To wonder. To wonder with no plan
for where it might lead. No strategy
for arrival. No finish line. No pot
of gold. No perfect score. No striving for.
To wonder. To wonder the way a small child
might wonder when seeing a roly poly for the first time —
oh, look at all those legs. Look at how
it curls! Look how it moves again. Feel
how light it is in the palm. Feel how
it tickles as it moves. Imagine
an awareness that new meeting a life form that old.
Can I be that new as I meet this infinite world?
To wonder not just with my mind
but with my belly. To let every neuron
spark. To notice where there is a channel
and imagine the great wing of life
is scraping it clean so the stream might flow
in new ways. To wonder beyond the edge
of the known, and in that spaciousness, play.

~Rosemary Wahtola Trommer

winding through all the ways to know….

inquiry for today~ tell yourself it’s ok right now….

when it’s enough to love…

You ask, “Is what we do enough?”

As others have asked forever: before, during, and after the storm brewing around us and within us.

The truth is we will never know, which is why we have to do what we can anyway. For so often, we can’t see the goodness that our small risk releases- today, tomorrow, in years to come. Cruelty comes and goes and the in between is always unspeakable and too long.

Yet Noah’s ark began with one nail. And it was Ariadne’s thread that Theseus pulled after slaying the Minotaur to bring him home. It brought him back from the darkness into the light. And it was a polished patch of Perseus’ shield that served as a mirror by which he could slay Medusa without looking directly at her and being turned to stone.

The smallest patch of self-reflection can keep us from turning to stone. And what made a hesitant Moses go to Pharoah to demand that he let his people go? He had no idea of the miracle to unfold. But denouncing bondage led to freedom. And Pliny the Elder, as an old man, dropped everything to try to rescue strangers from the eruption of Vesuvius.

And what made Clara Barton thread her first stitch through the torn shoulder of a Union soldier while so many were bleeding around her? And Gandhi started his march of sixty thousand to the sea by closing the door to his small hut alone. And children were saved from the ovens by being tossed in potato sacks over the walls of the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania. And in the beginning, who would have thought that the very first atom, floating by itself, would be enough to create this eternal flood of Mystery that we call Life?

Still, you are right, even as I share this, there’s a treachery spreading like a dark virus, staining countless hearts around the world. It makes me think of Miriam Elkes, a simple Jewish mother who survived Auschwitz. In her final years, she told her son that what kept her going during those horrible days was that every day she hid and carried a broken crust of bread, in case she came across someone more in need than her. “Is what we do enough?”

Though I keep asking, too, living transforms the question to simply, “What can we do?” There is no denying the cruelty whenever it appears. Yet hard as it is to believe, the smallest gesture that breaks the wall of our silence, that admits we are wrong, that admits to how much we love- the smallest gesture remakes the world, in time. 

~Mark Nepo