Love, an explanation

Love is the name we give to the energy of pure potential that was released when the universe as we know it was created. At the moment of the Big Bang, massive amounts of energy were released into the universe. This energy is the foundation of everything that we can see, smell, touch, taste and hear. It has formed galaxies and stars, planets and moons, whales and snow fleas. It has formed into people too, and helps shape our thoughts, create inspiration, and expands our souls.

Love is the energy of pure potential. This energy, when coupled with the information dormant in all of the tiny bits of matter that swirl through space, condenses to create kitchen tables and John Deer tractors, Himalayan mountain ranges and new born babies. It is possibility. When seen through our human eyes, perfectly adapted for the several hundred thousand years we spent chasing after woolly mammoths across the tundra, but ill suited for seeing the subtle complexities of a quantum universe, this energy seems static. That’s a table and its static, and it’s a good thing it is, because my laptop computer is sitting on it. That’s my neighbours car, and I’m glad that both it, and the car I’m driving have clearly defined bumpers, or I’d likely back into it.

But the energy of the universe I think of as love is really nothing more than probability. According to some quantum physicists, if I was to turn away from my computer right now, it would merely possess the potential to be a computer. While I’m not looking, the particles of matter – made up, at the most fundamental level, of nothing more than energy and information – that are my computer become waves of potential. When I look back, expecting to see my computer, there it is! It snaps back to particle form. Our eyes and our brains are not accustomed, maybe not yet ready, to see the world as waves of potential. They may never be ready. We need the hard edged reality of particles of matter. It would be pretty hard to function day-to-day if everything was simply seen as slightly fuzzy, mostly empty waves of possibility.

All of this talk about energy, information and possibility has a point. Love makes all things possible.

We’ve all heard that before. I hope that every one of us has, at some time, spoken those words, or had them spoke to us by someone we love.

In Pavlo Coelho’s book The Alchemist the Sheppard who is at the heart of the story falls in love with a young woman named Fatima. In doing so he realized “that he had loved her before he even knew she existed. He knew that his love for her would enable him to discover every treasure in the world.”

When we are in love, we are open conduits for the energy of the universe. We are funnels, channelling that energy into everything that we do. The process of manifestation, where we are able to create whatever it is we want in life from the pure potential of the universe – and it’s all just potential, probability, possibility – becomes so much easier when we experience the harmony of love.

In love, we are responding to how the universe intended us to exist. We are made up of pure love, of pure energy, of pure potential, that has existed since the beginning of time. We are told, in 1 John (twice) that “God is Love.” Much earlier, in Genesis 1:27 we are told that “God created man in his own image.” So, if you’re into that sort of thing, you might agree that God made us of pure love. In the Tao te Ching, Loa Tzu says that love is one of the three pillars of the Tao (Tao, 67). Christ and the Buddha both taught love.

As I experience love, and the harmony it creates, I feel the incontrovertible truth that in this most natural state of existence, I can do anything. I often tell my partner, Jenn, that with her love I am able to accomplish anything. With my children’s love, it is possible to create miracles in my quest to create harmony and peace in our lives.

I am in love, and it is beautiful. When I allow myself to feel that love to its fullest potential, it feels as if every cell in my body is open to the universe, and the pure, unfiltered energy of the cosmos is streaming through me. Like a river, like a current. Channelling this flow to express the love I feel for my children, my partner, my friends and family, and for the magical world around me, is my highest calling in life.

Easter Egg Hunt

I’m searching for perfect moments. These perfect moments are not necessarily monumental in stature. They are often subtle, but sublime.

Perfect: the way my children put their arms around my neck as they are falling asleep; the rush of endorphins when I finish a long run; the look in the eyes of my partner, my lover, when she sees me across the airport after we’ve been apart for a few days, or a few weeks.

They are every day moments. Perfect: making coffee and bringing it to Jenn as she is blow-drying her hair in the morning; the deep satisfaction I experience when I work with people who are trying to make the world a better place, and my service helps over come an obstacle that’s been vexing them for some time; the sparkle in my boyz eyes when they are running on a beach.

