I’m not sure what it says about me that I experienced a moment of bliss while driving. I’m pretty sure it makes be a bad environmentalist, or maybe a good spokesperson for the Subaru Impreza.
It wasn’t really about the car.
Driving out to Royal Roads University for a morning of meetings and interviews about the Bateman Centre, I was listening to Moby’s album Hotel. I haven’t listened to this album much in the last year, though there was a time that I couldn’t stop. I associate it with darker days, when I was plagued by a deep depression, though the album itself is reasonably upbeat. There are a few songs on the album, such as Dream of Me, which are filled with the longing that fuelled my sadness during the period leading up to my separation from Kathleen. With that chapter nearly a year in the rear view mirror of my life, I found that I no longer need to connect that album with despair.
One of my favourite tracks on the album is called Slipping Away, and in it there is a line that goes “all that we needed tonight are people who love us, and light.”
As I listened to that line I felt myself slipping into the space where the boundary between me and things around me began to blur. I consciously invited the sensation, and allowed it to linger, so that for several minutes I experienced the "cold fire" about which I have written previously. It wasn’t so much that I was feeling connected to my immediate surroundings, i.e. my little Impreza, the Walmart I was passing or Highway 1. Instead, I felt connected at that moment to everybody whom I love, and to everybody who loves me. It was as if a silver thread of light extended from my heart to the hearts of so many others around the world.
People who love us, and light. At the moment of creation, when some tiny ball of nuclear energy exploded, sending forth the swirling clouds of matter that would form into our universe, everything that we know in this world was touching. I’ve read that physicists, working with infinitesimally small particles of matter, have demonstrated that if you separate two such particles form one another, and subject one of them to stimulus, the other responds at the exact same moment as the one it has been separated from. There isn’t even a millisecond delay by which some form of communications might be transmitted from one particle to the next. They have deducted that somehow, beyond what our naked senses can determine, that these particles are still connected.
The quantum leap (not the kind where an electron leaps its orbit, silly) that they have taken is that because at the moment of creation everything was touching, it is all still connected in a way we can’t see, or touch, or taste or hear. This is the theory of entanglement as I understand it.
Bliss to me is the sensation of feeling connected to everything and everyone; it is the blurring of the imaginary lines that separate us from one another. Bliss is how entanglement feels.
Of late I’ve been receiving random gestures and expressions of love from friends and family. It is the most beautiful thing to hear a voice on the phone, or read a note in my email, or to receive a message over Facebook or Skype (this is the 21st Century remember) that says I love you; you are a good man; I am thinking about you and sending you peace. What a gift to give one another!
Distance and time are rendered irrelevant when you take the leap of faith required to see that everything is connected, and that those connections are actually illusionary in nature, so that its not so much that everything is still touching, but that everything is simply a part of everything else. Still. The big bang might have sent us hurtling through time and space, but it was our own minds, informed by our dim senses, that created our notion that time can generate distance between events and space could separate us from one other.
It looks that way, but it just isn’t so.
About Me
- Stephen Legault
- Stephen Legault is a writer, activist, organizational development consultant and fundraiser who lives in Victoria, BC and Canmore, Alberta. Stephen started writing in 1988. Kicked out of his high school biology class, he bought a notebook and sat down in the woods near his Burlington Ontario home and wrote some really awful, angst ridden poetry. Since then, Stephen has written for the Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic, Outdoor Canada, Canadian Wildlife, and dozens of other periodicals and newspapers. His first book, Carry Tiger to Mountain: The Tao of Activism and Leadership was published in April of 2006 by Arsenal Pulp Press. The Cardinal Divide is the first in a series of environmental murder mysteries featuring Cole Blackwater. It will be published by NeWest Press in November of 2008. The series will combine gritty, action-oriented stories and rich human drama with real environmental and social justice conflicts. Stephen is a runner, photographer, and father of two beautiful boyz: Rio Bergen and Silas Morgen. He and his partner Jenn travel and explore the natural world of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains.