In the Beginning

"Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of what you truly love." Rumi

Us humans sure do seem bizarre sometimes. Watching our movements I often wonder, What are we doing? What are we motivated by? Do we give ourselves permission to be drawn by what the beloved Sufi poet, Rumi, suggests?

Moment by moment being drawn by what we love! The fresh enthusiasm of a child worn over and over again as heart inspired action. Is that what we're doing? Is that what we want to be doing?

That's what I want to be doing. I didn't learn it in school. My parents didn't teach it to me. And there was never any boss, priest, or guidance counsellor who gave me the kind of advice Rumi gives. I'm not exactly sure who taught me to follow what I love. I imagine it's something we're born with, something primal, alive in each of us. Over time, what we should do starts to outweigh what we want to do, morality is conditioned into us from the outside. And we, bright humans, blessed with the ability to feel, to think, and to choose, choral ourselves into cultural norms convenient to our dispositions.

I thank the beatniks and the Buddhists for some early on awakenings. Intonations of a freedom I longed for, an enjoyment of life's beauty, on a mountain, hitch-hiking, in poetry. But it was going away, and then coming back, that really opened me up to a greater awareness of what I was dealing with.

I realized I was brought up a willing participant in a dominant paradigm of privilege, paycheques, and power. The more I looked, the more I saw, how deeply this penetrated my life. I was already hooked to the idea of needing steady employment to cover the monthly payments for the thousands and thousands of dollars in student loan debt I had taken on to complete my 'education.' A vision of me and my nuclear family in our big, single family home, with two cars, two kids, two parents with jobs, glimmered hopefully before me, then suddenly flared up, burst into flame, and vanished.

I saw my life disorganize, then hang in limbo, whiled I trolled continents for answers to questions I wasn't even sure of. Perhaps it was Rumi's far off voice calling. Perhaps it was my own. I knew I was looking for something. I didn't know what.

It came to me gradually, but when I found it, it slid into place like a custom made pair of shoes. I realized my purpose in this life is to live in community, to open my heart to myself, to my community, and the world around me, to celebrate the beauty of our experience, and to help others do the same. I had been studying psychology, community building, conflict resolution, compassionate communication, restorative justice, sustainable living, art as a tool for empowerment, creativity as a venue for the mystical work of modelling empathy.

I realized I knew what I wanted. I knew what to follow. I knew what i loved.

I love warm, open, connections with people. I love creating. I love living in harmony with life.

Then a new vision began to form. No longer the pictures I had seen on the outside. One that was forming on the inside. A vision of people together, in a way I hadn't yet seen.

A year ago, through the whims of fortune and the sweat of hard work, I gathered a community on a secluded, but breathtaking site, to try an experiment: a community formed with a foundation of empathy-based co-creativity. I called it the L.O.V.E. Collective. The acronym stands for Lifestyle Of Valuing Empathy. For three months we lived together, working, playing, and creating. Then for three months we travelled, sharing our 'performance' which consisted of (to oversimplify) invisible theatre on a dance floor that ran through a series of emotionally charged scenarios designed to provoked fear, anger, sadness, joy, and compassionate love. To make the experience more authentic and real we used situations from our own lives as material for our dramas. We scripted very little. Each time we did a show we sat down and said, 'OK, who's got anger in them today?' We knew our triggers, and the deeper connection to our truth that helped us to find resolution to the challenges. For each scene we modelled an empathetic responses to people's pain, and left many people amazed by what they had seen, some still not knowing if what they had seen was real, or acted. Partly because it was both.

Our work was incredible. But I was twelve years older than the next youngest person in this community and found myself with different needs for commitment and longevity. Alongside my drive for community, was growing my desire for fatherhood. Then, halfway through our tour, I found the woman that I wanted to realize this dream with. Everything changed. Suddenly, life dealt me a whole new hand.

A year later, I am now living with my partner Bernice, her three girls, Ayla, Lily, and Rosy, and her husband Chris. We are an unconventional family, mostly because we don't fit the mold. (People get a little freaked out sometimes by things that don't fit the mold.) Bernice and I are committed to cultivating the conscious dance community in the Kootenays, we're planning workshops and performances together, and we're looking for more magic to build a community that supports our dreams and nourishes us so that we can bring a baby into the world while we share our vision of compassionate creativity.

In a way I'm just starting. In a way I've been doing this for years. Now, I am putting this vision out into the world through this blog, so that I may let the magic of this incredible existence find its way into the intimate details of my journey, and fill the spaces that help to complete the picture I now carry with me. A picture that comes from the inside. A picture I am still creating.

As I release my hold on what I think I should be, there emerges more and more of what I truly love.