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.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Saturday, September 29, 2007
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.
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)
Thursday, September 27, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, September 24, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, September 21, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, September 17, 2007
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.
“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.
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.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, September 02, 2007
The Fractal Equation for Beach Glass
Fractal Equation, noun: a geometric pattern than is repeated at every scale and so cannot be represented by classical geometry
The sky presses close to the shore when Silas, Rio and I trip down to Clover Point for a long weekend, Sunday afternoon gallivant. Silas is asleep in my arms as we make our way over the rocks and logs. Rio, armed to the teeth with swords and a Power Ranger’s spear (early Halloween custom accessories) deftly navigates the obstacles. Silas continues his sleep wrapped in a fleece blanket, while Rio and I hunker down at the shore line. First we bat rocks with flat pieces of driftwood, a favourite beach pastime. But that grows dull, and Rio asks for a new game.
I’m stumped. I’m on my knees picking up dollar sized stones to bat and instead of rising and knocking them out to sea, I dig a little deeper. I find a speck of clear beach glass, polished and wet, just under the top layer of stones on the beach. Rio says it looks like a jelly bean and speculates on its flavour: pop corn. I push a few more rocks aside and find another one, and another. Soon I’ve dropped the fist full of stones I had collected and Rio and I are pushing layers of beach rocks aside, finding dozens of tiny brown, blue, green, white, and even red specks of glass.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the beach, but I’m rarely the one who brings home the big find. My good friend Jack could walk along any stretch of beach and find something extraordinary: half a dozen Japanese fishing floats, a Pepsi bottle from the 1940’s, a glass eye from a sixteenth century pirate, something that he lost in Baja California in 1969. Me, not so much. I once found a hockey glove at Cape Scott. I think it might have been part of a load of such items washed off a container ship somewhere far out in the Pacific. I left it on the beach for others to enjoy. That’s about it.
So finding such a wealth of tiny specks of beach glass under my feet in a place that I visit often (three times this week, for example) was nothing short of amazing.
Of course, its always been there.
It reminded me that the scale at which nature presents marvels is infinite. Its fractal.
It was the second time this week that the word had been appropriate.
Silas slept, while Rio and excavated. Rio thoughtfully put up barriers to keep the tide form washing over our prone bodies. In an hour my pockets were full and we were onto filling our Frisbee.
Each tiny piece of glass, none bigger than my pinkie fingernail (that’s a precise scale of measurement, similar to comparing clear cuts in Northern Ontario to the various Atlantic provinces) was unique, but similar in shape. Most were shaped like a kidney. Wet they are magical, refracting light in varying degrees of translucence.
For an hour Rio and I were absorbed in our task. I thought of little else. He danced, waved his arms like a maniac, built barriers, laughed when my shoes got soaked because I wasn’t paying attention, and came dutifully to inspect each piece of glass I thought worthy of his perusal.
I kept saying to him, "this glass is always under our feet at Clover Point, like a secret treasure buried just beneath the surface." He kept on dancing.
All we need to is push some stones aside, and there they are, if we care to look. Just one layer down.
The fractal essence of nature’s marvels, its patterns, its gifts made me think of a conversation with my friend Dan Spinner late in the week. We were talking about some of the intense lessons I’ve been learning, and re-learning, over the last month. He reminded me that these lessons were fractal: that when learned in one area of my life, they could be repeated in many others. The lessons I’ve learned around success in work, therefore, could be applied to my recent conflagration in my love life, and in raising my children.
Silas woke and we had snacks and then walked along the beach for a while, Rio dashing ahead, swords flashing, while Silas and I tottered along at a two-year old pace. I felt the stones shift beneath me, and under them, millions upon millions of kidney shaped specks of brown, blue, green, white and even red specks of beach glass moved too.
I felt my concept of deserve shift then and there as well, the fractal equation of beach glass being applied at a completely new scale.
