Sara Stutz, song, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, lyric quotation
Lyrics:
1. Grow inner garden,
grow inner garden,
grow inner garden, grow.
Cha cha cha!
2. I want to plant an inner garden
One I visit without a step,
One that asks nothing of me,
Except that I find myself there.
3. Help me to find myself,
to be myself
and nobody else
Teaching Tracks
All Voices:
Melody:
High (at 1:54)
Low (at 1:06 and 1:34)
Sara writes: Inner Garden sprouted quickly after reading these two sentences from the poem “Right Here” ( see below) by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: “I want to plant an inner garden, one I visit without a step. One that asks nothing of me, except that I find myself there.” So juicy….can you imagine your own inner garden that you can visit without a step? And, can you imagine a place that you can visit without a step where you are able to find yourself? Yes, please!
Right Here – Rosmerry Wahtola Trommer
These autumn afternoons
I find myself in the garden
standing amongst the flowers.
Not deadheading. Not weeding.
Not harvesting. Not scanning
for aphids. Just standing there
a few moments, hands hanging
empty at my sides. It lasts only
a minute or two before I return
to work with a clarity, an attunement,
that felt impossible before.
I want to plant an inner garden.
One I visit without a step.
One that asks nothing of me
except that I find myself there.
I reached out to Rosemerry to ask permission to use a portion of her poem in Inner Garden and Rosemerry kindly responded:
“Hi Sara!
I LOVE this jazzy, fabulous acapella romp in the inner garden! I am so sad my acapella women’s choir is no longer singing … we would have had a lot of fun with this! We sang together for 26 years! And then, well, three people moved and one is no longer physically here … and that was half of us. But I can imagine what a great time it would be to do this with other women!
Yes, of course, please, share it, share the poem, make it public, that’s what the poems are for. What an honor to have you play with it in such a collaborative gloriousness!
Wishing you joy,
Rosemerry”
Cross pollination! What a glorious thing.
More information about Rosemerry:
(Excerpted from Rosemerry’s website): Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives in Southwest Colorado with her husband and daughter. She served as the third Colorado Western Slope Poet Laureate (2015-2017), was a finalist for Colorado Poet Laureate (2019), and is currently poet laureate of Evermore. Her poetry has appeared in O Magazine, on A Prairie Home Companion and PBS News Hour, in Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry,” on stage at Carnegie Hall, in back alleys and on river rocks. Her poetry collections include Hush (winner of the Halcyon Prize for poetry of human ecology), Naked for Tea (finalist in the Able Muse Book Award), Even Now, The Less I Hold, The Miracle Already Happening: Everyday life with Rumi, Intimate Landscape and Holding Three Things at Once (Colorado Book Award finalist). Her newest collections are All the Honey and The Unfolding.
For over 25 years, Rosemerry performed with Telluride’s eight-woman a cappella group, Heartbeat, and still sings through her days as if living in a musical. Since 2006, she’s maintained a poem-a-day practice. Since 2011, she’s posted those poems on this site and also sends them out daily to her mailing list. You can sign up for the daily emails here. Her MA is in English Language and Linguistics. Favorite one-word mantra: Adjust. Visit her at www.wordwoman.com . Watch her TEDx talk The Art of Changing Metaphors: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer TEDx Paonia
You can sign up to receive a poem a day from Rosemerry here: https://www.wordwoman.com/a-daily-dose-of-poetry/
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