Kissing the Joy as it Flies

“He who binds himself to a joy, does the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

An excerpt from the poem:

“Heaven in a Wild Flower”

by William Blake (1757-1827)


You’ve probably noticed themes of death and life in my tomes. I used this week of creative residency as a template for my last week on earth. I’ve channeled my elder self and asked him to write the wisdom he learned as he returned to the northern islands for the very last time. I have slept very little this week. I felt his tiredness and his losses. I mostly felt his soul still yearning to experience all of life. Last night we walked in the waxing moonlight, with the crimson crown of Orion guiding us on the milky shoreline. I sang our song and shined my small flashlight toward the heart of Orion chasing the moon across the sky. A hundred lifetimes from now that small light will still be on its way to Orion’s heart. But the song has already been heard.

Three years ago today she died, my soul-friend-beloved. Our whole world lost her just as she was reaching her stride as a young elder. Today is a day similar to that day. We’re on the verge of our first artic storm of the season. This could be the day of change for me, or for you. The potential of constant change makes everything more vibrant and beautiful. Like the persistent fragrance of the wild basil below the window, the call of the heron over the bay, the tear on my partner’s waking eyes or our cold house smudged with the curling smoke of a newborn fire.

I want to say this:
People, don’t mistake the platitudes, achievements or even comfort for real life. These are only thought forms. Life thrives between the thought and movement and in the simple things. Love is attention and noticing. Like the eye contact with your daughter at the breakfast table, the spontaneous song on the freeway, the humming bird shivering in the blood red madrone tree or the silence of the phone punctuated with the scratch scratch of the pen on paper. What makes these moments poignant is the obvious fleeting nature of it all.

So many worldly achievements establish an air of permanence and mastery. Rubbish! Something is lacking if any part of life is not seen for what it is. We are God’s moving, living dream. The Beloved Mystery is creating us moment by moment.

And yet, my tiny quivering light still travels toward the arc of Orion’s bow.

She was no dream. Yet after three years, our life experiences together feel like a dream. I remember her. She ignited the poet and dreamer in me. She restarted the heart of Avalon in me. She taught me to dance without worrying what others think. I hope I brought some gifts of joy to her too.

Everyone has gifts to be shared with you. Somehow it’s the fleeting and fallen ones that stick with you. Through happiness or sadness, let the gifts of God be witnessed and cherished as they fly.

I am grateful for this last day to walk the shoreline. A cold snap is falling from the north. My elder self will embark tomorrow on the ferry to his islands. I let him go, until we meet each other again in the future.

Thanks for traveling with me.

Rick

Heaven or Purgatory

Everyone should get a chance like this. Everyone should have a week to experience their unrequited life, with dreams come true. Here it is for me.

I’ve been softened by the realization that fantasies are not very good company. I have my ritual here, just like I’d dreamed. I live in a cottage on the bluff. The beloved ocean is within view. The good people are in the village nearby. I have the comfort of silent rituals, like the tea pot rocking back and forth with steam. Right on cue. The writing table is waiting like a needy lover, just as it was left last night. Everything is in order. I even have a new book of poetry opened for another divination of my day. It’s my dream life.

Now that I am here it feels as if my family life, the work on the farm, my job and my community on the hill were the life of another person. Like I’m very old and the memories are as dreams. Like death is near (as it is for every poet). Everyone should get their chance at living their “What ifs”. I find that this experience is a way of manifesting a dream. Then I find that heaven is basically like earth. Maybe not so painful here But it is not so succulent either.

I don’t have the heart to complain. But my heaven is not complete. I need a family and friends that can see me. I feel like I’m part of the ancient myth of the fairy. When I’m not recognized and seen I begin to fade into the other world.

My heaven is a sort of creative purgatory. It’s a beauty not directly shared. It’s a stack of tattered story books left on the piano by people who no longer live here. Purgatory is safe. It’s a ghostly comfort to live in that in-between place where I am a witness to every memory and act of nature but not connected with anyone physically.

Here’s another cue: The sun pushes through my window, between the lace of cloud banks. It is my time to walk on the beach. It is my daily time to gather the shiny stones the waves have ground to pieces. To walk and walk and walk. At the end of the peninsula I’ll turn around, like I did yesterday. Then I’ll return to the cottage, to my paper and my ink. If I’m lucky, I'll discover a message from earth in my inbox. The flashing screen saying that some living being is thinking of me. Like a prayer, someone is wishing that my stay here is beautiful and productive. Someone is missing me. But they knew it was my time to go.

I am grateful that I was given the chance to circle back into a life I’d wanted for so long. It’s a temporary landing. But it is enough to know how much I appreciate my current life and love back in the ordinary world. How much I miss Heather. I appreciate the life here too. I have a pocket full of wave polished agate and granite to bring home. And perhaps a story or a memory or a simple dream.

What is your fantasy life like? What is your dream of the perfect home, or town or even mate? What real joy would they bring that you cannot claim right now?

For most of my life I felt like a ghost. I was not quite part of the real world. Committing to someone at home that loves me and sees me was the best decision for LIFE I ever made. If that’s the only realization I find on the beach here, then it is enough.

Rick

Human Doing, Human Being

I have the privilege of being a creative resident sponsored by Centrum in Port Townsend, WA. I have week to write and dream and go wild creating. This is my fourth day here. I was driving myself nuts trying to produce something “worthy” through the first few days. The editor and the creator usually have to be separated in times like these. And the internal critic, that surly little man, needs to go on vacation. What about sending him to Maui, or even Australia? I’m going to be content here on the salty skirt of the northern Islands.

Walking on Fort Worden beach I found a curious army washed up in the foam. Hundreds of infant kelp, high and dry, clinging to small stones. I’m not sure if the stones were meant to be anchors or just tools to slow the drift until the young kelp get stronger and bigger. Either way, the young were lost to the air and howling sands.

This got me to thinking about the rules I’ve been anchored to. I’m connected, yet I continue to drift in my creative process. Here are a few tidbits from my critical editor. Sure, all of them make perfect sense. Yet when they become religious dogma, they squelch the joy and fire out of the creation. process. Ultimately the end result looks land locked and meager. Maybe you’ll see yourself in these contradictions:

Rick’s Rule-O-Rama:

Invoke the muse every time you write.
Just be yourself.
Release your pain.
Be joyful.
Free write.
Be disciplined.

Light the candle.
Be free, damnit.
Rise early.
Sit by the window.
Don’t move.
Walk more.
Use fewer words.
Put flesh on the story.
Don’t be such a critic.
Be deep.
Tell a story worth hearing.
Let it come from the heart.
Autobiography sucks.
Seek to be heard and published.
Write for your own joy.
Make it therapeutic.
Just be real.
Be bigger than yourself.
Collect stories.
Use ordinary words.
Challenge the reader.
Don’t be too ethereal.
Share the dirt on everything.
Allude.
Show. Never tell.
Have a plan.
Never plan.
etc. etc.

