Day 8: Patience of a Cedar Tree

The Ancient Cedar Tree that Became My Sanctuary in the California Hills

This posting is a segment of my ongoing series Two Weeks in an American Ashram begun in November 2012. To see the previous entries just scroll down or click on Journal Archive at the right.
          

“Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes space around you.

Let the darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

move back and forth into the change…

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there…”

Rilke*

   
There are over a thousand acres to be free in. I walk. I am a wanderer in the hills of this intentional community. The rolling oak strewn, mesquite tangle of central California is my land today. I wander and survey all that I steward with presence and remembrance.

I walk for miles, through savanna and forest. I traipse through the village of people who have chosen to live in a binding freedom with each other. This place of farms and frictional unity. This splatter of homes that have stood through forest fires and schisms and holy blessings for over forty years.

I wander through the central square of the community and its humble collection of white clapboard houses. I walk by the little shops full of gems and amulets of astral magnetism. I wander past the temples and the altars. Then through the herd of goats and deep into the woods.

In the middle of all of this community and beauty I feel that familiar voice, a tinge of I am alone, even here. Which I now believe is a spell I have woven deep into the tangle of my life.

I am more than half way through my time here. Halfway in any endeavor often is a time of resistances. Today I am tired of the sacred songs. I feel non-pulsed by the lofty texts. I am slightly wary of the people that smile at me. And yet… And yet, I know that this is real here. There is family here. That community of virtue and devotion is real on this earth. A tug occurs between the old and the new within me.

So much of the world’s pain has come with me, even here. I need to let that go.

“Just breathe” I tell myself.

I take in three circles of breath. I feel the wind move in spirals through my sinuses. I feel the welling of living air in my lungs. I taste the happiness of release as I exhale. Then I hear the clouds moving through the trees. I am standing beneath a mighty cedar. This being is gnarled from storms, burnt from lightning, bruised by man and his machines. Yet it continues to stand here. Magnificent. Ten feet across. And perhaps 180 feet tall.

I lean into the tree. I sit. I watch the land and empty myself the best I can. But I continue pondering and recalling the old spell that wends its way through me: I am alone.

I think of my father, as I often do at these times, how I miss him. I think of the family who has declined to speak with me and won’t tell me why. But I don’t spiral any further into the inner night. A voice clear and ringing rises up through the wisdom of my body. The voice is from someone who is beyond all names. He speaks:

“You’ve known no father. I would be your father, in a family of love, right here, inside this time, inside me.”

I answer the voice: “Please be patient with me. The sadness is deep in this world. I want to grow closer to you.”

And the reply: “I am eternal, outside of time. Patience is not even a reality of need for me. Remember, the kingdom belongs to the prodigal. What has abandoned you on earth will never harm you in the ascension of now.”

Profound, mysterious and yet clear words.

A simple peace moved all around me. When I breathed in again, peace took root as a small seedling within me. Much like this ancient sentinel of a tree that began so small and now touches the clouds. I knew that I must have patience with myself. And I saw glimpses of love that is real and true and lasting… right here, right now.

Rick

*Rilke From Sonnets of Orpheus, Part Two XXIX

Selection from Rainer Maria Rilke's In Praise of Mortality, p. 132

Trans: Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Copyright Richard Sievers January 2013, All Rights Reserved

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

Day 5 - Lineage

My Great Grandfather: Ludwig Muther ca 1900

How astounding that all we usually know about our ancestors are a few tidbits and facts. After a few generations even those facts fade. Is that all that is left of us when we are gone, facts and then nothingness? My gut says NO, our essence lives forever somewhere, somehow. And a competing voice in my gut says: YES, this is all there is. This, what we see and touch. Perhaps both voices are correct.

I went to the community of Yogananda's disciples to dive into the dueling voices inside of me. I also went to discover more about my great grandfather. He was a devotee and direct disciple of Yogananda.  My great grandfather once was a part of this community. He was an American aspirant to bliss in the 1940s. And he was way ahead of his time.

I never met Ludwig Muther.
Like most modern people, I know very little about my ancestors.
These are the scattered facts I have gleaned about my great grandfather:

- Born sometime in the later 1800s.

