Conduit

This May marked the twenty-first year I have been writing.

Of course, I had been stringing words together before that. In fact, in Grade Five I won an award for my writing. First and only award to date. But May 1988 was when I began consciously writing. It was when I decided, subconsciously at first, to become a writer.

My first writing venue was a street lamp near my suburban Burlington Ontario home. My first genre: really awful, angst ridden teenage poetry. My first topic: heartache, loss, nature, the doors of perception (I was reading Jim Morrison’s poems at the time), and love. Yes, the kind of love between two people, but also a bigger love that incorporated the rest of humankind, and the universe.

With the exception of Jim Morrison, not much has changed.

Then, as now, I felt that I was a conduit through which the universe might communicate.

We all are.

Writing is the tool I have used to channel my particular part of the universe’s energy.

For the longest time I thought it would be photography. Starting in about 1985 or so I was pretty dedicated to the art of black and white photography. But working in a professional photographer’s studio for a few months after graduating from high-school pretty much put that ambition to bed. I still love to view the world through my camera. A single image can say as much as any essay or book I might pen (I won’t insert the cliché). But it is when I am at the keyboard that I feel most in touch with the creative energy of the universe.

A number of years ago I started seriously writing fiction. I penned my first short story in 1994, while living at Grand Canyon National Park for a winter. I’ve written two or three dozen short stories and a couple of novellas since. In 1999 I spent the better part of my summer researching and writing a novel called Across the Universe. I got about 300 pages into the project and stalled. Summer’s were short in the Canadian Rockies.

In 2003 I began writing the Cole Blackwater mystery series. Writing can often be hard work, but writing about this hard-edged, soft-hearted environmental sleuth was easy. Once I established a pattern to my writing the words just flowed. Making time to write, and to write every day, was a challenge, but once seated at the computer, following a story-line scribbled on a sheet of butcher paper or typed out in rough, the words just poured out of me like water. It was as if, after many years of searching, I had found the tap and turned it on.

The first book took its own sweet time to congeal, but not so for the second and third books in this environmental murder mystery trilogy.

Circumstances played a role in the ease of this writing, mind you. I found myself, in the early days of 2007, with more time on my hands that I might have chosen: I had recently separated and was living on my own – Rio and Silas with me three nights of the week – so I could rise at 5am and write for three uninterrupted hours each morning. My consulting work was steady but not overwhelming, so throughout the day I could return my attention to the misadventures of Cole Blackwater to edit and revise what I had written that morning.

I wrote the first draft of the second book in the Cole Blackwater series in 28 days.

The third book followed soon there-after. It was much more intricate, with a very complex and disturbing antagonist, so it took two full months to pen the 500 page first draft.

Writing these books was pure bliss.

It was easy. They flowed. I knew beyond a doubt that I had discovered my dharma.

Dharma is a Sanskrit word that means purpose in life.

According to Deepak Chopra – whose book the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success has meant so much to me over these last few years – there are three components to the ancient law of Dharma.

The first is that each of us has a unique purpose in life. The universe has conspired to give us human form to discover that purpose.

The second component of Dharma is to express our purpose through our unique talent, or talents.

The third component of Dharma is to serve humanity, and all of creation, through those talents.

Chopra argues that if you can discover your purpose, express it through your unique talents and serve others doing this, then you might tap into the unlimited abundance that the universe is able to provide. This is not merely physical wealth, but emotional and spiritual abundance too.

This might be true; I’m still waiting for the largess to arrive in the mail in the form of a royalty cheque.

What I know for certain, however, is that by discovering my Dharma – or what will certainly be a part of my life’s purpose – I have been able to tap into an abundance I had never imaged existed before in the universe.

When I am writing sometimes I “disappear.”

Stephen Legault, physical form – balding, slouched over the keyboard, cup of tea growing cold close at hand – dissolves. What remains is part of the electric current of spirit I have described elsewhere; an extension of all life, or all the energy and information that has existed for all time, blinking in and out of existence, taking on the momentary form of people, of planets, in contact with everything else in the universe.

Momentarily I am simply a conduit through which the ideas, the energy, the love of all life can pass, through my heart, out my fingers, and onto an electronic page.

It’s an imperfect universe, and so the creation is also imperfect. The universe, obviously, could care less for spelling and grammar mistakes. Its also struggled with past and future tense. And it’s got a certain affinity for vulgarity. But when I am truly connected with my Dharma, my purpose, I am a pipeline through which the universe’s energy passes and I am left to experience the sensation of bliss; where I feel as through I am all things and the boundaries between the hard-edged physical me and the softer, more supple energetic world vanish.

Several times, during my stint writing the third Cole Blackwater book, the experience was so overwhelming I had to stop writing all together, press my hands flat against my desk and close my eyes to allow the sensation to move through me. It was like cold fire passing through my entire body, and it brought tears to my eyes.

Anything that feels that good can’t be to far off from what the universe intends for you.

My blessings are many, because I also feel such bliss when immersed deeply in nature, when being fully present with my children, and when absorbed in the rapture of my wife’s generous love.

There is a theme here: you and I are temporary beings, having taken physical form, and we have a chance to experience our single, or many, unique reasons for being if we choose. That purpose need not meet anyone else’s notion of meaningful. Your purpose may serve humanity in ways only you might understand. But when we are living our lives in a way that expresses that unique purpose fully, there can be bliss so profound that it stops us cold. It is that bliss that I live my life for, and through.

