Re-Membering

When I was seven I taught myself to consciously record my experiences within the cells of my body. I remember one time vividly. I was sitting at the dining room table with my whole family, all eight of us. I sat opposite of an old glass window. It had one of those panes that appears to be flowing over itself, like water. Solid glass which was ripply like a frozen river. I sat in my chair and put my fork down. Then I  pretended I was a camera and a cat at the same time. (Kids can easily be several things at once.) I let the image of the scene outside the window seep into my brain and then filter down into my whole body. When the image was in me I would close my eyes slowly like a camera shutter. And I'd blink with the pace and ease of a cat with lovey dovey eyes. Slow and easy.

I remember my step father catching me in my experiment of integrating the outer with the inner. He gave me one of those befuddled stares. Everyone was talking, and I was just sitting there slowly opening and closing my eyes. "What the hell are you doing?" he said to me. But I was dreamy. I just stayed quiet. How can a seven year old explain such advanced stuff to a mere adult?

Little did I know, that not only the image was steeped into me, but also all the other senses came alive inside too. The body-mind is such an exquisite instrument for memory and Re-Membering. What I saw became a part of me consciously. Unlike the trauma I'd stored in my body out of fear, I'd moved this experience in with intention and care. I just wanted the experience of being that tree and little house just outside our window. Then I became the whole scene. Just by being a cat and a camera. Just by being a kid in love with the sultry light of a Southern California evening. It's all still alive.

Try being a kid like this in your own space. I guarantee it works just a well as an adult. And it brings a smile up from the core of all the chakras. Be a cat slowly blinking and a camera of the spirit that longs to be one with an unsullied creation. And when the critical step-father (inner or outer) asks "What the hell....?" , just smile softly and enjoy being quiet in response.

All the places I've loved.

They are still there,

inhabiting their experience.

I can visit them all when I am still.

All the people I've loved,

they are still there, in this moment.

Some are transposed.

Some are lost within their sacred ordinariness,

experiencing their experience.

I can visit them all!

Time, place, circumstance are all a spiral of the spirit.

The way home to the beloved is close, very close.

It is just across the folds of the universe.

I bring the realities of all these into the basket of my heart.

Sweetness.

No death,

No time in a line.

Moments of forever and ever.

Love,
Rick

 (c) Copyright (Image and Text) Richard Sievers,  All Rights Reserved, 2014

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