Water's Certain Return

How do I love the ocean? James and I sit on the beach near Clover Point. A high bluff, carpeted with salt sprayed wild flowers and dense thickets provides isolation from the city beyond. An on shore breeze buffets the slope, lifting kites, some with a human cargo, into the mottled sky above. Far out in the Straight that separates Victoria from the Olympic Peninsula, and its flotilla of mountains, kite-surfers revel in the five foot swells kicked up by the wind.

James and I have been supporting one another through our separations. We open cans of beer and marvel at the perfect night, and express deep gratitude to be alive in such a magnificent place.

The same swells that let the kite-surfers take flight, break in waves on the pebble beach, each collapsing column of water raking the stones, creating a subtle symphony of voices that sing their delight. It sounds like laughter, and I think of Rio, my oldest son, who at five loves nothing better than to run, dance, laugh, yell and sing at the ocean’s side.

How do I love the ocean?

Without expectation.

Without attachment.

Without fear.

I love it as I love myself. There is no separation between the ocean and me. The ocean radiates an energy that I can feel pulsing through my body. It charges the world around it. Where the Juan de Fuca and Haro Straights come together there is a throbbing of life, and that energy, that life, is pure love.

I’ve speculated before that love is the energy that binds the universe together. Its one of those things that I could never prove in a scientific way, even if I was so inclined. Its not like I could reproduce the effect that this love has in a lab. No instrument at my disposal, save for my heart, can take its measure.

We are told that the universe is made up of energy and information, and that the information that creates matter, that helps direct the creation of planets and continents and the critters that roam over them, was imprinted at the moment of creation, at the moment of the big bang (where it was before that, God only knows….).

But what about the energy? We’ve cleverly figured out how to channel energy to make heat and light. But I’m not entirely clear what energy really is. All the laws of physics tell me is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, that there are many forms of energy (kinetic, potential, electromagnetic, mass etc.), and that a dizzying array of calculations can be used to tell us what kind of energy we are dealing with, and how to convert it into something useful, such as light to read by, fuel to power our cars, or heat to cook supper with.

Our bodies are filled with energy. So is every object in the universe. Logic suggests that if energy can neither be created or destroyed, then that energy has been around as long as the information that it is using to give shape to the universe.

But what energy actually is remains a mystery.

I believe it to be love.

Some people want to believe that love is uniquely human. Sometimes we hear it stated that love is what separates us from other species: we have the so called unique ability to love, though I know many dog owners who would argue that their pets possess this ability as well.

I think that the human soul is slowly becoming attuned to love as the unifying field of energy in the universe, and that we are beginning to learn to allow that field of energy to pull us together, to move us through life. I don’t think we’re unique in that. What I think does make us singular is the conditions and attachment we place on love.

James tells me that he has given himself over to unconditional love. That he has committed himself to loving everyone, and everything. Last week he sent me this note, which he had circulated to a few friends and family:


"I love you no matter what. We live together eternally in a place beyond time and space. We are inseparable, because we are one. We are integral in the living fabric of gaia in this moment, and we are part of the threads woven together through time from our ancestors and teachers through to those who are yet to be born and to learn.

So, you too love yourself/me/us, this dancing web of matter/energy no matter what. This is the truth. It requires no effort. There is nothing we have to do. There is nothing we have to become. There is no way to prove that we are worthy and lovable, because we are inherently worthy and we cannot be anything but love.

What a relief, eh?"


Just as I speculated with Rio recently that indeed the beetle that he found on China Beach did in fact love him, I can postulate that the ocean lapping at my feet loves me. That these stones that I sit on, and the knotted and twisted log that I rest my back against likewise love me.

It’s a clear love. It doesn’t have expectations. It asks nothing in return. It is not laced with fear. They want me to exhibit no particular behaviour to earn their love, and offer nothing other than their own ancient existence as proof of their love.

Can I love people the way I love the ocean? Without expectation, without fear?

I’m trying. On Monday of this week I came to this same place with my children. While Rio raced the waves along the shore, soaking himself to the armpits, Silas and I cuddled under a blanket, his meaty arms wrapped around my neck. We ate sushi and chocolate chip cookies, and watched float planes descend towards the Inner Harbour.

There is a white light that surrounds my children, and that surrounds me, and I know with a certainty that this light is a symbol of the connection that I share with them. It’s a reminder to me that we are not separate. Our flesh appears to have boundaries that demark one being from the other, but those boundaries are illusionary. They are practical, but they don’t reveal the whole story of existence.

A hour earlier I had had a hard conversation with someone I love, and I was reeling again. I made up my mind then and there, with Silas clinging to me, and Rio prancing, and waves tickling the shore, that I would love people with passion, and with compassion, but without expectation, and without attachment to outcomes. No more would I falter with each difficult conversation, or become jubilant when things seem to be going as I want them to.

I released my lover from the grip of my fears, my expectations, my carefully planned outcomes. There is no choice. Each step forward is into the unknown, and to think that I could somehow construct that future is delusional.

