The Buddha that sits in my entrance way has a tiny Santa hat perched jauntily on his head; set at a rakish angle, it juxtaposes perfectly against Gautama Buddha’s serine expression.
I love Christmas. I inherited this from my mother, who worked slavishly to ensure that the season was a flawless expression of the image of her family she projected on the world. Our home was always perfect; presents were piled high under the tree which itself was cut on our property in Northern Ontario in an idealistic holiday gathering of caroling friends and merriment and dragged home through the waist deep snow, dinner was an elaborate affair that often induced early forays into eggnog and rum, hold the eggnog.
I love Christmas, but I’m not enamored with the wild debaucherous consumerism that seems to infect our society like some kind of pathological screwworm, always present but most veracious at this time of the year. But like all things in life, I live with the paradox that I enjoy giving gifts. So I go shopping.
This year I went in search also of the Buddha Claus.
While wandering the downtown streets of Victoria, or through the cities many shopping malls, I tried to imagine what it would be like for a four year old to sit on the Buddha Claus’ lap and read off their wish list. The Buddha would listen placidly and then, with a warm smile, would explain that much suffering is born from desire and the illusion that “things” can provide us with fulfillment and stave off the inevitable end of our impermanent nature of our transient existence. Then the children would be sent on their way, a copy of the Dhammapada clutched in their sticky fingers.
Maybe the Buddha Claus isn’t for everybody.
I spent my albeit brief time in long lines in retail outlets doing what I could to make the lives of those around a little better. I gave them the gift of a smile, a friendly word, a feeling of camaraderie, and the so necessary sense of human connection. I failed at this effort a few times, providing unwanted verbal assistance from the safety of my glass and steel bubble to those who failed to grasp that parking lots don’t mean that you simply stop unexpectedly and interminably in the middle of them.
But I hope that in the main I was able to relieve people of a little suffering during what is often a stressful and lonely time of the year. And in doing so, relieve myself of some suffering. It’s the illusion of our separateness that so often leaves me feeling unnerved.
As I’ve said before, the purpose in all my running and my stillness isn’t to achieve enlightenment – the permanent end of suffering – but to simply find some peace. Christ taught us that the meaning of Christmas is peace on earth. The Buddha teaches us that the purpose of life is peace in our troubled souls. We can’t have one without the other.
In the spring of 1996 I pushed off from the public boat ramp in the town of Green River, Utah, with two friends, three weeks of food, my two Nikon FM2 camera’s and 60 rolls of film. For the next 21 days we explored the length of Stillwater and Labyrinth Canyon’s; 120 river miles, and another hundred or more on foot up the Green River’s dendritic side canyons. I shot all my film, dropped one roll into the waterlogged bottom of our raft but managed to save it, and came out of the canyon country with a few dozen good shots and a hunger to shoot more.
(The Green River, from Green River Overlook, Canyonlands National Park, Utah)
It wasn’t my first trip to the Four Corners region. During the winter of 1993-94 I spent five months in the Southwest, first volunteering at Grand Canyon National Park as a Ranger Naturalist, and then down through southern Arizona and New Mexico, and back up through the high country around Santa Fe. But I was stupid, and was traveling light, so didn’t bring my real camera with me, just a tiny Olympus point-and-shoot.
Since my first trip down the Green River I’ve been back to Utah five times, including three other trips on that wonderful river, and a five-week-long exploration of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Zion National Park in western Utah. At the end of September Jenn and I spent two weeks in southern Utah and Northern Arizona; it was a powerfully creative time.
Photography is the art of bending light. The eye beholds the scene, and the heart longs to capture the beauty before you. The mind calculates how. The camera is the tool through which light passes and is recorded, for the longest time with silver on the film plane, and now through ones and zeros on the memory card. The light must bend through eye and heart, through head and lens, through bits and bytes to emerge transformed by the creative process on the screen, on the wall, on the print before our eyes once again.
The American southwest is one of my hearts true homes. It’s a joy to share it with you.
