Pulse

I’m sitting on the stairs at Victoria Gymnastics, watching Rio fly through the air, his sandy blonde hair streaming out behind him, as he launches himself off a mini-tramp. He’s getting good at this, pushing himself in a way that makes me awe struck. Between the mini-tramp and the tumble track he dances on a matt to a rhythm only he can hear. Watching him physically grow up is such a precious gift.

A few hours ago I was flying (though not through the air, thank God) myself, running up and over Mount Doug during a short, but grueling scamper on the rocky front side of the hill. There is a rhythm to this too, and a pulse. Once when running up the steepest ridge on the tiny hill with my best friend Josh we checked our pulses after making the dash from bottom to top in 12 minutes: 190 beats per second. The pulse of a hummingbird? Sedate by comparison.

Sitting on the stairs, watching Rio, I become aware that I’m swaying forwards and back. Forwards and back. It is my pulse that is moving me. I’ve noticed this before. Sometimes if I sit with one leg crossed over the other at the knee, the top leg actually bounces. Today the rhythm of my heart is actually moving me back and forth. I’m hoping that such a prominent pulse isn’t a bad thing.

Forwards and back. The pulse. The heart pumps because of electrical waves generated by the Sino arterial node. This node is cellular tissue located in the right atrium of the heart that acts as the body’s natural pacemaker, creating a “sinus rhythm”. (Not to be confused with the metrical blowing of one’s nose when suffering from allergies, which is the other sinus rhythm.)

The Sino arterial tissue is composed of special cells called cardiac myocytes which generate the electrical pulse. In essence, the heart is a muscle that generates its own electrical cadence that causes the contraction and expansion of its cells and results in the pulse of blood through our bodies.

Anybody who isn’t awestruck by that simply isn’t spending enough time marveling at their own human self. How this electrical impulse starts, and how the brain, which is also something of an energizer battery, keeps tabs on all this, is yet unknown to me. I need more time with Wikipedia.

What I do know is that these waves of electricity pass through us and out of us. We can measure them with electrodes attached to the skin. Researchers have shown that these electrical waves extend far beyond the body. As tools for measuring this human electrical pulse become more sophisticated we are learning that the field encompassed by a human pulse seems almost without practical limit.

If someone was to sit down next to me on the stairs at the Victoria Gymnastics club on Friday, they would be sitting down inside the electrical field of my pulse. They would be sitting down, in a sense, inside a part of me.

And I them.

We are a little naive to think that who we are is encompassed by the seemingly solid demarcation of our epidermis. We breath in, and we take in the world around us, it mixes with blood pumped from our hearts, and in a quick wink, is circulated to every cell in our body. And just as quickly, the byproducts of our existence at that cellular level are circulated back, deposited via our blood stream in our lungs, and then, we breathe out. We are released back into the world around us. Forward and back.

But of course, even that think layer of skin that keeps everything from dropping onto the trail as I lumber up the rocky hills on the Saanich Peninsula is almost entirely not there. At the molecular level, my skin that holds me intact, among other things, and the muscles that pulse after a long run, my heart that beats its electric rhythm, my brain that somehow keeps track of my children’s birthday’s and ensures that my Pancreas knows just what to do when I eat a big meal; all of these things are almost entirely made up of nothing.

And so, I am a pulse of electricity, moving among other pulses of electricity, exchanging both matter and energy with everything and everyone I meet.

That’s both really nice sounding, and a little creepy.

Over the weekend, I think about pulse.

On Thursday night I swim with my children, marveling again at Rio as he twists and turns underwater, and at Silas, his wrestler like arms wrapped around my neck as we bob along with the current in the whirlpool.

Friday is gym. Friday night Jenn and I go to a farewell party for a friend and colleague and walk home in the dark arm-in-arm. Saturday we take the boyz to Wiffle Spit near Sooke, where Rio can dance along with the waves, and Silas hunkers down to get intimate with a stick (it’s a paintbrush, he says) and the earth (his palate).

Sunday we head to Clover Point. Fly a kite. Play soccer. Throw a Frisbee. See fire trucks, and a new fire boat. Race along the rocks on the beach. Drink hot chocolate at the end of the day.

It’s a perfect weekend, and by the end of it, I’m more deeply in love with all three of these people than I ever dreamed possible.

We’re caught in each other’s pulse.

It’s the most amazing place to be.