The love I feel for the ocean, for all of nature, is the love of pure possibility, of pure, unbounded, unrestrained life. That is how I wish to love to. It expects nothing, it is not based on attachment to the illusions of past or future, it is grounded in present-moment awareness, and it creates a peace that is deep and resonant. I expect nothing of the ocean, and I have no planned outcome for my love of it except to carry on in love with it regardless.

In the moment it is possible to love without conditions. In the moment it is possible to love without fear. Fear is driven by our attachment to how things once were, and is often laced with attachment, sentimentality, melodrama, or regret. Fear is also driven by an expectation of how things should be sometime in the future. But neither are real. The energy of the universe, expressed through the water pulsing across the stones on the shore, exists only in this very moment. Staying centred in that moment is an antidote to fear.

Yes, I have desire. Yes, I have dreams. Do I find it easy to let go? Certainly not. Sometimes I feel my heart gripped with fear, and when that happens, I loose my ability to attune to love’s energy, and to release my expectations, hopes, dreams, and desires.

But like my love of the ocean, and its love of me, I know I must release these desires and these dreams. I can do this the same way we skip stones on the waves’ broken backs, casting them into the depths of life’s mystery with the quiet belief that love will be born back to us on water’s certain return.

Mystery, Love, and Letting Go

How do I love, and let go?

How do I hold the intention in my heart to have someone in my life, and release my attachment to how the situation unfolds? To the outcome?

How do I care deeply, and remain grounded in self referral?

It seems like its all about the questions these days. I guess it always has been.

I’ve been in the thick of this question for the last few years – the love and let go quandary. When Kathleen and I separated, of course, I initiated the letting go, but then I had someone else to hold onto. More recently, when Cypress and I split up, my future was much less certain.

Now I have met someone that I absolutely must remain unattached to. The circumstances demand it.

My intention is to have this person in my life, but our situation may prevent that. I find that my heart is like a pendulum, swinging back and forth. At one apex of its parabola, I’m deeply attached to the outcome of our romance, while at the other, my heart wants to turn its back. I want to find the place in the middle where I can love deeply, without attachment to what happens next.

As in the self-referral quandary, my ego becomes entangled with the dilemma. If our relationship fails to materialize, my ego will take a bruising. I’ve already started to create the story line, and now I’ll have to re-script it! More challenging for me is to let go of the memory of our physical connection: how do I wash the memories of an intense sexual relationship from my heart?

It occurred to me this morning during meditation that I don’t have to wash any of it away. All I have to do is let go of my attachment to the outcome, and I can just love this woman regardless of what happens between us. My ego can let go of its stifling questions: was I a good lover? was I special? Did I push to hard? Have I made a monumental mistake? My heart can find freedom in the knowledge that together something powerful passed (is passing) between us, and that is enough. If that’s all, then that is what is meant to be.

My worry has been that if I set my intentions – to love and care for this person – and then let go of any attachment to the outcome, that somehow I will predetermine the conclusion. But to not let go is to fight the entire universe, because the entire universe is spread out before me like so many stars in the night sky, but with no single pathway predetermined. How could I know what comes next from such possibility?

Every moment we step into that mystery. The future is nothing more than a infinite field of possibilities. Wanting to know what the future holds is really just me clinging to the past, to what I’ve already known. Letting go of outcomes is like embracing the myriad possibly before me all at once. Its frightening. Its painful even. But its also exciting.

How do I love, and let go?

How do I hold the intention in my heart to have someone in my life, and release my attachment to how the situation unfolds? To the outcome?

How do I care deeply, and remain grounded in self referral?

By not being afraid. By trusting my spirit, my soul, to guide me. My acknowledging my ego and its questions and fears, but not allowing it to control me.

We have no choice. This is how the universe is organized. Past, present, future. Only the present is real. The past is simply emotional responses derived from our ego. The future too. Feel love in the present, but not an attachment to what it meant in the past, or might mean in the future.

Both past and future are mystery. And possibility.

I just keep telling myself that over and over again.

Reference Points

I’ve been struggling with the notion of self vs. object referral these last few weeks. Facing the spiritual struggle I have, finding a reference point that allows me to become centred has been critical to moving through a very challenging time.

Self referral occurs when the self – the true self, the spirit, the soul – is our centre of happiness. Object referral occurs when our centre of happiness is the result of an object – such as money, a house or a car - or a person, a relationship, a title, or position of power. In object referral, our attachment to how the money, how the person or how the power makes us feel becomes our centre of happiness, and of course, it lasts only as long as the object does.

Apparently self referral is permanent. It brings permanent happiness, because our spirits, our souls, are likewise everlasting.

In object referral, our happiness is dominated by our ego, which is the story we have devised over the course of our lives that we project outwards to explain to the world who we think we are. Our ego becomes attached to the objects of our referral because we need them in order to continue to tell the world the story that we have created about ourselves. No object, no story.

I’ve been trying to ground myself in spirit or self referral of late. A lifetime of being at the whim of my relationships with other people, with money, with power, with ego, have left me feeling pretty damn empty, lonesome, and physiologically bruised. Its just not fun anymore.

