in love with life at a time when that might seem impossible, this strange fact alone seems enough to remind me to ditch the armor, to cast wide my arms, to unsheathe my heart and say, yes, life, I serve you. And I feel like it was that kind of ongoing practice of, okay, can I do nothing now and let life move through and let love move through and take care of this? The more I did it, the more I trusted it, and by doing it I mean I did nothing Like it was, I didn't do anything.
Speaker 3:That was the point and life did, and how glorious that's been to. Of course I forget. I mean I was so open and shattered in that time and now, three and a half years later, all kinds of armor have come back up, but it's easier now to see them and come back to that vulnerability that you were speaking about earlier and trusting life itself to move through and trusting love to move through and do what needs to be done, whether that's writing a poem or speaking to a difficult situation or, you know, even showing up alone.
Speaker 2:Can I? Yeah, I just I want to honor and say thank you so much for sharing about your son, Thank you. It's also got me wondering, so a couple of things as I dance between the inner landscape and the outer landscape of my being. Question number one, or curiosity number one, is does it have to take some sort of situation where life brings us to our knees to discover this awareness? And so you're describing removing armor and letting love flow?
Speaker 2:I think for me very similar, slightly nuanced, and that I find myself gripping and trying to control, but when I can let go and know that none of us really have control, and come back into the inner landscape that I do have control over, where I can be in silence and stillness and inner contemplation, and that feels like where love then flows more easily. But then I jump back into the grip of life and I don't want this to be. And how can this be true? And so this dance for me is really interesting. So A does it take a moment where life has literally brought us to our knees to begin to see and experience that? I think I'm going to pause there.
Speaker 3:I think that's an awesome question and I don't think so. I think, but only because you said does it take something traumatic to begin? No, I really don't think so. And here's an example of that, especially around that grasping that you're talking about, like that it's supposed to flow and that being stuck is bad, and that you should just write and write and write and never cross things out, and that you should always sit down and have an idea. You know, when you come to the page, you know come full.
Speaker 3:All this advice that I received, and when I started doing the daily poems, I would prepare like all day long. I had my little notebook and I'm running around and I'm looking. You know, where's the poem, where's the poem, where's the poem, which was exciting in a way, because I was starting to see the world in a new way. It was thrilling. You know, all of a sudden I saw the tree at the top of my drive, this giant ponderosa. It's always been there, but how often had I seen it, you know? So I felt like that was exciting, that I suddenly was able to view the world with more curiosity, because I thought I'm going to be writing a poem. But it also occurs to me now that part of the reason that I was writing and writing and writing all the time was because I was afraid to show up to a blank page and be blank. It took years, ila, for me to show up to a blank page, blank, and think that was okay, to sit with a blank page and let it be blank, maybe for a very long time. The relief of that. Then you know, and actually you know. I always say people go, you know, to retreats and they spend lots of money to go be blank and all they had to do was go sit with a blank piece of paper in their back room and you could have done that.
Speaker 3:That writing everything down was in fact, a kind of grasping, of wanting to control the process. I wanted to be sure that I had something with me, so I was. For me, it became important to not start writing everything down, to be able to trust that I could go out into the world with this wider lens now I've been practicing that for a long time and then show up at the blank paper and maybe something would come up from the day I always write at night, but maybe something wouldn't, and that would be okay too, and then I could have another process by which but I didn't have to grasp and grasp and grasp all day to be able to show up at a blank page. So, no, I don't think that.
Speaker 3:I think it's possible for us to start to have that release, for us to start to have that trust develop without a trauma.
Speaker 3:There was nothing traumatic about what that experience was, right.
Speaker 3:That was just a daily practice that evolved and evolved and continued to evolve Until finally, after years, I was able to sit with a blank page and be fine, without grasping all day at something, wanting to control, wanting to be sure I could do something good when I finally did sit down.
Speaker 3:I do think, however, that because I had a daily writing practice for 16 years when my son died, practice for 16 years when my son died that all of that work that I had done already, with letting go of the grasping, or having experiences of letting go of grasping, of showing up, so that when he did die and it was the most awful time of my life I had a practice of staying open, and I think, because of that practice of staying open, there was possible, in this very traumatic time, the ability to have that kind of transformative feeling of life moving through me, affirmative feeling of life moving through me, love moving through me. So I think it might take a deep trauma for it to go really deep in, but I don't think that that's the only way for us to start to learn those lessons. In fact, if we've already started learning them, I think maybe we've done ourselves a big favor.
