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.

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.

Run, Cry, Sleep

I'm deep, deep in the woods again. Circling back through uncertainty. Circling back through vulnerability. Two years of intense change, of emotional rollercoaster, doesn't just abruptly screetch to a halt. I remind myself that "faith is a bird that feels dawn breaking, but sings while it is still dark."

Sometimes it feels as through dawn is so far off. I feel as through the world is crumbling around me while the elusive bird Faith fritters its time away deeper in the darkness of the woods. Of course, the world isn't really crumbling around me, but to me it feels that way. I’m melodramatic, and a sensitive creature. I take things too seriously. Never the less, I can’t help but fall into the pit from time to time. Tuesday is the nadir. I can’t even get out of Rio’s school without weeping.

He’s so beautiful and sometimes I feel like I hardly know him. I’m walking down the hall after dropping him in class and my eyes begin to fill with dew.

Work, love, family. So much joy, sometimes even bliss, but not without a cost.

I drive to the trailhead of Mount Doug, intent on banishing my grief with motion, with momentum, but instead just sit there, staring into the dark forest.

Sometimes when I’m frustrated, when I’m angry with myself, I want to feel physical hurt to mask the emotional pain. I want my legs to ache, my lungs to burn. I want to punish myself. Penance. With a dash of redemption at the end, please.

“We’re not out of the woods yet….” I remember those words, written just a month ago.

I call James, and can’t get through a sentence. He tells me that I am pure love. I put the phone down, believing him, but wondering what good its doing me?

Run.

Finally, after half an hour, I slip into my running gear and jog up the trial, feeling light on my feet despite the fear in my heart. The woods are wet – Monday was the wettest December day on record on much of Vancouver Island – and the trails are so saturated with water that they seep under each footfall. I run easily through the heady smelling woods, bright with sunlight and gleaming moisture this morning.

I’m above the beach when my phone rings – I don’t normally run with it, but this morning its a life line - so I stop and answer it. Another friend calling in response to my pleas for help. So much love. And yet, I’ve never experienced such pain. I sit on a rock and weep while talking.

Further into the woods. I run through tears, up the back slope, pushing hard through the hills, feeling the comforting rush of endorphins pulsing through my veins. I splash through ankle deep streams where there once were trails, pulling the moist air into my lungs.

When I’m done I feel the comforting buzz of energy through my body, but I also feel empty. No sleep, no food, and half a dozen kilometers of hard trail. I drive home, stand in the shower and let the hot water pour over my body, and then my sister and I drive downtown for lunch.

We sit in a diner and talk about our family. We talk about our parents divorce when we were teenagers, and she reminds me of a time when were both very young and my mother threatened to leave. I remember our parents yelling about divorce throughout much of my young life, but this specific instance exists nowhere in my memory. Chantel reminds me that she and I sat on her bed with my father while my mom made preparations to leave. How could I forget that?

Ten years later my father left.

So much leaving. So much walking away.

This pain isn’t just about the hard road that I am walking, but the miles that have accumulated over the last thirty six years.

I tell Chantel about an extraordinary experience with acupuncture a few months ago when my Chinese Doctor put her hand on my chest and said, “you are safe here.”

Cry.

I can’t even get those words out. I’m sitting in a diner and I can’t even look at my little sister. Finally I get the words out and have to leave.

Is it possible that a child’s yearning for emotional safety can become the man’s?

We walk a while, and then I head to the Victoria Natural Healing Clinic to see another Chantelle, my acupuncturist. I’m here ostensibly for treatment of my back, which I wrenched a few days before, an old grievance that dates back almost twenty years. But that’s not really why I’m here. She asks how I am and it starts all over again.

She listens to me intently, really hearing me, and then invites me to lay down on my back on the table and begins her treatment.

“I’m doing a different treatment today,” she says. “I’m doing a treatment to make you stronger. So you can do what you have to do.” In the past we’ve worked to help me let go; today, its about holding together.

The first four needles go in with their buzzing warmth, and I can feel the tears again. I’m so fucking tired of tears that I fight them. She invites them. “Don’t hold any of your emotions back,” she says, her hand on my arm.

I let go.

She puts in another twenty or thirty needles – in my forehead, my neck, my arms, hands, up my sternum and in my belly, down my legs, in my ankles, my feet and my toes. I can feel the energy pulsing. Tears flowing.

Chantelle sweeps the tears aside, dabbing at them as they pool in my ears. I am suddenly calm. Music. She slips from the room. Heat. I can feel the heat lamp on my chest, my belly.

