Songs of the Heart

Bringing Avalon Home

2009-12-21T11:10:00.000-08:00

At this very moment eight years ago I was legally taking possession of my island land in the San Juans, WA. I was flying in an inflatable boat across Burrows Bay on the way my island for the very first time. The weather was moody and stormy just like today. The world of islands and forests was so full of possibilities just like today. Eight years of “Dreaming Avalon” have passed away. Life flies in the storms and upon tides that we barely see.

My companion that accompanied me across the rain and fetch has been gone now for four years. She’s no longer just dreaming of eternity. But I dream. Eight years ago I was full of innocent and even naïve visions about how to be a poet with healing words and sacrificial actions.

I’ve begun to learn more in these eight years than I could have ever dreamed. Like how love here and now is better than visions of “soon and hopefully.” Like how healing is a circle within oneself not something on a to-do list of karma. I’ve learned a little more about being honest. And also how to be true to another human being without being a sacrificial offering. That’s a lot. And it all started with that fateful crossing on a stormy day… a day that looked like today.

I’m going beyond the fantasy of the islands now, beyond the beguiling but lonesome beauty, beyond he powerful magic that manufactures an illusion of love. I’m going to celebrate that crossing to and from the island by coming home. It’s not eight years ago. Such sad losses and astounding growth in love have occurred in that time. I’m going to spend the next four months honoring the kind of growth and creativity that occur for all of us on earth. I’m going to bring Avalon into me. And then I want to sing with its voice to you.

So I vow to write to you every day through April 19th of 2010. I’ve had eight years to dream. And now I want to tell you about the tides of love deep within the dreams.

This is my last entry on this blog site for now. To honor this experiment of sharing a new site is online: fieldofsevenhouses.blogspot.com

Come into the field with me… beyond ideas of wrong and right. Join me in contemplating what it means to be a human being on earth.

http://fieldofsevenhouses.blogspot.com/

Buying the Farm

2009-02-23T11:17:00.001-08:00

Photo: The mid winter remains of last summers spiral.

We will make another acre wide labyrinth of grass again this Summer. This time a triple spiral in the manner of of the sacred Celtic design found in the passage tomb of New Grange, Ireland. Feel free to contact me anytime this Summer if you would like to walk within the singing grasses of the land.

I have also created a small chapbook of poems called Buying the Farm, A summer of Poems.
I'd be happy to share a copy with you. Just contact me at ricksfarm@yahoo.com.
Here are a few excerpts:

Holy Things

Holy things show
themselves through surprise.

Like the island rising
over the shoulder of the road
when I was lost

Your glowing
face at the airport
curb

This white farmhouse
I’d passed by
for years

A poem tipping over
the edge of dawn, before
the newspaper hit the driveway

The perfume of the river
as we flew our open
windows across the bridge

Sunlight spearing
the crystal through
our breakfast table

A covey of quail
in the quivering
snowberry

The foghorn
I heard two hundred
miles from the sea.

The home I dreamed
of moments before
I woke in your arms.

And One More:

At the Dance in the City Without You

The dancing was a writhing sweat.
So many women
watching and searching.
One looks like you,
though younger.
Her desert eyes
deep and lonely
meeting my oceanic glances.

I turn away from her,
remembering that you’re home
with the children while I dance
free, a man all in black
pretending to be
of the city,
while the country claims me
now with coveralls and sawdust,
sickles in alfalfa,
roosters at dawn,
a scarred cat scratching
at the barn door.

The city eyes must
turn north, drinking in starry nights
as we sip beer on the back porch.

You and I are
the dancers in the dark mantle
that hovers above our orchard,
we the committed,
we the field
and the freeway home.

(c) R. Sievers 2009

Thanks
See you in the spiral.

Rick

Vision in the Turning

2009-02-06T11:01:00.000-08:00

(Mother Tree (c) H. White)

Snow is in the forecast. But I’m dreaming of summer flying on my scooter. I’ve been considering the magic of vision and intention. How life follows where we look. In this case my scooter has been a teacher for me. There is magic in the art of motorcycle riding, just as there is magic in life choices. An example from riding is that wherever you turn your gaze the vehicle will follow. All the fiery forces of the 580cc engine will be guided by the simple look of the eyes. If you’ve ever driven a motorcycle you’d understand. Set the sight a hundred yards ahead on a specific point. The bike will always go right to that place, as if on its own volition.

