Conduit

This May marked the twenty-first year I have been writing.

Of course, I had been stringing words together before that. In fact, in Grade Five I won an award for my writing. First and only award to date. But May 1988 was when I began consciously writing. It was when I decided, subconsciously at first, to become a writer.

My first writing venue was a street lamp near my suburban Burlington Ontario home. My first genre: really awful, angst ridden teenage poetry. My first topic: heartache, loss, nature, the doors of perception (I was reading Jim Morrison’s poems at the time), and love. Yes, the kind of love between two people, but also a bigger love that incorporated the rest of humankind, and the universe.

With the exception of Jim Morrison, not much has changed.

Then, as now, I felt that I was a conduit through which the universe might communicate.

We all are.

Writing is the tool I have used to channel my particular part of the universe’s energy.

For the longest time I thought it would be photography. Starting in about 1985 or so I was pretty dedicated to the art of black and white photography. But working in a professional photographer’s studio for a few months after graduating from high-school pretty much put that ambition to bed. I still love to view the world through my camera. A single image can say as much as any essay or book I might pen (I won’t insert the cliché). But it is when I am at the keyboard that I feel most in touch with the creative energy of the universe.

A number of years ago I started seriously writing fiction. I penned my first short story in 1994, while living at Grand Canyon National Park for a winter. I’ve written two or three dozen short stories and a couple of novellas since. In 1999 I spent the better part of my summer researching and writing a novel called Across the Universe. I got about 300 pages into the project and stalled. Summer’s were short in the Canadian Rockies.

In 2003 I began writing the Cole Blackwater mystery series. Writing can often be hard work, but writing about this hard-edged, soft-hearted environmental sleuth was easy. Once I established a pattern to my writing the words just flowed. Making time to write, and to write every day, was a challenge, but once seated at the computer, following a story-line scribbled on a sheet of butcher paper or typed out in rough, the words just poured out of me like water. It was as if, after many years of searching, I had found the tap and turned it on.

The first book took its own sweet time to congeal, but not so for the second and third books in this environmental murder mystery trilogy.

Circumstances played a role in the ease of this writing, mind you. I found myself, in the early days of 2007, with more time on my hands that I might have chosen: I had recently separated and was living on my own – Rio and Silas with me three nights of the week – so I could rise at 5am and write for three uninterrupted hours each morning. My consulting work was steady but not overwhelming, so throughout the day I could return my attention to the misadventures of Cole Blackwater to edit and revise what I had written that morning.

I wrote the first draft of the second book in the Cole Blackwater series in 28 days.

The third book followed soon there-after. It was much more intricate, with a very complex and disturbing antagonist, so it took two full months to pen the 500 page first draft.

Writing these books was pure bliss.

It was easy. They flowed. I knew beyond a doubt that I had discovered my dharma.

Dharma is a Sanskrit word that means purpose in life.

According to Deepak Chopra – whose book the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success has meant so much to me over these last few years – there are three components to the ancient law of Dharma.

The first is that each of us has a unique purpose in life. The universe has conspired to give us human form to discover that purpose.

The second component of Dharma is to express our purpose through our unique talent, or talents.

The third component of Dharma is to serve humanity, and all of creation, through those talents.

Chopra argues that if you can discover your purpose, express it through your unique talents and serve others doing this, then you might tap into the unlimited abundance that the universe is able to provide. This is not merely physical wealth, but emotional and spiritual abundance too.

This might be true; I’m still waiting for the largess to arrive in the mail in the form of a royalty cheque.

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.

When I am writing sometimes I “disappear.”

Stephen Legault, physical form – balding, slouched over the keyboard, cup of tea growing cold close at hand – dissolves. What remains is part of the electric current of spirit I have described elsewhere; an extension of all life, or all the energy and information that has existed for all time, blinking in and out of existence, taking on the momentary form of people, of planets, in contact with everything else in the universe.

Momentarily I am simply a conduit through which the ideas, the energy, the love of all life can pass, through my heart, out my fingers, and onto an electronic page.

It’s an imperfect universe, and so the creation is also imperfect. The universe, obviously, could care less for spelling and grammar mistakes. Its also struggled with past and future tense. And it’s got a certain affinity for vulgarity. But when I am truly connected with my Dharma, my purpose, I am a pipeline through which the universe’s energy passes and I am left to experience the sensation of bliss; where I feel as through I am all things and the boundaries between the hard-edged physical me and the softer, more supple energetic world vanish.

Several times, during my stint writing the third Cole Blackwater book, the experience was so overwhelming I had to stop writing all together, press my hands flat against my desk and close my eyes to allow the sensation to move through me. It was like cold fire passing through my entire body, and it brought tears to my eyes.

Anything that feels that good can’t be to far off from what the universe intends for you.

My blessings are many, because I also feel such bliss when immersed deeply in nature, when being fully present with my children, and when absorbed in the rapture of my wife’s generous love.

There is a theme here: you and I are temporary beings, having taken physical form, and we have a chance to experience our single, or many, unique reasons for being if we choose. That purpose need not meet anyone else’s notion of meaningful. Your purpose may serve humanity in ways only you might understand. But when we are living our lives in a way that expresses that unique purpose fully, there can be bliss so profound that it stops us cold. It is that bliss that I live my life for, and through.