What It Is

"The Way that can be spoken of is not the Ultimate Way"
- Tao Te Ching

"It is like a finger pointing to the moon: if you concentrate on the finger, you'll miss all that heavenly glory"
- Bruce Lee (Enter the Dragon)

"WHAT IT IS, BROTHER! WHAT IT IS!!"
-Man on the street, New Westminster B.C., circa. 2006

Lately, I have been struck with the futility of trying to express in words the things that have been happening in my life. If I tried to explain these things It would probably end up sounding like gibberish and I would likely eventually be shunned by my peers or worse, locked up as a dangerous menace to sober society. And as a wiser man than me once said, "talk is cheap".So I have been content to keep my musings to myself or at the most, share them only with an inner circle of lovely freaks and weirdos (you know who you are). However, a series of unusual events occurred yesterday that I feel deserves to be thrown out there.

Yesterday I woke up early, intent on taking a walk along the Point Grey foreshore by UBC. This is my favorite walk in the city, encompassing a beautiful stroll/hike along the ocean between Spanish Banks and Wreck Beach an then back to Spanish Banks via the forested trails of Pacific Spirit Regional Park. On the way there however, the idea popped into my head to go instead, up to Squamish and climb the Chief. This sounded like a great idea so I proceeded across the Second Narrows bridge and up into the forested and fog shrouded mountains of the North Shore.

As I was driving on the upper levels highway around Cap road, I suddenly got a very strong feeling that said quietly yet very firmly, "SLOW DOWN". I looked at my speedometer and saw I was only going 90. "Slow down?", I thought. I began to feel more and more that, yes, I should slow down so I edged it down to about 80 and kept driving. I was a little bit confused about where this thought had come from. I wasn't speeding and the highway had only light traffic. A feeling began to rise up in me that said "you are in danger, be careful". It was a very sobering feeling. It was very strange because I drive a truck for work and am usually very comfortable on the road. One minute I was driving along, playing with the stereo and day dreaming and now I was fully alert, fully aware of everything around me. It was at this point that I stopped thinking and I didn't really start again until later that evening.

At around 9:30 I passed Horseshoe Bay and Started up the Sea to Sky highway. As I started rounding the corners and curves of the mountain highway, the sober, hyper-aware feeling steadily got stronger. About five or ten minutes past Horseshoe Bay I came around a corner and slammed on my brakes as I watched the last few rocks of a massive landslide fly across the highway. Ahead of me was a mass of steaming, dusty earth, trees, boulders and shattered rocks. The movement of this pile of debris, with parts of it still heaving and settling, indicated that it must have JUST happened. I sat there in my car and looked at it without thinking anything. A smell began creeping into my car, a strong, deep, and dark smell of ancient soil and pulverized rock. It seems to me that I had never really smelled the earth until that moment. looking at the landslide and seeing massive trees sticking out of the pile like incense sticks and the dump truck-sized boulder in the middle of the road, I decided that the road was most definitely closed so I pulled a u-turn and drove back towards Vancouver as the drivers of the other cars pulled over and got out to get a better look.

I drove back to Vancouver, deciding to do the original walk around Point Grey. On the way, my Dad phoned me and I related the story of the landslide and the intuition to slow down without really thinking about what had happened. I parked my car at Spanish Banks, suited up in my rain gear and started my walk. On the way I passed a film set with a huge mock-up of a plane crash with a real jetliner lying in shattered, burnt-out pieces on the beach. For some reason I found it deliciously amusing and I couldn't stop laughing to myself all the way down the beach. I passed many people along Spanish Banks variously sharing smiles and worried glances with them depending on their temperament.

