Being The Fire

 The Fallen, 2004 (c) Rick Sievers

I woke this morning feeling very sad, like there's no place in our world for a man poet dreamer idealist...too sensitive, too nice, too unskillful. I sat at my window for a time and then went out on the crystal strewn grasses of the frosty field. This world is so luminous when you really experience it. It can be so painful too. I came back to my desk and opened up an old journal from a decade past. A Compassionate Spirit had given me loving words to sustain me:

“Be the fire you seek to warm yourself by.

Be the flame and others will come.

A flame never burns alone.”

Then I opened another journal and right there the last poem I ever wrote for my beloved friend on Whidbey Island:

We walk

into the fire .

We live

in the burning.

We fly

within the smoke.

Finally I opened a journal to a prayer I heard in my heart when I was walking in the New Mexico desert four years ago.:

"God, consume me with a story 

that will spark healing in our world. 

Let me be ashes in Your hearth. 

Let me be a memory of a deep cold night 

spent in the light and heat of Your love."

Sometimes the spirit that can save you from despair is your own historical self, coming forward in time to remind you

of the praises in this world.

Am I willing to be a fool for my longings? 

Am I open to being saved by remembering 

the Compassionate One's voice? 

It's hard to remain present in this world 

that seems to be so full of self-inflicted fear. 

I cling to the love I know is real... 

that's the only thing that seems to last. 

Today, what do you cling to? 

What is worthy of your one beautiful blazing heart?

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Copyright Words and Images (c) Rick Sievers 2011

Bad Poetry-Deleted

Deleted

Urgent

Early Autumn Morning on Redfish Lake, Idaho

What if this one journal entry was the only writing left of mine at the end of my life? 

What if this was the very last thing you ever read? 

I'm reminded of a poem by Wendell Berry:

The Wish To Be Generous

All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.*

All that I serve in this world will die sooner or later. What essence of me will last through my brief flash on earth... Earth, Holy Earth, cradle of me and trillions of beings like me? What a luminous cradle this place is! An amazing refuge for small little lives that that will be something more and yet nothing at all.

Did I love well in service and self evolution?

Was I present and willing to be here?

Did I primarily give or take from the earth and my fellow beings?

Each moment is the last moment of your history. Soon enough the moment will be the last of your particular life. The endeavor to love truly, simply and wholly is urgent... URGENT. This is not a practice run. We have such a finite span of moments to be together in this form, in this shining wounded wonder of places.

I remember Ram Das saying something like this: The meaning of life is to really experience life (paraphrase). 

What do you need to experience today, in this moment, in this life? 

What/who will you release to make room for the yearnings of your soul? 

What dangerous and loving words must you utter to step into joy in your life?

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Copyright Richard Sievers 2011

* Poem The Wish To Be Generous was quoted from Wendell Berry's book The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, page 70, published in 1998 by Counterpoint, Washington, D.C.

Between Before and After

On the Morning of 

Our Last Farmer's Market of the Season

Before beginning anything else this morning,
before the plans, the lists, the worries...
Yet after making the kid's breakfast,
sending my spouse off to work,
after coddling the cat,
feeding the chickens and
emptying the bucket
from last night's rain riffling and rifling
through our shingles....
between the need tos and the to dos...

I will praise the world that is
rising from the sunrise mist.

This is a beautiful morning of fists uncurled
and wild hair and drowsy garden.
This morning holds the song of
the organic produce of dung
and clay and sweat and dreams.
The crops are bent in their final days,
offering their lights of glory
to my singing knife and shovel.
They end up on our tables,
the bounty being consumed by so many,
becoming one with
my customers, children and friends.

Living seeds and leaves are offering themselves
to the boiling pot and sweat lodge oven,
becoming more than themselves.




These fruits, herbs and vegetables are the sun stored
and then released in veins and breaths.

This morning I praise the verdant field
which offers it's life for all
who care enough to breathe.
This morning I choose
the the side of life that is filled
with the heat of a once upon a time Summer,
with thirst slaked by the rain,
with feet cooled in the loam and buried stone.

