StephenLegault.com
Writing
The Three Treasures: 2) Compassion
Jan 16th
Compassion is the “deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relive it.” Lao Tzu, the hero of Carry Tiger to Mountain: the Tao of Activism and Leadership, says that the sage activist is “saturated with compassion.”
It is the second treasure of the Tao te Ching’s three treasures: restraint, compassion and love.
It is easy for us to feel compassion with those we are closest too: our partners, family, children, friends, and close colleagues.
And while they need and deserve it, if we wish to make the world a better place, not just in the short term, but for the long journey of humanity, then we must practice compassion with those who oppose us. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama says that we must “remove negative feelings towards our enemies.”
I believe that we must stop thinking about people as our enemies. Simply put, we oppose other people’s actions. We oppose what they do, and sometimes, their world view. But they are not our enemy. We do not wish them harm; we want to stop what they are doing that is harming the world and its creatures.
Always remember that your opponent is human
Like you
Treat her with love and compassion
(Tao, 31)
Those we oppose are human, and humanity is all interconnected. Even those who we most vehemently oppose are capable of loving their children. Our most ardent opponents have fears that drive them to make wrong-headed decisions that harm the earth and make other people’s lives very difficult. Treating them with compassion will unlock the possibility for long term solutions to the problems that vex our society and our planet.
What do we do when compassion doesn’t feel like it’s enough? How do we respond when it feels as if the world is on a collision course with doomsday and people are suffering and dying?
We meet anger and fear with love. Next week, the third treasure: L.O.V.E.
There is a whole chapter on the Three Treasures: restraint, compassion and love in Carry Tiger to Mountain, The Tao of Activism and Leadership. You can read more about the book here.
The book was published by Arsenal Pulp Press and is available by ordering it directly from the Press, or by asking for it in your local bookstore or library. If all else fails, you can always buy it online.
Follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault as I post stanzas from the Tao te Ching all week related to compassion.
The Three Treasures: 1) Restraint
Jan 9th
The foundation of the Tao te Ching are the Three Treasures. These have been interpreted in many ways over the last 2,500 years; in Carry Tiger to Mountain, The Tao of Activism and Leadership I interpret them as Restraint, Compassion and Love.
Restraint is sometimes know as “daring not to be first,” in various translations of the Tao te Ching. Ostensibly, it requires us to control our own ego, to step aside while allowing others to step forward. The Tao te Ching says:
Our finest effort will flow like a river
Rocks, boulders, even a dam, in time, will succumb
to the current
We can learn to act with such patience and perseverance
In doing so, be like the Tao
Tao, 8
Together, patience and perseverance form a yin-yang equilibrium. Patience is the yin side of the equation – the light, the yielding part – while the yang, or assertive part, is the perseverance. Yin and Yang do not work against one another; they are not opposites: they are two parts of the same whole, working in harmony. Knowing when to step back, and when to step forward and provide a needed injection of energy and enthusiasm is one of the hardest challenges facing leaders, in both business and in non-profits.
Restraint does not come naturally to those of us working to protect what we love, either through non-profit organizations or by running ethically driven businesses. We’re afraid that if we step back, more of what we hold dear will disappear. But sometimes, practicing restraint is what we need to do to advance our efforts. Lao Tzu says:
When you speak, do so clearly
And then remain quiet
Be like nature
A tempest doesn’t last all day
Afternoon heat is followed by a thundershower
Tao, 23
One of the themes I’ve explored in Carry Tiger is ego. Ego can be very helpful; it propels us forward, it provides us with “appropriate self worth.” But for an activist working to create a better world, it can be very harmful. Ego can keep us from allowing others to step forward and share the burden of leadership; ego can keep us too long in the spotlight, casting long shadows on others. Practicing restraint allows us to step aside and let others step forward.
One final thought on restraint: the most important time to exercise it is with those we oppose. When we win, do not be boastful; simply “step back and be watchful.” When mired in conflict, retrain from inflammatory accusations. These only harden our opposition, and prevent us from long term progress.
