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