The last, and slightly overdue post in my recounting of my recent visit to BC will give an amazing bird’s eye view of… well, let’s just say that things haven’t been exactly smooth going for me lately, and an eye-opener was in order. Blame God for this post. It was his idea.

My friend Devon is probably the most swashbucking, dynamic person I know. A towering figure (and a tall guy!), he’s the director of the largest school of Western martial arts in the world, Academie Duello. Do check out the link, you won’t be disappointed, and I’d bet money a lot of you will wish he lived closer to you…

I met him through this shared passion for the art of skewering people, but our friendship is far more than that. He is probably one of the people I admire the most outside of my family circle. The reason I admire him is the methodical way in which he is so committed to living life to the fullest in every respect. This time around, he introduced me to a bit of sport that I should’ve gotten involved with a lot earlier, while I was living in Canada: snowshoeing.

[caption id=”attachment_372” align=”alignleft” width=”225” caption=”The equipment”][/caption]

Devon is training to do some more serious climbing later this year. He indulged me by bringing me along for an easy hike up Mount Hollyburn, north of Vancouver, and on the way there heard a fair bit of griping on my part about the frustrating aspects of my life at present, all arising in the aftermath of my brother’s passing, which has taken up a fair bit of mindspace for me lately. As a life coach, Devon is used to listening, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard; I bared my heart to him, and he mentioned with some frustration in his voice that he thought I needed to make some changes, but didn’t feel like I was ready to make them.

Now, when a loved one dies, it’s a fairly common thing to evaluate one’s life and go through a good helping of feelings that most people would rather not know: anger, helplessness, guilt, grief… all pretty heavy stuff. For me, after touching in at the bottom of the pond with despair, I found myself questioning my life as a whole: I admired my brother for his commitment and his accomplishments, and the fact that he died made me question what, exactly, am I doing with my life that is worth the fact that I am still alive and he’s not? Not a very skillful question, but hey, that’s what came up. It wasn’t an easy or a happy place to be in.

Devon listened patiently, lovingly, and said nothing.

[caption id=”attachment_373” align=”alignright” width=”225” caption=”The Dragon and the Octopus, sitting on a mountain…”][/caption]

I’ve had a good share of painful moments over the last few years. Breaking up with the love of my life for no good reason except a freak-out moment, and then entering the most excruciatingly long financial bump in my entire life have left their mark. I am frustrated because my business isn’t doing so great, and a whole bunch of other stuff is coming up for questioning: my relationships, my life plan, my work… it’s hard not to feel like my life is a mess some days. But the truth is, Devon was right. When I was bringing up all this stuff on our way up the mountain, I wasn’t even capable of seeing what the changes were.

Especially, the idea of trying out new stuff or making an effort to accomplish anything seemed particularly unpalatable. It still does, to a degree, although I’ve gotten better. Anyway, on that day, hiking up that mountain pretty soon became a grueling ordeal. I was huffing and puffing, my feet were cold and wet and painful, and I was feeling miserable. At some point, I stopped and was almost ready to tell Devon that I needed to stop and wait for him to go all the way and return… and then it hit me that I was giving up, not only on the mountain climb but on life.

So I trundled on, painful feet be damned. However, instead of trying to muscle my way to the top, I started listening to my body. Pacing myself, as it were, according to the rhythm of whatever I was feeling. I remembered, when it mattered for once, that I had learned how to do this whole “physical” thing from, amongst other people, the towering figure walking beside me, cracking jokes and listening to all my rants and thoughts and feelings, and sharing his own. By the time we got to the last slope, I was almost exhausted, but I was having a good time.

Devon looked at me. I know he knew that I was going through something inside, but instead of pointing it out, he just said: “see the top of that slope? It’s just a bit more after that to the top of everything. You ready?”

When my grandfather was young, he took one of my uncles, the only one who didn’t want to go to college, up the mountain, and showed him the view from halfway up and the view from the top, as a way of giving him a lesson on advancement in life and its benefits. My uncle said he got it, but he felt like school wasn’t for him. I thought about that when Devon subtly offered me a last chance to stop. Well, damned if I was going to do anything else but climb all the way to the top.