(Above, Jenn in Dry Fork Canyon, and below, descending into Peekaboo Gulch, Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument, Utah)
(Jenn's shot of me in Spooky Gulch, and my lay-down on your back shot of Dry Fork Canyon,
Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument, Utah)
(It's a tight squeeze in Spooky Gulch, and it got even tighter. I set the ISO at 1600 so I could hand hold the camera in the low light of Spooky Gulch, above and below)
(Jenn in Dry Fork Canyon above, and below, moonrise and Balanced Rock, Arches National Park, Utah)
(Above, Canyonlands National Park looking towards the La Sal Mountains, and below, a storm trails over the The White Rim of Island in the Sky, Canyonlands National Park, Utah)
(Sunset from Cape Royal, North Rim, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona)
(Standing Rock, above, near The Maze, Canyonlands National Park, and below, Jenn's shot of me in a cave formed from massive slabs of sandstone in the Doll's House region of Canyonlands.)
October 24th is the International Day of Climate Action; a mere six weeks before COP15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Copenhagen December 7th through 18th. If we’ve been good and eaten our vegetables the world’s leaders just might approve a meaningful, binding and ambitious climate change treaty that restricts CO2 emissions to 350 parts per million. They currently stand at 390 ppm and are rising by 2ppm each year.
According to just about everybody who knows anything about this stuff, 350 ppm is the level beyond which life on earth becomes really uncomfortable, if not downright impossible. Some world leaders are toying with a ceiling of 450 ppms, which might be politically expedient, but only for those who like intolerable heat, continent wide droughts, killer floods, constant and colossal storms, the extinction of much of the planet’s wildlife, global pandemics and the whole-sale collapse of the planet’s life support systems.
For the record, I’m urging the adoption of 350.
(Hampi, in Karnatika, India, was the site of massive flooding recently that took many lives)
Today is Blog Action Day. It’s a little thing. There’s about 9,000 bloggers, in 149 countries around the world writing about climate change today. I’m doing my small part (for ideas on what you can do, go here).
It would be pretty easy for me to join them in the condemnation of global leaders for their failure to act on this most pressing issue facing humanity today. In particular, here in Canada, it would be easy to point to the spineless inaction of Stephen Harper’s conservative government as he positions us at the top of one list (highest green house gas emissions per capital – yes, we finally beat the Americans) and at the bottom of another (worst track record for action on climate change of all the G8 countries).
Easy, but redundant. Everybody else is writing that today.
For many years now, and with increasing intensity, I’ve been studying the teachings of Gotama Buddha. The looming catastrophe of climate change is enough to test anybodies spiritual resolve, as it has tested mine. I have found myself turning again and again to the wisdom of the Buddha for spiritual grounding during this progressively troubling period in human history.
A few things emerge from the Buddha’s teaching that have helped me, and might help others.
The underlying foundation of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths. They are 1) that life has suffering, 2) that suffering has an origin, 3) that suffering can be ended; and 4) that there is a path to end suffering and it is called the Noble Eightfold Path.
Suffering is a product of attachment; attachment to possessions, to relationships, to situations, to our own ego. Buddhism teaches us to find sanctuary in uncertainly; to become comfortable in the fundamental uncertainly of our everyday existence. These are the most uncertain of times; not since World War Two has the world faced so perilous a threat to our survival. The consequences of our failure to curtail green house gas emissions could be dire indeed.
If we are to summon the courage and compassion to face this global threat, we’re going to need to be secure with insecurity.
Within the Noble Eightfold Path are a number of wise and practical lessons that humanity might consider as it struggles to address climate change. Listening to author and scientist Tim Flannery on the radio two days ago made me think about this. Flannery, whose book The Weather Makers was a game changer for many who were struggling with climate change, has a new book out called Now or Never. In the CBC radio interview he said that “we need to make that moral shift. [We need to make a] commitment to each other as human beings that we want to make a better world.”
The interviewer asked Flannery about his definition of sustainability, in the context of climate change: “It’s a simple aspiration,” he said. “I want to leave the world a better place than what I was born into. Is the lifestyle I’m leading and what I’m doing, really adding up to that, or is it leading to something different?”
What Flannery is talking about is the similar as the Buddhist principle of Right Livelihood. In the teachings of Vipassana Mediation, a 2,500 year old tradition passed down from the Buddha, Right Livelihood is understood to mean that “neither directly nor indirectly should our means of livelihood involve injury to other beings.”
Think about that. Imagine a world where we sought to make our living without doing harm, or causing harm to be done.
