naomi rose WRITINGS

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On this page

I share with you some of my own creative writing, both published and unpublished, to give you the flavor of my ways into deep things. I love to see behind the scenes of other creative beings — in part simply out of interest, but also as a side door into honing my own artistic understanding and (hopefully) mastery.

When I’m not writing to inspire and guide my book-writing clients, I’m writing about my own interests/preoccupations, especially those I love or want to more intimately understand. The old dictum, “Write what you know” makes good sense on one level. But on another, it also offers us a voyage into deeper understanding when we write what we don’t yet know but are called to seek and find.

I have chosen the following specific pieces to share with you because there is a more vulnerable kind of writing that we may long to read to glimpse a truer reflection of what lives inside us and hasn’t found a reflection outside us. Yet we may be afraid to do this kind of writing, ourselves, and allow others to read it. Perhaps because this kind of writing can get so close to the heart’s raw yearning that the nearer we get, the more our conditioned protections warn us away from the dangers of being known — a being known that we both fear (based on the early absence of full, loving attachment) and long for in our souls.

So I am no stranger to the kinds of things that you may go through when the desire to write arises. Whatever I know in the sense of helping others write the book of their heart, I know from lived experience, as well as inspiration and external learning.

And so I want to share a bit of my own writing of this nature with you.

On this page, I share writing that:

  1. Plays an imaginal note about music (“Inventing the Wheel”);

  2. Recalls a time of untrammeled adoration (excerpt from my published book, MotherWealth: The Feminine Path to Money);

  3. Conceives the possibility of human harmony based on musical harmony (“Sensing the Presence of a Conductor,” excerpted from my work-in-progress, The Place Where Everything Is Music: Musical Harmony in Human Form).

may these writings be of service to your mind, heart, and soul.

🌺

(1)

INVENTING THE WHEEL

NOTE: Music is such a part of my soul [see “Naomi Rose Music”] that sometimes I write about it, or try to. The following is a short work of contemplative fiction that I wrote some time ago to try to get below the usual cognitive filters and evoke something more subtle. See what you think.

A colorful, symmetrical, kaleidoscopic pattern with a central blue and gray design surrounded by red, yellow, and green elements.

Merinda had never seen such a beautiful flower. At least, she thought it was a flower. It had those same creamy radiating cups she remembered, that same astonishing balancing of its full, gravid weight on top of a stalk so slender, there was no reason it should stay aloft. A perfume emanated from it like a distant memory, some tantalizing life once known and long gone. Like her own.

She turned her gaze away from what she was assuming was a flower, and sighed. Ever since the time she privately referred to as “The Great Removal,” she had been up against the same paradox. Everything looked more beautiful than she could have possibly imagined: the sky’s light was more shimmering; the “flowers” (if indeed that was their name) more intimate, leaning their wildly colored tops balanced on spindly stems towards her as if to almost whisper her very own name; the slowed-down moments of encounter with things she would once have passed by, unseeing, now quietly urgent, as if a patch of grass growing out of a concrete island separating the lanes of city traffic were itself a wonder of the world, a message from beyond, a burning bush. Everything was radiant with life, calling her to it, calling itself to her. The nameless world had opened to her and claimed her, as a lover claims a beloved who doesn’t yet know that chosen role. Only, she could not speak of it like other people. She could not depend on a memory bank of knowledge of the names of things, the racheting how-tos of their care. It was as if her mind were a library, and whole shelves had been rendered unusable; but the beauty of the volumes remained.

The amazing thing was that she had been able to get away with it so far, to pass as “normal,” simply by speaking very little and allowing a reputation as a “run silent, run deep” kind of person to take hold. She made do, in social situations, with minimal talk, nods of the head, smiles, gestures, dimpling in modesty, laughter and sighs. There was no question in anyone’s mind who had been around her after the time of The Great Removal that she was an intelligent, engaged, amicable person, whose company they enjoyed. And all agreed, she was that rare thing: a very good listener.

But what they didn’t know, among all these sociable interactions, was what it was she was actually listening to.  That silence was what generated the field of listening, in which others imagined Merinda was talking to them in just the same way they were talking to her. That where they heard, inside their heads, thoughts and ideas and opinions, she heard silence. And sometimes, underneath that, music.  

“Inventing the Wheel,” by Naomi Rose. Copyright © 2025. All rights reserved.



