Hollowed by the Flame

In the gloaming on Sunset Beach, Anacortes, WA.

I found this poem I wrote crumpled in the sheaves of my journal:

Walking in the gloaming garden,
my skin gliding through the silken quiet,
orange, mauve light surrounding every being,
this body both vessel of the journey and the stillness,
this body my home, container and confinement.

Glass walls surround my vision.
I am like a lightning bug spinning in a jar.

It is sunset soon.
Soon the lid will be undone,
the confinement shattered.
The glass will fall and
the light that is me will fly
into the dark.

Across the top of the page I wrote

I can only burn so much ecstasy
without becoming hollowed out by the flame.

Creator, make me a clear and resonant instrument for your songs.

Reader, may you discover the light that is within you and may you find freedom in that light.


Love,
Rick


(c) Copyright Richard Sievers, August 2015

Today I Allow Myself to Experience All My Feelings

To the subscribers who only got code in their notice of my last blog, 
here's a better link to the musings on machismo:   
Machismo and the Spiritual-Creative Life

Mandala of Perth

This is a mandala I painted of the rune Perth.

This is the rune of true identity and initiation.

It's a living symbol of cosmic energies which 

give birth to that which was once hidden.

 ~~~~~~~

Today

I allow myself to experience 
 all my feelings.

No good. 
No bad. 

Only the truth as it appears in the moment.

Only the moment as it slips away.

With Love,

Rick 

(c) Copyright, Words and Image, Richard Sievers, January 2015, All Rights Reserved

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.

Disappearing and Being Born

Sunrise on the Art Farm

Letter to One in the Near Future:

If I had a time capsule I'd send you the sky. If I could include you in this moment, I'd send you the heady spring sky. I'd send you the air spiraling with bird song and sweet pollen and wild whispery clouds. I'd send you the cool exhale of the garden lifting flowers in the orchard. I'd send you the blue borne breeze as it swirled and spun the new born grasses in the pasture. I'd send you the hint of loss and life, death and desire, wrapped in an aging man's hands lifting up the sun.

Can you stay awhile with me, friend? I'm not so far away now. Feel the wind where you are. Know the thoughts of the dirt. Catch the flickering magic of a black spun wing in the periphery of your dreaming. Be here.

How good it is to breathe, to be alive! Painful, agonizing even, but all gold. All, love of the trinity: Sun, Moon and Earth. Holy, the Triple Spiral, the vortex of wonder, the funneling passion of passing tides in the field that sings your true name.

You are alive if you are reading this. Dive into your experience. Unplug. Be still. It only takes a moment to be real. And in a moment more, you will be gone.

I see you. I hear you. I dance you.

Today I walk with the dearly departed on one side and dearly living on the other. With me, in-between worlds. I am disappearing and being born at the same time. Would you like to walk with me awhile, friend?

Love,
Rick

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

Clarity on the Way to the Wide Open Sea

Forgive me if I'm thrilled with the idea, but just now I thought that every poem I write ought to be called: "Happiness" 
By the late Raymond Carver, Found on a scrap of paper beside his typewriter.*

~~~~~

An excerpt from my journal while at Starbucks. These are moments of a sadness-happiness-wonder-loss all spun together, which was also bliss to me:

Just reading Raymond Carver (R.C.). Then writing whatever rises to my finger tips. An hour of not doing anything in particular, not paying much ado to the goings and comings of the cafe.  At a table in the middle of the swirl and swagger of so many people. I am an island. The people are the tides sliding past the shore.

I keep my head down, an odd bearded man, not really alone. Happy. Lonely for no one and no thing. Allowing the poems to read me. The words become sea songs. Right here, living a whole life as an Avalon for myself. A refugee called God (by some) lives on these shores, in these misty headlands. We sit together, praying to each other, heads bent, while the pearly storms make cloud faces that will disappear in the slanted rain.

I muse inwardly, wondering what my flying pen must signify to any that would care to notice. So much for a conscripted life. So much for normalcy in a reckless age of shattered reflections.

I hear you, island voice. My head tilted slightly. You whisper into my ear, a single word over and over again: "Home, Home...."

And I am, home.

