The Day of the Dead

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Rick


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

Squandering Our Assets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick

Terrible Beauty

Dawn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Rick

Is The Sky Falling Yet?

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Rick

Moles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick

Bark-O-Rama at 4 AM

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

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

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

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

Maybe true maybe not.

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

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

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

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


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

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

Rick

Remembering My Father

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick