Running Towards Stillness

Bending Light

2009-10-17T16:38:00.001-07:00

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.)

Recipe for 350: Blog, Buddha and a Binding Agreement

2009-10-15T09:20:00.001-07:00

October 24^th 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 7^th through 18^th. 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 of life 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.

Harnessing the Third Coincidence

2009-10-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

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)?

All of these questions sloshed around in my head as I was preparing for and departing towards our Utah adventure. Jenn and I talked a lot about the ideas as they began to emerge – like startled, blinking voles from dark fissures in the earth – over the first week of the trip. At first, I didn’t want to talk about the ideas too much; I feared that if I let them out on their own, they would just slip away. But soon we were yakking for hours -- on our hikes in The Maze, over cold beer on the beach at Spanish Bottom, over grilled cheese sandwiches at a riverside café in Mexican Hat -- about the narrative arc of the trilogy.

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.

Already Home

2009-09-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

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.

But we start knowing that we are already home.

Writing The End of the Book

2009-09-11T17:11:00.000-07:00

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?

Discovering Dharma, Part Two

2009-09-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

I don’t believe in coincidence.

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 penning stories 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 13^th, 1999 – my 28^th 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.

One Moment of Wildness

2009-09-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

There was a time in my life when I spent every spare moment in wildness.

I was raised with wildness at my back. Beyond the mown expanse of weeds and the thousand square-foot vegetable garden that was our back yard in Porcupine, Ontario, was a field of tangled shrubs and small trees bordered by an old double track road; beyond that a small creek sheltered by willows; beyond that a single paper birch that stood on the edge of Mr. Mackey’s field; and finally, the rough second grown pine forest that defined my childhood and gave birth to my taste for nature.

These woods, and those that rambled away beyond the squared log home that my grandparents lived in for more than forty years on the Palmour Mine property, were the geography of my childhood.

(above, walking with my sister along the double track behind our home in Porcupine;
below, the paper birch and Mr. Mackey's field, with woods beyond)

Singular moments: cross country skiing on the trails that Lucien cut through the woods behind his home, and coming to the place where like a miracle, cookies would materialize form the worn pack he always carried; cookies no doubt hastily packed by my whirlwind of a Grand-mare, Evelyn. I remember one particular day as if it were yesterday; it was just he and I -- Grandfather and grandson – and a gift of precious time that will never occur again.

Singular moments: hunting for grouse with my father behind our Porcupine home. My father was a good marksman who won trophies for trap-shooting. To watch him stop, swing the Winchester shotgun to his shoulder and fire in one fluid motion was a heart stopping sight for a boy of seven or eight. There would be an explosion of leaves and small branches in the woods and then he would walk into the foliage and return with a partridge, its body perfectly intact but its head astonishingly absent. My father would then field dress the bird and put it in his back while the acrid scent of gunpowder dispersed in the crisp autumn air.

(Above, my grandparents square log house on the Palmour mine site property;
below, after a day's hunting)

Singular moments: during the summer of 1979, when we lived in Elliot Lake for a short time, building a fort in the well of a tree that had been toppled in a storm in a woodlot behind our house. We hollowed out the well and using scrap lumber and garbage bags built an igloo like structure which we convinced our parents to let us sleep in one night. I was eight; just a little older than my eldest son Rio is today.

I lasted until sometime after midnight. Of all the phantasmal sounds that haunted those woods, it was an ant that finally sent me indoors. We had an old 8-volt battery powered light in our hut with us, and it’s beam was angled upwards toward the ceiling. In the circle of light it cast we watched, horrified, as a giant creature circled our hut again and again, its shadow pressed against the flimsy plastic fabric of our makeshift walls. As the creature roved around the circumference of our abode, we would each in turn cower as it drew close to our backs. It finally dawned on one of us that if we were seeing the shadow inside the hut, then the beast had to be inside too: which is when we noted the ant running in manic circles around the rim of the upturned flashlight.

Skiing with my grandfather, hunting and fishing with my dad, camping with my buddies in a plot of forest spared the saw and the subdivision, fishing, hiking, the annual Christmas-tree hunt in the back-forty, walking with my sister to inspect robin’s eggs in the trees beyond the big garden: these and a hundred other moments of wildness are what shaped me and created who I am today.