I’ve spent the past month tossing in a sleepless haze, studying the challenges of my own mental health, scrutinizing the worries about our family. Last night I dreamt of flying two wheels around the serpentine song of Highway 14. I painted my dreams with the tree stone collide-a-scope of the Columbia Gorge. This morning the realities are still the same but the gaze is no longer a haze. I fly my scooter at night. I make my way the best I can in the day.

I found another example of how form follows vision at home this week. I removed the couch and table from the cabin. In their place I finally set up the easel. I also resurrected and installed the battered painting desk. That desk is splattered with last years dreams of this very place. I want to reinvasion my life again. So I pulled the bottles of paint out of the moving boxes. I figured if art is primary then art should be seen and then followed.

(Sun Flower (c) R. Sievers)

It’s funny that on the day of setting out the paint and tools we began a deeper connection through creating art as a family. The kids kept requesting art time. It just seemed to happen. One night we sat around the table painting. Another night it was Sculpey. Another night we made a communal drawing. We had fun in long moments of creativity this week. I’m curious about how making room for something new and just gazing in a new direction could bring healing through art. I wonder if just the act of putting the paints and pencils out created a new field of possibilities. We loved each other this week through colors. It was like the flying green of the forest and river as I followed my gaze from the scooter.

What are you looking at today? What possibilities are you setting out in your home? What mysterious corner has always tempted you? What colors do you want to paint in your vision?

Rick

Night School

2009-01-26T10:27:00.000-08:00

I’ve gone through a two week season of little or no sleep. Night school for the soul. A half cycle of the moon has drifted with the snow through my cabin window. I have tossed in the darkness and shimmering. I thought that this is what it must be like to be born. This is what it must be like to die. There is the pain in the journey. There is the loss of what we must leave in order to evolve. For the dying it is the loss of the bounding heart of a once rich life. For the new babes it is a falling from the heaven they floated within. Then, like today, there is the joy in arriving again.

I’ve had two weeks of no sleep with a strange paralysis in a free association of visions. At four in the morning I was awake with eyes squeezed tight as if to thwart reality. I was tossing and agitated on the journey to a new life.

When I lay there it seemed as if nothing was present but the solar system of my spinning brain. This morning the burring sun of my thoughts fell through my heart into my stomach, lighting me with a staggering peace. Insomnia is often a sign that I’ve broken a promise or neglected the life I was called to. My surrender to my soul work and art opened the door to peace.

I’ve been turning on the wheel, struggling to be born. Last night I slept for the first eight hours of my new life. I slept after the contractions of the spirit, the great push and my reluctance to leave the old ways of thinking and being behind.

I had a dream where I could fly, propelled by the light of the rising moon. But I would fly only if I knew I was made for the flying. It’s not just a belief in flying, or my abilities. It is the empty handed leap off the edge of the canyon wall, knowing that a holy spirit will buoy and move me. I hear the voice of the Beloved in my dreams whispering. “Just leap. Just begin. Just put the pen to the paper and scrawl.” The action of movement itself creates magic and wisdom.

So I ask myself this morning: “What does the sun in my gut say?” Then I leap into the first words that come, unfiltered and unedited. I follow them over the edge. Soon enough I am riding a beam of the rising moon. I am aglow. I see how the sun and silvered shield of night inhabit the same heaven. I awaken in my cabin to the snow swirling a brilliant azure of a cold sky, breathing deep. I have happy moments for the first time in a season.

Whatever circumstance or inspirations come, remember the circle of life. Pause in the hard won wisdom of being in this world and then just begin. The path has only one destination: to be born again and again. Let go and then be who you were meant to be.

Rick

The Storm

2009-01-09T11:43:00.000-08:00

A month has passed since I last wrote to you. It was a month of storms, beginning with the squall that chased me south from my residency. We moved through weeks of deep snow and heavy rain. Now it ends with a pile of rubble around my home and flooding within our walls.

I won’t burden you with too many details. After all we all have our storms to contend with. But here are a few of the highlights. An arctic blast brought ten days of confinement in our home due to heavy snow and ice. Then the warm and pounding rains came. Trees fell all along the edge of the creek. In that time the healing space in the cabin basement was filled with the three feet of water. All the power tools were inundated. New leaks sprung from our house roof. The woodstove broke. The cooking surface in our kitchen stopped heating correctly. The heat pump broke on the same day. On the first day out the truck began smoking after it limped home, stuck in first gear. Even more significant, in the family we saw the evidence deep distress in the children. There were waves of anger and screaming trances that shook our sense of safety and comfort. Old traumas raised their dead spirits over and over again in our home around winter solstice into the new year.

