Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Eleven - Part One.

    Chapter Eleven - Part One.


     The Gorge waterway or 'The Gorge' as it's known in Victoria, is a waterway that flows through the city of Victoria. It runs east to west, a sliver of blue or grey that streams out of the Victoria harbour.
      I sat on a bench beside one of the Gorge's banks on a May afternoon in 2008. The day's weather didn't stand out from many other similar spring days. The sun popped out from behind spring clouds from time to time. A passing shower sprinkled me lightly with water. The waters of the Gorge turned blue, then grey, and then blue again.
      Yet after sitting on a bench for an hour or two, something seemed to hover over  me, and  I felt some invisible curtain fall over me. I can't say if this was an extra-terrestial force or a spark from above. I saw nothing different or scary. Yet I felt I was being touched by a seemingly divine spirit. At afternoon's end, I hobbled away from the waterway, feeling a changed man.
    "I have had a born again experience," I told people about what I thought had happened. I felt I had just put behind me the past eight years. "Now I can begin again," I told myself. Now after that experience I wanted to live in the present and look forward to the future.
      When the year 2000 came around, I felt fairly good. I was nearly 58 and though my body was definitely running down, my spirits stayed up. Long before 2000 I'd switched from doing primal therapy to trying Rational Emotional Therapy that was a more mainstream therapy than primal. It also focuses on the present and not the past. After that, I started to meditate every day and this soothed my mind and relaxed me.
      I also kept on traveling but the long journeys of my youthful past lay well behind me. I moved around Metro Vancouver and to and from Vancouver Island. At least once a year at summer's end, I went to Penticton, a popular desert vacation spot that lay about four hours east of Vancouver. I was a contented man who was weaning himself away from the obsessions of the past. Yet once again troubles loomed ahead.