Three by Seven

It’s hard to know the right thing to do when it comes to parenting.

There’s no manual.

There are lots and lots of books filled with advice, but no actual operational guide.

And that, of course, makes it pretty much the same as everything else in life.

Rio turned seven in January. It seems like so long ago now; we’re halfway to eight. But at the time it felt momentous. He seemed to go from being a little boy to a little man almost overnight.

In the yogic tradition our lives are segmented into seven year periods of development that follow the progression of the seven chakras. The first, or base charka is about connecting to the earth and the material world; it’s about stability. About getting our footing in life.

The second, or sacral chakra is about sensuality, creativity, enthusiasm and exploration.

According to the Yogic tradition the seventh year is a period of transition and contemplation.

Rio is moving through such a transition now. Its beautiful, and challenging, to be a part of it. In the end the best I can do is watch, hold his hand, and love him as he deepens his experience of this extraordinary life.

Earlier in the spring Rio and Silas, who is now almost four, and still very much connecting with the earth and seeking stability, spent an afternoon at Clover Point, looking out at the Juan de Fuca Straight. I was frustrated because the afternoon wasn’t going as I had envisioned. It was cold, and when we traipsed down to Mount Doug beach half an hour earlier it was in the shade and felt like winter. I complained bitterly. I turned the two children around and, still complaining, traipsed them back up to the car and made for the more dependable Clover Point. The sun was out but so was the wind, and my mood which was sour from a day of too much city and too many responsibilities was as biting as the breeze.

We settled onto the beach and after a few minutes of sun and stones and waves I was able to relax. Silas bouldered while Rio contemplated me as we draped ourselves over a driftwood log.

“Dad,” he said, and the rarity of his using my title rather than the more familiar “Stephie” surprised me. “Dad, is it hard being an adult?”

“Sometimes it is,” I said without hesitation, and then exhaled loudly into the chilly air. “But most often we just make it hard.”

I turned and looked at him, at his beautiful face. “We have expectations about how things are supposed to be, and when they aren’t, we get frustrated or angry and make ourselves unhappy.”

Attachment leads to suffering.

“Do you know what expectations are?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Things that we hope for,” he said.

“That’s right, things we want to happen. We have stories playing in our head all the time about how our lives are supposed to be. When the stories don’t come true we are unhappy. Adults have a lot of expectations and life often doesn’t turn out the way we want. It’s not that it’s always bad. It’s often very good. It’s just that we can never really know what’s going to happen, so we have to let go of our stories. Does that make sense?”

He smiled and nodded. “Why do you ask?” I said.

“You once asked me if it’s hard to be a boy,” he said.

“And is it?”

“No. Not really.”

I pulled him over the log and held him in my arms and we looked for beach glass and he told me all the things that he wanted to be when he grows up. It was agreed that he could be all of them and many, many more. We agreed that I could be all the things I wanted to be too, and many more that I hadn’t thought about yet.

Early summer now, and Rio and I are lying on his bed, reading books. The boys spend about forty percent of their time with Jenn and I; the rest of the time they are with their mom and step-dad Andy. Both boys spend a lot of time talking about their lives at their other home when they are with their respective parents. I hear about Kat and Andy a lot, as I think they hear about Jenn and me a great deal too. Sometimes, however, I grow weary of the list of cool things that Kat, but mostly Andy, do with the boys.

I don’t have anything against Andy. In fact, I really like him. If I could hand pick a step-father for the boys, I’d pick Andy. He's smart, funny, loving, adventurous and practical. He teaches them a lot, and loves them deeply. But I get pretty jealous of the fact that he gets to see them more than I do, and sometimes when I get my four nights with the boys, I don’t feel I need him coming along for the ride, even if its only in the endless parade of stories the boys trot out about how they spend their time.

So I said to Rio, “You know, you told me you like to have adult conversations, so I’m going to tell you sometime in an adult way. When you talk about Andy so much all the time, it makes me a little jealous. I wish that when you and I were together that we could just focus on us, and maybe not talk about Andy all the time.”

Rio looked at me and said, “Well Steph, it’s just that I like Andy better. He’s funny, and he wrestles with me more.”

It wasn’t said to be mean; it was said matter-of-factly.

It felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach. I lay back on the bed next to my son and looked at the ceiling. He read his books. People have said some pretty awful things to me, and about me, in my life, but nothing compared to this. Nothing. I felt sick. I felt like I wanted to run away. I felt like weeping.

Suffering is caused by attachment. I am attached to my love for my son. For my children, and for my wife. You never expect to hear that one of them loves someone else more. Especially not your seven year old little man.

I fully expect to hear both my children tell me they hate me. I just through I had until they were teenagers before that happened, and it would be because I had stopped them from drinking all of my beer.

But hearing Rio tell me he liked Andy more brought all my fear to the surface. Since leaving two-and-a-half years ago, I’ve been afraid of loosing my children. I’m not afraid that I won’t ever see them again: I’m afraid that I will slowly be replaced. Rio’s casual statement cut me to the quick.

So I lay there and looked at the ceiling and wondered what to do? Get angry? Yell? Run away? Cry?

I had to take all of that emotion and turn it; I had to take that frustration and anger and most of all, my fear -- that black, oppressive fear -- and turn it into love.

Fear casts a shadow over love, but love can overcome fear.