Which is why I find it so perplexing that I have moved so far from my connection to wildness. And why, when recently Jenn and I spent a long weekend in the Rockies that a single day in a wild, out-of-the-way place made my heart ache for more singular moments of wildness.

There is a creek that snakes its way between Mount Andromache and an unnamed peak to join with the Bow River just south of Mosquito Creek in Banff National Park, Alberta. The creek’s name is Noseeum: it’s named for an animal the size of a dust mote with teeth like a saber tooth cat’s. This was our destination one hot afternoon over the August long weekend: It’s a place I’ve been twice before, and have wanted to share with Jenn since we became a couple two years ago.

I moved to the Rockies in 1992. After a single season working for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources as a student Park Naturalist at Murphy’s Point Provincial Park, I got a dream job as a natural history interpreter in Lake Louise, in Banff. I knew nothing about the mountains, but over time learned just enough to stay alive and employed, in part thanks to the fact that my lot was thrown in with veteran park staffers Jim Wood and Jack Loustinau. For three or four summers I lived with Jim, Jack and a motley collection of other seasonal park staff in a dark, dank, dismal locale called Charleston Residence. But we were rarely there. We spent our time outside and it was that time that defines my experience in the Mountain Parks. We hiked. We hiked a lot. And in 1993 when Jim and Jack and I met Josh – who is now a Doctor of Physiology but was then a sheet snapper at the Lake Louise Inn – we became a team.

But it was Jim Wood who provided my inaugural experience with the true wildness of Banff National Park. It was Jim who taught me how to pack for a trip, what to wear, how to read a topographic map and use a compass, and how to travel “off-trail.” In short, it was Jim who taught me to take my adventuring in the parks beyond the carefully scripted descriptions in the guide-books (most of which were written by friends, and which are invaluable) and into the vast regions of the Parks seldom seen and rarely visited by people.

It was Jim took me up Noseeum Creek for the first time. It was early June of 1992; I’d been in the Rockies for five or six weeks, and Noseeum Creek and the high mountain passes beyond were to be my first off-trail adventure.

Like the singular moments with my father and grandfather, this one is engrained in my recollection.

Jenn and I shoulder day packs and head up the south side of the creek. The afternoon is warm, and within minutes we’ve feeling the sun boring into us. We find the familiar cadence of walking and talking and inside of an hour we’re at the base of a steep cliff where waterfalls thunder through a deep gorge and trip across ancient stone cast aside in the last ice age. From here we can see where Jim Wood and I made our accent of the limestone steps that lead to Noseeum Creek’s headwaters: a narrow gulf strewn with boulders that provides a steep egress to a table-like plateau nearly two thousand feet above us.

Jenn and I take a more circuitous route, but one with fewer objective hazards (fancy mountaineer talk that rocks that might fall on your head). After plugging up the mouth of the creek with where it surges from its canyon with stepping stones we jump across and scramble up the headwall. Another ten minutes and we’re reaching the top of the first of many deceptive benches that will eventually lead to a sparkling, melt-water lake. But we won’t reach the glistening waters before succumbing to the erroneous relief of numerous false summits.

(Near the headwaters of Noseeum Creek)

The day that Jim and I ventured up Noseeum Creek was overcast, the clouds pressed tightly down on the headwaters of the creek, so that when we finally exited the narrow chimney, we were cloaked dank, grey cloud-cover. We didn’t have the spectacular view that Jenn and I enjoy of Mount Andromache and the Molar Glacier to buoy our spirits. It’s probably for the best, because I was already tired, and a little scared, and if I’d seen where we were heading I probably would have protested even more than I already was.

On the hot afternoon in August, my wife and I look back at the long, sensuous ridge of Mount Andromache and I can’t help but retell the story of Josh and my accent of that peak. It was during the feverish summer of 1995 when he and I climbed peaks before work and after work and on the weekends. In one frantic week Josh and I ascended five mountains and got turned back by a sixth. Mount Andromache was one of the five, and it was a lovely scramble on a perfect morning. I later wrote an unfortunately worded account of that climb for the Alpine Club newsletter in which I stated that Josh and I lost our innocence on that peak. That of course could be misconstrued: all I meant to say was that because we thought the peak’s name was Andrew Mackey, and not Andromache, we hadn’t found any climbing bata on the peak, and so our route was of our own making.

That’s all. No harm intended.

I shake my head at the memory of the awkward mistake, and at a time when all I did was wake up at four a.m. and bag peaks with my best friend.

It wasn’t so long ago, really.

Jenn and I weave our way through a steep, forested glade, crossing another creek below a tantalizing waterfall, its spray filling the air with a cool mist scented with the essence of a mountain wilderness: sun warmed pines tinged with seared limestone. I’ve written this so often over the last twenty years that I fear that I’m plagiarizing my own words: it is moving water is what stirs me and awakens me the most in nature. Our bodies are almost entirely composed of water so that when next to a cascading creek or river I find it nearly impossible to ignore my kinship with the blood of the earth.

Of course, Wallace Stegner said it best when he wrote, in The Sound of Mountain Water that “[b]y such a river it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired or old. Every sense applauds it. Taste it, feel its chill on the teeth: it is purity absolute. Watch is racing current, its steady renewal of force: it is transient and eternal.”

Stegner may not have known it (or he very well may have) but at a quantum level water is of course both transient and eternal, as are we. Transient because like all matter, the tiniest components of our water-born bodies are flickering in and out of existence at the speed of light; eternal because these particles that make up this cascade and my own sweat and blood are nothing more than energy and information, born of a star eleven billion years ago, recycled over and over, assembled and reassembled as man and forest and canyon and yes, as mountain water.

Just as the boundaries between ourselves and the world around us are fanciful demarcations, nowhere more so than when seated next to, or standing in, an icy creek high in the mountain wild.

Upwards again, urging our protesting legs to plod along a small rise, we surmount yet another bench of tilted limestone. Jenn lies down in the sun while I scout our route, wondering just where the hell this lake has gotten too since I was last here more than a decade ago. I scramble up another fifty foot high step and spot the reclusive thing and then see Jenn striding along below. Reunited, we make the final approach to the shimmering lake and find a place in the shade to cool off.

All around the landscape is bare and devoid of vegetation. This is raw earth, not so long ago beneath the rapidly receding Molar Glacier or its kin. Unnamed peaks rise up all around, dip and fold and are cut through by rivets of melt water. A few snow patches cling to the mountain sides below the merciless sun. Above, another few kilometers walking, is the saddle that Jim and I crossed into the next watershed on our journey.

I’m not normally one to take the plunge, but being a coastal boy these days, the opportunity to cool my heels (etc…) in a mountain lake is rare, so I strip down and dive in. Jenn complains that she might have missed the event while taking pictures so insists I do a repeat performance. I oblige, shouting and stammering as I cut the frigid waters.

When Jim and I reached the lake we kept on walking right by, crossing that high col above the watery shores to reach the headwaters of the Molar Creek and South Molar Pass. From our extraordinary vantage point we could look down on a herd of elk – and no tame town elk these but a wild lot never having munched someone’s front lawn or manicured hedge or roadside verge.

From there Jim and I carried on, dropping down to the Molar meadows, traversing miles of hummocky terrain that taught me my first real lessons in off-trail travel – don’t get frustrated -- and finally connecting with the Mosquito Creek Trail. The last dozen kilometers of our walk were on that well worn path. It was my first really big hike in the Rockies; counting couldn’t number all those to follow.

In 1992 I was just discovering what it means to be alive, on this glorious earth, in a wild place untrammeled by people. Today, eighteen years after I first visited the headwaters of Noseeum Creek, I am remembering again all those vital lessons.

Though sore feet and aching legs might have obscured it at the time, my long day in the mountains with Jim Woods was one catalyzing moment of a profound relationship with the earth. What began with my forays into the spruce and pine forests and on the crystal lakes of Northern Ontario became a vocation for me during the summers of 1991 through 1996 when I hiked a thousand kilometers a year, many of them in an Ontario MNR, Parks Canada or US Park Service Volunteer uniform.

But more than that, being amid the wildness of Banff and the other Mountain National Parks became a portal through which my perception of the world changed, and my place in it right along with it.