I believe that part of what is driving us so recklessly towards self destruction is our unwillingness to become comfortable with uncertainty, and our need to placate ourselves with distractions that fuel livelihoods that are cause great harm and suffering around the world. We are fundamentally afraid of the true nature of life – temporary, uncertain, difficult yet heart-breakingly beautiful – so that we suffer deeply. Our suffering causes us to seek placation: we buy bigger, faster cars; we gobble up foods that are unhealthy and that are grown unsustainably (Twinkies are not grown organically); we live in massive houses that isolate us from each other and require enormous amounts of energy to heat and illuminate. The list of what we use to temporarily insolate us from the true nature oflife is long and sad.
All of this distraction requires industries that cause deep, lasting harm in the form of ruined ecosystems and an atmosphere that has surpassed the safe level of CO2 emissions. We are killing life on this planet because we are afraid to face our own reality, and because there are those who are willing to reap profits from this preoccupation with comfort and false security.
There are many solutions to climate change, and it’s likely that 8,999 of my fellow 9,000 bloggers today will catalog them. Political action is most necessary, because trying to cajole behavioral change from a society that is so deeply invested in its own distractions will take far too long, with far too uncertain a prospect for success (and I’m just not comfortable with that). As the current thinking goes, we need a climate deal in Copenhagen that is ambitions, fair and binding.
But what we also need is a spiritual awakening. And whether we wake up to the Dharma path, to Tao Tzu’s teachings on the Way and its Power, to the sermons of Jesus Christ or Mohammad or any other of the worlds myriad interpretations of spirit, until we substitute genuine love, compassion, understanding and acceptance of our fragile, temporary and remarkable lives for the material distractions that blind us, we will continue to inflict immense harm on ourselves and the many creatures we share this fragile earth with.
For the last couple of months I’ve been nattering on about discovering my dharma and the coincidences surrounding my departure from Royal Roads University. Somehow my acceptance that writing is what I truly want to do with my life, and the space created for writing by my untimely exodus from my post as a fundraiser for the Bateman Centre, seemed incomplete. There had to be a third coincidence.
My hope was that a meeting with a prominent Canadian literary agent in Toronto in August would round out the trio, land me a fat writing contract, and set me on a course for literary stardom, or at least literary self-sufficiency.
It was not to be. All the positive visualization, wishful thinking, creative manifestation, meditation and voodoo doll arranging in the world is no competition for a supportive, yet skeptical, battle hardened agent.
God answers all prayers, say some: sometimes he just says no. Or, as the Buddha and Lao Tzu said: all anticipation leads to disappointment. Instead I had to remain open to other signs. Of course, one presented itself.
One of the first things Jenn and I decided to do when I lost my job was to take a vacation. Liberated from the tyranny of three weeks of holidays each year, we were free to travel, so we headed for the American Southwest. We have both ventured there on numerous occasions, through never together. We planned to spend time riding our bikes and hiking near Moab, venture down the Colorado River and day trip into the Maze in Canyonlands National Park, camp on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and take a quick tour through the Escalante.
The protagonist in my books The Cardinal Divide, and the forthcoming Darkening Archipelago was inspired by the canyon’s of Utah. In the mid and late nineteen nineties I spent a lot of time kicking around Canyonlands National Park, doing two and three week long trips down the Green River, through the San Rafael Desert, and into Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons. I employed a local outfitter from Moab called Tex’s Riverways, and became friends with the three brothers who ran the show, Tex having long since retired. Dirk, Devon and Darren were the kind of iconoclastic, offbeat characters that make a bone chilling jet boat trip up the Colorado River a great experience, and I’ve stayed in touch with them all these years.
I think it was on my second Green River adventure that one of the boys started referring to me as Glint Longshadow. As I noted in the back-of-the-book material for The Cardinal Divide, I think they had this image of me striding across the agoraphobic Utah desert, fighting evil developers with a iridescent glint in my eye. It’s hard not to become attached to such an image of oneself, and so when I was hunting around for a name for my first environmental murder mysteries’ leading man, Glint Longshadow came to mind. But that’s a ridiculous name (maybe they were making fun of me…) so I let my mind wander, and Cole Blackwater (some cadence, same number of syllables) emerged.
About a week before Jenn and I left for Utah I was stirring from my morning meditation when an idea surfaced from my cerebral morass: why aren’t I writing an environmental murder mystery series set in the Southwest?
Shortly the second book in the Cole Blackwater series will go to press. This series is set mostly in Canada. Canada is a very small country. It doesn’t publish many books. And it doesn’t really celebrate genre fiction. In fact, if most often looks down its nose at the field. Canadian Literature recently referred to my first novel as pulp fiction, through (bless their souls) they did recommend it.
