Every Love is For Us

This is one of my son Kai's sculptures that he made four years ago in his grade ten art class at Victoria's Mt. Douglas High School. Kai has been sculpting since he was a toddler. While he was growing up, working with sculpting media was the only thing that was able to entertain him.  When Kai got to high school and had access to a kiln and limitless clay, he was in sculptor heaven.

At the time Kai told me that this sculpture was about loving. I think he called it "The Embrace". What I love about this sculpture is that at sixteen, my son was able to express through his art work what most of us middle aged folks are still struggling to become reconciled to. To choose to love is to wrap our arms around a person or a passion, and it is also a choice to be speared through the chest in the midst of the embrace. That fact is the balance of life.

I am not advocating for the pursuit of dysfunctional relationships, or telling you that being abused by a lover or friend or family member is your spiritual destiny, I am simply saying there is no love without injury, and there is no joy with out an equal amount of sorrow. It is the yin and yang of life. Light is what makes the shadow. The endurance of winter is what is required in order to welcome the arrival of spring.

I frequently listen to people verbally tantrum over this balance of life. They want the light but not the dark. They want the benefit but not the price. Whatever it is that they do not have, that is what they decide to want. They hate the discomfort of yin. They want a big pile of yang. And don't get me wrong, I've been there. I too have cried for the big pile of yang.

This is almost every conversation between close friends. We report on the things that are going well, and then we report on the things we don't like that are happening, as if we could separate them from each other. But all of these circumstances are actually one thing and it is called LIFE. That is why jealousy is so silly, because whatever that other person has that looks so good to us always comes with something that is equally unpleasant, something that we probably just don't know about.

Spring has arrived in Tokyo and I am enjoying the mild weather and natural beauty that surrounds me. I take quiet walks in the nearby forest and at the local shrine, and I am overwhelmed with gratefulness for my life here. In equality at times I am overwhelmed with how much I miss my family. It is the yin and yang of my life. I love my family a lot, but I also love Japanese people with an equally overwhelming passion.

NO! NUKES NO! WAR NO! EXPLOIT NO! FASCISM some musicians on the train last night with their guitars and their political opinions... the best part of watching them was how much they made each other laugh. they had love.

I am completely convinced that there are no people more magnificent than the Japanese people, and that is why it fills me with joy to spend my time in life using my gifts and talents to help improve the chances of Japanese children to fulfill their ultimate personal potential. By supporting Japanese children now, to fulfill their potential in the future, I believe that I am fulfilling mine. Whether I am quietly puttering about my apartment, or out and about on various escapades, I am constantly plotting ways to use my unique creativity to support more Japanese children in bigger and better ways, that I hope will eventually assist them to be of greater benefit to the world. Maybe this sounds like a lofty goal, but I like to be incredibly challenged on a daily basis. That is also why I chose to raise four children instead of two. I like to be busy and to do something that will have a lasting impact. I like to be in way over my head. Not everybody is able to be my friend because of my extreme personality, and because like everyone else, I also have as many demons as I have angels.

sakura over the dead

what's not to love?!

the kichijoji funk band i get to jam with

rishu and his mom at our favourite raman place

a tokyo salary man loaded down with his loves

   In February my sister got married to her longtime sweetheart, who is the father of one grown and two almost grown amazing children. We had such a unique and private celebration of their marriage, in our empty little country church, but for the two families gathered together to celebrate this beautiful love. It was so yin and so yang. I was overjoyed to be with my family, but my brother's grave was behind the church, reminding me that one of us hadn't made it this far. All of my children were there, being wonderfully talented and gorgeous, singing a song my sister had written for the wedding, but their father was absent, and that was my fault, by divorcing him, which made me sad. But I was also so happy, because I was with my family and because I have this fantastic life in Japan, and all of this is ultimately because there is no happy without sad. Nobody gets to ditch the parts of life that hurt. Life is the dancer, we are all just doing our best to play the music of being ourselves with as much integrity as is possible.