[caption id=”attachment_374” align=”aligncenter” width=”576” caption=”Worth the insightful metaphor, I must say…”][/caption]

Yep, the view was amazing. My feet hurt like hell, but there was nothing that I cared more about than the expansive feeling of being “on top”. I even saw an eagle, dancing in the air above us. The way down was a breeze. More importantly, the seed of a change that I couldn’t express or understand at the moment was planted. I guess that’s why this post had to wait almost a month: I couldn’t really write about it until I understood it a bit better.

Life is what we make of it. Now, that doesn’t make a shred of sense until you turn it on its head: namely, whatever we make of our life will wind up being made use of by Life (the big everything, call it what you will), because nothing is wasted. The show must go on, and every little, insignificant piece of everything we do becomes a stepping stone for something else later on. There is no use lamenting what’s happened, because it led directly to what is happening now. There is no sense or point in delaying reaching out and moving towards what you want because even if you don’t get it, something else will come of it, and the direction of your steps will help make the next steps easier. Being a self-aware part of this endless recycling process is a sobering thought, and it makes climbing life’s mountains all a bit easier, when I think about it.

[caption id=”attachment_375” align=”alignleft” width=”576” caption=”The City of (my) Dreams… well, sort of.”][/caption]

That was the way I spent my last day in Vancouver. I don’t know why, but I get the sense that I will be coming back, sooner rather than later. Next up, a post about a different kind of journey, and what came of a kitchen experiment that I will be very happy to soon repeat. Stay tuned!

KYL

So, after paying my respects to my ancestors in unlikely places, four days and nights of awesome dining, and walking the streets of my sleepy little Canadian adopted hometown, I bade Nelson adieu and made my way across British Columbia to hang out in Vancouver with my friends there. It was an awesome weekend, during which much became clear regarding my current life conundrum, and the last post of my BC series will be about that… but first, I want to tell you about my friend Ed.

[caption id=”attachment_367” align=”alignleft” width=”225” caption=”A World-Class Citizen”][/caption]

Ed was my roommate in Nelson, back when I was studying. He is, in no particular order, a consummate martial artist, a decent musician, a movie aficionado with awful taste, and a good friend. He’s also the one other person I know of my age demographic who doesn’t have a facebook account. I don’t count all of you weasels who opened one and left it there to accumulate hits by derivation in cyberspace, or who have one but “no longer” use it (emphasis on the quotation marks here). Ed never has had, nor will he ever have, a facebook page.

Not only that, but he also does not have twitter, foursquare, or any other such modern pastime. I was mildly surprised when he told me this. Mildly, because if any of my friends was going to not ever feel drawn to facebook, it was him. However, let’s face it: everyone and their grandma has a facebook page, literally. I don’t, but I have a tumultuous and voluminous twitter output (follow me @cintain if you don’t already, BTW), a foursquare account that many of my friends consider has more than a healthy number of check-ins per day (over-sharing, anyone?) , and assorted other sources that feed my various interests into those two (Untappd, Hipstamatic, Soundtracking, everything in my friggin’ iPhone, etc.) I am a part of it, facebook or no. (And no, this doesn’t mean I will give in and start FB now — no sense in breaking a good hate scheme…)

However, Ed is very happy not even knowing what any of those things are. He speaks English and Chinese, has lived abroad in China for a number of years, and is at present getting ready to do the most exciting life turnabout any of my friends have even considered. He is happy, cultured, amiable, and totally interesting and cool… all without any form of involvement in social media whatsoever.

Last year, someone @-mentioned me on a retweet with a link that pointed to an article about why people who didn’t have facebook were not trustworthy, because they were probably hiding something. My reply at the time was that I was, indeed, hiding something. It’s called “a personal life”. Seeing Ed go through life so thoroughly happy without any connection to the social-media-space made me think about how important (or not) it is to participate in these things. I love my twitter feed, and I’ve made some very interesting, powerful connections through it, some of which I would truly call friends. I use it to arrange meetings and get-togethers. I enjoy “foursquaring” all over the place. I won’t give them up, but I have newfound respect for what they cannot do.

