A short meditation for America

Like the rest of the world my morning starts with thoughts of America. Thoughts of hope, thoughts of fear. Never in my lifetime have so many people around the world needed to believe that the self proclaimed greatest nation on earth would do the right thing on a single day. But we do. We need you, America, to believe in your own rhetoric, to believe in yourselves as much as you have been asking the rest of the world to believe in you.

So this morning, as America wakes up and teeters on the brink of the most important decision of a generation, I start my day meditating on love and peace and hope. You say “we are the ones” and “yes we can.” Today, I believe you, America. Please don’t disappoint me.

Kid with a Chemistry Set

So I’ve been moping. Jenn is away, and the boyz are with their mother, and I’ve been hanging out at home feeling bored and lonely for most of the last week. I’ve made good use of my time: running, working, writing, cleaning, visiting with friends. But the fact is, I’ve been dragging my ass around for the last few days, feeling sorry for myself, and more often than not, making an ass of myself while I’m at it.

I don’t do well with distance, or absence, or a lot of free time on my hands. My brain is like a chemistry set, and I’m a four year old with a shit-eating grin and a devil-may-care attitude. Left alone in a room with all those beakers and funny shapes jars and colourful liquids and powders, you can be reasonably certain the fire department will have to come and sort things out.

My first tactic is to fight loneliness with cheerfulness. You know, smile at the world a la’ Mary Tyler Moore (we have similar problems). This works pretty good, actually. The girl in the grocery store gets a big hello and chit-chat about how her shift is going; the dude in the dry cleaners (wet cleaners, actually, cause its way less toxic) and I chat about shirts, and where to get a flash shirt for less coin. I greet people on the street. Its like an episode of The King of Kensington.

This all worked pretty well until I ventured into the parking lot a Wal-Mart. I had uploaded a few pictures to be printed there, you know to try and save ink on my home printer, and it was time to pick them up. This was Saturday. Mid afternoon. It was a bad idea.

I managed to keep pretty cool until some punk in a mustang slipped into the parking spot I had been waiting for the 90-year old blind man to drive his mini-van out of for five minutes. The guy just parked, and sashayed by me. I knew if I lost my cool then, it would be curtains for the day, so I silently suggested a nice warm spot for him to vacation, and what route he might take to get there, and found another spot some miles distant.

But I got back on the cheerfulness band-wagon, and smiled at as many people as I could. Some smiled back, while others avoided me like I was a plague ravaged maniac. It’s a smile, lady, not a axe….

So cheerfulness works. But what if there is nobody around to be cheerful too? That’s when my inner four year old really gets to cooking. That’s when I have to fall back on entanglement. Ironically, I’ve written about this before. More than a year ago, during a very dark time, I penned a piece called Dismantling Loneliness. The notion then - which I need to be reminded of nearly every day of my existence, it seems - is that there is no separation. Between you and I and all life around us, there is nothing separating us except our dim senses that cannot see or touch the way the world really is. It’s the, “we’re all one” argument, but with a healthy dose of scientific explanation to avoid sounding like I should be sitting cross legged, offering you my favourite crystals as proof.

The theory of entanglement, as I have also written, is that everything that has once touched is still touching, and that at the moment of the Big Bang, everything was touching. All energy, all matter, was bundled up in a little atomic ball that burst and now, even with everything spread out across the plura-verse, its all still connected.

At the quantum level, all matter is just energy and information. And this matter is made up of 99.9% empty space, so if we could see the world as it really is, we’re just concentrations of matter moving through space that is really only very slightly less dense than we are. And all of that matter – you, me, that swank shirt that I’d like to pick up – was once, and still is, connected. We’re damn near nothing at all, but what we are extraordinary, and it is all one.

Nice thought, right?

So how does it stop the kid with the chemistry set in my head from seeing what happens when you mix the red power with the clear liquid? I can imagine that I am connected with my loved ones, across town, or 954 kilometres away. But imagining isn’t really what this is all about. That’s an intellectual exercises, and it’s my intellect that is more often-than-not the problem. It’s really more about feeling it.