Sleep.

I am fading to silence.

I have to let go, without giving up.

There is nothing in our lives to prepare us for such a bewildering paradox. You either hold on, or you let go. Most of my life I’ve held on, held on, with a death grip, and then finally, in a spasm of defeat and relief, just let go. Gave up.

Disappear. The music evaporates. The room fades. I dissolve into nothing at all.

I am gone for some time.

“You have to be strong,” I hear Chantelle at my side. I come back from stillness.

I can feel the meridians in my body coursing with chi, with life, with love.

Strong for what?

To sit through uncertainty? Again? For how much longer? To open to vulnerability?

Its twenty four hours before the answer comes.

To be selfless.

To not leave. Work, love, family. To hold things together. To keep my promises.

I am reminded of Barry Lopez’s book Desert Notes: “I see that you are already tired. But you must stay. This is the pain of it all. You can’t keep leaving.”

I will not leave. And I won’t be pushed away. We’re going to figure things out.

What I must do is let go of my own fear, my insecurity, and be strong and courageous and give what is needed – unconditional love – in order to break the cycle of uncertainty and vulnerability.

Faith is a bird. Dawn is just around the bend in the trail.

Racing Waves

The first cross country race I ever participated in was a 3km run when I was in grade three or four. I was nine, maybe ten years old.

I remember training for the race several days a week that fall, the sun just up, the crisp Northern Ontario mornings biting into lungs and legs as a handful of classmates and I plodded through Jack pine forests and through frozen wetlands. Some mornings in the shower after those runs our legs bled where blades of grass like razors had left their mark.

I finished in the middle of the pack for that race, both on my team, and for the event.

The next race I competed in with this past June. Time lapse: twenty seven years, give or take a year.

It was the Mount Doug Gut Buster. A hot June day, the race was on my home turf, a hill I’ve run over at least five hundred times since moving to Victoria a few years ago. At eleven kilometers, with three accents and descents of the bulbous dome, it was a grind, and the heat left me sapped. I came in sixty ninth of one hundred and twenty runners.

Middle of the pack again.

I can’t say that the Mount Doug race was fun while I was running it. It was hard. I remember that while dragging myself along the back stretch, through dark trees towards the finish, someone said to me “pick it up!” She told me saying that was easier than passing me, which she eventually did. I simply couldn’t run any faster. I passed out that afternoon while my two sons bounced on me.

Over the weekend I ran in my fourth race ever, my third of the season. (I ran the Royal Victoria 8K in October as a last minute “something-to-do-on-a-Sunday” sort of thing.)

This past weekend was the Gunner Shaw Classic Cross Country Race at Thetis Lake. The location is another favorite place of mine to run, with winding trails that zig zag up oak dotted hills and down through dark, lichen strewn woods. The Gunner Shaw has a reputation as being a bit of a tough race with a rather unnecessary, but interesting, splash through a thigh deep swamp at its mid point. This plunge, aside from reeking of fetid algae, provides the added bonus of turning the legs into blocks of cement.

The final dash to the finish is through the foreshore of the Thetis Lake beach, which starts out at nearly crotch depth, and ends calf deep. Some sprint to the finish. Several people took a dive.

I finished in the middle of the pack – 205th of 460 - running the 9km race in 45 minutes. Josh reminded me that the Gunner Shaw attracts a pretty tough field: there were several Olympic athletes in the race. It was won in just over 30 minutes.

I was grumpy all afternoon, failing, I think, to properly dehydrate and replenish the system afterwards. Instead I jumped right back into single parenting.

My grouchy state was also because I didn’t feel I ran as well as I might have. I felt drained of energy before I even got started!

While running I kept pulling myself back to the here and the now, repeating over and over: “Where am I? Right here. What time is it? Right now. What am I? This moment.” But inevitably, as the weariness crept in, my mind drifted.

I forgot that I was running in a favorite place. I forgot that when I get tired while running I try to pull energy in from the rocks, the trees, and the water. I take what I can get. Instead I just tried to concentrate on being nice to people. I'm really not much of a competator: when I hear someone coming up behind me (often) I make sure they have room to pass and tell them they're doing great as they go by. Its about the phun.

On Sunday the boyz and I ventured out to Fisgard Lighthouse National Historic Site. Only a few minutes from town, we’d never been. Silas is obsessed with Lighthouses’ these days, though I don’t know that he’s ever seen anything larger than a navigation buoy. Fisgard was the first lighthouse built on Canada’s west coast, and was operational for 100 years unitl the mid 1950s. Its on the same site is Fort Rodd Hill Naitonal Historic Site, which served as part of the defensive system for the Esquimalt Naval Base through World War Two. It’s a pretty cool place for two little boys and their dad to spend an afternoon.