The storm has passed, as all storms pass. The sun shines today for the first time in a month. The damage is deep. The earth will heal. The home will be rebuilt. The lives here will be renewed. The fronts wiped out seasons of idealism and hours of work. The field is scraped clean, revealing what was behind all of these herky jerky efforts to make a perfect and safe home.

I’m happy today. The Creator comforts me through the friendships that have also welled up this month. My art group, a friend at work, my two sisters of the spirit in California, my mother in the mountain snows, the neighbors that offer help, Heather. These are worthy of praise and gratitude.

All things change. And a kernel of the original story remains after the flood and the pounding wind. I haven’t written this month because my inner critic could not produce a svelte and eloquent product. The storm wiped out all the perfection plans. What’s left is a holy mess and new space for compassionate spirits and friends to come. There is an emptiness inside me that is full of potential and life.

I’m not going to finish the basement now because a spring has decided to grace the room with its flooding wisdom. I’m not going to build the grand studio on the field’s edge. I’m just going to write at my trusted old desk. And I don’t have the answers that will fix the sad angers that have dripped into our living room. I look around and I don’t know how to proceed or what to do. And that creates a strange and even happy freedom. It’s like the great burdens of being responsible, right and even “good” were blown off my shoulders. That’s the ruthless gift of the storm. We all are defeated eventually by something bigger than us. Perhaps that defeat is the dark gift that strengthens us and brings us into a new season of life.

Now the sun shines on the standing water beside the bent and tattered trees. Looking at my world, my family, I survey the injuries to my surety. The ideals I based my life are sheared like the alder grove along the creek. All my life I’ve based a sense of self on being good, being nice, being meek, and making a vision of heaven on earth. I have striven to be the attending partner, the entertaining and hard working step parent, the spiritual listener, the visionary artist… the one so controlled.

A lovely mentor of mine has been encouraging me to meditate on the attributes of “correct action” instead of being controlled, nice and perfect. Being correct as a human in motion and in stillness. Perhaps being “correct” means being a little messier. Yes, the storm and the sun are worthy teachers. Like the holy muses they have powers beyond control. Maybe I can be more human now. Perhaps that is the other gift of the storm. Sometimes it is correct to say “What I have done is enough. What I am is enough. Let the winds come. Let the ocean fall from space. Let the dramas of others lives rush by in their howling. Let it all be.”

Today I am grateful for the cold sun and the steaming field. Today I am grateful to be imperfect and even stormy in my craft. Today is another day to say “Yes!” to the fate and blessings the Great Beloved brings.

Rick

Kissing the Joy as it Flies

2008-12-11T10:36:00.000-08:00

“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

2008-12-10T13:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-09T12:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-01T14:19:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-20T11:58:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-15T12:25:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-06T11:44:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-31T11:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-11T16:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-09-26T10:19:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-09-17T11:30:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-05T10:40:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-20T20:36:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-08-08T11:30:00.000-07:00

“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

2008-01-03T19:38:00.000-08:00

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.

RSS

Open Asking Hand

2007-12-11T11:34:00.000-08:00

Photo: On the window sill of the abandoned lighthouse on Burrows Island.

“The simple clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.
Choose.
For we meet by one or the other.”
Carl Sandburg

We also part by one or the other.

Last words often come as a surprise. One of the last things I ever wrote to her was “The next time I see you it will be as if we are meeting for the very first time.” The last thing that she wrote to me was: “I swear in the days still left we will walk in fields of gold.” These parting words came from an open hand. They delivered an unexpected prophecy. I truly do feel that I will meet her again, and everything will be healed and new. I picture a place like the field of grasses and the single great tree we loved. Who knows which words will be our last. Who knows which words will spell out a soulful future of unexpected joys and karma.

Today is the second anniversary of this earth without her laughing eyes, without her mysterious dance with scarves and without the pleasures the beach cobbles feel beneath her feet. It’s a day to remember with an open hand. I’m grateful that she came into my life and taught me how to say “Yes” with my whole being. I’m especially grateful with how the poems began to arrive the day I first met her. And they have never left. She taught me that there is a place beyond right doing and wrong doing… a place where love blooms and grows and evolves without judgment. She taught everyone that she met how to be passionate about every transient moment. There is so much to be grateful for.