Running Towards the Sun

It’s the first sunny day of the month. My body, my heart, my whole being aches to be on a trail, running through sunlight. There is a push and pull to the winter months. Short, grey, rainy days pull me towards lethargy. My body wants sugar, carbs, and a couch. But I know that to endure a west coast winter, I must push myself out the door, even if my mind and body protest, to keep running. And on any sunny day, the imperative is even stronger. Drop what you’re doing, and grab your shoes.

Mount Doug is my destination and I plod up the familiar trails, wheezing from lack of time on these rocky slopes over the last month. While Jenn and I vacationed in Baja I managed to run a few times through the desert like environs, pounding along ridges and hills, shredding my shins, knees and thighs on cactus and thorny shrubs until it looked as if I’d been in a knife fight with a two foot tall assailant, and had lost.

(Some of the rocky hills that made running in Baja so much fun)

But I drank way too much beer, and our diet seemed to include a pound of pulverized avocado ever day, which accumulated around my middle.

When we returned, Jenn fell ill, and I followed (though she got the worst of it), and then I went to Ontario, which kept me off the trails for another couple of weeks.

But this morning there are no excuses, and so I tramp along the track, slanting rays of sun warming my face, and coaxing me onwards.

It occurs to me that I’ve spent more than my share of time this winter mired in melancholia. More than just this winter, really. This last year. I’m supposed to be searching for bliss, I recall, and yet I keep finding blah. The cycles of my life continue to repeat, and time and time again I find myself trudging towards these summits with a tear stained face.

People say to break the cycles, but I don’t think I want to. Instead of breaking them, I’ll bend them, angle them upwards. As this trail I’m on winds through Garry oak forests and out over a rocky bulge that I gingerly run up, mindful of the 100 foot drop to my right, so too must I push the angel of my cycles towards the sun.

Work, family, love: it all comes down to this: every single day is an opportunity to make rich the experience of our precious time on this fragile and fleeting earth.

My body now loose, my head clear, my back warmed by the mornings dazzling light, I push over the summit and back down into the woods again. Its OK to be in the darkness now and again. I know the way. My body intuits rocks, roots, hidden obstacles. What I know for certain is this: my life now and forever is infused with the most extraordinary love I could imagine. I am deeply and profoundly grateful. The love given to me now is the greatest gift of life's myriad offerings.

I will not get in the way of this. I will relax into this ecstasy, this bliss of being loved. I will put away fear, doubt, guilt. I will run forward, upwards, towards harmony.

I will run towards the sun.

Praise

It’s the last day of my impromptu visit to Southern Ontario, and I’m ready to head home. The sky yet hangs in tattered rags above, a skiff of snow fell overnight dusting the asphalt trapped earth in white.

My father invites me to church.

He is a believer.

I am too. But not in God, or Jesus, or the Holy Ghost, at least in the way that he is. He knows this, but wanted me to come to church to witness first hand something that is so important in his and Mabel’s life.

It was a decade ago now that he informed me that he and Mabel had been born again. I think it was a preemptive move on his part to keep me from launching into one of my regular tirades about organized religion. I wonder how many of these he and Mabel had to endure after they had joined the Alliance Church and invited Christ into their lives? I’ve never asked, but I hope not too many.

I agree to join him for the Sunday morning service.

The last time I was in church was in 1993, the year my grandmother died. Before that, it was when my grandfather died the year before. And before that, when my Nana died.

Get the picture?

We enter the hall and people greet my father and ask about Mabel. A man at the door shakes my hand, welcoming me. It’s nice to be welcome. We move towards the Sanctuary and my father receives hugs and handshakes and there are offers of food and other assistance. Finally we are seated, towards the front, where he and Mabel always sit.

This isn’t the church that I attended on Christmas Eve and Easter as a child. Instead of an organ, there’s a youth-led rock band. Instead of a cloaked priest, Pastor Brian wears Dockers and a golf shirt. Instead of symbolism and ritual erected as a barrier, there is a down to earth belief that you can speak directly to God with your heart.

I believe that. But my definition of God is very different than the one celebrated here.

The service starts and the band launches into a couple of rock and roll spirituals, including a vaulting version based on Amazing Grace. They lyrics are projected via a Power Point projector for all to sing along with. Hands and voices are raised. Indeed, I can feel the power of the music, and tap my feet as I might at a concert I was just beginning to enjoy. And why not? Music is one of the shortest routes we can take to connect with the miraculous. And maybe that is just another word for God.