(2)

MotherWealth: The Feminine Path to Money

(Excerpted from the book)

NOTE: I wrote this book, a spiritual money memoir, over 30 years ago, during a challenging time, in hopes that doing so would not only help heal me but also heal my then-feelings of not belonging to life or understanding the world’s ways in terms of money (as well as deeper sources of well-being). It ultimately did have those effects, over time. But I think the real heartbeat of the book — and the healings it brought about — was a longing to be connected with the Divine Feminine. And since our first experience of this — whether in full love-embrace or distortions of love — is our mother, I began my exploration of the deeper roots of money-and-belonging with my relationship to my mother.

The passage that follows was written from the perspective of an adult seeking to understand and heal an intergenerational inheritance of disconnection from the Mother — in the first recollection, to acknowledge my father’s disconnection from real mothering; and in the second, to recall that state of childhood adoration of my mother in hopes of somehow reconnecting with that place of deep trust in a protective, loving, all-surrounding embrace.

A black and white line drawing of a woman and a young girl sitting and talking, with the woman smiling and the girl listening attentively.

When I first had a mother, when I was very young, I loved her happily and completely. I loved her like God must love the morning in spring, when the mist rises golden on the meadows, when the sun moves a gold hand through the forest. I loved her like God must love the ocean, its vastness and depths, its dancing light and gravitational pull, every wave, every bit of foam, every little treasure it tumbles toward the shore. Drinking at her breast, searching her dark-brown eyes with my blue ones, burrowing into the fragrance of her hair, my adoration for her fed my spirit as much as her milk fed my growing body. And in that state, all was good, all was well, all was beautiful. 

It was scarcely a breath of difference from her arms to the lake where she taught me to swim, holding me stiffly from underneath, and letting me kick and flail and splash. “I’ll fall!” I cried; but her hands stayed with me until my body believed that this invisible, wet water would actually hold me up. There was a lurch in my torso when the warmth of her hands went away. But even with my flailing, the water held me. 

I swam in the green lake, surrounded by greener trees, watching the reflected world appear and disappear with a single stroke of my small, swimming hand. At such times I belonged to everything, and bliss was too ornate a word for the deep happiness I knew, just being there, looking, swimming, breathing. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do. No mountains, no conquering. Why should I want to conquer what held me up and made me buoyant? Should I slice the water with a sword? Should I challenge the trees to bend to my will? No, my beautiful young mother sat on the bank, talking to a friend and smiling at me. I had been made to lie down in green pastures; I had been led to the still waters. I swam inside my own, patient joy. 

With the presence of my mother there, in nature where she and I belonged down to the smallest cell of a leaf, the largest sweep of a hill, I could receive the world. It was all there; there was nothing to do but receive it. To make my mark on it was to separate myself from it. And that I would never do; for all my delight was in expanding to meet the thousand and one emissaries of Motherlove: the breeze fragrant with cow dung, the mud squishing between my toes, the fields ripe with wild flowers, lilacs and daisies, dandelions sassy yellow and gone to seed for wishing on 

Everything and more was there. My father might go Out, into the Big World, and I might miss him; but my mother and I were In the embrace of God. What was going Out for, except to take it In, and revel at the wonder of simply being of it? 

Line drawing of a woman with long hair lying on her side, smiling, with one arm under her head. She is wearing a floral dress and patterned bottoms, with a background featuring a moon, stars, and wavy lines.

Excerpted from MotherWealth: The Feminine Path to Money, by Naomi Rose. Copyright © 1993, 2012 by Naomi Rose. All rights reserved.


(3)

Sensing the Presence of the Conductor

Note: The following is an excerpt from a work-in-progress (in the genre of contemplative, narrative nonfiction) in which I’m seeking to learn from my appreciation of, and facility with, musical harmony something real about bringing the nature of musical harmony into human relationships. The book, so far, is called The Place Where Everything Is Music: Musical Harmony in Human Form.

Partial view of a stylized yellow sun with radial rays.

What does it take to be connected with oneself in the midst of other things happening and one’s automatic responses to them, so that what may habitually perceived as “noise” can turn into music?

#    #    #

If this were an orchestra during a rehearsal, there would be those long moments—before the conductor raised her baton, and all the instrumental players ceased their conversations with each other, or ate the last bites of the dinners they had packed along, or put their phones away (important messages for their families or just scrolling to see who had won the latest tennis match), and so on—those long moments of simultaneous actions that seemed to have no center to them beyond the individual’s, no branches connected to the trunk of the same tree.

