The Log.
The Tide.
The Everything.
I’m sitting on a log at Locust Beach.
The tide is going out. The sun is warm on my face in a way that feels less like weather and more like something is trying to get my attention. My feet are in the sand. Deep Forest is playing in my ears. An artist I fell in love with as a fourth grader, thirty-something years ago. It still sounds like the inside of a cathedral. It still sounds like something that exists just outside the edges of language.
I’m not trying to think about anything in particular. I’m just here. Watching the water pull back and reveal everything the tide was hiding underneath. Watching the light scatter across the surface in a million directions at once, like it can’t decide where to go, like it’s going everywhere simultaneously, like it’s saying yes to the entire horizon at the same time.
And then it hit me.
That’s it. That’s the whole goddamn thing right there.
The tide going out. The light scattering. Me on this log. Deep Forest in my ears. The fourth grader I used to be and the man I’m becoming and this single warm moment holding both of them at the same time. All of it, every last bit of it, is the result of a chain of events so impossibly long, so impossibly precise, that if even a single electron had zagged instead of zigged, none of it would exist. Not the warmth. Not the music. Not this log. Not me on it.
And sitting here with that thought, I did the only thing that made sense.
I started writing about love.
On Easter Sunday I Unexpectedly Found God
As I wrote in a previous post, on Easter Sunday I unexpectedly found God sitting next to me at church. I went back to the Center For Spiritual Living again that afternoon to find God again.
God as I am coming to know them is not an all powerful controlling deity in the sky that I bow down and surrender myself to. It’s so much more than that. And in the past three weeks my experience with God has become even deeper and more powerful.
A few weeks ago I listened to a favorite song by INZO, “Just A Mirage”. It begins with spoken words and I have listened to it probably a hundred times and the words suddenly hit me in a very different way. I could listen to these spoken words a hundred times now. It makes the hair on my neck stand up.
“Allow yourself this fantasy that you’re 13.8 billion years old. And you’re a part of this incredible ocean of happening instead of this one individual. Just let yourself experience that for a second. The glorious knowledge that you are a never ending ever changing flow of matter that’s temporarily manifested with the ability to express love.”
— Spoken by Duncan Trussell at the beginning of INZO’s “Just a Mirage”
God as I came to know them on Easter Sunday isn’t just the collective consciousness I am surrounded with. It’s also love. You and I were created out of a bunch of astrophysical chaos and atomic matter 13.8 billion years ago, to be love, on this spec of dust we call Earth, in this very moment. It’s really fucking incredible when you think about it. Every single atomic particle, every single photon of light, every last thing that has ever existed has given us the ability to contain and express love.
The Chain That Goes Back Infinitely
The rain. The oxygen producing plants that the rain waters. The sun that provides the energy to the entire food chain we eat. That gives us warmth. The subatomic particles and energies we may not and never know about. Every single thing in existence and every single event that has ever happened since the creation, and whatever existed before that, created this very moment you are living in. And without any of it happening or existing, even one single electron, everything as we know it would be different.
But let’s dig deeper than that.
You and I exist on earth in a capacity to contain and share love, because of a chain of events that goes back infinitely. Yes, I am being repetitive. Your chain of events is different than mine. You have different parents. Grew up differently. Have had different life experiences and events. Even identical twins have different paths of events. Multiply that by the billions of people on this earth and the gazillions of things living and happening on this earth, and then everything happening in the universe (and possibly beyond) and the number of different chains of events becomes infinitely large.
Yet — ALL of those chains of events are simultaneously converging into one single point of time. The exact moment right now.
And — all of those chains of events are immediately proceeding in an infinite number of directions as soon as they all converge on that single point.
And — at the exact same time all of those events flying away in an infinite number of completely different paths, they are still converging at that same exact point.
Think about that for a second. The universe has been expanding outward since the Big Bang, in every direction, at speeds that are genuinely incomprehensible to the human brain. Billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, each with their own gravitational pulls and orbital dances, each creating and destroying matter in a continuous, relentless churn. And somehow, somehow, all of that is converging on this exact moment. On you reading these words. On me on this log. On the tide going out.
It’s like infinity and zero existing at the same exact time and same exact place, and simultaneously running away from each other but never actually leaving where they are.
Physicists call the present moment the only thing that actually exists. The past is gone. The future hasn’t happened. There is only this. This convergence point. This razor-thin slice of time where all of the infinitely complex chains of events that have ever existed collapse into a single, shared, breathing now.
