The gifts of the paths we didn't choose.

“As you start to walk on the way,
the way appears. ”

— Rumi

Okay, in my case today maybe the way didn’t appear as much as it became impassable. I sought out a new trail today. I’ve been trying to get to know my new area by exploring new places to walk—and I found a trail that was only about a 12-minute drive from where I lived. Normally, I find comfort in familiarity—I like walking the old paths. I am known to re-watch favorite movies and re-read favorite books. My work requires so much travel and meeting so many new (and wonderful) people that I often need a break from novelty and new-ness. So I seek the familiar and known.

But I am trying to stretch myself a little this Spring. It’s good for the brain to walk. And it’s really good for the brain to walk in a new place. Your brain creates new neurons, if merely to help you create the mental maps that might get you home from the new place. But it’s also because I just want to give myself more of a chance to observe—to be surprised—and have to be present with where I am.

The place where I chose to walk had two trails—a shorter inner trail and a longer outer trail. My plan was to walk the outer loop —it was longer and would have given me a good hour of walking. But it’s rained for most of the weekend and after traversing some wooden walkways above water, the path led into a meadow that had become a marsh. I walked a few steps out and decided it was too tricky to walk in. I decided to turn back.

I had seen a sign back at the first bend in the path to the inner loop, a trail to a quarry, so I headed to that fork in the trail and turned left. I figured I’d get a short walk. The trail wound through pine and up to ledges. Along the edges of the path were swaths of labrador tea . The air was sweet with pine and the labrador tea. it smelled just like the islands in Maine.

After about 10 minutes of walking in dense forest I emerged into the open and along an old granite quarry. A wide-open sky. A mini canyon, filled with water and reeds. Red wing blackbirds loud and flying around. It wasn’t the Grand Canyon, but it was spectacular—a wide expanse—with a view of the mountains in the distance. Blue sky and white clouds in one direction and grey sky in the other direction. Light rain fell despite the sunshine. I looked for a rainbow, but didn’t see one.

It was odd mix of small and large. You could see the other side, but it was big enough and deep enough that you didn’t want to get too close to the edge. I thought, as I looked out, that in some ways it doesn’t matter how big a canyon is if you can’t get across it.

Respecting what you can’t get across or can’t get around seemed to be the message of the day. I would have completely missed the canyon if my original plan for the outer loop hadn’t failed.

I walked back out thinking about how many things I wouldn’t have done, or wouldn’t have seen, or people I wouldn’t have met if my original plan had worked. If I wasn’t sent on some detour because of life’s equivalent of a marsh. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to imply that every one of life’s setbacks or detours always is always positive in some way or works out in the end. I don’t believe that. There are some things that happen that are simply awful.

But it is also true that some of my best learning has been because of detours. And I got some of my best teachers and mentors because of programs that ended or hospitals that closed. Or jobs I got because others fell through. And some of my best creating has been because we were understaffed and had to invent something new, or the electricity went out, so we had to do everything with flip chart and markers. When the trail disappears, you make your own way. And sometimes that leads to someplace spectacular. Or some place new.

© 2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Speaking of new trails—as I have mentioned before I have a new endeavor. I have co-founded the Center for Trauma and Leadership with my colleague Carolyn Murphy. We work with leaders at the intersection of leadership and trauma. We work primarily with people who work in jobs where trauma is routine—first responders, mental health, medicine, journalism, social work to name a few. I know many of you work in trauma related fields so you may be interested in the support we provide. We do programs for leaders and coaches—both in organizations and also open enrollment. If you’d like to connect with the work we are doing there, sign up for our newsletter here.  

What is the home you carry with you?

“I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: home. ”

— Mahmoud Darwish

“So we contain that which contains us. ”

— Wendell Berry (Sabbath poem, VI) 1997

I have returned home from nearly four weeks on the road. For the past 22 years (pandemic excepting) I’ve travelled for work and generally spend two weeks a month away, sometimes three. But this binary of home and away doesn’t really describe my experience.

The dictionary definition of home ranges from a house to a family’s place of residence, to being on familiar ground. It is the place one returns to, as in a childhood home, or if you happen to be a salmon, a particular riverbed. Home is a place you are at ease. Or safe – as in safe at home base.