So I rolled over and grappled with the lanky kid and said, “Andy wrestles more, does he? We’ll see about that!” and I put the little bugger in a half-nelson and pinned him. Well, not really. But we did wrestle.

It was a momentary victory: conquering fear; conquering my habitual angry response to fear.

But my dread didn’t abate. For the next two days I felt angry and upset. Finally, when she was sick of me over reacting to everything, being cantankerous and mean Jenn said to me: “Why don’t we just talk about what this is really all about. It’s about you and Rio.”

We talked it out. A seven year old can’t know how much a simple statement can hurt. He may not even mean it. As Jenn told me, “one day the monster loves broccoli and the next he hates it….” And Jenn reminded me, for the thousandth time, that I am his father, the only one he will ever have.

And then a couple of days later, when I was dropping the boys off with Kat, I mentioned the story and she laughed and said, “Yeah, I think they like Andy better than me most of the time too….”

Its best not to take things too seriously.

Now I think back to a time late last fall when Rio, Silas and I were engaged in a familiar tradition: we visited Ross Bay Cemetery. The leaves at Ross Bay Cemetery are great for jumping in, and the boys love to create huge piles and leap into them. Who doesn’t? The cemetery was little more than an interesting setting for our activities until Rio asked about all the headstones and who was buried beneath them.

“Some people get burnt up!” Silas added to our conversation on burial.

Rio shot him an angry look and then cast his eyes down. Then he started to cry.

“What’s the matter?”

He hooked his arms around me and cried into my chest.

“I don’t want you to leave me,” he said, sobbing.

“I’m not going to leave you,” I said.

“I don’t want you to get burned up. I don’t want you to leave.”

It’s hard to know what to say.

“I love you,” I finally said. “I love you more than all the leaves in the world; I love you more than all the stars in the sky” I said, repeating our familiar refrain. I held him while his tears dried. “Everybody dies someday. We just have to love each other as much as we can while we’re here together.”

I suppose that was enough said, because we built another pile of leaves and jumped up and down in it.

The message of that moment isn’t lost on me now, six months later: love them while they are here. They love you, you fool. Love them and then let them go. You don’t ever forget about them; there isn’t a moment you don’t love them more. You just have to let go.

When Rio was born I dubbed him my little Taoist master. At first he didn’t know it, but slowly he’s coming to understand his role as my teacher, just as I have a role in teaching him. It’s an awesome responsibility, just as it’s an amazing opportunity.

It’s worth considering just exactly where, in terms of seven year cycles the father in this equation is at: at thirty eight, I’ve just entered the sixth stage, or chakra. It’s also known in some circles as “the third eye.” According to most resources I consulted for this entry, this seven-year phase of life is when we might shed off our illusions in time to integrate all of the qualities of each chakra and experience true reality. One online entry reads: "The sixth chakra is the chakra of forgiveness and compassion. Forgiveness is the power to let go of anger, hatred and resentment and to discover, in humility, the nobility and generosity of the Spirit. It is the one that dissolves all our conditionings, ego, habits, false ideas of racialism, and all our misidentifications. It is the narrow gate which opens the way for our consciousness to ascend to its final destination, which is the seventh center.”

It’s not easy. There is no instruction manual. The lessons come hard sometimes, if they come at all. It would be far simpler to just ignore them and watch summer reruns on TV.

Three lessons by a seven-year old. A boy, so early in life, grounding himself, finding his feet and exploring his world. A man, approaching the middle of the journey, but also exploring the true nature of the experience of being human.

Union

We’ve all heard the banal, new age expression that “we’re all one.”

I’ve written about this myself many times, talking about my experiences with my children, and the mirror of nature that we all reflect.

At the quantum level, where the hard boundaries that seem to exist between us evaporate into fuzzy, swirling clouds of subatomic matter -- blinking in and out of existence like an old movie projector -- there can be no way to discern where I begin and where you end. Despite being the basic building block of all “things,” the atom is curiously empty of almost anything. 99.9% of an atom’s mass is concentrated in its nucleus, where the protons and neutrons hang out, but this only constitutes an infinitesimally small fraction of the atom’s actual size. The rest is an electron cloud, held together by electromagnetic force inside an electrostatic potential well. This cloud is almost entirely nothing at all. In addition, this bundle of nothing can best be characterized as potential matter, because until it’s observed, it’s neither a particle (a thing) or a wave (movement). It’s potentially both at the same time.

And that’s the stuff we’re made up of.

What’s more, the theory of entanglement states that everything that was once touching is still touching – and it was all touching at the moment of the Big Bang. Two electrons separated from one another by a great distance both react at the exact same moment when one of them is disturbed. Twins often react the same way. And so to does everything else in the universe, only on a more subtle scale.

The space between us is an illusion of our senses.

So we’re mostly nothing, with no hard boundaries, composed of matter that is simultaneously the potential of both a “thing” and “movement,” and we are touching everything else in the universe at the same time.

I guess the reason that we don’t often see the world as it actually exists is because our sense of taste, sight, hearing, smell and feel have developed to keep us from being eaten by sabre toothed tigers and from falling into lava flows rather than experiencing the world as wavy masses of blinking energy without borders or limitations.

Most of the time we can’t see it, taste it, smell it, hear or fee it, so like the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, it simply doesn’t exist. (The same can be said of God, but that’s for another story.)

Here’s the crux of my argument in favour of one: I have experienced this union in my day to day life.

Recently I experienced it on the most singularly important day of my life so far.