Speaker 2:There's another beautiful quote and I can't remember. This is terrible. I need to. I need to source this, but it basically says dig the well before you're thirsty, right, and so you. You had a practice that supported the hardest times in your life. I had a practice that supported, has supported and continues to support me in really tough times about coming back to the inner landscape and letting go of the grip, and so I, you know, coming back to as as individuals and learning the love of self that, like authenticity. This is who I am, and I think especially of leaders right now. Right, do more. You don't have time for that. We pay you to have the right answers, get shit done like go, go, go, go go. That we're not actually setting people up for what's a practice or something that tends to you. That no matter if things are going super well or they're super bumpy or anything in between, what's the one thing that you can lean in on when you need to yeah, need to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I also something else that came up for me as I was listening to you, rosemary, talk about the building, that practice, and the moments when you, kind of you, saw things differently. Something shifted for you. It's so I'm curious about. Do you think that your ability to do and to recognize those shifts came from an intention, or at least an intentional openness in you that allowed you to see, for example, when you looked at the tree and said, oh, I'm grasping here because I'm spending all my time writing down, preparing for the blank page and then at some point you began to think, well, wait a minute, no, I don't need to do that. The blank page is, yeah, there's. So there was a shift, another big shift for you. So there was a shift, another big shift for you. Was there for you an intention to grow into this, or to grow into whatever it was that you were growing into, even though you might not have known what it was?
Speaker 3:That's such a good question and I don't know that I thought about it this way. I always like it when people ask questions I didn't know. I knew the answer to so no, when I started writing the daily poems and remember I had already been writing poems for many, many years before that too right, but when I started writing the daily poems I really did think it was about poetry. I really thought that that was what I was doing. There wasn't an intention to be open. I had no sense of it at all that way. Then, maybe eight, ten years into the daily practice, I started working with a spiritual teacher, joy Sharp, who leads Satsang, which is really's a practice of inquiry, and that's when I started to have a curiosity around opening, about being open. And I remember actually it was it was when some a very difficult, another very difficult time in my life and things fell apart, things I thought I knew about who I was and what I was doing in the world kind of fell apart, and that was an invitation at that point you know, this is like 10 years ago to be like, oh, what if I opened up? What if I opened up to all of life? What if I opened up to life as it is. That was the driving force then for this kind of that was the driving force then for this kind of longing for openness and authenticity.
Speaker 3:And I remember at the time writing in the sand my kids and I were playing in a sandbox and I took all the little stones and I wrote open me in the sandbox and just it was a constant prayer for me open me, open me. And I remember my teacher saying oh, that's a very brave prayer. I felt like I had no idea what she was talking about. It was many years before, I think I understood just how brave that was. If I had known, could I have prayed that way? I don't know.
Speaker 3:But I can also say then that that longing continued like after Finn died. Then I remember I would go to a chiropractor not, yeah, I guess chiropractor too, but specifically an acupuncturist, a body worker and they say what can I do? And I'd say open me. I just wanted to stay open, open, open to experience it all. And I do feel like the poetry writing poems was a really beautiful way to start to explore that. I think we can use language to do that, and now I value that more than anything else. Way more than cleverness or intelligence, I value openness, and so in the poetry that I write and the poems that I love to read, I notice that this is kind of my highest value.
Speaker 1:I think you've said a lot of it, but can you say a little bit more about that openness? What?
Speaker 3:is that for you? Oh, okay. So I feel like a couple of things At least. It's getting out of the way right which I think you said a little bit about this too, ila Like we do and then all of a sudden we're in the way again. You know, and I think part of it is this kind of overriding willingness to trust that wherever we're at is exactly where we need to be.
