All That Matters Is That I'm Telling This Story

"Every choice you have ever made, Toshar, has led to this moment. Your moment."
~ The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy (The Q'ntana Trilogy, Book I)

There's a chapter in Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir that chronicles a bleak period in my life. It was late 2008. My finances had crashed and I had taken a physically demanding, poorly paying job that would be unlikely to save me from losing both home and car. Then one day, in the midst of my panic and despair, I had an aha. I realized that none of those external circumstances mattered. All that mattered was The StarQuest, the MoonQuest sequel that I had launched and aborted twice during the previous decade. All that mattered was that I set my situation aside and recommit to the novel, which I did. I titled the memoir chapter "All That Matters Is That I’m Writing."

I thought about that chapter a few mornings ago during a meditative stroll through the Rio Grande bosque. I had felt the need to escape the relentlessly scrubby desert near my home and to surround myself instead with the leafy cottonwoods and willow thickets that fill out the riverbank. Perhaps the rustling trees would speak over my anxieties. Perhaps the rippling water would calm my fears.

God knows, I needed some fresh voices. Since agreeing to direct The Q'ntana Trilogy Movies last month, I had teetered between excitement and angst, exhilaration and terror. Part of me acknowledged the perfection in this new role -- both for the stories and for me. Another part, its buttons pushed multiple times a day, was shrouded in doubt and overwhelm. The emotional teeter-totter was dizzying!

As I ambled through the woods, those fresh voices spoke to me with the same unequivocal clarity they had done four years earlier. It wasn't about writing this time. I had written what needed writing: novel and screenplay versions of all three Q'ntana tales (The MoonQuest, The StarQuest and The SunQuest). In fact, I had completed all drafts of both versions of The StarQuest and The SunQuest in a frenzy of unprecedented -- for me -- creative output: through an 18-month period during which I also finished and e-published Acts of Surrender.

No. Writing wasn't the issue. But the story was. The Q'ntana story. "All that matters," I heard from a deep inner place, "is that you are telling this story."

A film director, I realized when I first contemplated taking on this new role, is also a storyteller. And as I wrote a few weeks ago in "Taking Storytelling to its Next Level," the Q'ntana story is a story that not only wants to be told by me in this as in its previous forms, but that is insisting it be told by me.

As has happened so often in my life, and as I relate repeatedly in Acts of Surrender, that Infinite Mind within me that is wiser than my conscious mind ever could be has made my next steps clear to me, and I have no choice but to surrender if I am to live from my heart...if I am to step up into my potential...if I am to be true to everything I write and teach.

"This is your story to tell," that inner voice continued, in an echo of the opening scene of The MoonQuest book and film. "Only yours to tell."

Arguing was futile.

"No one else has lived these stories as you have. No one else carries the vision for these stories that you do. No one else can bring these stories to life the way you can. No one else."

It didn't matter that I had never directed a film before. I had also never written a novel before tackling The MoonQuest. I would learn what I needed to learn. Others would help and support me. And everything I had ever done -- writing, teaching, coaching, inspirational speaking, art and photography -- had already prepared me for this moment, this opportunity.

"You already carry much of what you need within you. Can you trust that?"

Could I? Could I trust the intuitive knowingness that had always guided me so powerfully and rightly in the past?

"This is different," I said, knowing it wasn't.

"You either trust or you do not. There is no halfway in between." Those words had followed me relentlessly since I first penned them in The MoonQuest. They were still true.

As I continued on my walk, I wondered what the Q'ntana stories' theme was. Of course, I had written the stories, but I don't write to a theme. I allow a theme, as I do the story itself, to emerge organically through the writing. I had never contemplated an overarching theme for the trilogy. Now, though, as its director, it would be useful to be aware of one. A moment later, my inner voice spoke again: "When you acknowledge and move through your fear, you can accomplish great things -- for yourself and for others."

This was not only The Q'ntana Trilogy's theme, it was mine -- has been mine since a spiritual awakening two decades ago made me aware of the fears that, until then, had paralyzed me. Of course, this was my story, and not only because I had written it. And, of course, it was mine to tell...and would be until all the ways of telling it had been exhausted.

As I left river and bosque behind, I knew that, once again, nothing else mattered. In 2008, I had been called to surrender to my writerly self through The StarQuest. Now, only the Q'ntana story mattered. Only the Q'ntana film mattered.

Today, as I pen these words, I know that it cannot matter that, in some ways, my life is even more on the edge that it was four years ago. What matters is that I surrender to the story -- my story -- and that I free myself to grow into all that I can become through this new Q'ntana journey.

