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.