Sedona, AZ
Twenty-six years ago today, on the morning of the 1997 harvest moon, I drove into Sedona for the first time. Although I’d felt powerfully called here, a story I share in my Acts of Surrender memoir, I didn’t consider Sedona to be anything more than a weekend whistle stop on the open-ended road odyssey I had launched three months earlier when I left Toronto with everything I owned packed into my Dodge Caravan.
That Sedona weekend turned into a week, the week extended into a month, and the month stretched into nearly a year and a half, before it came time for me to move on.
If that sounds familiar, it should. I was three months into an open-ended journey of a different sort, the 2019 one I chronicle in Pilgrimage: A Fool’s Journey, when I again stopped in Sedona not expecting to stay. That time, I was pretty clear by the next morning that I wouldn’t be leaving. And I didn’t, not until this past January, when circumstances flung me back onto the road.
For 160 days, I followed my heart through eight states, writing as I went — for a Pilgrimage-like book I titled Hello, Yellow Brick Road! The Fool’s Journey Continues.
Through those weeks and months, I spent most of my time in California, which every intuitive and inner-wisdom impulse insisted against all conventional logic was to be my new home. I even switched my home state to California, navigating the byzantine labyrinth that is California’s DMV for a new driver’s license and matching car plates, a stress-filled quest that lasted five weeks and felt as though it rivaled any I describe in The MoonQuest.
Yet the same financial challenges that pushed me out of Sedona prevented me from landing in California…or anywhere. So I kept roaming, reminding myself that, as Tolkien put it, “not all who wander are lost.”
Then, on the morning of July 7, as I was setting out to drive from Gallup, New Mexico back to California, I was lured to Sedona by the promise of a few nights’ free accommodation.
Not unlike my 1997 experience, those few nights stretched into more than two months. Unlike in 1997, however, that’s about as far as they are going to stretch. In about ten days, synchronistically close to this anniversary of my first Sedona landfall, I will be moving on.
Before I share the why and where of this soon-to-be latest departure from Sedona, let me share what have I been doing through these, now, seventy-one days here.
For the first few, I was simply grateful to be off the road. On the evening of the fifth, however, in true Sedona fashion, something happened that changed everything.
I was staying with my daughter’s mom, and that night we were chatting about The MoonQuest. “Is it available as an audiobook?” she asked at one point.
It wasn’t. She insisted that it ought to be, with my narration.
Like Toshar in The MoonQuest, however, I was reluctant. Oh, I loved the idea of an audiobook. But I doubted that my narration could do it justice. “Let someone else do it,” I said, echoing Toshar. In the end, though, also like Toshar, I was talked into it.
The next day, we recorded a demo, and within seventy-two hours, I had secured both a recording studio and, miraculously, most of the funding to pay for it.
Clearly, I would have to stay in the area until all recording was complete. But where? I had run out of friends’ guest rooms. Sure, the audiobook funding would cover production costs. It wouldn’t, however, cover my accommodation.
Enter the next miracle: A free place to stay for the duration, with someone I hadn’t even known before I got back into town.
The original plan had been to do back-to-back recordings of the four Legend of Q’ntana books. But you know how plans go. I had barely begun recording The MoonQuest (a profound experience I’ll share another time) when the project mushroomed beyond anything I could have imagined. Sort of like The MoonQuest story did when it hijacked me nearly thirty years ago.
Suddenly, instead of simply releasing a series of audiobooks, I was producing new editions of all four Q’ntana novels and relaunching them…with the help of an LA-based PR agency that specializes in book promotion. The next miracle? Someone who loves my work kicked in the cost for the first month’s PR.
The new edition of The MoonQuest launches in paperback and ebook on my birthday, October 3. The audiobook follows on November 3. My website is handling paperback and audiobook preorders; online booksellers are handling ebook preorders. Both are available now,
Speaking of which, I’m hoping for there to be so many Kindle preorders that when I wake up on my birthday, it will rank as an Amazon bestseller! Talk about a great birthday present!!
As for The StarQuest, The SunQuest and The Bard of Bryn Doon, existing editions have been pulled from circulation and will relaunch at six-month intervals starting in the spring, also accompanied by audiobook versions.
Wednesday morning, barely twelve hours after I’d downloaded the final MoonQuest audiobook files, I learned that I would lose my Sedona accommodations before the end of the month. My host’s daughter and her family were, understandably, moving back to the Mainland from Maui and needed a place to land.
Sedona, it seemed, had kept me here just long enough to record the audiobook and launch my next Q’ntana journey with the new PR-supported editions. It was time to move on.
But where to?
The answer came to me before I’d even finished asking the question. “Home, to Southern California,” I heard. “To stay.”
I should have been stressed. After all, II was no more able to install myself in greater Los Angeles now than I had been nine months ago...at least not financially. To my surprise, though, my first reaction was excitement and exhilaration. I was going home. Finally!
I would be lying if I claimed to not have had moments of anxiety since. The most recent was at 3:30 yesterday morning. It was hours before I fell back asleep.
Yet even then, somewhere far beneath my debilitating fear, was the certainty that now is the time and LA is the place.
No, it makes no sense...on so many levels. And, no, I can’t begin to imagine how it will be possible.
At the same time, I have experienced more miracles (including housing miracles) through the decades than I could possibly list here. For that matter, I have experienced more during this Sedona sojourn than I could possibly list.
It’s stressful not to know how this next chapter is going to manifest, especially given how soon I must leave here, not to mention how on-the-edge I am financially. But if The MoonQuest is about anything — both the story and my experience writing it — it’s about radical trust. Come to think of it, all my books are about trust in some way, just has my life has been.
So that’s what I have to do — not only to get me to California but, this time, to land me there.
Back on July 26, I shared my sense that, somehow, I’d come to the end of my Yellow Brick Road. “I’m not sure I can identify the moment,” I wrote, “at least not yet. Perhaps it will be unmistakably clear in retrospect. Or perhaps there wasn’t a single moment. Maybe it has been more passageway than portal.”
It could be that I stepped into that passageway a month earlier when, driving up Mount Shasta, I felt my old life fall way (Day 147). Will I step out the other end of that passageway when, somehow, I land in California in the next weeks? Will that be the real end of this Yellow Brick Road journey?
Time will tell…as it always does.
Meantime, if you know of a furnished, pet-friendly studio or other situation coming up in the next weeks (or even of a Kyri-friendly housesitting gig), preferably in the Beverly Hills/West Hollywood/West LA area (it's not a dealbreaker if it isn’t), please drop me a line. Like everything else on this life’s journey of mine, whatever it is is certain be beyond anything my conscious mind could imagine. (I figure I’ll be able to pay rent if I have to, even if I don’t in this moment know how!)
And if you feel moved to contribute to my “landing,” my Yellow Brick Road GoFundMe campaign is still live. I also gratefully accept donations through PayPal, Zelle, Apple Pay and Facebook Messenger.
Photos: 1/ Sedona, on a recent hike, near where I’m staying. 2/ Kyri, on high alert in West Hollywood a few months ago.