I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but even then I was aware that through my exploration of the natural world I was delving into my spiritual connection to the universe beyond. Then I spoke of nature and the mountains, and later the canyons of Arizona and Utah, as my temples, my houses of the holy. And of course they still are.

Now, I can add to this. Simply put, when immersed in wild country I know that I am closer to the basic elements of creation than nearly anywhere else. In the canyons of Utah, the folded peaks of the Rocky Mountains, my childhood forests of the North, or on a wild beach at lands end I might touch the raw fabric of existence. That of human making only adds to the barriers which obscure our relationship with the fundamental truth of existence: we are all incontrovertibly one.

(Jenn along the table land near Noseeum Lake, with Mount Andromache beyond. Josh and I walked up the ridge that forms the right hand sky line and then traversed above the Molar Glacier to the summit.)

Since childhood I have experienced moments of blissful connection with the earth and the sky and those I love while in wild places. Here the illusionary boundaries between me and the living earth, its myriad creatures the universe beyond are less palpable. Here I can, for brief moments, experience the rock solid earth as part of the quantum soup that we wade through, unseeing, most every day.

These are singular moments: not unlike the feeling of connection that comes from a moment shared between father and son or grandfather and grandson, we are connected to this sacred earth in ways more holy and more profound than we have the senses to perceive.

Jenn and I return to the car. We drive into Lake Louise, and for nostalgia’s sake, drink a cold beer and eat dinner at Bill Peyto’s Café at the Hostel. If we were to slip a Blue Rodeo CD into the stereo it would complete the reminiscence. We’re both dirty and sun burnt and a little tired, but exuberant for having been in the mountains for a day. I love my wife in all ways, but in no way more than when we are together in wild country.

I remember now what propelled me up so many trails, over so many unmarked passes between wild valleys, to the summit of so many craggy peaks: immersion in the world around me. Immersion: It’s what I’ve been missing living apart from wild places. It’s what my decisions over the last five years have cost me. And though I don’t regret the outcome of those decisions, I’m ready to invite more wild moments into my life again.

The moving away from is of course as natural as the desire to reunite. And now, of course, I have so much more to bring back into the wild that might help me see it as I really is. And so much less to get in the way of that view. One moment of wildness can reveal all that there is to know about the real nature of this universe of mysteries. One moment of wildness is a window unto the vast, sparkling nature of the soul.

(Bliss: the rope swing and the man who built it - my grandfather Lucien Legault - and me, around 1976 or so. The swing dates to when my father was a boy. I really wish I had a coat like that now....)

Note: My thanks to my father, Bob Legault, for taking such good care of our childhood images, and for scanning them recently for a fabulous slide show at my wedding to Jenn. We are very grateful.

Power Up

2009-08-26T13:30:00.001-07:00

I start up the long slow climb from near sea level, just above the bluffs that form a sandy escarpment above Mount Doug beach, towards the summit of Mount Doug, some six hundred feet above. It’s a spectacular trail that weaves its way between sea and sky through a dense, light speckled forest. In the winter it can be very wet, being on the windward side of this coastal hill, and the forest reflects the damper climate: massive Douglas fir trees jut out of the fern cloaked forest. Red cedar and spruce compete for the light. The trails can become brooks during heavy rains, and more than once I’ve found myself calf deep, jumping up the steps of a track turned waterfall.

But in the middle of this drier-than-normal summer, it’s parched and makes for easy running. It’s a good thing too, because once again I have much in common with the banana slugs I labour to avoid as I plod along through the woods.

I come to the place on the trail – or, more accurately, a point in my run -- where I always seem to slow down. It’s inexplicable. I’m less than fifteen minutes into my run and I’m feeling tired. It’s the hump; it’s the wall. I look at my watch and allow for 60 seconds of walking and then begin again. I pass one of my favourite trees – a Douglas Fir that is broader than my six foot wingspan. It always gives me a boost of energy to power up the steep hill that rises above this primordial giant. Before long I’m on the trail that circumnavigates the rocky hill near its midpoint, gliding over the undulating terrain.

The sun peaks out from behind high clouds and the woods are momentarily transformed into a living cathedral of light.

