Run, Cry, Sleep

I'm deep, deep in the woods again. Circling back through uncertainty. Circling back through vulnerability. Two years of intense change, of emotional rollercoaster, doesn't just abruptly screetch to a halt. I remind myself that "faith is a bird that feels dawn breaking, but sings while it is still dark."

Sometimes it feels as through dawn is so far off. I feel as through the world is crumbling around me while the elusive bird Faith fritters its time away deeper in the darkness of the woods. Of course, the world isn't really crumbling around me, but to me it feels that way. I’m melodramatic, and a sensitive creature. I take things too seriously. Never the less, I can’t help but fall into the pit from time to time. Tuesday is the nadir. I can’t even get out of Rio’s school without weeping.

He’s so beautiful and sometimes I feel like I hardly know him. I’m walking down the hall after dropping him in class and my eyes begin to fill with dew.

Work, love, family. So much joy, sometimes even bliss, but not without a cost.

I drive to the trailhead of Mount Doug, intent on banishing my grief with motion, with momentum, but instead just sit there, staring into the dark forest.

Sometimes when I’m frustrated, when I’m angry with myself, I want to feel physical hurt to mask the emotional pain. I want my legs to ache, my lungs to burn. I want to punish myself. Penance. With a dash of redemption at the end, please.

“We’re not out of the woods yet….” I remember those words, written just a month ago.

I call James, and can’t get through a sentence. He tells me that I am pure love. I put the phone down, believing him, but wondering what good its doing me?

Run.

Finally, after half an hour, I slip into my running gear and jog up the trial, feeling light on my feet despite the fear in my heart. The woods are wet – Monday was the wettest December day on record on much of Vancouver Island – and the trails are so saturated with water that they seep under each footfall. I run easily through the heady smelling woods, bright with sunlight and gleaming moisture this morning.

I’m above the beach when my phone rings – I don’t normally run with it, but this morning its a life line - so I stop and answer it. Another friend calling in response to my pleas for help. So much love. And yet, I’ve never experienced such pain. I sit on a rock and weep while talking.

Further into the woods. I run through tears, up the back slope, pushing hard through the hills, feeling the comforting rush of endorphins pulsing through my veins. I splash through ankle deep streams where there once were trails, pulling the moist air into my lungs.

When I’m done I feel the comforting buzz of energy through my body, but I also feel empty. No sleep, no food, and half a dozen kilometers of hard trail. I drive home, stand in the shower and let the hot water pour over my body, and then my sister and I drive downtown for lunch.

We sit in a diner and talk about our family. We talk about our parents divorce when we were teenagers, and she reminds me of a time when were both very young and my mother threatened to leave. I remember our parents yelling about divorce throughout much of my young life, but this specific instance exists nowhere in my memory. Chantel reminds me that she and I sat on her bed with my father while my mom made preparations to leave. How could I forget that?

Ten years later my father left.

So much leaving. So much walking away.

This pain isn’t just about the hard road that I am walking, but the miles that have accumulated over the last thirty six years.

I tell Chantel about an extraordinary experience with acupuncture a few months ago when my Chinese Doctor put her hand on my chest and said, “you are safe here.”

Cry.

I can’t even get those words out. I’m sitting in a diner and I can’t even look at my little sister. Finally I get the words out and have to leave.

Is it possible that a child’s yearning for emotional safety can become the man’s?

We walk a while, and then I head to the Victoria Natural Healing Clinic to see another Chantelle, my acupuncturist. I’m here ostensibly for treatment of my back, which I wrenched a few days before, an old grievance that dates back almost twenty years. But that’s not really why I’m here. She asks how I am and it starts all over again.

She listens to me intently, really hearing me, and then invites me to lay down on my back on the table and begins her treatment.

“I’m doing a different treatment today,” she says. “I’m doing a treatment to make you stronger. So you can do what you have to do.” In the past we’ve worked to help me let go; today, its about holding together.

The first four needles go in with their buzzing warmth, and I can feel the tears again. I’m so fucking tired of tears that I fight them. She invites them. “Don’t hold any of your emotions back,” she says, her hand on my arm.

I let go.

She puts in another twenty or thirty needles – in my forehead, my neck, my arms, hands, up my sternum and in my belly, down my legs, in my ankles, my feet and my toes. I can feel the energy pulsing. Tears flowing.

Chantelle sweeps the tears aside, dabbing at them as they pool in my ears. I am suddenly calm. Music. She slips from the room. Heat. I can feel the heat lamp on my chest, my belly.

Sleep.

I am fading to silence.

I have to let go, without giving up.

There is nothing in our lives to prepare us for such a bewildering paradox. You either hold on, or you let go. Most of my life I’ve held on, held on, with a death grip, and then finally, in a spasm of defeat and relief, just let go. Gave up.

Disappear. The music evaporates. The room fades. I dissolve into nothing at all.

I am gone for some time.

“You have to be strong,” I hear Chantelle at my side. I come back from stillness.

I can feel the meridians in my body coursing with chi, with life, with love.

Strong for what?

To sit through uncertainty? Again? For how much longer? To open to vulnerability?

Its twenty four hours before the answer comes.

To be selfless.

To not leave. Work, love, family. To hold things together. To keep my promises.

I am reminded of Barry Lopez’s book Desert Notes: “I see that you are already tired. But you must stay. This is the pain of it all. You can’t keep leaving.”

I will not leave. And I won’t be pushed away. We’re going to figure things out.

What I must do is let go of my own fear, my insecurity, and be strong and courageous and give what is needed – unconditional love – in order to break the cycle of uncertainty and vulnerability.

Faith is a bird. Dawn is just around the bend in the trail.

Racing Waves

The first cross country race I ever participated in was a 3km run when I was in grade three or four. I was nine, maybe ten years old.

I remember training for the race several days a week that fall, the sun just up, the crisp Northern Ontario mornings biting into lungs and legs as a handful of classmates and I plodded through Jack pine forests and through frozen wetlands. Some mornings in the shower after those runs our legs bled where blades of grass like razors had left their mark.

I finished in the middle of the pack for that race, both on my team, and for the event.

The next race I competed in with this past June. Time lapse: twenty seven years, give or take a year.

It was the Mount Doug Gut Buster. A hot June day, the race was on my home turf, a hill I’ve run over at least five hundred times since moving to Victoria a few years ago. At eleven kilometers, with three accents and descents of the bulbous dome, it was a grind, and the heat left me sapped. I came in sixty ninth of one hundred and twenty runners.

Middle of the pack again.

I can’t say that the Mount Doug race was fun while I was running it. It was hard. I remember that while dragging myself along the back stretch, through dark trees towards the finish, someone said to me “pick it up!” She told me saying that was easier than passing me, which she eventually did. I simply couldn’t run any faster. I passed out that afternoon while my two sons bounced on me.

Over the weekend I ran in my fourth race ever, my third of the season. (I ran the Royal Victoria 8K in October as a last minute “something-to-do-on-a-Sunday” sort of thing.)

This past weekend was the Gunner Shaw Classic Cross Country Race at Thetis Lake. The location is another favorite place of mine to run, with winding trails that zig zag up oak dotted hills and down through dark, lichen strewn woods. The Gunner Shaw has a reputation as being a bit of a tough race with a rather unnecessary, but interesting, splash through a thigh deep swamp at its mid point. This plunge, aside from reeking of fetid algae, provides the added bonus of turning the legs into blocks of cement.

The final dash to the finish is through the foreshore of the Thetis Lake beach, which starts out at nearly crotch depth, and ends calf deep. Some sprint to the finish. Several people took a dive.

I finished in the middle of the pack – 205th of 460 - running the 9km race in 45 minutes. Josh reminded me that the Gunner Shaw attracts a pretty tough field: there were several Olympic athletes in the race. It was won in just over 30 minutes.

I was grumpy all afternoon, failing, I think, to properly dehydrate and replenish the system afterwards. Instead I jumped right back into single parenting.

My grouchy state was also because I didn’t feel I ran as well as I might have. I felt drained of energy before I even got started!

While running I kept pulling myself back to the here and the now, repeating over and over: “Where am I? Right here. What time is it? Right now. What am I? This moment.” But inevitably, as the weariness crept in, my mind drifted.

I forgot that I was running in a favorite place. I forgot that when I get tired while running I try to pull energy in from the rocks, the trees, and the water. I take what I can get. Instead I just tried to concentrate on being nice to people. I'm really not much of a competator: when I hear someone coming up behind me (often) I make sure they have room to pass and tell them they're doing great as they go by. Its about the phun.

On Sunday the boyz and I ventured out to Fisgard Lighthouse National Historic Site. Only a few minutes from town, we’d never been. Silas is obsessed with Lighthouses’ these days, though I don’t know that he’s ever seen anything larger than a navigation buoy. Fisgard was the first lighthouse built on Canada’s west coast, and was operational for 100 years unitl the mid 1950s. Its on the same site is Fort Rodd Hill Naitonal Historic Site, which served as part of the defensive system for the Esquimalt Naval Base through World War Two. It’s a pretty cool place for two little boys and their dad to spend an afternoon.