We visited the Lighthouse, which was lovely and immaculate and well presented by Parks Canada, and the boys dutifully posed for a picture, and I think Silas’ was pretty impressed. But all Rio wanted to do was go to the beach, which is hard for me to argue with, so we did.




There I cracked open a thermos of tea (I did wish that it was hot chocolate and Irish Cream for a moment) while Silas collected shells and Rio raced back and forth along the shore.

His running was so completely free. He would stand on a log along the tide line and as the small waves washed over the gravel, he would launch himself along the beach, jumping and laughing as he always does when we are at the sea shore. Its one of the things I love most about this dear, beautiful child, and there are many, many things I love.




When he stopped to catch his breath I asked him what he was doing? “Racing waves,” he replied matter-of-factly.

“What for?”

“Its for my exercises,” he said.

“Is it fun?”

He simply nodded.

“Do you ever win?” I asked.

“I always win,” he said, his pants wet to his knees, his boots sloshing with salt water.

And off he ran again.

I can’t wait until he and I run together through the woods. And we won’t be racing the clock, or each other, but simply racing for life, racing the trees that blur past, racing the waves, racing the spinning earth. At East Sooke Park we’ve run along the sandy foreshore for hours, jumping logs and dodging boulders and getting our feet soaked and laughing like fools. It’s the purest expression of running I know. Its freedom incarnate. Its joy. Its bliss.

We take a break from running for a snack. Rio finds a rock that he brings to my attention. I asked the boyz to find something beautiful that we can bring to Jenn, whom I love deeply and profoundly, and who will arrive in Victoria in a few short days. We always try to find something beautiful for her when she isn’t here. Beach glass, heart shaped stones, something lost overboard far out to sea. Today it’s a lovely russet coloured rock with green stripes. We take a picture of us with it to send to her.



What I found that was beautiful on that beach that day was a reminder of why I run. I’ve only recently enjoyed (the aftermath of) racing. For much of the last few years running has simply been the way I dissolve myself into the splendor of nature; to feel with my body the reality that I am nothing more than nature moving through itself. To let my heart and head have some time to do their work without my constant intrusions; to let my body do what comes most naturally – be completely free.

Eleven Skies

Its starting to sink in. I can relax into being loved. I can let go of my fear, my apprehension, my jealously. I can accept that I deserve this. I deserve to feel this good. I can trust myself: I won’t blow this because I think that I don’t merit feeling so adored. And I can get comfortable with vulnerability and uncertainty -- it will always remain -- and simply accept that these questions enhance, rather than detract, from the experience of loving, and being loved.

This week it's been a story told under eleven skies.

First Sky: Victoria, the mottled cloud cover, dappled autumn leaves, rain. Under this sky I walk up the ramp and board a flight to Alberta. Its only been a week since my lover left, but it feels like a month; a year.

Second Sky: Above the clouds, the Rockies hidden below, glimpses of familiar ridge lines I’ve walked in a previous life time. Poetry. Longing.

Third Sky: Calgary, my lover greets me at the airport. Time is suspended in her eyes when I see her. I can’t say a word, but only kiss her face, her eyes, her mouth. We embarrass people in the parking lot.

Fourth Sky: the Bow Valley. It was home for fourteen years, so familiar, but so strange. The last time I was here was one of the most painful days of my life. Now, its just mountains and forests; at once so familiar and yet so foreign. And its where my lover lives, so its also paradise.

Fifth Sky: Day Two. Breakfast in Banff at three in the afternoon.

Sixth Sky: driving up the darkening valley we let fear and jealously and guilt creep into our hearts. Darkness falls early. Hell, we just ate breakfast! But the days are so short. Its so easy almost all of the time, but when its not, its really frightening. I fear the fear. I don’t want to feel this after so many months of vulnerability. But with the open heart comes tiny wounds, healed swiftly by loving hands.

Seventh Sky: We practice retail therapy in Lake Louise. Visit friends. Drive back down valley in the darkness. I forgot about snow squalls.

Eighth Sky: Harvie Heights, where I lived for six years: we delight in the carved stone of Fairholme Canyon, its polished walls pocked with fossils, its bends and plunge pools and narrow slit of sky like the embrace of an old friend. New love, my last love, here now in my arms.