And that center point of reality that we observe, that moment where the infinitely large number of events all come together to form the present moment, before it is simultaneously destroyed to become the next present moment, love exists.
Planet earth and the creatures that can contain and express love might be the only place in the entire universe and existence that this power and phenomena exists. Who knows.
But every single event and atomic reaction made it possible here, in this moment, and it is radiating outward through humanity, continuously.
God Is at the Intersection
This simultaneous convergence and divergence of events has been happening infinitely and will continue infinitely. And at the damn intersection is where I believe God exists. And because that intersection is simultaneously infinitely small, and infinitely large in its expansion, God is not measurable. It’s nothing and it’s everything.
When I tried to explain it to a friend one day, she turned to me and said, “You are going to have to stop, this is giving me anxiety.”
Rightfully so. Humans don’t like things they can’t measure or quantify. Love and collective consciousness is one of those things.
And here’s the thing. The ocean doesn’t ask you to understand it. The tide going out at Locust Beach right now doesn’t need you to calculate how many gallons are pulling away from the shore. It’s just happening. All of it. All at once. Whether you can wrap your brain around it or not. Whether it gives you anxiety or brings you to tears.
That’s the invitation.
Not to understand it. Not to measure it. Not to solve it like a problem. Just to let it be true.
The word God has always been a problem for me. For most of my adult life I was agnostic. I still am. I couldn’t get behind an all-knowing, all-controlling deity in the sky. I still can’t. I couldn’t get behind the version of God that shows up in twelve-step rooms or gets invoked to justify cruelty or division or exclusion. That God never made any sense to me. And still doesn’t.
But this God? The God that is the intersection of every chain of events that has ever happened? The God that is the collective consciousness of every human being that has ever lived and loved and suffered and learned and passed that learning forward? The God that is love itself, woven into the fabric of 13.8 billion years of matter in motion?
That God I can get behind. That God I have already found. They were sitting right next to me in a church in Bellingham on Easter Sunday, and they are sitting with me on this log right now.
Love Isn’t What You Think It Is
Love for me isn’t roses, dates, jewelry, kisses, hugs, Valentine’s Day, poems, romance, or all the things we typically associate with that word. Love is much bigger and powerful than that, and it lives in every cell of our being. Love is the ability to provide happiness and friendship. To reduce or remove suffering. To find joy in others. It’s unconditional friendliness. It’s concern and care for things and people around you. It’s simply wanting others to be happy. And I will expand that inwards to include ourselves. We want to be happy too.
I told a friend recently that I love everyone unconditionally, including my exes and people who have harmed me. It raised their eyebrows. How could you love your ex and people who hurt you?
Because love for me isn’t romance. That’s being “in love” with someone, and I’m definitely not in love with people no longer in my life or that have hurt me. I do want them to be happy. I know inside them, at their very core, there is happiness and love. From the point they were created, events out of their control and consent, have slowly paved over this love and happiness. Traumas, deaths, losses, abuses, pains, illnesses, or any number of adverse things and events slowly and deeply bury that beautiful part we all have inside us.
This is where IFS (Internal Family Systems) meets cosmology and blows your mind a little.
Every person you have ever met is walking around with a system of parts inside them. Parts that were built in childhood to protect them from pain. Parts that learned to rage, to shut down, to people-please, to run, to numb out. Because at some point those strategies kept them safe. Or at least kept them alive. Those parts aren’t the person’s fault. They didn’t choose them. They were installed by events that happened to them, without their consent, before they had the brain development or the resources or the support to process any of it.
The person who hurt you? They have parts running the show that were built in their darkest moments. Protective parts that developed long before you ever showed up in their life. You just happened to be standing in front of them when those parts activated. It was never actually about you.
And here’s the thing that wrecked me when I finally understood it. Knowing this about myself and others means that there is actually no reason not to have unconditional love for everyone and everything that exists. Not because they’ve earned it. Not because they deserve it in some transactional sense. But because at the core of every single one of them, underneath all the parts and all the armor and all the damage, there is the same thing that is at the core of you.
Love. The original thing. The thing that 13.8 billion years of astrophysical chaos built us to contain.
Love is free to have and give. It’s absolutely effortless. It takes absolutely no energy or effort to want someone or yourself to be happy. Yet in our world, people make it into this big god damned thing with layers and layers of rules and conditions. People hurt each other instead of wishing happiness upon them.
Our layers of hurt and suffering that people and experiences gave us, that were never ours to carry, seem to really block that love from shining through. It was in a moment that I couldn’t feel that love, and therefore I wasn’t love, that I blew up a relationship. No love present in that moment, no wishing for happiness for them or myself.