Running helps. This morning Josh and I ran up Jocelyn Hill. It’s a fifteen K loop that gains a whole lot of elevation. We ran it in just under two hours. But at times during that run I was very angry. I learned this morning that a friend and colleague in Vancouver has a very aggressive form of cancer. She has a teen aged son. Then Josh told me about a friend who is separated from his family in order to earn a living, and who hasn’t seen his wife and little girl for months. They have been apart for so long that the little girl now only speaks French (they are in Quebec), and this friend only speaks English, so when he calls home, he can’t understand what she is saying any longer.

The world, sometimes, isn’t a very nice place, and it isn’t fair. That anger fuelled me and propelled me up some steep hills, but I didn’t feel any closer to my kids and to Jenn. Anger separates. Fear separates. Love connects.

Its only now, as the day wanes and I am becoming still that I can feel it. Stillness of all things is what keeps the kid with the chemistry set from blowing things up. Stillness is what can connect us.

Big as the Sky

Together Jenn and I pick up Silas from daycare, and then we drive straight to the airport and within an hour, Silas and I are back in the car, now without Jenn. We pick up Rio and head home and I’m in the door and cooking diner before it dawns on me how many different lives I’m living. The boys have a bath and I fold laundry and soon we’re clearing the table and making Rio’s lunch for tomorrow. Jenn calls from the airport shuttle and asks for phone numbers for taxis in Canmore.

The boys and I watch an episode of Avatar, and we snuggle on the couch and Silas, in his casual way tells me “You’re a great Dad, Steph,” the way you might say, “You’re a great fruit, Banana.”

Recently Rio looked and me and told me “I love you as big as the sky.” It’s a refrain we often repeat to one another. Then he said, “That’s really big, because the sky never ends, cause’ it goes on into outer-space.”

I tried to explain to Rio once that space has no beginning and no end, fighting my own impulse to question what, exactly, is on the other side of the end of the universe as it expands at the speed of light? I tell him that the universe bends back on itself to where it started, and then get confused, and instead we ended up reading a Dr. Suess book about how many apples a lion, a tiger and a leopard can balance on their heads while being chased by a bear with a broom. The answer is ten. But not for very long.

Sometimes I ask Rio if he knows how much I love him, and he just smiles and points his finger upwards, and I tell him anyway.

I call Jenn and she’s home. Home. I’m home too. We’re both home, but 954 kilometres apart. Not including the Straight of Georgia, so I guess it’s pretty damn close to 1000 kilometres.

In a couple of days, I’ll be in Canmore too. Then we’ll be apart again. And then…I get anxious just looking at my Calendar these days. Blocks of time with and without the people of love. I’ve got them colour coded. It helps. Not much, but a little.

Home. It’s where the people I love as big as the sky are. And it’s a good thing the sky is so big, because it’s got to stretch a fair distance to cover those three people at any given moment in time.

Missing

These days it seems as through I’m always missing someone.

I miss my children. When I am away from them, as I am now, it feels as if something has been ripped from my chest, leaving a cavernous vacuum.

When I’m in Victoria, and Jenn is in Canmore, I can only think of the next time I’ll see her. I miss her more than I thought I ever could.

At times I think my life has become so fragmented that it’s defined by who is missing from it.

This summer has been particularly difficult. I’ve spent a lot of time in Canmore, which is wonderful and glorious – hiking, climbing, backpacking, running, riding - but it’s a long way from Rio and Silas. The boys spent a week with Jenn and me in the Rockies (we did the 15 hour journey in one shot! Thank-you Kamloops water-park; thank-you portable DVD player….). We went to the Calgary Zoo, and had a birthday party for Silas. The boys got to hike in the alpine, have a snow-ball fight in July, and see their first grizzly bear. But it was too short, and punctuated with challenges.

For the first half of August I was in Victoria, and it felt like Silas, Rio and I had only just finished telling each other over and over how much we missed one-another before I packed up and drove the 950 kilometres back to Canmore again. Returning to the arms of the woman I love, leaving the tiny arms of the boys I adore.