Ninth Sky: Too swiftly our last evening comes, and under a fat moon we curl into one another. I don’t want to leave. I just found you! I just found you, I want to cry. That very morning I burst into tears at the joy of this discovery. The following morning the sun rises over the tentacles of the city as we drive towards the airport. Its like time stands still when we are in each other’s company. Its so damned easy.

Tenth Sky: The moment I step through security I want to turn around and run back. I feel the lump in my throat and the ache that starts in my heart and seeks a place to end. Then Vancouver, where I work with a client, and then….

Eleventh Sky: Victoria. Under a powder blue sky I fly home and await the arrival of Rio and Silas. How I wished that I was walking through the door to the sound of ice cubes chiming their happy song in a glass, and her arms thrown around me. Love, bottomless.

We go to bed early, and by 8:30 I am drifting in and out of sleep, moving between Silas’ and Rio’s beds. Rio asks me to massage has back, and gives detailed instructions on what he likes: “Now make your fingers tickle me,” he asks. I feel his body slacken as sleep settles over him. I smile at him and point to the ceiling, the meaning understood between the boy and the man: I love you as big as the sky. Then he says, his eyes closed, “I love you as big as eleven skies,” and I close my eyes too, imagining the vastness of such a love.

A Thousand Normal Things

The half moon crests above Grotto Mountain. The air is crisp – I haven’t felt this kind of air in my lungs for a few years. In the morning I run the trails along the bench lands and mull over the fact that I’m not in as good a shape as I thought I was, and I don’t really care.

Catching up with the world after a few days in hibernation: I look at Asha Hope’s blog. My friend and colleague Will Horter, and his partner Claudia Campbell had a little baby girl on Thursday, born 15 weeks premature, and less than 800 grams in weight. The next few months will be a daily trial for little Hope, and her lovely parents. Looking at the photos on the blog of Asha Hope in her sealed incubator, I couldn’t help but imagine how much Claudia and Will must long to hold her. My lover's arms around me, I close my eyes and say a prayer for her.





Then I checked in with the Facebook page of friends Joel Solomon and Shivon Robinsong. On Wednesday of last week, Shivon gave Joel one of her kidney’s (in a hospital, with Doctors looking on) as his were slowly shutting down, the result of a life long disease that has finally caught up with him. Both are well, buoyed by an outpouring of love, as Shivon’s kidney now pumps away inside Joel.

Out of habit, after visiting Asha Hope’s blog and Joel and Shivon’s Facebook page, I clicked on the Globe and Mail site, and as I was doing so I caught myself thinking: “I wonder if there will be any news about Asha Hope?” Then I shook my head at how asinine a thought that was. There is nothing really important in the news. There is never any report on the thousand normal things that make up each and every one of our days and nights: triumph and tragedy, hope and despair, joy and sorrow, pain and bliss. The magic of life, the ecstasy and wonder of every single moment.

The sun sets behind Mount Rundle. The sky is indigo except where stars prick the tapestry of dusk. Its just another day. Another thousand normal, extraordinary, heart wrenchingly beautiful things.

Faith

“Faith is like a bird that feels dawn breaking, but sings while it is still dark.”

~ Kalil Gibran


Somehow I just believed.

Somehow, despite months of darkness, I knew that there was light.

We knew that there was light.

Early moments: lying on the sand at Botanical beach, the heat of July soaking us, the pockets of water that team with life stretched out towards the rippled horizon. She rests in my arms, her skin under my fingers. Then we’re exploring, she is showing me the secret world of tide pools, places I might otherwise walk past with merely a glance. Its not the life beneath the water that I marvel at, but the life dancing in her eyes.

That’s the moment I fell in love. That very moment.

It was like falling into one of those tide pools. A shock. Unexpected. This wasn’t supposed to happen. But like morning's swift approach, there was no struggling against it.

Early moments: the dizzy delirium of falling. The way she looks at me. Speaks to me. I can feel the love though she can’t say the word. Not yet.

Early moments: racing down the highway, out of Strathcona Park, Moby’s Hotel filling my ears, the windows open, the sun shining in, and I’m going to pick her up on my way to Victoria. Pure delight. Pure light.

In those early moments I saw a lifetime of possibility. This is how I want to feel for the rest of my life.

It was that light, that possibility that helped me, helped us, navigate very troubled waters. The darkest moments before the dawn.

She asked me to believe in her. To trust her. It became my mantra. I would meditate on those words: I trust you; I believe in you.

I believed in us.

I had felt dawn breaking. I knew what dawn felt like. Soft fingertips. Loving eyes. Belief beyond words.