The trouble is, I’m not certain how to stay centred in self referral.

I spend a lot of time everyday in meditation, which is supposed to help. This time of silence is like rinsing my soul with cool water. I feel refreshed afterwards. Following my morning time of silence (which I do at 5am most mornings to ensure Rio and Silas will be asleep) I read a set of sutras, and spend some time setting my intentions for the day, and for life. I often emerge from this time feeling very grounded in my spirit. In my soul.

But things can throw me off. An email, a phone call, a text message. Sometimes little things. Sometimes big things. My heart gets pulled back and forth: when I’m in favour, it soars; when I fall out of favour, it plummets. Its during those times that I remind myself that my happiness can’t be dependant on anything but who I know I am deep within.

This notion of reference points is important to me. There are always going to be tough times, pain, sorrow. Fear. Anger. Remorse. Moving through these unattached will be so much easier with spirit as my internal reference point, and not my ego. Feel them, let them go. My ego will want to drag these things along for company so it can continue to tell an old, worn out story about who it thinks I am. I’m going to try and break its grip on my story.

Maybe its just a matter of time, and practice. I'm willing to make the effort.

Fucking with my fifth Chakra

Full disclosure right up front: I’ve not always been gentle with folks who talk of chakras. In fact, I have made good natured fun of chakra-talk in the past. I’ve also made fun of the didgeridoo in the past, but then I got didgeridone and things changed, but that’s another story all together. My point is this: that was all yesterday, and this is today, and I’m done putting my thinking in a box simply because I can’t see or feel or touch something with my own dim-witted senses.

So lets talk chakras. There’s seven, and they extend up the body, starting at the base of the spine, and ending at the very top of the head (or just above the crown, according to some). According to one online resource:

"A chakra is a spinning vortex of energy created within ourselves by the interpenetration of consciousness and the physical body. Through this combination, chakras become centers of activity for the reception, assimilation, and transmission of life energies. Uniting the chakras is what we experience as the "self." The word chakra comes from the Sanskrit word for "wheel" or "disk" and originated within the philosophy of the ancient yoga systems of India."

Ok, the spinning vortex of energy talk might put me back in the box, if I hadn’t spent some time fucking with my fifth chakra a coupe of weeks ago.

The fifth chakra is in the area of the throat. It is the centre for communication and creativity. It is the portal from the lower chakras, which focus on the body, into the realm of mind and spirit. This chakra’s element is air, and it is associated closely with sound. Sound of course is vibration, and vibrate is what every speck of matter – every wave and particle of energy and information in the universe – does all the time.

Two weeks ago, the Friday night when I was in Canmore, Alberta and was having a tough go of it, I screamed “fuck” so loud, so harshly, with such despair and fury, that at the time I was certain I had damaged my larynx (not to be confused with the fuzzy Dr. Seuss character who speaks for the trees. He’s in trouble too, but that’s also another story). It was a release of pent up energy, anger, frustration, fear, pain and regret that I hadn’t been able to express during the almost unimaginable drive from Victoria to Alberta. It came out all at once. 12 hours, maybe 12 years, of emotion, rushing out, making one hell of a vibration. Moments later I had to pull over before turning onto the highway to sob pitifully, another release of despair that had never fully emerged in the last year, triggered by a romance so convoluted that may never be fully told.

But the next day, and the day after my throat was fine. I was worn thin, and weary, but my throat was as well as the rest of me.

On Monday I went for a run up the Plain of Six Glaciers trail. I don’t think I drank enough water, and I’m pretty sure my body was susceptible, and possibly succumbing, to colds and flu bugs, given my dilapidated immune system, and by the end of the day, my throat was constricted and raw. Its not how most of my colds start (my first symptom is almost always itchy etesian tubes) but the throat is connected to these little tunnels, so I assumed I was simply getting sick. In addition to the penetrating, raw pain in my throat, the glands on the right side of my neck were the size of an almond.

I fought what I thought was (and may well have been) cold symptoms for the next two days. The pain in my throat became severe; the only way I could eat was to swallow half a dozen or more Motrin a day.

When the flu symptoms never materialized, but the sore throat continued, I remembered “the scream” (Edvard Munch, eat your heart out baby.)

But why didn’t I feel it first on Saturday? I believe that the endorphin rush that my two hour run released must have triggered the pain in my throat. A physician might explain it another way, but this is what my body-wisdom is telling me, so I’m going with it.

The fifth chakra is about self expression, but speaking the truth, about letting go of constrictions and expectations.

What I felt most acutely over the ten days starting with the drive to Alberta, which ending at the beginning of last week, was an utter inability to say what I meant, and explain how I really felt, to someone who I care for, but who communicates differently than I do. I felt during that time that I simply could not express my true self, that I could not open my heart, and that her heart was not open to me.

Then the shroud that blanketed my self expression lifted, my throat healed.