Thank you Spirits of the Land for such bounty
in-between all the doings and undoings,
in-between the season's growth and resting fallow,
in-between inspiration and expiration.

Peace of the Field Be Yours on this Autumn Day.
Rick

Expendable?

Two incidents in the same day:

The young man was covered with sawdust and sweat. He leaned into the fender of his truck after a hard day of cutting diseased trees. His eyes were steady as he looked down at his girlfriend sitting on the fender. One by one he spit cherry pits at her. She winced and then smiled like it was no big deal. Then he said to her while chewing: "You're expendable." Her face blanched white as the bark on the fallen cottonwood. I said "You should treat your girlfriend better." The boy-man turned his face to the ground, spit and then just walked away.

A graying man stood clutching his smart phone. His face was down turned. His hands in his pleated pockets, with a hint of a gold watch gleaming just above the fine twill. He was telling his woes about the nasty business cycle, how he has to ride on commercial planes now, how he has to work a sixty hour week.

He was bemoaning a failed venture of firing his American employees and moving his factory to Mexico. "The labor costs were killing me. So I got rid of all of them. I was set for an easier life and lower overhead. But that didn't work out."

"What happened?" I asked. "The product (from Mexico) just wasn't the same. So I let all of those (people) go too and came back."

Two men, one virile and young. One older and soft in body. Both were hard in the heart.

What ties these two opposite men together?
What makes them think that human beings are expendable or created as cogs in a money machine?
How did huMANity get to this place where civility and kindness are demeaned along with women, minorities and other men?

In these two conversations I was struck with the continuum of dehumanization and domination of the other. I found both men's attitude repulsive. And I also found myself participating in their attitudes. Toward the first man my first thought was "Well, you're the one that is expendable." Toward the second I made an instant judgment about those with unrestrained privilege and wealth.

I wonder how to live without separating myself from the humanity of others?
What part do I continue to play in looking down at people instead of listening to what's beneath their pain and bad choices?
What brought this disempowerment and societal sadness into bloom?
Are men just like this?
What role do family and women play in this system of soul usury?

Many questions. No sturdy, steady answers.
All I can do is be free and stand up for the freedom and basic rights of other beings.

Yet I am sometimes left with a lingering fear of the disregard and hateful order these men represent. One, a working man. One, a corporate boss. Both, disempowering others even as they diminish the integrity their own heart. Both are human beings. And both are worthy of basic rights and love too.

I'm left with more questions about how to navigate the difficult middle path of fierce love and strong boundaries.

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(c) Copyright, Rick Sievers, July 2011

Fitting In

I heard a quote concerning the rewards of livelihood that went something like this: "I'd rather that my child became a taxidermist or a tax collector than a poet."

Lately, I've been trying to become someone who fits into the world a little neater, with more clear edges, in sync with my false expectations of what a man should be. And the consequences are eroding my happiness.

My business card reads out my occupations, including farmer, builder, counselor and minister. Lately, I've been applying my precious time to an angled hopscotch of vocational pursuits that would actually pay the mortgage. What makes my soul become alive and free are not necessarily on this peg board of squares and numbers. Poetry, writing, art are not high on the list of what the world rewards with money or stability.

Nearly everyone I've spoken with as a counselor has said that they do not feel like they fit in with the world, including familial expectations and popular views. This separateness and alienation seem endemic in our society. Sometimes people on the fringe can have a double dose of this splitting. In my own family I've heard that reading poetry in public is akin to being effeminate (as if that's a bad or good thing). Neighbors have given a nervous skirting smile when I tell them that I have time allotted every morning write and create. So be it.

I wonder if the sense of alienation comes not from outside of the self but from deep within. I wonder if the split could be healed if one would accept and even celebrate their God given gifts? What people think in judgment is only a reflection of how they treat themselves privately. Everyone is "special" and everyone is "only a part of the whole". As the popular song goes: "To be yourself is all that you can be...."