Two weeks ago Jenn and I were married. It was an amazing day, and the culmination of a year and a half of days both wonderful and challenging as two people, in the early-middle of their lives wove their worlds together.

We married at a small lodge in the mountains west of Canmore, Alberta called Mount Engadine, and were joined by Rio and Silas, our immediate families, and a few close friends. The backdrop of the mountains, moose grazing in the meadows a few hundred feet from where we wed, and the circle of loved-ones who joined us made our marriage magical.

I’ve long held that love is the most important thing in the world. I teach Rio and Silas that. I’ve not always been able to live as through love were paramount, but I’ve tried hard to demonstrate this belief through my actions.

I’ve more recently postulated that the love is the energy behind the creation of, and underlying existence of everything in the universe. The energy released by the Big Bang that has now created a billion swirling galaxies, and that when imprinted with the information also present at the moment of creation now forms everything from platypuses to people, is actually love.

Its all energy and information, just rearranged to create stars and starlings; planets and plankton. Love is the energy; the energy is love. Human kind’s greatest gift from evolution is that we are perfectly adapted to be receptors for, and expressions of this energy. While the rest of the creatures we share this planet with live by this energy on a day to day basis, we can’t be certain any of them experience love as we do.

But for human kind, it’s a certainty. We experience perfect moments of love. And when we do, we’re conduits for the raw energy of the universe. People often describe these moments of union with another person, with their children, with a pet, or with a beautiful place as feeling connected, or feeling as through they are a part of something much larger than themselves. Sometimes we go so far as to explain that they feel a certain…oneness….

And of course, we do. That bond we feel when experiencing love is actually a moment when the barriers to understanding the universe as it really exists evaporate and we sense the pure energy that forms everything in the cosmos binding us to everything else.

It is bliss.

There is no proof for this conjecture about love. There never will be. This isn’t about the scientific method of inquiry. This is about direct experience. This is what I have experienced in my life, and that can’t be supported or disavowed by any set of controls or experimentation.

On a sunny afternoon in the Rocky Mountains I experienced once again the bliss that alerts me to my connection with everything else in the universe, and with the magnificent energy of love. I held hands with Jenn on the broad sundeck of Mount Engadine Lodge before gathered friends and family and committed my life to her.

When she walked out of the lodge on her father’s arm to greet Rio and Silas and I standing hand in hand awaiting her appearance, I felt a tunneling of my vision that I hadn’t ever experienced before. I must have shooed the boys away to sit with their grand parents because suddenly we were there, alone, facing one another. I was lost in her.

In that moment there had never been anything more beautiful in the universe to me than Jenn.

(Jenn and her father)

(Rio, Steph and Silas await)

Carl Shields, our marriage official, read our service. It was simple and eloquent. We choose to include a passage from Kahlil Gibran’s 1926 book The Prophet:

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.

But if you love and must have desires, let these be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own understanding of love;

And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;

To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;

To return home at eventide with gratitude;

And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

I bumbled the whole I do thing, thinking that Carl’s question was more properly answered (phonetically speaking) with I will, and then had to quickly add “I do” lest the whole service go off the rails (it’s a present tense, not a future tense thing Jenn reminded me later).

And then suddenly we were married. It’s just a word; just a legal formality. But it isn’t really. It’s an affirmation of one of the most profound aspects of the human condition. It’s a celebration of what may well be the most unique experience of the fundamental backbone of the universe. We human creatures are receptor towers tuned to experience the pure energy of the universe: love.

When I married Jenn, it was a public declaration that two such human beings had come together in a union of that pure energy, of that pure love. And if time and the graces of that same universe are willing, it is only the very beginning of what we can do with that magnificent energy.

(just the beginning of what love's magnificent energy can do)

The Electric Current of Spirit

It’s been more than three months since Jenn and I returned from India. Its time to say goodbye. Its time to move onto other topics, but not before exploring a few additional ideas.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t return to the topic of traffic, or more aptly, transportation. And I can’t leave unexplored the electric current of spirit that prevails in India.

On my first day in India I landed at the airport in Goa at 6am, after sleeping on the floor of the Mumbai airport for a few hours. Jenn and Lisa met me with little paper cups of Chai and we then hurtled through the awakening streets of the city for the train station in a hired car. Within an hour we were rolling east towards the hills, up through forests and Ghats and onwards to Hospet. The trains in India are fabled, and I was spellbound. We rode second class, no AC, so the windows opened to let in a tantalising breeze. Every so often someone would stroll up and down the aisles selling all manner of food and drink. Many little paper cups of Chai later I was buzzing but happy.

I strolled the aisles, learning to smile at people and being rewarded with broad grins back. My camera became a tool for easy introduction. Make a simple gesture, easily understood as “May I take your picture?” Snap away. Then, on the LCD display, show the curious what you captured. Instant conversation starter / barrier-breaker down.

When we arrived at Hospet, Lisa had arranged an auto-rickshaw, so we could run the gauntlet of drivers offering rides. The 20 minute drive to Hampi was the wildest I had in India, and I jumped to the early conclusion that all rickshaw trips would be so momentous. Nobody died. We didn’t run anything over, at least nothing all that big. Hospet is as poor as dirt, and the children playing barefoot and mostly naked among the smoldering ashes of garbage fires left an impression.

The train ride back from Hospet to the coast four days later was a highlight for my travels in India with Jenn. We had two bench seats almost entirely too ourselves; it wasn’t too hot: it was a magical, suspended moment in time.