What I had to do was let go. Let go into mystery. Let go of needing to know what tomorrow might bring. In part because of this, and in part because of other work around my notion of self referral, attachment to love, and in part because somehow time and a few good nights sleep helped both my friend and I open our hearts again, we were both able to communicate more clearly, more truthfully.

I spent a lot of time in meditation during these challenging few weeks. I would imagine my throat bathed in white light. During the fleeting moments of clarity I had during these silent experiences, one image continued to appear in my mind:

My throat gently opening, my head tilting back towards the sky, my eyes closed, while a dove emerged from the naked space of my neck, the sky blue light of the fifth chakra spilling from the fissure as the bird takes flight.

Breaking the Shell

If there is a path to self knowledge that doesn’t require so much damned pain, then someone should write a book about it or make a movie or a first-person video game. Its no wonder most of us simply sit on our butts and watch Survivor: “spiritual survivor” is way too hard on the nerves.

Last week, when I was in the grips of some kind of emotionally induced ailment, I read the Prophet by Kahlil Gibran for the first time in fifteen years. I took cold comfort in his meditation on pain: “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

It reminds me of an experience in Kiakum, at Hollyhock, where my friend Yoni Gordis explained how we move through stages of spiritual growth. I asked him to recount the story for me, and this is what he writes:

“It is my re-wording of a teaching by the Hassidic Master, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810). He tells us that many spiritual teachers tell us that when we encounter the hard stuff in life it is a sign that we have fallen or failed in our paths. The truth, Reb Nachman explains, is that life is somewhat like a pile of stacked records (does anyone remember records?). Each record is a stage of spiritual growth, or a period of one’s life. In a stage of spiritual growth, you start by plowing through the peel (like a fruit), the outside, and you get through the external layers and get through to the core teaching and essence of that stage, the “what is this stage all about” point. But what happens when you get to the core and are through with that stage is that you get bumped up to a higher spiritual plane. But on that plane you hit the outside of the next higher record first and have to drill through the peel of that stage to get to its core. Thus, encountering the hard stuff (the peels or shells as they are known in Hassidism) is a sign that you have merited to move up rather than have fallen. The lesson, perhaps, is that we need to congratulate people who are encountering hard stuff and let them know that they are moving forward on their spiritual path and that this is a sign of that progress.”

Like Rabbi Hachman’s stack of records, there isn’t a single shell, but layers upon layers of shell. We emerge into this world at the centre (or, at the bottom of the stack of records, or maybe part of the way up depending on our reincarnation) of a series of shells. That first moment of blissful emergence from the womb is the first shell through which we pass, and it would seem that the rest of our days are preparation for, and emergence through subsequent layers of shell.

For some. Again, it is no wonder many choose to lock themselves inside the shell and placate their inquiry with reality TV, booze, drugs, shopping, general excess, sloth and general malaise; all substitutes for the hard work of genuine growth.

Because its painful. Breaking the shell hurts. As we grow spiritually, we find that the layer of shell that contains us no longer fits and we press up against it, and when we finally break through, there is discomfort.

Gibran says: “Much of your pain is self chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.”

This recent emergence has been amoung the most painful, and beyond a doubt I know it was self chosen. Given the unfolding over the last two years, that’s saying a lot. I thought that I had broken the most painful layers of shell when Kat and I separated last year, but now I’m pressing up against subsequent layers that are resisting fracture.

What am I finding as I break through these layers of shell?

* I still must work to define my own happiness internally, rather than externally. My happiness must be the result of my own spiritual grounding, and not the people in my life, their approval or acceptance of me, my financial status, whether I have my children with me physically ever day, or what the weather happens to be doing during a rainy Victoria summer;

* I must continue to affirm that I deserve to succeed in love, in work, and in life;

* Somehow I’ve got to pay my karmic debt around the pain and hurt I have caused Kathleen, and others in my life;

* And that karmic debt is somehow linked to my current, and ongoing, misadventures in love;

* That I need to learn to find a place of harmony between spiritual and physical love, and self-referred detachment from that connection which is so vital to me.

Painful lessons. But necessary it would seem.

One might ask why? Why accept such pain? Because to not inquire into our true nature, to not delve into these quandaries, means stagnation, and spiritual death. With each emergence the world becomes so much more beautiful, so much more bountiful, so much more magical. With each emergence we tap into the field of all possibilities that fashions the universe, and which the universe fashions itself from.

Lord Buddha said that suffering was a result of attachment, and that there could be an end to suffering, through transcendence of attachment. It has also been said that pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. I’ll take door number two, Alex….

I wonder if it gets easier? Some of the layers of shell that I’ve broken through have been very painful, but others haven’t been as difficult. I remember that first conscious moment when I actually felt, rather than simply imagined, the connectivity of all things, which I think of as bliss: I was practising Tai Chi on the beach at Hollyhock, and I slipped out of the confines of my physical self and gently became the sand, the jumble of logs on the foreshore, the water lapping on the highwater mark, the dark forests beyond. I remember walking, as if through a dream down the beach to find a three foot long mud shark on the beach – I knew it was there not because I could see it, but because I was the beach that I felt it on my sandy back.