Visual noise is what it might look like, if you backed up to get the wider view of these people with their flutes set carefully nearby, their woodwind instruments (clarinets, oboes), their stringed instruments (violins, cellos, basses), their tympany—those instruments they played well enough to be invited into a musical group whose sole purpose was to play beautiful music together, who were trained in this, who knew how to come forth with a trill in just the right place in the score and then fall silent and wait until their turn came again. Visual noise, as they went about their business, social or familial or ingestible, as if each player were a world unto themselves and the rest was just distraction, or did not even exist in their awareness—were just a car’s low-decibel announcement of its presence, a thrumming in the middle range, a fading out as it passes into a neighborhood beyond our hearing.

And then . . . and then . . . the conductor steps up into the podium or its equivalent, and raises the baton. And everyone in the orchestra falls silent. The last bits of dinner are hastily packed away, the phones are shut off and replaced in their pockets, the conversations are quickly brought to a close with a wave of the hand and a smile—and everyone moves into a silent state of readiness. The instruments are now in position—the violins at the players’ shoulders, the clarinets vertical and the flutes horizontal below the players’ lips, the drumsticks in hand above the waiting drums—and the players are in a state of full concentration, of readiness, of waiting for the moment when the conductor lowers her baton and the well-practiced but still utterly in-the-moment sounds are let out of the instruments in wait. A moment ago, there was chatter and noise, and now there is—it begins: music.

What allows this shift to happen, from noise to music? What is the agreement that all these people, with all their differing instruments, each with its own requirements for preservation and playing, can bring themselves together in the right moment, with the right note and the right rhythm, to make it all one concerted thing, one channel for the music that knows where to go and what to do, and sounds like it was born to be this way?

Of course, an essential part is the individual players’ skill with their instruments—being called to that instrument in the first place, and then the years of practice and increasing skill, including the discipline and humility of continuing to practice scales along with the Bach fugues they can play by now with their eyes closed. Adept instrumentalists are key. Without them, there is no orchestra.

But then there is also the conductor, who stands in front of the orchestra with no instrument but a baton (some conductors use their arm and hand, instead). The first raising of the baton signals the players with their instruments at the ready that this is the silent moment before the music will unroll out of them, out of their years of practice and higher-level scales. This raising of the baton is a heightened moment for everyone, signaling, “Get ready. Be here. Gather yourselves together. In the next moment, when the baton comes down, you will be called upon to use your skill and your instrument in a way that fulfills their promise, and the promise of this composition to be played. You will move out of a single instrument into part of a musical weave. You will be an oboe and an orchestra, a cello and an orchestra, a piano and an orchestra. You will exist in your own right, but not in the same way as before. You will be part of a great harmony. Now: play!”

And the baton comes down, and the slow sinuous wail of the oboe begins, sliding through the air like a forgotten memory retrieved. And the cello’s rich notes provide a sensuous ballast, and the violin’s arabesques in the air wind around the spaces between that are wanting such soulful ornament.

And the conductor, with her baton that makes no sound, plays the instrument of the entire orchestra—guiding them as to volume, pacing, subtlety, who comes in when so that no one steps on another’s notes or leaves a gap in the score. Arm or baton gesticulating with purpose, the conductor ensures that the individual instruments play as one being, the parts aware of the whole while forming the whole, a mandala of sound.

Oh, if only our own lives could be more like this! Our disparate pieces brought into a wholeness. Our skills, born of love and devoted practice, brought into the service of beauty and healing. Our instruments tuned and at the ready. The ability to sense the presence of a Conductor, who will let us know when, and at what volume and pace, to play our part in the greater symphony.

What does it take to glimpse the presence of a Conductor in our lives?


Excerpted from “Sensing the Presence of a Conductor,” in The Place Where Everything Is Music: Musical Harmony in Human Form. A work-in-progress by Naomi Rose. Copyright © 2025 by Naomi Rose. All rights reserved.



Thank you for reading my writing.

I look forward to reading what you will write.

If these writings resonate with you and awaken a desire to bring forth your own book from that vulnerable, authentic place within you, I would be honored to support your creative journey. Through my Book Development work, I help writers discover and express their own unique voice with the same kind of depth and authenticity you've experienced here.


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