We traveled by plane, train, bus, cab, hired car, boat and auto-rickshaw throughout India, as well as logging a fair number of miles on foot. Transportation in India is the physical form of the chaos theory. Everything seems to work, but just exactly how is a complete and utter unknown.

Later, traveling up into the Western Ghats to reach Kumily, we had planned on taking the bus. Sitting in our seats, the weather sweltering, two young India women asked if we’d like to share a car? The cost was reasonable, so we drove together. The three hour long journey up and over high passes and into spice country was astonishingly beautiful, and nearly fatal more times than I can count. Passing on blind corners, driving up hill in under powered vehicles on roads with no shoulders and sheer drops on one side and vertical cliffs on the other is something of a national pastime in India, and our driver excelled at this simple distraction. Jenn and our two traveling companions fell asleep (I think they may have passed out so as not to have to see the face of death so damned often) leaving me there alone to psychically keep us from utter ruin through sheer force of will.

On the trip from Kumily to Munnar, set amidst the hilly tea plantations, Jenn looked at me at one point and said she now understood why everybody was always praying in India.

Sometime towards the end of my travels we were traveling by car to the airport in Cochi, on the coast, to hop a flight to Mumbai. We were on the causeway crossing from Cochi onto the mainland and signs suggested that passing was forbidden. We asked our driver about the rules of the road and he laughed and said that of course there were rules and it was all perfectly safe. “See,” he said, “here it is forbidden to overtake another car,” he pointed. “So nobody does…” and of course, just as he said it, a car pulled out behind us to pass, forcing us and the cars occupying the oncoming lanes to swerve to avoid fiery death. Jenn asked about this and he said, “Oh, they will have to pay a fine….”

Because there are always Highway Patrolmen just waiting to pull you over and issue demerit points.

Add to this contest for space on the roads camels, elephants, herds of cattle, wild packs of dogs, chickens, various pilgrims, holy men, people pulling and pushing and riding on every conceivable form of cart or carriage or coach and you get a mild approximation of what it’s like trying to get around India.

Somehow the whole thing works. The trains carry thirteen million people each day in India. But as crowded as they are, people smile and make room for you as you shoulder your way aboard. The streets are crammed with four or five lanes of traffic in a space that we would fight tight for two or three, and yet everybody just inches forward. Jenn and I were once in a traffic jam involving half a dozen rickshaws, a lorry loaded with grain being pillaged by pigeons, several hand-pulled carts, a taxi and at least one goat, and the whole thing was sorted out with men pushing and pulling the vehicles this way and that until the congestion was overcome and we all went on our merry way.

The other matter pertaining to transportation that amazed me was that almost nobody wore helmets while riding motorcycles and scooters, which there must be 100 million or more in country.

And there must have been some law against riding them alone, because most often two, three, four or five people were stacked atop these things like poultry in the back of a flatbed truck.

Whole families would pile on. Dad driving -- helmet optional -- with mom behind, loosely holding onto a baby, her sari inches from being tangled in a wheel or the drive train; brother(s) and/or sister(s) behind her, their legs dangling for oncoming traffic to more easily maim. And not just on the slow moving back streets of some hill country village, but on the highways and in downtown Mumbai.

Add to this contest for space on the roads camels, elephants, herds of cattle, wild packs of dogs, chickens, various pilgrims, holy men, people pulling and pushing and riding on every conceivable form of cart or carriage or coach and you get a mild approximation of what it’s like trying to get around India.

(the goat at the centre of the traffic jam)

Yes the horns blare endlessly, but not out of anger. They are employed as early warning, saying “I’m here, I’m here, now I’m here,” over and over. Only once while in country did Jenn and I witness anything akin to road rage. A bus full of kids took a corner onto a highway at breakneck speed, forcing our car to drive into on coming traffic, which itself had to take what meagre shoulder existed. Our driver slowed down and peered at the driver of the bus a moment and made a bland, neutral gesture of inquisition with his hands. That’s it. In many North American cities the cops would have been called out at the very least; the air would have been blue wish profanity; gun play would have resulted most metropolitan American cities.

Somehow it all works.

Part of me thinks that it’s a matter of the people’s strong faith; part of me thinks that there is no choice but for it to work. A country of 1.1 billion people. The fourth largest economy in the world. Three wars in the last fifty years with its neighbour Pakistan. The first country outside the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to develop nuclear weapons (in 1974, with the first test explosion called, ironically, the Smiling Buddha).

The country simply has to work.

But that’s the mechanical undertakings of the country.

As interesting are the spiritual endeavors of this vast, complex, contradictory land. Hindus account for about 82% of India, Islam roughly twelve. About two and a half percent of Indians are Christians. Sikhs account for another two percent, while less than one percent of the population are Buddhists. The remaining point is made up of Jains, Parsis (followers of Zoroastrianism) and Jews (who at .0005% of the population still constitute over half a million, more than the 350,000 Jews in all of Canada).

Spirituality isn’t something that happens on Sunday’s in India. It isn’t confined to the church or the synagogue. It is a daily, if not hourly occurrence throughout the country. It is everyday life. Nearly every little town has a temple and temple tank, most have a mosque, its loud speakers announcing prayers five times a day.

(evening hindu ritual in Varkala)

But more than the formal religions and spiritual practices, which have as often divided Indians along bloody and violent fault lines, we observed a powerful current of spirit that seemed to charge everything in the tiny corner of India we visited, and could imagine permeating the rest of the enormous country.

