The Farmer and the Chicken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick

Simple Magic

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Photo: Cabin Window Rain)

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

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

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

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

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

Rick

Better Than a Dream

Photo: Astoria on the Columbia River Bar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wisdom!

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

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

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

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

Life is better when it’s shared

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

Rick

The Day of the Dead

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Rick


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

Squandering Our Assets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick

Terrible Beauty

Dawn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Rick

Is The Sky Falling Yet?

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Rick