by Nadine Pinede

What really helps, when ‘the storms of life come bearing down’? What supports us to dig deep to find the resilience to keep going and find new goodness in the eventual aftermath – or even in the thick of it? From reading a bit about Nadine Pinede’s life on her website, I have the sense that she has distilled her life experience into the wisdom that has important things to say on this topic – and this poem offers some powerful hints. Warmth, breath, lighting a candle – and: crossing over from sorrow to joy with ‘a single braided rope of gratitude’. Wow!

And immediately the question: where to find gratitude in the midst of the storms? How to braid a rope out of the thread that might be there? I guess the first and most important thing is to know to look in the direction of gratitude – and then to practice so it grows!

PS We have an upcoming weekend in October 2025 on the topic of gratitude – free for members! Do join us if you’d like to explore what gratitude can bring in your life…

Photo by Nikita Ivanov on Unsplash

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

It’s always a bit of a process, choosing the next poem to explore here. Not only do I have to like it, but it has to be relevant for me at that time so I have something to say about it, I want to feel some alignment with the poet and I strive for a diversity in the selection, and I try not to share too many poems by the same poet. But that last one is not always easy with a poet as prolific as Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, who has a practice of sharing a poem a day and has done so since 2006. You can find all of her poems here, or click here to hear her read the above poem. So with the amount of Rosemerry-poems already in our list, another one wasn’t the most likely choice for today – but when I came across this one just yesterday and it named exactly how I felt, I couldn’t resist.

Being with the swirl of okay and not okay, with the heartbreak and the gladness of any given moment, is quite a thing! And it’s not easy to communicate or have space for the presence of such different ingredients in the same instant, in the same world… Yet I’m glad it’s possible, for the alternative is not very appealing: having only what’s not okay in the picture could easily lead to the heart closing into breakdown, and only letting in what’s ok might lead to a polyanna flavoured denying that also doesn’t serve us well. For the glass is not only half empty or half full, it’s both – I’m so glad to be alive and have a glass at all.

When there’s something strongly in the foreground of my experience, I often ask myself the question: “and what else is true?” Not to deny what I’m experiencing, but to open up into the fuller, wider experience of the moment, which frequently is a mixture of different ingredients. Making space for the mixture usually feels honest and true, and rich in a multidimensional kind of way – like a musical chord with a dissonant included, or a beautiful day in autumn that holds the last of the summer sunshine alongside the chill and decay of what’s to come. It may be that these are the moments I feel most alive, most real and open to the fullness of living. So here they are, all these feelings, swirling together… how precious to be living in the midst of it!

PS if you’d like to become more awake to what’s present inside, there’s a new Level 1 Mindfulness course starting soon, which helps us show up in the moment with all its different ingredients, living life fully!

Photo by charles hsiao on Unsplash

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

by Mary Oliver

Close to this year’s Earth Day on the 22nd of April, this poem (part 3 of a longer poem you can find for example here) reads like a passionate love letter to being alive on this magnificent planet. What a wonder to be able to experience the gorgeousness of being alive! Pausing with it, I feel the preciousness and ‘unguaranteedness’ of my own life, like the great poet Keats who didn’t live beyond 25 – but also my deep care and concern for the larger picture of this invaluable planet, and it’s degree of health. There is so much to admire, to weep over…

I often wonder about the balance between those two – admiring and weeping. There have been times in my life I’ve done more of one or the other, and while despairing over what’s wrong with the world and the “broken record of broken records” obviously feels painful, the times of trying to blank out what happens beyond my immediate circle has its own precariousness and numbness to it. The question I am most interested in these days, is how I can be most alive and ‘useful’ – to speak with Lama Yeshe urging his students to be ‘joyful and useful human beings’. Which includes a continuous searching for where this balance is most conducive.

I find Joanna Macy a beautiful, living example of being useful and joyful and showing up with immense love without glossing over pain – and she powerfully speaks to that here, interwoven with poetry. So why not get started immediately…

PS. If you’d like to explore, together with others, how you can bring your compassion into action with practices inspired by Joanna Macy, there is a weekend coming up in Samye Ling to do just that!

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

by Rumi, translated by Kabir Helminski and Camille Helminski

What is it with Rumi?! When I read some of his poems, I feel like my brain flips over! This poem is one such. It’s like he’s writing from a place so much more vast, connected to a reality so much beyond my usual ‘known’, that rational thinking just gives up. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left. When I drop into the body, I find all kinds of goings on. With this poem I’m uplifted, something rises in my heart wanting to heed the call Rumi is making, recognising a truth and pushing towards the possibility of it.

So, let’s grapple with this. What comes first, gratitude or abundance? And further, what comes first, gratitude or contentment? We assume that being grateful is something that arises without our conscious involvement and as a result of something good happening. But what if the state of gratitude is its own reward, generating a perception of an abundance around us? And what if we can choose deliberately to enter into it more? Something good becomes visible to us by allowing gratitude’s glowing warmth to embrace us into an abundant world.

‘Hunt for bounty with the net of gratitude’ is Rumi’s parting line. Well this much is clear – practicing gratitude is recommended. Letting gratitude be a net in which you can catch the abundance, beauty and poignancy of life moment to moment. But I sense that what Rumi really wants to do is to beckon us towards this instruction: relish getting caught in the net yourself, get caught into the net of ‘the Generous One’; be lifted into being and surrendering to the essential abundance of life.

Ps. Our mindfulness and compassion training pathway teaches you how to bring gratitude alive in your own life. Check it out here.

Photo by Herbert Grambihler on Unsplash

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

by Marie Howe

Wow, this one touched me deeply. And reading that poet Marie Howe‘s brother John died not long before, gave more poignant context to what the living do, all these ordinary and not exactly glamorous ingredients of life that you might think you’d be happy to do without… and yet, this is it! How precious to realise that we are part of this human family of the living, and able to remember those who have passed away.

Nothing more to say, but to live it…

PS if you’d like to practise being aware of the miracle of living – in all its glory and mundanity – together with others, there is a new mindfulness course starting before long…

Photo by Tina Bosse on Unsplash