All that matters is that I am telling this story.

Photos by Mark David Gerson: Rio Grande Nature Center State Park, Albuquerque, NM. Q'ntana film posters by Richard Crookes.

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To the Other Side of Fear

There's a scene a third of the way through my novel The MoonQuest where the four principal characters discover the true nature of their quest. On the surface, Toshar, Yhoshi, Fynda and Garan are on a journey to restore storytelling to a land silenced by tyranny and, through that, light to a long-darkened moon. In reality, their true enemy is not a brutal king. It's fear.

"All Bo'Rá K'n's power emanates from a single source, from a single weapon: Your fear. Stay together, refuse your fear its power and your mastery will rival his..."  

Later in the story, Toshar asks the Dreamwalker Na'an whether he will always feel fear clutching at his throat.

"Just as fear has not stopped you from reaching this point in your journey, it will not stop you from continuing, unless you submit to it. Don’t submit to it, Toshar. When you do, Bo'Rá K'n grows stronger."

Both scenes have been much on my mind in recent days as I've come to see the many ways fear still dominates my life.

I shouldn't have been surprised. Fear permeates our social and political culture more than ever before. Just read any newspaper, listen to any newscast, or browse your Facebook or Google+ feed. Or follow the current Republican primary, which has taken political terror-mongering, already a slime sport, to a new, fear-based low.

Yet, I was surprised. Over the past two decades I've faced many of the Bo'Rà K'ns in my life and moved, as Toshar was guided, through to the other side of more fears than I can name.

“Feel your fear, Toshar. Then pass through it to the other side, where your destiny awaits.”

Today, thanks in part to my experiences writing The MoonQuest , I'm more fearless than I have ever been, and my destiny feels so near that I can graze my fingers against it, even if I can't yet grasp it.

At the same time, I'm closer to the edge than at any other time in my life. I gave up my rented condo 18 months ago and let my car go 14 months ago. My current bank balance, in the low three digits, isn't the lowest it's ever been. But when it has been lower, I've had a job or client or contract...or some prospect. I have none of those today.

Wait, that's my fear speaking...

What I do have in abundance is my faith...not in some bearded deity but in that infinite mind that resides within me, that force, as I put it in an earlier post, "that has a much clearer sense of what will serve and satisfy my deepest (often hidden) desires than the childish cravings of a limited mind ever could."

Over the past year and a half, that infinite mind has called on me to commit to my writing, and I have surrendered to the call -- fully, unconditionally and in ways I could never, in my past fear, have conceived.

The result? In 18 months, I've penned two drafts each of The StarQuest book and screenplay, two drafts of The SunQuest screenplay, one draft of The SunQuest book, and a first draft of my Acts of Surrender memoir. Never before have I written so quickly, nor have I ever been this creatively productive. To put that in perspective, it took me seven months to write a first draft of The MoonQuest and 11 years to complete an initial draft of The StarQuest. I wrote my first draft of The SunQuest book in three weeks.

As well, The Q'ntana Trilogy film projects (The MoonQuest, The StarQuest and The SunQuest), while not moving forward as expeditiously as I might like, are coming together more speedily now than they were before I surrendered to a full-time writing focus.

Through this time, although I have lacked home and car of my own, I have always had a roof over my head and access to a vehicle (important when the nearest shopping/public transit is an hour's walk away). And, somehow, funds have always shown up to cover the remaining necessities. For all those miracles, I have been grateful beyond words.

Then, a few days ago, with disturbingly dwindling resources and no sign of a fresh miracle, I determined that something needed to change -- dramatically and demonstrably. Not my commitment to writing, which remains of prime importance, but chunks of the rest of my life. February, I proclaimed, would be the month when my circumstances would begin to shift, when I would exit survival mode and begin my ascent toward prosperity.

That's when the fear kicked in.

It wasn't anything specific, like fear of success or financial anxiety. Ironically, I was less frightened by my few hundred dollars in the bank than I had been when my balance was triple that. No, it was more insidious and Bo'Rà K'n-like than that.

I didn't even initially identify it as fear. But fear it was. I knew it when I happened on the phrase "refuse your fear its power" from The MoonQuest. The instant I read that, my heart began to race and my stomach knotted up. When I reworded it more personally -- I refuse fear its power! -- my palpitations and queasiness worsened. And when I decided to speak it, mantra-like, in every moment of anxiety, I found myself repeating it, practically nonstop, all day long and amid a discordant medley of physical discomforts.

