My Ducks

(picture taken last Spring with my eldest daughter)

Recently I was able to attend a Sunday service at TZC. The format usually makes for a fairly short talk, but this one was one of the more notable ones I have heard in a long time.

Rinsen spoke of ducks.

The gist of it was the nature of ducks vs. our tendency to want our ducks to be in a row. As he explored this, my mind tried to identify it's ducks. (given that the mind is one big duck to begin with) Today however, I found one of the more disorderly bunches of ducks that I have been hanging with. Collectively, they are my house.

In August we had some flooding in our basement and the repair work (covered by insurance) has been very slow. The contents of our basement were moved to our living room and our garage. The short of it is that our living space consisted of a kitchen, 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms for 3 months. I have been very stuck in the mind that says "I'll be happy when all of this is done and I have my house back". Although I am happy that the repairs are almost done, I can see that I have been playing a very dangerous and unhealthy game with my own mind.

As drastic as the damage to the basement was, I have to recognize that even now there are issues. Things to be worked on and repaired. The new paint and carpet will get dirty or chipped. The idea that there is a perfect way for my basement to be, is a static view of a dynamic situation. Even as the ducks seem to be coming into line, I have to recognize that they will drift apart again.

This was basically what Rinsen was getting at, but it is much more useful when these things can be seen in our own lives and not just as abstract concepts.

I am going to go downstairs now and play with my ducks.

Why Me?

Lately I have been going through some minor plagues. Nothing major, just a torn calf muscle and some colds and flu's. But for most of the time I was going through it, it FELT major. It felt terrible. I felt terrible. I felt like my entire life was crumbling around me. It took some time to create the space I needed to work through it, but once I did, I spent some time thinking about how situations like this arise.

What I found was not earth shattering, surprising or even new, but it came from a different angle and provided some insight.

In the physical universe, there are countless bodies in motion. Every body has a gravitational field and that field acts on every other body in the universe. This creates an infinitely complex and dynamic relationship between everything in existence. Pull back far enough and it can be seen that there is a geographical center to the universe, and everything is moving outward from that. Some theories hold that the universe will eventually collapse back to that point in the Big Crunch.

But that is not where we live. We live in eddies of activity and drama. We exist in currents of dynamic drama with people we did not know 10 years ago and who will not always be a part of our lives. We live in homes that will decay and eventually be abandoned, regardless of how much time and money we put into them during our lives.

We move through these swirls of life and activity from which there cannot be perceived a center. There is only motion, in even in stillness.

Then a moment comes. We might perceive some subtle agency behind a collection of our circumstances that brings us to wrongly pursue a line of thought based on an idea that we are getting more than our own share of suffering and calamity.

What is your due portion of calamity? Really?

I played a bit of poker in my life. I know how the odds work. In Hold'em, if you are chasing a flush after the flop, you have approximately a 36% chance of making your hand. But YOU WON'T ACTUALLY hit that flush 36% of the time. You'll die first. To get what the odds say you should get you'd have to play poker forever. The closer that your time playing gets to infinity, the closer your outcome will reflect the odds. Despite this, many players decide poker is rigged because they are hitting their hands less often than they "should". Others feel they have something called "luck" on their side because they seem to make their hands more than they "should".

What is your due portion of luck? Really?

So what happens when my world is collapsing around me? Having made the error of thinking there is a certain amount of luck or calamity that I should have, I place myself in the center of the universe. This is a terrible place to be. When you are at the center of the universe, the universe is either running away from you, leaving you alone and isolated, or it is rushing towards you, threatening to crush you.

When I slip, it is a slip into the center of the universe.

For me, when I break out of these frames of mind, it is usually the result of displacing myself from the center of the universe. I might see it through the suffering of another person, or even from just looking up and truly seeing the unblemished sky that covers all the beings of this planet.

Parks and Rec

Julie asked why I was putting trip reports on my Zen blog.

Where else would I put it?

I know it is not particularly reflective like most of my other posts, but there is more to contemplative life than reflection. There is also awe and living. Short trip that this is, there is a many layered beauty in it. The movement through this country is parallel to the movement through this life. The depth of connection between Julie and I, although it is always there, can ride at the surface of our awareness in those brief moments away from familiar places and faces.

There is beauty.

--------

Friday night we went to bed early. I won't say it was a mistake, but in the morning we knew we had to force ourselves to sleep long so we would be better able to handle the day.

Saturday morning we went for a walk in the rain after breakfast, and got our hands on a coffee and an umbrella. Julie made an appointment to get her hair done for the wedding and we did a little shopping at Zellers and Winners.

We had a lot of time to kill until the wedding, so we looked at a map and I suggested the Elizabeth Lake Bird Sanctuary. We learned from our cabbie that this used to be a popular duck hunting spot. It would be a popular ANYTHING spot.

Eventually, one of the paths let us exit back into Cranbrook's suburbia. We walked and talked, and I kept Julie laughing a lot of the time. If for no other reason, this trip has been worth it for the time we have had alone together. After a lot of walking and a little garage sale-ing, we called a cab. It was time to rest and get ready for the wedding.

Dave is a friend of ours from high school. We were not best friends, but we ran in the same crowd. He is one of 2 friends whom we have stayed in contact with more or less consistently since 1990. We went to different universities and after school he pretty much went straight out to Penticton BC to work as an astrophysicist at a radio observatory. We would see him every few years, and we even drove out West and saw him after I started teaching full time. There are few things in my life that I would change at this point, but being closer to Dave is one of them. He is a source of goodness in the world. A positive soul whom I am better for knowing. I am so very happy for him and Jackie on their big day.

Going to this wedding, Julie and I have already been married for 18 years. It is an amazing thing watching our friends just getting started on this journey. Last night was a celebration of the day. Their coming together as individuals, remaining individuals but become a single thing. If I could offer them anything about marriage it would be this...

Look closely at yourselves and your lives and see that you, as individuals are not set, static, unchanging beings. Your experiences, likes, dislikes, dreams, goals and biases have been in flux for almost 40 years. This is living. This is being in tune with life. You will continue to be so. As a couple, grow together. Don't let yourself attach to some unchanging image of who the other is. Celebrate this growth and change. Explore how your love and friendship develops and changes. Revel in its robust moments, nurture and sooth its weak moments, cherish every moment.

Lose the ability to hear the phrase "you're not the person I married" as a complaint. It is an observation that points to the unique path you will create together.

I wish you all the best. I love you both.

Full Body Scan on the First Date

A couple of interesting things about the rest of our flight to Cranbrook...

During our layover in Calgary, Julie got a massage to help her combat one of her tension headaches that started coming on yesterday. To get to that part of the airport, we had to go out of the secure zone, which meant we eventually had to go through a security check before our next flight. Being a big city, international airport, they have all the bells and whistles. I was randomly selected for a more thorough scan. My security concierge gave me a couple of options, but I didn't really listen. I was zoned in on the one I wanted; the electronic full body imaging.

Why the excitement? Because it is SOOOO Star Trek. The thing looks like a transporter. It actually functions more like a time machine. It transported me 15 seconds into the future, and there is no getting that time back.

After the scan, a female agents voice came over the radio, asking my security guard to pat down one of my pockets. Yep, somewhere in Calgary, there is a woman who got to see this...

you're welcome.

So anyway, when we finally boarded our last flight, we got on a small, two prop plane. How small you ask? Here was the view from my seat.

Honestly, it was a lot of fun. The flight was only 30 minutes, but I could see forward as we flew over the Rockies. When we descended, there was a time when all I could see out the front was the ground. Given the design of the plane, it was very loud. When we arrived at the Canadian Rockies INTERNATIONAL Airport, we were the only plane on the tarmac. It was very quiet. A good transition from travel to rest. That is, once we took care of some shopping.

Blogging on the Fly

Julie and I are on our way to Cranbrook BC for our friend Dave’s wedding. There are a lot things to be excited about, including not being at work on a Friday, having a 3 day vacation with Julie, Dave getting married, but the thing that I always get a huge kick out of is flying.

Despite the seeming drudgery of waiting in the airport and sitting still in public for long periods of time, flying excites me. To borrow from Louis CK, after all, you are sitting in A CHAIR IN THE SKY!

For all of that amazement, it is moving through the airports that I find amazing. If each person is a thread in the fabric of life, the weave is tightest and brightest in the airport. I am overwhelmed by the infinite number of stories, or at least possible stories, that each person carries.

• The 30 year-old, red-blooded hunter, off tocash in on his moose tag.

• The tired businessman en route to the meeting he could not care less about.

• The thin, grey haired woman on her way to Africa to build schools for the poor.

• The university grad with the backwards cap, heading to visit friends in Fort McMurray, while he contemplates what to do with an English Lit. degree.