There is much more about this theme throughout Carry Tiger to Mountain. And in the coming weeks and months, I will explore this further through Twitter (@stephenlegault) and through this blog.
Next week: the second of the Three Treasures: compassion.
I’m going to share bits and pieces of my interpretation of the Tao with friends on Twitter using #carrytiger as a hashtag. Please follow me @stephenlegault and retweet when you can.
You can read more about the book here.
Carry Tiger to Mountain was published by Arsenal Pulp Press and is available by ordering it directly from the Press, or by asking for it in your local bookstore or library. If all else fails, you can always buy it online.
Join the conversation: tell me about your experiences exercising restraint, or when in retrospect it might have been a good idea:
Tweeting Carry Tiger to Mountain
Jan 2nd
In 2006 Arsenal Pulp Press published my first book, Carry Tiger to Mountain: The Tao of Activism and Leadership. I’d been thinking about this book for almost as long as I’d been an activist – applying the ancient principles of Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching to my own work in the conservation movement – and had started compiling ideas for the book some years before.
The premise of Carry Tiger to Mountain is that we, as people who are trying to make the world a better place, might experience more success if we use the three treasures of Taoism as talismans: restraint, compassion and love. The centrepiece of Carry Tiger is an interpretation of the 81 stanzas of the Tao te Ching specifically for activists and leaders in the social profit, and socially-minded business world.
There are also chapters on strategy, collaboration, conflict, leadership, fundraising and self-care.
I’ve been surprised, and pleased, by the resilience of Carry Tiger to Mountain. People still contact me to tell me how much this book has meant to them, and how it has helped them improve their own lives, and the world around them. Over the next while, I’m going to share bits and pieces of my interpretation of the Tao with friends on Twitter using #carrytiger as a hashtag. Please follow me @stephenlegault and retweet when you can.
It’s important to remember this about the Tao te Ching: its an enigma. Its paradox wrapped up in contradiction. The first thing Lao Tzu wrote was “The Way that can be spoken is not the only way.” I was conscious in penning Carry Tiger to Mountain that everything I said could be wrong. Or then again, it might not be. It’s up to each of us to determine the Way and its Virtue for ourselves.
You can read more about the book here.
The book was published by Arsenal Pulp Press and is available by ordering it directly from the Press, or by asking for it in your local bookstore or library. If all else fails, you can always buy it online.
Capture Whole
May 3rd
A Conservative majority may not be the best thing for the environment, or social programs, or for Canadian priorities like healthy care, diplomacy or even Parliamentary values like transparency and fairness, but a Conservative Majority is what we’ve got for the next four years, so we better figure out fast how to get what we want from it.
There has never been a time when thinking creatively, and acting with courage, was more important. And despite moving Canada back into the dark ages of climate-denial and finding ourselves at the back of the bus when it comes to global diplomacy, the Harper Conservatives have provided some important leadership on issues such a National Parks. There’s a small opening there – a chink in the armor maybe – where we can work to advance progressive issues.
The Conservative government of the last five years, as someone recently told me, doesn’t like to be criticized. Who does? We can make the mistake of trying to teach them a lesson about democracy and being “grown up” about it, but look what happens when you spend your time trying to teach Canadians a lesson about democracy: You end up losing your seat and your party.
Instead, people across Canada who want to make this country a better place, and restore its standing as a leader among nations on issues like climate change and poverty reduction, should take a lesson from Loa Tzu: “This is the universal truth; the soft shall overcome the hard.”
There’s no arguing with the fact that the Conservative majority will pose a hard obstacle to progress in Canada. We can spend our next four years battering ourselves against it, or we can find a way to move slowly around it, over it, under it, through it. In Taoism this is called Wu Wei, which means “not forcing.” Nobody is going to force Prime Minister Stephen Harper to do anything. We’re going to have to, as Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, suggests: “capture our opponent whole.” That means moving carefully to make it so our values, our vision, our passion, slowly becomes their own. We must find what they respond to – be it positive reinforcement or public accolades, as difficult as that may be to stomach – and exploit them as an opportunity to advance a progressive vision for Canada.