When the band takes a break I lean over and tell my father that if they had played music like that in church when I was a kid, I might have gone more often.

Next the children are hustled from the Sanctuary downstairs to where they will attend Sunday School. My only memory of this ritual was attending a few classes where we did a lot of colouring. They had the big 64 packs of Crayola crayons at my Sunday School – the ones with the built in sharpener – which was alright by me. I don’t remember anybody talking with me about God or Jesus there, although I might not have been paying attention (why would Sunday School be any different for me than, say, regular school?). Or maybe we were colouring pictures of God or Jesus.

I recall that over breakfast that morning my step-sister’s son Ian talked with his Alice about various passages from the bible. I think he might have quoted some scripture. He’s six.

Rio, who is also six, can quote Scoobie Doo. He’s an expert at finding crabs under rocks. And he can sing most the lyrics to several Jim Cuddy songs. Different priorities, that’s all.

After a few announcements, there are prayers for members of the congregation. I like the way these folks pray. It’s conversational. There’s none of the Latin chanting that I recall from my early experiences in the Catholic Church. Its just, “God, we’re asking that you look after Mabel and Bob,” and so on.

I can feel the power of the words, and of the congregation’s intension on my father, and I can sense him feeling alone, his wife still in the hospital, and absent from his side at church maybe for the first time. I take his hand and hold it tightly while Pastor Brian finishes his prayer.

Do I believe in the power of prayer to heal?

Damn right I do. But not for the reason’s anybody in this congregation might give. As I have written elsewhere, prayer focuses our intent, and through that intention we are able to tap into the mysterious field of energy and information that swirls around us; that is us. The energy that combines to create mater is susceptible to the energy released through the power of our intention. Loving intention is the most powerful of all, because love is pure energy, and when directed towards another person’s well being, can create miracles.

When the congregation of the Burlington Alliance Church prays for Mabel’s swift recovery, hundreds of people’s loving, heart felt energy is directed towards her. Yes, it has been proven that prayer makes a difference. So does meditation. The universe responds. I'm not the one to explain how, or why, and I don’t need anybody to provide the overly simplified explanation that “God responded.”

It will never be proven (or disproven, I suppose) that God or Jesus intervene, unless you expand your definition of God or Jesus. And then all we might be able to say that if God is the field of all possibilities in the universe, and our prayers and meditation are a means by which we consciously influence how energy and information is assembled, then our "prayers" call “God” to organize energy into matter in a way that heals. Enough loving hearts willing someone to be well evokes a powerful response in the quantum field, which again, might be just another way of saying "God."

It’s no stranger to contemplate the power of the human heart and mind to make this kind of change in a person’s health than it is to believe that an omnipotent being has control over how someone’s heart responds to quadruple bypass surgery.

The service continues with Pastor Brian delivering a sermon on charity. It’s a good topic, and I believe almost everything he says, except for the parts that say that it is God who wants us to be charitable.

Again, unless you expand your definition of God or Jesus.

And therein lays the problem for me. It’s always the central challenge I have with religions that focus their praise on a deity. “You shall have no other gods before me,” the bible says in Exodus 20: 2-3. What about after?

What if God wasn’t simply an almightily entity, but the creative power and energy of love in the universe?

The problem isn’t that there are different definitions, it’s that there is no possibility of discussion. God is God; the bible tells us so, and that’s all there is too it. End of conversation. To not believe is to condemn oneself to hell. That seems a little harsh.

The day before my father and I discussed this while sitting in the cafeteria of Hamilton General Hospital while Mabel slept in the ICU. I ask him my standard questions about God: “If he made me in his image, then why would he be so upset if I question him? Isn’t the very intellectual curiosity to question Him a gift that He would have bestowed had he fashioned me in his likeness?”

And: “if He is a merciful God, it seems a bit of an over reaction to condemn someone to eternal damnation for questioning His existence. Where’s the mercy in that?”

It would be proportional to Santa Clause carpet bombing your home if you wondered about his existence. Or the Easter Bunny doing something unspeakable to the family pet instead of leaving chocolate eggs. Or the tooth fairy…well, you get the picture.

The answer always seems to be the same: it’s about faith. God asks that we believe in him without question.

