A Pilgrimage of Sorts

Two weeks ago, I made a pilgrimage of sorts. Back to a village I went to as a high school exchange student in Germany with my host parents.  It was an artist village called Worpswede not too far from Bremen. And it is famous for artists like Paula Modersohn-Becker, Fritz Mackensen, and the poet Rilke. Back in 1982, we walked around the village, looked at the art in the museum and had coffee and cake at the “crazy café.” On that trip I took a photo of a road leading to a meadow and woods.

Flash forward to my senior year in college.  I have an art class called Methods and Materials and our final project is a self-portrait –but we can’t put our likeness in the image—we must find a place that represents who we are on the inside—and sketch that place until ‘you are the place are interchangeable.’

I pulled out the photo of the road from Worpswede, and I began to draw over and over. I identified with the road, as someone who already traveled abroad. As someone who was always seeking, wanting to learn more. As someone who left their home in search of a new one. As someone who was about to graduate college and was headed into a journey of the unknown.

I chose to draw the portrait in charcoal in black and white. It was, in some ways, the outline of a portrait. The bones or skeleton of a portrait.  The color and the background would fill in later. With experience. With struggle. With love.  The portrait, framed, hangs in my house, as it has, for most of my adult life.

So, two weeks ago my host cousin graciously took me on an adventure back to Worpswede. She’d never been there, and I wanted to see the art and the village as an adult. I’d begun my trip in Copenhagen and Amsterdam with a friend, seeing beautiful art and grand museums, and it felt like the perfect circle to finish my trip in an artist village. But there was something else. I wanted to find my road again. I wanted to visit the road like an old friend. I wanted to connect with that part of me that I saw as my essential self when I was 22.

But finding my “self”, my road proved much more difficult than I had anticipated. Much had changed since 1982. There were new museums, restaurants, cafes, and stores.  My cousin and I set out on a self-guided walking tour that took us each historical site on the map—going to the landmarks and museums. And on every road and path, and around every turn I looked for ‘my road.’ I looked forward and behind me. I squinted. I erased houses in my mind. I was trying to find the picture. I was trying to find myself. But every path and road was surrounded by trees and forest. There were no meadows without forests. There were no open roads. The landscape was completely different.

For most of the day I kept thinking I just hadn’t found the right view. and then I did the math. It had been 44 years since I was in that village. Forty-four years since I took that picture. And now I realized that a 44-year-old tree is a very big tree. None of these ‘old’ forests I were there when I was a high school student. Nature, itself, had drawn all over my portrait.

Growth happens in such small increments. I know, logically, that I am not exactly the same as I was when I was 17 when I saw that road for the first time. And I am not the same as I was when I was 22 and drew the road as my portrait. But because I was painting my essence, my core, as I knew it then—because I had drawn the road so much that we were interchangeable -- I somehow believed that the road had remained unchanged. And I guess, I even believed that about myself.

What does it even mean to try to take in the ways you’ve changed or grown? It’s easy to see a tree that wasn’t there. It’s harder to imagine what’s grown inside yourself. Are the new trees in my landscape people who have come into my life and made it richer? Taught me, loved me, and helped me be the person I am? Are the trees in my landscape things that I haven’t paid attention to? Beliefs, myths, habits that are crowding out what needs to grow next?

Is my landscape richer now? Yes. Do I miss a simpler landscape? Sometimes.

If I had to do that assignment again—I wonder what landscape I would I choose. Would I choose a road again? Maybe. I still love landscapes. But the perspective is different now. The road is no longer the main figure: it’s just a part of a bigger landscape. So much has filled in around it. Sprung up beside it. There’s more horizon. More sky.

A pilgrimage is an act of journeying to an important place. A holy place. Sometimes defined as the ‘journey of life.’ The road ahead of you. The road inside of you.  Even if it’s hard to recognize again.

© 2026 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 

 

 

Finding the green shoots

Today I came back from my walk/jog  and realized that the snow was gone from the side of the house that faces south. Everywhere else was still covered in deep snow—and on my jogging route mists hung above the snow and below the trees. It was a warm day that made your brain think of spring even as your eyes told you it was still winter.

But when I saw the stretch of green grass I suddenly remembered that there were crocus and daffodils bulbs I’d planted in the fall—right before the final freeze—and I ran over and began scouring the area looking for any signs of spring—any green shoot.

