Bakersfield, CA
*** I had just finished writing this piece a bit ago when I received an invitation to be a featured speaker at April's New Living Expo in San Rafael, CA! I still don’t know how I’ll make it through the next weeks, but it’s definitely a shift!! ***
When I was writing my Acts of Surrender memoir, once I understood the theme and had a title, I thought a lot about the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. In the story, to test Abraham’s faith, God calls on him to sacrifice his son. It’s only in the final moment, with the blade at Isaac’s throat, that an angel appears and tells Abraham to lay down the knife.
At one point, when I was looking for a cover for that first edition, I considered trying to get the rights to a colorful painting I’d found online. The evocative image showed Abraham, Isaac and the angel in that moment of reprieve. In the end, however, I opted for a different cover for that early edition and never returned to the idea for subsequent editions.
I thought a lot about that Old Testament story this morning as I drove over the Temblor Mountains from Santa Maria to Bakersfield. And I thought, too, about how inappropriate it would have been to use that image for the Acts of Surrender cover back them. Not because it was a biblical image, although that might have put some potential readers off, as would the fact that the representation was a touch homoerotic. And not because it didn’t evoke surrender. You can’t get much more surrendered than Abraham in that story.
It would have been inappropriate because, as immense and terrifying as they had felt at the time, those acts of surrender were nothing compared to the ones I’ve felt called to live in the years since…compared to the one I’m now living nearly nine months into this Yellow Brick Road odyssey.
Through these, now, 263 days, I have been challenged again and again and again to follow my heart and the voice of my highest wisdom — against all conventional logic, against all established ways of doing and being in this world and against all those voices around me that, as Mary Oliver wrote in “The Journey,” one of my favorite poems, have “kept shouting their bad advice.”
To be fair, the advice from those voices around me has not been objectively bad. Nor has it been ill-intentioned. But it has been bad for me because it has urged me to walk away from what I know in my heart to be true *for me*, because it has urged me to trade this path for one that is safer and more certain…one that is, at least on the surface, more secure.
Oh, I have been tempted. You can’t know how often I have been tempted, especially through these past few weeks when I have woken most mornings in paralytic terror. I don’t know whether Abraham begged, bargained and threatened when God insisted that he sacrifice his son. But I have done all three, as the voice of my wisest self — my God-self, if you will — has insisted that I “stay the course” and “stay committed to California” even as the visible resources to do so rapidly evaporate.
For all the miracles that have sustained me thus far along this Yellow Brick Road, and there have been many, I can’t in this moment see how I will manage much beyond next week. As things now appear, my visible reserves of credit, along with the cash to sustain it, will be depleted as I step into Month #10 of this journey.
When I teach writing or work with coaching clients, I like to use the metaphor of the iceberg. Did you know that ninety percent of the typical iceberg lies below the water line? In other words, what we see with the human eye (and mind) is the tiniest fraction of what’s actually there. The invisible is always greater in scale, scope and possibility than the visible. “The story knows best,” I often say, “whether it’s the story we’re writing or the story we’re living.”
It’s a scary, tightrope-walking way to write. It’s an ever scarier way to live. In both instances, however, at least in my experience to date, the results are always more wondrous, enriching and miraculous than any conscious mind could ever conjure up, because our conscious minds have access only to the visible portion of the iceberg.
But what if, the frightened pre-dawn parts of me shriek, “experience to date” doesn’t matter anymore? What if I’ve used up my lifetime quota of miracles? What if this leap turns out to be not one of faith but of futility? What if I’m not caught in the arms of God before I go splat? What if the angel doesn’t show up this time?
The fear is real. I have no home to go back to. I have no more savings to fall back on. I’m unlikely to get any more credit. Moreover, this Yellow Brick Road journey feels increasingly pointless as I drive the same roads, stop in the same towns and sleep in the same hotels and motels. Over and over and over again.
Yet, if we return to the iceberg metaphor, what I’ve just described is only the part we can see — a mere ten percent of the whole, of what’s real, of what’s possible. The remaining ninety percent isn’t available to our conscious minds. The remaining ninety percent lies in realms beyond our fear, beyond our reason, beyond our conscious mind’s ability to envision. Those are the realms of the miraculous, the unanticipated, the unexpected. That doesn’t make them impossible, only impossible to imagine.
Those are also the realms that are easiest to forget, especially when my eyes open to the predawn darkness of a new day, and I don’t know how I’ll get through it emotionally because I’m so terrified by that visible ten percent.
The affirmation that ends Step #7 (“Take Risks”) in my book The Way of the Fool reads, “I trust fully, surrender completely and risk all as I open to the voice of my heart and let it guide me along the Way of the Fool. And so it is.”
Today, it feels as though I am living that affirmation more intensely and completely than I ever have before. Or am I? It struck me as I began this paragraph that if I truly “open to the voice of my heart and let it guide me along the Way of the Fool,” there is no risk. And if there’s no risk, there’s nothing to fear.
I will try to remember that tomorrow morning at 6:30 as the journey continues…
• As always, I welcome your expression of support, however they show up. Should you feel moved to offer them in the form of a donation, my GoFundMe page is still live at https://gofund.me/c6bce9c5 . I also gratefully accept donations through Zelle, Apple Pay, Facebook Messenger and PayPal - https://paypal.me/gerson888
• Mary Oliver's poem "The Journey" is in her book, Dream Work
Photos: The Hope Clock, downtown Bakersfield; Clear Lake at Lucerne, CA...on last week's drive to Ukiah