But the United States, on the other hand…big country, lots of books and book publishers, lots of readers of crime and other genres. I love the Southwest, and have always wanted to write about it. Tony Hillerman, whose Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn Navaho Tribal Police series first inspired my interest in the genre, passed away in 2008 at the age of 83, leaving a tremendous, if not unfillable, gap in the Southwest’s literary landscape.
So I set my intent to have a fully formulated idea for a mystery series set in Utah and Arizona by the time Jenn and I returned from our trip.
Intent is an incredible thing. I recall once staying at a century old hotel built over a hot springs near Helena, Montana and being fascinated with the place. It was in some disrepair; part of the hotel served as a retreat centre for Alcoholics Anonymous (I learned this when I cracked open a beer in the lounge). I went to bed that night with the intent of waking with a fictional story in my head about this hotel and its guests, and woke with a complete story-outline in my mind.
That was more than a decade ago. I’ve had a lot of practice over the last ten or more years at creating something from nothing. I have come to believe that like everything else, stories are merely a product of the energy and information swirling around the universe, born of an exploding star some ten billion years ago. We human’s, with our thick craniums and hyper-developed gift of imagination, are wired to be walking, talking receptors for these stories, and we quickly fashion them into tales about our own miraculous journey through life.
I love the creative process. I love taking an idea from inspiration through to cultivation. At first there is next to nothing. A single idea: in this case, a terrible, marvelous, beautiful landscape. What do I want to say about such a place? My own niche in the mystery genre is to tell stories that focus on environmental issues. It’s what I know the best. There’s no shortage of environmental calamities in the Southwest. How to choose? And how do I create characters and a plot that allows the reader to enjoy a good (maybe great) story without pummeling them over the head with an environmental message (that niche is already filled to overflowing). Who’s the protagonist? What makes him or her interesting? Why would a reader want to follow this person for three books (I think in trilogies best)?
Two and a half weeks into the creative process, I was ready to write it all down. We camped on the North Rim of Grand Canyon for three nights, and choose to forgo long hikes or mountain bike rides for more sedate explorations so I could have the afternoons to sit and scribble. At Point Imperial, with the wind howling and leaves blowing and sun setting, and again on the trail to Widforss Point, in a grove of golden trembling aspens, I sat and wrote and thought and wrote some more, all the while bouncing ideas off Jenn for perspective.
(Sunset at Cape Royal on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon above, and below Sunburst through aspens on the Widforss Trail)
When we returned home a week ago I had two dozen pages of notes, including a stretch of how the three novels will work together, and biographical outlines of all the major characters. I’ve spent a few hours each day over the last week writing as succinct an outline as I am able for the trilogy, and hope to be able to start pitching it to publishers by the end of October.
I have no way of knowing now if the ideas I blurted out in the searing heat of the Maze, or jotted onto paper in the crisp autumn afternoons on the North Rim will emerge into the literary canon of the American Southwest. If they do, I have no way to say if anybody will read the books and enjoy them, discuss them with friends, seek out the awe inspiring landscapes I hope to populate with my characters, and maybe one day stand in a place where the protagonist stood in my imagination and have fiction and fact blur, if only for a moment. I have no way of knowing.
What I can say with absolute certainty is this: in just a few short weeks I was able to recognize and harness the power of events emerging and converging to produce ideas I find exciting and inspiring. If this isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing as part of a right-livelihood on this amazing planet, I don’t know what is.
It occurred to me for the first time the other day that I am already home. For more than twenty years I’ve believed that someday I would reach the apex of the spiritual journey – Nirvana, enlightenment – and that I would find myself…well, somewhere, free from worldly suffering. I would arrive at the journey’s end, like a road weary traveler, grateful to be finally home.
Sitting on a rock at sunrise, looking over the tapestry of tea plantations of Munar in southern India, reminded me that I’ve never been seeking enlightenment through all my running and my stillness.
If pressed I would say that what I am seeking is peace.
Just peace; a quiet heart; a moment of freedom from tiresome striving. Freedom from striving for wealth, striving for recognition, striving for health, striving to be loved, striving for wellbeing, for security. From illusion. Freedom from the promise of enlightenment.
And even freedom from striving for peace.