Well, you can see the mess one could get into if all the rules rose up in a storm. I’m not sure whether to be grounded or dreamy, to be connected to the ocean bottom, or a drifter. I think I’m like the little kelp. I have the illusion of being grounded and the companionship of a form. But the sea will still take me where it will.

At the beginning of the week I had a vision that was honed into a plan. After all, one needs a juicy plan to get into a residency like this, right? That’s all in the past. I’m learning something about my unique voice. I don’t usually tell workaday stories very well. Yet, I can sing ruthless beauty from my heart!

What does all this mean? Put boundaries around the “shoulds”. So, I made a structure for my days of solitude: Create, unfettered in the day. Edit last season’s writing at night. And if I’m lucky have a rockin dream, where something beyond the rules or structure makes a visitation.

Today a storm rushes from the San Juans down Admiralty Inlet. The sea is wild, but not frantic… like me. I just go with the weather, faithfully being true to my particular, quirky self.

Rick


Here’s the view out my window:

THANK YOU CENTRUM!!

A Place for Beauty

The Field (c) R. Sievers 2008

I was startled by the tear in my raw throat. Getting sick yesterday was not on my agenda. After a night of tossing the covers around the bed I woke up calm. I was then startled by the peace in this day. Instead of working hard to improve my little world here I’ve sat. I’ve been wondering how many people actually have the privilege to sit down with a cheap blue pen to record the musings of the sky. Who is that lucky? And there are so many other things to be concerned about, right?

After all, the sky has fallen. There’s depression on Wall Street. Our presidential mirror has burned up the world with light from the past. The cars sliding to the mall are still fueled with the blood of innocents from some sandy environ. Who am I to chide the sure and supple ones with my childlike poems?

All I can say is that all of my life experiences have led me to this very chair, scooting across a pile of wadded poems, oil pastels and graham cracker crumbs. The cell phone is blinking its urgent red light through the scrim of discarded papers. I won’t answer it just yet. I’m dreamy today. Sick with the beauty as much as from the razors in my throat. I just want to listen for the voice of God in the trees. If I’m lucky, to hear Her voice in the rustling of inky wings.

I wonder what sparks this addiction to beauty? Is it the fog or how the sun stirs his holy liquid hands through the morning? Is it the golden field framed with the symphony notes of knotty pine? Perhaps it is the rusty maple standing sentinel with the brick of the old chimney. Maybe it’s the silver barn shimmering signals to the creek dancing around its feet. I also recall the coyotes marching through the forest right to the edge of my fevered dreams last night.

Now I just watch through the steamy windows. The meaning of everything is clear, without words. But I’ll try to translate the wink of the midnight coyote with words anyway.

I think about the ones I love. How hard they are working right now. I remember them like I remember what God has created. The kids at school swinging a tetherball and playing a piccolo in band practice. My mother flying her wood laden pickup truck up highway 75 through the lava plains of Idaho. My silent father sitting on the sand pondering his next money making adventure, while he finishes studying the shape of the waves. My brother asleep so many years beneath the forest. My step father asleep in front of the TV after lunch. My beloved climbing the metal clank of stairs above the churning river. And here I am at my window.

There are so many ways of swallowing up time. And there are so many ways to sing of the succulence of this life. I want to know that I am fine in this world remembering all of you, my beloved friends and family. I want to know that I am free enough to see secrets in the spiral of grasses. Secure enough to dream beneath Orion’s watchful bow. I hear the headlines and I also remember all that is correct in the world. There has to be a place for beauty, even in the sad and struggling times we’ve called into this existence. I think that beauty and remembrance are as necessary as air and water. I think attention is as important as food. Sometimes I even think attention is the essence of love.

I encourage you to loaf for just a moment with me. Be free enough to pause. Remember those that you love and then let them go. See something beautiful you have never recognized before. Maybe the world needs this sort of care as much as any. And a loving pause seems to be such a fine way to begin loving and solid action.
Rick

The Farmer and the Chicken

Image: Coming Home With Stories (c) R. Sievers 2005

Dawn entered the day about an hour ago. I’ve been watching my neighbor across Risto Road attempting to herd a black and white striped chicken into a corner of a pen. The woman’s long braid swings rhythmically as she chases the hen. She has a long wispy stick in one hand, prodding the roundabout runner. In the other a hand she holds an amazingly wide butcher knife. Shining. When she has the foul seemingly cornered, the hen skirts around in frenzy. This happens over and over again. It’s an amazing dance to observe. Apparently all the other farm creatures think so too. They lean through their barbed wires watching with quizzical expressions. Everyone knows the outcome, whether quick or strenuous. Even the chicken knows what is coming.

I sit in my window again recording whatever skirts through my fingers. I move slow and steady across the page. I don’t wonder if chasing after words is worth the effort. I only want to catch my prey. I have a pen in my write hand. In the other hand I have a sharp honed blade, leaning out from last nights dreams.

I’m going to write again and again. It is my ritual. It is my dawn. It is my time to chase the feeling around the page until I capture the quarry. It’s a primal rite, just like the one I see across the road. All the penned up dreams and stories watch from the dark corners of the cold morning cabin. The young revelations are lurking under the old lumpy bed. A song roosts on the fir branch outside the frosted window. They are all curious about the chasing dance occurring at my desk. They know the outcome if I will just keep at it. They know that someday they will be next. And I’ll take them with gratitude in my herky jerky grace.

Someday my life will be quarry for The Beloved, who stands outside of time. All my stories are building me cell by patient cell, until I become more than myself. And I’ll be reborn on the sharp edge of rough love.

I look again into the barnyard down the hill. The curious gawkers have gone back to their cud. The geese and ducks have ceased their squawking. The dogs are fast asleep. A light burns now in the farmer’s kitchen window. There is fresh smoke rising from her woodstove. I watch, like the Spirits watch all of us. We are all interested in the raw integrity of how life chases after life in order to live.

I am grateful to be a player in this scene. My pen continues scratching the dust of these pages. With one eye I search for precious kernels. With the other I watch for the bright glint of the sun slicing through the mist.

What are you chasing after today?
Is it life?
Is it worthy of your effort?
What stories will you bring home when the silver light falls?

Rick

Simple Magic

Photo: Stones in our field brought from the Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sometimes you don’t see the magic of life events and decisions until months or years after the fact. This weekend marks the six month anniversary of living on our farm called Elysia. I’ve grown a lifetime in these two seasons. I’ve written a lot to you about longing and beauty. I’ve written about my island home. The islands are blatantly magical. Who would not be bulldozed by the awe of a hundred mountains floating in a crystal sea? Now I write to you about carrying the magic in simpler country.

