How to be Steadfast

A Meditation and Reflection from January, 2025

In these summer throwbacks we are revisiting past meditations and reflections, delivered every Friday at our regular time, 9 am EST.

Among the most unforgettable images to have arisen out of the 2025 LA wildfires was one I watched live on television, as the fires expanded beyond Pacific Palisades. A journalist was reporting from alongside a narrow road with flames in the distance on both sides. Behind her, a palm tree was lit up like a torch, whose light cast an orange hue over the hillside. Then out of that hue emerged three figures, which I came to see was a woman and two horses. She jogged with slack reins in both of her hands. She was leading a white horse on the left and a brown horse on the right. Together they were trotting away from the blaze behind them, the horses calm and patient at her pace.

I still think of that woman, driving them forward, her grasp on both reins. It is an image so striking for its reality and urgency. And it is also an image very deeply metaphorical, for we are all guiding two horses through the fire of the world. On the one side, we want and cling; on the other, we resist and avoid. It gives me comfort to think of these powers in us—hard wired into our organisms because they are a part of life's requirements of nourishment and protection—as horses within our care. The woman guided her horses through the fire, the way our practice can teach us to be skillful and calm in hard situations.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer began her practice of writing a poem a day in 2006. When she lost her son, Finn, some years ago, she tells Tara Brach that she halted the process for a time but then picked it up again in the wake of that immense pain, summoning up grief and gratitude in later collections like All the Honey (2023) and her new book, The Unfolding (2024).

Wordlessly

By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

With such gentleness,
he stood behind me
and held me as I wept,
held me the way a pond holds a lotus,
the way a scarf holds perfume,
the way a man who has lost his child
holds the mother of the child,
his hands so light on my hands
as our fingers laced into a tender weave,
held me the way the pericardium holds the heart,
the way the eye holds a tear
then lets it slip away.

In “Wordlessly,” Rosemerry’s examples reflect systems of support that neither cling to nor avoid their roles. Nothing resists just being with, or bearing up, the other. The scarf does not resist the perfume, nor does it grab hold of it. The pericardium does not resist the heart or squeeze too tight. The mate sits silently, weaving with, not grasping, his beloved's hand. Even wordlessness seems the groundwork, the organ of support, for the poem's words. In this way we can feel the presence of God, sitting with us, and we can sit with friends half a world away whose suffering we know about and call forth in our meditations and prayer. As we look this semester at the ways love begins not as an action but a quality of being, a flavor of presence, the special quality expressed here is one of steadfastness. We learn how to stay with ourselves and with others without holding on too tight or too quickly letting go.

Oars for the Boat: How can I remain steadfast today?

As you practice the meditation on steadfastness, think back to Rosemerry’s example: eye, pond, pericardium. They don’t do anything but merely provide the space for the other. They are an energetic well, holding the other in an almost unnoticeable embrace. And when it’s time for the tear to slip away, so it goes. And when it's time for the lotus to die, so it goes. To begin, you might think of a discomfort you’re experiencing in your body or in relationship to someone else. Place your hand on that point of discomfort, physically locating where you feel it in your body. Now translate the experience: is it helplessness? Fear of the future as our political system undergoes changes? Fear of changes in the natural world, encroaching upon things you always believed to be true?

Next, bring that well of steadfastness to what you are feeling. Rather than reproaching yourself or nature or the other or the systems in which you live, find a way under and around the circumference of it, scooping hold of it, moving slowly through the following blessing:

May I be steadfast in my interactions and relationships.

May I hold without grasping, may I let go without running away.

May I be loyal to my practice, no matter what I am feeling.

May I sit and stay awake with the struggling world.

Steadfastness is, really despite its name, a very slow and deliberate staying where you are. Anyone in our group who has sat with the dying knows that at the end, there is nothing left to do. There is only steadfastness. There is sitting with, being beside. We don’t have to wait until we’re with the dying—or with our own dying bodies—to practice this strength. We can vow to be steadfast for the planet. Once, when I was staying in a monastery in a very removed Japanese village, on top of a mountain, as far from home as I had ever been, I was awakened before dawn by the sound of the chanting monks. It came like a hum from underneath the quantum foam. They were not chanting to improve themselves, or to change anything, really, or to show how spiritual they were. I fully understood in that moment that they were chanting to actually hold up the world. They were chanting—I feel this even now—to support reality, welling underneath and around the ultimate, the way a pond holds a lotus, the way the pericardium holds the heart.