You and me and R.C. Swirls of tide and storm buffet our sacred place. Across the straits, the peopled shore is so close and yet so far away.

~~~~~

This is my reflection to you. Forgive me if I'm being presumptuous or trite. But here is my unsolicited advice. Just be yourself. Don't allow anyone to tell you that one feeling is good and another is bad. Feel all that you can feel. Then discern what to do with it all. To me this is freedom.


What you resist, persists. If you stuff an experience down in your body, a sadness, a joy, a trauma, a revelation, it will get stuck there and fester and create all sorts of sideways havoc in life. Acknowledge what's true for you now, maybe just in a private space like a journal or on a dance floor, with a counselor or in a wood shop. Acknowledge the truth as it appears now, before it slips away and becomes something else.

One of my best teachers said that the meaning of life is just to experience stuff. Experience life events (internal and external) as fully as possible and then move on to the next experience. There's only one you in your one life. So be open to your own special experience and then let it pass through on the way to the wide open sea.

Love,
Rick

(c) Copyright Richard Sievers, November 2013, All Rights Reserved.

* From Appendix 2 in All of Us: Collected Poems by Raymond Carver and Edited by Tess Gallagher

The Book Under the Book

First view of my island land in the San Juan Islands in 2001

photo (c) Rick Sievers 2001

After thousands of words writing my new book I put my tired hands down. Why am I here? What do I really want with the writing of this particular story? I was grateful to get a glimmering of this as lay on yoga mat in my lovely circle of friends.* Thank you circle for opening space for me to be still and begin to remember who I am. These are the first raw words of my new book:

The Book Under the Book:

Most nights The Spirits come. In dreams, floating up and around me, watching me, touching me tenderly. Some nights They take me to the place that is no place at all. Some nights They take me into Their houses in fields of star-lights that sing and moan with wordless wonder of the original song of the universe. Some nights I rest in Their arms, or play with Their words like putty, or swim in Their oceans with shining cities beneath me.

I awaken in the morning, sometimes drugged, because holding the joy and the sadness is so painful in a world that seems to be mutilating itself. Most mornings I awaken and for moments my body is not afraid of dying or of living. For moments my body is eager to express the wonder of that place of “wows”. But this experience on sacred wounded Earth is a place of vows and loss. And I forget.

I promised my soul that I would really be here in my life and circumstances this time around. But it’s so hard when waking in the morning means that my heart  begins to afraid again. Sometimes I see why my Grandmother chose to die at age 50.  The tangled world of consensuality can be so challenging to the soul, so challenging to remain awake in, so challenging to not take the lessons we dance with personally.

One sweet spring night seven years ago I lay my body down in a room with 30 people intent on spiritual journeys a compassionate magic. I lay my body down. And my spirit rose up and out… but now away. I touched something so wonderful and beautiful it hurt to recall. Almost terrible in it’s beauty. A red star pulsed in the crown of Orion. I went into the burning and I sat in a field as solid as what we call real. A single blade of grass bent low beside me and quivered in the breeze. Al the magic, all the miracles, all the posturing language, all the yearning for things and acceptance and understanding fell away in a moment. I swear I was there for eternity. I swear, I have never left that place.

Yet my consciousness came back here to this world, back to the room with arguments and hurts and love affairs that seemed so important at the time. Back to this reflection of the Great Beauty from the Song of the Universe. Back to forgetting again. There are moments that are so poignant or painful or lovely that I must go into that small seed on the swaying grass head and remember. The universe is joy incarnate.  And here it is also pain.

When I arrived back in the circle of friends after that journey I cried…. no, I wept loudly for several hours. I stumbled outside into the mid California night fragrances and fell into the dirt. Over and over I cried out to the Benevolent Spirits: “Why did you have to show me that?? It’s so beautiful. It’s so wonderful. Why? Why?” I wondered how I could remain here in corporeal form and be away from that full knowing. I sensed that reintegrating into my everyday life after this would be hard. I didn't know how the yearning and remembering would tear my sense world apart. It was a profound mystery to me.

Today, after losing the touch of so many of those friends and the kiss of my once upon a time Anam Cara, I have a hunch about the “why”. Somehow I need to tell about the nature of the wonder that we are all destined for, the wonder of true love that is everywhere and nowhere at all. Poetry seemed like a good place to start, and then surrender to my life and to the griefs that have been carried by all my ancestors, and perhaps all of our ancestors.

I don’t know how to start explaining that single blade of grass that was singing. For me, it was God Universal cloaked in a form that I could touch for a moment… just a glimmering of what really is true.

This book could be a story about fostering spiritual power, searching for healing, becoming a man and then being torn from limb to limb… so that somehow I might give you, beloved reader, a glimpse of wonder. Or it may be to tell you we are not alone, we the beginning of the new age, we the opened and destroyed, we the merely human. You are not alone. And I am writing this to remind myself to cling to the voice whispering in my sleep: “Soon my love we will be as one. Soon.”

I write to channel the sadness of sleeping through my own life into a gift to the world and especially to my grandmother who felt so alone when she died. I write to remember who I am before the end, before the Great Song rises through my body and takes me to a crimson star.

Love,

RSS

Copyright (c) on image and words Rick Sievers, 2011 

* My Yoga Community:

Shanti Yoga of Vancouver, WA