My parents were attending their beautiful daughter's  wedding together, at peace with one another, after years of conflict, an unhappy marriage and a traumatic divorce. The balance of life. They had endured the hard stuff, and this was their reward.

This got me thinking about the purpose of love, asking questions like "Is the primary goal of love for things to work out between two people the way that they had hoped them to?" and not just with romantic love, but with every love we share with one another, our friendships, our family relationships, and even our mad crushes. Or is the purpose of love something all together different than the pressure we put upon it?

just before the ceremony, kai is on my right, my parents are on either side of the bride and groom, my older children are to their grandfather's left in a row of three. all others in the photo are the wonderful groom's beautiful children and lovely parents.

where my brother john was, we had a very cold candle lit toast over his grave after the ceremony.

I am beginning to conclude that the purpose of love is not for our personal satisfaction or emotional happiness, although those things can certainly be a wonderful perk within our loving relationships. But I am suspecting that the ultimate purpose of love is creativity and transformation. I think that love is meant to bring people together in order to create a life experience with one another, an experience that will ultimately transform them into their wiser and deeper selves.

What if love, every love, is always, ALWAYS a gift, including the loves that result in our greatest heart breaks and our most desecrated bank accounts? Why would we regret any love? For example, so many important and hugely contributing members of the human race would not have existed were it not for the love and physical passion of some of the most ill matched and miserable couples to have ever copulated. Those loves should not be regretted.

my daughters

And there are so many other things that are created by people who love each other, by friends or lovers who take on projects, or support each other in all sorts of ways, projects that are beautiful and contributing to this world, by friends or lovers who may at some point part ways with one another in terrible disappointment.

And what about the catastrophic loves? The loves that embarrass us the most? Those can be the most transforming loves of all. Those epic fail loves can actually catapult us into heights of wisdom and prudence we would previously never have imagined as possible for ourselves.

Love inspires creativity and it has the capacity to transform us into being far more than we were before that love took us on its hazardous journey. If every love is for us, including the ones that are not happily ever after, including the uncomfortable loves with family members or friends who end up estranged from us, then nothing needs to be wasted when we are determined to find the benefit within it. We know there is always a yin for every yang, so we don't need to be surprised when the hard stuff comes up. And in regard to jealousy, we should never wish for somebody else's yang, because it would only come with an equal yin, one that we might not have the strength for. Instead we can be grateful for our own balance of joys and sorrows in life. For our every moment, our every tear, our every smile, and for our every love.

father of the bride... way more entertaining than any movie ever made

For me my sister's wedding was not only about the love of the bride and the groom, the wedding was about every love represented that day. The love of the groom's parents, whom danced together at the reception, letting their hair down to celebrate the marriage of the eldest of the seven children they had raised together in a marriage that had lasted their entire adult lives. It was also about the love represented by my children's presence, the sorrow of my failed marriage, and the glaring absence of their father, and it was about the love I have for myself that required me to tragically end that marriage. It was about the love of my brother who was there in his own way. It was about the love of the newly deemed cousins celebrating their official status, and it was the love of my sister as a step mother to her flock of beloveds. It was about the love of the community that protected the church from being sold off as threatened a few years ago, allowing us to have this beautifully private occasion in this sacred place, and the love of friends that had allowed the bride and groom to stay for the weekend in their beach house, which added so much relaxation to the weekend. It was about the love between my parents whom after such a terrible ordeal of disappointed love, were standing together giving their daughter away in marriage to the sound of her and her sister and their grandchildren singing and making beautiful music in the same place that they had christened her as a baby. I could see how my parents were overwhelmed to the point of holding back tears. That was such a beautiful moment to me, because it powerfully echoed my thought that every love is for us. 

click on the link below if you want to see the bride's family singing to the grooms family <3

my sister's wedding,video of us singing

For some reason, I absolutely love that we are singing and the church pews are empty.

me and some beautiful j babies, i believe these are the future solvers of our world energy crisis puzzle, canadians like my mother can stop the pipeline by standing outside the liquor store with petitions, and in the meantime i will prepare these geniuses with the skills they need to bring their engineering brilliance onto the world stage. let's get things done!