I feel the steady growth of subtle magic in my life on this land. This place is more than a place. It’s a school of the human soul. It’s a grist mill of the heart. It’s sometimes a burning field, now frosted in white (like me). If I can adapt and thrive in this country and familial context, then I know I can do more than I ever dreamt. There have been many new challenges: a neighborhood that is often filled with ignorance and poverty, the roar of family life, being baffled between city and sea, being alone most of the time yet on the hem of a braided community. If I can expand and explore being a provider of safety and solidity, if I can evolve and not leave behind the creative good aspects of the puere’ (being a child in an adult body), if I can release the codependent ways of control, then I can be more than my original programming. I am becoming a man here on this land. I am waking up from the “other world” and seeing the joy in the grit of this world.

Last night I revisited the little home I moved from in Uptown, Vancouver. I drove by slowly, craning my neck. The old street was draped as usual in autumn leaves. I wheeled by in the stealth of night’s covering. I saw a ragged yard, a dead tree that I’d loved from a sapling. There was the picket gate off its upper hinge, cockeyed. The shades glowed with incandescence. But there were no shadows dancing there. No flicker of candles burning. My old house appeared sad and small. I wonder if it appeared like this when I lived there? That little place was a weigh station for my move further north. I never made it to my islands. But life apparently is not over yet.

Sometimes miracles occur within very common handiwork. For years I dreamt of Avalon where the Spirits and I danced with God, a primeval forest with stones singing in the rub of the tide. I’ve spent most of my life dreaming.

(Photo: Cabin Window Rain)

I came Here by surprise. Through the heavy dreams of March rain I drove into the weedy driveway. I Stepped out of my car and heard the creek whispering just like it is today. Six white buildings stared at me blankly from a three acre canvas of grass. I said to myself without thinking: “This place could work for all of us.” Like we were already a family. That moment was the entry point to a thousand small decisions that helped me grow past my self perceived limitations.

My life script no longer cries “Someday I’ll be home.” I hear the river in me whispering that I am the home I’ve always sought.

I’d lived my entire adult life, until this past year, bent on living safely like a monk. In many ways my profound spiritual experiences tainted me. They showed me a world “just over there” that shined with only love, grace and belonging. It was not like the rain of this world. In my twelve years of shamanic training we practiced dying (sometimes literally) in order to reach the compassionate ones. Now, I practice living.

I say to the loving spirits: “I am wrapped in God now. Yes, I know you are waiting. I know our island home hovers expectantly. Wait for me. Be patient. Let me gather more stories, more happy tunes with sad words, more colors from the twilight forest. Wait. I’ll come to you when I have learned to be human.”

I think I’ll practice much more the miracle of ordinary living. I think I’ll practice the gifts of deep breathing, laughing and crying before I go to the other world. There is so much to be grateful for today.

Rick

Better Than a Dream

Photo: Astoria on the Columbia River Bar

My early winter task has been to go through my bags of photographs. Each year of my pre-digital life had been stuffed into its own grocery bag. My goal has been to pull thirty images from each year and scan them. So far I’ve waded through 1985 through 1991. Thousands of pictures have flown into a heap for the fire. And some remain. One photo from 1990 struck me. It shows me laughing with my entire family. I was beside “K” my first lover and adult companion. I was struck with how far life has come since then. I am struck with gratitude for what is now, here on this farm, with my family. Here’s what I wrote in my journal as I looked at this photograph:

I’ll never forget her words. It was July of 1990. I was unconsciously bent on rejecting her. It had been only months since I’d backed out of our wedding. Now I was unsatisfied with the infernal hovering. I wanted to fly. I’d arrived at freedom’s door. I’d been a professional therapist for nearly two years. The money flowed into my life from multiple sources. I was only twenty nine years young. Condo on the hill. Red turbo car. Degreed. I was itching to live some other way… as usual.

We were due to go on a family reunion trip to Idaho. Little did I know then, that would be the last family gathering. By Labor Day my mom would bravely leave my childhood home, alone for the first time in twenty five years. And I was about to break into the shiny and jagged shards of a new adult life.

Our years as a couple were full of travel, wine, concerts and all that the burning city and verdant hills could offer. I claimed her as my very first lover. I had just risen from graduate school. Only four years before I had been homeless. Now that I was home I was on the cusp of rejecting her.

The trip was set to begin in a week. I was poised to go alone. Of course I told her everything on my mind; one of my better habits (?). I remember how she looked up at me from our tangled sheets. I remember her exact words:

“You better not dump me now. Wait. This vacation is all we’ve got left. You better take me along.”

We went on that vacation. We laughed. Loved. For ten days we forgot the leaving and denying of our years together. My mom brought our whole family together on Redfish Lake one last time. We were all happy. How transient and yet lasting, this life.

I say this to you, dear reader: Be careful. Some day you will come across a photograph that will remind you of the selves you thought you left behind. Hundreds of colors will hit you. You’ll find that events and people are still alive in you. And they may be almost too much of an effort or pain to examine. I encourage you to look anyway.

It’s not that I miss her. It’s not nostalgia. It’s not that I made a faulty decision to leave. What comes is a great flood of joy. It’s so big it hurts. Also, there is regret. I was so unaware how rich life really was… really IS… at the time.

Photo: Heather on Samhain Night
And then the memories of the others come to me. The woman I lived and grew up with on the river. The one I lost by being too careful. The one who’s anger I embraced too closely. And today one woman I deeply love…my first adult partner… and last. She works on the tugs and barges on the Columbia River. On her travels she passes the island beach where I first loved a woman. She sends her wake upon the shore where my once young cats grow old without me. She plies the waters like the innocent one of islands.

What slaps against my hermit’s heart is how important all the people have been in my life. I also see how the dark lord of depression, the family sicknesses and the drug of the spirits have all sucked me away from connecting with others. Really, I’m grateful. I see how I really, truly lived my full life. Yet in the aftermath of so many efforts and hard work I see a continual leaving behind. All in search of an ideal. My ideal loves have been in the form of psychology, shamanism, holistic healing, Art, an island paradise, a house or two and now this cabin in the field. These are simply not enough for me anymore. In the memories I see the skin, the eyes. I feel the laughter and arguments. I soak in the silences and drunken nights and love making and dreamy plans together. I always ended up leaving for the sake of an Avalon. So many chances of love rejected.

I admit I am more grounded now. Leavings and rejection and splitting up always extract a deep toll. All the wine and song and trips and money spent. All the long discussions and sweet kisses and family gatherings. What were they for?

Wisdom!