Home is something that is deeply personal and intention doesn’t always create the desired results. You can work hard to create a home for yourself and never quite connect with your surroundings or neighbors. You can be welcomed into a group or a community, but not yet have the capacity to accept or receive what has been offered.

If the definition of home is where we lived more permanently, we can also say it is where we can put down roots. Home is the right environment for our roots to find the nourishment they need.

Today on my hike up a nearby mountain I observed the spring wildflowers each at home at in the ground that suited them best. Each happy at their own altitude. Low down were the lady slippers, tucked under other foliage, peeking out, pink, floating.

A little farther up were the trillium, just past their bloom in a section of oaks at the edge of the road. Trillium don’t just make their homes anywhere— they are exacting in their requirements: they like the acidic oak leaves and the dappled light.  And even with the right conditions they take a long time to grow. In the best case scenario it can take two years for a seed to germinate and 5-7 years for a plant to flower.

And farther up the trail—nestled into the cracks of the granite rocks—a more easy-going flower—a columbine in a mix of yellow and red—making the most of the least amount of soil.

Maybe I’ve always had a loose definition of home. When home isn’t happy in childhood you find home elsewhere—you look for soil for your roots wherever you can. From a young age I learned that the idea of home wasn’t limited to the house you lived in or the people you lived with there. At first, I found it in school and in books. And then I found it in the houses of friends, in the tents and troops at Girl Scout Camp and in the house and family I lived with as an exchange student. Home was the college campus where I spent four years with women who are still some of my best friends, and in the gardens which I’ve created in the houses where I’ve lived. I’ve found it in the many, many homes and families I’ve been welcomed into and in workplaces where I create and work with purpose.

Because I travel at least two weeks a month I often call home the place where I am staying. On one work trip to Cambodia, we left the hotel and work venue in Siem Reap and went away for the weekend to Battambang. I got horribly sick on the trip and endured a 7-hour boat trip back to Siem Reap. Walking into the hotel lobby I exclaimed to my colleague, “I’m so relieved to be home” to which she replied, “Really, you couldn’t be farther away.” But I meant, at that moment, that I was back in a familiar place, with my familiar bed where I could finally lay down.

Today on my way home from my hike I could see the surrounding mountains. I live in a valley that at one time was a glacial lake—it’s like living in the world’s largest bird nest—you can see the edges of it and feel nestled in a vast space. I have often pondered how you carry home with you. Or how you make a nest in your heart.

Growing up with trauma I needed to build a new version of home in my heart. And traveling for work I was tired of feeling exiled from the experience of home. I needed another way to think about home.

So I made nature my home. And now I can find home anywhere. And I can feel found anywhere. If landscape is home and trees and flowers and rivers are family, then I am always home. If I can see trees, or mountains or the horizon—I can breathe. I can relax. I know where I am. I know who I am. I know that I am connected. I know there’s always a way home.

© 2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

100 Poems: Home Christan Wiman (Editor)

I Want to Sing

I Want to Sing

‘Isn’t all grief a prayer?’

you asked.

I rolled my eyes.

The animal of my grief

is feral and hurt,

and I hide him

under a heavy blanket.

There is no poem.

All the words

I want to say

rise from my heart

and crumble apart

when I open my mouth--

fragments of silence.

I want a voice

as sharp and clear

as the cardinal perched

in the side yard.

I don’t know whether

his song is celebration

or sorrow, but I want

to learn how to

sing those things

with my whole body.

I want to be

the red thing

against a blue sky

breathing in all

of the pain

and filling the silence

with song, whether

grief or love—

singing so loud

I can be heard

above the hammers

fixing the roof

next door.

I want to be the red thing

among green leaves

steady and strong,

though the wind

tosses the branches

back and forth.

I want to sing

a melody so pure

I pierce your heart—

your burden lightened,

suddenly,

by my song.

© 2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

*A shout out to Cohort 30 of the Teleos Coach Development Program who, this week, each found their clear voice and inspired others, including me, to do the same.