I can remember back to November. I had a basket full of fall bulbs that I had procrastinated planting because of work and travel. It seemed I never had the time. And then watching the winter approach, I remember thinking that I needed to plant the bulbs for ‘future me.’ The day I planted them I was catapulted out the door with my shovel and the basket of bulbs by imagining it being the end of winter, and walking out my door, with no spring flowers to look forward to.

I am truly grateful for ‘November me.’ Seeing the green shoots of daffodils and crocus today made such a difference. A reminder that growth can lie fallow. That you can’t always see what is happening when all is dark and cold. That maybe we already have all we need to head towards the light.

I know I haven’t been writing much for the outside world lately. There’s such a cacophony of noise and outrage. I don’t know what to say to all of the hatred and violence. I don’t know what to say to all the children who have been hurt. I don’t know any way to stop it or slow it down. Words seem so small. And there’s so much constant chaos. It feels like there’s a thousand Double-Dutch jump ropes spinning at once: I watch them go around and around, and I don’t know how to jump in. What possible difference could it make?

But then two barely ½ inch yellow-green shoots show up in my yard and I remember that hope and bravery are contagious. I see the small shoots who have waited patiently underground. Have waited patiently under piles of snow. Have sunk their roots in, in a new place, and trusted themselves to show up.

And I remember the Girl Scouts behind the table in their winter jackets selling cookies, having shoveled out a place to put their table. Or the people I work with who are doing AIDS research, or staffing a newsroom during a war, or working their shift in the NICU or the pediatric emergency department—who almost all also leave their shifts to go home to their own children at the end of the day—and somehow manage their own broken hearts enough to help with homework, read bedtime stories and make lunches the next day. A faith not in the whole future, but in the small acts of beginning and ending a day.

I remember all of them and my heart hurts—but it is also full. Life is both so courageous and fragile. It breaks my heart to hold that trauma is so asymmetrical—with some people living in bunkers right now and others in comfort. Some children in dance recitals and some dying in rubble. It’s true that trauma has always been asymmetrical—whether at the individual or collective level. But it’s also true that some of us can sometimes have choice about what we plant. And we can also choose to look for the green shoots of growth, or love or faith wherever we can find it—and we can be grateful for its presence. And we can nurture it along.

© 2026 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Letting Love In

If I had a wish for me and for you as we head into the new year, it would be to invite love into your home this year to live with you. If you are anything like me, love might stand in your doorway a bit apprehensive and shy. Maybe even jaded. Love doesn’t have a lot of hope about their relationship with me. It isn’t so sure that this year will be any different. Love stands there wondering—Will she listen to me this year? Will she let me be the voice that guides her? Or will meanness and judgment be the only one she listens to again.

I stand in the doorway staring at love, knowing in my bones that if meanness and judgment were actually catalysts for change—the world would be a much different place, and I, myself, would have achieved all the goals I’ve ever had for myself. But meanness and judgement don’t work as catalysts for change. In fact, they may be the strongest guarantee of maintaining the status quo. Or staying stuck. And certainly, staying in an old story. Especially if that story is a story of trauma.

I stand in the doorway, looking at love, and we are in a standoff. Love is quiet. Sad. Hurt. Not because I don’t believe in love. Not because I haven’t taken love into my work and relationships over the years. Truly, I bring love everywhere I can. Except right here. Sitting next to me on the couch. And love stands on my doorstep in the winter wind wondering, “why does she take me everywhere to everyone else but not invite me to live with her?”

And I stand in my doorway wondering, “What will happen if I let love in?”

When you grow up with meanness and judgement, they feel familiar, and for reasons that still aren’t clear to me, it becomes easy to mistake familiar for love. It becomes so easy and so successful that you can actually believe meanness and judgment ARE love. That to abandon them means abandoning yourself. All the while, love sits alone on my porch waiting. Waiting to be invited in.

It’s a crazy kind of brainwashing that makes us believe that meanness is what we need to succeed. And it’s a crazy leap of faith that it takes to let the mean voice yammer away while you turn your head toward love. While you let it quietly listen to your fears.  Or while you ask it to repeat itself again so you can hear it more clearly. While you let it tell you in a timid and tentative voice to make yourself tea. Or to sit and read a book. Or go for a long walk.

I am so very tired of the same old fights with myself. And maybe it’s not so much in hope, but in the exhaustion of despair that I open the door to let love in. Sometimes you have to be tired of yourself. Sometimes you have to be so tired of the old thing, that you let the new thing in.