We visited the Lighthouse, which was lovely and immaculate and well presented by Parks Canada, and the boys dutifully posed for a picture, and I think Silas’ was pretty impressed. But all Rio wanted to do was go to the beach, which is hard for me to argue with, so we did.




There I cracked open a thermos of tea (I did wish that it was hot chocolate and Irish Cream for a moment) while Silas collected shells and Rio raced back and forth along the shore.

His running was so completely free. He would stand on a log along the tide line and as the small waves washed over the gravel, he would launch himself along the beach, jumping and laughing as he always does when we are at the sea shore. Its one of the things I love most about this dear, beautiful child, and there are many, many things I love.




When he stopped to catch his breath I asked him what he was doing? “Racing waves,” he replied matter-of-factly.

“What for?”

“Its for my exercises,” he said.

“Is it fun?”

He simply nodded.

“Do you ever win?” I asked.

“I always win,” he said, his pants wet to his knees, his boots sloshing with salt water.

And off he ran again.

I can’t wait until he and I run together through the woods. And we won’t be racing the clock, or each other, but simply racing for life, racing the trees that blur past, racing the waves, racing the spinning earth. At East Sooke Park we’ve run along the sandy foreshore for hours, jumping logs and dodging boulders and getting our feet soaked and laughing like fools. It’s the purest expression of running I know. Its freedom incarnate. Its joy. Its bliss.

We take a break from running for a snack. Rio finds a rock that he brings to my attention. I asked the boyz to find something beautiful that we can bring to Jenn, whom I love deeply and profoundly, and who will arrive in Victoria in a few short days. We always try to find something beautiful for her when she isn’t here. Beach glass, heart shaped stones, something lost overboard far out to sea. Today it’s a lovely russet coloured rock with green stripes. We take a picture of us with it to send to her.



What I found that was beautiful on that beach that day was a reminder of why I run. I’ve only recently enjoyed (the aftermath of) racing. For much of the last few years running has simply been the way I dissolve myself into the splendor of nature; to feel with my body the reality that I am nothing more than nature moving through itself. To let my heart and head have some time to do their work without my constant intrusions; to let my body do what comes most naturally – be completely free.

Eleven Skies

Its starting to sink in. I can relax into being loved. I can let go of my fear, my apprehension, my jealously. I can accept that I deserve this. I deserve to feel this good. I can trust myself: I won’t blow this because I think that I don’t merit feeling so adored. And I can get comfortable with vulnerability and uncertainty -- it will always remain -- and simply accept that these questions enhance, rather than detract, from the experience of loving, and being loved.

This week it's been a story told under eleven skies.

First Sky: Victoria, the mottled cloud cover, dappled autumn leaves, rain. Under this sky I walk up the ramp and board a flight to Alberta. Its only been a week since my lover left, but it feels like a month; a year.

Second Sky: Above the clouds, the Rockies hidden below, glimpses of familiar ridge lines I’ve walked in a previous life time. Poetry. Longing.

Third Sky: Calgary, my lover greets me at the airport. Time is suspended in her eyes when I see her. I can’t say a word, but only kiss her face, her eyes, her mouth. We embarrass people in the parking lot.

Fourth Sky: the Bow Valley. It was home for fourteen years, so familiar, but so strange. The last time I was here was one of the most painful days of my life. Now, its just mountains and forests; at once so familiar and yet so foreign. And its where my lover lives, so its also paradise.

Fifth Sky: Day Two. Breakfast in Banff at three in the afternoon.

Sixth Sky: driving up the darkening valley we let fear and jealously and guilt creep into our hearts. Darkness falls early. Hell, we just ate breakfast! But the days are so short. Its so easy almost all of the time, but when its not, its really frightening. I fear the fear. I don’t want to feel this after so many months of vulnerability. But with the open heart comes tiny wounds, healed swiftly by loving hands.

Seventh Sky: We practice retail therapy in Lake Louise. Visit friends. Drive back down valley in the darkness. I forgot about snow squalls.

Eighth Sky: Harvie Heights, where I lived for six years: we delight in the carved stone of Fairholme Canyon, its polished walls pocked with fossils, its bends and plunge pools and narrow slit of sky like the embrace of an old friend. New love, my last love, here now in my arms.

Ninth Sky: Too swiftly our last evening comes, and under a fat moon we curl into one another. I don’t want to leave. I just found you! I just found you, I want to cry. That very morning I burst into tears at the joy of this discovery. The following morning the sun rises over the tentacles of the city as we drive towards the airport. Its like time stands still when we are in each other’s company. Its so damned easy.

Tenth Sky: The moment I step through security I want to turn around and run back. I feel the lump in my throat and the ache that starts in my heart and seeks a place to end. Then Vancouver, where I work with a client, and then….

Eleventh Sky: Victoria. Under a powder blue sky I fly home and await the arrival of Rio and Silas. How I wished that I was walking through the door to the sound of ice cubes chiming their happy song in a glass, and her arms thrown around me. Love, bottomless.

We go to bed early, and by 8:30 I am drifting in and out of sleep, moving between Silas’ and Rio’s beds. Rio asks me to massage has back, and gives detailed instructions on what he likes: “Now make your fingers tickle me,” he asks. I feel his body slacken as sleep settles over him. I smile at him and point to the ceiling, the meaning understood between the boy and the man: I love you as big as the sky. Then he says, his eyes closed, “I love you as big as eleven skies,” and I close my eyes too, imagining the vastness of such a love.

A Thousand Normal Things

The half moon crests above Grotto Mountain. The air is crisp – I haven’t felt this kind of air in my lungs for a few years. In the morning I run the trails along the bench lands and mull over the fact that I’m not in as good a shape as I thought I was, and I don’t really care.

Catching up with the world after a few days in hibernation: I look at Asha Hope’s blog. My friend and colleague Will Horter, and his partner Claudia Campbell had a little baby girl on Thursday, born 15 weeks premature, and less than 800 grams in weight. The next few months will be a daily trial for little Hope, and her lovely parents. Looking at the photos on the blog of Asha Hope in her sealed incubator, I couldn’t help but imagine how much Claudia and Will must long to hold her. My lover's arms around me, I close my eyes and say a prayer for her.





Then I checked in with the Facebook page of friends Joel Solomon and Shivon Robinsong. On Wednesday of last week, Shivon gave Joel one of her kidney’s (in a hospital, with Doctors looking on) as his were slowly shutting down, the result of a life long disease that has finally caught up with him. Both are well, buoyed by an outpouring of love, as Shivon’s kidney now pumps away inside Joel.

Out of habit, after visiting Asha Hope’s blog and Joel and Shivon’s Facebook page, I clicked on the Globe and Mail site, and as I was doing so I caught myself thinking: “I wonder if there will be any news about Asha Hope?” Then I shook my head at how asinine a thought that was. There is nothing really important in the news. There is never any report on the thousand normal things that make up each and every one of our days and nights: triumph and tragedy, hope and despair, joy and sorrow, pain and bliss. The magic of life, the ecstasy and wonder of every single moment.

The sun sets behind Mount Rundle. The sky is indigo except where stars prick the tapestry of dusk. Its just another day. Another thousand normal, extraordinary, heart wrenchingly beautiful things.

Faith

“Faith is like a bird that feels dawn breaking, but sings while it is still dark.”

~ Kalil Gibran


Somehow I just believed.

Somehow, despite months of darkness, I knew that there was light.

We knew that there was light.

Early moments: lying on the sand at Botanical beach, the heat of July soaking us, the pockets of water that team with life stretched out towards the rippled horizon. She rests in my arms, her skin under my fingers. Then we’re exploring, she is showing me the secret world of tide pools, places I might otherwise walk past with merely a glance. Its not the life beneath the water that I marvel at, but the life dancing in her eyes.

That’s the moment I fell in love. That very moment.

It was like falling into one of those tide pools. A shock. Unexpected. This wasn’t supposed to happen. But like morning's swift approach, there was no struggling against it.

Early moments: the dizzy delirium of falling. The way she looks at me. Speaks to me. I can feel the love though she can’t say the word. Not yet.

Early moments: racing down the highway, out of Strathcona Park, Moby’s Hotel filling my ears, the windows open, the sun shining in, and I’m going to pick her up on my way to Victoria. Pure delight. Pure light.

In those early moments I saw a lifetime of possibility. This is how I want to feel for the rest of my life.

It was that light, that possibility that helped me, helped us, navigate very troubled waters. The darkest moments before the dawn.

She asked me to believe in her. To trust her. It became my mantra. I would meditate on those words: I trust you; I believe in you.

I believed in us.

I had felt dawn breaking. I knew what dawn felt like. Soft fingertips. Loving eyes. Belief beyond words.

During the darkness I held onto that belief. That trust.

First light came a month ago. It seems like we move in 28 day cycles, she and I.

I had been prepared to let go, forever, if that is what was needed for her to be at peace. Her peace was what I dreamed of, and was prepared to give her, even if it meant goodbye once and for all.

But when she walked through my door, I knew that my faith, my belief, my trust in us had been vindicated. She knew too.

Later that week she said “look at me.” I was already. She said, “really look at me.” And then she told me that she loved me, was in love with me, and that I was the man she didn’t know that she had been searching for her whole life, but had somehow found.