• The young family travelling back home to visit a grandparent who probably won’t see their granddaughter
  ’s next birth day.

I know I don’t know these things, but ultimately, they are true. Across this world, millions of people are bored in airport terminals, watching in-flight movies, and sleeping on undersold flights.

We are travelling. Infinite destinations, infinite purposes, infinite stories. Being infinite, they are baseless, and at the same time an accurate picture of reality.

Like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, I can know the velocity of that story, but can’t localize the story without its blurring.

All I can do is hop on a horizontal escalator and weave my thread toward the Western shore of this fabric.

It COMES with fries

Earlier this week, while I was walking from my car into the place where I work, I saw an airplane taking off. It was a cold and grey morning. The ground was dry, but the air held a certain promise of rain. The plane pulled my attention away from the too many things that I was carrying, as it prepared to break through the clouds and disappear.

For a moment, I was seized by the notion that I wanted to be on that plane. I wanted to be going where they were going, and not into work.

Planes taking off have always held an exotic mystery for me. Uncertain of their destination, I am able to imagine that they are going to the exact place I would like to go myself, even if I can't name it at the moment. On cloudy days, I know that they will soon reach a world of white, billowing carpets, blue skies and blinding sun, leaving me in this grey, unfinished basement.

But really, where am I? I am in the circumstances of my choosing. Whether I have chosen through spectacular actions,

"Julie, would you marry me?"

"Mom, we're moving home."

or by the the equally powerful in-actions that keep me working on what is in front of me, I have chosen this path.

I could have dropped my things, walked back the car, gone to the airport and got on a plane. But even then, I could never actually step away from where I am.

Even if I had the power to jump into other lives, that then would be my life, and that life would be different from all of the other possibilities.

Considering this, I can sense the faint faint flavour of victimhood in wishing to be on that plane.

Next week, I will be the one on the plane. As we take off to the West Coast, I will looking down people on their morning commute, wondering where they are going.

Anger

Does anyone harbour anger against another, and expect healing from the Lord?

-The Book of Sirach

This small passage was part of the first reading at mass today. It hits on a few things that have been very important to me in my practice as of late. I'll start with the words "against another". Sometimes it feels as though we drastically underplay the importance of the relational nature of our ethical lives these days. Looking at the news and politics of global economies, it is very easy to see the world as a series of wars, crises and disasters that are to be conquered. People are often either allies or obstacles. Those who seem to stand against us seem pretty deserving of our anger and wrath. After all, they are standing in the way of our noble vision of how things should be (whatever that is). But if we really look at our place in this vast world, such anger and the energy that we might devote to defeating those who oppose our vision of the world is a huge misdirection of time and energy.

There are close to 7 billion people on the Earth today. That is a lot of people to expect to conform to our view. As daunting an exercise it would be to just focus our mind on wanting each of these individuals to be the way we would want them to be, none of these people are autonomous. They know each other, and for each person they know, their actions and behaviours are influenced by these relationships moment after moment. To just spend the mental energy wanting a person to be other than exactly what they are is akin to trying to make the ocean calm by pressing down on the waves on a beach.

The other important word for me in this short quote is "harbour" ("harbor" for my American readers). We tend to treat anger like an infant we have won in a contest. (WHAT?). I know, strange analogy, but by this I mean that we treat anger as something we feel entitled to and something that we need to care for and nourish. When we react with anger to some wrong done to us, we take some version of the stance that "they MADE me angry". Accepting that position blindly, we take the position that we have no choice in being angry. Granted, there is a thing such as righteous anger that arises very naturally. Heat is sometimes the natural response. But something shifts when we hold onto, play with, and nurture that anger. It grows and deepens. It poisons and consumes us. We rage outwardly trying to beat out fire with more fire, until we exhaust ourselves.

I get angry, I get happy, I get sad. But with all things, a time comes to let them go. I suspect that we tend to hold onto anger beyond its natural shelf live with a greater regularity than other things.

I know how hard it is to let go of anger in the face of people and situations that seem determined pour crap on you and the universe. I run into this difficulty every day and I meeting with varying degrees of success and failure. But I also know that I can't get angry enough to end the anger. I can not "expect healing" until I release it.

I heard this teaching as I sat beside my wife in church, in about the same place my father and I used to sit. My daughters were working in the sacristy as altar servers, and my in-laws were singing in the choir. In the midst of all of this, I felt the room shrink. Everything became closer and more personal. Everyone became closer and more personal. In some way, I could feel that there was less room for anger.