Is The Sky Falling Yet?

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Rick

Moles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick

Bark-O-Rama at 4 AM

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

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

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

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

Maybe true maybe not.

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

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

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

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


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

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

Rick

Remembering My Father

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick

There's A Bear By The Creek

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

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

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

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

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

Rick

Plastic Brain in the Crumbling Cabin

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

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

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

How did it come to be so soft?

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

~

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

~

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

Rick

In the Field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll see you in the field.

Rick