I take the cut off that veers upwards again, scrambling over the polished stone that leads out of the dark woods and into an Arbutus pocked ridge that will lead me to the summit.

This is where I struggle.

I think that I’ve run over the summit of Mount Doug a thousand times now. I’ve lived in Victoria since the spring of 2005, and for big chunks of that time I’ve run at Mount Doug at least twice and sometimes three times. Every time I come here I run over the summit at least once. I haven’t been keeping track, but a thousand sounds about right. Despite that, its still hard work, largely because of my lack of consistency. Life is busy and at times several weeks will pass when I don’t run. I realize as I’m running up over the rocky outcrops that I’m also prone to settling for shorter runs, even when I’m feeling good. I’m resolving to run for at least an hour when I’m out, rather than cutting my time in the woods short with 40 minute jogs.

This morning when I started out I set my mind to run for an hour and to run from sea level to the summit twice. But now, two thirds of the way into my first lap up the hill, I’m feeling empty. I stop, chiding myself for my lacklustre effort. I eat an energy bar. That helps. Despite having been running for more than two decades, I often get the nutrition part of the exercise wrong and run out of steam. I need to work on that too.

The food helps, but I know something else is even more important to my running: mindfulness, and the awareness of no-self.

When I run I find that as hard as a trail might be, it’s made all the more difficult by the insistent intrusions of my overactive mind. Serious athletes talk about the “chatter” or the “monkey mind” that they must confront during competitions. I have a friend who is preparing for an Iron Man race this fall and she tells me that during her gruelling 180 km long training rides the chatter can be almost deafening. The voices in our minds can tell us over and over again that we can’t do this. So just stop. Stopping is easier than continuing. Stopping riding, stop running and the discomfort will stop too.

It’s the same voices that I confront when I’m in the empty room of meditation.

On the meditation cushion and on the trail there is no place to hide. There is no escape.

When I’m meditating and confront something dark lurking in the emptiness, my inclination is to run; to actually jump up from the couch or the cushion and blot out the door. So it is with my life; sometimes I run away from things. And that hasn’t served me very well.

But when I’m physically running, my challenge is to find stillness within without grinding to an embarrassing halt half way up a tough hill.

Pushing through the discomfort of the climb, I borrow a trick from my meditation practice to confront the ruckus in my mind. I acknowledge the voices and rather than try to banish them, I make friends with them. “You are just voices. You have no power over me. You speak to me, but I can choose to accept what you are saying or not. I choose not to.”

This mindfulness takes the wind out of the voices’ sails.

I glide over the summit of the hill and begin down the front side. My aim is to run the long, main trail along the leeward side of the hill all the way down, and then turn around and make for the summit again along the sandy, Garry Oak studded slopes.

The second element of mindfulness that matters to me is simply maintaining present moment awareness. I can acknowledge the clatter of voices in my head that pull at my legs and make my movement heavy; I can choose to reject what those voices are saying. And I can shift my awareness to the marvellous experience of gliding through the ancient forests of this tiny island park. I seek out rough, rocky, root strewn, boulder clad trails with plenty of downed trees and stream crossings because when I run on them I have to pay attention. The voices don’t get to have their say if my mind is engaged with the world around me.

Weaving my way back up the 600 feet of elevation gain is hard, but not as hard as I thought it might be (And certainly not as hard as the voices told me it would be). Once again I let go of the concept of self.

No-self is one of the fundamental tenets of Buddhism, and probably one of the most difficult to grasp. Most of us have come to believe that there is an “I” inhabiting our body, and that this “I” has a soul that is singular and unique. But the harder one searches for the “I” in ourselves, the more likely we come to see that there is no-self home to answer the call.

Gautama Buddha recognized this two thousand years ago. Today we can affirm with science what the Buddha discovered through many years of meditation: No-self is the recognition that we are simply the local manifestation of the soup of energy and information that gives rise to all life, to all matter.

We are at once individual manifestations, and at the same time seamlessly a part of all the rest of creation.

This is very helpful when we’re addressing our suffering. Attachment to the notion of the self can lead to some pretty big hurdles to freedom from suffering. If we’re attached to the notion of the self, then we can lose that which we love. We become entangled with our ego. We can die.

If there is no-self, then there is nothing to become attached to.