The past is not gone. I have taken it all along with me. All my friends and relations. All the experiences. It’s like I’ve died. Now I’m recollecting and reviewing all of God’s gifts. How do I transform the ones I neglected or used or slept through?

Now I’m working hard not to sleep through my rich and varied life. Here I am in my little cabin, pinning my self to a swaying field, sharing a table with a family. I have a lover who adores me and a broad future. I have no idea how to proceed now that I am present, now that my soul has folded into my growing wisdom.

Be warned, friend. Going through old photos can be dangerous to your complacency. Yes, throw away most of the images if you will. But ponder a few. Hold them lightly and with reverence. These memories are you, right now. Remind yourself of what you’ve moved through with each new photo you release.

I’m grateful today. My life is simpler, less arrogant. I still have the privilege of being on earth, unlike a small but growing number of my friends and lovers. I have the pleasure of this cabin and this desk. I have the plans for community taking shape from my sweat in the sawdust. And I have a beloved coming home to me this evening. While I plot nothing but to simply be here with her. She comes back to our home on the edge of a country mountain. The smell of the river in her hair. The love of our shared and tangled life in her eyes. I am grateful at last. I have new simpler wisdom that comes down to this:

Life is better when it’s shared

Sometimes what you have now is good enough. And sometimes it is better than what you could have ever dreamt.

Rick

The Day of the Dead

I haven’t written to you in nearly three weeks. I’ve been downcast and distracted. I’d wondered where my muse went. Last night She came back in the percussive moan of the rain on my cabin roof. Now I sit still in mid morning. I sit in the aftermath of winter’s first storm. Now I watch the mist rising from the forest to meet her lover’s kiss in the face of the clouds descending. The hum of the heater sings. There is a staccato putter of flame in the lantern. I hear the talons of the Cooper’s Hawk lighting on my gable. She comes again on her morning hunt for the prey flitting below in the fairy grove of snow berry.

I have not written because I’ve been denying the tough love of Truth. I’ve been afraid of the predator I’ve felt watching me through the window pane milky with dewfall. And this morning I also hear my old man self calling back to me from the future. He’s imploring me to not go back to sleep.

Honestly…I’ve been awash in a tsunami of challenges at home. I’ve given too much of myself in the name of altruism. But in reality I’ve sacrificed my creativity to gain a sense of control. I’ve spent my writing energies on responsibilities over children and money that were never mine to grasp.

Three years ago one of the finest hearts I ever loved stopped beating. For the past three years I have cried. I keep saying “I’m so sorry.” For three years I’ve lived in the illusion that if I was only kind enough, giving enough, if I only offered enough of my time, money and attention… If I was only ‘enough’… I could make up for how I let her down. How I let myself down.


Now she sits on the other side of my older self. An 88 year old man and a woman he loved nearly fifty years in the past. A woman he loved in secret. I feel my older self dying and yet shining on the horizon of life’s hard won wisdom. There is no shame in that twilight time. I hear her voice from the past and mine from the future chanting together: “Live your particular life. Tell the truth.” I hear also from the forest mist: “For the love of this life, be satisfied with being a man, not a saint, not one fallen from grace, but an ordinary man.”

I feel a glimmering this morning that I can be solid in this world with help from the Great Mystery. I have my crying window and a hawk as my friend. I have the woodland and the standing stones. I have my family and beloved. I have my life which was never meant to be a sacrifice. I came as an explorer of the many different ways to breathe, feel and create.

I am grateful for my Anam Cara (Celtic for “soul friend”) who lived and died on her island of white deer. My island home floats just off her northern shore. I feel she has blessed my new love and family with the power of forgiveness and even joy (which is not the same as happiness). If I made one mistake with her it was that I was not messy enough. I was trying to work my way out of being human. I was so bound in what was right and wrong. I was so “in control” that I forgot about love and connection.

Here I am writing to you from the thick fog of something very messy and yet inspired with devoted love. I’ll listen to the voices of the old, of the dead and of the forest. They are so wise. I’ll go on with my life now.

Rick


(The first photo is from the cabin window this morning. The following two photos are from Gravel Point Cemetery, which is just down the road from the farm.)

Squandering Our Assets

Yes, the country has a huge financial crisis. When I think about it, I have a credit crisis of my own. I’ve felt deep personal turmoil this week. Perhaps it’s the national vibes rubbing off on me. Yet I know it’s also something more specific to me. I’m funding current distractions with the energy that could build a better reality. I’m spent, and tired. I feel death hovering near me. Yet, I don’t want my epitaph to read “I’ll get to it someday soon.”

I’m currently in Idaho for a week helping my mom. I’ve felt relief from my depression because I could be of real service within the realm of my capabilities. This has given me pause to see the realities I’m avoiding. Mostly through the wee hours of early morning insomnia, obsessing about an injustice or unkindness back home. Worrying. I’ve been thinking through the night, wasting my energy. Diverting my resources from building the deep infrastructure of my craft and life. Thinking. Planning. Spinning in my head. What’s the use of this? It’s like the man mortgaging his family’s future because he puts hot cars and plasma televisions on the credit card he’ll pay for someday… someday real soon.

I spent part of the eleven hour journey to Idaho listening to the car radio. I’m strangely interested in listening to the preachers on country stations. On the narrow way through the Blue Mountains I heard a local pastor talk about pain and regret. He said there are two types of pain. One is the pain of self discipline. The other is the pain of regret. He got me to thinking that I would rather have the satisfaction of consistent focused action (discipline) than the soul bleeding regret of diverting my life energy.

As an average human being I spend much of my time in my head. In fact I’m a particular expert in the area of thinking and preparing. One example is preparing to write and to create the art that is swirling in a sunrise cloud just above my chest. But first I’ll attend to things that are not even relevant to what makes my heart sing. Like avoidance. Laying there on the couch and flipping through channels. Ordering a book about painting on the web. Then never reading it when it comes. Intruding into the choices of my closest friend and trying to make her life into something that I have not even realized. By the time I get the paint brushes out and the paper taped to the board I’m too tired. I’ve spent my daily assets.

Sometimes I even find myself paying someone else’s bills while missing my own. This is true literally and energetically. Or sometimes my debt is in the form of creating distracting energy by pushing away necessary silences in a conversation. If I regret my actions later I know that I’ve given away something precious. In either case I have not focused on relationship skills that fuel my art and gifts. This is ironic to write about. Because here I am caring for my mom intensely as she recovers from life changing surgery. Yet I am called to do this care giving. And I do not regret a single moment here. It’s the time I spend in the dark that I regret. It's the time that I spend worrying about sadness back home, or my tendency to isolate or the challenges that come from avoiding any form of boundary setting with the kids. At the end of the day my poetry, my gift, feels dry and broken… and smothered in fears. Then the fears sneak in and steal my sleep.

