A conflicted lama’s Canadian connection

For a young man who has relished the past few years of living in anonymity, the return to fame has been unwelcome. “I’m actually really involved with them and in contact a lot, we do have brainstorming…It’s not like I’m a renegade at heart, or a runaway,” he says. At the same time, he admits that there is some distance between him and his religion. “Once I left the monastery I completely forgot about all of that, because I had given it too much importance my whole life. So it was about time to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to live my own life for a bit without thinking about it,’ so I didn’t worry too much. But I’m way over that now, I do talk to them and keep in touch.”

Tongue remembered a time Osel talked to him about the difficulties he faced. “He was talking about how difficult it was to have all these expectation about who he was and how to act when that wasn’t what he wanted to be. So I said to him, ‘What is it you actually want to do?’ And he said, ‘I want to sit down on a street corner, string my guitar, and bring people together spiritually’. And I said, you’re the lama, you can do whatever you want!”

Osel’s position can’t be explained in a soundbite. Parts of him have been pulled by the strands of destiny and reality, the past and modernity, for as long as he has lived. Yet another part of him is just another twenty-something, looking for a good job in a bad economy and figuring out what to do with his life. “I’m working on a masters degree on documentaries, afterwards maybe next year I’ll do some course on cooking, become a cook, and then maybe I’ll start doing something [with the FPMT], you know. But I’m taking it slow.”

It is more than walking the path to reach and end.
It must be something like flying in the sky
with infinite options at our fingertips.
Life is more than what we see and believe,
there has to be more…

The contradictions in myself pacify,
the tension relaxes, eyelids seal, same darkness…
It is too complicated, for now.

Know it one day, I will.