Now I am missing them again. Sometimes I feel like a visitor in their lives. I feel like my time with them is just visits, not really parenting. The staccato instances when they are in my life these days seem all to brief, and interspersed far too widely.

I find that I am not looking forward. I am not looking forward to the future because there is simply too much time away from my children. Too much time away from Jenn. My calendar has become a series of demarcations of time periods with, and away from, the people I love. Yesterday I looked over my September schedule and was nearly reduced to tears: I only see the boys for three short periods and then I leave them again!

The alternative eludes me.

When I am missing the people I love, I box myself into a corner constructed of fear. I fear making a decision that will cost me one of the things so dear to me. I fear that in my absence, someone else is filling the role of father to Rio and Silas. I fear that when away from Jenn, we will become distant.

What is missing is bliss. I am searching for bliss in my family life. It’s been a long time since I felt it in a consistent way. Bliss for me is the connectivity I feel when the boundary between me, and the world around me, disappears. It’s the experience of the physical realm, but at the quantum level. That’s where, as the bandy legged guru’s might say, everything is one. This of course, is simply the state of the universe. The boundaries between everything are only a reality at the scale of objects – people, cars, chairs, pelicans – and are a construct of our senses which lack the refinement to experience the world as it really is. Fuzzy. With no hard edges between things. The chair feels solid when we sit on it, but if we could see it as it really is, there’s almost nothing there at all. Its 99.5% empty space, with an electron cloud swirling around a dense proton nucleolus and an electrically charged neutron. The chair feels solid, because it’s denser than my ass, but not by much. At the quantum level, we’re really sitting with the chair, or even in the chair, rather than on it, so much energy and information is being exchanged between it and ourselves all the time.

So that’s bliss for me: living the experience of the world as it really is. One. Connected. Whole. Not separate from everything around me, but a part of it.

At the quantum level, everything is just possibility, and everything is love.

When I feel that sensation of bliss, of connectivity, it’s often times accompanied by the rush of cold fire that fills me, that overflows from me. It’s intoxicating, and I am addicted to it. I don’t actually see the world at the quantum level, but I get a clear sense of it. I can feel what it is like to be a part of everything around me, no matter how far away.

I can experience the love of those who I am missing as through they were cradled in my arms.

Missing people of course seems like a waste of time. Having a hard time looking into the future? Stay connected to the present. Find solutions. Stay connected through the heart. At that miniscule scale of quantum physicals, everything is simply energy and information. It becomes matter only when perceived at the scale of objects, and when paired with a pair of eyes, finger tips, ears, a nose, taste buds on the tip of the tongue. I believe this energy that makes up everything in the universe is love: it is the creative force of the universe, which we feel as attraction, affection, desire, longing and passion for places and things in our lives. Our hearts seem to be the place in our body most connected to this energy of the universe, so it’s through my heart that I might find connection to the people I seem to miss so much. And through that energy, find solutions to the vexing challenge of loving so much those who are so far away.

(Rio, Jenn and Silas - in Grandma Mabel's coat, looking like a Jawa - at the beach)

Postscript: Monday afternoon, sun streaming through the trees as if in defiance of the autumn we know is just weeks away, at best. My father and step-mom Mabel are in town, and just back from Canmore, Jenn and I have the boys in the back seat and are driving to East Sooke Park. Tomorrow is the first day of school; today the last day of summer vacation. Silas asks for “maybe sometime,” and I slip the CD in and start to sing. I ask Silas to sing along but he just wants to listen. Rio sings the chorus. Jenn holds my hand. I feel it happen: the perceptible shift that precedes the wave of bliss. I have to stop singing. Jenn squeezes my hand and urges me on; I watch Rio in the rear view mirror as he sings the words. This is all that I want from life: to be with the people I love, in harmony, in peace.

Ears to Hear

Sometimes I’m foolish enough to believe that my ears are located on the sides of my head.

