I recently came across the poem Sacred Ground, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. She reminded me that everywhere is holy.
It’s easy for me to see aspects of my life as mundane. When I do, I gloss over the present moment, and the personal stories that surround it. Rosemerry prompts me not to:
‘And if, as I now know, the closet
is sacred and the bare room
is sacred and the sidewalk
and classroom and the ER
are sacred, then I trip
into the teaching
that everywhere is sacred—
not only the church, but
the alley. Not only the mosque,
but the bench…’
—The beginning of the poem Sacred Ground by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Reading the poem, I was reminded that approaching mindfulness as the cultivation of embodied awareness includes “having my heart be where my feet are.”
At times, this feels so dificult. I distract myself from being present. I fret over why things are the way they are instead of accepting or changing them. And I get lost in the mundane.
The poem’s end offers a redemptive practice…
‘…Every step, a step
from holy to holy
to holy.’
Thank you, Narayan Helen Liebenson, for introducing me to Rosemerry’s poem.
Image attribution: Timothy Neesam (GumshoePhotos) under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license
“Sacred”, “holy”, what other words will be found when I look that will be similar in meaning and then intent? Of course because this is your post, I began to think “what if all the places where people gather by their intention or others’ convening, or by accident, were considered ‘holy’, in what ways would we consider the ways in which we configure them? Design what is planned for their use?”
Contemplating….
Thank you, Adrian.