If we do not, we’ll find ourselves on the outside looking in, and watching all that we cherish about this beautiful nation slipping from our grasp. And we will only have ourselves to blame for its loss. Every moment in life is a choice. This choice is clear: accepting the reality of a polarized politic and gaining what we can, or raging against it, and losing it. It’s that stark a dichotomy.
And while we do this, organize for the future. The political environment across Canada has been dramatically recalibrated. Michael Ignatieff has resigned. And the BLOC Quebececios has been reduced to a fringe movement; this is maybe the best of all the outcomes from the May 2nd vote. And though separatism is by no means dead, at the very least one of the key factors keeping the centre-left from uniting and moving forward together has been eliminated.
While we work to find ways to advance our goals under a Conservative majority, we must do exactly what Stephen Harper did to capture it: unite. It’s time to put ego and hubris and the fallacy of worn-out political history aside and come together under a single banner. It’s time to find common ground, and learn to live with our differences, and embrace the future as a united positive alternative. I simply can’t listen to people complain that with only 40% of the vote the Conservatives formed a majority any longer without demanding that the progressive voices in Canadian democracy join together to form an united, positive alternative.
And within that the Green Party will finally find its place in our House of Commons. Next to the defeat of the BLOC, the election of Elizabeth May in Saanich-Gulf Islands is the single greatest thing that has happened for Canadian democracy in many, many years. She will make Canadians proud.
I hope that people who want a better Canada won’t spend too much time moaning about what may happen now under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. We may not like it much, but it’s what we’ve got; the sooner we make a choice to move forward, smartly, carefully, like water slowly but patiently wearing away at that which stands between us and our vision of Canada, the better. Our future is at stake; we are the ones who must make the choice about how we advance towards it.
I Am Resolved
Jan 2nd
Before 2011 gets away on me, I thought I’d put down on paper a set of ideas I feel resolve for this year. I wouldn’t say these are resolutions as much as strong notions that I am humbly committed to. I’m sort of hooked on the idea of there being eleven of them:
1) To live fully in the place my family has chosen as home – the Bow Valley of Alberta – and to rediscover the majesty of the Rocky Mountains and its communities.
2) To learn to let go more: long a part of my spiritual practice, I am resolved to stop clinging to those things which were never in my grasp in the first place.
3) To rededicate myself to maintaining the temple of my body, so that it can be a vehicle long into the future for spiritual fulfillment, love, adventure and excitement. I’m in good shape, and I want to be in great shape.
4) To continue to write every day. It is my dharma.
5) To find a meaningful way to earn a living, because my dharma isn’t cutting it quite yet. This could mean taking a terrific job (I interviewed for one in mid December that would be perfect) or the continuation of my consulting work.
6) To make peace part of my every day practice. For so long I’ve been journeying towards this goal: 2011 will certainly be a seminal year in that pilgrimage. To calm the fires.
7) To reignite my daily practice of meditation. Along with daily study and finding opportunities to gently show others the opportunities to conquer suffering and strive for peace, this will be the foundation of my undertaking as a dedicated, well-meaning but somewhat distracted amateur Buddhist and Taoist sort-of-person.
8) To let go of more: of more things, of ideas, of pre-conceived notions, of iron-clad ideas. And to let go of the idea of letting go: sometimes its OK to hold on tight. The world is spinning pretty fast, and hurtling through space at thousands of miles per second. Holding on makes good sense sometimes.
9) To continue to love people – as many as I can – as much as I am able. Starting with my family: Jenn and our boys, my parents and Jenn’s, our siblings and their amazing families, and our extraordinary friends; and radiating out beyond that to random people I meet on the trails and on our travels, in café’s and in Safeway and Costco. To try and stay out of jail while doing this.
10) To be a caring and nurturing friend, husband and parent who embraces restraint, compassion and love; the three pillars of the Tao, and the fundamental teachings of the Buddha.
11) To let go of the silly idea that there needs to be eleven of this things so it jives with 2011.
