Two freaks go bump in the night, or how I learned to love a German.

Is it a safe bet to say that most couples meet at work, at parties, at the volunteer fire hall, or on the tennis courts? There has to be at least one couple out there that met on the summit of Mount Everest. Well, here is another possibility; how about in a Tantra class at Ohso’s ashram in Pune, India? It was my third day in this controversial place and I took the plunge and signed up for the course where the men grunt and gesticulate like primal cavemen as the women dance and connect with the feminine divine. If you have ever participated in a Tantra group, then you know how good it feels to act naturally. Tantra is the ancient practice of activating and releasing primal energies from the depths within. We all have them but perhaps are not aware. More accurately, some may say they are suppressed by the Western practice of being polite. When these energies are touched, what makes one feel like a man or a women can become more obvious in subtle ways. Since energies are not confined to a space, they merge with others into this awareness. Cool or what!?

One of the first exercises in the class involved a lengthy gaze into the eyes of all the 17 other participants. Have you ever really looked into another’s eyes? I realized I have seldom done that. My gaze first fell upon a set of large brown eyes belonging to woman across the room. Hmmm, what is this? What do I see? Takes a while to relax into it. I saw fear, shyness and depth. The experience has the somewhat uneasy feeling of being a voyeur, peering into the depths of one’s being. It has been said by wiser folks than I that we are engaging in the act of connecting with the one reality that unites us all. A couple of days later, the owner of these brown eyes and I engaged in our first conversation and now we are riding bikes to Tierra del Fuego. Her name is Olivia, aka Surenda.

If we review our lives as a chain of events, it is no surprise to find us where we are at the moment. If you find yourself sitting behind the desk at the Carnegie Center in Vancouver, that morning you hauled your sorry ass out of bed, brushed your teeth, burnt out of the drive way on your bicycle, grabbed a coffee and donut, and somehow managed to get to work on time. One thing leads to another. On a more macro scale, ask yourself how fate put you behind that desk doing that job. If your belief is that life is a series of random events, then your answer is easier to figure out….. I got this job because I had to pay the rent and have another engine rebuilt on the VW Van. I could just as easily be somewhere else doing something else.

A real freak could come at it from a completely different angle, that your life is one continuous event not broken up into fragments of this or that. There is an energy that is drawing you onward, linked more closely to your heart, rather than the head, that you are where you are supposed to be and couldn’t be anywhere else. No coincidences! For whatever reason, Olivia and I were in the same place and time in a nonquantum way of speaking, on March 21, 08.

So now we rewind to recent years to experiences that we have all shared, more or less. It is those times that you feel your life sucked the most and fantasies of faraway places creep into your head. I can see myself sailing off into the sunset but in recent years the gods were more realistic and altered the fantasy to cycling off into the sunset. A strong second place fantasy was to travel in India. As I felt more and more stuck in my world, these fantasies intensified but there was no outward reason to believe either would actually happen. I merely parked them in the garage. Those readers who go back that far with me know that Krista and I were, as a unit, inert and stuck in time. In the summer of 07 on that day, Krista must have had an epiphany and/or had the wisdom to question our togetherness as we had known it. I heard her say after she called me over to the picnic table on that sunny August morning as I was washing Nathan’s truck, “I want to be on my own… maybe this would be a good time for you to go to India”. She had heard me talking wistfully about it for years. I almost sprained my ankle running to Exedia.com. This is not to diminish the effects on my heart, just a silver lining to the dark cloud. Krista’s relief and my sense of excitement were palpable. India, yeah!!

India delivered! Even through the blue haze blanketing Bombay at 3 am upon touch down, I was witnessing Nirvana amongst all the sleeping street venders and endless clutter. By 10 am I hit the streets where adrenaline coursed through my veins at the theater of India. The ensuing months took me to an ancient ayurvedic hospital in Kerala, to Shivananda yoga ashram in the deep south, and across the country to Madras for a professional tennis tournament and a date with Rafael Nadal. Ginet, my good friend and travel companion from Sivananda, and I blitzed the East coast, Pondicherry and Auroville, and some interior temple towns. If you are interested in my impressions, write and ask, but you are probably not so I spare you the details. Ginet split for her yoga teacher training course, then home to Berlin.

My Indian odyssey continued at Osho. This is where I was to hook up with good friend Jessica for a month of travel in the North. This was the tipping point in my trip as Jessica signed up for, yes, a yoga teacher training course instead. I was left to meet my fate at Osho for my last month in this deeply mysterious land before heading back to my beloved home in the mountains of British Columbia. It was a few days later that my tantra course started and those clever readers out there know where this is going. Her name is Olivia, she has brown eyes, and we are our bicycles to ‘Tierra del Fuego’.

What must be said is that a few months later when Olivia had flown from New Zealand to visit me in my home in the Slocan Valley, I blurted out (probably after a Margarita and feeling fearless) “Are you in the mood for riding a bicycle to Tierra del Fuego with me?” There was a nano second pause, or maybe not, and the game was on. From that point on all of our energy and decisions led to that moment on December 1st 08 when Gaye, my dear sister, drove us to the Amtrak station in Vancouver. We detrained in Salinas, California, with 2 bikes and 10 bags in tow.

Olivia and I believe in the quantum reality that we are all fields of all possibilities. We bring into existence that on which we put our attention. Call it magic, law of attraction, or the secrets of the jedi; but no matter what happens Olivia and I cannot think of anything else that we would rather be doing.

John Lennon had it right when he sang ‘Love is the answer’. We are all going to discover this sooner or later in this expanding universe. Love what you; do what you love.

There is no way to express thanks for all the love and support from my family, including Krista, and friends. As this journey of self discovery continues for the coming years, we are really counting on you for generating the energy we need to climb all the bumps and mountains on the way to Tierra del Fuego.

Apologies to good friend Dan and any others who are left rolling their eyes.