Steve Jobs's True Legacy

"...the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do..."
~ John 14:12

"Follow your bliss."
~ Joseph Campbell

"Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above / Don't fence me in."
~ Cole Porter


I was packing up to leave Starbucks from an afternoon's writing on Wednesday when I heard about Steve Jobs's death. The news came to me in a terse email notice from the MyAppleSpace social network. The subject line read "Steve Jobs is dead."

Incredulous, I thought it was a hacker's prank. Only when I had double-checked the news against a reliable source could I bring myself to believe it.

Like many, I received and verified the news about Jobs on products he had pioneered. For me it was a MacBook Pro laptop and an iPhone.

And like so many around the world, I was grief struck.

Here was a man who had spent most of his life bucking the system, never letting fear or conventional wisdom get in the way of what he knew to be right and true. Nor did he ever permit the legions of critics and pundits who declared him foolhardy and misguided to stop him from following the path he knew in his heart to be the correct one.

Was he a saint? Hardly. Few geniuses are. Could he be cruel and cutting? Apparently so, for he is reputed to have had little patience for those who doubted or stood in the way of his passionate vision.

Few in the Western world remain untouched by that vision. Even those who swear they will never touch an Apple product have been affected by the revolutions in computing and music distribution that he incited.

Did he change the world? Absolutely. Did he do it uncompromisingly and on his own terms? Undoubtedly.

Is his greatest legacy the products and software systems he engineered? Not hardly.

Through the day or so following Steve Jobs's death, I was deeply moved, sometimes to tears, but the outpouring of love, respect and grief for this man. But by Friday night, as I scrolled through the unending stream of Jobs tributes and Jobs quotes in my Facebook news feed, something about it all began to trouble me.

Don't get me wrong. The sentiments expressed were true and powerful, and I clicked the "like" button on many of them.

But I began to wonder, as I read them all, how often we latch onto the words and lives of others as a way to avoid expressing our own words and living our own lives.

Back in 2006 while visiting Toronto, I was privileged to attend a Barbra Streisand concert. It was a performance that more than filled the city's vast Air Canada Centre. I wrote about that experience here two years ago, in a post titled Larger Than Life.

"Whatever you think of Barbra Streisand's talent or personality," I wrote, "when you are in her energy field, you touch that [limitlessness of your soul's natural state] and your soul cries out, 'Me too! That's who I am, too!!'

"Here in the Western world, where we have been taught to play small, we transfer all of our natural desire for the fenceless world of a life lived large to our movie stars and sports heroes.

"If we can't play out our own passion and power, we play it out through a celebrity cult that's no healthier than any other cult, one we also find in countries with charismatic leaders/dictators, in religions with unapproachable gods and in all situations where we abdicate the expression of our infinite nature to someone or something outside of ourselves."

How much of the grief for Jobs, I began to wonder, is not about the death of a brilliant man whose visions touched so many but about the death of a figure who publicly lived so much of the courage, vision, sense of purpose and uncompromising adherence to inner truth that so many of us shrink from in our own lives.

Steve Jobs was not unusual. We all have the same access to the same infinite pool of wisdom, courage, purpose and inner truth that he did...not to mimic his journey and follow his bliss, but to uncover and follow our own...wherever it might carry us.

In my novel, The MoonQuest, very much a metaphor for all our journeys, the main character, Toshar, is destined for a greatness he continues to resist. Yet destiny, as he is constantly reminded, is not cast in stone. There is always a choice.

"Every choice you have ever made," Toshar is told, "has led to this moment...of choice."

"The power to choose is always ours," I wrote in Larger Than Life. "In every moment and through every situation, we're offered the opportunity to choose our greatness, our passion, our light."

The best tribute to Steve Jobs is to not quote his words but to live them, to not restate his wisdom but to find and write your own, to not honor the choices of his heart but to listen to and honor the choices of yours, to not look backward but to live in the present moment as you step forward into the next.

It's time to awaken your vision. It's time to rekindle your passion. It's time to live your greatness.

If that becomes Steve Jobs's legacy, the revolution in each of our lives -- and in the world -- will only have just begun.

Please "like" these Facebook pages:
• The MoonQuest book
• The MoonQuest movie
• The Voice of the Muse book
• Mark David Gerson fan page

A Different Kind of April Fool

Legendary sci-fi author Ray Bradbury says that writing is about leaping off cliffs and trusting that you'll sprout wings on the way down. It's the way of the Fool in the Tarot: that surrendered leap of faith into the void that alchemically transforms something that, in the moment, appears to make no sense into art.

Life is like that, too. And why wouldn't it be when the precepts of one apply equally to the other, when the first rule of both is that there are no rules.