During the darkness I held onto that belief. That trust.

First light came a month ago. It seems like we move in 28 day cycles, she and I.

I had been prepared to let go, forever, if that is what was needed for her to be at peace. Her peace was what I dreamed of, and was prepared to give her, even if it meant goodbye once and for all.

But when she walked through my door, I knew that my faith, my belief, my trust in us had been vindicated. She knew too.

Later that week she said “look at me.” I was already. She said, “really look at me.” And then she told me that she loved me, was in love with me, and that I was the man she didn’t know that she had been searching for her whole life, but had somehow found.

Faith is a bird….

Mornings in her arms. We slip down the Oregon Coast. Become enchanted by sea otter play. Have normal nights. Dream together. Bliss. Watch salmon spawn with my boyz.

It was easy. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it was easy to have faith. Despite the darkest of times, the fear, the vulnerability, it was easy to have faith.

We’re not out of the woods yet. There will be many dawns that we must hold our faith through before morning finally comes for good. Maybe morning never really lasts, but like the diurnal rhythm we all share, we simply pass through mornings and nights over and over, believing, trusting, and falling more deeply in love.

Deeper into Deserve

Today was a gift. It was a stollen day. I was supposed to fly to Vancouver for a meeting, but the gig got postponed until Friday, so I had a day without appointments. A storm that was supposed to blow in this morning got stalled up Island, and its only now, at the end of the afternoon, that the sky is darkening. The morning was bright and clear and crisp; a perfect autumn day. I ran.

I didn’t really want to at first. I was a little stuck, so I started slowly in a lazy circumnavigation of Mount Doug. Maybe it was the colour of the big leaf maple leaves littering the forest floor, or maybe it was the crack in the air that pushed my lungs out and let my blood soak in lots of O2; whatever it was, I negotiated another threshold that I wasn’t expecting to cross today, and it was exhilerating.

I’ve written elsewhere that I realized just before Kathleen and I separated last August that I’ve spent most of my life believing I don’t deserve success. In life, love, business, in family matters. I’ve never felt that I deserved to fail. Only that success, true success, was supposed to be beyond my reach.

This morning, running along the forested trail on the north-east side of Mount Doug, it suddenly dawned on me that I’ve been successful in love, and not allowed myself to let it last. I have had women in my life who have loved me. Who were tender with me. Who adored me. I even felt safe with them. And I left them. I had what seemed like good reasons, both at the time, and now. I wouldn't make those decisions differently now. You can’t go back and make decisions over, and I’m not so foolish as to second guess what were carefully weighed choices at the time. But I was loved. And I left.

Something in me seems to fundamentally believe that even when I have a degree of success – for no relationship will ever be perfect – that I have to wreck it. Subconsciously (at least until this morning) I determine that I don’t deserve something so good (I can’t believe you’re with me….) and I set up conditions to make the relationship fail. I cheat. I get restless. I let my anger, my fear overtake me. I forget to be kind, to love. To love.

This might be overly simplistic. I might need to think this through, but I’ve got to say, I am really done with that. I'm done wrecking my own sucess because somehow I fear it.

I have love in my life now too. I feel safe. I feel adored. I long for the barriers to drop away. I long for what I know we both deserve.

As I raced through the stolen morning of sunshine, a riot of colour and an empty day on the calendar, I decided that I will not destroy my own sucess again. I will not settle for anything less than love in my life. I’m open to how that shows up. I’m accepting that it may appear differently than what I expect. I know it will have its ups and downs. But I deserve to be loved, to be treated tenderly, and to be treated with kindness. And my lover deserves the same: to not be subjected to my anger, to my fear.

My children deserve to have a father who is envoleoped by love. My friends deserve that too. So do the people I work with who are trying to save the world.

I am at my best when I feel loved. When I feel safe. When I am adored. When I can love, give comfort, pleasure, and adoration in return. I’m ready to accept that I deserve this. I wish that we all could see that we deserve love.

And when I experience it next, I won’t run away.

The 29th Day

Today is day 28.

I hadn’t really thought of it until a few days ago. I looked at the calendar tonight and saw that it had been four weeks, one full moon, since something so beautiful, so tender, so difficult, passed out of my life.

Maybe forever.

Maybe not.

It has been a very challenging, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes agonizing 28 days. Not just for me. I’m not alone. Another shares this sorrow. But I can only write of my own journey, it’s the only I know. Even though that knowledge is so imperfect.

