Having a Completed Experience

On Mount Neahkahnie, Oregon Coast 

I want to be more present in my life. Perhaps this is true for you too. Lately I've been considering the all encompassing way life events seem to blur together and loose their vitality when I am fretting or over analyzing. Time flies, we hear over and over again. Or is it that we fly from experience to experience without being present?

I've lived about 19,000 days. How many of those days have I really been here? How many moments have I inhabited? How many inhabit me?

Lately I've been playing with two ideas about life. One is that I want to rescue one memory a day, to really dwell with it and let it pass within and through me. To really see my friend across the table and feel their presence. To feel the cold rain on my face without resistance. To sit with pain, mine or yours. And then to present this experience to God, the Beloved presence coursing within me.

The second idea is that a great role of living is to allow the experiences to move through me. Not just the ephemeral aspects of "me", like spirit and soul, but through my blood and bones. I've been  wondering if enlightenment might be as simple as having a completed experience in this particular body. It's a simple idea, but not an easy idea.

The body is a transmitter of pleasure and challenge. Perhaps the body is more than we think. I had a beloved teacher who said that the body is the horse we ride to enlightenment. The body may seem incomplete or flawed or like just a vehicle to cart around our brains. But what if it was really the doorway to knowing what is sacred in my life? How to live in this body with less judgement or fear?

How do I not just accept the physicality of me but inhabit it? What practices lead me into the wisdom beyond what is surmised or analyzed? Living, really living, is simple, but not easy.

So, for me, I do my little practice in the morning. I watch the field. I write. I pray. I do these not because of strong discipline or special insights. And self improvement only goes so far. No, I do these things to live!  As Rilke says "I have begun to listen to the lessons my blood whispers to me."

What truth is your body presenting to you today? Will that experience get locked into the vicissitudes of reaction and fear? Or will you trust yourself enough to feel what's really going on inside?

Dharma of Blood

                                                                       

Follow the blood,

the streams,

the rivers,

the great ocean

of heart and brain.

Moving silence

into the throbbing

chorus.

Blood, the synthesis

of four elements:

air enriched,

water based,

metal in filled,

fire of soul.

Salty as the ocean.

Blue as the topaz.

Turbulent as the wind.

Blood,

what is holy to God.

Blood,

the manna from my mother.

Blood,

the transmission of my father.

~~~
Peace to you today.
Rick

(c) Rick Sievers, May 2012

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

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

A Hundred Winged Praises

 In the Meditation Hut 

Under a Skylight Filled With Starlings.

Waves of starlings
land on the shingled roof.
I sit and present
myself for meditation.
But I cannot keep
from looking up.

The flock lifts
off of the gable.
The birds are
a great roaring engine
of air and will.

The rumbling
wheel of flight
spins through
the morning mist,
only to land
on the peak
again and again.

Is it joy
the starlings know?
Or is it just
what they were
born to do...
circling within
hidden labyrinths,
a shudder of wind
upon God's spine.

I bow to the altar.
My heart flutters,
and opens wide.
I breathe within
my Beloved's breath.
We rise in a hundred
winged praises
across the morning sky.

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Check out my new book of poetry available now.

(c) Copyright Rick Sievers, 12/2011 on text and images, All rights reserved.

The Presence Beneath the Storm

The Presence Beneath the Storm in the Field

This is a revised version of the blog I posted and then deleted on Halloween. 

We  recently hosted an intimate gathering of friends to read poems in remembrance of our ancestors. We shared a circle of poems while orbiting a candle-lit altar of photographs and mementos of the dead. It was sweet and expanding to take in the voices of my friends. I was inspired to witness people standing bravely at a podium to read their grief and gratitude.  Rumi reflects my feelings about friendship shared in this way in his poem This We Have Now Here’s an excerpt of Rumi’s poem as translated by Coleman Barks *

This we have now  

is not imagination. 

   

This is not  

grief or joy.  

 

Not a judging state,  

or an elation,  

or sadness. 

 

Those come and go. ..

   

This is the presence  

that doesn’t… 

 

What else could human beings want? …   

When we turned out the lights, and left the studio everyone felt the mystery of deep love come with them into the night. I slept deeply that night, with a smile.

Then I woke up to challenges in my personal life. The world of  neither this nor that, neither good or bad, had faded within my sleep. In the morning I found myself feeling cut off and alone. The reasons why are not so important. It’s just part of the human experience.  Up and down, happy and sad… These are feelings that everyone has. They come and go.

I found myself wondering what difference I made with my writing. I found the shadow within me rising in the ashes the great light of the previous night. Indeed it was a night that I felt reflected holiness, heaven and hope. Isn’t it amazing how the dark feelings also want to flower from the sweet earth of prayer and service?

I  spent the next day planting an orchard in our field.  Fourteen supple apple saplings. These are trees that I hope will outlive me and my concerns. I was digging with a fervor. I had also been spinning down a hole of my supposedly being alone in the world, of other people not caring, of my particular work on earth being pointless.

So I paused and put down the shovel.

Then I asked myself "Why am I falling into a dark place of feeling less than and alone? Where is my self worth as a writer?"  I had been feeling unique in an experience of alienation. Not so.

 
Is there any place for a poet or artist in our society of put down humor and murderous video games?  What about other wonderists, or dreamers, or conversationalists, or yogis, or prayerful farmers? What if everyone felt alone in the sometime sense of alienation and separation? I just stood and looked into the muddy hole I was digging.

I paused.

A chant from yoga moved through my body:

Chidananda rupa shivoham shivoham  

It's a Sanskrit chant remembering loving consciousness, divinity and even bliss. I felt more solid. I began to sing while the rain began to fall gently. Then I came up here to my cabin, to this flickering screen of many colors and I wrote to you. 

I wonder what thoughts I am planting in my soul?

Is there a place for the dreamer, the sensitive and the even the childlike?  Yes… YES… there is a place! It’s inside the heart. And it was in our little studio on a stormy night last week. Where is the place of Presence for you?

I returned to field. I recalled the joy of being with friends and the presence that never leaves. I went and sliced more sod, laid down more compost and untangled more pot bound roots. I planted gratitude and an honoring of All of my feelings, pretty or not.

Whatever creative endeavors that come to you, no matter how spindly or muddy, plant them. Nourish them. Let no one, not even your inner critic, tear them down. Remember the One that never leaves us and always loves us.

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Words and images copyright (c) of Rick Sievers, 2011

* An excerpt from the Book: The Essential Rumi, a Translation by Coleman Barks, Harper Publishers, 1995

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,

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

* My Yoga Community:

Shanti Yoga of Vancouver, WA 

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