Days 6-7 A Fire Ceremony in Winter

This is what we keep

going through, the lyrical

changes, the strangeness

in which I know again

what I have known before.

Wendell Berry: The Recognition

New Collected Poems, p.185

Winter comes for a visit. It is 28 degrees outside and 42 degrees inside the trailer. So, I move down to the warmth of the dining area to work on a long time writing project. Everyone else is working in the kitchen or in yoga training or in meditation. I sit at a long table, alone with eleven empty chairs. Outside, snow spirals lazily. Inside the darkness of my own karma sits as shadows all around the table.

I am, again, writing and arranging the story I've held in my body for seven years. It's a story of spiritual power and ecstasy, a story of illicit love and the death of my best friend. It's a story I long to tell, somehow,  someday, or my life might feel incomplete. And it's a story that vexes me at every keystroke, every rewrite and every attempt to say what I really want to say. Here I am, again writing and plotting. This is the work that I love and that loves me. And this is the work that I sometimes dread and resist.

For eight hours I endeavor to move the contents of 280,000 words into some order. I feel driven and sure of my mission as I write and re-write this book. But there is an emptiness about it too. Because words fail to convey the real truth of what love and loss are capable of.

Toward the end of the day, as the ice begins to thicken, a friend walks in and invites me to a fire ceremony. I accept the invitation and I close the computer and walk with him to the temple. The gist of the ceremony is to become clear on what one wishes to release, describing that intention to the congregants and then literally burning the old ways as a public recognition of moving onward.

Here I was in ceremony, writing something again. I knelt at the altar with a trembling sheet of snow white paper. Upon it were words like "not being enough", "being dishonestly nice", "feeling alone much of the time". I burned the paper! The facilitator (swami) laid her hand on my spiritual eye in the middle of my forehead and blessed me. And it was over. No bells or flashes or thunder. Just simple communal ceremony.

The next day I awoke with the driving desire to get my writing just right. I went down to the dining hall. Same table. Same snow. Same drive. I turned on the computer. There was an unexpected event in the hard wire. All the information I'd so feverishly rearranged and rewritten had disappeared from the memory. I had little reaction to the loss, which I found to be curious. I just said to myself "Oh, I guess that's that."

And I wondered "Who is it that observes all of this coming and going within me?"  

I noticed how I was different after my work disappeared. Not so heavy. But instead of feeling surprised I thought "This is how I naturally feel: Light". I wondered how many limitations I had set on my writing and my life with the need to call myself by labels like depressed, too sensitive for the likes on mankind, unseen, alone etc. etc.?

Then I closed the now blank progress of the old writing project. It was not as if the sad sorry feelings had disappeared. It's that I could hear other parts of me with more clarity.

So, I opened up a new screen and wrote a poem. It was a poem that had little to do with my projects or wants. It was not a good poem or even one that has deep meaning. It simply made me smile. It was just my little song at that moment.

I looked outside. The sun was peeking through the swirling clouds. Our two days of winter had passed. More snow will come in the future I'm sure. But not now.

Here's the little song I wrote

Moon of my night,

Star of my morning,

Earth of my day

I love Thee 

I love Thee

I love Thee.

Breath of my dreams,

Fire of my experience,

Water of my eternal birth

I love Thee,

I love Thee,

I love Thee.

Earth: Holy, Holy.

Life: Sacred, Sacred.

Death: illusion, illusion.

Beloved I love Thee

Beloved I love Thee

Beloved I love Thee.

And I smile, reading this again.

May you discover who observes this life experience within you.
And in the discovery, find a simple thought or song or poem that brings a smile to your face. It doesn't have to be pretty, proper or correct. It only has to be yours and real in these moments of sun or passing snow.

Peace
Rick

(c) Copyright Richard Sievers, January 2013, All Rights Reserved

The Angry Man Staring

This is the setting: I am at a coffee shop hunched over my journal while writing out my internal world. I was discreetly mouthing some of the words that appeared from my pen. A man, wearing a perfect suit  that looked like armor, sits in the booth across from me. He appeared confident and competent. His eyes were upon me. And I felt embarrassed.  I looked at him not as another human being. I saw him like he was a puppet of the oppressors, and a hater of those that appear to be different. 

Here’s what I was thinking as I rehearsed talking to that man.

Our world is twisting apart.

The very fabric of compassion or truth or integrity is ripped and shredded.

No more loving nature.

No shelters for the poor.

No food for the hungry.

No justice for those under the pall of hatred, war and pollution.

The pontificators live in big houses

with blazing hearths of electrons beaming with empty truths.

The pundits say that there is no global warming,

that there is a recovery,

that the rich will provide all that is needed,

that non-technical education is pointless and

that kindness is a curse of the sentimental.

Sure, the world is flat and the true believers are the prize of God’s universe along with all the other religionists. Right?

I say that the world is round.

I say that I am poor but alive.

I say I want peace in a time of war.

Then I stepped back 

from my internal rehearsal at life.

I was grateful that I kept my arguments to myself.

I am free, aren’t I?

What will I recall when it’s over, 

the warring or the aliveness?

The man across the coffee shop stared at me with a downward curl to his lips.

He sipped his long cold coffee as if it still had steam and heat.

He never let his eyes flicker or fall off from the drilling scrutiny of my flying pen.

I think most of us live like we’re alone.

We live alone in our thoughts and fears.

And the end is near…

And the world is a circle.

So is my heart.

I go back to the moment in the coffee shop and look at the man again.

The man is really staring right through me.

It’s like I’m not even there.

He appears lost in his some reverie or perhaps indifference.

He may or may not be judging me.

He is not radiating hate like I thought.

Rather he seems to be blank as a page unwritten.

Who’s scrutinizing here?

And who is crazy and afraid with judgment? 

Me!

My experience is that I write and dream while people seem to look right through me.

I sometimes feel like the awful stranger, like the traveler in a gypsy wagon, a person who dreams and gives his life away to spirits that other fear. I feel like the one who is chided in the market place for muttering to his hallucinations.

My hallucination is that I am alone and need phantoms of thought to keep me company.

Alienation is our world’s disease right now.

The bible relates how the curse of Adam and Eve is a sense of separation from the divine. What a loss this is for all of us. And yet we have free will to choose another way.

O Great One, let me remember who I am and who that man is. Let me be aware of where these words are coming from and what effect they may have before the end really does come like an angel with his scythe.

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(c) Copyright on words and image Rick Sievers, 2/2012