Vocabularies of Healing

“Most of the best poems, the most personal, are gathered crumbs.”

— Robert Lowell

I have an artist friend who has sketchbooks upon sketchbooks filled with color studies and studies of shapes and figures. They are beautiful, organic, colorful and rich. When she talks about these studies she talks about learning and playing with vocabularies of shapes and colors. She talks about trying out new vocabularies for her work. Vocabularies of colors. Vocabularies of shapes. The term vocabularies made my head spin -- I wanted to shout, “That’s it!”

She offered language, or the possibility of language, for something I couldn’t quite put words to. There was suddenly vocabularies for languages that defied words. You could make, study, and create with the fragments that might make a whole. During difficult stretches of healing, I often found that the words I had or the words I knew seemed too small to describe my experience. Feeling words didn’t seem to match the way I felt. Sadness felt too small. Longing felt too far away. Rage felt both inadequate and out of proportion.

And maybe visual vocabularies felt congruent or familiar – as images often were better communicators of feelings and experience than words alone. Early on in my healing a feeling I often had was the feeling of coming apart: I felt like my arms and legs weren’t attached. The image I had was a small doll that I owned as a child whose arms, legs and head were connected internally with a central rubber band. When the rubber band broke—her arms, legs and head detached. The image wasn’t violent, as much as it was simply disconnected. But words—such as detached, or disconnected, or even coming apart didn’t describe how I felt. I felt like I was in pieces, like I was fragmented, like I couldn’t move as a whole, like I had to sit still.

When words don’t match your feelings or experience it can feel hopeless or pointless to communicate and this can make healing frustrating. Yet, communicating your experience and feelings--having them validated and witnessed is a crucial part of healing--and why it’s so important to expand what we think of as vocabularies of healing. Most often when we imagine talking about trauma we think of feeling words---and feeling words are important. Research shows that merely putting feelings into words can help us feel better. And tools like the Feelings Wheel can help you do that by finding more words than the simple five: mad, sad, afraid, happy and disgusted. Putting our feelings into words is important for everyone, not just trauma survivors.

But what I have found in my own healing and in working with others is that for people who have experienced trauma—feeling words, even the more descriptive feeling words, don’t feel like they fit. They feel alien. And there are many good reasons they don’t fit. One reason is a lack of experience of saying the words and having them validated or heard. In essence feeling words are a foreign language—they’ve never been paired with anything. And another big reason is that repeated trauma causes us to go numb—or to shut down emotion. So that not only don’t you have words for feelings, but you may not actually have any experience with the feelings themselves. The sensations themselves are new—and trying to describe them with words seems impossible.

So what are the vocabularies of healing? How can you find them or create them? It requires experimenting with different ways of seeing and hearing—and it requires you risking saying whatever feels true to you at the time. You can make vocabularies of healing from words, images, metaphors, poems, songs, dreams, stories, or films that ring true or resonate somewhere in your body and mind. They may come from dance, or yoga or the natural world. Sometimes an image or fragment of words shouts your experience in a way that you never could have—and sometimes the experience is quiet—like an echo—like a distant image of something that just catches your eye—but it gives you hope that you might be able to describe this feeling soon.

These vocabularies would look different for everyone: some might be actual sketchbooks, some might be boxes of found objects, some might be playlists of music or piles of books with post-its marking the pages. I have sketchbooks of watercolors, and poems typed and pasted to the pages, map fragments, and notes from books I have read. The word ‘vocabulary’ comes from the latin vocare –to name or to call. Much of the work of healing from trauma is naming—sorting the experiences you had and giving each part of the experience a name.

But the root of the word ‘vocabulary’ is actually the root of the word for voice and this is what creating a healing vocabulary does: it gives you a voice about something that rendered you voiceless. It gives you language for things that you had to be silent about—that were often unspeakable. It gives you a voice to your trauma—but also, importantly, to your healing—a way to be understood and connect. A way to go from lost to found. A way to go from hidden to seen. A way to go from healing to growth. Becoming whole--one image, poem, fragment, metaphor at a time.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Robert Lowell in Hirsch, Edward (2021). 100 poems to break your heart. NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 133