(Read: The Next Step in Deserve)
The sky presses close to the shore when Silas, Rio and I trip down to Clover Point for a long weekend, Sunday afternoon gallivant. Silas is asleep in my arms as we make our way over the rocks and logs. Rio, armed to the teeth with swords and a Power Ranger’s spear (early Halloween custom accessories) deftly navigates the obstacles. Silas continues his sleep wrapped in a fleece blanket, while Rio and I hunker down at the shore line. First we bat rocks with flat pieces of driftwood, a favourite beach pastime. But that grows dull, and Rio asks for a new game.
I’m stumped. I’m on my knees picking up dollar sized stones to bat and instead of rising and knocking them out to sea, I dig a little deeper. I find a speck of clear beach glass, polished and wet, just under the top layer of stones on the beach. Rio says it looks like a jelly bean and speculates on its flavour: pop corn. I push a few more rocks aside and find another one, and another. Soon I’ve dropped the fist full of stones I had collected and Rio and I are pushing layers of beach rocks aside, finding dozens of tiny brown, blue, green, white, and even red specks of glass.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the beach, but I’m rarely the one who brings home the big find. My good friend Jack could walk along any stretch of beach and find something extraordinary: half a dozen Japanese fishing floats, a Pepsi bottle from the 1940’s, a glass eye from a sixteenth century pirate, something that he lost in Baja California in 1969. Me, not so much. I once found a hockey glove at Cape Scott. I think it might have been part of a load of such items washed off a container ship somewhere far out in the Pacific. I left it on the beach for others to enjoy. That’s about it.
So finding such a wealth of tiny specks of beach glass under my feet in a place that I visit often (three times this week, for example) was nothing short of amazing.
Of course, its always been there.
It reminded me that the scale at which nature presents marvels is infinite. Its fractal.
It was the second time this week that the word had been appropriate.
Silas slept, while Rio and excavated. Rio thoughtfully put up barriers to keep the tide form washing over our prone bodies. In an hour my pockets were full and we were onto filling our Frisbee.
Each tiny piece of glass, none bigger than my pinkie fingernail (that’s a precise scale of measurement, similar to comparing clear cuts in Northern Ontario to the various Atlantic provinces) was unique, but similar in shape. Most were shaped like a kidney. Wet they are magical, refracting light in varying degrees of translucence.
For an hour Rio and I were absorbed in our task. I thought of little else. He danced, waved his arms like a maniac, built barriers, laughed when my shoes got soaked because I wasn’t paying attention, and came dutifully to inspect each piece of glass I thought worthy of his perusal.
I kept saying to him, "this glass is always under our feet at Clover Point, like a secret treasure buried just beneath the surface." He kept on dancing.
All we need to is push some stones aside, and there they are, if we care to look. Just one layer down.
The fractal essence of nature’s marvels, its patterns, its gifts made me think of a conversation with my friend Dan Spinner late in the week. We were talking about some of the intense lessons I’ve been learning, and re-learning, over the last month. He reminded me that these lessons were fractal: that when learned in one area of my life, they could be repeated in many others. The lessons I’ve learned around success in work, therefore, could be applied to my recent conflagration in my love life, and in raising my children.
Silas woke and we had snacks and then walked along the beach for a while, Rio dashing ahead, swords flashing, while Silas and I tottered along at a two-year old pace. I felt the stones shift beneath me, and under them, millions upon millions of kidney shaped specks of brown, blue, green, white and even red specks of beach glass moved too.
I felt my concept of deserve shift then and there as well, the fractal equation of beach glass being applied at a completely new scale.
(Read: The Next Step in Deserve)
The Next Step in Deserve
In July of 2006 I contemplated suicide. I was running at the time on one of my favourite, most familiar places on Vancouver Island, Mount Doug, and it was a beautiful day. Its both strange and not surprising that the impetus for such an act occurred while sprinting along the back-trails of this hill, its giant trees dropping dappled light along the well worn path.
I had allowed my life to become unbearable. My relationship with Kathleen, with whom I had spent the last eleven years, was in shambles. I had started a clandestine affair two weeks before with a woman who to this very day will always be my angel of salvation. She didn’t save me from a horrible relationship, understand; she saved me from myself.