It feels like it takes immense amounts of effort to love someone else, let alone ourselves. We think that love has to be demonstrated through words, actions, gifts, gestures, or whatever measurable objective thing we can convey it through. All of that takes a lot of effort, energy, and resources.
You know what doesn’t? Simply wishing happiness for others and yourself. Simply caring about the suffering inside you and those around you.
That’s it. That’s the whole practice. That’s the whole revolution.
What the Preacher Said
In church last Sunday, the speaker delivering the sermon said two profound things:
“The things we don’t like in others are a result of their suffering.”
“Hatred never ceases by hatred. By love alone it is healed.”
Sit with those for a second. Really sit with them.
The person who cut you off in traffic. Their suffering is producing that behavior. The coworker who makes everything difficult. Their suffering. The family member who says the wrong thing every single time, who pokes the exact same bruise every holiday. Their suffering. The ex who did the unforgivable thing. Their suffering. The parts of them that were formed in their darkest, most unprotected moments, doing what they’ve always done, which is to try to keep them safe from a pain they’ve never been able to name.
You cannot hate that out of someone. You cannot judge it out of them. You cannot argue them into healing or shame them into growth or punish them into becoming who you need them to be.
The antidote is love. The actual, real, un-sentimental antidote is love.
Not the Hallmark version. Not the version that requires them to deserve it first. The version that looks at a human being carrying suffering they never consented to, and says: I see you. I want you to be free of that. I want you to be happy. Even if I never tell you. Even if we never speak again. Even if you never know I held that wish for you.
That’s not weakness. That’s not naive. That’s the most cosmically powerful thing you can do. Because if you believe anything I’ve written about the convergence of events and the infinite chain of cause and effect, then you understand that the love you direct at someone, even silently, even internally, is an event. It enters the chain. It ripples forward in directions you will never fully see or know.
If you strip away the layers of suffering that are masking the love inside all of us, there is absolutely no reason not to love and care about anyone, including ourselves, unconditionally. Wishing happiness upon others and ourselves heals the suffering we were given by the big ass chain of events we had no part of. And when that is healed, the infinitely large chain of events that follows becomes healed as well.
The Whole Thing Changes When You Do
We all have the capacity to improve all of humanity. It starts with love. It starts with wishing happiness and less suffering for all. It starts with caring about the bruised and scarred human beings around us that still have love and happiness underneath everything life has burdened them with. I guarantee it is there, in everyone. If you strip away all of the trauma and hurtful things you/they have experienced and the resultant suffering, nobody is actually a “bad” person.
Nobody.
Not one single person.
What we call “bad” is just suffering that hasn’t been witnessed yet. Damage that hasn’t been met with love yet. Parts that haven’t been told they can rest yet. Every act of cruelty you have ever witnessed was a scared, wounded part of a person doing the only thing it knew how to do. That doesn’t make the cruelty okay. It doesn’t mean there are no consequences. It means there is always something underneath it that is worth reaching toward, even if only in the privacy of your own heart.
Lead with love my people. It’s at the center of everything we know to exist in our human reality. It’s capable of radiating out infinitely if we let it. And we don’t have to do anything to make that happen, other than wishing for happiness in those around us and ourselves, and treating them and ourselves like we deserve happiness and less suffering, because we all do.
Love prevails. Spread joy and happiness. End the hate. End the violence. End the generations of abuse. End the perpetuation of suffering and harm. Break your toxic patterns. Have compassion for those burdened with suffering and emotional pain they never consented to or asked for.
Start wishing happiness for others and seeking happiness in yourself. All of the events of everything that has ever happened is the moment you are sitting in right now. If any of those events hadn’t happened, this moment wouldn’t exist. And this means that if you choose love in this moment, you are altering the course of every event that follows this.
You don’t have to be perfect with it, sometimes we still don’t choose love and make mistakes. We are human. It happens. When you do those things, simply turn back to love and make your amends from a place of love. It’s actually quite easy.
Choosing love changes everything, in every direction, infinitely.
And it’s absolutely effortless.
Just like the tide going out.
Just like light scattering across the water and not choosing which direction, just going everywhere all at once, because that’s what light does, because that’s what love does.
Just like Deep Forest playing in the ears of a fourth grader who had no idea what was coming. And a man on a log in the sun who is finally, finally, starting to understand it.
I am Tukayote.
I am unrecognizable.
I am love.
So are you.