For me that electric current of spirit burst to the surface one evening in Varkala. Jenn and I were sitting atop the cliffs on the Southern part of the town, looking out at the Arabian Sea as the sun slowly sank towards the horizon. It was still hot, and we had been out in the town all day, and then swimming in the ocean, and were sipping cold Kingfisher beer and enjoying the peace at the close of the day. The sun, as is its custom, disappeared before actually meeting the horizon (pollution makes for such lovely sunsets) and as night overtook day, stars began to appear. We watched for an hour as darkness drew up all around us, the stars punctuating the deep blue above. And then something amazing happened: the stars began to conglomerate along the pan flat horizon of the sea.

(fishing boat at sunset in Varkala)

We watched as more and more stars appeared on the horizon, and as the darkness grew it became impossible to discern where the sky ended and the sea began.

They were, of course, the lights from fishing boats. Thousands of them. And they drew across the Arabian Sea for as far as our eyes could roam.

It dawned on me that for each light we could see on the horizon, there were at least one or two men, and maybe many more, settling in for their supper, and then to sleep on the floors of their open boats; a simple awning or tarp all that would separate them from the vastness of heaven.

I’ve long gazed at the heavens and marvelled at our collective arrogance to believe that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. Maybe at this time we are, and maybe we’re the only supposedly intelligent life that struts about yammering on cell phones while fouling our own nests to the point where they are toxically uninhabitable. But to think that of all the ancient and long extinct stars that we can see in the heavens we are the only “life” is pure hubris.

I squinted my eyes a moment as I sometimes do when trying to perceive the world as it really is: a maze of energy and information swirling in clouds like dust. No hard edges; no beginnings and no end. Things became clearer. The single, ocean like soul that spreads across this tiny orb called earth reaches far beyond into the vastness of space. We are all points of light in that soul; all unique and varied waves on that singular ocean. I pressed my eyes shut to better see: nothing separates us one from the other except the dimness of our senses and the prejudice of our training. It’s not a matter of education that is needed to see the world as it really is – one – its simply a matter of experiencing it.

The current of spirit that electrifies India charges us all. It’s just that in India it is inescapable.

I took Jenn’s hand in mine and watched the stars dance across the sea and the sky; the sun set on another enchanted day, the dawn just a matter of a few short hours away.

(the current of spirit that electifies India: above, a Hindu procession in Cochi;
below, Jenn's photo at a Hindu temple in Mumbia)

The Attachment Theory of Suffering

It’s a horrible way to start a piece of writing, but I can’t help myself: in the 1970’s the one-radio-station town I grew up in (Timmins, Ontario) must have played Frankie Valli’s My Eyes Adored You in some kind of masochistic continuous loop so that the lyrics “so close, so close but yet so far…” have been hard wired into my brain’s chemical make up.

Once they are in there, it’s hard to get them out short of an invasive surgical procedure.

So imagine my surprise when I was sitting in meditation on a rock perched on a steep hillside in Munnar, India, at sunrise, when a twist on these immortal words surfaced through the miasma of my mind:

I am so far, so far, and yet so close….

It would be misleading to say that I had expectations of enlightenment heading to India. I actually have no expectations of enlightenment in this lifetime, let alone during a three week vacation.

I know people who claim to be “going for enlightenment” in this lifetime and I admire them, through it does sound a little bit akin to announcing that you are “gong for a latte.”

Enlightenment, in my very limited knowledge of Buddhism, is permanent freedom from suffering. It is a state of continuous liberty from hate, greed and delusion. The enlightened have freed themselves from suffering through a profound understanding of the Four Noble Truths and by following the Eight Fold Path.

This isn’t scholarly or intellectual understanding that might come with study, and the ability to recite the noble truths and eight fold path like the multiplication tables: it is emotional understanding. It’s an experiential understanding. It’s centred in the heart not the head.

This is, in essence, the path to understanding the origin and nature of suffering: that attachment and delusion leads to suffering. Suffering can end when we free ourselves from attachment and from delusion.

Now bear with me a moment while I walk through a brief recitation of some of the Buddhist cannon. I promise to get back to Frankie Valli shortly.

The First Nobble Truth is that suffering exists.

There is the ordinary kind of suffering: pain, sickness, disease, separation from loved ones, not getting the happy meal prize that we really, really want.

There is suffering produced by change: something good comes to and end. We lose a loved one, our marriage falls apart, our favourite TV show gets cancelled.

And then there is suffering as a conditioned state: our attachment to our own ego; our sensations, perceptions, our illusions, our stories, ideas, consciousness and our bodies.

The Second Nobble Truth is that suffering is caused by an attachment to desire or by delusion.

We might be attached to something pleasurable: good food, music, sex, other comforts.

We might be attached to ambition or ego.

We may be attached to the desire to rid ourselves of unpleasant experiences: anger, pain, fear, jealously.

Germaine, it seems to be, to the Second Nobble truth is that we delude ourselves into believing that attaining that which we desire will somehow end our quest for it. But as we all know, the desire is rarely slaked by obtaining that which we seek. We just want more. Even if we what we what more of is less suffering.

The Third Nobble Truth is that suffering can end by letting go our attachment to desire, craving, and delusion. Easier said than done.

The Fourth Nobble Truth is that there is a path to end suffering and that is The Eightfold Path.