Soon I reached the end of Spanish Banks where the road turns uphill and the trail ends leaving only a wild shoreline for me to walk. The day was overcast with a steady drizzle that turned occasionally into a proper rain then back to drizzle again. It seemed to me though to be exceptionally bright out. As I walked the lonely and deserted stretches of Acadia and Tower beaches I began to notice that it seemed to be getting brighter although the light seemed to be coming as much from the ground as from the sky. The last person I saw was at the beginning of Acadia beach and for the next hour or so I walked the shore alone. The glow from the ground now became perceptible as coming from the individual stones, from the grains of sand , from the driftwood and the trees. I stopped near the first WWII artillery tower at a place where the shore was built up with tons of smooth river rock. The rocks at my feet were shimmering and quivering with excitement. They were glowing, beckoning to me, asking me to listen to them. I knelt down and touched them, noticing as I did that my hand seemed to be glowing too. I stayed there for some time hearing the endless ocean and looking at the rocks. I wanted to stay there forever but since I didn't yet know how to listen to the rocks, I stood up and continued my walk.

Soon I came to Wreck Beach proper. In the summer, Wreck resembles a Grateful Dead or Phish concert with hippies, freaks, starving students, dropouts and assorted profiteers jostling for space amid the sounds of guitars, hand drums and the smell of some of the finest cannabis to be had anywhere on Earth. But today on a rainy February morning the only company I had was a leaderless and dispirited flock of seagulls and the only sounds were the wash of the ocean and the occasional rumble of a distant airplane. I walked along the beach slowly, engrossed in the elusive and constantly shifting division between the ocean and the land . When I reached the end of the beach where the jagged boulders of the breakwater jut out into the ocean I sat down to meditate.

I gazed in silent and thoughtless abandon at the soft, smooth sand, unencumbered by the memory of footprints. The ocean lapped up onto the sand in front of me and my mind stood still. At that moment I realized that the light that I saw radiating from everything was really coming from me but at the same time it was coming from everything else too. I am not separate from the world and from creation in the standard subject/object division - none of us are. The divisions between everything are illusions - there is no division - only unity. Unity is the supreme principle. I did not think any of this at the time, I simply sat and experienced something which I am now choosing to call "Cosmic Unity". After an indeterminable period of time, I got up and walked (floated?) up the Wreck Beach stairs and continued my Walk through the forest and back to Spanish Banks. I spent the rest of the afternoon fluttering around Banyen Books, talking to people, reading books and laughing at various things. The bliss of Unity faded as the afternoon wore on but I didn't really feel the need the cling to it or recreate it. Even now though, a day later, I still feel some of what I felt yesterday . . . .yesterday? Huh, that's funny. I just got the strangest feeling that it all happened a very long time ago . . . .strange. . . . .

I don't really know what it all means and I don't really care. When I first moved to New West last summer I encountered a local man walking down the street who was convulsing with excitement and yelling "WHAT IT IS BROTHER! WHAT IT IS!". It seemed that in his crack induced euphoria he had come into contact with the basic "is-ness" of the universe. You see, we can talk about things, tell stories about things, try to explain things but none of our analyzing or interpreting changes what "it" is. In essence: it is what it is and it can never be anything other.

Yesterday was what it was, it wasn't what I have written here and it isn't my interpretation of it now. I think too that yesterday was really nothing special or supernatural or fantastic. Rather it was just a brief glimpse into "What it is".

I feel that I am just at the beginning of a strange and wonderful journey. For all my life I seem to have been on a quest to acquire. Acquire knowledge, peace, material things. But my experience yesterday confirms an intuition that has been creeping up on me for awhile now: that my Way in life lies in renouncing, in shedding ideas, in abandoning beliefs, in discarding "things".

I'm sure by now you've saved this page in order to bolster my insanity plea at some inevitable future trial. . .ha ha. But seriously, I'm impressed that you made it this far. Like I said, I don't know what this all "means" but one thing that I am sure of is that it is a sweet and beautiful thing to be alive.


We are Stardust
We are Golden
We are Billion year old Carbon

And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the Garden

-Joni Mitchell (Woodstock)


And We all Shine on
Like the Moon and the Stars
And the Sun
Everyone

-John Lennon