I'm still repeating it several days later, if somewhat less often.

I realize now that the moment I proclaimed February "dramatic change month," I set in motion all that would be required within me for that change to take place. What's required? That I drill down to the next levels of fears I have carried within me all my life...all my lifetimes, perhaps.

It's not about identifying individual fears and taking steps to reverse them. My individual fears are irrelevant. They are merely symptoms of fear's presence as a pervasive, overarching energy in my life. Of course, it's that same energy that dominates the world outside my psyche. But I can't dissolve it from my outer world unless and until I'm able to dissolve it from my inner world.

At other times in my life, just the prospect of tackling such a deeply rooted issue would have overwhelmed me, filled me with dread. That I'm now able to approach it with more equanimity is, itself, a measure of the distance I have traveled.

Equanimity, yes. Comfort? Hardly. It feels as though I'm (once again) experiencing a radical renovation and overhaul, from the inside out. If fear has been much of the glue that has held me together, letting that fear go is forcing me to make way for new inner structures, adhesives and foundations.

Like all transitions, this one is awkward, sometimes painful, often disturbing.

I'm the mountain lion in mid-leap from one cliff to the next, with no paws touching ground. I'm the Tarot Fool who has already stepped off the precipice into the unknown. I'm the version of me I once experienced in meditation, who has finally and reluctantly let go of the roof ledge of an old high-rise office structure, only to find himself floating feather-like into the arms of the Divine.

Where will the mountain lion and Tarot Fool find themselves when they land? Will February propel me any closer to my destiny? Come month's end, will I have been able to do more than graze destiny's edges with fingertips of yearning? Will my fortunes improve demonstrably through this exercise? I can't in this moment know.

What I do know is that fear is a sticky, swampy morass through which little can move. If I don't reclaim my power and deny Bo'Rà K'n his -- as Toshar did in The MoonQuest and as Q'nta and Ben must in The StarQuest and The SunQuest -- then fear will have won.

At the beginning of The MoonQuest, Na'an tells an elderly Toshar that unless he commits his story to parchment -- something he has spent his life resisting -- he will not be free to "move on to other realms, set off on other journeys." I have always seen Toshar's reluctance as an expression of stifled creativity, a clear theme in the book. Now, though, I see that his fear holds him back...just as mine has held me back.

I did not want to write this coda to Acts of Surrender, a manuscript I thought to be complete. As vulnerable as I have allowed myself to be in the book (and in this blog), I did not want go deeper in a public way with my fears. Like Toshar, though, I can't separate my fear, my self-expression and my place in the world. And so, like Toshar, I have surrendered to the story told to me by the shadows, my shadows.

I see it all now, in the leap of light against dark. The shadows will tell me the story and I will write what I see. I will write until my fingers and beard are black with ink. I will write until the story is told. Only then will I be free to continue my journey...

...Whatever that journey is, wherever it chooses to take me.

"You either trust or you do not. There is no halfway in between."

• Mark David reads an excerpt from The MoonQuest

All quotes are from The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy, (c) 2008 Mark David Gerson. Please credit both book and author when reprinting.


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Stuck in My Throat

"Na'an came to me in a dream this night. It was early. I had not been in bed long and the night was newly dark. 'It is time,' she said, 'time to fix The MoonQuest on parchment.'"

 ~ The MoonQuest: A True Fantas

yI've had a raw throat and stuffy head for nearly a week now. Through much of that time, I've done little other than sleep, guzzle gallons of water and honey-infused tea, and clear my throat.

"Oh," you might murmur with sympathy, "a summer cold."

I don't look at it that way. Whenever something physical goes out of whack for me (mercifully, not often), I spend at least as much time tuning in to what in my emotional life precipitated it as I do to self-care. My philosophy is that if I look after the underlying cause, the symptoms will largely take care of themselves.

When the throat-clearing kicked in, I knew that it was about my voice. Not my speaking voice (even as I grew hoarse and teetered on the edge of laryngitis). My writer's voice.

And when my throat got worse on Thursday, after Anvil Springs producer Kathleen Messmer and I spent the afternoon compiling ideas for directors and a principal cast for The MoonQuest movie, I knew it had something to do with the film project.

I was even clearer that evening, after we added a particularly illustrious director to the top of our list.

This isn't the first time we've assembled an A-list slate of actors and directors for the The MoonQuest movie. But something about this director pushed all my worthiness buttons. I spent the evening feeling intimidated by the prospect of not only working with someone of that caliber, but of having someone that, well, literate, read my screenplay.

