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)