The elements of the Eightfold Path are right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

All of this, of course, was whirring around in my head along with Frankie Valli’s song as I watched the sun spill over the crest of forested mountains and paint the tea plantations below me with morning light.

Not.

In fact, what was going through my mind was that I was two weeks into a three week trip to India and I hadn’t had a single deep thought yet. I felt further away from a sense of peace and understanding I had been before I stepped off the plane onto Indian soil.

Peace is really what I am seeking. I’m starting too far back in the pack to hope for, or even really want, enlightenment. I would settle for peace. And bliss: that wondrous sense of connection I feel, from time to time, with all people and places and things.

But instead I was feeling very, very far away from peace, bliss or detachment.

And then it dawned on me.

If one of the Four Nobble Truths to end suffering is detachment, then no wonder I was struggling: I am attached to my own suffering.

Here’s how this works: like everybody, I’ve had my share of experiences that have been painful. I’ve also caused a lot of pain in my life. I’ve been hurt, and I’ve caused a lot of hurt.

I cling to these experiences. I can’t seem to let them go. I relive them over and over again in my head.

When I think about some of the people I have hurt, people who have forgiven me, I still feel deep remorse.

When I think about the times I feel I have been done wrong, I can’t let go of the need to seek resolution from these incidents.

As a result, I grow dour from having hurt others, and spiteful and angry from being hurt. This attachment to suffering in turn creates its own suffering. It’s the epitome of a vicious cycle.

And its one that I know I must break if I am to find the freedom and the peace that I seek. So far, but so close….

So the sun broke over the horizon and spilled its grainy light across the tea plantations and I sat on my rock, amused and somewhat perplexed at the awkward marriage of bad 1970’s pop ballads and a brief, blinding insight. And I’m left wondering: now what? What do I do with this?

Build on it. Tear it down. Take it with me on the path to freedom. Let it go.

(Sunrise in Munnar, India, from my meditation rock)

Waves

We’re chest deep in the Pacific Ocean, our bodies encased like giant black caterpillars in thick wet suits, clinging to powder blue and pink surf boards. Above the sun is shining but here on earth the water, in early April, is frigid. Every now and again the water warmed by my body is joined by a trickle of ocean that seeps down my back or through my gloves and I remember how cold winter really is.

(Surfing near Tofino, Vancouver Island)

Jenn and I are novice surfers but already can taste the hint of perfection that comes when we are able to stand atop a wave and experience how the ocean feels as it moves across the skin of the earth.

We catch a few more waves and ride them and get put through the ringer a few times, and while we’re bobbing along in the ocean Jenn says “the last time we were in the ocean it was the Arabian Sea.”

(Father and sons, Varkala, India)

Then the water was warm. We were in Varkala, India. We dove through the breaks and floated north in the current; the afternoon sun was so hot it was hard to be out in it.

Varkala is a temple town. For more than 2000 years Hindu’s have made a pilgrimage to Janardhana Temple; each morning and evening they descend the temple’s steps and make their way through the crowded streets to the ocean where they receive the puja blessing, and where many then wade into the ocean as part of their religious ritual.

I don’t know the significance. I’ve read that in the sacred waters of the Arabian Sea Hindu’s can plead for salvation for the souls of their departed loved ones.

What is clear is that these water’s are holy. Step into these waves, and you are stepping into healing waters of salvation.

But then, so are all the waters of this sacred earth.

The waves break against our bodies and in doing so, carry away a little bit of us; cleanse us of what hurts us, what makes us afraid, what comes between us and that which we love. And these healing waters carry something to us as well; the buoyant peace born from the knowledge that all human kind are ripples on the sea of creation.

(Rio at sunset, French Beach, Vancouver Island)

Rio and Silas understand this intuitively, and may someday even create their own language of expression for this miracle. Both boys have become so much the ocean; are often most complete when racing the shoreline waves on the southern tip of Vancouver Island.

Imagine, says Deepak Chopra, that all life is an ocean; you and I are waves. Temporary, forming and moving, and diminishing. He says this in the context of Quantum Physics, but from the perspective of Hindu mysticism: we are localized expressions of the life’s yearning to exist; the universe’s restless effort to organize the mass of energy and information born at the moment of creation, of the Big Bang, into momentary concentrations of existence. Temporary, but beautiful.

We are waves. We descend into waves to seek salvation. We ride waves to find perfection. Sometimes we sink beneath them. Sometimes we emerge cleansed and whole. Sometimes we emerge holy.

(Pilgrim, Varkala, India)

The Perfect Nation of Tea

Tea fuels India.

As a life long tea drinker, one thing seemed certain when Jenn and I decided to travel to the sub continent: I would be able to get a decent cup of tea just about anywhere, anytime. I wasn’t disappointed.

After stepping off the plane from Mumbai to Goa at 6am, after 36 hours in transit – three of which where spent sleeping on the floor of the Mumbai airport – I was handed a cup of chai tea by Lisa, mere seconds after getting a hug and kiss from Jenn. I was pretty happy to see all three members of my welcoming committee.

It was the beginning of a delicious love affair: with India, with Jenn all over again, and with a Devine brew called Chai tea.

Some believe that tea is as old as India itself, though the first documentation of the cultivation of tea comes in the Rāmāyaṇa, a Sanskrit epic tale that explores such themes as dharma, duty, and how to become the ideal person, servant, wife, husband or king. Part of the Hindu canon, the Rāmāyaṇa dates to 700 BC. In my world, becoming perfect at anything would involve the consumption of a great many cups of tea.