This director has acted in and/or directed nearly three dozen films, and has won close to half of the four dozen awards he's been nominated for. As well, two of his Oscar nominations were for a film that, indirectly, helped propel The MoonQuest book to completion. He's also had an award-studded history on the stage.

I spent the next day letting myself feel my fear and discomfort, grudgingly grateful for the opportunity to work through yet another personal growth issue, one that had little to do with a potential director and everything to do with me.

During the many years when The MoonQuest book was nothing but a stack of manuscript pages languishing in a file box, I kept telling myself that regardless of whether it was ever published, the life lessons I'd learned while writing it had been valuable beyond measure.

It's true. Writing The MoonQuest the way I did -- moment-by-moment, word-by-word, with no idea where my Muse was taking me with the story -- prepared me for a life of ever-deepening surrender to my story, to the life story that has revealed itself to me in each moment through that infinite mind I wrote about here a while back.

It's also true that I had to tell myself that, or I would have been hard-pressed to feel good about all the time I'd invested in a project that, for too long, seemed to be going nowhere.

Similarly, I kept telling myself through the day Friday that, in the long run, my current journey was not about whether a particular director would sign on, or whether there would even ultimately be a MoonQuest movie. It was about what I'm learning and about all the ways I'm growing along the way.

This morning, still hoarse and laryngitic, my head still feeling as though it was jammed with mucus-soaked cotton balls, I wondered why I wasn't feeling any better. After all, I had identified the root cause of my physical discomfort and had committed myself to doing whatever it would take to move through and past my feelings of fear and unworthiness.

And then, while I was out walking, I had flash of Na'an's words to a reluctant Toshar in the prologue to The MoonQuest book: "It is your story to tell," she insists. "It is for you to fix it in ink, to set the truth down for all to read."

"So many seasons of storytelling and still I hesitate," Toshar replies. "Of all the stories to stick in my throat, how ironic that it should be The MoonQuest, a tale of the freeing of story itself."

When, in 1994, I began writing The MoonQuest, this "tale of the freeing of story," I was freeing my story. I was dissolving not only Toshar's reluctance, but mine. I was breaking through not only generations of repressed creativity in Toshar's heartland, but decades of creative block within myself.

As I've written here before, I don't like the expression "coming full circle" because it suggests that we're returning to a place we've already been, having learned nothing and grown not at all. My preferred image is that of a spiral, where we return to a place along the same axis, but at a higher level of consciousness and understanding.

As I wrote in The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, "Each cycle’s completion returns you not to where you began but to a higher level of awareness, mastery, openness and trust." I wrote that about the creative process, but isn't life the ultimate creative process?

Now, I realized on my morning walk, The MoonQuest is once again "stuck in my throat." Not in the same place it was stuck 17 years ago, when the Toshar in me tried to avoid telling his story. It can't be. I've moved through many turns of the spiral since then, turns that got the story written, the book out and the screenplay completed and on the cusp of production.

What's sticking in my throat now -- what's causing my hoarseness and loss of voice -- is the prospect of taking The MoonQuest to a new level: letting it be read by Oscar-nominated professionals and exposing it (and me) to audiences far greater than the book could ever reach.

Like Toshar, I'm scared. Like the Mark David who was creatively shut down for so many years, I'm afraid of being judged...and found wanting. Like so many creative artists through the millennia, I'm terrified that I'll finally be revealed as a fraud.

And so my story sticks in my throat, as parts of me try to protect other parts from the perceived danger of moving forward.

Years ago, in the early days of my conscious spiritual and creative awakening, before I know there was a MoonQuest inside me, I had a dream.

In the dream, I’m walking out of a multistory parking structure when the uniformed attendant steps out of his booth and stops me. He won’t let me leave. I shout. He shouts. I shove. He shoves.

I woke from the dream drenched in perspiration, more angry than frightened. Later that day, as I had done in the past, I took the dream-confrontation into meditation.

"Why won’t you let me leave," I ask the guard, politely this time.

"I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll be out of a job," he answers simply.

"I still need you," I offer reassuringly. "But I need you to act more as a filter than as a gate. I need you to protect me more discerningly."

"I don’t know how," he counters.

"Are you open to learning how?"

He pauses for a moment, his face screwed up in concentration.

"Yes." He nods. "I am." He stands aside to let me pass from the dank dark of this structure -- this place of parking, of storage, of non-motion -- but not before we’ve shaken hands and hugged.

Today's fear, today's self-judgment, today's stuckness in my throat -- they all come from the present-day equivalent of that dreamworld parking attendant, trying to protect the only way he knows how.