At times throughout my life I’ve worked very hard to find peace. The obstacles have been almost entirely of my creation, but they have proven to be formidable barriers. At times the passage has been arduous, leaving me disenchanted. If only I knew that I could simply end the search and return to the start. If only I could remember that at those times of disquiet I was as close to peace as I had ever been, then I might have simply sat down on the path and realized I was already home.
When we stop seeking enlightenment, when we cease the wearisome quest for peace, we see that it has been ours from the very start. From the moment of creation peace has been the gift from the creator: Tao, God, the quantum field.
We are already home.
I watch Rio and Silas asleep in their beds, arms splayed above their heads, their faces a perfect reflection of quiet serenity. There is no searching here; there is nothing to strive for.
“Seek nothing and find everything you need,” says the Tao te Ching. But we forget. We strive. We hope to wash ourselves clean of life’s anguish through meditation, prayer, stretching before exercise, Brussels sprouts and herbal tea. And it helps. But all striving is a form of suffering, including striving for an end to suffering.
So we return to a clear moment of peace and remember that we have always been enlightened. We have always been pure peace. We are born Buddha and remain Buddha throughout every moment of our life. We’ve just forgotten.
Maybe enlightenment then isn’t so crazy a notion then, if only I can keep myself from seeking it, and simply experience it, and then let it go.
Father Thomas Keating, of the Christian contemplative movement, says in the movie One: “In the beginning the spiritual journey is the realization, not just the information, but the real interior conviction that there is a higher power, or God. Or, to make it as easy as possible for everybody, that there is an Other. Second step, to try and become the Other. And finally, the realization that there is no Other. That you and Other are one. Always have been. Always will be. You just think that you aren’t.”
This doesn't mean that the journey is over. Far from it. Its just starting.
I had lunch with a friend in Toronto recently. He’s a literary agent. He’s one of the best in the business, and represents more than 350 of Canada’s brightest lights in literature, theatre, art and culture.I was there on other business, but we did have a few minutes to chat about my own writing career, and the news he delivered brought no cheer to my bookish heart.
According to my friend, book sales are down about 40% across Canada. This is part of a trend that pre-dates our current economic slump, and therefore will likely not respond when the economy starts its languid recovery.
It seems that I’m writing at the end of the age of books.
For those on tenterhooks for me to cut-to-the-chase (a rarity) here it is: I love writing books, and want to keep doing it. So how, in the age of Twitter and Facebook and Kindle and E-Readers, can an upstart like myself make money crafting stories more than 140 characters in length? Jump to the end of this posting to add your comments.
For the rest of you:
I’ve recently come to the conclusion that my Dharma – my purpose in life – is to write. I’ve been scribbling most of my life. When I was a teenager I used to slip out the back door in the middle of the night and perch under a street lamp and write the most ghastly, angst ridden poetry. I’ve penned stories for my collage newspaper and for The Globe and Mail; sold more than one hundred and fifty stories to dozens magazines and papers and had two books published; all the while trying to hold down other meaningful work to afford luxuries such as a mortgage, child support and premium beer.
So this news sucks. At least, it seems to.
And I’m trying to figure out what to do. I think a lot of writers are.
I’ve always said that the writing part of being a writer is easy. I’ve never had much trouble getting the words out. I’ve never experienced writers block. I have often suffered from a scarcity of time to write, and more often from a lack of focus or discipline, but my challenge hasn’t been writing: my challenge has been to make a living writing. The last time I tried was in the mid nineteen nineties and it was slim pickings’ around the Legault household, let me tell you (domestic beer….).
Making a portion of my living as a writer is important to me. It’s a symbol that my writing has value to others; it’s a symbol that people are reading my writing and that they are willing to support my writing with their hard earned pay. Earning at least part of my income as a writer will allow me to keep writing for some time to come.
There’s a lot to be said for the notion that I should just keep writing regardless of who wants to pay for it. If it’s my purpose to write, then I should let nothing stop me. There’s also something to be said that the need to be read has a good deal to do with my ego. While both arguments are true, I’m exercising my basic human right to ignore them.
I’m not a big trend spotter. I still have a pair of “dad-jeans” in my closet. But here are the trends that I see in writing and publishing: first, books are being replaced by digital media. E-books are a part of that, but blogs, citizen journalism, and all manner of social networking sites are providing content where professional writers, journalists and novelists once plied their trade.
Secondly: online, content still seems to be king, but it seems to be getting shorter and shorter.