“What pattern is this teaching you about?” I hear Dan’s voice in my head. It was just this week that he brought me to the brink of tears – likely sobbing tears – in the middle of the Royal Roads Café. Loving bastard.

What patterns?

That my challenge is to stay. My challenge is to stick it out. Leaving would be easier. By no means easy. Just easier. Leaving would mean some short term pain, agony, but it would pass in time, and I could move on. There would be scar tissue. Some things simply don’t heal any more. But in a month, or two, or maybe three, I could move on. That’s my pattern. When the going gets tough, I walk away. I’m choosing to stay this time. As long as I can.

Sometimes the right thing to do is stop. Sometimes, things aren't right and the only thing to do is stop. "Know when to stop," advises Lao Tzu. Fine. Right now doesn't feel like the right time for me to walk.

Patterns....

That I fear fear itself. It is ice water in my veins. Fear closes my heart. Fear is the opposite of love. Fear kills love. I dread the cold hand of fear on my chest, on my throat. When I feel it taking its grip, I do anything I can to not feel it. But I am learning to invite fear in. Instead of running of late, I am learning to “sit through” fear’s icy wash. What’s the worst that can happen?

I guess I could die of fright….Likely not.

That I like quick fixes. I remember one morning receiving an email that released the icy wash of fear through me and before I had finished reading the note, I was reaching for the phone, making it worse. The thought of sitting through my day with the intensely uncomfortable emotions that the note, my own stupidity, and the uncertainty it evoked was unbearable. But my haste to try and fix the problem only made it worse. Lao Tzu advises restraint as one of the three pillars of the Tao te Ching. Step back, he says. Wait. Sit through it.

That uncertainty and vulnerability are also my nemesis’s, and that I seem to attract them into my life.

So what are these patterns teaching me?

I’ve been pretty focused on the notion of self referral of late, and that my attempts at staying completely centred in my own soul, my own spirit has lead me to some pretty sophisticated forms of self loathing. I’m in the middle of one of the most emotionally challenging situations of my life, and I’m beating myself up because I can’t stay detached from its ebbs and flows! One day I’m high as a kite, and the next I’m whale poop, and brow beating myself for not staying “at the centre of the river” as Deepak Chopra advises. Well, it might take a little practice to master the whole self referral gig. Go easy.

That I’ve got to love myself before I can really, honestly love anybody else.

“The object of your practice should first of all be yourself,” says Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Han in True Love. “Your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself.”

I still don’t really. I still don’t really think that I deserve to be loved. I catch glimpses of it, where I know that I deserve, but I’m not quite there yet. Sit through that too.

That being said, I’m starting to learn more about love. Tonight, my two year old Silas learned how to say love. He’s felt it since the moment of his birth, I’m certain. He is love. He is made of love. We all are. But tonight as we wrestled on the couch, and I told him over and over again that I loved him, he repeated it, and then wouldn’t stop saying it. He would throw his meaty arms around my neck and kiss me and say “I luv you dada.” And then he would try it out on his big brother Rio. And then say “Luv you momma. Luv you An[d]y.” There’s a lot of that energy to go around.

(Love manifest)

I’ve always maintained that love is really the only thing in the world that mattered. Now I’m beginning to believe that matter is really nothing but love, as energy, combined with the imprint of information that has existed since the beginning of time, taking shape in the material world.

That means I am love manifest.

I’m good with that.

I’ve learned how deeply I am loved. So many friends. So much joy. So much love. This life, these friends, this love. I am humbled by the mystery.

I’ve learned a lot about joy, and about sorrow in the last 28 days. “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain,” says Kahlil Gibran.

I’m ready to be filled up with joy.

I’ve learned that I can be pretty fucking selfish. I get caught up in my own pain, and forget to consider that someone else is in pain too. It blinds me. It feeds my insecurity.

I’ve learned that I can run from all of these things: sorrow, pain, vulnerability, fear, but that I can’t really. I can run, and fast, and hard, especially when I’m not loving myself as much as I deserve, especially when I want to feel physical pain rather than emotional or spiritual pain. Then I can run for hours, and let the ache in my body, and the numbing flood of endorphins mask the ache in my heart, but its always there the next morning.

I’ve learned that I can, in fact, sit through it.

I’m going to have to continue.

Because I have no idea what’s going to happen next.

And I’ve learned that if I run towards love, and not from fear, that I can run even farther. And that it doesn’t hurt nearly as much.

I’ve learned that it’s a bad idea to drink when I’m feeling pain, or sorrow, or uncertainly, or fear. There’s a pattern there, in my family, and its not a good idea for me to fall into that deep rut. Its a better idea for me to feel the pain, and know that I can endure it, and move past it.