How does no-self eclipse the suffering experienced in my leaden thighs as I plod towards the summit of Mount Doug for the second time inside of an hour?

If there is no-self, then there is no separation. If there is no-self, there isn’t a man running along a trail on a hill next to the ocean. There is only nature; there is only the totality of creation. There is only one part of nature moving through itself, upwards.

And when there is no-self, when there is no boundary between “me” and “the hill” and “me” and “the forest” it becomes so much easier to draw on the boundless, effortless energy that nature exudes. In Taoism we would say that nature accomplishes its spectacular existence by “doing little to accomplish much.” Trees don’t struggle to grow: they just grow. They are humming with energy; with bountiful life.

So might we. And we can draw on their energy to fuel ourselves because its all the same thing: we simply must dissolve the illusion of separation in order to make use of the energy freely available to us.

When I am running up a long hill through glades of trees, or over the rocky spine of some ancient mountain, I see myself as not separate from the bounty of life around me, but seamlessly a part of it. I actively invite its energy to flow through me. In my mind, and through my heart, I pull that energy into me and allow it to power me up the trail.

This is what quantum physicists might call “non-local communication.”

It’s not an intellectual exercise. I feel this. It is my experience of the world.

I’m not merely replacing one set of “chattering” voices in my head with another more positive one. When I am moving through the woods, up in the mountains, down in the desert or along the ocean or a creek or river, I let go of the notion that I am separate from that which I am moving through. I surrender.

And of course, there is no “I” to do the surrendering.

During these brief moments, born of necessity, there is no duality: there is just creation and it is in motion through itself. It is powered by the same life giving energy and it exults in itself.

And then “I” am on the “summit” again. I stride out on the run down through the arbutus, spruce and fir. My focus must remain on the trail as there are places where a misstep could cause some damage, but the voices have been cast aside, and I let my mind rove a little. The energy that powered me up the side of the hill can also become a portal to the broader creativity of the universe. Here I can recall that I am also a conduit for the universes desire to express itself. I can make the voices work for me.

Nature abounds in creative energy, and it’s when I am “powering up” a hill and gliding back down, inseparable from the world around me, that I tap into that field of pure potential. I let the ideas come and go as I jump fallen logs and gingerly jump down rocky embankments.

By the time my run has finished, there is an “I” again and he’s getting in the car to navigate his way home for a shower. The moment of no-self, no-illusion and no-separation fades and I become absorbed with what ever comes next in my day. But the practice of powering-up – of drawing on the world around me for what I need by recalling that there is no “I” to separate me from the world of pure love, pure energy and pure possibility, is one of the most important things I am learning in my search for bliss.

Discovering Dharma, Part One

2009-08-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

Let’s start with a statement of fact: I recently lost the only real job I’ve ever had.

Another fact: I’m not that upset about it.

Until March of last year I’ve always been self employed, or worked on contract. Landing a job at Royal Roads University as a Senior Development Officer for Sustainability with the school’s Foundation was the first time I’ve ever had a position with an org that had a payroll department, benefits, and an office with chairs that worked and a desk that wasn’t a kitchen table or a door in a previous life.

My professional trajectory has been a little less structured than the career path of my father’s or grandfather’s generation. I’ve had a paper route, mowed lawns, baby sat, worked as a Shift Manger at McDonalds (best leadership training program I had up until well into my time as an Executive Director), a hardware store clerk, and a camera store stock boy; I spent eight months helping to renovate a century old farm house, been a darkroom manager, a teaching assistant at my collage, a consultant to my collage on environmental issues; worked as a park naturalist in Ontario, in Banff National Park, and as a volunteer at Grand Canyon National Park, as a news paper columnist, a freelance writer and a novelist, been a professional pain-in-the-ass environmentalist and semi-registered federal lobbyist, an Executive Director of a small, punch-above-our-weight-class national environmental organization, and most recently the chief cook and bottle washer of my own strategy and communications consulting gig called Highwater Mark Strategy and Communications.

There have been moments in each of these diverse endeavours that I would characterize as enjoyable, even exceptional. Being paid to lead guided hikes into the Plain of Six Glaciers valley above Lake Louise or along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon was a pretty amazing way to pay the rent. My work with groups like the Alberta Wilderness Association, UTSB Research and Wildcanada.net made it possible for me to earn a(n often meagre) living defending the wild lands and wild creatures I love.