- In the early 1900s he left Germany in shame after he and his cousin became pregnant with my grandfather. He was separated from his son and entire family. He was pushed across the Atlantic Ocean by a Germanic version of Catholic guilt.

- He immigrated to Flint Michigan and worked as a machinist.
- Married most of his American life to a woman, his best friend, named Bert. 
- In 1930, or so, he reconnected with his lost son, my grandfather Rudolph, and sponsored him as an emigrant to the United States.
- He saw my mother (his grand daughter) at least one time. This took place in the late 1940s in a spiritual community founded by a man named Yogananda, in Southern California.
- My mother saw him and Bert with Yogananda (A glowing man in golden robe: my mother's description) where they shared a meal in a dining hall.
- He was a German Catholic devotee to a yogi from India in post World War II America.
- He is buried with his wife Bert in Flint Michigan.

That's what I know.

I also have one ceramic painted plaque of him when he was a young man. I often look at it. I sometimes ask him if my life brings a smile to his face. I wonder if the struggles I am working through are like his struggles. I have told him of my hopes that my work here can somehow bring healing to him in his time, in his life.

I wrote a prayer to him while I was in the Ashram:

You preceded me here by 65 years. 

I am here now, Great Grandfather. 

Are you here too? 

I'd like to see God with you. 

I'd like to live our family's highest and most healing destiny.

I'm the end of your family line on earth. 

I have no blood and bone descendants to follow me. 

The press of time is upon me Great Grandfather. 

So few breaths are left. 

Yet so much living remains for me. 

Who are you in me? 

And what needs to be said or done before I leave this place?

I began to think of lineage. How important it is to touch someone or something connected with another generation? I have a glimmering that what we do, including our smallest habits, directly affects those who came ahead and those who follow us. That time is a circle, not a unidirectional line. I'm not sure that human beings have the physical capacity to understand the physics of spirit and time, yet.

Try to imagine this: everyone you ever loved or hated, every event that sings in your blood, every voice in your genes, every being, is alive right in the here and now. Just because we cannot see through time and dimensional space does not mean that we are alone in this moment. Perhaps God can see all the ancestors and descendants. And God sees them always right in the here and now, along with me and you.

So I come on faith, into an American Ashram, to find parts of me I'd forgotten. One of those parts has a name: Ludwig Muther.

There are moments in everyone's life that are transcendent, where figuring it all out loses its gravity. Where connection with love and lineage and being present are all that is real. Those moments ask us to have faith, action and will.  If we pause and pray we can touch what is hidden all around us in plain sight.

I see the results of all your good and difficult work, Great Grandfather. May I have faith in loving kindness. May my actions in these fleeting moments of forever bring healing and happiness.

Who sings in your veins? 
What actions and dreams yearn to live through you?

Peace,
Rick

Copyright Richard Sievers, January 2013, All Rights Reserved

Day 3 Transmutation of Faith

Day three at the ashram and I begin a new habit of being a scribe. I write down a verse or line that has meaning to me. The act of writing it again makes it a part of the body’s memory.

Today it was a particularly succulent translation of Psalm 19. These words rose up from the page and then seeped into my heart:

“God’s universe is perfect

awing the mind.

God’s truth is subtle,

baffling the intellect.

God’s law is complete,

quickening he breath.

God’s compassion is fathomless,

refreshing the soul.

God’s justice is absolute,

lighting up the eyes.

God’s love is radiance,

rejoicing the heart,

more precious than fine gold,

sweeter than honey from the comb.

Help me be aware of my selfishness

without undue shame or self judgment.

Let me always feel you present

in every atom of my life.

Let me keep surrendering myself

until I am utterly transparent.

Let my words be rooted in honesty

and my thoughts be lost in your light,

Unnamable God,

my essence,

my origin,

my life blood.”

From Ladinsky’s book Love Poems From God

I am in the temple meditating and the words and tune from an old Christian hymn drift inside of me

“Holy Holy Holy Lord God Almighty.

early in the morning I shall raise my song to thee.”