Faith is a bird….

Mornings in her arms. We slip down the Oregon Coast. Become enchanted by sea otter play. Have normal nights. Dream together. Bliss. Watch salmon spawn with my boyz.

It was easy. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it was easy to have faith. Despite the darkest of times, the fear, the vulnerability, it was easy to have faith.

We’re not out of the woods yet. There will be many dawns that we must hold our faith through before morning finally comes for good. Maybe morning never really lasts, but like the diurnal rhythm we all share, we simply pass through mornings and nights over and over, believing, trusting, and falling more deeply in love.

Deeper into Deserve

Today was a gift. It was a stollen day. I was supposed to fly to Vancouver for a meeting, but the gig got postponed until Friday, so I had a day without appointments. A storm that was supposed to blow in this morning got stalled up Island, and its only now, at the end of the afternoon, that the sky is darkening. The morning was bright and clear and crisp; a perfect autumn day. I ran.

I didn’t really want to at first. I was a little stuck, so I started slowly in a lazy circumnavigation of Mount Doug. Maybe it was the colour of the big leaf maple leaves littering the forest floor, or maybe it was the crack in the air that pushed my lungs out and let my blood soak in lots of O2; whatever it was, I negotiated another threshold that I wasn’t expecting to cross today, and it was exhilerating.

I’ve written elsewhere that I realized just before Kathleen and I separated last August that I’ve spent most of my life believing I don’t deserve success. In life, love, business, in family matters. I’ve never felt that I deserved to fail. Only that success, true success, was supposed to be beyond my reach.

This morning, running along the forested trail on the north-east side of Mount Doug, it suddenly dawned on me that I’ve been successful in love, and not allowed myself to let it last. I have had women in my life who have loved me. Who were tender with me. Who adored me. I even felt safe with them. And I left them. I had what seemed like good reasons, both at the time, and now. I wouldn't make those decisions differently now. You can’t go back and make decisions over, and I’m not so foolish as to second guess what were carefully weighed choices at the time. But I was loved. And I left.

Something in me seems to fundamentally believe that even when I have a degree of success – for no relationship will ever be perfect – that I have to wreck it. Subconsciously (at least until this morning) I determine that I don’t deserve something so good (I can’t believe you’re with me….) and I set up conditions to make the relationship fail. I cheat. I get restless. I let my anger, my fear overtake me. I forget to be kind, to love. To love.

This might be overly simplistic. I might need to think this through, but I’ve got to say, I am really done with that. I'm done wrecking my own sucess because somehow I fear it.

I have love in my life now too. I feel safe. I feel adored. I long for the barriers to drop away. I long for what I know we both deserve.

As I raced through the stolen morning of sunshine, a riot of colour and an empty day on the calendar, I decided that I will not destroy my own sucess again. I will not settle for anything less than love in my life. I’m open to how that shows up. I’m accepting that it may appear differently than what I expect. I know it will have its ups and downs. But I deserve to be loved, to be treated tenderly, and to be treated with kindness. And my lover deserves the same: to not be subjected to my anger, to my fear.

My children deserve to have a father who is envoleoped by love. My friends deserve that too. So do the people I work with who are trying to save the world.

I am at my best when I feel loved. When I feel safe. When I am adored. When I can love, give comfort, pleasure, and adoration in return. I’m ready to accept that I deserve this. I wish that we all could see that we deserve love.

And when I experience it next, I won’t run away.

The 29th Day

Today is day 28.

I hadn’t really thought of it until a few days ago. I looked at the calendar tonight and saw that it had been four weeks, one full moon, since something so beautiful, so tender, so difficult, passed out of my life.

Maybe forever.

Maybe not.

It has been a very challenging, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes agonizing 28 days. Not just for me. I’m not alone. Another shares this sorrow. But I can only write of my own journey, it’s the only I know. Even though that knowledge is so imperfect.

“What pattern is this teaching you about?” I hear Dan’s voice in my head. It was just this week that he brought me to the brink of tears – likely sobbing tears – in the middle of the Royal Roads Café. Loving bastard.

What patterns?

That my challenge is to stay. My challenge is to stick it out. Leaving would be easier. By no means easy. Just easier. Leaving would mean some short term pain, agony, but it would pass in time, and I could move on. There would be scar tissue. Some things simply don’t heal any more. But in a month, or two, or maybe three, I could move on. That’s my pattern. When the going gets tough, I walk away. I’m choosing to stay this time. As long as I can.

Sometimes the right thing to do is stop. Sometimes, things aren't right and the only thing to do is stop. "Know when to stop," advises Lao Tzu. Fine. Right now doesn't feel like the right time for me to walk.

Patterns....

That I fear fear itself. It is ice water in my veins. Fear closes my heart. Fear is the opposite of love. Fear kills love. I dread the cold hand of fear on my chest, on my throat. When I feel it taking its grip, I do anything I can to not feel it. But I am learning to invite fear in. Instead of running of late, I am learning to “sit through” fear’s icy wash. What’s the worst that can happen?

I guess I could die of fright….Likely not.

That I like quick fixes. I remember one morning receiving an email that released the icy wash of fear through me and before I had finished reading the note, I was reaching for the phone, making it worse. The thought of sitting through my day with the intensely uncomfortable emotions that the note, my own stupidity, and the uncertainty it evoked was unbearable. But my haste to try and fix the problem only made it worse. Lao Tzu advises restraint as one of the three pillars of the Tao te Ching. Step back, he says. Wait. Sit through it.

That uncertainty and vulnerability are also my nemesis’s, and that I seem to attract them into my life.

So what are these patterns teaching me?

I’ve been pretty focused on the notion of self referral of late, and that my attempts at staying completely centred in my own soul, my own spirit has lead me to some pretty sophisticated forms of self loathing. I’m in the middle of one of the most emotionally challenging situations of my life, and I’m beating myself up because I can’t stay detached from its ebbs and flows! One day I’m high as a kite, and the next I’m whale poop, and brow beating myself for not staying “at the centre of the river” as Deepak Chopra advises. Well, it might take a little practice to master the whole self referral gig. Go easy.

That I’ve got to love myself before I can really, honestly love anybody else.

“The object of your practice should first of all be yourself,” says Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Han in True Love. “Your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself.”

I still don’t really. I still don’t really think that I deserve to be loved. I catch glimpses of it, where I know that I deserve, but I’m not quite there yet. Sit through that too.

That being said, I’m starting to learn more about love. Tonight, my two year old Silas learned how to say love. He’s felt it since the moment of his birth, I’m certain. He is love. He is made of love. We all are. But tonight as we wrestled on the couch, and I told him over and over again that I loved him, he repeated it, and then wouldn’t stop saying it. He would throw his meaty arms around my neck and kiss me and say “I luv you dada.” And then he would try it out on his big brother Rio. And then say “Luv you momma. Luv you An[d]y.” There’s a lot of that energy to go around.

(Love manifest)

I’ve always maintained that love is really the only thing in the world that mattered. Now I’m beginning to believe that matter is really nothing but love, as energy, combined with the imprint of information that has existed since the beginning of time, taking shape in the material world.

That means I am love manifest.

I’m good with that.

I’ve learned how deeply I am loved. So many friends. So much joy. So much love. This life, these friends, this love. I am humbled by the mystery.

I’ve learned a lot about joy, and about sorrow in the last 28 days. “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain,” says Kahlil Gibran.

I’m ready to be filled up with joy.

I’ve learned that I can be pretty fucking selfish. I get caught up in my own pain, and forget to consider that someone else is in pain too. It blinds me. It feeds my insecurity.

I’ve learned that I can run from all of these things: sorrow, pain, vulnerability, fear, but that I can’t really. I can run, and fast, and hard, especially when I’m not loving myself as much as I deserve, especially when I want to feel physical pain rather than emotional or spiritual pain. Then I can run for hours, and let the ache in my body, and the numbing flood of endorphins mask the ache in my heart, but its always there the next morning.

I’ve learned that I can, in fact, sit through it.

I’m going to have to continue.

Because I have no idea what’s going to happen next.

And I’ve learned that if I run towards love, and not from fear, that I can run even farther. And that it doesn’t hurt nearly as much.

I’ve learned that it’s a bad idea to drink when I’m feeling pain, or sorrow, or uncertainly, or fear. There’s a pattern there, in my family, and its not a good idea for me to fall into that deep rut. Its a better idea for me to feel the pain, and know that I can endure it, and move past it.

And just yesterday I learned that peace might in fact be the most noble goal I can strive towards. Not for me. But for the woman I love. It may be that more than love, what I can offer her is a chance at peace.

But I don’t know if I can do what might be needed of me in order to allow peace to have a chance. Because there is no guarantee.

Its been 28 days.

One moon.

I am still in love. And often it is bliss. And often it is joy. And often it is very hard, and I don’t do as well as I wish I might when facing my fear, my vulnerability, and the impenetrable frustration or uncertainty. But I’m learning to be gentle with others, and with myself. And I’m learning what true love is.

One moon, come and gone.

Tomorrow is the 29th day.