Miracles are the experience of many perfect moments strung together like a necklace of pearls, each one unique, together making up something wholly beautiful, wondrous.

Easter is a day of perfect moments. But perfect moments can’t be separated from challenges. Challenge is what makes perfection possible.

A few days before, while driving Rio to school, he says “remember when we just had one house?” I watch him in the rear view mirror. “Yes,” I say. He says, looking out the window, “that was nice.”

I’m tempted to tell him that it’s all my fault. Some days, its how I feel. That it’s my fault that he has to go back and forth between Kat and Andy’s home and Jenn and mine several times a week. But I don’t. I say nothing.

Life is filled with such challenges. Love is rarely perfect. The bank balance is seldom inspiring. The path forward never comes with a map and directions.

So when a few days latter Jenn and I load the boyz in the car for the drive up the coast to China Beach, I’m cognisant of family, of work, of love. The boyz fall asleep on the drive up, and Jenn and I chat about serious stuff, grown-up stuff. She puts her hand on my neck as we drive, and I feel the hot rush of passion that I feel for her twenty times a day. We weave along the winding road, the sunlight on the water is crystalline in appearance. I like the way she looks at me.

When we reach the parking lot Rio and Silas are awake so we give them a snack and then troop down through the forest to the beach. Rio runs ahead, darts back, and then bounds ahead again, like a border collie herding errant sheep. Silas trundles along under his own steam most of the way. We stop and gaze up at a gigantic Sitka spruce before descending crude stairs to the rocky beach.

It’s not a warm day, and there is a little wind, but Rio immediately heads for the water to race along the shore, soaking his feet and dancing along the tide line. Silas plunks himself down with his diggers and moves rocks around. Jenn and I lie back against a log, my arms around her, her head on my chest. We prepare some lunch, and open two cold bottles of beer. We lounge there, watching the boyz, watching the horizon, watching the Olympic Mountains in their snow-bound resplendence across the Straight of Juan de Fuca. When the boyz come over, tummies grumbling, and we all eat something together leaning against a log.

Jenn looks at me and smiles and asks, “You’re happy right now?”

I tell her that I simply couldn’t be happier.

It is a perfect moment. It is one of many perfect moments strung together, each something as impossibly simple as finger tips on the bark on a five-hundred year old tree, reading the Globe and Mail in bed, or being kissed gently, innocently by the woman you love bottomlessly.

When we’ve finished our lunch Jenn announces that she and the boyz will head down the beach to explore. This leaves me alone to play Peter Cottontail. We already had an Easter egg hunt that morning, the boyz following a trail of eggs from their room around the house and down to two golden bunnies waiting for them in the living room (“You are a great father,” Jenn tells me after I’ve hidden the eggs before bed the night before. I believe her.)

When the trio returns, I’m reading a book and ignoring the trail of brightly coloured eggs that leads along the crest of the log that I’m resting against. Silas spots them first, and the hunt is on. Rio has learned to let his younger brother find a few eggs. The track of eggs leads down the log and into the pebble beach behind it. The treasures are clustered on shells and on drift wood and in among the rocks.

When the search is over, Rio leads us back down the beach to show me a rock he and Silas have found at the tide line where they can be surrounded by the sea momentarily. They run up and down the sand, in bliss.

That’s what a perfect moment is for me; bliss. When I’m sitting on the beach with the woman I love, with my children, I feel the wash of cold fire pass through me and for a moment I feel the astonishing reality of all experience. We are all together a part of one moment of perfection called human existence. That we can actually feel the pulse of no-separation, of love, of entanglement, is one of the miracles of being human. (It’s possible that all other life on earth feels this pulse all the time, and that we have simply forgotten as our journey takes us further and further away from our animal nature.) I feel it, from time to time, and am hungry for it. I crave it.

It’s like an Easter egg hunt. There, scattered amongst ordinary moments, are precious experiences that remind us of our connection with one another, and with all life around us.

School Bus

I’m making the turn off McKenzie up Blenkinsopp towards the trailhead at Mount Doug when I see the Kids Klub bus. Its March break and Rio is in all-day care with his normal after school program. As I complete the turn, I’m craning my neck to try and spot his golden head above the windows, and I mutter something like “my little bear is on that bus…”

Fatherhood has done strange things to me.