In addition to my relationship, I couldn’t seem to get my feet under me financially. I was flat broke. I had started my new business just a year earlier, and though I had served some amazing clients, most of my jobs were short, and didn’t pay very well. I was in the hole at the end of every month, borrowing more and more money to pay the mortgage and make sure the kids had what Kat and I thought they needed.
I came to a black space in my ability to see through the veil of darkness, and in that blackness, imaged that the only way out was to punch my own ticket.
I didn’t. I never really got close. But the experience jarred me into aciton. I made some dramatic changes, some of which are being chronicled elsewhere. Part of my karma at this time is to share these things with the world (all seven of you who read this blog) so that others might learn from the lessons my life is revealing to me.)
In the shadow of that darkness, the biggest lesson I had to learn is this: I deserve success.
During my run on Mount Doug, and in the days and weeks afterwards, I had to face the fact that the primary story of my life to that moment had been that Stephen Legault didn’t deserve to succeed. He didn’t deserve to fail. He just didn’t deserve to succeed. I had doomed myself through my own mythology to purgatory.
I had said to myself so many times that “the universe won’t let me fail” that it had become rote. It was true, I had never failed, not completely. But I had come close. My experience with Wildcanada.net’s demise was heart breaking for many, including myself. I had been within five hundred dollars of bankruptcy several times. And now, for a few brief but terrifying moments, I thought that the only way I could escape myself was by engineering my own swan-song.
I had said that the universe wouldn’t let me fail, but I had never said, “the universe will conspire in my success beyond my wildest dreams.”
I started saying that. A lot.
I focused on work, and amazing things started happening. The story began to change. Reality began to resemble the mythology that I was recreating. I believed the mythology. I deserved success.
Now, just over one year into the refashioning of this mythology, I’ve come to see that I need to take the next step in deserve.
I deserve to be loved.
I deserve success in love.
I am surrounded by love. My children, whom I just tucked into bed, love me in a way that is astonishing. Rio on one side and Silas on the other, their arms wrapped around me, and Rio says through the groggy miasma of sleep, “I love you as big as all the universe.”
My parents love me. My friends love me. I have people in my life – Kate Dugas, James Pratt, Sarah Pullman, many others – who don’t hesitate to tell me that they love me. That is a gift. I love them bottomlessly.
Hell, Kathleen loves me. To me, that is astonishing.
I deserve to be loved. We all do.
The love that I have to give is gigantic in proportion. I deserve someone who can handle that.
I deserve to be in a relationship where I can love freely.
I deserve to love, and be loved, deeply, opening, without hesitation and without fear.
I deserve to love, and be loved, even when I am unlovable, which is pretty damn often frankly.
I deserve to be loved in a way that allows me to grow sexually, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, all at the same time. I want to love in a way that allows someone else to grow too.
I have not idea where I got it into my head that I didn’t deserve this. Maybe it’s the way I was born. Maybe that’s how we are all born. Maybe its learned, or some kind of social conditioning. The fact is, I’m done with that story. Its yesterday’s illusion. Today, now, I deserve love, and deserve to be in love with someone who wants love in return.
I had allowed my life to become unbearable. My relationship with Kathleen, with whom I had spent the last eleven years, was in shambles. I had started a clandestine affair two weeks before with a woman who to this very day will always be my angel of salvation. She didn’t save me from a horrible relationship, understand; she saved me from myself.
In addition to my relationship, I couldn’t seem to get my feet under me financially. I was flat broke. I had started my new business just a year earlier, and though I had served some amazing clients, most of my jobs were short, and didn’t pay very well. I was in the hole at the end of every month, borrowing more and more money to pay the mortgage and make sure the kids had what Kat and I thought they needed.
I came to a black space in my ability to see through the veil of darkness, and in that blackness, imaged that the only way out was to punch my own ticket.
I didn’t. I never really got close. But the experience jarred me into aciton. I made some dramatic changes, some of which are being chronicled elsewhere. Part of my karma at this time is to share these things with the world (all seven of you who read this blog) so that others might learn from the lessons my life is revealing to me.)