Sing Along

We three head out on a Friday afternoon for the local video store. Its movie night. Its nearly 6pm so I have the radio on. Rio asks, “put on some music.” I hit the CD button and Michael Franti and Spearhead set the car on funk. “Not that one, the one we were singing to.”

He’s recalling when, a few days ago, we were coming home listening to Jim Cuddy. Over my own singing, and the melodious sound of Cuddy’s crooning, I could hear Rio is singing “Maybe sometime….” I looked in the mirror and was amazed to see him singing at the top of his lungs.

“You know the words,” I asked.

“I just followed along with you.”

He’s heard them many times.

I love the song of the same name off of Cuddy’s The Light that Guides you Home.

“Well its all right now, that was the way we were, but there’s no sense in changing that now…..Well maybe sometime, maybe some time, maybe some time….”

The sun pours through the windows of the car. Silas is content. He watches out the window, and turns to watch his brother. Rio is singing along again. I feel the cold fire wash over me like rain and turn the mirror so I can see his angel face while he sings. I sing too, in bliss, entangled with this child who is more beautiful than the sun.

I used to think my life was supposed to sound like a Blue Rodeo song. You know, peddle steel guitar, when the girl always leaves in the end. Not anymore.

“Well the story will end and we’ll never know just why. There’s never a chance to say goodbye. But maybe sometime, maybe some time, maybe some time…”

He’s getting most of the words, and belting out the chorus. He’s five; he can’t know the kind of sorrow that sleeps behind those words, but he’s heard me sing them a thousand times, and knows what its supposed to sound like.

In time he will. In his life, he will love and lose many times. His heart will grow wise. And hopefully he will never grow so foolish as to fail to love again.

Maybe sometime.

Running Towards Stillness

It’s a welcome sunny day in September, and Josh and I park his car at the Pike Road entrance to East Sooke Park, and then drive mine south to Aylard Farm to start our run. I don’t get nervous at the start of a long run anymore: I know I can do this. I don’t fear the physical discomfort that might come. Instead, I’m exhilarated by the prospect of moving through the coastal landscape at the southern most tip of Vancouver Island on this extraordinary day.

We begin along the path slowly, warming up, falling into a rhythm of conversation, and a easy flow along the gravel path to the beach. We follow along the water’s edge a while, the mid day sunshine gleaming off the swells, the beach strewn with bull kelp. The tide is high, so we scramble up the bank and into the woods and continue along the trail that skirts the water’s edge along some of the most exquisite sea shore on southern Vancouver Island.

The path winds through groves of naked arbutus trees and over rocky outcrops. This is the sort of running where you use your hands a lot, pulling up steep slopes, and dropping down over rocky cliffs. Below us, sometimes a hundred feet or more down sheer cliffs, the surf pounds the exposed southern point of the island, its roar omni-present, filling the space around us with a cacophony of white noise.

We pass Beechey Head, warming up. I can feel my body starting to intuit the trail. Can feel my mind relaxing into the run. Our conversation takes long pauses as we pound up steep sections of the trail that climb high above the sea, where finger inlets poke the rocky bulkheads. Then down again, thick mats of salal. We pass the first clump of black bear dung of the day, itself composed nearly entirely of salal berries, leaves and twigs, most of which have been only minimally digested. The berry crop is so rich that the bears need only draw minimal nutrition from each encouraged bellyful.

Every step forward is a step into joy. Every step forward is a step into bliss.

In the last two or three years, trail running has become the yang component of my body/spirit workout. I’ve been running all of my life, but never like this. I was a skinny kid who was frequently chided for his lack of athletic prowess. In grade four I was on my schools cross country team. I remember a three kilometer race where I placed dead centre of the pack. I didn’t run much through grade school, except through the woods behind my home in Burlington, where second growth maple, pine and beach cast dark pools of cool shadow during the heat of southern Ontario summers. In high school and collage I dated a woman who was a track and field athlete, and she inspired me to run again.

It wasn’t until moving to the Rockies in 1992 that I ran again with any regularity. When I landed at the western edge of the continent two and a half years ago, I replaced Nordic skiing with cross country running as the mainstay of my work out. It brings me to bliss nearly every time I hit a trail.

So now I am a skinny (I prefer slender, svelte, or streamlined) man who can run for hours.

Josh and I race down a long, muddy slope to where the trail crosses a rocky beach and a sheltered cove just south of Cabin Point. From here the trail climbs steeply up through cliffs and a tangled forest again to emerge on a broad, open plateau a few hundred feet above the crashing tide. Its my favorite place on the Coast Trail, a flat expanse of stone and meadow where I can stride out and feel the contentment of a cadence and the flow of land, sea, sky, muscle and heart.

Just a few weeks ago I ran to Cabin Point and back on my own, shaking off a difficult parting from someone I love dearly, and I remember crossing this bench wishing that I was not alone, that she was there to share this miraculous place with me.

Maybe someday. Maybe someday.

Josh and I push ourselves along the trail, feeling the effortless flow that comes at the apex of a run.

I know that soon I’ll touch, however briefly, the stillness that I am seeking in all my efforts.

The yin aspect of my mind/spirit workout is meditation. Every morning I sit for thirty minutes, practicing silence and stillness as best I can. I’m an amateur, and my daily practice is still mostly involves a pattern of inner dialog where memory and prediction emerge; where dreams merge with reality; where sexual fantasy foists itself on the stillness of my body; where fear and vulnerability take an icy grip on the softness of my heart. I’m still practicing tenderness with myself: rather than growing angry or frustrated, I silently say “those are thoughts,” and return to focus on my breathing.

As I have written elsewhere, from time to time I am even jolted from this stillness by an urge to move. To escape my mind. I lurch from my cushion, from the tiny alter, and have to gently remind myself to “sit through” whatever is making me so uncomfortable with stillness.

The urge to run, during these challenging times, is almost overwhelming.

This is where yin and the yang create not opposites playing against one another, but two halves of a whole, becoming one.

When I run, I allow my mind to range over the landscape through which I pass. The technical nature of most of my trails demand sharp focus on my feet or I’d surely trip or fall, in some places almost certainly to my death. But inside of that focus, my mind, and my spirit, are working things out. I let them. I try not to get in the way of my mind, my heart, my soul’s intuitive nature of sort through life’s mysteries.

I run in nature, in part, because in the woods, in the hills and mountains, by the sea shore, I am most able to draw the extraordinary creative abundance of the natural word into me. When I run, I am reminded that I am not separate from the landscape through which I move. I am simply another element of the land moving through a myriad other elements, indistinguishable.

Running awakens my passions, my desires, my vulnerabilities, my creativity. In meditation I touch to the creative void, the field of pure potentiality that exists everywhere around us, and within us, at all times. In meditation I find a stillness where I can allow my soul to touch the place within, and all around me, where this creativity manifests. But as with the Tai Chi -- the swirling black and white symbol taken to represent yin and yang -- in the black there is white, and the white there is black: in stillness, motion, and in motion stillness.

In meditation, my breathing (and my occasional physical reactions to the really hard, and sometimes dark places my soul stumbles upon) are the movement. In running, in particular on long, challenges runs, I inevitably find a place of stillness: I am not a man running through nature, but nature finding a still point from the motion.

And then, without a doubt, that stillness slips away, and is replaced by burning muscles and panting lungs as the trail winds on and on. On this particular day, I am awe struck by the shear magnificence of the coastal landscape. I keep exclaiming to Josh that I “can’t believe I live here!” Its pure delight to pass through this place, this promise, this life.

We finish our trail on the beach at the end of Pike Road and rest in the sun, on a log, watching the waves pound the islets off shore, watch fishing boats navigate the narrow channels, watch the sky grow mottled with cloud and then clear again. Then another short run out Pike Road, and we reach the car after two and a half hours of on the trial and begin the drive back into Victoria.

Every step is a step into mystery. Every moment an opportunity to touch the both stillness and motion, the abundant creative power of life’s love and energy, its joy and its sorrow, its peace and challenge and beauty. I will spend my life running towards stillness, and then, when I’ve finally reached it, simply keep running.

(Josh and I near Cabin Point on a previous Coast Trail run last winter)

Philosopher Kings at the Royal Roads Cafe

The parking lot is packed as it always is at lunch, and when I step inside the place is jammed with elderly couples having their mid day meal together, and road crews, construction workers and tradesmen tucking into a hearty lunch. That’s the kind of place it is. Its why we like it.

I spot Dan across the room and when I approach we shake hands.

He asks “How are you?” and I only smile and instead ask him how he’s doing.

“Tired,” he says, and I know he’s not complaining. He’s not the type. Its just a statement. “I’ve been getting up at 4am a lot lately. There’s been a lot of energy flowing.” We’re not big on small talk.

I sit down and order tea.

I ask him about the energy. He says that while he doesn’t like to talk about it this sort of thing too much, he thinks that we’re moving through an energy portal.

He must notice my eyebrow shoot up, because he quickly adds that its not about all the astrological, Sagittarius in the fifth-house kind of nonsense (my word) but more about how energy moves through the universe, and that from time to time it becomes much more intense. I beleive that we share a healthy skepticism of things so overtly woo-woo.

