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

A sketch toward love

Félix Henri Bracquemond, The Swallows, Art Institute of Chicago, Public Domain

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
— Rumi

“There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” Rumi said. And walking around the Princeton University Art Museum I would have to say that he got that right. Each artist looked at the world his way (mostly his way, sometimes her way) –caught light differently, used color differently, and showed us what he saw or felt or what he wanted us to see or feel. Something as common and ubiquitous as a landscape was so varied in the hands of the many. Not a single artist, even when they were trying to match the others, truly matched anyone else. One of the exhibits was of the Italian Master Drawings and even when the artists were copying from a standard book of drawings or from plaster casts—they had their own take on it—the horse looked a little more to the left and the mane curled over, the torso of the figure was more muscular, or there was more of an emphasis on the child.

Each artist kissed his or her ground in a different way, and opened up something else into our view. They cause us to kneel and kiss our own ground in a different way. And in my mind, it is no different with healing from trauma or grief. Each person will catch the light in their own way, will lean into their story in their own way, and will find hope in their own way. Some with broad fast brushstrokes and some with tiny fine lines. There is no way to look at a museum full of art and imagine that there is one approach to healing that would fit all people. There are too many ways to see the world, so many ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Some of the most beautiful drawings are the sketches. Fragments of drawings or studies that were clearly going to be a small piece of a much larger painting. The artist practicing how to draw a cow, or just the hoof. The turn of the head, or the eyes cast downward. The artist trying to figure out how to catch the experience and make it feel real. Sketches are such important reminders that beauty and art and accomplishment are made up of persistence and attention and devotion. Yes, the finished painting is beautiful. It is what we know as art. But the sketches are beautiful too. They too are art. Each attempt to get the curve of the hand right brings its own beauty, each slightly different. Each attempt has the artist reaching further toward their imagined piece of work. And so it is with your healing. Each attempt at talking, at doing something new, at trying a different way of being—is a sketch toward the art you are creating. A sketch toward love. A sketch toward healing. Each attempt is beautiful in its own right. “Let the beauty we love be what we do. There a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

 © 2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD