If you read my September newsletter or blog post, you’ll know that, at the time, I had been sensing a move out of Sedona, the place I landed three and half years ago after an emotionally wrought, yet miracle-filled road odyssey. The move I wrote about was to be to Southern California, a place I have felt drawn to for nearly as long as I’ve lived in the US. I’m someone who pays close attention to my dreams, to the signs and synchronicities that show up in my life and to my intuition and inner sensings. For well over a decade, those have all supported that magnetic pull toward California.
I had no deadline for this move when I published that newsletter. Yet less than three weeks later, days before my birthday, my condo manager told me that the unit’s owner wanted to move in. I had ninety days to vacate.
Given the challenging rental market in Sedona (this was my second consecutive lease here to not be renewed), leaving town felt like my best option.
Still, I was prepared to stay were I to sense that to be in my highest good. Were that to be the case, I knew that another of the many housing miracles I have experienced over the years would show up.
Yet as the weeks passed, not once did I sense that it would be appropriate for me to try to stay, nor did any housing miracle magically appear. Moreover, I recalled a conversation I’d had a few months earlier with one of my neighbors. “There’s nothing for me in Sedona anymore,” she’d said, and I remembered feeling that she was saying that for me too.
Problem was, I didn’t have the funds to simply pick up and relocate from pricey Sedona to pricier California. What was I to do?
In situations like these, I tune in to what I like to call my “wisest self” for guidance. To be clear, that “higher wisdom,” as I put it in my Acts of Surrender and Pilgrimage memoirs, does not derive from some white-bearded, white-robed gentleman commanding the universe from some celestial perch. It is “an infinite indwelling presence that is simultaneously my wisest aspect and the ineffable universality that is the sum of all that is.”
To access it, I variously meditate, journal using the “Muse Stream” method I describe in my books on writing, use kinesthetic muscle-testing or simply ask a question and rely on my intuition to listen for the answer.
When it came to my relocation dilemma, it didn’t matter how I sought to access that higher wisdom, the answer never varied: I was to plan to leave Sedona and I was to act as though a move to California was both desirable and possible. Countless signs and synchronicities through the months supported that answer.
Yet come December, although my tenancy was drawing to an end, none of the miracles had manifested that would have made such a move financially feasible. The miracle that did show up was a one-time, one-month extension of my tenancy. I could stay until January 28, 2023...but no longer.
Still, despite the powerful feeling that I needed to be gone from Sedona and that California was to be my ultimate destination, the means to move there failed to materialize.
What was I to do?
In 2019 when financial disaster pushed me out of Portland, I hit the road with everything I owned packed into my Prius, a journey I chronicle in Pilgrimage: A Fool’s Journey. Although my financial situation as 2022 drew to an end was not as grim, it was still shaky. Would I need to do that again?
Meantime, one effortless miracle I did manifest was the potential sale of all my furniture and some other household furnishings — to a single buyer who, when she heard I might be leaving town, asked whether I would be selling my TV and wall art. In the end, she expressed interest in buying not only those, but pretty much everything. Clearly, even if the means to move to somewhere had not yet shown up, moving from Sedona was being facilitated, fairly effortlessly.
In the end, I gave myself until January 6, the Feast of Epiphany in the Catholic calendar, for a “moving-to” miracle to show up. Otherwise, I would need to make other plans.
Miracles show up in our lives in many ways. Some are visible and dramatic, as when I found this condo a year ago when no Sedona rentals that were even vaguely affordable were being advertised…or when one person offered to buy up much of my current household. Others are subtle and show themselves only in retrospect. Most don’t show up the way we think they should. Hardly any are in any way predictable.
The visibly dramatic miracle I had hoped for, the one that would pave a clear and easy road for me — if not to California, then to some new permanent address — did not make itself known by bedtime last night. Nor was it waiting for me when I woke this morning. Instead, the road ahead is looking more like Dorothy’s yellow brick road: winding, indirect and not-exactly challenge-free.
As things stand right now (and much of this is subject to change), I will hit the road on January 27 or 28. However, it will not look as it did when I left Portland three years ago (or the four other times I’ve done something similar). Instead of ridding myself of pretty much everything, I will rent a small storage unit (likely in more-accessible, less-expensive Phoenix) for the things I choose to keep but that won’t fit in my car. And when I leave Sedona, I will initially aim the car south and east, into West Texas and toward the McDonald Observatory, a place I have visited on similar journeys in the past and where I have often found answers and direction.
From there, barring any intuitions or opportunities that suggest otherwise, I will yellow-brick-road my way toward Southern California and look for a place where I can park myself for a month or two to write. Not only is this journey likely to find its way into a fourth memoir, I have a fifth book in my Legend of Q’ntana fantasy series to finish (The Lost Horse of Bryn Doon)…and a sixth to start.
Beyond that? All I can do is trust the story — my story — to play out in a way that serves my highest good…and to reveal itself similarly. For more than three decades, that’s how I have written my books and that’s how I have lived my life. However challenging and uncomfortable those journeys might have been, the outcomes (be they on the page or in my life) have always surpassed anything I could have imagined, predicted or consciously desired. Why would things be any different now?
A few final thoughts…
As I did with the “pilgrimage” that carried me, unwittingly, from Portland to Sedona, I expect to be chronicling this journey, on Facebook and through whatever other means prove practical. So…stay tuned!
Also, if my finances are not as dire as they were when I left Portland, covid decimated the financial recovery I experienced after I settled in Sedona. As such, I will need to bring in some money while I’m traveling and will welcome opportunities to run writing workshops, give coaching sessions and sell books wherever I happen to be. Online too, of course. I will even consider altering my itinerary to accommodate such opportunities. (I am already looking into the possibility of facilitating a private workshop in Phoenix in late February.)
As well, just as in 2019 when so many were so generous in supporting my journey through donations and offers of accommodation, Kyri and I are again gratefully open to both. So should you be inspired by my “Fool’s journey” — the one I’m about to embark on and others of mine you may have followed through the years — I will welcome whatever “energy exchanges” you feel moved to send my way, through Zelle, PayPal, Apple Cash, Facebook Messenger, credit/debit card or other means (reach out to me for the relevant links).
Whether or not you choose to support me financially, I am profoundly grateful for your blessings and good wishes — today and through this latest chapter of my journey, wherever it carries me. As they did in 2019, your thoughts will undoubtedly help sustain me in my too-frequent moments of doubt.
In The Emmeline Papers, one of the books in my Sara Stories series of novels, one of the characters says, “It’s not about what I want. It’s about what life wants from me. And it looks like life has spoken.”
Yes, life has spoken.
Photos: I shot the "Pilgrimage" book cover and the selfies of me and Kyri on my "Pilgrimage" journey. Cover photos for "Acts of Surrender" and "The Lost Horse of Bryn Doon," Kathleen Messmer.
