10.20.2025. Unwavering & Quivering
Hello dear Friends,
“Why Bother? Because right now there is someone
out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words”.
— Sean Thomas Dougherty
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We share, we show up, we risk vulnerability, we offer again and again. Why? Because we are buoys for each other's hearts. We remind each other how to live close to the bone, smacked by beauty, battered by sorrow, choosing love over bitter. Somehow, ‘bitter’ happens, my friends, when we cannot find our way through the sticky muck of life, when we curl too far inward believing we are on our own, alone, the only one. This is different from resting inward; this is the place where, as Dante wrote, “In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood / Where the true way was wholly lost.”
This is when we are vulnerable to all things that begin with the letter ‘d’—dry-hearted, dismayed, down-a-rabbit-hole, despairing, dark night of the soul. But perhaps destruction is the holy of all holies, where we meet each other as a communion of saints—quivering heart to quivering heart—devoted to raw, to honest, to holding each other in the mysterious and tragic, reminding each other of the rising from stone, from ash, the soul.
“This being human is complicated business,” my meditation teacher would say. We bother because ‘there is nothing singular in our own sufferings.’ More and more, I’m struck to my knees by the awe and reverence of these words. By the poured life, that insists on Silence, returns us to the sacred, to ourselves.
“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious” — Albert Einstein
(Today, dangling over the edge of my teacup as I write this Metta Letter, this quote hangs at the end of my teabag.)
Come Join Me Today *
Drop-in Meditation Monday
All are welcome; no prior experience is needed—just bring an open heart.
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM: Short forgiveness practice & 20-minute Metta Meditation Practice
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Conversations on the Practice of Meditation
* New Temporary Location: 778 West Frontage Road, Suite 114, Northfield, IL
Donations are gratefully accepted.
Closing here with heart beats of gratitude,
Love, Wini
Scroll below: More goodness to find, made with ♥️.
💌 If this newsletter has meant something to you, I invite you to pass it along—send it to a friend, a colleague, or someone in your life who might need a reminder about the power of tenderness and care. Subscribe for your own copy
🌸 Two Poems
O Tempo que Foge (“My Soul Has a Hat”) | Ricardo Gondim Rodrigues, is often mis-attributed to Mário de Andrade
My time is too short:
I want the essence,
my soul is in a hurry.
I don't have many sweets
in the package anymore.
I want to live next to human people,
very human,
who know how to laugh at their mistakes,
and who are not inflated by their triumphs,
and who take on their responsibilities.
Thus, human dignity is defended, and we move towards truth and honesty.
It is the essential that makes life worth living.
I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch hearts, people who have been taught by the hard blows of life to grow with gentle touches of the soul.
Yes, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.
I don't intend to waste any of the leftover sweets.
I am sure they will be delicious, much more than what I have eaten so far.
My goal is to reach the end satisfied
and at peace with my loved ones
and my conscience.
We have two lives.
And the second begins when you realize you only have one.
The Question | Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
for Jude Jordan Kalush, who asked the question
All day, I replay these words:
Is this the path of love?
I think of them as I rise, as
I wake my children, as I wash dishes,
as I drive too close behind the slow
blue Subaru, Is this the path of love?
Think of these words as I stand in line
at the grocery store,
think of them as I sit on the couch
with my daughter. Amazing how
quickly six words become compass,
the new lens through which to see myself
in the world. I notice what the question is not.
Not, “Is this right?” Not,
“Is this wrong?” It just longs to know
how the action of existence
links us to the path of love.
And is it this? Is it this? All day,
I let myself be led by the question.
All day I let myself not be too certain
of the answer. Is it this?
Is this the path of love? I ask
as I wait for the next word to come.
*this poem is published in The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection & Joy, edited by James Crews (Storey Publishing, 2022)
🍃 Perhaps this is the primal question to orbit one's life around: "Is this the path of love?"
Perhaps this is the bottom-line precept: one that holds care and reverence for all, yourself included.
Pondering this within myself, what if I held this question with devotion as a consistent daily practice—like going to the gym, eating good food, daily meditation, and prayer.