I’ve been considering the words of the radio preacher. I might add one more thing to his dyad of challenges. Regret subtracts life force. Discipline can add life force but only if it is amended with risk. Am I open enough to channel my discipline into action? Or am I going to spin the fine words and colors into something terrible in the night? Does my river flow any where?

There is a potential pain in risking exposure through action in the world (EG this blog). But there is a grater potential for release, healing and reward. I’m inherently a very careful person. I’m into planning and preparing so much that I often do not have the energy for the fruition. Sure, as soon as my cabin is finished I’ll write that book. As soon as I have complete silence and safety from family crises I’ll finish that painting of the Raven. As soon as my depression lifts I’ll return my phone calls. Discipline, then risk? Or regret? What/who helps me to heal and bring healing out into the world? Which will it be today, the killing pain of regret or the joyful pain of having tried?

I took a chance last month and went to New Mexico with my beloved. There we met a wonderful teacher, Debora, who began our sojourn with a challenge from the Gospel of Thomas. It goes like this:

“If you bring forth what is within you,
what is within you will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Sobering and inspiring words. I wonder what I’ll do tonight if I cannot sleep because of thoughts and fears. Will I keep the promises I made to my heart when I committed to being an artist? Will I write the pain, and the joy? Will I move it out of my body? Or will it stew? Am I paying for something that I really do not need now, out of fear or reactivity? Or am I funding my well honed discipline with the risk of moving it out into the world? When I hear Thomas’s quote, it almost sounds like a sin not to share the gifts given to us! Or am I sounding like the country preacher now? I wonder.

Rick

Terrible Beauty

Dawn

It was one of those terrible nights, lying in bed awake for hours. Then prostrate on the couch, drifting into semi dream states, half awake, half in fearful fantasies. The last time I remember the clock it was 3:47. The next time I saw the clock it was only 5:10. Then another hour of staring out the window commenced. A vigil for the sun.

Between the old fears and how I felt unsafe within the dark moans of the house.
Between the howling doubts in the shadows flitting, I watched, and was watched.

Last night a powerful Autumnal storm brought the memory of salt and sand on the wind. The cloud banks were swelling. They were rushing chaos into the space of light bouncing from the city of Portland, thirty miles south. I was horizontal as the skyline; my eyes wide as the horizon.

We live on a promontory of mountain, like a peninsula jutting into a wavy plain, buffeted by the tidal sky. On each side of us a valley sucks up the incoming storms and then banks the rain that struggles over the peaks. Our window looks out on the skyline of tall fir and cedar trees. At night the trees appear to be dark with memories. They seem to bend right into our window.

Last night I was seeing things again in the half dream way. A pair of slanting eyes enveloped in a haze of violet blue mist stared right into me. They were neither benevolent nor righteous. They were peering with a poker face of interest. Voices from a thousand twists of branch and needle rose out of the storm and fell through the panes of glass. I heard the words: “I am the forest. I once was. I will be.”

As I lay there I recalled the stories from the pioneers that settled here one hundred and fifty years ago. It is told that the trees were once so tightly packed and so big that the light of day only penetrated their humble clearings between 11AM and 1 PM. Now the forest watches from expanded clearings that are not so humble. Mostly it is the fire of the bright sun that holds sway nowadays.

I wonder about a mystery I fell into last night. The trees seem to get much bigger at night. Their 120 foot height turns into 300. And their power is more ancient and wise. That was my solace last night. My worries were really small compared to the forest. Yet the forest and I shared a storm. We bent and churned. In the dark I could hear a snap of a trunk and the breaking of limbs. I should have walked out into the rain and tumult last night. I could have felt two wide worlds washing over me at once. But the half dreams and fears hit me with night bruises. And I was a trembling beast in the shadows. Small.



I want to be the woodland and the cloud banks. I want to be bigger in the dark. The sun has returned and it is morning. The forest has moved back to its place and normal size. Here I am, eyelids cracking with the dawn, scrutinizing my own life and the wreckage of a passing storm. There are no answers to my fears; no fixes. All that remains is a brooding and a clearing. I’ll let the sun and the axe have their way with me, for now.

Rick

Is The Sky Falling Yet?

"Field of Sky" (c) Rick Sievers 9-08


I’m on my way home from a 25 hour work day, sitting in the downtown Vancouver Starbucks. I am halfway home, pausing on my way north in my old favorite haunt. As usual I eavesdrop on conversations to pick up strings for weaving on the page. The urban are talking about the same thing as the country folk. Our nation seems to be on the precipice of another crisis. There is financial collapse on Main Street. And the good ole boys are raking in 700 billion dollars on Wall Street. People seem to be afraid or indignant. They want to know how to keep their homes from being inundated while the sky is falling.

This place is halfway between the p/c trends of Portland and hunkering fire tending in the mountains. The sky is tumbling down all around us. At least that’s what I’m hearing on either side of this steaming caffeinated state.

Soon I’ll be driving home to a new amour of Harvest Brown shingles. I hired a hard working, hungry man to re-roof my cabin and out buildings. He’ll also help staunch the trickles that periodically creep through the roof of our main house. (It’s amusing how the rain seems to find it’s way right in to the cabinet that houses the water color paints.) Right now he’s up on our roof sweating out his life, pounding nails and making my life seemingly more secure.

When he gave me his bid last week he looked at me earnestly and said: “You know, the world is coming down within three months. Dude, you better prepare.” He explains how he has five years of food stored, how the great tribulation is coming, how only fifteen million people will be left on earth by the year 2012. Right now he’s up on my gables, flashing my chimney and binding metal into the eaves. He’s still making a living at the end of the world, keeping the storms out.

Now, he may be correct in his prophecies. He also may be making his fears self-fulfilling. There is a terror laden glee in his eyes as he describes the end of history. I consider what he says. Frankly, I understand his view. And I also muse how we always live near the end of the world. One never knows when life will turn us into something else. Yet, I am still putting a thirty year roof on. I am also adding a skylight on an accessory house that we’re dreaming up from the good green earth.

At this moment I am not afraid. And I’m not overjoyed either. The cabin and house and family need protecting. The sky is wide, wild and wet. We are small. beautiful and vulnerable.

Like yesterday, I’ll come home to find a radio blaring the jargon of "being right" from the top of our chimney. I’ll hear words that dehumanize the other side. The words are like the drug of religiosity. One can hear versions of this same diatribe from the south/left and from the north/right. And here I am in the middle, sipping my coffee, grateful for the cyan and silver in the Autumnal air. I’m grateful for how the muscular clouds dance wildly around the loving sun. I’m grateful to start my day with good news instead of bad.