That wasn’t so painful (though other events that weekend were). Some layers we emerge through in pleasure, and others we have to peck hard to break. My guess is that as our heart and spirit grow wise along this spiritual journey, each layer will become unique, and our memory of and insight into our past emergence will make the breaking shell softer, and the recovery from its pain faster.

God in the Hills

Three weeks ago, before I could conceive of the journey taken over the last ten days, my best friend Josh and I spent four days in Strathcona Provincial Park. I’ve lived on Vancouver Island for just over two years now, and this was my first foray into the rugged interior of the Island. It was a wonderful experience to be back in the mountains, lugging a pack up the steep trails, feeling the various pinches and aches and pains that comes with self reliance.

When we were younger, Josh and I spent nearly ever weekend in the backcountry of Banff, Kootenay, Yoho and Jasper National Park, or in the front range peaks and foothills of Kananaskis Country, in Alberta. With Jim and Jack from Lake Louise, with Kathleen, and many other family members and friends, we logged uncountable miles, on trail, but mostly off, striding out across the vastness of the Rocky Mountain wilderness.

Josh still gets out a great deal, but this month’s sojourn into the hills was my first backcountry trip in three years! I’ve let a lot come between me and the mountains. Children, family obligations, writing books, various work endeavours, a new business, all stand as reasonable excuses for not putting one damned foot in front of the other and putting some distance on what Edward Abbey used to call “syphilization.”

Our four days in Strathcona were all spent along the convoluted spine of Phillips Ridge. We didn’t set any records for distance or heroics. Nobody will call us “he-men” after this trip. Its unlikely that the Canadian Alpine Journal will be asking me to pen something for this years cover section.

For me the most remarkable part of the experience was rekindling the memory of how powerful a connection a person can have with God while surrounded by wide, open country.

Now, before we go jumping to any conclusions, let me explain that my definition of God has changed dramatically over the last twenty years. I grew up in a Catholic household where church was reserved for Christmas and Easter, and even then, only sporadically. When I was in high school I read the little Gibbons version of the bible nearly every night, turning to its pages for solace during tumultuous times. There were many. By collage I had given up on most of what I had read, and when I moved to the mountains in 1992, I discarded the rest, replacing theology with science as an explanation for everything I could see, hear, touch and taste.

I couldn’t perceive then that science, particularly quantum physics, would lead me back to God.

For the record, I never believed the line that God created the universe in seven days, even if the first four of those lasted billions of years. I had a hard time swallowing the white-bearded dude in the flowing robes image, and now its only during sexual ecstasy, or deep depression that I invoke God’s name, as in “Oh, God,” with either an exclamation or definitive period as punctuation.

But returning to the mountains was a reminder of the true nature of God. Here’s my take, at least for now. This is subject to change without notice:

God is the sum of all possibilities that exist in the universe. The universe, according to quantum mechanics, is primarily made up of energy and information, hurdling across space at the speed of light, taking form here and there as solar systems, stars, planets, possums, porpoises, platypuses, people and other equally unlikely critters. Physicists argue these days that it is a conscious universe, where matter takes shape with intention, where the thing formed and the will to form it are one in the same.

All of creation is connected (see entanglement theory) through a unified field of energy and information. This is God’s playground. God, the creator, is just another word for conscious possibility. We (the possums, platypuses, and people) are all part of God, consciously creating the unfolding universe.

In both the Vedic, and Taoist tradition, we are urged to spend time in direct communion with nature in order to see this field of all possibilities. To feel it. To be a part of its consciousness. Through connection with nature’s abundance we are able to sense, in our hearts, the magnificence of creation. What we are learning now is that we too are part of that creation. That we too are part of God.

There is one place on Mount Doug, in Victoria, where I am always reminded of this: It’s a trail on the east side of the hill where I find myself opening to the bounty of nature in order to fuel my legs and lungs up the steep track. I consciously invite the splendour of nature into my lungs, up through my legs, so that it is not a man running up a hill; rather, it is simply one part of all nature, all creation, all possibility, moving over another. Running becomes easier. I feel singularly connected with creation, with the field of all possibilities that I am inseparably a part.

I feel it overlooking distant ranges of mountains along the knotted spine of Phillips Ridge.

That feeling is love. Its not love for something. Its not love for nature. For the mountains. It is simply love of existence, of the inseparability of things.

"God is Love" it says in 1 John 4:8. Full stop.

That’ where is should have ended, before we started talking about “whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3:16)” which just muddied the waters, and started putting conditions on love. “God will love you if….”

God is love. Period. Love is the energy that binds the universe together. It is what causes creation. It makes solar systems and planets and platypuses. We are a part of that love, its creators, its destiny.

When we are in nature, we are simply a little bit more conscious of our part in God, in creation, in love.

I will still love you after I die

Rio, Silas and I arrive back in Victoria late on Tuesday night after a long, but amazing journey. I picked the boys up at the riverside water park in Kamloops and we drove across the Coquihalla highway, the guys slipping in and out of sleep, and in and out of spells of fighting and playing together, as I put more miles on Alberta.