This verse and this song rose from the memory of a church I'd been part of decades ago. It was a place where many would have thought this ashram experience blasphemous, or at least dangerous. I let those thoughts pass. For the song was beautiful inside my chest. I recited the next verse softly:

“Only thou art holy.

There are none beside the.

Which wert and art

and evermore shall be.”

In the temple, beside me, a disciple of Yogananda begins the low slung tones of

OM… OM. 

I am filled with joy.

I join in with his rhythmical chant.

It is not only melding of beliefs here but also a transmutation of faiths I've experienced in earlier parts of my life. The duality thinking that this is bad that is good melted away for long moments in the meditation hall.

Am I crazy, singing evangelical songs and reciting old testament poems in an ashram? Yes, to the world perhaps, crazy. Probably crazy just for being here. Perhaps not.

The separation between sects and faiths falls apart like a brittle wall in an earthquake of devotion. None of that matters now. God is everywhere, even in church, even in the memory of an old song I thought I’d forgotten.

Between the Old and the New

Rick

Copyright Richard Sievers, December 201, All Rights Reserved

Day 2 Habits of Body, Mind and Spirit.

 Manly Development

I cried

reading a poem.

That is a good sign

for my development,

both the reading and

the tears.

From my upcoming book of Poems Simple Life

Our breakfasts in the community are always taken in silence. The silence is broken later with a devotional reading and prayer. I remember my first breakfast over oatmeal. Sitting with new people. Sitting with my wife and with wonderings about the coming two weeks. Thinking I should be calming and quiet. But that is not what my body had in its mind.

At the table with sun speckled leaves all around me I read Rilke’s Ninth Eulogy. He is describing how the angels are already experts on the miraculous and the wonderful. They long to connect with us in something that they cannot know: They want to know more about simple miracles of the ordinary life.

"...And the things, even as they pass,
understand that we praise them.
Transient, they are trusting us
to save them--us, the most transient of all.
As if they wanted in our invisible hearts
to be transformed
into-- oh endlessly-- into us..."

Rilke's poem ends with

Abundance of being floods my heart.

Quote from marvelous book Rilke's In Praise of Mortality, 

Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

When I read the word Abundance I break into a sob. It is spontaneous and even jolting. I sat over my bowl of oatmeal and weep, not just cry, but weep. It's embarrassing to say this out in the world where people trample what they fear. Yet my pride about being strong was not so stony in the shelter of community. I wanted to feel safe. My spirit must have informed my body that it was safe here. So I cry. Head bent and then held up.

 

I was fully a man and I felt everything!

For moments a poem sang in my body.

I cried in a way that might have been mocked in my own family, out in the world or even here in cyber space. But here on this retreat, my wife looks on with compassion. And the other people don’t seem to even notice. Like it’s normal to feel like this and even to show it out loud. (It is normal!!)

I felt like my whole body let out the storage of the strongman. The armor of being in the matrix of the world.

I look out over the field and see our little trailer up on the crest of the hill. I recite the Rilke lines “Praise the world to the angel: leave the unsayable aside”

I write in my journal

"These trees, my parishioners.

This meadow, my church.

This stone, my pulpit.

These grasses, my holy parchment.

This wind, my song.

This trailer, my hermit’s cave.

This being still, the light of the sun

This pen, my traveling heart,

moving from god into God."

Then I named the spirits that I have known and who have loved me deeply over the years. I recited their names, like doorways to God. This practice of seeing, reflecting and naming would become the habit of my stay here in the church of sky and people.

For long drafts of time I felt unafraid of tears and worship. I thought: Perhaps this is the way we are built, under the armor of survival and comparison.

Peace

Rick 

Copyright Richard Sievers, December 2012

Day 1 We are Stardust. We are Golden

Yuba River, Nevada City, California

We are stardust. We are golden. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Stills and Nash form Woodstock Era.

The first things that strike me are the pictures and carvings and poems of the master and his lineage. All over this land. No matter where I walk or stop, a reminder is emblazoned on the wall or in the garden stone. A quote. A sacred symbol. Photographs. Why all the images of men and women? I am judgmental and afraid, at first, because I have been let down and disappointed by people over and over. But is that really the reason I recoil? I also am curious.