I miss you beloved, friend.
Soon the green grass will grow
bonny on this side.
How is it with you?
What are the fields like on the other side
of the hole in my heart?

RSS

A New Story

2007-12-04T14:07:00.001-08:00

Photo: From my front yard. Sun and the fire beneath a walnut tree named “Artemis”.

The November writing experiment is over. There are now 52,542 words written by hand in a single large sketch book. I wonder “Now what?”. I feel out of sorts. And I feel like I met my life’s purpose in living the creative process. I dreamt about my book last night. My first real mentor came to me. We shared fine coffee around my kitchen table. I could actually smell the beans in the coffee grinder… delicious. In the dream she read every line of my tome, made suggestions and then placed the book in my hands. She said “Now is the time to write a new story.” I remember feeling disappointed and a little excited by the prospect. She smiled at me and walked out my front door into a sunny spring day.

I woke up to a Northwest morning of muscular winds and waves of rain. I felt keen to remember her face and her hand on mine when she handed the book back to me. I thought: “She died ten years ago and here she is still helping me to stretch my self limitations.” I wanted to be happy and grateful. But the rain had a way of seeping into my heart. Because I also woke with the weight of losing someone beloved this week. And next week marks two years since she, a song of my heart, died.

I felt the wind of this past Fall coming in off the glaciers of Mt. Shasta. I remembered the laughter of friends in the Autumnal sun, all of us hiking down to the most beautiful lake in the woods. I remembered how a shaft of sun bent in through the branches of a great tree and lit her hair and eyes by the outdoor fireplace. And I remembered the cloudy year of sitting alone in my quiet house. Then I thought about my mentor’s advice: “…time to write a new story.” She’s right again. Perhaps part of the new story is about how to stay connected with this world, this moment and the rich and transitory sensations of being alive. The rest of the story is a mystery. I guess I’ll have to write it…maybe even live it. The tale begins with a friend and mentor’s hand upon mine. It begins after someone has read every scrawled messy word, looks up and says “I love you even more than I knew.” It begins with someone who actually wants to share my ordinary full life. It begins with me.

Unconditional love comes from many surprising places: a storm, a dream, a voice of the dead or even a bent shaft of sun around the fire. Unconditional love usually appears in seemingly ordinary events. Unconditional love begins with simple attention and circles around into gratitude.

Thank you for sharing this brief journey with me. I’ll write to you next week and then close this portion of the story. Who knows what will begin after that?

PS The name of my book is The Weight of Beauty.

RSS

Catching Joy in the Breath

2007-11-24T09:57:00.000-08:00

Photo: Last night’s full moon from Washington Park, Anacortes.
I felt my brother walking with me in the dark.

“…We may yearn to rest in some small piece of pure humanity, a strip of orchard between river and rock. But our own heart is too vast to be contained there. We can no longer seek it in a place or even an image of a god or an angel.”
End lines of Rilke’s Second Elegy.

This is my last real trip to the cabin. Friends, who are family, were kind enough to drive me here from Vancouver. I would not have wanted this ending to begin alone. There’s a vista from Interstate Five moving north, just before Conway, that always takes my breath for a moment. A hundred islands spread out off the edge of the Skagit Delta. The view reminded me of the Thanksgiving table shared with kin of choice this week. Our horizon served up with so many succulent dishes. Lummi Island is the turkey, Orcas Island the bowl of mashed potatoes, Lopez is the pie. I was in the back seat, behind my friends, feeling so sad and so blessed, even happy. The table is full of so many inner experiences.

This led me to wonder, what is it that catches the breath with joy? When you first spot your beloved at the airport curb. When you sit back and really see the painting you coaxed into the light over a long winter. Or driving away after the last day at a job that was beneath you. I don’t think it is the experience itself that fuels the power of the heart to sigh. The catch of joy in my case comes from an inner landscape. The islands are inside of me every day. The lover at the airport, in my adoring intentions. The paintings come from a dimension that is eternal. The actual objects and experiences are worthy (and loved) in themselves. But they are not the whole story.

As I stepped out of the heater’s hiss and the lantern’s glow of the cabin for the last time I knew that I would never forget the joy and dreams associated with the little home. This was a place for visions shared with a beloved. It became a lonely place with the song of ravens and coyote. And it was a place full of house plans made out of paper and prayers. Most of the intentions were not actually met. And I had to leave. Yet, the home is still inside me. Her hand still can rest on my shoulder as we sleep in the tall June grasses. The raven spinning songs in woodland flutters in my chest. It’s not necessarily about particulars. These things are real dreams. The catch of the breath, the joy of the unexpected moment are inside. And they are too big to be defined.