An hour at the central park in Hope, some fudge (mistake) and then the long, arduous, and confusing journey across the lower mainland to the ferry, and finally, the crossing, and home. All in all I was on the road for more than 15 hours, fighting a cold the entire way. For most of my adult life, when I’ve undergone some kind of major emotional challenge, my body works through the trauma buy getting good and sick. It’s a special two-for-one deal. The difference between ten years ago and now is that now I don’t give into the illness, but meditate on perfect health, which almost always works.

The next morning I take Silas to daycare, but Rio is set against it (Silas is set against it too, but he is still too small, and lacks the language to mount an effective counter campaign), and I can’t blame him, so he sticks with me, as I try to clean up the wreckage from the journey, both physically and emotionally. The cold that I hoped to keep at bay with COLD FX, vitamin C and positive vibrations, grabs me by the throat and works me over pretty good around the neck, shoulders and back, so my day is punctuated with moments of miserable whining, something I am well known for when ill.

By mid afternoon I’m beat. I give into the repeated requests by Rio to watch a movie, and he puts on The Two Towers, arguing that he really likes the “scary parts.” Great. Its good to have a prolific inventory of nightmares to choose from, I think. He points out that the orcs don't brush their teeth so they become bad guys.

Kat comes by for diner, and offers to take the boys for the night so I can rest and recover from my cold. This is the sort of flexibility that she and I are so proud of in our new relationship, and I gratefully accept her offer, though its painful to let go of the boys again and again. Before they leave, Rio and I settle into the couch to snuggle and watch a bit of the movie together.

There is a scene in the Two Towers where Aragorn is portrayed as the king, cast in stone after his death, and Arwen, his bride, is seen by his side, morning his passing. Rio watches and his eyes grown narrow and he turns to me and asks, “Is that what I will look like when I die?”

Oh boy.

“No,” I say. “That’s a sculpture of the Aragorn. It’s a carving that they made of him so people will be able to remember him. What happens to us is usually one of two things: after people are really sure that we are dead, we are buried under the ground, or we are cremated. "What's that?" That’s when they put our bodies into a great big oven and turn on some flames and what’s left is just ashes. Then sometimes our ashes are sprinkled over a place we love, like a mountain or the ocean.”

Just saying the words make cremation sound scary. Rio starts to cry, his arms wrapped tightly around my neck. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to go into an oven,” he says, “I want to be buried.” I assure him that it will be many, many years before he dies, and that he gets to choose what happens when he does.

I save the cheery news about embalming for some other time.

He looks into my eyes again, his face tracked with tears. “What happens to me after I die?” he asks.

“Our bodies might die and disapear,” I tell him, “but our souls, our spirit remain.” I tell him that our bodies contain our organs and our muscles and our blood, but that our souls are what allow us to feel. “Our souls are the conscious energy of the universe, and when we die, that energy returns to the trees, to the birds, to the rocks, the sky, the ocean, and to each other.”

“What is a soul for?” Rio asks.

“Our souls allow us to feel. What you are feeling right now,” I put my hand on his belly, “this worry about dieing,” and then I put my hand on his heart, “and the love you feel for momma, and Silas and me, those feelings come from our soul, our spirit. It allows us to feel joy and sorrow, fear and happiness, loneliness and love.”

I tell him that our soul allows our hearts to stay connected with each other, because our souls extend beyond our bodies and touch one other even when we are far apart.

This seems to satisfy him because he shows me some of the new scrapes and bruises he's collected in the last few days, but later, when he touches my tear streaked face as we say goodbye, he reminds me of the drawings he did for me that afternoon.

He came down from his room to show them to me. We’d been playing together, drawing sets filled with rivers and oceans and coral reefs for the new action figures we’d picked up at the Calgary Zoo.

Rio had half a dozen new drawings in total. He gave them to me with great reverence, saying “when ever you miss me, when I am at Momma’s, or when you are away, you can just look at them, and you will know I love you.”

We talked then about love. “I love you because you played with me,” he says, after we finished our game together. I thought about that. “Our love isn’t because we do nice things for each other,” I said carefully. “Our love is about what we feel in our hearts for one another. You love me even when I get angry, don’t you?” He nodded. “And I love you even when you do something that makes me sad. Our love isn’t because of how we act, but how our hearts feel.”

Now, as I bend down to kiss him goodbye, he announces “I will still love you when I die.”

I kiss him and cradle his beautiful face in my hands and say “of course you will. Love goes on forever. The energy that is you and that is me is made up of our love for one another. It will never, ever end.”

He and Kat and Silas leave and I trudge upstairs and crawl into bed. I read The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, from cover to cover, along with a few stories from Barry Lopez’s River Notes, an old, sad essay by Edward Abbey, and some of Deepak Chopra’s lovely, and spiritual translation of the Kama Sutra, before inviting sleep to descend for the night.

But before it comes, I tuck the six draws that Rio did that afternoon under my pillow. They are symbols of pure love from a boy whose heart is open so wide it casts the most radiant light on all that it touches.