Breaking the Buddha
Apr 21st
My statue of Gautama Buddha broke the other day. Broke again, I should say.
I bought this eight inch tall statue shortly after moving out of my family home almost four years ago now, and into a 100-year old character home in Victoria’s Fernwood neighborhood. I bought it before I had any real furniture or even a bed for my kids. After looking at dozens of different figurines, I selected this particular effigy because of the particularly serene look on “the conqueror’s” face. It was to be a symbol of my new approach to living, and day after day I used it as an aide memoire for the peace I was hoping to bring into my life.
This statue sits perched in my entrance way, watching over my family and I as we come and go. Silas and Rio both recognize his placid smile as other children might recognize Big Bird or that crazed purple dinosaur that haunts so many parent’s nightmares. When Silas was learning how to build with Duplo, he made his own characters and would present them to me and say “look, it’s the Buddha.” And of course it was.
I keep the Buddha on ledge with a slight slant, in a prominent place in my entrance, in part to have a touchstone, and in part to announce to those entering and exiting that I for one am at least making an effort to clean up my act. The Buddha’s prominence is part ego and part beseeching for patience with my indiscretions.
The house I live in is very old, and more than a little cranky, and is listing precariously to, well, all sides at the same time. Put a marble down on any of the century old Douglas Fire floors and off it goes, careening one way, and then the next, racing for a wall or stairwell. The doors in the house suffer the most. Their frames are ancient, and the wood is well past its prime, and all of the hinges require regular lubrication (don’t we all) and every three or four months I have to take them all off, fill in the decaying screw holes and re-hang them.
But sometimes more than three or four months pass and the doors start to sag and we have to lift the door to close it. And sometimes we don’t even do that, and a great shudder is sent through the frame as the prehistoric door is rattled on its primeval hinges.
And sometimes they get slammed.
Fear is the root of anger. Behind most everything that I become angry about lurks a silent fear that won’t show its face, but sends anger in its stead. When I get angry I yell, I stomp around, I bolt. I sometimes rush from the house, frustrated and afraid and fuming not understanding where my anger was born or why it is rearing its head again, but knowing that I have to get away from it. That I have to run from it; that if I can just put enough distance between myself and my fear and my anger that I might finally outrun it.
The door, hanging on its hinges, comes between me and the outside world.
And the Buddha sits on its slanting ledge next to the door.
I can’t remember if the first time the Buddha lept from his ledge I was slamming the door, or just closing it forcefully so that it would stay closed.
But I know that the most recent time the Buddha called me to attention was when the door got between me and escape.
And down he came.
His head broke off, a piece of his shoulder came apart and the funny little pom-pom on his head came off. It stopped me in my tracks.
I stood there looking at him on the ground, trying to feel nothing. Trying to let go of my disappointment with myself.
The fact of the matter is that in toppling to the ground, Gautama Buddha alerted me once more to my suffering, and my need to address it. Suffering, according to the Buddha, is the basic human condition. But suffering can be ended, and there is a clear path – the Eightfold Path – to put a stop to it. Enlightenment is the permanent end of suffering. The Buddha is called The Conqueror because he was the first to vanquish suffering and gain as a reward freedom and peace.
I’ve been walking this path consciously for five or six years. I’ve been aware of it for much longer than that, trying in my furtive way, to ease myself onto this path without actually doing the hard work to address what stands between me and freedom from suffering.
I picked the Buddha up that morning, collecting the little pieces, cradling his decapitated head in my hands, and brought him downstairs to the workbench. He seemed beyond repair that morning. Sometimes everything seems beyond repair. I walked away from him believing that when I returned from my research and book tour of Alberta, I’d have to throw him out and start over again.
But I didn’t.
Sometimes it seems, in my effort to achieve peace, to free myself from the illusions and fears that cloud my vision of reality, that I have to start from scratch again and again. I burn up any progress made over the last half decade – over the last 40 years — in the heat of my passions, my anger and my fear.
