Peering Into the Heart

I had a heart catheter procedure done this week. What an amazing experience to be awake and see a living picture of the inside of one's own heart in real time. I am especially grateful to be breathing freely and to share my life with you here. Here is a poem I wrote the next morning while recovering. To The Beloved, who is within everything:

Heart Catheter

Whoosh, Whoosh, Whoosh

I peered into your mystery,

the flesh cave where you live.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh

is your whispering song.

Your current, your flood called my true name.

I am spun in your eyes.

I am the fluttering wings of your tears.

I am at home inside you inside me.

Maybe this is the new day, Beloved?

Maybe this is the first day?

Maybe this is the last?

All I want is to be with you.

Circuits of dream are

depositing layer upon layer

of life enriching memory

within the walls of the secret labyrinth,

where we walk together,

where we fly in the morning light,

where we sing as the winged and the free.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

What am I searching for?

Who do I see in the darkness of my chest?

I found the place where you live.

In a dreamy haze I saw you!

With feather and fluttering mouth,

your dark secret revealed,

your longing alive in me,

beyond sense and convention.

Your song a flood within me.

The portal of our longing is

finally opened to the wide world.

Fly within me, Beloved.

Take me into your secret vows.

Love me in this sunny place.

Love me in the darkest place.

I faint.

I fall back.

I spin at your midnight touch.

I am lost in the veins.

I am red and salty.

I am found in living breath.

I am loved in the death of someday.

I am one wing of two,

arcing through the grace

of blood and bone.

I am this until the portal is open forever.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh…

Then I am everything you are.

Love, 

Rick

(c) Copyright Richard Sievers, Image and Words, May 2016.

The Thirteenth Door

I wanted to tell you about a dream I had about freedom and life.

I was in a great school with my father, step mother and brother. The school was a magical building with rooms that expanded and contracted as if space and time were just concepts. This was a place we went in-between waking life in dreams. This was a place we went in-between the dreaming of being alive on this planet.

Many scenes are murky now. But I remember the highlights. We had a kindly stern instructor with a face like a rotating mirror. We were learning and laughing together, experimenting with art, skills of storytelling and even magic. The dream was ending. We all knew it was time to time to return to our waking lives.

Our teacher pointed to twelve doors. "You can go anywhere you want now." S/he said. the doors had labels on them, fantastic labels like "Byzantium" and "The Milky Way", and ordinary like "San Diego" and "Portland". My family members stepped toward the doors that called to each of them.

And I paused for a moment.

In that moment the teacher smiled at me. And within a kaleidoscope of mirrors of her face I saw a door I'd never seen before. I stepped through that door, the thirteenth door. This is a door that is always open, with an ocean breeze wafting through. On the other side was a small deck and a thin rail. On the other side of the rail was a great ocean. I felt the warm salt air lifting my hair. I smelled the warm briny tides. I heard the whoosh and moan of the sand being pushed in and out like a drawer. These feeling were visceral and as real as this breath, this connecting with you.

I looked over the rail. I knew I could go no further, unless I jumped into the sea. I also knew how free I really was, really am. I could stay right here on the edge of wonder. I could leap. I could turn and walk back into the room. I could re-inhabit any of the twelve other doors that I'd bypassed earlier. It did not really matter what I chose. I was free. FREE! And that's the reality that was as sweetly pungent and vibrant as the sea.