I experience a wave of sadness so acute it’s like being stabbed with a knife. This is day six in the parenting schedule when the boyz are with their mom and step-father. It’s always at this point when I start to miss them intensely. Good days and bad, this is time apart from my children, and that’s hard. On good days I remember how happy they are, how healthy, how full of love and joy, and how they are adored and loved by Kat, Andy, Jenn and I, along with the cadre of caregivers that surround them every day. On bad days I wish only to fold them into my arms and never let go.

The story bound image of Rio on the bus with his friends, laughing or eating a snack or horsing around is both absolutely lovely, and heartbreaking.

I push aside any sorrow and remember that every parent must at some point let go. This is a normal part of the process of raising a child. Sooner or later they leave. For the huge percentage of society where kids split time between Mom and Dad, this separation comes sooner, both for the parent, and child.

Rio and I have talked about this. He’s told me it’s hard on him. Silas cries for his Mom when he’s with Jenn and I, and misses me when he’s at Kat and Andy’s. But both houses are full of love, and in the end, what the children gain from being in homes with couples and parents who are in love with one another outweighs the feeling of missing one parent or the other.

There is great joy in watching the boyz grow, gain independence, bloom like spring. The school bus passes, and I reach the trail head and spend a few minutes struggling through the emotions of the day before launching up the trail. At first I simply want to turn around, or find a place in the woods to lie down, but after ten minutes or so, I gain my legs, clear my head of emotions, and simply dream about a precious future.

Morning Glory

Across the great divide, light snow falling, trees like cloaked phantoms, their snowy forms stark against the dark shadow of mountains beyond. We ski up the fire road, the crisp air tightening our faces and making our noses red.

Ours is not an alpine start, far from it. It’s 4pm before we begin, and after six when we reach Lake O’hara. Above, the fabled ramparts of Wiwaxy Peak jut like limestone gendarmes into the milky sky. It’s dusk when we reach the Elizabeth Parker Hut. Perched on the edge of a snow hummocked meadow, the hut is backed against the dark, protective shapes of Odaray Mountain and Mount Shaffer.

Jenn beams. This is her element. Winter, snow, mountains. To see her so happy is my heart’s delight.

Its been ten years since I stayed at this magical hut in these marvellous mountains. There is a fire warming the century old logs when we enter, people I know from my days in Canmore up for the night with two young kids. We stow our gear in the smaller cabin, light a fire and heat the place up as we prepare diner and curl up on the benches, reading, drinking wine from a box.


The morning is grey, but not the kind of grey you get on the coast. Mountains stand in dark contrast to the mottled sky, their faces are dark and comforting against the gently falling snow. Jenn’s enthusiasm and her love of these ranges is contagious. I didn’t believe, when I moved from the Rockies three years ago, that I would miss winter. But its hard to not fall back in love with a season that brings such delight to the woman you will spend the rest of your life with.

We ski through the woods, watch lichen sway in the breeze like a summer dress, inviting; see the tracks of rabbit, tracks of squirrel, and here, a set of tracks that merge with our trail. Bobcat? More likely lynx. We ski along beside them for a while, delighted with the living forest around us.

Then down a slope and into an open meadow beneath the implacable face of Cathedral Mountain. Pan flat spots on the otherwise undulating landscape tell us where the Morning Glory Lakes are beneath the snow.

Jenn drops to the ground and makes a snow angel.

The wind pushes us down the valley but we stop again amid the soft, naked forms of Lyell’s Larch. There is a moment amid the snow and mountains and the Morning Glory Lakes where all my life seems to fold into a singular burst of joy and light, and then there is an affirmation that life really is pure love, that the energy that conspired to create this mountain, that ocean, this man, this woman, this precious moment in time is just a way of saying that all of this is love made visible.

And that this is forever.

We ski back down the creek, and take a trail through a tangle of Engleman spruce and subalpine fir, and catch the lynx tracks again. We have a late lunch in the hut, and by 4pm are skiing back down the fire road, faster now as we glide down the valley. Fairer now that our souls are entwined.