Speaker 3:With that, so when the aperture is wide open and we feel like we're in this flow state and it's gorgeous and glorious and I love it, and then, when I'm not like that right, when I feel shut down, when I feel constricted, when I realize that I'm writing something that has an agenda as opposed to just letting whatever it is come through, and I get to laugh at that too, and I get to be so gentle and tender with that part of myself that isn't open. That, I feel like, is the great reward for not staying in that open flow state all the time and to start to trust, like this advice that we hear all the time, especially about writing, but I think about other parts of our lives too. You know, you're supposed to just let it flow, you don't cross things out and I realized that for me, my writing practice itself, part of it, is just sitting there with nothing, just sitting there. That doesn't look like flow perhaps, but I realized that that's what it's like for me and that actually when I get stuck, what we would call stuck the only problem with stuck is when we call it a problem. But really just sitting there with wonder, what's next? What's next, what's the next true thing? What's the next true thing?
Speaker 3:And not knowing, and letting ourselves steep in that not knowing, kind of like what you were saying, charles, about when you're sitting with your client and you say, well, we're just a little reset, I just don't know right now. And you know, like when we let ourselves steep in that not knowing what a gift what is. So that doesn't look like flow state perhaps, but it's such a valuable gift. So I guess when I say open, I feel like open doesn't just, it means open to all of it, all of it, all of it, all of it. And to see that whatever I had the thought of as a problem is perhaps not a problem at all. It was just the only problem was me thinking it was a problem.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yes, yes, that openness to everything, including what we might think of as armor and clothes. What I hear you saying is it's all part of life and all part of love and loving all of it is the real gift of being embodied.
Speaker 3:That is the real gift, that is the real gift of being embodied. That is the real gift. That is the real gift is the learning to love all of it. Amor fati right. Love your fate, Whatever it is, can you?
Speaker 2:love it yeah.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And sometimes that's really, really hard to do. Oh, of course, yeah. And so I think you know, going back to that, the dance that I noticed myself in more and more often, but I also noticed now that, oh, I'm over here, I'm starting to grip and clutch, and in that gripping and that clutching, in that trying to control, and I can feel my body constrict, right, it just gets so and then it just gets even worse and worse and worse, and whatever it is that I am resisting or, you know, trying to hold on to the opposite of, and then I go, oh, what do you? Oh, love, right, oh love, what are you doing?
Speaker 2:It's okay and inviting, you know, a couple of breaths through the drop of the shoulder and then it's like, oh, actually, this isn't as so bad as I thought it was. It's still maybe not something I want or that I like or that I'm happy about, but the more tightly I resist it or push it away or not want it to be, the harder it is, and so that openness, and just even if it's 1% more open or 5% more open, oh okay, okay, it's all right, it's all right.
Speaker 3:So I love what you're saying and I feel like you're so right about this. I mean, there is that resistance and that we feel it in our bodies and I've just come to learn that my body has spent so many years being so unkind to my body and I feel like one of the greatest gifts of being older is this new relationship I feel like I have with my body that has so much generosity and respect and even trust that the body is going. My body will tell me when I'm in resistance. That's such a beautiful thing. It's just like you said, Ila, with that clenching that happens. And when that starts I'm like oh OK, this is a hello invitation to pay attention. Oh okay, this is a hello invitation to pay attention.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then that sweet self-talk that can happen which, honestly, for me came out of poetry also. It was the kind of thing that was so easy for me to talk to other people when I was coaching other people, it was so easy to be generous with them. Oh, you know, they'd tell they were stuck. Oh, sweetheart, that's okay, I'd say to them. And then noticing how easy it was to well, no, it wasn't easy, but noticing that there was a pathway then to bring that same language to myself, and the more that I did it.
Speaker 3:And it started with the writing, but then it moved into every other part of life. You know, breaking a glass on the kitchen floor, whatever it was, you know, and just be like, oh sweetheart, I love that, yours is, oh love. I think we all probably have these little words that would, if you have a word, oh honey, you know whatever it is. But that ability then to turn toward that part of us that's in resistance and not vilify it, right, Just to love that part too, that, I feel like has been an astonishing practice for me also. Yes, yes.
Speaker 1:There's something that came up for me as I was listening to you, Rosemary, about so we can turn that tenderness, that empathy and love towards ourselves when we're caught up in our stories and those stories are bringing us pain and suffering, and we can do that with other people.
