Early this year, I became Facebook
friends with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, a poet from Colorado’s Western Slope.
Recently, she posted on her wall a link to, fellow writer, Christie Aschwanden’s
blogpost about envy. The impetus of the blogpost, oddly, was Rosemerry’s
expressing to Christie her jealousy of her. That Rosemerry would have any
reason to be jealous of another person seems so bass-ackward wrong. It ought to
be the other way around. How does yours truly envy Rosemerry? The number of
reasons is incredible, but here are four:
1) She has a much fuller “outside
life” than I, yet still manages to write (and publish, on-line) every day.
2) She has a prestige that allows
her to make a living from her writing. (Okay, the prestige is more than
well-earned, but still…)
3) The woman is everywhere:
conferences, workshops, readings, open mics, photo shoots, bookstore events and
others. (See #2, above.) Still, I’ve never seen her look anything other than
vibrant, hale, and hearty.
4) Finally, and most harshly, the
woman is six years younger than I, yet so far ahead of me. Much more than six
years, it seems.
In my FB dealings with Rosemerry,
I’m sure I’ve teasingly called her a goddess, at least once. But the truth is she’s merely,
thoroughly, human, with all that that implies and contains. Again, the seed
crystal event that led to Christie’s blogpost was Rosemerry finally meeting
her, and saying how she’d envied her. So much so, in fact, Rosemerry’d written
a poem about her jealousy, which she recited to Christie, on the spot, when
they finally met. And, in the ironic way life often works, Christie quickly
fired back with her own poem, expressing her own envy of Rosemerry. She’d been
made uncomfortable by Rosemerry’s poem; and Rosemerry was subsequently
uncomfortable because of Christie’s.
The irony deepens, saddens further
actually, because they each were jealous of the other’s writing. Full-bore,
award-winning, nationally-recognized writers, each of them; and still, this
envy. And it was mutual.
Perhaps the reason envy is included
in the Seven Deadly Sins is because it leads one to discount, to dismiss, one's own gifts. To discount and dismiss themselves. And because it incorrectly
depicts the connection between gift and recipient. (It’s a shaky, troublesome
thing, separating, distinguishing the two.) The bumper sticker says, We’re all
alone in this together. That’s what envy manifests.
I gave reasons why I envy
Rosemerry, which I too often do, and she’s not at all the only one, nor the
only writer, I gaze at through the wrong end of the telescope with my “green”
eyes. However, I have talents and abilities which even Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, in all
her magnificence, doesn’t have. Focusing on what I lack keeps me from
furthering my own abundance.
O me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
...Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I,
and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the
struggle ever renew'd,
...The question, O me! so sad, recurring--What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here--that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
-Walt Whitman
