Seemingly Flawed Works of Love

Have you worked on a personal project with diligence and idealism? What about a way of life or a love affair or a work of art? Did that process turn out the way you dreamed? What if it failed? What then?

Our little farm produced hundreds of pounds of the most beautiful grapes you ever smelled or touched. Succulent to the eyes. Honey to the heart... These grapes were jewels. So, I decided to make a project out of canning them. The process and the result brought forth introspection and a surprising touch of grief over other projects I've participated in.

Canning at the End of a Long Growing Season

When you work the vines,
when you cut and fertilize,
when you water and wait,
then the harvest,
then storage in a cool dark room.

When you steam and juice,
when you infuse the skin with sugar,
when you boil and add pectin,

when you sterilize, fill and seal,
then you process in a rattling old kettle.

When you wait for the set,
and the grapes dream liquid dreams,
then you awaken the next day,
and you arrive at 48 gleaming mason jars.
You smile.
All your hard work is right here,
contained and steeping.

Then you open the first jar
with a pop and a whoosh
of inward rushing sky.
You dip in the spoon.
What do you find?
What does the process
bring forward in this world?

You find the jelly
you labored over for six months
is only very sweet syrup.
The pectin you applied failed.
The long work of your hands has not set.
Can it be that your taste buds still celebrate
despite the shift in expectations?

What do you do now with 48
expensive jars of useless syrup?
What now?

Just dip the spoon in again.
Taste all of the long journey
that you expected jelly.
you got syrup instead.

Is the taste of the explosive sun
worth the lacking texture?
Only you can answer.
Do you taste disappointment or possibility?

Perhaps the single spoon of wonder is worth
the past push of growth and harvest
through a season of sprinkler songs.
You must decide how to process
the difference between
what you dreamed and what is.

Disappointment or possibility?

Your answer will create your true experience of these fruits.

Your answer will honor or degrade you inner labor.

How will you label your seemingly stunningly flawed long won work?

Just sit for a moment and view what's here.
Distilled and preserved is all the sun and sweat and soil of summer.
A spoonful of bright earth!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I write to you wondering what to do with many things I've made and co-created that seemingly went awry. Such is the experience of life. A poetry book that sits in a tall pile of wrapped bundles. A family member who will not talk on the phone. A roof that leaks. A lover who has left after years of laughter and long winter talks. The grapes are just another choice point of how to label the process.

How will I deal with my seemingly flawed long won work? How will I name it?

I could just sit and view what's here. Or really, I mean Really, taste that one spoonful of distilled sunlight. I could re process the whole batch. Would I process again with gratitude or regret? I could possibly make gifts of syrup, a sweet offering to a Sunday morning stack of pancakes. I could even shuffle the rejects away into the root cellar, in shame, with the purple fruit dreaming of the vine and the man who forgot to pray.

What do you do with the flawed? 

Reject or love? 

What will I...what will you...choose?

Rick

(c) Copyright on text and images, Rick Sievers, October 2014.

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