The Wisdom of Friends

My friend Kate Dugas sends me a text message after reading the “Even in Pain, Bliss” posting and I call her and we talk as only people who are on ever deepening spirals of inquiry can. Kate reminds me that this Karma I am experiencing as pain, as suffering, has to run its course, and that I have to feel it, let it work itself through my system, through my heart. “You have to do it now, or ten years from now, or on your deathbed,” she reminds me.

Deepak Chopra says “No Karmic debt ever goes unpaid.”

Kate tells me that I’m masking my emotions with fast-speed, caffeine and a frantic mind. “Find your cushion,” she says, referring to my need right now to meditate a while and slow things down.

She then says that I have to find this quiet so I can listen to the answer that my heart already knows. I jump to conclusions: “you mean, walk away?” Walk away from someone I have fallen hard for? “See what you just did?” she asks? “I didn’t say that.” The hardest thing for me to do right now, and the thing my heart says I must do, is step back, be patient, and allow the universe to unfold without my senseless attempts to intervene.

It’s a ten minute conversation, but it fills in so many gaps, and I am grateful beyond words for the wisdom of friends. I hang up after telling Katie what a blessing it is to have her in my life, and how much I love her. Life is made rich by the threads of white light that connect me with all those that I love, and who love me.

Plain of Six Glaciers

Two days in Alberta and it feels as if I never left: both the place, and the mess of stories that I spent most of my life telling myself about who I was and how I should move through this world.

Rio and Silas and I visited Drumheller and the Royal Tyrell Museum on Sunday, and after a great day together (spent mostly in the bathroom changing diapers) I dropped them with Kat and Andy in Canmore, and beat feet for Lake Louise. I wasn’t racing from the boyz, but from the crushing weight of being back in Canmore, and the memories it evoked.

Somehow I’ve slipped back into the belief that I don’t deserve success as easily as I slipped over the continental divide on Friday night.

Is it the place? Or the circumstances?

I rise on Monday morning still reeling. Time to drown this stupidity in a flash flood of endorphins. I wait for 20 minutes at Laggans Deli for a cup of tea and a slice of apple strudel. Some things will never change. Then I make for Lake Louise itself. For five summers, and a couple of winters in the early and mid 1990’s, Lake Louise was my home. I worked as a Naturalist / Interpreter for Parks Canada then, leading hikes along the shore of Lake Louise, and up the valley beyond called the Plain of Six Glaciers. I must have tramped the trail into the scene immortalized on a million post cards more than a hundred times, but I still consider it the best “bang for the buck” in the Rockies. Nowhere else can you so easily get into a recently glaciated alpine landscape with such majestic scenery. Its been more than ten years since I guided this trail, but striding out along the flat lakeshore, I remember every step of the way.

The first two kilometres are pan flat, and for a few minutes I fear that my sea-level legs and lungs might not be up for this run, which starts at more than 5500 feet. But when the trail starts to climb beyond the cliffs where I learned to rock climb a decade and a half ago, I feel myself settling into the familiar rhythm of trail running.

It’s a beautiful morning to be in the mountains, and I remember the first time fellow Park Naturalist Joel Hagen and I hiked this trail, in early May 1992. Deep snow still blanketed the entire valley then, in places 10 or 15 feet deep, so that we post holed up to our hips much of the way. Unwittingly, we crossed half a dozen avalanche slopes yet to “let go.” Our weight could easily have been the trigger. We joked again last night about the possible newspaper headlines: “Two young, stupid, park naturalists killed in avalanche first week on the job.”

There’s no snow on the trail this morning as I run up towards Mount Lefroy and Mount Victoria. In fact, in the ten years since I’ve been here, the glaciers that give the valley its name have noticeably retreated. How long will it be before this place becomes know as the Plain of Five Glaciers, and then Four, Three, Two....

The feeling of running in the mountains is euphoric, and for more than two hours I nearly forget my foolish troubles. Mountains have a way of doing that: they put our early difficulty into perspective. They dwarf our concerns with their stalwart grandeur.

I pass the tea house and run out the trail to the Abbot Pass lookout, dancing along the narrow edge of the lateral moraine that drops off two hundred feet to the debris covered Lower Victoria Glacier. At the lookout I sit alone and feel the sun on my face, feel the pulse of life through my limbs, feel the surge of endorphins (endolphins as a friend calls them) swimming through my system. It’s a good thing to alive on this earth.

The run down is pure bliss. My feet know every step, and my running on the rocky slopes of Mount Doug, Mount Work and the trails in the hills above Theatis Lake have given me intuitive footwork, so that I feel as through I am flying. The plod along the last two kilometres back to the menacing, penitentiary like Chateau is a test of willpower which I am glad to report I passed.

I spend the rest of the day visiting old friends. I finish the day with diner at the Lake Louise Hostel with good friends Jim and Jack, who I met the very first day I moved to the west more than fifteen years before, and who I have stayed close to, more or less, ever since. They are both in their early 60’s now, and it’s a stark reminder of the passage of time to be with them again in a place we’ve frequented for a decade and a half.