Speaker 1:I'm sort of struggling to articulate exactly what it is that came up for me, but it was something to do with this sense that love is just there, yes, there's no need to look for it, to hunt for it. So the capacity to love someone else, the capacity to love myself, begins to loosen the boundaries between self and other. That there's this just, it's just love, that's there and we don't need to. Yeah, I'll just stop there.
Speaker 3:That's so beautiful, charles, and this sense of kind of latency, right, that it's all around us at all times and that all it takes is you know for it to be brought into action. Is us noticing it really, I suppose. Can I read you a poem that's a little bit about that.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, yes please, yes, please.
Speaker 3:This one's actually also from that same book, all the Honey, and it's called With the Stars All Around. I wish you the peace of sleep, your breath, a canoe that carries you toward the next moment without any need for you to touch the oars. How easily you arrive. Oh, to trust the world. Like that, trust, you will be carried not just in sleep but in waking dreams. Trust, no matter how high the waves, the skiff of grace has a seat for you. And oh, to let go of the oars. There is no steering toward what comes next, toward what comes next.
Speaker 3:That poem I actually wrote for my son a week before he died. He was really struggling and I remember wanting to offer him this trust in life. And could he let go of the oars? Could he trust? Of course, a week later, and it was probably a whole year later. And could he let go of the oars? Could he trust? Of course, a week later, and it was probably a whole year later by the time I read the poem again and realized I had written it for me. But I think that what is at the heart of that poem are two things that you were talking about, charles. One is that being carried by love, right, the sense that the love is there and that will rise up and carry us. And the other is that sense of communion that happens between the self and the other in those moments when we are allowing. I say allowing that's still so much agency. When that happens, there's so little. It does. It just blurs the distinction of the you and the I and it brings us into this sweet connective space.
Speaker 1:Yeah thank you, yeah, I love that poem.
Speaker 3:Was it called again? It was called With the Stars All Around.
Speaker 1:There's one more poem that I would love it if you would read, maybe as a closing for our call today our conversation of tenderness.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, this one's also from that same book. Oh actually, no, it's in the new book, it's in a book called the.
Speaker 3:Unfolding here. It is Of tenderness. So easily the thin rind pulls away from the clementine to reveal what is soft, what is sweet. It matters, I think, the way we offer ourselves to each other. I think of how it falls open, the peel of the clementine. I think of how it falls open, the peel of the clementine. I think of how, sometimes, when I ask how you are, you too fall open and give me everything. What a gift when I don't need to pry. What a gift the bright scent of conversation, how the tang of it lingers in the air. I long to open for you this way too. Trust begins here.
Speaker 2:Thank you, beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, charles. Thank you, elah. Well, I don't really want to bring our conversation to a close. I'd like to stay here with you for much, much longer, but we do need to wrap and I really, really, really would love for you to share. How can people find you, how can they read your work, how can they connect with you? How can they be blessed by the beautiful gift that you share with the world?
Speaker 3:That was a gorgeous invitation. Thank you, hila. You can find me on my website, which is wordwomancom, and all my events should be up there, plus lots of ideas for writing your own poems, links to where you can find all my books, and I'll say too that if you're interested in seeing or receiving the daily poems, you can find those on my blog, which is a hundred falling veils all spelled out. If you go there, you can either read them there or you can have them delivered to your inbox every day. There's a link there for you to do that and also, if you like, listening to them out loud. I have a app, part of the ritual app, and it's a program called the Poetic Paths, in which I read a poem every day and then talk a little bit about what you might, if you wanted to write a poem of your own. Of course, that's just totally optional. Maybe you just think about it, but those are all ways to see what's happening.
Speaker 1:Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. This has been a wonderful conversation. I've really enjoyed it and look forward to perhaps others in the future.
Speaker 3:Thank you, I'd love to come back any time.
Speaker 2:That makes my heart sing that this isn't an only, that there could be a continuation. Like I'm just sparkling in the joy of that possibility.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Well, thank you very much for taking the time to join us and blessing us with your poetry and your thoughts and your wisdom and your curiosity, and those places that work for you and flow, and those places where you believe you're stuck and those ways that you recognize that you're actually not really stuck, it's only your thoughts, that are stuck. Yeah, thank you, rose yeah.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Rosemary.
Speaker 1:Thank you, we can just now click the little black square.