But as I’ve opined elsewhere, it is writing that allows me to feel the perfect connection between myself and all the rest of the universe in a way I can only describe as blissful.

But my writing has yet to pick up the cheque. And so I’m also searching for “bliss-light” in my work to make sure I can put food on the table and buy the boys the occasional ice-cream cone. Consulting fit that bill.

One of my clients through my work with Highwater was the Royal Roads University Foundation. They asked me to help create a “strategic narrative” for The Bateman Centre for Art and Environmental Education. At the time (nearly 3 years ago now) Mr. Bateman and his wife Birgit had just agreed to donate $10.7 million in art, archival material and cash to the University as seed funding to create and Centre, and spearhead the Universities more ambitious plans for a sustainable campus.

Working with the Foundation team to create a thinly veiled Strategic Plan for the Centre (we couldn’t call it that due to University politics) was very rewarding. At a time when the whole world seemed on the verge of implosion, we were imaging a place where art, nature and community would come together to inspire people to solve some of the planets most pressing problems. I loved the people involved, and was really excited about the project.

About six months after finishing the contract, someone forwarded me a job posting for a fundraising position with the Foundation. The job was directly tied to the creation of the Bateman Centre, and was to be focused on working with green businesses, foundations and major donors who were motivated by environmental causes.

When I was the Executive Director of Wildcanada.net I spent about half of my time looking for money. I didn’t really enjoy it. There were times when I hated it. It was intensely stressful work. I had half a dozen people counting on my success for their pay packs. At times we had less than a month’s worth of cash in the bank; those were the nights I didn’t sleep. When I left Wildcanada.net in 2005 I was deeply relieved not to be fundraising anymore. I swore I’d never do it again.

That same year I wrote a book called Carry Tiger to Mountain: The Tao of Activism and Leadership (Arsenal, 2006). In it, I dedicated a chapter to what I tongue-in-cheek called “Hot Taoist Tips for Fundraising ,” and then proceeded to state that there were no hot Taoist tips, and half-jokingly suggested readers might look elsewhere for advise.

For me, the best counsel that the Tao had for fundraising was that our anxiety about money, and the tension it creates within us, within our organizations and within the various social justice and environmental movements is a significant barrier to our overall success. As people constantly facing the ruin of things we loved – be it wilderness or justice or freedom – we had developed a scarcity lens through which we viewed the world. Time was scarce; that which we advocated for was obviously growing increasingly scarce; money was scarce.

Shifting our frame of mind to see the world as abundant; advocating with love and compassion rather than fear and anger; these were the couplets that would allow us to create a new paradigm for our efforts.

I think by the end of that chapter, and the penning of that book, I had convinced myself that raising money wasn’t so bad after all.

Around the same time I had started delving more deeply into the ancient Vedic practices of India, as taught by Deepak Chopra, and saw that attracting things like affluence and wealth needn’t be anxiety ridden: that indeed our anxiety keeps true success, whether it is material or spiritual, at bay.

I also learned that finding and following one’s Dharma, or purpose in life, is the secret to lasting fulfillment. When we are living our Dharma in our daily lives, the universe naturally responds by providing us with limitless opportunity.

All of that to say that when I went to the Royal Roads University Foundation office to discuss the position with my friends there, I was ready to step back into a position where supplication – to ask for humbly – would be a key component of the job. I choose to regard raising money as a means to a worthy end: the creation of the Bateman Centre; and as a tool to make the world a better place by involving those donors in the behavioural change work that we might one day undertake on campus. Money after all, I reasoned, was merely a representation of the energy that is constantly in circulation between us as people.

The job came with an attractive salary, which was a bonus, and meant that I wouldn’t have to scramble from time to time to recruit new clients to Highwater Mark. I worked 3 or 4 days at week for RRU, and was able to maintain my consulting practice on the side, working with groups like BC Hydro, The Ministry of Labour and Citizen Services and Communicopia on the side. It seemed pretty ideal.