The first western cultivation of tea in India can be traced to 1837, when the British East Indian Company established the first English tea garden in Chabua, in Upper Assam.

Along with Dejarling and Assam varieties of tea, India is most famous for its Chai Tea brews, which you can purchase in upscale restaurants or from Chai-whalhas on bicycles, in trains, on street corners, or just about everywhere else in the country. On my first night in India, in Hampi -- the imperial capital of The Great Vijayanagar Empire -- a boy not much older than Rio and with a smile as wide as the sunset, offered us no end of opportunities to enjoy a cup of Chai while we watched the day close over ancient ruins and temples. The next night, when Jenn, Lisa and I climbed to the top of a Matunga Hill to watch the sun set from Veerabharda Temple, a man was set up with stove and pots and little stainless steel cups to peddle Chai to pilgrims for ten rupees a glass.

(Jenn took this photo of Chai tea being served from the back of a bike in Fort Cochi)

Chai tea on the train, though, is one of India’s greatest ideas. At irregular intervals men lugging 20 gallon stainless steel urns make their way through the cars; their coming is heralded by the sing-song chant of “chai, chai, chai tea,” and by the pungent aroma of the brews herbs. You get your ten rupees out when you hear that song.

No longer is Chai served on the trains in the legendary ceramic cups that you launch from the window when you are done as a means of stimulating economic activity: now it comes in flimsy plastic cups. But it is, quite simply, the mark of a great civilization that the tea comes to you rather than you having to go to the tea.

Chai tea is a brew of black tea, milk and sugar, along with cinnamon, black pepper corns, ginger, cloves, and cardamom pods. Like laws and sausages, maybe it’s best not to watch too closely at how Chai tea is brewed:

“At a stall men are brewing tea, they put the tea, the milk and the sugar all in together, boil it and strain it through what looks like an old sock. It has an odd taste that grows on you,” says by Quentin Crewe in Letters from India.

(Chai tea being brewed in Cochi: note the old sock....)

The secret, according to some, is in the freshness of the spices. We traveled through some of the countries finest spice growing regions, and witnessed first hand the careful cultivation and sorting of each of these fine plants.

I suppose another secret would be fresh socks.

To enjoy a cup of tea is equal parts flavour and location. To this day I can remember cups of tea I have enjoyed in some magical spots: the ‘breakfast rock’ at Murphy’s Point Provincial Park, for one. Though purchased almost twenty years ago now, I still use the blue and white loon mug I bought that summer in a shop in Smith Falls, Ontario and drank tea from each morning while watching the sun rise and the world come to life from my granite perch overlooking Loon Lake.

Others: Cups of tea brewed on day hikes from a base camp in the Whaleback, in southern Alberta, with my friend Mark Holmes; morning tea in the Stillwater Canyon, in south-eastern Utah.

Now, add to this list possibly my best cup of tea: at a lonely tea stop along the treacherously winding road from Kumily to Munnar, where the cardamom grew tall right along the side of the road. It hadn’t been my best day in India, and I was worn out from the twisting road and the Indian predilection for overtaking diesel-belching Lorries while going uphill on blind corners in an under powered vehicle. The driver stopped to let us have a look around at the cardamom forest and we ordered a cup of Chai from a woman brewing the mix in a dark, concrete bunker on the road side.

It was advertised as ‘cardamom tea’, and it was, beyond a doubt, the best cup of Chai that I had while in India, and possibly the best cup of tea I’ve ever had in my life. She served it in a stout glass and it was thick and creamy and heavenly on the pallet.

(Possibly the best cup of tea I've ever had....)

From this wayward tea stall we carried on to Munnar, home of the Tata Tea Corporation – subsidiary of the Tata group, which is among India’s largest corporations - one of the largest tea conglomerates in the world (in 2000 they bought UK based Tetley Tea, in a nice twist of historic irony). There we stayed in a small but charming resort perched on the side of a steep mountain overlooking tea plantations as far as the eye could see.

Many of us are drawn to pastoral landscapes, and the hills of Munnar are bucolic to the extreme. The hills are voluptuously feminine in their undulating contours; the quilt of tea plants give the landscape a tidy, orderly appearance while the insanely snaking roads provide a sharp contrast to its systematical grids.

(Above, along the winding road between Kumily and Munnar;
below, the view from where we stayed outside of Munnar)

Tea is grown in dense plantations that flow over the hill country like a slightly disjointed lattice. Its beauty is beguiling. Make no mistake: this is agro business at its very best, and very worst. Tea is largely grown in monocultures, and the volume of hardwood forests that must have been clear cut to produce it are staggeringly vast. To its credit, however, tea has very deep tap roots that reportedly do a marvellous job holding the soil intact. Tea is hand picked every ten days or so, and as such, provides solid employment for mostly women of villages like Munnar. Ten million people rely on tea for their livelihood in India. Work on a tea plantation is among the highest paying job in agriculture in the country. That being said, it is a subservient and still barely subsistent existence, as the shanties of Munnar attest. Like all agri-products, it would be best to source organic and fair trade tea to encourage healthy communities and a healthy landscape.

(Shacks in the town of Munnar)

That being said, I never stopped a Chai Whalla on the train to ask if his tea was organic. Thick, rich steaming cups of heaven for the equivalent of a few pennies: who but the most morally righteous could contest such a custom?

And for the record, I never met an Indian man who wore socks.