WLM | people
W
e had the opportunity to cover Matteo
Pistono’s first book, In the Shadow of the Buddha,
in 2011, and his story just fascinated me. Now
that I’m finally able to sit down and dive into his second
book, Fearless in Tibet: The Life of the Mystic Terton Sogyal
(2014), I find my fascination renewed.
I truly enjoy learning the journeys of people from
Wyoming – what they’ve accomplished, where they’ve
traveled to, what they’ve seen and done. I feel that being
connected to Wyoming is almost an exclusive club of
sorts. Perhaps it’s our meager population size – or the
distance between most of our communities – but when
someone says “Oh yeah, that person – they’re from
Wyoming,” I usually reply, “No kidding!”
Such is the case with Matteo Pistono. Born in Cody
and raised partly in Clark (population 70), Matteo
graduated from Lander Valley High School in the
late 1980s. “I grew up like all the other kids, playing
baseball and soccer, hunting and fishing in the Winds
and South Pass,” Matteo says. The choice to attend
school abroad when he was 16 was the springboard to
a lifelong journey. “When I came back and completed
my undergraduate in Wyoming, I kept traveling
abroad whenever I could…a semester in Holland,
climbing mountains in Morocco, etc.” His travels and
perspective on the world took a twist that led him down
a path of exploration.
“My parents had
instilled in me
an awareness
that social action
is not so much
a choice as a responsibility – to ourselves and to our
community,” Matteo explained in his first book, In the
Shadow of the Buddha. He began his career in social action
in environmental politics, going head-to-head with oil
and gas lobbyists. The juxtaposition of a fast-paced
life in politics on the one side, and spending months
meditating under a Tibetan lama in Nepal on the other
fueled his desire to explore.
Political disillusionment led to an increase in time
spent trekking in Nepal, where Buddhism intersected
Matteo’s life. His choice to embrace the Buddhist
practice evolved from the study of, and meditation
on, its principles, which made a great deal of sense to
him. “Buddhism does not ask you to believe anything.
Rather, it is about seeing very clearly the nature of
reality, and then acting from that place of knowledge.
When we see how everyone and everything is somehow
interconnected, then of course we won’t harm ourselves
or our environment, because that, in a sense, is harming
ourselves,” he explains.
Shortly after arriving in London to pursue his Master’s
Degree in Buddhist Philosophy in 1996, Matteo saw a
striking photo of Terton Sogyal (a nineteenth-century
Tibetan mystic) at the Rigpa Meditation Center and met
Sogyal Rinpoche, Terton Sogyal’s reincarnate. “I was
drawn to Terton Sogyal’s life because I know politics
matter,” Matteo explains. “There was something in
{him} – the way that he pursued the path of spiritual
enlightenment even while in the unsavory theater of
politics – that I wanted to understand more deeply.”
He found the mystic’s endless source of strength and
wisdom in the political realm to be an inspiration for
Matteo’s own political work.
photo by Barry Beckett
www.wyolifestyle.com
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