When I start the old Ford pickup for the last time in this place, I will ride the blue smoke and the turning wheels somewhere else. What do I take with me? Gratitude. Sadness. A little fear? But what I really take is Mystery. There is a joy of feeling every feeling, beyond the judgments about what is good or bad. There will be a new experience from within the rusted cab of the truck lumbering down I-5 toward the city. There will always be home. It just won’t be what I first expected.

42,181 Words

RSS

Truth or Consequences

2007-11-17T09:23:00.001-08:00

Photo: Lenticular Clouds hovering near Lava Beds National Monument.

“Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”

“This is going to be too messy.” I’ve said too many times. “Let’s deal with this some other day.” Sometimes another day does not come. And sometimes hiding an important feeling or event can lead to a fragmented self. That’s how affairs continue. That’s how people fall apart. I’ve hidden much of my life in fear of making things messy. Perhaps a mixed up dynamic is occasionally necessary for the growth of whole being. I found that there are certain moments in life when the truth, ruthless or kind, rears itself up through the consciousness. At these times suppressing the message would be a way to segregate and maybe even kill a part of the self. The “truth” seems like a moving target. Perhaps it can never really be seen without taking a chance on screwing up and processing it. Perhaps true feelings cannot be known without the witness of a loving friend or partner… where love wants the highest good for self and the other at the same time. I write about this because I made a few seemingly benign decisions in my life that had vast consequences. One was to play it safe and not hurt someone dear. They were hurt anyway. Another was to be dishonest about my own abilities and vulnerabilities. It was a way to act but not live. Secrets always come forward in one way or another. Why not be empowered by them instead of afraid? My writing project is a way to begin putting the truth out in the universe, into the embrace of the Creator and even myself. I want the process to move into my whole being so that I can be free in the world, not hiding parts of myself in shame. The ghosts of the past hover just above the internal landscape. But the ghosts are not really someone else. They’re only cast off parts of ourselves, parts that need to come home.

31,755 Words

RSS

Relationship

2007-11-15T20:57:00.000-08:00

Photo: Flying together in a storm near Weed, California.

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return.”
From Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy”

I just returned from the southern part of my spiritual territory: Mt. Shasta and Klamath Falls. I’ve been thinking about how writing, or any other creative act, is made up mostly of collecting experiences from a place of curiosity and presence. Having an ongoing relationship with a particular place and people adds layers and depth to the stories. I’ve been going to visit my friends in Bear Valley (on the Oregon California border) for a decade now. I have found that the juniper steppe, the white wings of Mt. Shasta and familiar hum of the desert wind have actually seeped right into my bones. And the voices of the people that love me become the story tellers in my dreams. Right relationship builds lives and a rich story. What I have found about writing is that witnessing a particular part of the earth and her people, while being seen in return, can build joy from the inside out. I wrote so many words while I was with my friends. But the words (or any physical manifestations) are just reflections in a broken mirror. What rises above our thinking and planning and moves into our beautiful wounded world feeds the creator within each of us. I’m grateful for the witness of my friends and the love of the earth. They are the chorus singing within me.

26,002 words.

RSS

Vows

2007-11-09T10:18:00.001-08:00

A photo of standing stones near Langley, Washington, on Whidbey Island

“When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing or frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

Excerpt from Mary Oliver’s Poem: When Death Comes.
From her New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press 1992
(Perhaps the best poem written in modern times.)

I’ve been considering the vows I made in a ceremony on Whidbey Island in April of 2001. In a round sanctuary called the Marsh House I fasted and prayed for three days. On the fourth I was met by two friends. I read a long elaborate list of vows of service for the world I was then asked to boil them down to three. I have kept those three vows close to my heart and private. As St. Francis said: “Preach the gospel constantly, and sometimes use words.” I was anointed with oil. I was given a blessing by the elders. Then I was sent out of that round house into the world. I felt like my life finally began to break the surface and breathe on that day. And I found myself actually making more messes and crying more after my initiation. Living is not an ideal or a thought or sixteen thousand words in a book. Being human is as messy and as rich as you allow it to be. In the six years since I have lost the friends from the circular house, experienced family turning their backs on me, lost a great and mostly unrequited love.