And so I stand on my back porch, snowflakes visible in the light, and gesture to love, ‘come in out of the cold.’  It tiptoes in and sits across from me in a chair. I feel like I owe it an apology, for all the years of neglect, but love doesn’t seem to care. Love is wondering:

“Will she trust me enough to lean her weight on me this year?”

“Will she tolerate the slowness and in-betweenness that comes from change fueled by love?”

“Will she actually learn to embrace the things that are just fine the way they are?”

And I have my own wonderings. Like suddenly adopting a rescue dog, I realize I don’t know much about love. What does it need for nourishment? Does it have a bedtime? What does my love need to feel at home?

Love curls up next to me on the couch. I sit quietly letting it rest. And I guess we will just figure it out slowly from here. I hope you can too.

© 2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Finding Power in Despair

GLS 1997

GLS 1997

This morning I had to get out for a walk in the woods. It was a grey morning, but the snow was bright. I wanted the fresh air to wash the despair out of my brain and out of my heart. The despair from another terrible mass shooting. The despair from a war with so much violence and so much sorrow. The despair that it happened again. And that it has been happening for a long time. Beirut, Boston, London, Madrid, Mumbai. Newtown, Virginia Tech, Charleston, Chattanooga, Roseburg, Parkland, Ulvade, Pulse Nightclub, Lewiston, and now Brown, and Sydney.

Despair is defined as the complete loss or absence of hope and it is one of the human emotions that can feel the most painful and dark because despair knocks the light right out of you. It leaves you without a compass, without the energy to get up, without a reason to. Despair begins to tell you that there is no point to anything, that you might as well lay there, not get up. Nothing matters.

As someone who is wired as an optimist I find despair one of the most intolerable emotions. I am not just a glass is half-full person, I usually imagine an additional glass entirely. I have wielded hope as a massive source of energy and protection against despair. But eventually it doesn’t work: you find yourself face to face with the endless fight against violence or injustice—against something so very wrong—and whether that injustice or wrong happened just to you, or someone you love, to a group you belong to or all of humanity—you see it for what it is and you can’t imagine how you are going to live in a world and know, really take in, that injustice. That wrong. That level of sorrow for knowing that you can’t change it. The helplessness of seeing just how big it is and not having any idea of how it can be changed. You believe it is impossible. You are brought to your knees.

And paradoxically that is often the turning point of despair. At my most despairing I have gone in to talk to my therapist and chosen to sit on the floor, instead of the chair. I wanted to sit on the floor because I wanted to be where I was—at the very bottom—the place ‘you can’t fall below.’  And in admitting I was at the lowest place possible, I found the ground. I found something that felt real and solid. The healing part of despair is that it can actually be incredibly grounding: you know where you are, you see the world as it is, and you can get some clarity about what is wrong—what is really wrong at the root of it all.

In despair we find the most pessimistic and hardened parts of ourselves. And in despair we find the most pessimistic and hardened parts of our communities. In finding our darker sides we can be, ironically, more whole.

John Lederach who has worked with communities post-conflict on peacebuilding talks about the fact that the pessimism of the people who have lived through the worst cycles of violence may be one the biggest sources of true change. He calls their pessimism a gift, not an obstacle. Lederach calls pessimism grounded realism: “grounded realism constantly explores and questions what constitutes genuine change. For people who have lived for long periods in settings of violence, change poses this challenge: How do we create something that does not yet exist in a context where our legacy and lived history are alive and live before us?”

Despair brings us in contact with our most authentic selves and it compels us to demand that authenticity from the relationships around us. When we are feeling despair we cannot in any way tolerate fakeness, clichés or bullshit. When we are despairing we need authentic, we need real. We need it from ourselves and we need it from others. Hope is the fuel that helps us keep moving toward healing, toward the better imagined state. But hope often keeps us from being able to see and take in the trauma that has occurred- and it keeps us from seeing how we protect ourselves from knowing this—hope can keep us from becoming whole. You can’t do surgery in rose-colored glasses.

Despair is a turning point. In a state of despair you see the bigness of it all—and because of that you are freed from a world of simplistic duality—of there being an easy answer, of it being this-or-that. Despair helps you hold the complexity, which is the only real hope of healing. So we need to sit with our despair, sit on the ground if necessary, and we need to be able to sit with other’s despair as well. We need to trust that the ground that has been burned by despair is preparing for the seeds of change, the seeds of growth. And we must be the faithful gardeners of this growth by holding our pessimism and distrust and risking our hope again. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2025/2015