You know them: the little dangly, fleshy bits that look like they’ve been moulded by a three-year-old playing with modelling clay that has dried before anybody could put the finishing touches on it.

Goofy looking on the outside - especially given that they just keep on growing after everything else starts to shrink - ears are well designed to collect and funnel sound down through the auditory canal, and through the tympanic membrane, or eardrum. From there things get a little nutty. According to Wikipedia:

“That sound pressure is amplified through the middle portion of the ear and, in land animals, passed from the medium of air into a liquid medium. The change from air to liquid occurs because air surrounds the head and is contained in the ear canal and middle ear, but not in the inner ear. The inner ear is hollow, embedded in the temporal bone, the densest bone of the body. The hollow channels of the inner ear are filled with liquid, and contain a sensory epithelium that is studded with hair cells. The microscopic "hairs" of these cells are structural protein filaments that project out into the fluid. The hair cells are mechanoreceptors that release a chemical neurotransmitter when stimulated. Sound waves moving through fluid push the filaments; if the filaments bend over enough it causes the hair cells to fire. In this way sound waves are transformed into nerve impulses. The nerve impulses travel from the left and right ears through the eighth cranial nerve to both sides of the brain stem and up to the portion of the cerebral cortex dedicated to sound. This auditory part of the cerebral cortex is in the temporal lobe.”

If that alone doesn’t make you marvel at the complexity and downright unlikelihood of life and the sheer improbability of living creatures, then I don’t know what will.

But that’s just the start of it. That’s the part of our anatomy that lets us listen to a beautiful piece of music, or hear the sound of water cascading over stones. That’s the mechanical part.

Once that sound is in the cerebral cortex, it becomes subject not only to the temporal lobe’s functionality, but also places like the amydgala, which among other things, plays a role in creating emotions, and our old friend the hippocampus, which is principally involved in the creation and storage of memories.

The sounds come in, but what we do with them once they are rattling around in the maze of neurons that compose our brains is another matter all together. And so while we technically hear with our ears, we listen with our brains, and what we hear is filtered through the web of emotions and memories that we tote around with us.

I realized the other night that so often when I am hearing those people most important to me speak, I am not really listening. Nothing new there; hearing but not listening is one of the most common of human afflictions. My midnight epiphany was that I so often was listening with my fear – that complex marriage of emotion and memory -- and sound when filtered through that morass is perceptively altered. Worse than simply blocking sound out, listening through the cloak of fear alters meaning. Listening through fear means we are registering what we have been conditioned to hear through life’s sometimes unpleasant experiences, through our insecurities, our anger, and our jealously. If we’re accustomed to hearing something through this quagmire we’re likely to keep on hearing it that way.

What things sound like when they pass through my filter of fear is this: you don’t deserve success. You aren’t worthy. You’re going to lose what you have because you don’t know how to hold onto it. You don’t know how to do this, so you’re going to fail.

When I listen through my fear, I’m not really hearing what my loved ones have to tell me. I can’t really listen to my children or my partner’s concerns, hurts, pain or trepidation, because all I hear is “you’re going to loose something you love.”

What occurred to me the other night was that I have to listen not with my fear, but with my love.

Though they’d look even sillier blooming out of my chest, I sometimes wished that my ears were'nt so damned close to my brain, but instead were connected directly to my heart.

That way, when I listen to my friends, my colleagues, my children and my partner, all sound would first pass through my heart. When I listen this way, what I might hear would be this: this person is important, and what they are telling you is valuable. Don’t be afraid. Really listen to their words, and feel their feelings, rather than your own. This isn’t just about you; it’s about them. Hear them, not yourself.

Listen with your love, I must remind myself. Love doesn’t judge. Love doesn’t interrupt. Love doesn’t dismiss. Love accepts. Love enfolds, like two arms. Love creates solutions, not barriers. Love trusts. Love believes in.

When I learn to listen with love, not fear, then I might really hear what those I love are saying. Then I will have ears to listen with, not simply hear.