I recently signed up for Twitter, which until a couple of weeks ago I thought would make me look like a complete twit. I have a hard time taking anything on which one tweets very seriously. But there it is. I have three followers, and I’m pretty sure they are just a “pity” group; you know, the people who choose to follow me because I picked them as the people I wanted to follow.
One friend suggested that Twitter was like Facebook, but with less crap, and shorter postings. To me, Twitter seems like a microcosm of what is happening to content, and I’m trying to figure out how I can compress what I’m trying to say with my life into 140 character Tweets. (For example, last week I sent the manuscript for my next novel – The Darkening Archipelago – to my publisher. At 610, 654 characters (110,000 words) I would have to post 4,362 tweets to convey this books content to the Twitosphere. My three followers might protest. At least their dissent would be brief.)
Digital media contains much promise, and some considerable peril, for writers. I feel like a messenger without a medium.
The digital book market today is where the digital music market was five or ten years ago, but without the promise of Napter to force a solution, though Google might provide the necessary incentive for more publishers to recognize the trend. E-Readers like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader could be to books what the iPod was to music, but they have yet to catch the imagination and wallet of the general public. The promise is great: who didn’t want one of those crazy reading tablets that Captain Jean Luc Picard had on Star Trek the Next Generation? But Captain Picard didn’t have to tot his around in rainy Vancouver, or worry about running out of power in the middle of a plot twist. He didn’t read in the bathtub much, though that’s unsubstantiated.
And what will happen to Libraries and book stores if books vanish? Will the great books stores of my life go the way of Sam the Record Man?
Then there is the story of the Cushing Academy, a prep-school near Boston, Massachusetts, that is replacing its collection of 20,000 books with 18 Kindles, three giant flat screen computer monitors, and a coffee shop. The headmaster explains that he’s replacing the schools meager collection of books with millions becoming available online.
I just don’t know what to make of that.
My literary agent friend explained that I’m a writer between mediums. Books are dying and digital media has yet to catch hold. We’re struggling how to monetize this new format.
But monetize it we must. As a lifelong environmentalist, I know we can’t keep printing books on paper, even if it is ancient forest friendly. I can’t write environmental murder mysteries on an environment that has been murdered.
And monetize it we must: if anybody but the biggest names in literature are going to keep writing books, then we have to find a way to pay them. If we don’t, we’ll all just be blogging about what we did on the weekend with our kids.
I’ve always imagined myself to be a pretty modern person. A little stogy, but also on the cutting edge. Ok, maybe not. But I want to be. And it looks as if I will have to be, if I’m going to write books for a living. I just don’t know what my books will look like when I finally trick a big publisher into accepting my stories for print.
So I turn to you: tell me what you see as part of the trend in digital publishing: how are writers going to make a living? What is the future of books? What can we do to actually get out in front of this transformation of the written word?
The dictionary definition for coincidence is: “something that happens by chance in a surprising or remarkable way.”
I don’t believe that what we perceive as coincidence is mere chance, and I don’t think we should be surprised by their occurrence.
Case in point: a month ago I lost my part time job at Royal Roads University. As I mentioned in Part One of this treatise, accepting this change wasn’t hard. RRU provided good, meaningful work and with amazing people in service of a noble cause, but it wasn’t a good fit with my life’s other priorities. Hard times forced the University to make changes, and eliminating my position at the Foundation was one of many.
And I saw the change coming, though only at the last moment.
It was no coincidence that only a few weeks previous I’d written a piece called Conduit, in which I said “what I know for certain, however, is that by discovering my Dharma – or what will certainly be a part of my life’s purpose – I have been able to tap into an abundance I had never imaged existed before in the universe.”
Writing is my Dharma. Professionally speaking, it’s what I am on this earth to do. It is my purpose.
That is what Dharma is: it is our purpose in life.
That a piece of writing would emerge from me – after laying dormant for more than a year – just a few weeks before such an important change would occur, is not a coincidence. It’s a sign post.
I recall another such crossroads. In the late 1990’s I was kicking around Alberta’s Bow Valley, making a meagre living as a part time pain-in-the-ass environmental activist and communications consultant, and penningstories for just about anybody who would publish them.Being a freelance writer in Canada, and a chronically underemployed sorta-professional environmental advocate in Alberta, are two of the least lucrative means by which to earn a living. I figured by doing both I might double-down on a hardscrabble effort.
I remember saying on January 13th, 1999 – my 28th birthday – that something would have to change. At the end of every month I had nothing left, and most often paid the rent late thanks to less than punctual payment from my sole employer.