Dan says that his personal take is that during these times it can feel very difficult to understand why things are so hard. His belief that its because we’re literally being squeezed through a very small space – energetically – in order to emerge on the other side.

I’m laughing while he explains this. “Does this sound familiar?” he asks. I nod, still laughing, but feeling the uncomfortable lump in my throat catching.

He’s not one to quote the bible all that often he adds, but “its like the eye of the needle. You can’t take anything but your own soul with you when you pass through.”

“So how do you finally move through it?” I want to know. I’m the fixer. I like to fix things, and fast. If there’s a way through the eye, then sign me up.

“You have to surrender,” he says.

“Great,” I mutter, “more fucking surrender.”

OK, talk with me about surrender. Dan offers an analogy from our common work, and explains that it required him to move from “f’ing surrender, to eloquent surrender.”

My read is that eloquent surrender is when you can relax into the process of letting go, of stepping back, to giving up control over outcomes. This is opposed to simply saying “I’ve had enough of this shit. I give up.”

Our lunch comes and we begin to eat. I can see the question in his face. “So, how am I?”

I tell him: Angry. Really angry. Frustrated. Confused. Vulnerable. Feeling sorrow. And sick and fucking tired of it.

He knows without having to ask, of course. We’ve been having lunch together once or twice a month for a year and a half. But he would have known if this was the first time we sat down together. I’m an open book, and Dan is a highly skilled reader.

And for the last few months I have been in a profoundly perplexed, disparaging state about the most basic of human conditions: human love.

I say: “I was thinking about this meeting this morning, and I just couldn’t believe that this is what we were going to talk about again. I’m sick of it. But my work is going great, and while I sometimes feel fear and pain around my loss of my children, this is what’s got me completely, totally stuck. I just don’t know what to do?”

“We get together to work energetically,” he says, smiling. “I'm not a relationship councilor. That’s not my area of expertise. What I am here to do is help you with the flow of energy in your life. To help you get unstuck.”

When I tell people that Dan is my business coach, which he is, I quickly add that we’re don’t sit around and talk about marketing strategies and new client acquisition. We talk about how the world really works. The flow of energy. And we both agree that energy is really just love that has yet to manifest in the world.

A elderly couple takes a table behind us and I watch them order a late breakfast off the menu. The conversation is one sided. I can feel the woman reaching out to her husband, but he’s not really there any longer.

I explain to Dan that my greatest fear, the thing that gives me more pain than almost anything else is uncertainty, the unknown. Not knowing.

The mystery.

I know that every moment is a step into mystery. But this morning, when I woke from a wine and melatonin induced sleep, actually writhing in pain – this was a very new experience for me – as a result of too large a leap into mystery, I knew that something had to change. I just don’t know what, or how.

He feels my frustration. Actually feels it.

He challenges me: “Step into that frustration.”

I smirk.

“No, really step into it. Feel it. Right now."

“More,” he says.

I take away a layer of protection. My throat constricts.

“More,” he gently pulls me.

I slip further into the sorrow. I can feel my eyes getting wet and back off.

“Step back into it,” he urges.

I let the layers of protection slip a little. I feel heat in my chest, my throat tight, my face flush.

“Now ask yourself, what pattern is this teaching you about?”

I let that question sit a moment, the sound of the room distant.

“Ok,” he says.

I pick up my water and drink, but not because I’m thirsty. I’m just not interested in having a complete breakdown in the middle of the lunch rush.

“I didn’t hear any voices telling me what the patterns were,” I explain.

“When you feel that frustration, that pain, ask that question.”

I tell Dan that I have been thinking about my habitual nature to flee from pain, from sorrow, from difficultly. That’s a pattern. The hardest thing to do is sit with it. To sit through it. Some mornings, I tell him, when I meditate, my body literally lurches to get away, out of the empty room suddenly filled with swirling voices, with stories, with memories, with predictions. I lurch and open my eyes and want to run. To run from myself. And then I remind myself, “sit through this. There is nowhere else to go.”

The lunch crowd is starting to thin out.

“Why am I feeling this way?” I ask him. “Why are things so damn hard?”

And don’t tell me about the portal, I’m thinking.

“You tell me.” Old coaching trick.

I sit with the question for a moment. A word came to me this morning during a pre-dawn walk. “Its penance,” I tell him. It’s a funny choice of words for a non-catholic. I’ve been saying that my Karma is to tell my story, so as to wash myself off the mistakes I’ve made in the past. But penance?

“Because you’ve been a bad boy?” he smiles.

I nod. I can’t speak.

He tells me the story of a friend who has died, and who spent much of their life serving others but not taking care of themselves. Ignoring warning signs of illness. “What do you need to do to take care of yourself right now?” he asks.

The conversation swirls around answers to that question while the waitress clears the table. We order pie. It’s a good self care practice.

I remind Dan about my reading Deepak Chopra’s books over the last year, and my attempts to apply the concept of self referral over object referral in my life. “I find that I am getting angry with myself that I can’t detach from what is undoubtedly the hardest emotional situation that I’ve ever been in.”

He laughs. Dan has worked with Deepak in the past. “If Deepak was here he’d say, ‘that’s not what I wrote the book for!’”

“I know. I should try to practice self referral with my cell phone to start, or maybe with a contract that I hope to win, and go easy on myself with the big stuff.”

“You’re discovering new, sophisticated levels of self loathing,” he says, still smiling. “That’s not the purpose of practicing self referral.”

We talk about the emptiness that is sure to come when I step into the unknown space that is before me. “Remember” he says, “the void was misnamed. It may seem empty, but it is the potentiality field.”

The field of pure potentiality. Where all creation manifests.

I'm going to have to get comfortable with that void to move through this.

“Its easiest when I stay focused in the moment,” I say.

“That’s good, because the future doesn’t exist. Tomorrow doesn’t exist. Next week doesn’t exist.”

I share that recently I watched the movie Peaceful Warrior, which is based on the book The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. When I first read that book twenty years ago, I loved it, and credit it in part with my transformation from a skinny kid who couldn’t run to the street corner, to a skinny man who can run for hours up hills and along rough coastal or mountain trails.

The final scene in the movie is beautiful: Millman is on the rings competing for the first time after a terrible accident, and he can hear his mentor Socrates’ voice asking questions in his head, which Millman answers:

What time is it?

Now.

Where are you?

Right here.

Who are you?

This moment.

* * *

The sun is out when our lunch ends and Dan and I part ways in the parking lot. I head to Thetis Lake for a run. I ran yesterday, and its rare for me to want to run two days in a row, but I feel as though I need to imprint our time together on my body, and I know of no better way than a run in the hills to do that. The afternoon is warm, and I pad softly up the Lewis J. Clark trail to the summit of a ridge above the lake, mulling what Dan and I discussed, and my rocky path forward.

I’m going to need to be This Moment to make it through. I’m going to need to be kind to myself, to be loving with myself. I run slowly, easily through the giant Douglas Fir and down towards the lake, striding into my sorrow, my fear, my frustration, holding unconditional love in my heart, asking it all to reveal its patterns so I can squeeze through the eye of a needle.

Sheep River, Alberta

The Sheep River in Alberta is a favourite place at any time of the year for me. But in the autumn, I'd like nothing more than to be sleeping beneigth golden aspens, a blanket of stars overhead, a fire casting a warm glow over a loving smile, looking back at me.

Stepping into Fear

For a short spell last winter I studied Aikido again. It had been some time since I’d practiced the martial art, the last time being when I was in college. Then, my teacher had been a brown-belt who had come to Aikido from a life of juvenile delinquency and street fighting. We learned how to fend off multiple attackers, disarm knife wielding thugs, and I felt pretty sure I could break just about anybody’s elbow or knee if the need arose.

My teacher last winter was a black-belt who taught us to work with our own energy, and the energy of an opponent, to ensure that nobody in a conflict got hurt. One of the most powerful lessons that I took from that experience was to step into, not away from, an attack.

To step into, not away from, fear.

While studying Tai Kwon Do, again some years ago now, I was taught many defensive moves to fend off flying hands and feet. Step back, block, step back, block, block, counter-strike. Each movement was away from the attacker, until we were in position to land a punch or kick. Now, I was being taught to get in close to the attacker. To step into the knife swinging towards my gut, or the pipe being swung at my head. Step into it, so that you can direct where it goes.

Thus it is with fear.

This morning I rise and feel the angry knot of fear in my chest. I’m disappointed in myself for feeling this: only hours ago I declared myself free from fear! Now, I’m at its mercy again.

My first instinct is to run from it. What can I do to avoid my fear? I busy myself, drink tea, shave, shower. Fold laundry. Do the dishes. Try to zero in on writing, on work. I could do push ups. Chin ups. Tidy up the boyz room.

But fear follows me, no matter how many times I step back and try to block, block, and counter strike.

Instead I step into it.

I sit. Close my eyes. Feel it. Breathe through it.

Its hard. Sometimes when I meditate and allow the emotion, the feelings, the pain or the fear to simply rise and fall, I am jarred from my silence and begin to stand. My body craves movement. To get away. To move away from what I am feeling. Where am I going to go, I ask, that I won’t have to face you?

So instead, I take a deep breath and invite my fear in. I say to myself, “Sit through this. Sit through this.”

