Although I am posting this memoir-excerpt-as-tribute on World AIDS Day, it's important to remember that AIDS/HIV is with us 365 days a year...and not only in the West and not only in the LGBTQ community .

When at age twenty, a few months into my first job out of college, I announced that I was moving out, my mother announced that if I was going, my dog would have to go with me. Seven years of pee stains had been enough. She wanted her house back. (This story may appear to be unrelated to this Yellow Brick Road journey of mine. However, if you read through to the end, you'll see that it has everything to do with it!)

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.

A year later in rural Nova Scotia, on the anniversary of that Toronto class, I complete the first draft of my first book — a novel I never planned to write, a novel I knew nothing about except as I wrote it word-by-word: The MoonQuest.

“Even as I’m back where I started 179 days ago, I don’t sense that I’m here to stay. At the same time, it feels as though there was a moment during these past nineteen Sedona days when I arrived at the end of this Yellow Brick Road. I’m not sure I can identify the moment, 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 of a passageway than a portal…”

“The bigger miracle, however, showed up a few days later: One of the people who listened to my DIY recording , someone I barely knew, offered me a generous seed money donation to get The MoonQuest audiobook project started at a local recording studios. My acting as though was making it so!”

The problem with suspending public posts about my Yellow Brick Road journey, which I did back on June 21 (Day 144), is that it’s hard to know what to say to fill in the gap, other than that I’m still here and still traveling. 

I’m on the right track. Is there anything more I need to know? There may be plenty more I want to know. But there’s nothing more I need to know. 

My mother, who died thirty-nine years ago tomorrow, would never have understood this journey I’m on, nor much of the life I have lived since her passing. She would have worried incessantly for my well-being, as mothers do, yet she would never have tried to persuade me to change course.

I think parts of me can’t quite believe that I’m here, that I did it, that after all these years and despite the fact that I’m still floating, California is now my home state. Officially.

The road ahead for me is looking less like a simple, straightforward path and more like Dorothy’s yellow brick road: winding, indirect and not-exactly challenge-free.

The harvest moon is seen as a time to reap the fruits of our past efforts...a time of abundance in all its forms…a time of endings and new beginnings. As such, this 25th anniversary of the harvest moon that first brought me here feels like the perfect moment to let go of the Sedona season that has enriched me in so many ways and to fully embrace a new one. Where am I going, when and why? As the storyteller I am, the only way I can answer those questions is with a story…