Today I dug up my long list of vows. One vow was to simply experience every emotion and event as a guest walking through my life, being grateful for their teachings. This writing project is opening internal space to be grateful again. Another vow was to allow room for creativity and art every day. The lifeline of the Creator’s voice speaking through art saved me. In the writing I’m reminded about how messy and actually delicious life is. Even the sadness and losses along the way. We all share these experiences. For me, the vows and the witnessing of/by friends has given me a structure to fall back on in stormy times. These have also helped me to call for the Oneness to bring compassion through me in some way mysterious and kind. I hope that kindness is the result of this project. Getting the resistance and turmoil to move through the body and onto the page is a step. Perhaps this project is another dedication to be real and live in the messy world.

What vows do you keep in the private areas of your soul? What brings joy to your heart?

Sixteen Thousand words this week.

RSS

Sunrise Again and Again

2007-11-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

This is a photo of sunrise this morning, facing the Northern Cascades.

Anacortes:
There is something bittersweet about walking through this town at night. After writing in the Brown Lantern Tavern I became a ghost. The main drag was empty save for the brooding victorian buildings, and the mist making grey hair fall from the street lamps. I became the dry leaf scuttling along the gutter. I became the shadow that should not exist in the already dark alley. I became a hundred memories singing with the keen of the foghorn. Last night I stepped out of my skin and melded with the salt air, dark as the raven dreaming. I simply let the words flood with the tides and then ebb at sunrise. The sun always comes. A million years from now it will still come. But I’m going to experience, if not celebrate, every particle of my life now. Facing the ruthless truths of seemingly small decisions that killed dreams. Then meeting the sunrise, when I know I can go on. It’s another day. Let’s see what beauty or pain comes. Let’s be present. And let the sun come. The night will return soon enough.

9220 Words so far

RSS

Flying in the Woodland

2007-11-02T11:40:00.001-07:00

“I know the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes. I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one it’s living roots
embrace,

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.”

Rilke, I.5 The Monastic Life

Good morning. Thirty six hours into the journey and my word count is over 4,000! To be honest, the words mostly seem like a mish mash of obsessions, longings and fears. Like bubbles from the sea bed, I let them rise and pop on the surface. I see glimmerings of characters with fantastic powers and full lives coming forward. But nothing feels substantive yet. I consider writing the primary daily form of my spiritual practice. It’s a form of mediation and creation. It’s also a clearing out of the junk collected by the mind monkey. Perhaps a clearing is what is happening now.

Yesterday was the Day of the Dead. It was a day to celebrate and contemplate the lives of those that have preceded us to other side. Some cultures and traditions have rituals of actually feeding the ancestors and including them in their daily life during this time of year. When my pen starts it’s scratching song the veils seem thin between me and the dead. So I feed them my words, hoping to remember their wisdom and lives. I find myself between two worlds, one outside the laws of nature and one very much in the thick of the groaning world. Yesterday I wrote in covey of writers huddled over their laptops in the food court of the Pioneer Square food court (a city mall). I was writing as fast as I could in order to outpace the inner critic. I found moments where I was flying through the shafts of sun in the woodland of my island home. For moments, I left myself and became light and free. I soon came back to the grit of the city, laughing. I hope that I brought some freedom back with me. Looking at the other writers I wondered where they were traveling. I wondered what treasures moved from their key board into the city night. I hope some day to fly through the singing woodland again. I hope someday I can write in a way that brings you along with me.

Where do you go for freedom and healing stories? Can I come with you too?

RSS

Intentions

2007-10-31T10:22:00.001-07:00

This is a photo from Whistle Lake, a sacred beauty-spot on Fidalgo Island.

“What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.”
Ranier Maria Rilke
Excerpt from the Poem: “The Man Watching”

Only fourteen hours remain until the beginning of my experiment with living the a-musing life. Intentions always strengthen a sacred effort. My intention for this blog, as gift for you is: To inspire friends and family to consider their own particular gifts as worthy and meaningful and to transmute challenges and sensitivities into personal and even global healing. Now, that is a mouthful. But I mean it. I hope that you can pull your own inspiration and healing from the highlights of my process.

The format for the November writing experiment is just to write. I want to see what is born from a part that does not edit or criticize. At this point there is no plot or outline hovering in my brain. That being said, here are a few of my intentions for the coming month:

To spend thirty days actively in love with the Muse, making recognition of beauty, the body and the emotions of life creative priorities.