Ed’s explanation was so much like the way I feel about FB, I burst out laughing. He said, “if someone wants to talk to me, they should call me on my phone, or send me an email.” Social media are optional; what really makes a good friendship is the contact that happens when two people meet in person and show themselves, not as they want to be seen, but as they really are. I hung out with Ed for most of the weekend, and our friendship feels as strong and deep as it ever has been, even though we are not “in touch”, and rarely see or talk to each other. We live in different countries, and we both spend a considerable amount of time on our schemes that we can’t always do skype or reply to email. But we’re still friends, and when we see each other, it’s like we said goodbye yesterday.

Ed, rather unwittingly, renewed my faith in that being human is still about real contact between real people, and it doesn’t need facebook or social media at all. He would probably make some dismissive, smart-aleck remark if he ever read this, but it’s true. I don’t think that I will give up my social media space, I enjoy it too much, but I know that I am right in that it isn’t necessary. It’s a cool feeling.

I love Ed.

KYL

Sometimes, bad things happen to good people.

[caption id=”attachment_357” align=”alignright” width=”225” caption=”Dragon frolics on Adopted Homeland”][/caption]

Ten years ago, I lost a child. No, I’m not kidding, and I’m not being metaphorical. Ten years ago, my son died while still in the womb of his mother, in the ninth month of pregnancy. It was such a shocking experience, it took me years to process. At the time, it was the event that marked the end of my life as I knew it. I had grown estranged from the mother of my child, and I was just getting settled in in Nelson, the sleepy town in the interior of BC that would become my home. In the chaos and the haze, I remember thinking that it was really important to bring the ashes of my stillborn son with me to Nelson. I don’t know why I did, rationally. His mother (with whom I haven’t spoken since that time) had ample reason to be angry at this decision, and I have had to make suitable repairs on many levels to account for my actions. However, I still believe it was the right thing to do.

I scattered the ashes of my son (for whom the name “Wolf” had already been chosen) out on Pulpit Rock, the lookout halfway up Elephant Mountain, across the West Arm of Kootenay Lake from Nelson.

[caption id=”attachment_355” align=”alignleft” width=”300” caption=”From behind the trees, home emerges…”][/caption]

My martial arts teacher, soul-brother, and friend, Kevin Wallbridge, was the only witness to this. He stood silently beside me while I made apologies, wept, and perhaps for the first time, prayed to something greater from my heart. Ever since, In retrospect, I created a very deep and special connection to that place. So much so, that I knew that I had to go out there this time around and make offerings in the name of another, who recently crossed into shadow, who was once my brother and is now an ancestor of my line.

[caption id=”attachment_358” align=”alignright” width=”225” caption=”The path up the mountain…”][/caption]

Crazy? You bet. But I did, and it felt good, and Kevin went with me. I told him about the passing of my brother Jaime, and then said, “I need to go up there”, and without further explanation or clarification, we both knew what we were talking about, what I was on about.

As I’ve previously elaborated in this blog, I am honestly undecided about what happens to us after we die. Lacking the formal religious upbringing of many people in my country of origin, I’ve pieced together my own set of working conclusions (“beliefs” sounds way too easy) about that; my knowledge is limited, and surely flawed, but I do know this: up there on the rock, overlooking the place that took me in and gave me a home at a time in my life when I felt like I had nothing, I can feel the presence of those who’ve come before. I don’t hear their voices or see ghostly forms; I just feel welcome, and there is a clarity that I have never felt anyone else.

So I prayed that Jaime would be welcomed amongst those who came before. I called upon my son and upon the winds, and made my offerings of cedar and rose petals. It was a beautiful, windy and sunny day, full of hope and the smell of new beginnings that I remember from the time of early spring. A gorgeous morning, and well spent. It made me think of people who’ve come and gone, and who still might come again. The sky was a limpid pool of blue, and the way down was all laughter and promises of other, future visits to that place that I call home.

KYL

Say what you will about my brother, he was an awesome guy.

I liked my brother. We weren’t exactly the best of pals (in fact, it was pretty difficult for us to get along most of times), but after we became adults and made the choices that marked the rough overall directions of our respective lives, I came to really respect what he was doing. Jaime devoted his life to two things: first and foremost, his family. His wife and son were all the world to him, so much so that he really felt that he didn’t need anyone else. Second, he was a believer in the power of education to change the world, and he strove to reach as many people as possible, both as a vocational and technical trainer and as a teacher. He was a middle school and high school teacher. He was the youngest person ever to hold the office of principal at a middle school in Mexico, at age 23. Two years ago, he started his own school, and taught English and other subjects in addition to being the Manager and Principal.