Today, once again, I ask him to be more discerning, to widen the weave on the screen of his filter, to not only let me move forward but to come along for the ride in his once-again redefined job. And as I do so, I feel the rawness in my throat abate somewhat and sense some of the stuckness of the past week begin to unstick.

The MoonQuest is once again on the move...and so am I.

"I see it all now, in the leap of light against dark. The shadows will tell me the story and I will write what I see. I will write until my fingers and beard are black with ink. I will write until the story is told.  Only then will I be free to continue my journey. ..."
 ~ The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy

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• Read the full prologue and first chapter of The MoonQuest

• Read another excerpt from The MoonQuest  book

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• Tune in to Insight for the Soul Radio, August 22 at 7pm PT, when Mark David talks to host Charmaine Lee about his MoonQuest journeys. Use the same link to download/listen to an archived version of the broadcast.

Photo: Nightmare parking structure by Mark David Gerson.

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The Myth of Writer's Block, or How to Get Writing & Keep Writing (Video)

You don't have to experience writer's block.

Ever.

You don't have to sweat over the blank page. You don't have to chew your pencil (or fingernails) to the nub. You don't have to wonder where the next word is coming from.

Writer's block is a myth -- not because you won't ever feel stuck but because there's no reason for you ever to stay stuck.



If the video doesn't appear above, or if you'd rather view it in HD, click here.

(If you're on my mailing list and seeing this in an email, click the image above, which links to my blog and the "The Myth of Writer's Block" video.)

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The Myth of Perfection

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one."
~ Elbert Hubbard


"Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it."
~ Salvador Dali


Are you frustrated?

Do you struggle to find the perfect words that consummately evoke the depth of your passion or flawlessly paint the fullness of your vision?

Are you frustrated because the words you have chosen seem inadequate, their ordering unsatisfactory?

You’re not alone. Many writers echo your frustration.

It’s a futile frustration, for language is an approximation. It’s a powerful but often inadequate device for translating experience and emotion into a form others can share.

When I originally wrote these words for an early draft of The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, the sun was sliding through a marbled Hawaii sky toward the Pacific, its light skipping across wind-rippled waters.

If I was successful in that description, you will have seen some version of an ocean sunset. Some version, but not mine.

It may approach mine. It may approximate mine. Yet my words, as expertly as I may have deployed them, cannot create a Kodak moment. (Even Kodak can’t create a perfect Kodak moment.) My words are more likely to create an Impressionist moment.

That's not a bad thing. It gives readers space to have their own experience, to paint their own pictures from the words you have freed from your pen.

Just as you can't control the words that flow from you, you can't control your reader’s experience of those words. Nor would you want to.

How often have you been disappointed by a film portrayal of your favorite literary character because your inner director cast the role more astutely than the movie director did?

Empower your readers to have their own experience and recognize that all you can do is translate your experience as heartfully as you’re able into little squiggles on a page. Begin by recognizing that most of the time you’re only going to come close. Continue by knowing that it remains within your power to have your words incite revolution, topple dynasties, overthrow "reality."

That’s perfect enough for me. How about you?

Can you let go your natural human perfectionism long enough to let your story tell itself to you on the page?

What are you waiting for? Pick up your pen. Describe what you see, what you feel, what you yearn for, what you love. Don’t try to be perfect.

Don’t try at all. Just allow. And know that from that place of surrender, you are creating perfection.

Adapted from The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, winner of an IPPY Silver Medal as one of the top writings books of the year.

Photos: Santa Monica sunset (c) 2010 Mark David Gerson. Image of Salvador Dali from the University of Buffalo's 2009 Anderson Gallery Dali exhibition.

Acts of Surrender 2: Radical Rebirth

Amazing the things a soul will sign up for just so it can become a writer and have a good story to tell.
~ Mark David Gerson

There's a scene in my novel The MoonQuest where a character who's been living for many years in the safe solitude of a desert oasis hears a voice on the wind that urges him to leave, despite the blinding sandstorm raging beyond the palm trees that ring his insular retreat.

“You must go," the wind insisted.

“Go where?" Kyri asked. "There is nowhere to go. I will die out there."

“Stay, and you are already dead," the wind replied.

I thought about that scene in the days after I returned from my last visit to Los Angeles. I thought about it because of something that happened during the trip and because of something that happened when I got back to Albuquerque.

The L.A. piece of the story occurred as I was walking from my hotel to a Hollywood Starbucks. The phone rang. It was my friend Joan.