And then I got a call from someone who I went to high school with, and who I had run into at a conference in the fall of 1997, asking what I was doing for work. Within a few months I had a choice I had to make: full-time, gainful, and comparatively well paid employment with an international conservation organization, or to continue trying to scrape together a living as a writer and consultant.
Around the same time, I had a beer with an acquaintance, one of Canada’s truly successful freelance writers, Andrew Nikiforuk. I talked with Andrew about my paradox and he gave me a sage piece of advice: “You can’t make and report the news at the same time.”
I decided to make the news, and so I took a position with Washington, DC based Defenders of Wildlife, and helped them set up shop in Canada, which lead to the creation of Wildcanada.net, an online activism and grassroots mobilization effort I helped pilot for the next six years.
Writing was shuffled to the back burner. I remember that at the time I was penning a by-weekly column for my local newspaper, the Canmore Leader. My work with Wildcanada.net had me flying back and forth between Ottawa and Calgary, working on national parks and endangered species legislation, and later living in Vancouver organizing around the 2000 federal election. I started writing my stories about the Bow Valley from the airplane. I gave that up too.
I continued to write (mostly press releases and action alerts), but it wasn’t until my time with Wildcanada.net was coming to a close that I began to pursue publishing again.
It was the right decision at the time. It was no coincidence that my old school acquaintance called when he did.
Just as today – more than a decade later - it’s no coincidence that one of the barriers to writing has vanished.
Coincidences are an indication of the direction we are supposed to take in life. Put more forcefully, they are a sign from the Universe, from God, from the Tao – the universal energy from which all things emerge and exist -- of what we need to do to fulfil our Dharma.
When we want something in our lives, we radiate energy that attracts these things too us. All that exists in the universe is simply energy and information, which when organized a certain way can create matter. Our thoughts are energy and information too, as is the passion of our hearts. When we want something deeply, profoundly, our passion is expressed into the web of energy and information in a way that actually changes the fabric of the universe. The universe, the Tao, God, responds to our desire, to our incantation, to our prayer.
I don’t believe this happens in one trivial way portrayed in the movie The Secret. I don’t think we can sit down in a chair and wish for a fancy new car – going so far as to pretend to be enjoying the thrill of driving it – and low and behold, the car appears in our life, after an appropriate waiting period.
More likely is the story of Jake Canfield, author of the vastly popular Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and success coach, who after spending long years dreaming and striving for his own success, began to notice what some might construe as coincidences, but he rightly identified as signposts.
I do, however, believe that we can will these signposts into existence.
Where the movie The Secret explains just enough about the world of Quantum Physics and eastern philosophy to get people excited, it leaves out two critical components: First, just as luck favours the prepared, so does coincidence. Canfield noticed the signposts, was prepared, and followed them.
To be prepared means to be ready to serve. To be prepared means to know what we can do that creates a sense of bliss, and then dedicate ourselves to it. Some believe that success can only be achieved through hard work, and that to be prepared means to have toiled. I believe that many long hours must be logged in service of our Dharma, but the bliss we feel as a result of connecting with our life’s purpose erases much of the drudgery that may accompany the effort.
Secondly, discovering Dharma is a uniquely spiritual experience about our service to humanity, to the earth and its myriad creatures. For many it will be about our service to a higher power, be it God, Mohammad, Jesus Christ or the Tao. These are all just words for pure love.
If the energy we radiate is greed, or anger, or fear, then we might attract material objects into our lives for a short time, but over the long term, our purpose in life will remain unfulfilled. But if we are serving a higher purpose -- if we are serving love – then discovering our Dharma can become a fulcrum with which we leverage our broader spiritual awakening.
Love is the energy that binds the universe together, creates solar systems and single cell amoebas; when we serve with love we have a direct portal to the tapestry of creation.
Serving with love has been central to my discovery of my Dharma. It’s helped me to become prepared to follow the signposts when I see them. Fear and anger have acted like blinders to my ability to clearly see signposts in the past. That’s starting to change.
I don’t purport to have the answer to how we might all become better at creating the signposts, seeing them, and then following them. I can tell you how I have started: meditation.
(Note the emphasis on started…. That’s not a typo.)
Meditation quiets the mind. If our minds are busy, busy, always racing, then it’s hard to notice the often subtle indications of direction the Universe provides. Meditation is a deep breath in my day. It is a prolonged and refreshing pause.