The passage of time. The belief in my deserving. The faith in my spirit as my central reference point. The ability to love unconditionally, even if it means letting go of the woman whom I love. The power of self referral, where my own spirit, and not people, places, or things become the root of my happiness in life.

These are the things that crossing the continental divide has dredged up. Its not the place really, it’s the man, this localized mass of energy and ideas and information that has brought these questions to the surface. And now, driving back to the west coast, playing a waiting game with love, I try to find the equanimity of self referral to calm my mind and gently numb the pain in my chest and return again to a place where I know that I deserve to succeed beyond my own wildest imagination.

Even in pain, bliss

Driving, mountain ranges slip past, the ocean at my back. Pain. The stretch of highway from Hope to Merritt makes my hands tremble, my stomach wretch. I don’t even notice when I merge with Hwy 1 outside Kamloops, and I’m in Revelstoke, crossing the stout Columbia, before I’m certain that I’m heading in the correct direction. You can’t go home again.

I come back to Canmore with such a tangle of emotions that I can scarcely breathe.

I drive all day with my heart litterly aching. It feels as though steel bands surround me, crushing me.

It’s not just the return, after two years, to Canmore. It’s so much more than that.

But driving into the Bow Valley last night was the most painful thing I’ve done.

The Valley was my home for nearly fourteen years. For nearly ten of those, Kathleen and I were together. Our first son, Rio, was born in Canmore. Now, a year after Kat and I have separated, coming back to this place, leaves me feeling the loss of so much of what we had, dreamed of having, wished we could have had, but in the end, couldn’t find in one another.

Its not that I want Kat back. I don’t even want those dreams back. What Kat and I have now is so much better. But we sometimes become addicted to the past, and though I’ve done a lot to kick that compulsion, I can’t help but fall into that hole.

Canmore holds too many knotted emotions, both past and present, and after 11pm, having completed my first undertaking, heart wrenching, I pick up beer and drive east, determined to skip town to sleep that night away from this place. Rio and Silas are in town, have been with Kat and Andy for the last eight days. I feel so close to them, but a million galaxies seem to stand between us. I long for them. And the ache of the day’s drive still pieces my heart with an icy tine, compounding the distance.

Before I make the highway again, a voice rises in me so dire that after I scream, I fear I may have done permanent damage to my vocal cords. And then comes a sound so awful, so terrible, that I frighten myself with it.

The tremors pass and I find a place to sleep for the night, curled in my sleeping bag in the back of my Impreza.

The morning comes. I eat. Even the old trouble with money returns now that I’m back hemmed between these valley’s walls and I have to sort out a cash flow problem with my bank over the phone before I can retrieve my kids.

I can’t contain my tears when they embrace me. Rio puts his hands on my face and Silas climbs over me, his face aglow. They are the love of my life.

Letting go of my children was the one thing I said I couldn’t do when Kat and I separated, and now I’ve done it, although only for short spells.

We beat it out of town and hit the Calgary Zoo and spend the day. Its magic being back with the boys, so much so that my other anguish fades to a dull ache for periods of a hour at a time. At one point it bubbles back to the surface (after watching a male and female lion playfully bite each others ears: I’m a sucker for romance) and I find myself leaking tears while fixing a snack for Rio. I tell him that my heart is aching. He looks into my reddened eyes and says “I will sing you a love song.” He sings:

I love you so much
I love you as big as the sky
I wanna make your heart heal all up
I wanna give you a great big hug
And then, I wanna give you a big kiss

It’s the most beautiful song anybody has ever sung me. We write the lyrics down and sing them to each other.

It’s not the only love song that has been given to me in the last few days.

Friends Jason Mogus and Laura McKenzie, whose wedding I will be spinning tunes at later in August, have selected One Step Closer to You, from Michael Franti’s album Yell Fire as their first dance, so I’ve been listening to it a lot in the last few days. Dancing with Silas to it tonight I felt the power of these words:

I let go of my broken heart
I let go to an open heart
I let go of my broken dreams
I let go to the mystery
I believe in the miracle
I believe in the spiritual
I believe in n the one above
I believe in the one I love

Tears again, and this time its Silas who wraps his two-year-old arms around me, with such vigor that you’d think that the boy knew exactly what the man was feeling.

He and I dance in the hotel room we’ve rented in Calgary, and I feel the bands of steel loosen.

Even in pain, there is bliss. I experience that sacred moment of connection, and I know that I don’t have to hold onto this. I can let it go. That I can dream of the love whose face I know, and who I want in my life, but who I can’t become attached to. I can let it go. I can believe in the miracle. I can believe in the spiritual. I can trust this terrifying moment of free fall and know that I’ll soon be on solid ground again.

I can believe in the one above: love, the energy of the universe that makes all things possible.

And I can believe in the ones I love: A boy who wants to heal his father’s heart all up, and a son who hugs his dad so tightly that it would undo the bonds that braced his heart.

Even in pain, bliss. I can let pain go. I can let pain go.