I go through spasms of pretending to be someone I am not. It takes the form of working really hard at something to supposedly please someone in a sacrificial manner. i.e. I will give part of my life energy to be accepted. The result is fatigue and depression.

This month I've made a commitment just to notice what brings happiness and life force flowing through me into my world. And I notice what and who depletes my joy as I give away precious small parts of myself. It may be different for you. But I feel my body and soul smile as I absorb myself into writing, art and acts kindness and service. Am I willingly offering my services or am I giving from a place of lack?

I also made a vow that I will be less "nice" and more Kind in my interactions with people. Kindness includes the giver as well as the receiver. Kindness being real and true to oneself, in the way you are put together.

I hope that you find joy in your particular art, no matter how it looks, no matter how it evolves, no matter how it pays, no matter what people say. I hope that we, as human beings, can learn how to be free to create in alignment with love and pay the mortgage.

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(c) Rick Sievers, June 2011

Ordinary Acts

"There is no enlightenment outside daily life."
Thich Nhat Hanh

Once upon a time I lived with a simple joy of writing and painting and walking along the shoreline collecting shining stones. I lived in a quaint cottage on the corner of a friendly village. I stewarded an island in the green Salish Sea. My only drive was to be with the muse and write praises in poetry while healing my own human pain.

That is how I remembered my life yesterday as I wheeled the skill saw across a complaining sheet of plywood, as I hammered and measured and sweat in the dust of good hard work. I came home from a day of building and weeding for other people and I bent my will toward the woodpile. I swung and cut. We needed heat for our home. We needed to pay the stacked cord of bills.

By four pm I was spent. Yet there was a group at the YWCA that I was scheduled to co-facilitate. And a friend had left a phone message that he was in trouble. The radio was telling me how human beings are becoming selfish in their fear, while the world is sliding into chaos. I held my head and then my heart. I sat on my bed. I sat and remembered the once upon a time life I had... insulated, hidden and uncomplicated.

In an unguarded moment I whispered to myself: "I don't want to be here."

I was shocked at how easily the thought rose up; how life was asking so much of me; how responsibilities were sucking the bliss right out of me. Where were the days when I could not wait to get to the writing desk? Where were the times of wandering in cobbles and sea wrack between the singing tides?

I was carrying the traumas of other people and the sadness of suffering barking across the airwaves. For a moment being in this world felt like too much. It was just a moment of being human, like everyone else.

Then I remembered: I asked for this. I wanted to be an elder in the last days of this world system. I wanted the complications of friendships. I wanted to make a difference in other people's lives simply by listening.

Yet I was surprised at how being of service looked. It looked dirty and dusty and messy. Service is fraught with unsure outcomes, a family with no answers, a broken axe and a long drive into the city simply to sit with amazing wounded people.

Then I recalled that my once upon a time life was not so ideal. I was remembering like a child remembers the joy of summer vacation. But I am not a child anymore. The poems do not flow in such care free happiness any more. They rarely flow at all, at least on paper.

The poems and singing of tides are living in the acts of simply showing up... being with the one crying, swinging the maul, getting the mud under the fingernails. The impact and outcomes are really not up to me. What I realized about my once upon a time life is that even there challenges and pain and calls for discipline swirled around me. One cannot hide from the world.

There is little place for sentimentality in service and adult life. But there is infinite room for infinite love.

And what does "love" look like? It's different for everybody. I have a feeling it comes down to ordinary acts and simple hopes and thoughts. I have a feeling it comes down to compassion, even for the small part of us that does not want to be here.

May you find the compassion and gratitude for yourself as you drive to work and make your family's meals, as you scan the monitor and hoe the weeds. We may never know the healing impact of our actions. But something mysterious and loving is growing here on earth.

May you find the Beloved Loving power of this One Sacred Life in your ordinary acts of being human.

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(c) Rick Sievers, April 2011. All rights reserved.