In the shadow of that darkness, the biggest lesson I had to learn is this: I deserve success.
During my run on Mount Doug, and in the days and weeks afterwards, I had to face the fact that the primary story of my life to that moment had been that Stephen Legault didn’t deserve to succeed. He didn’t deserve to fail. He just didn’t deserve to succeed. I had doomed myself through my own mythology to purgatory.
I had said to myself so many times that “the universe won’t let me fail” that it had become rote. It was true, I had never failed, not completely. But I had come close. My experience with Wildcanada.net’s demise was heart breaking for many, including myself. I had been within five hundred dollars of bankruptcy several times. And now, for a few brief but terrifying moments, I thought that the only way I could escape myself was by engineering my own swan-song.
I had said that the universe wouldn’t let me fail, but I had never said, “the universe will conspire in my success beyond my wildest dreams.”
I started saying that. A lot.
I focused on work, and amazing things started happening. The story began to change. Reality began to resemble the mythology that I was recreating. I believed the mythology. I deserved success.
Now, just over one year into the refashioning of this mythology, I’ve come to see that I need to take the next step in deserve.
I deserve to be loved.
I deserve success in love.
I am surrounded by love. My children, whom I just tucked into bed, love me in a way that is astonishing. Rio on one side and Silas on the other, their arms wrapped around me, and Rio says through the groggy miasma of sleep, “I love you as big as all the universe.”
My parents love me. My friends love me. I have people in my life – Kate Dugas, James Pratt, Sarah Pullman, many others – who don’t hesitate to tell me that they love me. That is a gift. I love them bottomlessly.
Hell, Kathleen loves me. To me, that is astonishing.
I deserve to be loved. We all do.
The love that I have to give is gigantic in proportion. I deserve someone who can handle that.
I deserve to be in a relationship where I can love freely.
I deserve to love, and be loved, deeply, opening, without hesitation and without fear.
I deserve to love, and be loved, even when I am unlovable, which is pretty damn often frankly.
I deserve to be loved in a way that allows me to grow sexually, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, all at the same time. I want to love in a way that allows someone else to grow too.
I have not idea where I got it into my head that I didn’t deserve this. Maybe it’s the way I was born. Maybe that’s how we are all born. Maybe its learned, or some kind of social conditioning. The fact is, I’m done with that story. Its yesterday’s illusion. Today, now, I deserve love, and deserve to be in love with someone who wants love in return.
No illusions on Jocelyn Hill
There’s no place to hide illusions when you’re grinding up seven kilometres of rocky trail.
The number of illusions that I surround myself with every day of my existence is staggering.
The illusion of the past, the innumerable stories I’ve created about who I was, and how I became who I am today. Most of what I remember is erroneous. If something happened more than a year ago, the likelihood of my remembering it with any accuracy is slim. Its illusion.
The illusion of the future, the even more populous scenarios that play out in my head about the days, weeks, and months to come, are even less likely. Tomorrow is a mystery, next week impossible to imagine with precision. And yet I spend vast amounts of time, and huge amounts of emotional energy, allowing the dreamscape of tomorrow to dominate my present.
Jocelyn Hill is a good grind for working through illusions. As I start up the long, steep incline, I look down at my feet, picking their way over stones and roots. Breathing hard, feeling the burn of lactic acid in my legs, I burry myself in illusions, anything to avoid the present. Because the present is sweat, throbbing muscles, tearing lungs.
The day, which only moments ago was threatening rain throughout, has turned to sun, and as legs and lungs fall into a rhythm, I realize I’ve not been actually seeing the green world around me for the last kilometre.
I re-centre myself in present moment awareness.
This is the only reality, this is all that is real. Right now. This world that is before us in this very minute. Even as I write these lines, my run up Jocelyn hill on Friday, two days in the past, is illusion. The muscle fibre it built remains as a testament to its occurrence, as does the remaining stiffness in my knees, but otherwise, its only a bit of neural energy stored somewhere in the recesses of my brain. Or in the wink between electrons.