I know this morning that I’m not able to direct it, as I would like. All I can do is acknowledge it, greet it, and allow it to cool as I give it the space it needs to teach me what it must. Whatever that might be.

It helps. Not always as much as I would like, but it always helps. Its just an emotion. A response. Its almost always about some story that I’ve made up to explain the unknown. I don’t know what is happening, so I create a story, and get attached to it. Meditation helps to unravel the story. It helps unravel all the stories that I make up about the people I love, about my own life.

Patterns

Rio and I went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix tonight. We tried to. What ended up happening was that I stumbled into some old patterns, and learnt that my five year old is way less prone to disappointment than his thirty six year old father.

This was our second attempt to see the film. The first time, Rio feel asleep less than half way into the movie. The commercials and previews went on for a solid twenty minutes, so by the time the movie was playing, he was half asleep already.

This time we picked a seven o’clock showing at our local rep cinema, the Roxy on Quadra, expecting to avoid previews altogether. We had it all planned: get there just as the movie was starting, buy a humongous box of popcorn, and get through as much as the film as we could.

Good plan.

We arrived to learn that that theatre had been booked for a private function. My dander got up immediately: I had checked their web site yesterday, and even called their recorded message this morning to double check that the film was on. What can you do? I wasn’t very polite, explaining (lying) that my five year old was disappointed. He wasn’t. He just wanted to know what the new plan was.

We drove.

I called Kat and got her to check the movie listings. The only other place in town where Harry Potter was playing was the Imax. Show time: 7pm. It was a few minutes to seven. This still might work out.

Drive too fast downtown, circle the block looking for parking. I can feel my pulse quicken. This is for fun, I remind myself. Run for the Museum of Natural History that houses the Imax, Rio padding along as best he can. Doors locked. Grumble. It’s a few minutes after seven. Apparently they close the doors as soon as the show starts. Cuss. Think uncharitable thoughts.

Now what? Rio wants to know, without a hint of malice or disappointment in his voice.

I call Kat again; ask if she’s sure that there are no other places showing Harry Potter. Yup, she’s sure. I float a plan: rent a movie and watch it at her place. She warns me that Rio has to be in bed early because it’s a school day tomorrow. I grumble, and she pushes back, and I can feel us slipping towards a disagreement, before we both catch ourselves. “Lets just see what happens…”

What would you like to do? I ask Rio. He taps his head. “My brain is tellin’ me something’,” he says. “Lets buy Scooby Doo!” I tell him I can’t take Scooby Doo tonight. “How about we rent an old Harry Potter?” He taps his head and agrees.

Off we go. The first Rogers Video we visit doesn’t have any Harry Potter movies. More impatience on my part, now because I’m afraid that time is slipping away.

I say to Rio, “this experience is telling us a story. We just have to figure out what it is.”

The next Rogers has one that we haven’t seen in a while so we take it, along with some Microwave Popcorn (yes, yes, the stuff is poison. We don’t eat it every night….) and beat feet for Kat’s place.

When we’re finally settled, its after 8, and we skip through some scenes and watch between shovelling mouthfuls of popcorn into our faces, and soon Kat announces its fifteen minutes to bed time.

Rio, Silas and I snuggle for a few minutes on the couch, huddled under a blanket during a scary part, and that’s it. The timer goes off, and the boys are dispatched to brush their teeth and hit the hay.

What story is this experience telling me?

Patterns. Wired responses based on past behaviour, past responses to situations, to people, to experiences. My patters are to become impatient, to feel frustrated with incompetence, to feel disappointment when things don’t go according to plan. I get attached to the plan, to the experience that the plan will lead to.

Rio felt none of this. He just went with the flow, and eventually lead his father to do the same.

Patterns. We fall into them based on our experience of the past. The neural network in our brains keeps firing as it always has because its easiest to do so – repeated behaviour creates these neural pathways from recurring use. Trying to rewire the brain is hard, because we’re fighting against long term conditioning, and because to do so requires us to imagine a new behaviour often without having ever experienced it. The brain likes doing what it always has because it can follow a well worn rut. To break out of that rut, or runnel, requires us to create a reality out of nothing but imagination.

That’s why its helpful to have someone to show you how to bump your way out of the rut. Like a five year old who simply doesn’t know what disappointment or attachment to an outcome is. Who was happy to have what ever experience we were having, as long as we were having it together.

Dismanteling Loneliness

Its been half a moon. Fourteen nights.

This afternoon, Rio, Silas and I sat in a deli on Government Street in Victoria and ate bowls of soup and panini sandwiches.

Outside the overcast sky foretold of winter’s flat hand pressing down on the coast.

I woke feeling lonesome this morning.

It wasn’t a general loneliness. It was specific. It wasn’t a heart breaking kind of loneliness, it was a dull ache, like something stuck under my skin, that I couldn’t, and didn’t want to shake lose. Something beautiful, beneath my skin. Near my heart.

I sat with the boyz eating lunch, and trying to stay present to them.

A month ago I sat on the beach with James Pratt, drinking beer, watching kite-surfers skip across the water, and talked about life and love and loss. “We’re never alone,” he said, and he didn’t mean that in the city we can never find space for ourselves. What he meant was that the illusion of singularity which is a result of eyes that can’t see the world as it truly is, means we feel separate from one another. We’re not. Our eyes tell me that my body, my life, stops with my epidermis. But quantum physicists, Taoist mystics, ancient Vedic scientists of India, and scraggly-assed hippies, remind us that in fact you and I mingle as one. We emerge from the same quantum soup of energy and information; we are expressions of the same whirling mass of love, probability and tendency, connected in a way that we cannot see, but we can feel.

I grew up feeling lonely. I was a gangly, awkward, pimply kid who couldn’t open his mouth and say something charming if it was written down on cue cards for me to read. But I was a poet, and my heart ached for the love of a woman – Carrie, Kelly, Tracey, others – but my overtures always went unrequited. Late at night – sometimes in the early morning hours just before the sun came up – I would steal away home and sit under a street light and write really bad poetry filled with longing, desperation, and unfounded hope. Except for the time of day – I can’t stay up past 11 unless there’s a hot tub and a serious party – not much has changed, really.

I remember around the age of fifteen confiding in my mother that my heart just ached. She consoled me, and assured me that love would come.

Of course, it did. I had my first girlfriend when I was sixteen. When I eighteen I dated an amazing woman named Beth for nearly three years. When I moved to the mountains other woman came and went from my life. It was hard on my poet’s heart. I lived in Lake Louise, and nobody ever stuck around for long in Lake Louise, until I met Kat in 1995.

I remember living in Grand Canyon National Park for a winter in 1993 and 1994 and discovering Barry Lopez’s book River Notes: The Dance of Herons. In the story called The Bend he writes:

“I have lost as I have said, some sense of myself. I no longer require as much. And though I am hopeful of recovery, an adjustment as smooth as the way the river lies against the earth at this point, this is no longer the issue with me. I am more interested in this: from above, to a hawk, the bend [in the river] must appear only natural and I for the moment inseparably a part like salmon or a flower. I cannot say well enough how this single perception has dismantled my loneliness.”

I loved that book, and that story, and even used parts of it in my naturalist talk at the hotel on the rim of the Canyon throughout the winter. Maybe I used it because, like when I was fifteen, and like now, I was lonesome. But I replaced the word loneliness with separation: I was embarrassed to say loneliness in front of a group of complete strangers. It didn’t feel like something adults (I was 23? 24?) said in front of one another.

As it turns out, I now see the two as the same thing. Good, that lesson only took fifteen years to come to grips with.

What makes me feel lonesome right now is the illusion that I am somehow singular. That I am somehow not a part of those whom I love, even when they are far away, even when I am so vulnerable, even when I am surrounded by people, even when I turn my light off alone each night.

I think of it this way: we appear like the solitary, seemingly separate trunks of the aspen trees, each growing up through fireweed, crimson with the onset of fall. We seem singular. But just below the surface we are all one, the roots of a massive life sending up runners to emerge above the surface. One tree. One life. One.

(one)

Close your eyes. They deceive you. You are not separate from those around you. You are not separate from those you love. You are not separate from love itself, because love is the energy of the universe pulsing through every cell of your body, ever fibre of your being. Loneliness can be dismantled when we come to perceive with our heart and our soul that just beneath the surface of our awareness, we are all part of the same throb of life.

I sat in the deli on Government Street and fixed my attention in the present moment. Silas on his knees, a thick sandwich in his chubby hands, his face as bright and clear as the sun. Rio, his locks of hair askew across his face, eating hungrily. I reached out and touched Silas’ face, touched Rio’s hair, told them how much I loved them, and felt the illusion slip, imaged that from within, to a insightful heart, that we all must appear inseparable. How could I be lonesome?

Its been just half a moon, and I’m learning so damn much.

(one)

Heart to Heart

My step-mother had a heart attack last night. She is recovering well, but a heart attack is very serious, and its too early to know if there has been any lasting damage.

My father seems to be holding up OK. He has a tendency to take this sort of thing in stride, but when I spoke with him early this morning he sounded shaky – maybe from a lack of sleep, but more likely because the woman he has been married to for twenty years is in a hospital bed.