And just yesterday I learned that peace might in fact be the most noble goal I can strive towards. Not for me. But for the woman I love. It may be that more than love, what I can offer her is a chance at peace.

But I don’t know if I can do what might be needed of me in order to allow peace to have a chance. Because there is no guarantee.

Its been 28 days.

One moon.

I am still in love. And often it is bliss. And often it is joy. And often it is very hard, and I don’t do as well as I wish I might when facing my fear, my vulnerability, and the impenetrable frustration or uncertainty. But I’m learning to be gentle with others, and with myself. And I’m learning what true love is.

One moon, come and gone.

Tomorrow is the 29th day.

Sing Along

We three head out on a Friday afternoon for the local video store. Its movie night. Its nearly 6pm so I have the radio on. Rio asks, “put on some music.” I hit the CD button and Michael Franti and Spearhead set the car on funk. “Not that one, the one we were singing to.”

He’s recalling when, a few days ago, we were coming home listening to Jim Cuddy. Over my own singing, and the melodious sound of Cuddy’s crooning, I could hear Rio is singing “Maybe sometime….” I looked in the mirror and was amazed to see him singing at the top of his lungs.

“You know the words,” I asked.

“I just followed along with you.”

He’s heard them many times.

I love the song of the same name off of Cuddy’s The Light that Guides you Home.

“Well its all right now, that was the way we were, but there’s no sense in changing that now…..Well maybe sometime, maybe some time, maybe some time….”

The sun pours through the windows of the car. Silas is content. He watches out the window, and turns to watch his brother. Rio is singing along again. I feel the cold fire wash over me like rain and turn the mirror so I can see his angel face while he sings. I sing too, in bliss, entangled with this child who is more beautiful than the sun.

I used to think my life was supposed to sound like a Blue Rodeo song. You know, peddle steel guitar, when the girl always leaves in the end. Not anymore.

“Well the story will end and we’ll never know just why. There’s never a chance to say goodbye. But maybe sometime, maybe some time, maybe some time…”

He’s getting most of the words, and belting out the chorus. He’s five; he can’t know the kind of sorrow that sleeps behind those words, but he’s heard me sing them a thousand times, and knows what its supposed to sound like.

In time he will. In his life, he will love and lose many times. His heart will grow wise. And hopefully he will never grow so foolish as to fail to love again.

Maybe sometime.

Running Towards Stillness

It’s a welcome sunny day in September, and Josh and I park his car at the Pike Road entrance to East Sooke Park, and then drive mine south to Aylard Farm to start our run. I don’t get nervous at the start of a long run anymore: I know I can do this. I don’t fear the physical discomfort that might come. Instead, I’m exhilarated by the prospect of moving through the coastal landscape at the southern most tip of Vancouver Island on this extraordinary day.

We begin along the path slowly, warming up, falling into a rhythm of conversation, and a easy flow along the gravel path to the beach. We follow along the water’s edge a while, the mid day sunshine gleaming off the swells, the beach strewn with bull kelp. The tide is high, so we scramble up the bank and into the woods and continue along the trail that skirts the water’s edge along some of the most exquisite sea shore on southern Vancouver Island.

The path winds through groves of naked arbutus trees and over rocky outcrops. This is the sort of running where you use your hands a lot, pulling up steep slopes, and dropping down over rocky cliffs. Below us, sometimes a hundred feet or more down sheer cliffs, the surf pounds the exposed southern point of the island, its roar omni-present, filling the space around us with a cacophony of white noise.

We pass Beechey Head, warming up. I can feel my body starting to intuit the trail. Can feel my mind relaxing into the run. Our conversation takes long pauses as we pound up steep sections of the trail that climb high above the sea, where finger inlets poke the rocky bulkheads. Then down again, thick mats of salal. We pass the first clump of black bear dung of the day, itself composed nearly entirely of salal berries, leaves and twigs, most of which have been only minimally digested. The berry crop is so rich that the bears need only draw minimal nutrition from each encouraged bellyful.

Every step forward is a step into joy. Every step forward is a step into bliss.

In the last two or three years, trail running has become the yang component of my body/spirit workout. I’ve been running all of my life, but never like this. I was a skinny kid who was frequently chided for his lack of athletic prowess. In grade four I was on my schools cross country team. I remember a three kilometer race where I placed dead centre of the pack. I didn’t run much through grade school, except through the woods behind my home in Burlington, where second growth maple, pine and beach cast dark pools of cool shadow during the heat of southern Ontario summers. In high school and collage I dated a woman who was a track and field athlete, and she inspired me to run again.

