Expand the Pasture
After a remarkable stint as a waitress with the Jedediah’s Dream Team - training ground for stellar leaders in healthcare, nonprofit work, education, community volunteerism, the likes of Martha Bancroft, Lori Bowdler, Karen Connelly, Michelle Rooks, Leslye Hardie, Pam Carter, and of course, Sen. Mike Gierau! – I got my first office job. It came with the opportunity to really get to know our local nonprofit leaders and our small business owners, and had a few “networking” requirements.
Every Tuesday I would carry myself to Rotary where the meals failed to tantalize but the conversations more than made up for it. In addition to the four-way test (Is it true? Is it fair to all? Will it build goodwill? Will it be beneficial to all?), I got smidgens of wisdom from club members who had more life and professional experience than I did, to whom I still turn for inspiration or a gut check.
One afternoon, retired Senator and Governor Cliff Hansen, also a beloved local rancher, offered to give me a lift back to the office. As we made our way through town, the Senator told me that his foundational truths worked as well for people as they did for livestock. “You can only lead a horse to the water, but that’s true for people, too. You can’t drown them in your own opinions, fence them in like that.” If you want to get anywhere with people, he went on, you have to give them room. I never forgot that advice, and though it sounds simple now, it was a lightning bolt of epiphany then. I was learning “marketing” and sales and the art of persuasion, thinking my job and career would depend on my ability to convince or cajole people into something my boss wanted. It was stressful, that win-lose proposition. The gentleman from Spring Gulch shifted my path that day. I began to see that the best way to get someone into my corner was to stop trying to paint them into their own.
A passage from Shunryu Suzuki in “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” reminds me of Cliff’s earlier advice, something along the lines of the best way to control your sheep or cow is to “give him a large, spacious meadow.” I figure when a Zen monk and a Wyoming rancher reach the same conclusion, it’s worth noting.
One of the benefits of a mindfulness practice is the byproduct of more spacious, nimble thinking patterns. In essence, we are expanding the pasture of our minds to allow some gates to open, some new learning to occur. With consistent practice, it becomes more second nature to listen for understanding, unlike my former habit of methodically penning people in, trying to campaign them into agreeing with me.
There isn’t a single person I talk to these days who doesn’t reference how busy their lives feel, how overwhelming it can be to try to figure out how to raise decent kids or understand racism or make a decent living or help in some more purposeful way. Big thorny problems for small vulnerable humans.
Sometimes I expand the pasture so much I end up doing something like starting a nonprofit without realizing that’s what I was doing. Sometimes it’s simpler, like my experience the other night when I left town bearing west at 5 p.m. As the traffic snaked its way towards Wilson, I noticed the agitation growing, calculating how late I was going to be and how silly I was to think of the Wilson commute as the 10-minute excursion it used to be. Then I found my gaze resting on actual pastures, a mesmerizing green in the foreground of ink-blue Tetons, capped in white, expanding my attention until it rested with what was actually happening in front of me. Kids being ferried home on those glorious bike paths. The Walton Ranch eagle, playing sentry, maybe commanding safe passage for all below. The incomparable beauty of that setting, always a swell in my chest when I round the bend at Skyline and begin that visual feast. Never the same pasture. Never disappointing.