The rain has been diverted from the heart of our home. A faithful servant of Armageddon nails up the composition with staples and careful cuts. I am rich today.

"Falling Sky" (c) Rick Sievers 3-07
The sun peeks into my empty coffee cup. I know it is time to go home. Perhaps the scary dreams will drift across the airwaves later. But right now I will step gratefully into the fresh morning of falling leaves, heavy with last nights rains.

Season’s change. Yet something… someone… sacred remains true within us. At the moment impermanence and challenge are a part of this world. I’m glad I paused here, halfway, on the way to the future. My cabin is waiting and full of Love’s voices. My home, locked and cluttered, will happily welcome me when I finally arrive. I am always home. I am free in this middle place, sheltered within the elements and rooted in the earth.


Rick

Moles

Photo: When a developer made a mole hill out of my forest in Anacortes, 2007.

When we moved to the farm we made vow to respect all the life forms that live here. We promised to never kill unnecessarily. I had ideals to make this a harmonious place, where everyone’s voice is kind and the landscape is verdant and free. We’ve reached some of this potential. But we’ve fallen short in reality too. This leads me to an important question: “Why do I dream of killing all the moles?”

We’ve just arrived back home from a long sojourn in Northern New Mexico. We planned a day to bask in the beauty, freedom and the creativity of the last nine days. When we got home there were only the mole hills. Everywhere. The one civilized stretch of lawn was mounded with dozens and dozens of Vesuvius like buttes, some a foot tall.

In this part of the northwest chasing the mole is a serious pursuit, one that takes up a whole aisle of the farm and feed store. There are bombs, poisons traps, vibrators and killing tongs. I’ve tried them all. I even had the guilty pleasure of hooking up the old Ford’s tail pipe to conduit and pumping their underground runways with gas. Nothing worked except the old guilt of not being so “PC”. Their bountiful destruction continued unabated. The trees had been dug up. The sacred fairy circle upended. Our sidewalk continually covered with slicks of mud and stones.

When we arrived home I found my $30.00 solar powered sonic vibrator stake had been buried by the creatures. Also, the steel tongued trap that was supposed to impale them was unsprung and surrounded by fine dirt combings. My beautiful yard appeared like the “great dig”, with excavations stretching around the corners of the house. All my ideals and peace had been excavated too. I’d done every thing I could do to control the uncontrollable. Then I was defeated by a humble, resilient pink snout rodent that has never even seen the sun.

I’ll admit that I had a tantrum. Only 24 hours earlier I had been writing the prayer of my life beneath desert spires. Now I was stomping on my brilliantly designed stake labeled: “Sonic Deluxe: Guaranteed to Drive the Moles Crazy.” I also yanked out the steel trap, which proceeded to snap on my hands. I threw it as far as I could into the hedge.

I was struck with this primal anger at just another circumstance that I could not control. We all face these. Despite all our expensive, obsessive, well planned efforts life has its own plans. Not all of these are comfortable or accommodating.

What is it about going so deep and then coming back to messes on the surface? I’d spent over a week in “The Land of Enchantment” with seven of the finest people you’d ever meet. One would think that gratitude would take top billing. But anger was there instead. It was only a mole, right?

We came home to find the same circumstances we left. Heather and I were bonded, deep and even closer. But all the other issues haunting us were still eating away at parts of our home. They were reaching their claws up from a dark place, upending the order we were trying to make. They are only moles, right?

As I was writing within the wide adobe horizon I made a vow. I promised to save my own shining life and to be compassionately honest. Ever since I moved here I’d believed the myth that I was the foundation beam that supported a whole household. Strong, stout and stoic. A real man. But I’ve been excavating a real life in the desert sands. And it’s not so pretty and contained like I thought. And many of the ways I act do not create happiness or freedom. The trap I’ve made to control my own life has sprung on my own hands.

I just want to write and paint and live in a home of kind words and soulful work. I want to be happy and sweat my prayers and live in this field like it was heaven. But the world has other plans. Like many others, I am in-between wanting to tighten control and just letting it all be as it is. Is there a middle way? I wonder how to do that? Do I just give in and let the moles destroy what I work on with so much effort? Do I go with “reality”, till up the lawn and let it go wild with flowers and mounds? Do I revisit the farm implement store and try another round of warfare? How does one fiercely protect their precious turf without becoming the product and producer of more violence in our world?

They are only moles, right?
Then why am I so upset by them?

Hard work will be challenged and disregarded. And that hurts. I don’t have the answers except to remember the prayers and the million ways to be grateful. Remember the ocean of islands and the desert blooming with unexpected rain. Remember my sweetheart, who traveled with me. Remember that there is a solid self both above and below the reach of all the excavators.

I am home now. The cabin roof leaked a little while we were gone. But the writing desk is full, flooded with new words and songs. This imperfect life is making us more than control or self made myths could ever manufacture.

Rick

Bark-O-Rama at 4 AM

There it is again,
piercing the night,
rattling through our open windows,
waking us from forgetful sleep.

Folks in the city have an illusion that the country life is quiet. Nonsense. On a sound level I have often found more quietude in the city. There is a primal and mechanical barrage out here. There are the toads, the owls, the coyote, the winding road of racing cars, gunshots, turkeys, geese, cows, goats, ravens. There is large equipment just over the hill making dust clouds. And there is the ubiquitous lawn tractor always moaning from one direction or another. I like the country. I let these pass with appreciation.

But there is one sound that has driven me into fits. Barking dogs. At all hours. At all decibel levels. It hardly seems to matter if the people who steward said canines are present for their opera or not. The dogs bark and bark and bark and bark. The barking comes in waves, just like the silences. It’s as if the dogs are riding the energies and anxieties of the people around them.

I realize how the barking is really no louder than the other noises around here. Why does it lather me up into a sleepless anger? A part of the answer is that barking elicits a primal reaction to possible danger. But the real issue is how I make up stories and judgments. For example: “The owners don’t care. They are unconscious barbarians. Their anger is transferred to their frenzied dogs. They’re neglecting their animals.”

Maybe true maybe not.

I’m awake at 4 AM. I hear two dogs across the road barking obsessively. By 4:30 they have retired their blow horns and it is silent. But my inner landscape is not silent. I am holding onto the very noise that disturbs me. All the stories and memories make my head spin and drown.

Lately I’ve been curious about my reaction more than any outside activity. My head is a bark-o-drome, a circus of tumult. Sometimes I am so full of thoughts. They divert me from sleeping, feeling or living fully.

When I come from work, driving up the gravel driveway, I always pray. I pray that my inner dog will be soothed as much as the outer. Praying helps. Then I go deeper and wonder. What is the point of being riled up over something that is only sound… something I have no real control over? Perhaps it’s the stories and judgments that torture me. Perhaps.