It wasn’t until moving to the Rockies in 1992 that I ran again with any regularity. When I landed at the western edge of the continent two and a half years ago, I replaced Nordic skiing with cross country running as the mainstay of my work out. It brings me to bliss nearly every time I hit a trail.

So now I am a skinny (I prefer slender, svelte, or streamlined) man who can run for hours.

Josh and I race down a long, muddy slope to where the trail crosses a rocky beach and a sheltered cove just south of Cabin Point. From here the trail climbs steeply up through cliffs and a tangled forest again to emerge on a broad, open plateau a few hundred feet above the crashing tide. Its my favorite place on the Coast Trail, a flat expanse of stone and meadow where I can stride out and feel the contentment of a cadence and the flow of land, sea, sky, muscle and heart.

Just a few weeks ago I ran to Cabin Point and back on my own, shaking off a difficult parting from someone I love dearly, and I remember crossing this bench wishing that I was not alone, that she was there to share this miraculous place with me.

Maybe someday. Maybe someday.

Josh and I push ourselves along the trail, feeling the effortless flow that comes at the apex of a run.

I know that soon I’ll touch, however briefly, the stillness that I am seeking in all my efforts.

The yin aspect of my mind/spirit workout is meditation. Every morning I sit for thirty minutes, practicing silence and stillness as best I can. I’m an amateur, and my daily practice is still mostly involves a pattern of inner dialog where memory and prediction emerge; where dreams merge with reality; where sexual fantasy foists itself on the stillness of my body; where fear and vulnerability take an icy grip on the softness of my heart. I’m still practicing tenderness with myself: rather than growing angry or frustrated, I silently say “those are thoughts,” and return to focus on my breathing.

As I have written elsewhere, from time to time I am even jolted from this stillness by an urge to move. To escape my mind. I lurch from my cushion, from the tiny alter, and have to gently remind myself to “sit through” whatever is making me so uncomfortable with stillness.

The urge to run, during these challenging times, is almost overwhelming.

This is where yin and the yang create not opposites playing against one another, but two halves of a whole, becoming one.

When I run, I allow my mind to range over the landscape through which I pass. The technical nature of most of my trails demand sharp focus on my feet or I’d surely trip or fall, in some places almost certainly to my death. But inside of that focus, my mind, and my spirit, are working things out. I let them. I try not to get in the way of my mind, my heart, my soul’s intuitive nature of sort through life’s mysteries.

I run in nature, in part, because in the woods, in the hills and mountains, by the sea shore, I am most able to draw the extraordinary creative abundance of the natural word into me. When I run, I am reminded that I am not separate from the landscape through which I move. I am simply another element of the land moving through a myriad other elements, indistinguishable.

Running awakens my passions, my desires, my vulnerabilities, my creativity. In meditation I touch to the creative void, the field of pure potentiality that exists everywhere around us, and within us, at all times. In meditation I find a stillness where I can allow my soul to touch the place within, and all around me, where this creativity manifests. But as with the Tai Chi -- the swirling black and white symbol taken to represent yin and yang -- in the black there is white, and the white there is black: in stillness, motion, and in motion stillness.

In meditation, my breathing (and my occasional physical reactions to the really hard, and sometimes dark places my soul stumbles upon) are the movement. In running, in particular on long, challenges runs, I inevitably find a place of stillness: I am not a man running through nature, but nature finding a still point from the motion.

And then, without a doubt, that stillness slips away, and is replaced by burning muscles and panting lungs as the trail winds on and on. On this particular day, I am awe struck by the shear magnificence of the coastal landscape. I keep exclaiming to Josh that I “can’t believe I live here!” Its pure delight to pass through this place, this promise, this life.

We finish our trail on the beach at the end of Pike Road and rest in the sun, on a log, watching the waves pound the islets off shore, watch fishing boats navigate the narrow channels, watch the sky grow mottled with cloud and then clear again. Then another short run out Pike Road, and we reach the car after two and a half hours of on the trial and begin the drive back into Victoria.

Every step is a step into mystery. Every moment an opportunity to touch the both stillness and motion, the abundant creative power of life’s love and energy, its joy and its sorrow, its peace and challenge and beauty. I will spend my life running towards stillness, and then, when I’ve finally reached it, simply keep running.

(Josh and I near Cabin Point on a previous Coast Trail run last winter)