Your Life Is Your Message. Eknath Easwaran

      Your Life Is Your Message

      Conservation biologists call the elephant a “keystone” species. Just as an arch cannot stand without its keystone, many other species, and sometimes entire ecosystems, would be lost without the elephant. On the African savannah, the elephant’s foraging creates a mixture of woodlands and grasslands, making the savannah hospitable to many more creatures, from the zebra to the giraffe to the baboon. In drier climates, it provides water not only for itself but for all the other species by creating new water holes and even digging wells. Because of the elephant, a huge, hungry animal with gentle habits, the entire ecosystem flourishes.

      I believe that we human beings are meant for no less a role. Today, because of our skills and technology, human society has assumed the position of keystone in the vast, delicately balanced arch of nature. Like the elephants in the forest, our lives affect all the other creatures, plants, and elements around us. They all depend upon us for support and protection.

      In one way, our influence now is far from benign. Rather than supporting the rest of life, human beings often seem to be at odds with it. Scientists tell us that many of our social and business activities are not only driving other species to extinction but are threatening the water, soil, and atmosphere on which our own lives depend. We seem to have trouble relating even to our own species. The tension and alienation of our inner cities, the increase in poverty and homelessness, the drug abuse and high suicide rate among our young people all suggest that we lack the wisdom to protect ourselves, let alone the rest of nature.

      Yet in another sense, there is great promise today. Around the world – even in some of the countries most troubled by poverty or civil war or pollution – many thoughtful people are making a deep, concerted search for a way to live in harmony with each other and the earth. Their efforts, which rarely reach the headlines, are among the most important events occurring today. Sometimes these people call themselves peace workers, at other times environmentalists, but most of the time they work in humble anonymity. They are simply quiet people changing the world by changing themselves.

      The purpose of this book is to encourage those people and the changes they are making. In it, I hope to underscore the tremendous potential of such “tremendous trifles,” to use G. K. Chesterton’s phrase, for improving our lives and the world we live in, and I will be offering some practical suggestions on how to make those changes more satisfying and more powerful.

      Through such unobtrusive, almost inaudible work, the changes we would like to see in the world around us can begin immediately in our own lives, making us more secure, more contented, and more effective. Each of us has the capacity to become a little keystone, a healing and protecting force in the family, with friends, at work, in the community, in the environment.

      Such little changes can seem painfully small when compared to the kinds of crises we read about in

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