But the Buddha foresaw this in his own effort to conquer suffering. Anybody who walks a spiritual path does. We take our tentative steps forward, peel back another layer of illusion and come face to face with whatever it is we’ve hidden beneath the veneer of day to day existence. Sometimes it sends us reeling. And when it does, we wonder if we will ever be forgiven; if we will ever truly be free.
All of my spiritual teachers would remind me that when I feel as though I have to run away from my fear, from my anger, from suffering; that is the time to sit. To sit with the ghastly discomfort that surges through my body and make we want to slam doors and run away.
Gautama Buddha called me to attention: my Teacher was in the room that morning, and he crashed to the floor so I might relearn a lesson. Once again. It was a Buddhist monk, after all, who counseled that if we met the Buddha on the road that we should kill him. There is no ultimate orthodoxy in the path to peace: only the tearing away of illusions and the compassionate, loving embrace of reality, regardless of who we are or what we’ve done.
I didn’t toss my statue of the Buddha in the garbage. Yesterday morning I carefully glued his head back in place, even delicately bonding the little pom-pom back atop his tranquil head. We don’t have to start over; we can start so much further down the path than we ever imagined, and we can be forgiven our indiscretions and transgressions along the way.
But I am going to find a better place for my statue. Just to be on the safe side.
The Soft Shall Overcome the Hard
Apr 16th
Day breaks over the Continental Range; the cold hard light of dawn edges out the cloudless night. Its minus five but predicted to hit plus twenty today. The remaining snow here in the highest community in Canada will certainly be all but gone come the weekend. Mount Temple, viewed out my friends’ window, is a familiar sight; its a triangular, glacial clad massif that looms more than 6000 feet above Paradise Valley and the Bow Valley below. Its my favorite mountain in the world, so far. Its hard and angular and imposing, like the landscape that circles it for a hundred kilometers in every direction, like the landscape that stretches two thousand kilometers north and south along the axis of the Great Divide, the stalwart chain of the Rocky Mountains.
Paradinse Valley and Mount Temple: an adamantine landscape
It’s an adamantine landscape. Its all perpendicular angles and abrupt edges. Its often very cold except for a few brief months when it can be very hot. And while the dales that finger like green filaments between the imposing walls of limestone have a gentleness to them, most of this landscape is rigid and unyielding.
It’s a hard place on the body. When I lived here I felt as if I was always about to crack open. My body itched with the dryness. My head ached from the Chinook winds that pressed down on the mountains with accordant regularity.
When I moved to the west coast five years ago I remember feeling relief. The verdant coastal forests, the soft rounded hills, the gentle pulse of the ocean; each of these things heralded an abatement to the hardness that had predominated my life.
It was more than physical: I was like the mountains too. Hard, unyielding. It had made me rigid in my approach to life. The coast helped take the edge off.
The sun slips down the flank of Mount Temple, illuminating it’s snow plastered northern face. Temple’s glacial cap wears a blue tinge, catching the morning light in its pocks and folds and fissures.
I worry that as I spend more time in this landscape of hard edges and angles that I will take on those characteristics once more myself.
“This is the universal truth: The soft shall overcome the hard,” says Lao Tzu.
I’ve been preaching this in my work as an activist, and as a leader.
“All living things are soft and flexible / All things in death are hard and brittle / The hard and the brittle will be broken / the soft and the flexible will endure.”
How can I embrace this truth in my own life?
When I moved to the Pacific coast, I felt as if my body relaxed for the first time. Coming home to these mountains doesn’t need to mean I grow rigid once again.
I’ve been pondering this conundrum for more than a year. Its no surprise that the answer to this question might be found in water.
“Water is as soft as anything on earth / yet mountains and canyons have been sculpted by its force,” adds Lao Tzu.
The other day Jenn and I stood at the confluence of the Pipestone and Bow Rivers. We were scouting scenes for my novel The End of the Line. When I lived in Lake Louise in the early 1990′s I used to come to this place high up on the Bow River watershed to watch these two rivers seamlessly come together. I dreamed then that my life might emulate this confluence; now I am caught in its joyous flow.
