Up: [[People]] Created: 2023-08-28 Updated: 2024-12-29 ![[Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.jpeg|300]] POET American — Colorado Rosemerry’s website, [Word Woman](https://www.wordwoman.com) ## How I First Learned of Her Metaphor fascinates me. It has more power to shape our lives than is commonly understood. I was going to give a session on Connections for Linking Your Thinking and I wanted to find something new about metaphor. I stumbled across Rosemerry’s [TEDx talk on the art of changing metaphors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXC3-ZFkhDo&list=PLk9Sgig2v6cg5BoAYhLtXHiznfbjIcT9v&index=15). ## Since Then… Rosemerry took a poetry writing course in 2006 and was inspired by the instructor’s challenge to write a poem a day for 30 days. She shared her poems with two classmates and kept writing beyond the thirty days. Since 2011 she has shared with the world via her [daily poetry blog](https://ahundredfallingveils.com) which I receive in my inbox every morning. I purchased one of her recent poetry collections, *All My Honey*. I’ve taken two excellent online classes with her, one about [[Writing into Paradox]] and one on writing about death. It is Rosemerry I have to thank for my burgeoning interest in poetry. ## Rosemerry through the Lens of Instructions for Life ##### PAY ATTENTION Her poetry practice became an attention practice. Rosemerry says knowing that you’re going to show up to write something changes everything about the way you live your life. She started keeping her eyes and ears open for anything in a day that might speak to her. She has found that the more present she has become, the more the world speaks to her. I love that Rosemerry is able to both [[Savour]] and [[Accept Reality]]. She says, *To be alive is to experience opposition; to know that things are horrible **and** there is also so much beauty in the world.* ##### BE AMAZED One of [[Rosemerry's Four Promises to Herself When She Writes]] is to make her writing emotionally true. Rather than writing to be clever or to impress people, she just keeps asking herself, “What’s the next true thing?” A true thing has energy. And writing true things helps with writer’s block. You can always make a list of what you’re noticing! Rosemerry came to her focus on true things when her perfectionistic desire to write something ‘good’ couldn’t be sustained in a daily practice. By changing what mattered most to her from ‘good’ to ‘true’, more often than not she succeeds at both. ##### TELL ABOUT IT I asked Rosemerry why she shares. She said she thinks of paying attention, of mindfulness, as continuously inhaling. There needs to be exhale to keep the process going. It doesn’t have to be public. It doesn’t have to have your name on it. She talked about slipping unsigned poems in between the pages of library books. But [[Sharing]] of any form is a kind of communion. And when you do share, the communities that show up are so heart-opening, so life-affirming. Rosemerry has firsthand knowledge of this. In August 2021, her son Finn took his life two weeks before his 17th birthday. Her practice of paying attention and the “tsunami of love” that came to her from people who had read her poems didn’t just save her. To my mind they’ve turned her into a beautiful piece of kintsugi pottery, the broken places patched with gold. These [four poems about her son](https://oneartpoetry.com/2022/02/22/four-poems-by-rosemerry-wahtola-trommer/) are an example of that. ![[Kintsugi pottery.jpeg]]