I just rested with that knowledge and then woke up here, now. 

~~~~

The reason I share this dream with you is partly a mystery to me. It's a personal dream, sure. But it may also be a dream that is universal. My experience with big dreams is that if I do not inhabit them in some way then their reality falters. Sometimes inhabiting a new reality means to share it and then see what returns from the offering.

My wisdom is often young and sometimes off key from the universal song. Like all of us in the Great school, we need each other's face of God to realize more of what our lives truly are. This dream told me that there is a bigger picture than what my everyday fears and efforts and possessions have been offering. That sense of freedom to choose any door, or to wait, or to decide to leap into another reality is heady with salt air. Real. Perhaps that sense can be shared and multiplied like the loaves and fishes.

Are you feeling trapped? Like there are only limited ways to move, if any? I have been feeling that way lately. Maybe there is another way through all of this? Maybe that way is in the mirror of a teacher's loving gaze? Perhaps there is door you've never witnessed before.  Perhaps the choices are more wild and open than you've ever imagined.

Love,
Rick

(c) Copyright (Text and Images) Richard Sievers, April 2014, All Rights Reserved.

Offering of the Shadow

A man who has lost his dream has lost his way.

                                                                                         Aboriginal Saying *

Last night the wind whistled through the crevices of the half opened window. Ghostly dreams came to me. A frantic quality spun my slumbering.  I woke up this morning and realized I did it again. I stuffed the shadow so deep that it exploded out as the light of morning rain began to fill our room. There it was, my shadow, falling upon my head.

So I did what I do to hear the voice of God within me: I wrote. Above the journal was a fire of my breath. I asked the empty page: What is the truth that my body has given me?

And a whisper rises from the dusty corner beneath our bed: You forgot me. But I am here, always have been. Do you want me to come out and play within your waking dreams? Or must I manifest myself in some dark spot on your skin or soul?

I answered the shadow: I gave up everything for love. Sold the land, turned from the career, weeded instead of painted, all for the family, this home. But what have I really offered you, shadow in the half opened box? Do I offer up my life to serve what is crying deep in the darkness of my chest?

I wonder where the longings go when a person is nice and open and a servant to the whims of working hard? I'm reminded of an old Star Trek episode (The Enemy Within) where Captain Kirk is split into two bodies. The soul in one body is the good, kind, sweet version of Kirk. The second soul is one that is reckless and rash and emotional. The nice Kirk wanted to do away with the shadowed half of himself. But he found that he could feel little joy, make no big decisions or follow his rightful longings without the power that the shadow Kirk possessed. In the end both halves were joined again. And Kirk lived a fuller life knowing the powers of both goodness and passion.

I committed myself to write and pray every morning. But over time the "necessities" of the farm and family and finances have eroded the practice. But even worse, I began to write as nice and poetic as I could. Trying hard to make it right and good. I had forgotten that some of the best poetry, prayers and praises come from the messy, inarticulate scribblings. Just write whatever comes. Don't corral the wild mustang, at least not yet. Let the wild words be themselves. Then gentle some of them with the bridle of editing... but do that later.

Today I'm reminded of the blessing of the wild shadow within. I'm also reminded of my plaintive statement to the shadow: "I gave up everything for love of these people and land." That sounds good and noble on the surface. And it is these things. But the statement also carries the waft of resentment and sacrifice, all at the expense of what longs to sing the soul free. Resentment is a soul crusher to everyone in the family.

A Spirit that lives between the passion and goodness speaks now with simple insight: When offering something, the giver is as blessed as the receiver. And I interpret to also mean something in reverse: When sacrificing one's joy for a cause, the result is most often a harm to the creative passion that longs to come forward in the world. So, this is my litmus test: Do my acts of service come from a place of offering and joy, or from sacrifice and suffering? Am I blessed while I bless?

Which gets me back to that dusty dark voice from beneath the bed. What does s/he have to offer? How do we feed and nurture the creative exuberance that longs to be visible in the world?

There is a place in our chest that never sees the light of day. The heart lives there, flooding our body with living love, all inside the dark cave of the body. What does your heart say? Has your head instituted sacrifice as a penance for the heart? Or, on the reverse, have hidden emotions run about the house screaming, breaking boundaries that hurt others.

What are the choices of freedom? Is freedom just about going back and forth between the shadow and the light in our soul?  What would a co-creative marriage of the heart and the head mean to your life? How would that marriage change your daily practices?  Late at night, when all the house is asleep, what does the wind whistling through the widow say to you?

Love,
Rick
* PS The image is a full size self-portrait, based on a shadow projected on the wall. This was done in a wonderful dance class through: ecstaticdancers.com in Portland, OR.

What you resist, persists, as the old saying goes. 

(c) Copyright words and image,  Richard Sievers, March 2014, All Rights Reserved

Being Seen

My Brittney Spaniel, Shannon, in our field in 1972

I had a beautiful dream last night. My faithful childhood dog sat in a field that is bright with silence and vibrant with clarity. I was with her. We were both childlike and yet old and wise. Every feeling and experience I'd had seemed to be distilled into one experience. 

This morning, the frost was shining like a heavy blanket of stars in our field and orchard. A subtle shimmering hovered over the bent grasses and limbs. Yet something else was out there too. In the dark wood, at the edge of our pasture, our neighbor's dog was moaning from his pen. 

Still, the dream lingered in my own eyes. I did not see my dog again in this reality. But I remembered her. And I felt her living inside my body,  just below my left shoulder.

I needed to come here to this desk and write to you. I felt the need to tell you that you are not alone. Whoever you are, whatever the circumstance that grabs at your attention, whatever grief you have, you are not alone. Those moments that seem to be gone or thwarted or unseen by others live right here in the body.

I've lived almost all my life feeling the pang of being unseen, unheard. It's a universal human experience to feel this way. Perhaps you feel this way. Though I don't know who you are I was thinking about you. I wanted to reflect to you something that David Whyte wrote in his poem Sweet Darkness:

"...The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you." *

For me feeling lonely has been a captivating story, a nearly constant barking from the edges of my view of my life. It's not true like I thought. It's an ancestral story which is also stored in my body. And it lives right beside the shimmering field in my chest. It's a dark and dank dead woodland with a lonely animal kept penned and hungry. 

Perhaps I cannot choose what memory or energy lives in my body. But I can still be free. I can choose compassion. I can choose to be present with whatever has been living there inside.

The dream last night is beyond a smallness that needs to make sense. My sweet little dog  taught me by example how to see with eyes that are light and open as the shimmering sky. 

I will not shun that lonely one in the dark woodland any more. And I will not forget the clarity and vibrancy of wonder either. I live between the two. Seeing them.

There, in the field is a gentle companion that loves you without prejudice or even history. She sees you as if for the first time. She is beyond making sense of all that has passed or figuring all that will come. There is a companion with eyes that see you and know you. Where does that one live in you?

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Copyright of words (except quotation) and image Richard Sievers, January 2012

* Excerpt from David Whyte's book: River Flow, New and Selected Poems, published in 2007. p. 348