And what a treat, listening to Tara Brach read “The Question” during her guided meditation and body scan on "The Path of Love”
🌸 Three Quotes 📖 | Maya Angelou. Rainer Maria Rilke. Albert Camus.
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” ― Maya Angelou
🍃Best piece of advice she has ever given, she gave to her son, “there is a place in you that you must keep you pristine, keep clean and clear….that nobody has a right to invade (give a watch here)
“Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that…In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.” — Albert Camus
🍃Perhaps this is what we are seeing as a Nation, there is something stronger, something better, pushing right back.
This weekend No Kings demonstrations “millions of Americans and their allies turned out across the United States and around the globe to demonstrate their commitment to American democracy and their opposition to a president and an administration apparently bent on replacing that democracy with a dictatorship.” — Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, October 18, 2025
🌸 READ 📚 | The Drawer Where I Keep My Doubts
“Some people organize their lives by goals. Others, by memories. I seem to organize mine by unfinished questions—most of them too small for theology and too big for to-do lists.”
– Jeff DeGraff, “Dean of Innovation”
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Do you know about The Dewdrop—read deep, breathe easy– “This little journal is a digest of reflective and powerful writing focused on reading, writing and being.”
That is how this essay The Drawer Where I Keep My Doubts by Jeff DeGraff came my way. It begins with….
“THERE’S A DRAWER IN MY STUDY that doesn’t close all the way—jammed, as if by conscience—with old notebooks, foreign coins, expired IDs, and one letter I never sent. I keep meaning to clean it out, but I don’t. Not because it’s precious, but because it’s honest. It’s where I keep things I don’t yet know what to do with. Which is to say: it’s where I keep my doubts.” Continue
And I just fell in, sharing this on for you to give a read. Perhaps it will feed your heart, too.
I know my own cherished junk drawer, the one by my bedside. Every now and then I open it and visit, but I don't want to disturb “the dead”—“a place where memory and mystery mingle.”
There is a pair of black-handled pinking shears that were my mother's and her mother's, who are both now dead. I never use those scissors, and I actually forgot they were there, perhaps there is comfort in knowing they were held in their hands.
Tucked way, way in the back, behind papers, letters, a stack of deposit slips (does anyone write checks anymore?), and random ‘cherished’ clutter, there is a small paisley box secured closed by a green rubber band. In it is a small photo, printed in black, white, and gray shades, marked "11:47 am, 4/15/1998"—the first photo of our son at thirteen weeks old—along with the pacifiers that somehow “disappeared,” and a shell. I no longer remember why that pearlescent shell was deemed a “treasure,” but now it is one—a sacred talisman of a time I no longer can recall. A time, a me, I thought I would always remember. Perhaps that’s why I keep my ‘junk’ drawer undisturbed—I am hoping to keep time ‘kept’ forever.🍃
🌸 Closing Song 🎶 | Bring ’ Em All In by Mike Scott
“Bring the unforgiven, bring the unredeemed, bring the lost, the nameless,
let ’em all be seen-bring ’em all into my heart.”
– Mike Scott
A song for our day. A song that begs the question who is being left out of our hearts?
“I don’t belong to any religion, I wouldn’t even call myself a religious person, but I do believe that life has a purpose and I believe there is a power of love behind the whole universe, and I think that power is in me and you and everyone in the universe as well.”
🎶 Listen to Bring ’Em All In (4:10 min)
🎶 Listen on Spotify here (3:48 min )
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🌸 Dedicate Merit🙏 | In all Mystical traditions, there is a closing prayer – prayers of blessing, gratitude and protection.
May you let everything, everyone in your heart, hold all of it with compassion—this being
human is not so easy.
May awe and wonder—guide your day, your heart—where you pay attention.
May all be safe and protected from both inner and outer harm.
Have a blessed day,
Love, Wini 💖
🌸 ✨ Pass It On ✨
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The more voices of care in this community, in the world, the richer it becomes.
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✨ may we bloom more Light.
💞 may we grow more Goodness for the healing of all.
🌎 may each of us stitch more heart-tenderness into the fabric of our planet.
….Until next week. 💖 ✨