To let nothing within my control, and within the scope of personal integrity, impede living the life my heart longs for.

To write the story that needs to be written… the story choosing me.

To clear out the trophies and old boxes from my past in order to be more free with what life remains.

To “come out” and be more public, as an experiment in what it is like to be in the world and to be true to the internal life at the same time.

To say goodbye to my land and the dreams planted there; To share the realities and the grief about a forest that was killed for a neighborhood of high end homes.

To realize the privilege of being alive, of being me, in this body.

To write a truth of my experience, being fierce, tenacious and blazing in the telling.

“She” took a course based on Stephan Levine’s book A Year To Live several seasons before she died. That inspired me to treat every day as sacred. So I intend to write like this was the last year of my life. There are two months left. What is real? Where are the chords of love evident in this experience?

What if this was the last year of your life? What would you release? What would you do to celebrate this transient gift of breath?

RSS

Three Stones

2007-10-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

Hello Dear Friends,

This is an excerpt from my vision statement for my November Project. The photo is from three years ago. She is looking across Burrows Bay near the San Juan Islands. That was the last day I saw her.

Thanksgiving On Burrows Island

I sit on the stoop of the cabin painted with the bright green and purple of happiness and whimsy. The grey rain falls on the forest canopy, catching in the Spanish moss, never reaching the bones of last years roses below. Across the wilting glen, only ten yards away, is a circle of three standing stones. Each is about waist high. One stone is granite, sharp and bright. It is the memorial to my brother. One stone is sea green and strange in its slant over the moss. That stone is for her, set in the very last spot we held each other in the sun. The third stone is molten red and humped, smoothed by some ancient waterfall. She is for the living Song of the Island. She is the Great One roaming in my lineage, now whispering in the swaying cedar and hemlock.

I watch the circle, expecting movement. But stones never move when you watch them. I stand, my head dizzy beneath the single strip of gauze wrapping an old and healing wound. My mouth is open to the sky, free to catch the few unstrained drops falling. The grass is still, supple and bending low with last nights fog. My boots and jeans are baptized in their passing touch as I walk to my altar of solitude… to the stones removed from my head… stones full of stories… stones of longing that must sung.

I kneel, sinking into loam and next spring’s seed cones. I wrap my arms around the three. I look out with my mind and feel the waves, languorous on the shore. I feel the boat waiting for me. But the crossing back to the village can wait. Braving the cold floor of ocean can wait. The crying wind in the sails can wait. I have lives to save, no less my own.
So, I begin to sing.

RS

November's Story

2007-10-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

Hello Friends and Family,

I am finally coming out in the world. And true to my contrarian nature, I plan of doing this via a soulful retreat. This Thanksgiving week is the anniversary of losing my anam cara (A Celtic term: "loving soul mate"). It also marks the death of my brother. Both were connected with land and a simple cabin on the shore of Burrows Bay, near the Anacortes ferry. And it marks the final days on land that I have considered to be my heart's home.

For years I have hidden in the grove of hemlock, fir and madrone, writing the dreams and longings rising from the earth. I have found the soul of the land lives inside of me now. The stories of My brother and my soul lover, now hovering over the waters, flooding the page. So many season of longing and of living in dreams. We were going to build a home and write great poems and love the moon rising over the islands. In moments everything changed. There is only me now... and you.

The land is a beautiful park, a cemetery with standing stones marking what could have been. And it is time to move through a deeper layer of grief. And it is time to live again, celebrating who I am becoming... because of the messy life of love and the consequences of loss. This is my attempt to make the stories of my land live forever. The land has been sold to the developer that already mowed down the neighboring woodland. The bulldozers will come to my land in the winter. The trees will be cut. The standing stones will be knocked over. I want to honor this place and the paths, unseen and seen, woven through its tangled woodland.

My intention is to clear a path through my soul into the world. It's time to come out of the woods. I been lost in grief and untold stories. I've learned that the best way to heal is to be receptive to the process and the emotions and circumstances of being human. In November I intend to write 50,000 words. More importantly, I intend to let the untold truth about a love affair and a family story come forward. The truth is elusive and fickle. The truth lives in the heart, and not necessarily the facts. I am grateful to share my life with you, my close friends and family. I'm grateful to begin writing the words that may clear the way for my being a more loving, authentic presence in your lives. Thanks for letting me share my process in this adventure.