Meditation also helps create clarity around what it is we really want. My process for creating clarity was to write down a page of things that we really important to me: to have my children in my life on a daily basis; to be a conduit for stories with meaning; to do important work helping people make the world a better place; to find a great love and hold that love close to me throughout my life. Before I meditate, I take a moment to recall these priorities, and then I surrender them to the universe, to the Tao, and let them go. Letting go of the outcome is central to this effort. If you have a preconceived notion of how the universe will respond, you’ll likely miss important markers along the journey. You’ll spoil the surprise.
Meditation is a means by which we can directly connect with the energy and information that is the foundation for everything in the universe. Everything that our hearts desire, including peace, love, joy, and all the trinkets that make day to day life interesting – are comprised of that energy and information. When we slip into the empty space between our thoughts, beyond the chatter, we are touching the textured fabric of existence. We can insert our longing there, we can leave behind our prayer, we can weave our supplication into that fabric, and we can colour it with our love.
And then let go.
Meditation and prayer -- stillness – is one means of preparation. It is the yin. The yang is action: in my case it’s more than twenty years of writing. It’s running. Its being a loving husband and father. It’s a lifetime of service. It’s what Stephen Covey calls “sharpening the saw:” building our skills, becoming proficient; being ready to act when the signposts appear.
Deepak Chopra says: “Discover your divinity, find your unique talent, serve humanity with it….You will begin to experience your life as a miraculous expression of divinity – not just occasionally, but all the time. And you will know true job and the true meaning of success – the ecstasy and exultation of our own spirit.”
And so, when my signpost appeared, in the form of a pink-slip, I was prepared to act.
It’s worth mentioning here that the path isn’t always straight. In fact, I doubt it ever is. It’s crooked, most often, and a little dangerous. You start inserting your desires into the fabric of the universe and every now and then you’re going to drop a thread. My experience is that the universe doesn’t just put up a neon sign that says “Hey Legault, this way to prosperity and success as a best selling author,” though if wishing made it so.
It’s a journey. And it’s not straight forward. A week after losing my position at RRU I had a call with a man who I had hoped would represent me as a literary agent. I thought that maybe his call was going to be the next signpost pointing to success. This prominent agent and I had become friends, and chatted nearly every week. He read my second book (The Cardinal Divide) and I had hoped that he would agree to representing me. He didn’t say no, but he didn’t agree to take me on as a client. And while that might yet happen, but it’s not turning out how I had envisioned.
No doubt his call was a signpost, but it wasn’t the one that says “this way to literary success!”
It told me I had to dive deeper into my writing; it told me I had to craft stories with more heart, more soul, more love.
And it reminded me that faith is crucial to Dharma. It’s about believing in you. When you discover your Dharma, when you are doing the blissful, but often arduous work to prepare yourself, when you are engaged in the passionate and perilous spiritual journey, you must have faith. You have to believe that you are worthy, and that you deserve to succeed.
I’m writing everyday now. I’ve got a dozen ideas for books in my head, on paper, and in progress. At the same time, I’m re-launching Highwater Mark Strategy and Communications, because serving people who are making the world a better place is an honourable and exciting way of earning a living. Double down again.
And I’m sitting still, trying by not trying to touch the fabric of the universe and insert a handful of little prayers into the vastness of the Tao.
I don’t know what is going to happen next but I believe that it will be extraordinary and I’ll be ready when it does.
Stephen Legault is a writer, activist, organizational development consultant and fundraiser who lives in Victoria, BC and Canmore, Alberta.
Stephen started writing in 1988. Kicked out of his high school biology class, he bought a notebook and sat down in the woods near his Burlington Ontario home and wrote some really awful, angst ridden poetry. Since then, Stephen has written for the Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic, Outdoor Canada, Canadian Wildlife, and dozens of other periodicals and newspapers. His first book, Carry Tiger to Mountain: The Tao of Activism and Leadership was published in April of 2006 by Arsenal Pulp Press.
The Cardinal Divide is the first in a series of environmental murder mysteries featuring Cole Blackwater. It will be published by NeWest Press in November of 2008. The series will combine gritty, action-oriented stories and rich human drama with real environmental and social justice conflicts.
Stephen is a runner, photographer, and father of two beautiful boyz: Rio Bergen and Silas Morgen. He and his partner Jenn travel and explore the natural world of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains.