For years I’ve pontificated that The time for the guru is over. We have enough experts and parishioners worshiping books more than love. I repeat the well worn phrases of my reticence out loud as I gaze at Yogananda’s carved face resting on the garden altar. You are just a person, like me.

"Then why do I continue to be drawn to gazing at you?" I ask Yogananda? Like a memory in stone… me being the stone in my rigidity and him being like a memory that surfaces in my body and mind.

So I sit back and recognize how I feel stirred up, resistant to the statues and songs floating in the air. The sun light falls through the burning leaves of the autumn maple. I think “I can look at these images from any angle I choose.” 

The sun is tranquil and so quiet in its mighty fire. It is always there, burning, seemingly eternal. But do I really see the sun for what it is? Do I feel it, sense it, thank it? Or is it just a metaphorical bridge in a poem or thought (like here?) And what’s so wrong or right about a bridge into seeing deeper into life? Is that what the statues are? Bridges? Or distractions? Or tools and prompts to remember our divinity?

Then I stop the queries for a moment. I am here to re inhabit my body, to reinvigorate my health and to feel safe with other people. I long to do these things so that when I return to the outside world I can be the memory of the sun, too. I can be the stone, filled with mid-day fire. Warm, even in the cold nights to come. Ah, more metaphors. Perhaps that all human language has. Metaphors of what is holy.

Finally I rest back against the statue, the stony heat warming in the sun. I commit to be present as I can, for a long period of silences like the sun is silent, like Yogananda’s statue, silent.

I want to emanate light.
Light that is not afraid to grieve the losses that bring me closer to breaking through the stony surfaces. I want to b less drugged by my thoughts. Not thoughtless. But freer to catch the judgments as they wisp by in the wind. Just to be here for moments, until I am everywhere in the sun.

Peace

Rick

Copyright Richard Sievers, November 2012

Two Weeks in an American Ashram: An Invitation

On the road with our trailer near Mt. Shasta.

Hello,

This is the first entry describing two weeks that my wife and I spent in a community of people devoted to yoga as a path love, service and becoming more conscious. My wife was completing her certification as a certified yoga instructor. I was deepening my meditation practice.

I went with the intention to experience a loving community where I could be myself and feel safe. I also went to meet other men who desire to be open to their hearts and spirits as well as their intellect. I also wanted to grow in my understanding of how to proceed in my life as a young elder.

Our 1972 Compact Jr. Trailer

Along the way I found healing, challenge of my perceptions, judgments and peace. I hope to tell you the heart of my experience without doing any harm to the community that took us in and shared their particular path with us. I hope to share experiences that will be helpful and healing to you in your life on earth. Thanks for riding along with me on this spiritual road trip.

Over the next weeks I will use the term God a lot. I understand that this can elicit reactions and stories about one's own experiences, some happy, some hurtful. This term is used because it is the word I use in my devotional life. It is meant to be ultra inclusive in its use. I hope that you can see this name in terms of whatever is holy or inspiring or loving or cosmic or pure to you.

The Hermitage

I will also refer to Yogananda, a man who came from India in the early-mid 20th century to relay ancient and enduring, spiritual practices to the west. I see these practices as scientific in that they can aid one in being closer to be truly present and aware of life with less judgement and fear. I asked to meet men who are diligently exploring their spiritual path. I got even more than I asked for. I met a Master who is loving, wise and a beloved friend of my spirit.

I never wish to imply that this is the only way to enlightenment or truth. Yogananda and  communal faith are the reasons for the community that I visited. So I relate the information I have harvested there in hopes that it is inspiring to you in your life.

One of my callings as a writer is to

Make What is Universally Private Intimately Public

May this two week journal help me and you to not feel alone in our personal paths.

If you wish to come along with me on this brief dive into the life on an American Ashram check back here in the next three or four days. 

Or subscribe to this blog (see the box on the middle right). 

Thank You for Reading
I'll be publishing a new entry on this spiritual journey every three days until Christmas.

Rick 

Copyright Richard Sievers November 2012, All Rights Reserved