From the start I recognized the change taking a J-O-B would create: I couldn’t sit around in my jammies all day anymore. Ok, I never really did, but working for a respectable organization, and meeting with respectable people, meant I had to dress respectably. I became suit and tied.

While it was agreed that I could work from home a day a week, I also became a commuter, driving out to the RRU campus two or three days each week. By rights it should only be a twenty-five minute trip, but most days I would drop Jenn off at her office, then Silas and Rio at their respective care facilities, and then finally make my way out to campus. This usually took at hour or more, and then I’d do it all in reverse at the end of the day.

There were many days when Jenn and I would find ourselves rushing out the door, matching computer bags in hand, hurrying the kids along, her in a skirt and pantyhose and me in slacks and a tie. My wife would then apply her “war paint” looking in the mirror; I would try not to brake too hard when she was applying eye liner.

Sometimes we’d laugh at how ridiculous it was. Sometimes we’d cry.

The work itself was promising. The Foundation had a great team, made even stronger as we weathered a first round of global-meltdown-induced budgetary cuts last Christmas. But challenging economic conditions, and rather extraordinary internal hurdles lead to a second round of cuts just a few weeks ago, which my position did not survive.

I think I saw it coming. I frequently joke that I’ve never had a job so good that I couldn’t quit or get fired from it. When I was asked to meet with my boss on the morning the anticipated cuts were to be announced, it dawned on me (five minutes before the meeting; sometimes I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed) that my head was on the block.

Not so much my head, in particular, but the position it filed.

I’m going to miss three things about Royal Roads and the effort to fund the Bateman Centre.

Working with Bob and Birgit Bateman became a highlight, and I’m going to miss working to fulfill a dream that they have had for many years. Bob is a charming, engaging and compelling story-teller: ever the teacher, I could listen to him talk about art, photography, travel and nature all day. Birgit is warm and inviting and lovely. It makes me sad that I won’t be a part of the fulfillment of that dream; at least not as I originally imaged.

I’m going to miss the Royal Roads campus. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful place. From the shallow salt water lagoon outside my office door to the lush cedar forests along Colwood Creek; from the manicured Italian and Japanese gardens to the stalwart groves of Douglas Fir’s that number among the largest left on Vancouver Island: the campus is a powerful natural convergence of diverse ecosystems. Nearly every day I was on campus I ran the myriad trails that wove like serpents across the property’s varied landscapes; trails that ten thousand years of Coast Salish peoples likely once trod, and that were followed more recently by sweating officer cadets when Royal Roads was a military collage.

Maybe most importantly, I’m going to miss the RRU Foundation Team. It’s one of the best teams I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. I’ve joked that I could take this group of people and plunk them down in nearly any business or non-profit and we’d be wildly successful.

And in different times, maybe we’d have been wildly successful raising money for the Bateman Centre. Our campaign – built from absolutely nothing to one with hundreds of prospects - was hitting its stride just as the financial systems were collapsing. The challenge isn’t over yet for those few who remain. It is a difficult task they face, and one that will take much longer now to fulfill its vibrant dream.

My view of fundraising has changed through this experience. Despite the turn of events that leaves me watching from the outside again, I believe now more than ever that the best course for attracting wealth and prosperity and success is to believe whole-heartedly in what you are advocating for, and know that the universe will conspire to make it possible.

From the outset of these postings, I’ve been searching for bliss: in work, with my family, and through my loving relationships. Most of us spend forty five or fifty years of our too short lives working. If we can’t find and follow our bliss on the job, as Joseph Campbell advises, then when?

At times my work at Royal Roads was deeply satisfying. Serving Robert Bateman and his vision certainly was, as was my connection with so many amazing, creative and inspiration people. But it wasn’t blissful. Not everything we do can be, I suppose. And while my work there was important, it didn’t provide the experience of connectivity that I have sometimes experienced while writing. It wasn’t my Dharma.

In the end, I wasn’t disappointed that the experience came to an end. I would go back to serve the Foundation, that team, and the Bateman’s in a heart beat if asked, but life is short, and I’ve got so much that I hope to create and accomplish that I’m not going to waste a moment wishing for what isn’t so.

And I believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that losing my job is simply another sign that I am on the verge of finding exactly what I am searching for from my life; of discovering my Dharma.