I spent time in meditation, both last night and again this morning, imagining a warm, radiant light surrounding Mabel’s heart. I don’t really know if this sort of thing helps. Most days while in mediation I spend some time -- between fighting off the creation of a to do list for the day and all manner of fantasies and stories – focusing on people in my life who are suffering. I try to imagine a thread of white light radiating out from my heart to that person, surrounding them with energy and love.

Last night, and this morning that thread of white light extended from my heart to Mabel’s.

My Dad and Mabel are born-again Christians. They believe in the power of prayer. So do I. I just call it something different. Prayer is about focusing intent. So is meditation. Prayer is about reaching out to a higher power in the universe. So is mediation.

Some believe that our intentions have infinite organizing power in the universe. That thought becomes reality when given sufficient energy, channelled through dedicated attention, and focused intention. As I believe that energy is simply pure love, then the energizing force behind our ability to create reality out of prayer, out of meditation, out of intention, is just that: pure love.



If this is true, then my meditation will be focused on organizing Mabel’s swift recovery, helping her body recover and repair. And it will be focused on my father’s good heart too: to ease the fear that must be gripping him now.

Its impossible not to think about love when someone so special is lying in a hospital bed. Immediately when my own heart digested the news I thought: life is short, and all that matters is love. Love in its many guises: children, nature, good work, and a deep, resonant and meaningful connections with friends, family, and a lover.

Vulnerability

Sometime in the last three or four months, I’ve come to realize that I dread my own vulnerability. I know that’s a little like saying I fear being afraid, but there is a subtle difference.
Here’s Dictionary.com’s definition:

“Open to emotional or physical harm. Without adequate protection.”

“Capable of or susceptible to being wounded or hurt. Physically or psychologically weak.”

I think that it has a more nuanced meaning: to be vulnerable is to be completely open to the world around us. To be without defences.

Everybody is vulnerable. We try to control our vulnerability with big muscles, lots of money, fancy clothing, metal studs in our eyebrows, concealed weapons, blank expressions, wide smiles, Hummer’s, snarling dogs, fancy philosophy, meditation practices, spiritual retreats, and long black trench coats and black eyeliner.

It remains that vulnerability is a fact of life. The flesh is just flesh, and subject to attack, to disease, to ageing, to the impact of harder objects that move really fast. Its mostly space, a subatomic whirlwind that gives the impression of firmness, but is really almost nothing at all. And what isn’t nothing, is mostly water.

The heart is vulnerable too. Maybe more so than the flesh. Injured, we build a wall around it, thinking that we must defend it from without, but it is most vulnerable from within. First order of business: having trouble loving others, try loving you.

And the psyche, that complex tangle of neurons and chemicals and electrical impulses that make up the human mind might be the most vulnerable of all.

We are all vulnerable.

Some have recognized their vulnerability and still fear it.

Some have recognized their vulnerability and learned to accept it.

Some have surrendered to it. I’m beginning to believe this is one path to freedom.

I’m trying to recognize my vulnerability.

Over the last few months I’ve found myself in the most vulnerable romantic relationship of my life. There has never been a moment where there was an ounce of certainly about the future. In fact, moment to moment the entire relationship teetered on the brink of disaster. It has been beautiful, and intense, and loving, but it has also been rife with pain, fear and guilt. It made me feel safe and secure one moment, and weak and desperately helpless the next. Correction: my response to it was to feel alternatively safe and helpless.

When, a week ago, it came to an end, I realized just how vulnerable I had been.

More vulnerability: I live in a rental home that will be put up for sale in the near future. I might be able to muster the resources to by it, and I might not. I don’t relish moving again if it is sold to someone who wants to live in it, or who might jack up the rent, or let the basement suite to the drummer of the band that lives next door.

More: I am a consultant. For the first 18 months I was in business, I didn’t know from one month to the next if I would be working, for whom, and if the pay would cover the costs of living. Before that, I worked in the non-profit sector. Before that, seasonally for the Park Service. Job security has never been high on my priority list.

I am learning to accept my vulnerability.

It came as a shock that I was vulnerable. Its not that I haven’t been experiencing it. Down on my knees, weeping, I certainly was experiencing vulnerability. Running through madrona groves clinging to the side of rocky hills, I was in bliss. I was vulnerable then to. I was experiencing sorrow and grief, happiness and bliss, but I was experiencing those feelings because I was vulnerable. Because I was “Open to emotional harm.” I was “without adequate protection.” Because I was wide open.

There is a pattern here, no?

I got into the relationship knowing that it was completely uncertain.

I’ve made choices in my life that lead me to be a renter once again.

I could go and get a job as a…well, actually, I don’t really have any hard skills to speak of, so I’m not sure what I could do, but I could do something that was 9-5 and paid the rent. Maybe. Probably not. But man, I really know how to pick careers that leave me vulnerable.

Patterns.

I am learning to surrender to my vulnerability.

It is complete illusion to believe that we can be anything but vulnerable. And it is complete folly to believe that we are not completely safe.

Right now, my work is perfectly suited for my life. Not only does it provide infinite flexibility, letting me run when I want and spend plenty of time with my children, but its fascinating, exciting and deeply fulfilling. I meet with someone one day – they might be an entrepreneur, a fundraiser, a business owner, a CEO, or a leader of a social profit organization – and a month later, I’m helping them figure out how to make the world a better place, and decide what role their organization or business can play in that extraordinary cause.

I’m pretty sure the universe won’t let me and my kidz end up the on the street.

And love.

Deepak Chopra says this, in The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire:

“When you’re in love…romantically and deeply in love, you have a sense of timelessness. You are, at the moment, at peace with uncertainty. You feel wonderful but vulnerable, you feel; intimate but exposed. You’re transforming, changing, but without trepidation; you feel a sense of wonder. This is a spiritual experience.”

Romantic love is never for a moment certain. We can hope for it, and give it, and when it is given freely in return, cherish it, but romantic love is never certain.

But true love is the basic fabric of the universe. It is the energy of the universe, and it is ours to wield at will. So while romantic love between two people might be ephemeral, true love simply is. Forever.

At its most basic level, our vulnerability provides us with an opportunity for transformational spiritual growth.

First, we must recognize that we are vulnerable: we are just flesh and bones, energy and information, a tangle of pulsating love that is mostly nothing at all: the localized conglomeration of love, of energy, of ideas and information that has been swirling through space since the big bang started this whole whacky trip billions of years ago. Improbable. Deeply uncertain. Completely vulnerable.

Next, accept it. Ok, so, I’m not as tough as I thought I was. I’ve learned that the hard way. Pain. Fear. Sorrow. Self loathing. But I’m a good person. I’m loving. I’m compassionate. I am loved. Am love.

Then, surrender.

For me this moment came on the acupuncture table last week. I was so sick and tired of feeling fear, of feeling vulnerable, that I just let go. I surrendered. What more could I do? The dozen needles sticking in my arms, hands, legs, feet, and forehead helped.

Surrender for me meant knowing that I was vulnerable, and knowing that there was nothing that I could do about it. I decided to simply embrace it. I stepped aside, and realized that while I was completely exposed, I was also completely safe.

I found my way back to a place where my happiness in this world was centred on my own soul, in this very moment. This moment. Right now.

I let go of past and future. In this very moment I was safe. The pain I had been feeling for more than a month poured out of me, and was gone. Forever? I’m not that naive. But for this moment….

My lover may or may not choose to be with me. I am absolutely certain that I want her in my life. I am completely clear in my intent. I have done all I can do, and I surrender to my own vulnerability and simply wait, be watchful, intuitive. In this frame of mind, I find that I am without the fear that has ripped at our relationship. I am spontaneous. I am alert. I am loving, without possessing. I can be attentive to her needs, her pain, her sorrow, without clouding it with my own. I can stop being a selfish jerk and think about her needs for a while.

In short, I am free to love without expectation. I am safe to love unconditionally.

To surrender to vulnerability means to be open to mystery.

Every single step we take is into mystery. Every step.

There is no way of knowing what the future might bring. The future doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as any point in time but the very moment that we are living. Right now. My vulnerability was so focused on the future, that I was forgetting that this moment was the moment of creation, when I could experience the magic of life.

The next moment is mystery.

Surrender. I know one thing for certain: I have invited the experience of vulnerability into my life to learn something powerful from it, the lessons still disentangling before my astonished eyes.

Lessons in Letting Go

Here is what you must do:

1. First, hold on tight.
2. Then, let go
3. Repeat
4. Again
5. Then Again

That is what you must do to let go.

Needles

I hated needles as a kid. I understand that when I received one of my early immunizations that it took several nurses to hold me still, and even then they had to pin me between a desk and my mother to make the jab. Years of allergy shots helped, but to this day I’m not wild about getting pricked.

So it seems strangely paradoxical that I should seek out acupuncture as a means of healing. Years ago, when suffering from a mild inguinal hernia my naturopath suggested acupuncture, and after several sessions, the hernia stopped bothering me. A badly pinched sciatic nerve (a Lego building injury) and more recently strained muscles around a popped rib all made well again by a few needles.