Jaime had a way with people. Not the mercurial, all-out charm of yours truly (which I must admit, frequently got in his way and annoyed him to no end); he shone with a gentler light of his own. People, particularly younger people, trusted him. His students loved him. The people who worked for him admired him. I’m not making this up: he was a born leader who changed the direction and outlook of people’s lives. Removing the biased perspective of an estranged older brother and the memory of our struggles, I can say that it took a long while, but I really came to admire him for everything he was doing.

Which is probably why I got so angry when he started going downhill. It is also why I continue to feel sadness when I think back on all these things. In my mind, he had all the reasons to live and he gave up. Of course, the fact that I’m even putting it in these terms says a lot about who I am, and I am aware of this. Nonetheless, what I have to say is important: even when he failed to meet my expectations and, in a way, let his life go to waste, he was this awesome guy struggling to make sense of the things that happened to him, and live a happy life.

I wish I could have helped him, I really do. I know, however, that I couldn’t. For the past two weeks I’ve struggled with that. After all, my life is about helping people who are stuck in a rut. I prayed. I did ceremony. I ran a sweat lodge and fancied that I saw him, smiling and at peace. Last week I took advantage of a training retreat I was scheduled to go to in order to be alone with my emotions and my grieving. It all helped, but not until a couple of days ago was I able to really fathom his death.

True acceptance came to me when I realized two things. First, that I couldn’t possibly understand how important his family was to him: when he split up with his wife, she took off with his family life and his kid, and my brother fell apart. The fact that he failed to grasp how important and wonderful an opportunity this was to grow, heal, and try again from a better place says a lot about him, and I think he was aware of this. However, that doesn’t mean that he was capable of doing anything about it. He just knew he’d lost everything, and somewhere during the ensuing three months he just lost the ability to make sense of life without them.

The second thing I realized is subtler, and requires a bit of background. For the past year I’ve been training to become certified in Body Psychotherapy, in a school that follows John Pierrakos’s Core Energetics and Alexander Lowen’s Bioenergetics teachings. It’s powerful, crazy stuff. Deeply transformational in a way I didn’t think was possible coming from such a “brainy” approach. Anyway, at some point I came across the paragraph quoted below, which is Lowen talking about the way we set up our personality structure to protect us against feeling anxiety and pain:

“…death is the total defense against anxiety. …[S]ince every defense is a limitation on life, it is also a partial death. The defenses allow certain impulses through, under certain limited conditions and to certain limited degrees.”

When I read this, it led me down an interesting line of thought. Jaime had set up his life to be about his family, so much so that he was unable to reach out to love and pleasure in life once they were gone. It also led me to think about the ways in which I have, over the years, cut myself off from life because I was afraid of being hurt.

Over the course of the training this weekend, we did an exercise to work on our ability to let go. The exercise was simple. Resist for a bit, then allow yourself to fall freely onto a pile of pillows and mats without offering any resistance. It is amazing how caught up people get with this. Some will try to resist indefinitely (standing on one foot and bending one’s knee is added to the resisting by the therapist in order to highlight the “inner” resistance). Others will try to “break” the exercise by diving, catching themselves at the last instant. Very few are able to really let go.

When my turn came up, I was torn. I didn’t even know if I wanted to do the exercise, and the teacher offered me to opt out. I decided to try it, and when I stood before the pillows and the therapist asked me how I felt, I said: “I am very afraid, but I don’t want to resist at all”. He looked at me and said: “Fine. Just hang in there for a second, think about all the things that life is giving you right now, and then let yourself fall.”

I thought about my brother. Tears welled up in my eyes, and a deep sadness and longing came up in the form of uncontrollable sobbing. I let myself fall. All the way down, I thought of Jaime. I think I know what it was like for him at his last moments, when he died. Oddly enough, I don’t think he “let go”, in the colloquial sense of abandoning everything that people talk about. In fact, I think he did quite the opposite. And then, as the pillows hit my face and my body collapsed like a floorboard, I caught a glimpse of something: a feeling of trust and acceptance, of peace and belief that everything is going to be all right.