This week I’ve tried to claim something that I’m grateful for every time a dog froths up my inner seas. Being grateful always helps. And if I list ten things that I’m grateful for the peace actually lasts longer than a moment. Yet the inner and outer barking returns. I seem to habitually gravitate to a vigilant state.


Lately I’ve been considering walking across our wavy field and actually contacting these barkers. Maybe I’ll even meet the folks who seem to be deaf to their pets annoying cries. The reality could punctuate and test my stories. I think it’s important to contact irritating and frightening circumstances with open eyes and ears. When I really touch a scary part of my inner or outer world I am always rewarded with a broader sense of self esteem. Like telling a counselor or a friend the whole story. Or taking the initiative and introducing myself to my partner’s ex-spouse. Putting a face to the fear brings a strange relief.

I subscribe to something which I have a hard time following: “I’d rather have real problems than imaginary problems.” I’d also rather have real joys instead of imaginary. Frankly right now I’d rather turn over and go back to sleep. Oh, sweet silence. But I get up, again. I look across the dew of the early morning. The field is calling me. I hear a sound on the other side coming from the dark house in the forest. Perhaps I’ll stay awake this time. Perhaps I’ll walk. Perhaps I’ll contact one of my stories in this world rather than in the dream world.

Rick

Remembering My Father

Building my cabin two decades after my father and I last built a home together.

I wanted to tell the story of how my father taught me to use the level on the skinny side of a two by four. How he told me to watch the nail as I swung, not the hammer. How the screw rolls easier with a slide of soap and slow bursts of twisting. What about the way a wall sounds “not ripe” where a stud lurks behind the drywall? I look about my cabin walls and floor proud of the tongue and groove in perfect pitch and warp. I wanted a happy history. I wanted the father son story to be the foundation of my handy work.

My dad was a contractor. I worshipped him like a god made from clay and wood. The myth and facts about my dad swim side by side. The truth dives deep somewhere between the two. Here are some facts about my training through our fifteen years of building: When a foundation needed to be dug, I dug. When concrete blocks needed to be moved, I moved. When sawdust and nails needed sweeping, I swept. My memory of my father is one of him standing above me as I bent into the sandy wall of a trench. The same wall kept caving in as I dug, as he laughed. Once as a half joke he bought a shovel for me and monogrammed it with my name on the metal face. He threw the shovel down into the pit and chuckled: “Now Toby (My “slave” name) I want to see you wear your name right off that g-d blade.” Within half a year I wore the shovel’s edge away by two inches with the digging. And my name was scraped off and smoothed away by so much dirt.

The facts of the heart remain. He knew little of the beauty of building and manifesting soulful design. He knew sweat and equity. I learned the angles and the drives by watching the other workmen. I learned from books and even TV shows on building. Mostly I learned by myself. I learned with years of honing skills and shovel loads of mis-cuts, bent heads and broken glass. I learned by doing, by surpassing my father in everything but money wrung out of blind nailed walls.

He could be a smiling brute who got his kicks out of standing above me in so many poses. He could also be affectionate and unafraid of hard work. When I look at my cabin, knotted wood gracing the walls and bolting across the ceiling, when I run my fingers over glazing and the strong backs of thick beams, when I sit back and contemplate the deep beauty I’ve made from a shallow bank account, I remind myself. “I made this. With the grace of the Beloved I did this!”

For decades I told the misty eyed story of my father’s gnarled hands gently guiding mine on the hammer and saw handle. But his hands were used only for himself. It’s the gift of my hands that made my world. A myth never makes anything by itself. A myth builds hope and happiness and perhaps some innate knowledge. Yet it’s the years of mistakes, broken projects and lucky hits that made this cabin new again. All the history was tangled in a story that was a comfort. But now my own dream fashions a living structure, itself fashioned together with visions from the earth. All of it cut smart and measured twice with prayers, and even gratitude for those years behind the shovel. This cabin is my hands, worn off in the smoothing.

I have lived richly on a few deep inner journeys and his trinkets of kindness. That is the power of myth. It is a tree that grows from seeds of small gifts. The tree becomes the beam, which holds the home. The tree becomes something more. My father did many small kindnesses in his ways. The myth of my father being so wise and rich was once fuel to teach myself how to live, how to build my own beauty, how to do more than survive. My father was neither good nor bad. Just a mere human after all. I care for the man who will never speak to me again on earth. I love the man. . Whether it’s a myth or not, I loved his hands, bloody and callused with work. I loved his arm on my shoulder as we leave our frames and foundations at twilight. I loved how happy we were from a good day of sweat, looking forward to some rest and laughter in our fine home made of wood, driven together with nails.

Now I especially love my adult truths remembered in my cabin. I celebrate the occasional silence between the visions and the nightmares. This life is my myth now. My truth. It is something I build one board at a time, something I finish and smooth with the kindness of my own hands.

Rick

There's A Bear By The Creek

There’s a bear by the edge of the woodland. on the other side of the creek!

We’ve never seen her. But her signs are everywhere. Her woofing growl rises out through the brambles as we approach. She grumbles out a warning. It’s a very bear like sound. I consider her world. She’s protecting a cub or a den or herself. Why would I expect her to do anything else but growl? She is herself, fierce.

I drift into a few more insights when I gaze out over her green forest ribbon. I consider my life and how I’d once experienced fierceness as behavior or words that were violent toward me. Strong boundaries don’t have to come from the shadow lands of cruelty or even anger. It only has to be a growl rumbling from the heart most of the time. A bear that is well is not violent. She is not cruel in the sense of coming from a place of right and wrong. She just does what she does for a reason that would make sense to any mother.

It’s also clear that she must live a life on the edge. Why elese would she choose to live so close to us? Perhaps the berry sources in the mountains are skimpy? I spent much of the night worrying about money and broken toilets and challenges with the kids. I don’t know if she worries or not. But I do know that we share the fact that life presents us with needs and possibilities. Sometimes it takes fierce, hard work to manifest and protect our particular lives. She eats our plums at night and scrounges for moles (thank you bear for that service). We keep the cat in at night. Our whole household is out during the day making our way back to the kitchen table. I wonder what she sees on the other side of our window?

The other lesson is that we need bears. We don’t really know she is real. The signs left in the spirals of our field could actually be the ever present coyote. Who knows? We need the idea that bear would live on the edge of our world, five hundred feet from our kitchen sink. The myth of the bear feeds us as much as the groceries we scrounge for daily. Heather and I both gain so much by considering her life. We have even been thinking that she is a wild counterpart to us. Perhaps she is even a spirit protector. But probably she is just a regular bear. And that is totally sufficient… even magical.