For years I’ve been running on an injured knee. Almost five years ago, while visiting the B-Bar Ranch in Montana, I was jumping a mountain creek, and while in mid air, looked to see the rock I was about to land on was covered in a thin film of ice. I came down lightly on the ball of my left foot, but the momentum was too great, and my left leg shot out behind me and I came down full body-weight on my knee. I was able to walk back to the ranch, but for weeks afterwards I limped. Tai Chi helped, but I’m pretty sure I cracked something. When I visited my doctor he flexed the knee a few times and told me that yup, I had hurt it, and that was about it. I wear a brace when I run, and realize that if I want to do this for another 30 years, I’m going to have to take care of myself.

I used the knee as an excuse to visit a new Chinese Doctor last night.

But the real reason for visiting was to mend my broken heart. Hell, needles worked on a hernia. Why not the heart?

I met with Chantelle Zhuang at the Copper Mountain Clinic on Chatham Street in Victoria. We did the full assessment. All the questions about my own medical and emotional history. Yup, separation. That’s right, lots of intense change. Intense few months, Kat’s new man moving in, little Silas calling him Dadda’ Andy (which I think is pretty sweet, but it’s a little tender too), my house being sold, and of course, the end of something beautiful and difficult in my life in the last few days.

Family history? Grandfather died of a heart attack in his forties. The other had a non-fatal attack in his fifties and died of cancer. Mom has her challenges. History of depression in the family. Dad is healthy, works to keep his weight down. Alcohol in the bloodstream. Yes, Mom drank when I was in the womb. I tell Chantelle about my anger. How it manifests through my body. I tell her about my fevers. About the hives. How my guts turn to mush when I’m in acute stress.

She flips through her notes. Liver.

Liver.

The alcohol in the womb is linked to the fire, she says. The liver controls emotions.

She asks me what I am feeling. I hesitate. We both say it at the same time: fear.

The first four needles – two in my feet, two in my hands – make me catch by breath and I tell her “I’ve never felt so vulnerable in my life.” The first tears trickle down my face.

She tucks the blanket in around my chest, and puts her hand on my heart.

“You are safe,” she said.

I don’t remember the last time I felt truly safe. There were moments while in my lovers arms, fleeting moments, but for the most part, I live my life outside the safety zone. My choice.

I can’t remember anybody ever telling me that I was safe.

Sink in.

“When you feel that, cover here,” Chantelle says, her hand on my heart.

She puts in more needles. I can feel the heat rushing through my body now. The energy moving along the meridians. Music. Birds. The sound of traffic on the street. Sunlight.

She slips from the room.

I slip in and out of meditation.

The tears pool in the corners of my eyes and when I blink flood down my cheeks and stain the pillows.

I say goodbye, again, even though I am more certain than ever it is not forever.

Supplicaiton

Beach. Cool breeze. Wine. Tears. “Its going to get a lot worse,” she says.

“I know. I’ve cleared my weekend for mourning.”

“Not just for you. Its not just about you! For me.”

Fuck. Of course it is. Of course.

This is a supplication for healing. Not for my sorrow, but for yours.

No place to hide in the empty room

“Meditation is the practice of meeting whatever comes to us with equanimity and openness.
If the Western ideal is "tough on the outside, soft on the inside," the Eastern approach
is to become soft on the outside and tough on the inside. We can soften and open to others because we have the discipline to bring ourselves back into balance. We can do this because we have some measure of trust in our own and others' basic goodness,” says Susan Piver in How not to be afraid of your own life.

I said on Saturday that I feared my own meditation practice. I ended up not sitting that night. I was feeling numb after the passage of something so beautiful from my life, and I wanted to stay that way. I didn’t want to feel. I didn’t want to open to my emotions. I was tired of it. Sick and tired of it. I was tired of tears. Weary of feeling the hopelessness that comes with them.

Meditation is a portal through which one walks into a room of silence, and space, where there is no place to hide from all that we are, have been, and can be.

On Sunday morning I sat for 20 minutes. I was surprised when my session was through, in part because I usually sit for longer, and in part because I had managed to hold my mind largely empty of images, memories, stories and projections of the future. I felt pretty clean. Clear.

I was still numb.

This morning I cracked the well of tears. The sense of loss rose up from the emptiness and instead of pushing it away, I greeted it, and invited it in. Sooner or later you’ve got to sit down for tea with all of this shit, and it may as well be sooner, I thought. Its not so much the loss even, as the uncertainty. I fear the long wait ahead, wondering if what was glimpsed so briefly might yet become. At the centre of that waiting are desperate vulnerabilities, born of memory and longing, desire and guilt, insecurity, fear and shame, and the myriad stories that my mind can construct about how life will play out over the months to come.

I felt that pain, and in the darkness of my room, let the sorrow empty me. I sat for a while, a carving of the Buddha doubled over in grief in my hands, my fingers on the groove of his spine, which I am told is to be rubbed during times of sorrow.

Sitting with that sadness, I let it pass.

As my meditation ended, I read the set of sutras from Deepak Chopra’s book The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire, which has become part of my daily practice. Of course, today’s sutra was Moksha, I am emotionally free.

Whatever.

“Imagine that you have left behind forever any sense of anger or resentment.”

More tears.

“Imagine that you are free from blaming, free from feeling blame and guilt.”

Tears. Sigh. Getting bored of tears. Dumbness would be nice right about now.

“Imagine that you can choose any emotional feeling you want to experience.”

I stopped there. What would I choose? Easy: bliss. The cold fire that sweeps through me and out of me when I am feeling a part of everything and everybody, my body not a vessel to contain my life, but a reference point for the centralization of energy and love and creativity that is me.

And happiness.

And love.

I allowed myself in that moment to miss what I had lost, to say to the universe how much I missed and longed for what had passed, and to acknowledge that I wanted it back in my life. For there to be any chance of that happening, I have to let go completely.

One Moon

I set out from home with the intention of walking as far as I can centred in present moment awareness. I get half a block. I notice the shape of my neighbours roof, and the sound of crickets and birds, and see the last of the day’s sunlight falling on the maple trees that line the street. Then my thoughts stray, and I’m laughing at how rotten I am at this being conscious stuff.

Two and a half hours ago something beautiful passed out of my life, and I’m struggling to hold onto the present moment, fearing letting in the past, dreading the creeping dark form of the future.

Two and a half hours ago I said good bye, maybe forever, to something precious, something tender and loving, something painful and difficult and ultimately ephemeral.

I’ve said so many goodbyes in the last year that you’d think I’d be accustomed to. Not so. I’ve let go of so many things in the last year of my life that you’d think that I was able to step away with ease. Not so.

Its been coming for two weeks. Its been coming since my journey to Canmore. I thought that I could hold on, but I could not.

So now I open my hands, open my heart, and release.

I am not alone in my grief. I know there is another who is feeling the loss, the sadness. I am not so selfish to believe that my sorry is singular.

A friend tells me to make a list of all the things that I want to do. It’s a way to keep preoccupied. I take a stab at it: finish the summary of the Blackwater trilogy, and get it to a publisher. Focus on being a great parent. Love my boyz more than I ever dreamed possible. Eat well. Drink less. Run more swiftly, longer, and over harder country than ever. Read some inspirational books: World Inc., Blessed Unrest, The Upside of Down, Getting to Maybe. Read some mysteries. Write Becoming Sand over from scratch cause it’s a hopelessly sad, lovely story, but my first version of it, written a decade ago, really really sucks. Buy some clay and sculpt again. Meditate. Learn to play the guitar. Recruit some amazing new clients. Focus on serving three or four businesses and social profits really, really well. Love my boyz. Love my friends. Love my family. Love myself.

It all sounds great. Should keep me preoccupied for a few days. Maybe a week.

I walk for half an hour, pushing my mind back to the present moment each time it strays. I think of Thich Nhat Hanh’s book on walking meditation: The Long Road Turns to Joy.

The hardest thing for me to do now will be let go of hope. Hope that what has left my life will come back. Hope that the phone will ring. Hope that time will pass swiftly and with its passage that beautiful part of my life that just flew away (I really, really hate airports right now) will come back again.

I want to erase the pain. I want to find something that takes away the sadness. Kathleen reminds me that I have to feel it. Move through it. Not hide from it, no matter how difficult. She did when I left her. I admire her more than any soul alive.

Andy, her new partner, arrived this weekend, and they took the boyz camping at French Beach. My landlord has told me that my house is up for sale. It’s a good thing my challenges come at regularly spaced intervals.

I fear my evening meditation sit tonight. So much stillness. No place to hide.

I'm just going to feel the sadness, and let that go too.

The way to get through this challenge will be by staying grounded in each moment. Not playing over the tape of the past, not projecting forward into the future.

I round the bend and am walking down Princess Street towards my home when I notice the moon, a thin sliver hanging in the southern sky.

Can I do it for one moon? Stay in the present?

I can try.

But before I do I allow myself one small indulgence, a prayer, a supplication:

Thank-you
for coming into my life, gracing
me with your love and beauty,
tenderness and desire
Yes, you too are a gift
and I cherish the sweetness and
release the sorrow
and surrender to the mystery
And now
Let
You
Go

One moon. I can do this for one moon.