Not only do I do my best to write that way, I do my best to live that way. It's scary, but ultimately satisfying. And even though it means living and writing without a net, those wings Bradbury talks about have never failed to appear.

They first showed themselves to me in a dream I had nearly 20 years ago. In it, I was clinging to the roof ledge of a 1950s-style office building while an inner voice kept urging me to jump. I didn't...I couldn't. And I woke up scared and upset.

In the days that followed, I took that dream image into meditation. In each of three sessions, I tried to let go of that old structure and failed. By the fourth, I was so uncomfortable and so annoyed with the process that I just did it. I unhooked my fingers from the stonework and fully expected to plummet down to the pavement in a messy splat.

Instead, I found myself floating gently, feather-like, until I landed in what I can only describe as the arms of God.

I'm in that space today, as I feel a powerful pull to leave the embracing support of Albuquerque's Sandia Mountains and move to Los Angeles...to let got the comfort of the known for the shifting tectonic plates of the unimaginable. Nothing about such a move makes conventional sense. And there are plenty of people who have been happy to remind me of that. In this moment, I can't even see how it's possible.

Yet I'm reminded of a recent interview Apple's Steve Jobs gave, in which he said, "You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

He's right. It's never let me down. I've made many moves and done many risky things that defy logic and convention. And although I've experienced discomfort along the way, the ultimate rewards have far outweighed the fallout.

I wouldn't be in Albuquerque right now -- or even in the U.S. -- had I not honored a call, back in 1997, to leave Toronto with everything I owned in the back of a minivan and just hit the road. Three months of seemingly random journeying landed me in Sedona, AZ and gifted with a new country, a new daughter and a new life. A similar if tenfold-longer journey brought me to New Mexico and allowed me to gift the world with two new books.

I've discovered that once I commit to the highest possible path and purpose, a trinity of principles is always at play:
1) Trust
2) Let Go
3) Leap

First, I trust the voice of my deepest heart, which is also the voice of my divinity, my god-self, my muse, my highest imperative. Next, I let go of all resistance, all clinging and all clutching (which doesn't mean I'm not afraid and which also doesn't mean I have to know how it's possible). Finally, I leap into the void -- just like that Fool in the Tarot.

Of course, I'm not always without resistance. "You want me to do what!?" I've been known to exclaim when presented with a next step. That happened a few years ago, when an inner voice interrupted my on-the-road reveries and urged me to refresh, revise and overhaul my modest Voice of the Muse eBook into the expanded and published form that's now won two awards.

Yet once the initial shock dissipated (my novel, The MoonQuest, had been out barely a month at that point), I surrendered to the higher imperative. I trusted, let go and leapt...and watched all the requisite resources begin to fall into place, often miraculously.

Miracles are present in every moment of our lives. It's our limited vision that prevents us from seeing them. It's our limited sense of what's possible that prevents us from believing in them. It's our fear that prevents us from embracing them.

Those miracles are available to us equally magnificently in our writing and in our lives. What else would you call the logic-defying cohesion of The MoonQuest, written with no conscious notion of its story, except as the words of that story moved through me onto the page? That same miracle is repeating itself in The MoonQuest's sequel, The StarQuest, whose first draft miraculously displayed the same coherence when, once again, the story had only revealed itself word-by-word.

As I move into my California countdown (I expect to be living there in time for my keynote talk at San Diego's Body Mind Spirit Expo in October, on my birthday weekend), I know that the miracles required to make the move possible, graceful and prosperous will show themselves to me -- as I trust, let go and, always playing the Fool, take that surrendered leap of faith into the void.

Trust. Let Go. Leap. It's now a chapter in The Voice of the Muse. It's the only way I know how to live.

In my writing as in my life, it always works.

• Image of The Fool card from the Osho Zen Tarot, published by St. Martin's Press. Illustrated by Ma Deva Padma

• I encountered the car with the Beverly Hills front plate in a Target parking lot, one of many signs validating my leap of faith

MY FINAL NEW MEXICO EVENTS

Because of my planned move to California, my spring series of Albuquerque writing events is my last. Coming up in April and May is

• a 5-week Voice of the Muse Coaching Group, launching on April 13 (with April 4 the deadline to save on the registration fee), and

• a series of full and half-day workshops covering memoir-writing, character development, editing/revision and birthing your book.

More information on all Albuquerque events, along with discount options and registration details, is on my web site.

• I'll also be giving two seminars at the Screenwriting Conference in Santa Fe on June 3 and 4 (free with conference registration).

BEYOND NEW MEXICO (APRIL / MAY)

If you can't make it to New Mexico, join a separate 5-week Voice of the Muse Coaching Group, which I'm offering over the phone via conference call, starting Sunday, April 11. All you need to participate is a telephone with long-distance access.

More information on the conference-call coaching group, along with discount options and registration details, is on my web site.