Rick

Plastic Brain in the Crumbling Cabin

"Enlightenment consists of not merely in the seeing of luminous shapes and visions, [meditating and studying] but in making the darkness visible. The latter is more difficult, and therefore unpopular."
Carl Jung

In our couple’s group last night we spoke about the “Plastic Brain”. We discussed how the mind can become more flexible with its choices and patterns of decisions. The neurons rewire themselves through being open to repeated novel experience, work and visioning. Life can deal blows and joys with circumstance. We have choices of becoming malleable or rigid. Perhaps wisdom resides somewhere in the middle.

Talk about “plastic brain”, Mine is down right molten.

How did it come to be so soft?

Maybe it was God beating on me with expert deadly hands,
the hands that sing as they swing the hammer above
anvil and flames. My metallic heart in between.
A tune: “Return again. Return to the land of your soul.”
drifting in the ink.
Whack. Whack. Whack.
Pieces falling off into the inferno.
The work in the Beloved’s hands bends and burns
in protest. Becoming round, from angular.

~

At this window. In this pile of sawdust and broken beams, fused circuits I’m not sure if I am dead or alive. Wondering what the difference really is.

Whatever the dream is, live it
until the next dream. Sleeping or
waking, it’s all life.

This rustling field like the sea song of earth.
The tides of islands… what difference, truly?
The hammer falls either way.
Turning solid into plastic.
Then in the resting becoming solid again.
A few impurities knocked away.
Becoming more than a beautiful lump of ore.
Becoming a tool for the soul’s work.
Perhaps even something pleasurable for the sad world.
Maybe becoming shiny as a mirror.

~

I woke from a cool night of a farm dog’s song drifting into our windows.

The cold eye of the moon.
The moaning waves of grass.
The memories of sea lions calling
from the flotsam of islands.

What I know now is
the summer morning is streaming
into the broken window pane,
warming my hand and my wavy hair
slowly, steadily.

Soon the heat of the day will breathe
deep.
Soon the in-between be reached
by the rough mercy
of a hard edge.
Soon the fire of the sun will
this dreamy grass gazing into something solid.

~

Remodeling: Today I want to frame the new window and wall for the shelf of shiny treasures in this cabin. Perhaps I’ll dig the hole for the willow saplings before I drive to work for the night. Perhaps on the way I’ll hear my future self praying for me, telling me about the soft heart of what is to come, singing with God in a field that was once ocean… and will be ocean again.

Rick

In the Field

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.”
Rumi

I have come a long way since writing to you last year. An amazing surprise happened when I last wrote to you. . I saw a sweet and thrumming light surrounding a woman standing on the airport curb. I took her into my car and into my arms. I welcomed her into my home. Then I took her family into my gaze and loved them too. Now eight months later we all live on the remnants of a Finnish farmstead in the patchwork hills above Battle Ground Washington. The islands of the Northern Sound sent me here to find my way on earth and in the arms of love.

This is the continuing story of
how life amazes and challenges the pilgrim soul,
how a dream can manifest in a thousand surprising ways,
how the ocean can become a field of grasses on the edge of the forest,
how an island can become the flanks of a country hill,
how one great love can bless a new love on earth.

For now, the story is set in a little cabin that sits below our home overlooking acres of gold and green. I’m rebuilding this neglected structure and my life. My soul friend died over two years ago. I sold my sacred land in Anacortes. And life goes on. This is about letting the old stories go. This is about a new story of loves woven together. The island land and my soul friend are here too, visible in not only my dreams but also in my beloved’s dreams. Now we make a new dream together in the field of seven houses.

The plan is to post a new missive at least every Friday. I write in the saw dust and dangling wires of a cabin that holds so much potential. I’ll ask you to come in and join me at the table already overlooking the field and woodland. I’ve been lonely for my friends, even as I have isolated myself here. Come in and join me at the table. Watch how the old sea songs rise up through the earth and make a life real again.

Come to my writing desk.
Watch the field sway in the shimmering heat of August.
Listen to the grasses sing about the winter rains that made everything possible.
Then let’s step through torn screen door together, open the groaning steel gate and walk in the swaying gold, in a new season.

I’ll see you in the field.

Rick

Avalon

This is a photo of me unwinding a tangled buoy line on Burrows Island.
This blog has been about untangling while holding onto the thin cord between the worlds.

Today I signed the transfer papers for the land at the title company. Arriving in Anacortes brought a wave of sad-happiness. The tears were close to the eyes and hovering. After the signing I pulled into the port parking lot to listen to the wind moan in the sailboat rigging. Mars was rising over the Cascades. The sea was a froth of bioluminescence. All the sadness, all the schemes fell away as walked to the point called “Cap Sante”. I only felt gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. I leaned out, over the railing on the cobble beach and told the wind: “It’s like I lived a whole life here. I did have a studio in the old hotel! I did write the book about spirits in the waves! I did sew the song of my kayak through every channel and tidal flat! I did love deeply enough to grieve with open moans and an old mans body!”

The story of this place deepened because it has been an Avalon… a blessed isle for me. It’s a place made holy because I fell into moments out of being present and quiet. My solitude brought me closer to the land and the hum of the sea. I think about how this place is now in my bones…the salted wind and splash song of cobbles rollicking in the waves. These are the very songs of the universe… inside of me!

I never really took the chance to see a place or a hold great love until I took the chance and came here. I found my emotional self here. And now I leave this particular place. And this is a sort of death. And yet this leaving is pointing to other forms of Avalon, perhaps closer to my everyday life. I am grateful that I could be loved by the land here, especially in the havens of fir and arbutus along the shoreline. Once you bring some part of beauty, a way of love, or a landscape into yourself it can only grow deeper and richer and more alive. The engine for this deepening healing comes from gratitude.

All the sorrow of losing my beloved, witnessing the death of the forest, wrestling with my self imposed isolation led me to this very moment. And this moment probably is the only real thing. Tomorrow I visit the land one more time. Tomorrow I let the standing stones remain just as they are with no elaborate ceremony or decommissioning. Before I go I thank them and sing to them. And I leave the shame about the dreams that I let slide. The stones might be buried by a machine or lovingly wedged into a wall or even carted away. It is as it is. And I can’t help but wonder what imprint the stones and the earth I (we) loved will carry into the future? The fancy houses and the plans of the new people will also pass someday. And the stones and the earth and even the song of the shoreline forest will remain somehow because I saw them. The summer moments of reclining hand in hand in the grasses, the poems I made, the laughter on the edge of a dream in the morning, I hope these all reverberate and bless everyone who comes to this place even as I disappear.

Avalon is a holy place that appears and then fades and then appears again in the mist. It is a place where the Beloved teaches that religion is kindness and love is compassionate attention. Like the land, these are things that cannot be possessed. They only live when they are passed on in gratitude.

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