Perfect: the way my children put their arms around my neck as they are falling asleep; the rush of endorphins when I finish a long run; the look in the eyes of my partner, my lover, when she sees me across the airport after we’ve been apart for a few days, or a few weeks.
They are every day moments. Perfect: making coffee and bringing it to Jenn as she is blow-drying her hair in the morning; the deep satisfaction I experience when I work with people who are trying to make the world a better place, and my service helps over come an obstacle that’s been vexing them for some time; the sparkle in my boyz eyes when they are running on a beach.
Miracles are the experience of many perfect moments strung together like a necklace of pearls, each one unique, together making up something wholly beautiful, wondrous.
Easter is a day of perfect moments. But perfect moments can’t be separated from challenges. Challenge is what makes perfection possible.
A few days before, while driving Rio to school, he says “remember when we just had one house?” I watch him in the rear view mirror. “Yes,” I say. He says, looking out the window, “that was nice.”
I’m tempted to tell him that it’s all my fault. Some days, its how I feel. That it’s my fault that he has to go back and forth between Kat and Andy’s home and Jenn and mine several times a week. But I don’t. I say nothing.
Life is filled with such challenges. Love is rarely perfect. The bank balance is seldom inspiring. The path forward never comes with a map and directions.
So when a few days latter Jenn and I load the boyz in the car for the drive up the coast to China Beach, I’m cognisant of family, of work, of love. The boyz fall asleep on the drive up, and Jenn and I chat about serious stuff, grown-up stuff. She puts her hand on my neck as we drive, and I feel the hot rush of passion that I feel for her twenty times a day. We weave along the winding road, the sunlight on the water is crystalline in appearance. I like the way she looks at me.
When we reach the parking lot Rio and Silas are awake so we give them a snack and then troop down through the forest to the beach. Rio runs ahead, darts back, and then bounds ahead again, like a border collie herding errant sheep. Silas trundles along under his own steam most of the way. We stop and gaze up at a gigantic Sitka spruce before descending crude stairs to the rocky beach.
It’s not a warm day, and there is a little wind, but Rio immediately heads for the water to race along the shore, soaking his feet and dancing along the tide line. Silas plunks himself down with his diggers and moves rocks around. Jenn and I lie back against a log, my arms around her, her head on my chest. We prepare some lunch, and open two cold bottles of beer. We lounge there, watching the boyz, watching the horizon, watching the Olympic Mountains in their snow-bound resplendence across the Straight of Juan de Fuca. When the boyz come over, tummies grumbling, and we all eat something together leaning against a log.
Jenn looks at me and smiles and asks, “You’re happy right now?”
I tell her that I simply couldn’t be happier.
It is a perfect moment. It is one of many perfect moments strung together, each something as impossibly simple as finger tips on the bark on a five-hundred year old tree, reading the Globe and Mail in bed, or being kissed gently, innocently by the woman you love bottomlessly.
When we’ve finished our lunch Jenn announces that she and the boyz will head down the beach to explore. This leaves me alone to play Peter Cottontail. We already had an Easter egg hunt that morning, the boyz following a trail of eggs from their room around the house and down to two golden bunnies waiting for them in the living room (“You are a great father,” Jenn tells me after I’ve hidden the eggs before bed the night before. I believe her.)
When the trio returns, I’m reading a book and ignoring the trail of brightly coloured eggs that leads along the crest of the log that I’m resting against. Silas spots them first, and the hunt is on. Rio has learned to let his younger brother find a few eggs. The track of eggs leads down the log and into the pebble beach behind it. The treasures are clustered on shells and on drift wood and in among the rocks.
When the search is over, Rio leads us back down the beach to show me a rock he and Silas have found at the tide line where they can be surrounded by the sea momentarily. They run up and down the sand, in bliss.
That’s what a perfect moment is for me; bliss. When I’m sitting on the beach with the woman I love, with my children, I feel the wash of cold fire pass through me and for a moment I feel the astonishing reality of all experience. We are all together a part of one moment of perfection called human existence. That we can actually feel the pulse of no-separation, of love, of entanglement, is one of the miracles of being human. (It’s possible that all other life on earth feels this pulse all the time, and that we have simply forgotten as our journey takes us further and further away from our animal nature.) I feel it, from time to time, and am hungry for it. I crave it.
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