Despite these transgressions, my time in church is enjoyable. While the congregation prays, I meditate. I focus my heart on Mabel and envision her well, her own heart whole and beating. I focus my heart on my children, so beautiful and so far away. And I focus my heart on Jenn, also so beautiful, and also so very far away. I aspire that my meditation should be pure love, for that is what prayer could be. Selfless, pure, unconditional love. I’m trying.

It occurs to me as the service ends why people gather this way each week, aside from the question of faith. Simply put, it feels good. The room is alive with the energy of so many good people thinking so many kind, loving thoughts. It is alive with music. It is alive with what Christians might call the movement of the Holy Ghost, and what I call bliss: the mysterious connection between ourselves and the swirling field of energy that combines to create everything, both material and spiritual. That energy is love, and when we are a part of it, it feels heavenly.

These are my thoughts as we leave the church. I step out into the dark Southern Ontario morning, and breathe a sign of relief. (Later I check the web site of the Canadian Lighting Detection Network, a service of Environment Canada, and am relieved to see that no lightening strikes have been recorded in the vicinity.)

It is in the act of giving praise that we connect with something so much greater than ourselves, so much more vast and beautiful and lovely. If we have to call this God and accept His word without question in order to see ourselves as part of something miraculous, fine. But that’s not my way. I don’t need the answer handed to me so neatly packaged, all the questions answered without any room for doubt. The universe is far more complex, and far more strange, that the notion of an unseen creator controlling all of human destiny.

But praise is what connects us. All of us. We might all praise creation, in its myriad forms, and its myriad explanations, as the life giving, love sustaining force on earth and throughout the skies. In that praise – be it in church, through meditation, song, dance, physical and spiritual love, art, or communion with nature – we find harmony with the essential fabric of the universe.

Sanctuary

Another sleepless night. Another day at Hamilton General. By mid day I’m feeling overwhelmed by the pain of the place. Hospitals aren’t the place you go when you’re feeling groovy. And though there are many stories of hope and joy – babies born, lives saved – I can’t help but succumbing to the oppressive feeling of sadness here.

Maybe it’s the opaque sky that presses down on Hamilton. Maybe its my uncharitable judgment of the folks who people Southern Ontario. So many people overweight, ashen faced, grey like the landscape. Who can blame them? If I lived here, what would I do? No place to run through the woods, few hills to climb.

I had a great run or two when I was here a year and a half ago – up Mount Nemo, along a side trail well trodden in my high school years, and along the Niagara Escarpment through near forty degree heat. I remember pounding along the rocky, root strewn trail, my body slick with sweat, my head dense with recollections. But that was summer. And it was a novelty to run in such oppressive heat. There are so few places to escape the insufferable whine and drone of cars and industry and humanity, here. And winter seems incomprehensibly long. I too would likely collapse on the couch at the end of each day.

Now, my head is still whirling from last night’s macerations. I’m trying to square circles and untangle Gordian knots while staring at the ceiling.

Its not working.

In and out of the ICU. Mabel is making an extraordinary recovery. How can someone have open heart surgery on Thursday, and on Saturday be so full of life, of love? Of faith? I walk down the now familiar halls, feeling the press of sorrow in some of the hospital’s palliative spaces, amazed at the resilience of this amazing woman. Of humanity. We survive the most extrordinary things.

By the end of the afternoon my nerves are shot. Too much sorrow. Too much sadness. In the hospital. Elsewhere. I seek shelter. I go to the Sanctuary. Its peaceful. There are no comings and goings. I’ve been walking around for hours waiting for release. I let go. Tears, of course, though I swore there wouldn’t ever be another. I curse myself at first, and then give up and let go again. I slip into meditation and try to remember my vows. Patience. Peace. Love.

When I slip out of the stillness I realize I’m famished. I eat. Buy a Greek salad and tuck in. Reconcile my travel plans. At a table near by I see a man I’ve noticed for the last few days, who I’ve said hello to, but not stopped to talk to. I’ve been absorbed, with my father, with Mabel, with my own pathetic self pity.

His name is John. I invite myself to sit with him while he eats diner, drinks tea. We chat. A week ago he fell while drawing a bath, and for half an hour was trapped beneath scalding water dousing his face, head, neck, shoulders and chest, as he shouted for mercy. First, second and third degree burns. He has no hair left. He’s ashamed of his own face. 58, he lived alone. A neighbor finally heard him and the superintendent of his building opened the door. “The morphine was great,” he said. He doesn’t remember how he got from Kitchener to Hamilton. “I just woke up and I was here.” He has five kids. “Have you had any visitors?” I try to be tactful. “It’s been a hard year,” he explains. “I didn’t want them to see me like this again.” I take his hand as we say goodbye and hold it for a while.