These mountains, of course, have been shaped by water. The frozen sort, the massive glacial ice sheets that covered this landscape in a kilometer or more of ice ten thousand years ago gouged the V shaped valleys into broad U shaped dales. We see their work in the sheered off cliffs and sculpted domes all around us. But it would be a stretch to categorize the last ice age as a soft. The last glacial epoch lasted for millions of years and covered much of the northern hemisphere and I would imagine to all but the hardiest of creatures would have seemed unyielding. Its unlikely it was very relaxing.
Of course, in geologic time, the ice age too yielded to the tilting of the earth, the periodic wobble of the earth’s rotation around the sun.
Maybe its all a matter of temporal perspective.
I think that for my purposes I will look to water’s liquid form. See how it moves across the surface of the earth, gently pulling at the stones until they pry loose and succumb to water’s patient tug? Watch as it ebbs and flows; sometimes raging in a torrent, pulling entire canyon walls down in the flood, and sometimes placid, a crystal pool as clear as the sky.
“Be at ease,” advises Loa Tzu. “When turmoil swirls around you / be as the stone in the river’s flow / allow the waters to come and go/ come and go.”
And be like the water too, soft and yielding and at ease, but with the force and power to move the earth itself.
Already Home
Sep 12th
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.
The view from my sunrise rock: tea plantations, Munnar, India
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 well being, 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 isn’t so crazy a notion, 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.
Discovering Dharma, Part Two
Sep 8th
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 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.
Waves
Apr 11th
We’re chest deep in the Pacific Ocean, our bodies encased like giant black caterpillars in thick wet suits, clinging to powder blue and pink surf boards. Above the sun is shining but here on earth the water, in early April, is frigid. Every now and again the water warmed by my body is joined by a trickle of ocean that seeps down my back or through my gloves and I remember how cold winter really is.
Surfing near Tofino, Vancouver Island
Jenn and I are novice surfers but already can taste the hint of perfection that comes when we are able to stand atop a wave and experience how the ocean feels as it moves across the skin of the earth.
We catch a few more waves and ride them and get put through the ringer a few times, and while we’re bobbing along in the ocean Jenn says “the last time we were in the ocean it was the Arabian Sea.”
Father and Sons on the Beach, Varkala, India
Then the water was warm. We were in Varkala, India. We dove through the breaks and floated north in the current; the afternoon sun was so hot it was hard to be out in it.
Varkala is a temple town. For more than 2000 years Hindu’s have made a pilgrimage to Janardhana Temple; each morning and evening they descend the temple’s steps and make their way through the crowded streets to the ocean where they receive the puja blessing, and where many then wade into the ocean as part of their religious ritual.
I don’t know the significance. I’ve read that in the sacred waters of the Arabian Sea Hindu’s can plead for salvation for the souls of their departed loved ones.
What is clear is that these water’s are holy. Step into these waves, and you are stepping into healing waters of salvation.
But then, so are all the waters of this sacred earth.
The waves break against our bodies and in doing so, carry away a little bit of us; cleanse us of what hurts us, what makes us afraid, what comes between us and that which we love. And these healing waters carry something to us as well; the buoyant peace born from the knowledge that all human kind are ripples on the sea of creation.
Rio, French Beach, Vancouver Island
Rio and Silas understand this intuitively, and may someday even create their own language of expression for this miracle. Both boys have become so much the ocean; are often most complete when racing the shoreline waves on the southern tip of Vancouver Island.
Imagine, says Deepak Chopra, that all life is an ocean; you and I are waves. Temporary, forming and moving, and diminishing. He says this in the context of Quantum Physics, but from the perspective of Hindu mysticism: we are localized expressions of the life’s yearning to exist; the universe’s restless effort to organize the mass of energy and information born at the moment of creation, of the Big Bang, into momentary concentrations of existence. Temporary, but beautiful.
We are waves. We descend into waves to seek salvation. We ride waves to find perfection. Sometimes we sink beneath them. Sometimes we emerge cleansed and whole. Sometimes we emerge holy.
Pilgrim, Varkala