Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer served as featured guest of WholeHeart’s recent Poetry As Portal event online. She and Holly Wilkinson conversed about poetry as “companion” or a “living presence” that can accompany us through our most challenging days, providing passageway into our own hearts and souls. Enjoy this recap of the June event!
Dru Roessle, of Danville, Vermont, brings deep insight to the WholeHeart board of directors and beyond. She works as a facilitator of groups and teams problem-solving some of society’s most intractable problems. Dru centers relational justice in the spaces she engages in, believing that we already have what we need to create just systems that are designed for care, reciprocity, and collective well-being. Enjoy this provocative, inspiring interview!
On the eve of a full moon, WholeHeart launched its newest program series, Poetry As Portal, featuring Julie Cadwallader Staub, a poet from South Burlington, Vt. More than 40 participants gathered on Zoom, March 25th, to participate in the event, part-poetry reading, part-conversation with the poet, and part-listening exercise for attendees to reflect upon their own lives.
What does it mean to live one’s life like a prayer? Heather Omand, of Huntington, Vt., is pioneering a different human way of being in the world as a Queer person, mother, partner, and caretaker of agricultural lands. Read about their insightful journey. Listen to their prose, “What Queerness Means to Me.”
What does it mean to be in deeper relationship with the land where one lives? Three friends spent last summer wandering in the mountains of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, coming to know the plants/medicines growing on the land, preparing meals with the foods harvested, and learning to navigate the wind and waves off the coast of Maine. This story encapsulates some of their heartfelt insights gained.
I’ve participated in small protests before, but nothing on the magnitude of the Women’s March on Washington. Shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of thousands of people on Jan. 21, it occurred to me: this is what courage looks like.
As I stood on the National Mall breathing in the view, women, men and children with placards paraded in from every direction. A bundled senior citizen in her wheelchair held a sign, “100-year-old for women’s rights.”
The WholeHeart Wellness Model is an expression of our wholehearted desire to see individuals and organizations find their right alignment, knowing that the exact look and feel of that alignment will differ for each person or group.
The model offers a tool to help discover, explore, deepen, reflect, and buoy your own wellness wisdom by channeling the six areas of wellness we feel most completely capture true wellness in everyday life experience. The six chambers of the nautilus image are labeled by differing yet interconnected areas of wellness: Grace, Emotional, Intellectual, Physical, Social, and Cultural.
WholeHeart, Inc. convened a Leadership Exchange (a workshop model devised by Oakland, California based Berrett-Koehler Foundation) to bring together experienced and emerging leaders to explore a new paradigm of Intergenerational wisdom. The 26 participants were diverse in age and background--their ages spanned over 50 years, came from four countries, and five Vermont counties, and seven unique professional sectors. The exchange of perspectives, experience, and hopes for the world was rich.
There were 21 children in the room ranging in age from 1 ½ to 64 ½. The youngest left early to take a nap. The oldest took a nap afterwards, her dreams filled with heroes held in many hearts.
Some in the group did not know each other, so we began by standing in a circle and holding hands. The leader, Trish Alley, showed everyone how we would put our names inside the circle. After saying “Trish,” she squeezed the left hand of the person to her right, and then that person said her name. All our names were placed in the circle by passing the squeeze around its perimeter. This was the first step in creating a safe space to explore the heroes we hold in our hearts and to maybe share them in pictures and in words.