Nobody should go through this alone.

John.

Diane, who I met yesterday, whose husband, emerging from his fifth heart attack, asked for a divorce because her business was loosing money. She had slept in a chair in the ICU waiting room for two days while he underwent bypass surgery.

Sanctuary.

A place of safety.

Sometimes it seems that everything about our existence on this spinning earth is precarious. Sometimes it seems that love itself is the only thing that makes us safe.

A Room Full of Hope and Fear

Two days in the Hamilton General ICU is enough to provide some order to a man’s priorities, and teach an important lesson about the true nature of life’s barriers.

On Sunday my step mother Mabel was reemitted to the hospital after suffering chest pains. In September she had a heart attack, but made a seemingly speedy recovery. But over the weekend she experienced chest pain, managed to take some nitroglycerin, and then she and my father went to Joseph Brant hospital in Burlington. Tests showed that she had significant blockages in the arteries leading from the heart. Bypass surgery was scheduled for Thursday. On Wednesday I flew from Victoria to be with my father, and with Mabel.

Hamilton General is a sprawling complex in a crack-ridden, down trodden neighborhood of the Steel City. But it’s home to a top-notch cardiovascular surgery facility, and staffed with the regions best doctors and nurses. While Mabel entered the surgical theatre, my father, Mabel’s children Pat and Alice, my sister Chantel, and family friend Andy sat in a room called “The Heart Investigation Unit and Operating Waiting Room.”

We talked about nothing. We drank tea. Ate ice cream.

Mabel’s surgery was successful – quadruple bypass – and by evening my father and Alice were able to see her.

Friday and we’re back in the hospital for the day, visiting with Mabel, and sitting in the cafeteria, watching the snow fall. Today it’s just my father and I. After a while we return to the ICU, mostly for a change of scene. Everybody in this room is here because someone they love is undergoing heart surgery. I look around the room: people sit in little groups and talk quietly. One man sits alone contemplating the pale wall across from his weary eyes. A woman next to me reassures her son via cell phone that her husband – his father - will be fine, after five heart attacks, and his scheduled quadruple bypass surgery.

It is a room full of hope and fear.

Fear that the failings of the human body, the choices we’ve made through our lives, and the genetic programming we’ve inherited have finally caught up with us, and with our kin.

Hope that tomorrow we’ll wake up and those we love will still be by our side.

Last night I went to bed at my father’s home, exhausted though I’d done nothing more than walk up and down the stairs to the cafeteria to find caffeine throughout the day. I lay in bed thinking about the people I love most: my father, my sister and my mother. My beautiful boys. My angel Jenn.

It was the kind of day at the end of which I wished I could curl up with my lover and feel the warmth of her next to me. We speak in the evening and I can feel her so close, even while she is half way across the country in the Alberta’s Bow Valley. I wonder what the hell I’m doing wasting even a single day not by her side? And where are my children? I’m thirty-seven years old and I still struggle nearly every month to pay the bills. What am I doing messing around like this?

(And I’m not talking about this trip to Ontario, which feels like the most important thing I’ve done in a long while.)

I lay awake for a long time, my mind rearranging everything from my parenting style to my living arrangements; my career path to my living room furniture.

I decide that what I want is everything. What I want is bliss in my relationship with my children. I want my life to be inextricably intertwined with Rio and Silas. I am their father: I will be a part of them today, everyday, always.

(bliss with boyz)

I want bliss in my work. Work is love made visible, says Kalil Gibran. If so, then work should flow as gracefully as love. Though not without rapids, for what love is, it should at least seem to emerge from a source and cascade towards a destination. I’ve been finding more rocks in the watercourse of late than I’d like.

I want bliss in love. I’ve never been in love as I am now. The feeling of boundless possibility is staggering. I feel as though I might give more than I ever thought possible now, and in return could receive more than I ever dreamed.

The barriers that keep me from reaping the effortless state of inseparability with my family, my work and my love seem trivial lying in bed, thinking of the faces of families in the ICU, wondering if their husbands, wives, fathers and mothers will be at their sides in the morning.