I think some pretentious people in robes would call this “faith”. I don’t know what to call it; I just know it is there, and when I got up, I knew I understood the lesson.

In the end, Jaime did what we humans all do, all the time. He made a decision. I don’t agree with his decision; however, I know that his decision became part of the plan as soon as he made it. Not in a “destiny” sort of way… I’m pretty sure that what some people call “god” is nothing but a great process of balancing and counterbalancing all our insane little twists so Life can go on. It’s more like the Chinese concept of Dao: the big “Following of What Is”. Looking at all the good things that have already happened in the wake of his death is sobering. Nothing goes to waste here. That’s God’s true job, and ours, too: making the most with the stuff we are given. Whoa.

It still sucks, tho. My parents miss him, and the sadness in their hearts will take a very long time to heal. I know I will miss him, if only because I’ll never have a chance to try and talk some sense through his thick skull again. It sucks because my nephew and my former sister-in-law will have to grapple with some heady consequences, and it’s going to be really tough for my nephew, growing up without a dad. Yet as someone recently pointed out to me, at age 32 Jaime left a legacy that spans five countries and hundreds of people. He lived freely, and did good things with his freedom and his life. I guess Neil Gaiman’s Death is right: he got what everyone else gets — a lifetime. Too short perhaps, but not without blessing.

May he be received by love and kindness. I, for one, think that I am able to let his soul rest, a bit better off for the knowledge that he lived, and I was blessed by being touched by that life.

KYL

[caption id=”attachment_324” align=”alignleft” width=”150” caption=”The World Traveler. R.I.P.”][/caption]

(My younger brother, Jaime, passed away on Monday, March 5th, 2012, in his home in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. He is survived by his father Andrés, his mother Gloria, and his son Anfernee, age 12.)

I think the weirdest part of all this is how stubbornly I remind myself that he’s gone. Then, there’s the stopping of everything — the weird, unhappy moments when life goes on yet there is this awareness of emptiness, of lack, of the fact that the river continues to flow but not for him. He is gone. His flame has gone out of the Universe, at least the one that made him appear in human form. He was annoying, difficult, closed off to love and affection in so many ways, and always refusing to see things the way other people did… and yet, knowledge that I will never have another chance to try and talk some sense through his thick head hurts. It hurts because the senseless image of his broken body lying in his bed, curled up in a fetal position with his hands between his legs, his face twisted in a sad sleep in a blood-soaked pillow, still haunts me. Senseless because I half-expected him to wake up at any moment and mope about, lamenting himself over how miserable he was and all the bad stuff that had happened to him over the course of the preceding two months. I sat next to him and noticed the details in that detached, Sherlock-Holmes-like manner that I cultivate so conscientiously: the cyanotic skin, the rigor mortis setting in, the clothes that he was wearing. I kept getting visual images of what his last moments must’ve been like, my repressed writer imagination latching onto everything for future reference, when I need to write a death scene just like this.

The last four days have been a tide of emotions and moments of sharp focus. I tied his toes with red string, put coins on his eyes and made it a point that they stayed there through two wakes, a four-hour drive, and a burial. There were no Christian or Catholic masses — he didn’t want any, it wasn’t his belief and he said so in his note. What he wanted, a Mariachi band playing at his burial, and a burial not a cremation, were arranged for by my father’s clockwork personal power machine. Allies. Friends. Relatives. Over two hundred people showed up in person for the wake on Tuesday, the twenty closest stayed on or came back to the burial on Wednesday. People sent notes from various parts of the US, Mexico, Canada, Central America, even Australia. They were people whose lives were touched by my brother, who remembered things he did for them or said to them that helped them along on their own journeys. Even his high school friends, from whom he’d grown distant, somehow got word and showed up, a little cadre of inseparable friends who recalled how he had been the one who brought them together, and thanks to whom they, to this day, still get together to talk old times and to play.

Overall, I wish he could have seen all the love that surrounded him while he lived. Now, a love and kindness beyond our wildest imaginings is waiting to receive him, and today I go to help a little bit in ensuring that he crosses into that different place. I believe this with all my heart. I watch, and I pray.

Rest in peace, Jaime Daniel Quintana Covantes. You are loved, and remembered, and will be missed.

KYL