I remember it was a good run. Hard. Emotionally and physically. I fought the illusions most of the way to the summit, seven kilometres and a thousand feet up from the trailhead. When I made the rocky dome I carried on, circling back via a route that provided inspiring views down, down, down to the Saanich Inlet far below, and to the green hills - many being scrapped clear for the Bear Mountain Resort - in the distance.
On the flight down, shirt off, sweat stinging my eyes, the wet leaves and branches whipping my body, I contemplated again the notion of illusions. I’ve been struggling with the concept of self referral this last month. Staying grounded in self referral is helping me manage my way through a tangle of emotions. Staying centred in self referral is teaching me to be happy regardless of what is happening outside my own centre, my own soul.
Getting lost in the illusion of past and present pulls me from my centre. Illusions distract me from self referral. Illusions create stories about my past, they call my ego to the fore and make it act out scenarios for the future. Staying focused on the present moment, the trail drilling past me, the scent of wet leaves in the air, the crispness of the air on my flesh, the feeling of my feet light on the rocks and bald roots: these things keep me centred. These things keep me aware of my own soul, and its connection to all that surrounds me. Near and far.
Two hours and fifteen minutes after setting out I am back at my car. I have no illusions the lessons learned on Jocelyn Hill will need to be relearned again.
The number of illusions that I surround myself with every day of my existence is staggering.
The illusion of the past, the innumerable stories I’ve created about who I was, and how I became who I am today. Most of what I remember is erroneous. If something happened more than a year ago, the likelihood of my remembering it with any accuracy is slim. Its illusion.
The illusion of the future, the even more populous scenarios that play out in my head about the days, weeks, and months to come, are even less likely. Tomorrow is a mystery, next week impossible to imagine with precision. And yet I spend vast amounts of time, and huge amounts of emotional energy, allowing the dreamscape of tomorrow to dominate my present.
Jocelyn Hill is a good grind for working through illusions. As I start up the long, steep incline, I look down at my feet, picking their way over stones and roots. Breathing hard, feeling the burn of lactic acid in my legs, I burry myself in illusions, anything to avoid the present. Because the present is sweat, throbbing muscles, tearing lungs.
The day, which only moments ago was threatening rain throughout, has turned to sun, and as legs and lungs fall into a rhythm, I realize I’ve not been actually seeing the green world around me for the last kilometre.
I re-centre myself in present moment awareness.
This is the only reality, this is all that is real. Right now. This world that is before us in this very minute. Even as I write these lines, my run up Jocelyn hill on Friday, two days in the past, is illusion. The muscle fibre it built remains as a testament to its occurrence, as does the remaining stiffness in my knees, but otherwise, its only a bit of neural energy stored somewhere in the recesses of my brain. Or in the wink between electrons.
I remember it was a good run. Hard. Emotionally and physically. I fought the illusions most of the way to the summit, seven kilometres and a thousand feet up from the trailhead. When I made the rocky dome I carried on, circling back via a route that provided inspiring views down, down, down to the Saanich Inlet far below, and to the green hills - many being scrapped clear for the Bear Mountain Resort - in the distance.
On the flight down, shirt off, sweat stinging my eyes, the wet leaves and branches whipping my body, I contemplated again the notion of illusions. I’ve been struggling with the concept of self referral this last month. Staying grounded in self referral is helping me manage my way through a tangle of emotions. Staying centred in self referral is teaching me to be happy regardless of what is happening outside my own centre, my own soul.
Getting lost in the illusion of past and present pulls me from my centre. Illusions distract me from self referral. Illusions create stories about my past, they call my ego to the fore and make it act out scenarios for the future. Staying focused on the present moment, the trail drilling past me, the scent of wet leaves in the air, the crispness of the air on my flesh, the feeling of my feet light on the rocks and bald roots: these things keep me centred. These things keep me aware of my own soul, and its connection to all that surrounds me. Near and far.
Two hours and fifteen minutes after setting out I am back at my car. I have no illusions the lessons learned on Jocelyn Hill will need to be relearned again.
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