"So how do you feel in L.A.?" she asked. "Do you feel joyful? Abundant? Do you feel prosperous?"

I didn't feel any one of those things.

But a single word kept popping into my head as she asked: "Alive."

"I feel alive," I replied.

I've described my planned move to Los Angeles in many ways over the months -- as a call to be answered, as a certainty that this was my right next place, as a surrender to an inner imperative. And while all these have been accurate and remain true, this was the first time I could link L.A. to my life...to life itself.

When I was there, I felt alive.

The Albuquerque piece was equally dramatic. A day after my return, my life here stopped working. No book sales. No new clients. No money coming in to meet even the smallest expenses. It was as though the well of miracles that had sustained me in Albuquerque had suddenly dried up.

I panicked. I grasped for solutions. I felt paralyzed, impotent, angry and scared.

After nearly a week of this, I realized that I felt dead. Not because the money had dried up. No, the money had dried up because I was dead.

Like Kyri in his oasis, my desert sanctuary had ceased to work for me. I knew I had to leave Albuquerque. But how?

"You have to give notice on your condo," my friend Sander insisted in his tough-love way when he called one Friday morning in the midst of my self-pitying despair.

I knew he was right, yet I couldn't see how I could take that particular leap of faith. How could I give up my rental when there was no money to move and no money to land? Hell, there wasn't even money to pay my Albuquerque bills.

Yet even as I argued and resisted, I knew deep inside that my resistance was futile. I knew in my heart that the only way to live was to leave. And the only way to leave was to leap off the highest cliff I'd ever encountered and trust that, as I always had been, I'd be supported.

Nearly 20 years ago, in the earliest months of my conscious spiritual awakening, I woke from a nightmare in which I'd been clinging to the roof ledge of an old-style office tower as an inner voice urged me to jump. I'd refused in the dream.

But in the days that followed, I took that dream image into meditation. In each of three sessions, I tried to let go of that old structure and failed. By the fourth, I was so uncomfortable and so annoyed with the process that I just did it. I unhooked my fingers from the stonework and fully expected to plummet down to the pavement in a messy splat.

Instead, I found myself floating gently, feather-like, until I landed in what I can only describe as the arms of God.

I wish I could say that I remembered that dream on the morning Sander called. I wish I could say that I surrendered joyfully and gracefully. Instead, I was childish, petulant and argumentative...paralyzed by fear.

When, in the moments after I hung up the phone, I recognized this as the pattern that had ruled too much of my early life, I knew I had no choice but to give my notice and step trustingly into the void -- as I'd done so often in the past, as the Fool does in just about every Tarot deck.

The moment I made the decision, even before I wrote and mailed the letter to my landlord, miracles started showing up. The most dramatic was a phone call from an online friend who knew about my L.A. plans but knew nothing of my current situation.

"I was driving to the gym," Adam said, "and I knew I had to call you. I don't know why."

During the course of our hour-long chat, we updated each other on our respective journeys. I said nothing about my perceived crisis, sharing only that I was moving to L.A. on faith -- with no sense of how I would either get there or live there.

"I've got plenty of space," he said. "Stay with me." He lives south of L.A. in Orange County. His street name? Spirit.

The next letting-go was my decision to treat L.A. as a radical rebirth, to sell or get rid of pretty much everything I own (for the sixth time in 16 years) and to step into my new life open, naked and ready for whatever new beginnings awaited me. As I had determined on my very first journey like this -- from Toronto to Nova Scotia in 1994 -- what couldn't fit in my vehicle would not make the journey. And as happened 16 years ago, someone has offered to store the few things I won't be able to fit in my car but that I need to keep (tax records) or choose to keep (journals, boxes of MoonQuests and Voice of the Muse books and CDs).

Two days after Adam's call, I had a visit from another online friend, this one clearly an ambassador from the City of Angels (his online sobriquet is Angel). The 24 hours of his angelic pampering took my mind off the move and its anxieties and, with no action on my part, sent me the most response to any of my Craig's List ads. Another set of miracles.

And the miracles have continued: unexpected gifts of cash, support and love; unexpected contacts and connections; unexpected validations and confirmations; and assorted serendipities, synchronicities and surprises.

I still can't tell you with absolute certainty why I'm moving to L.A. I could offer up myriad reasons to do with writing, coaching and teaching, or with the film business. I could talk about climbing down from the solitude of my mountain aerie to rejoin the world. I could say I miss the ocean, or that my daughter's mom is probably also moving there, which would give me easier access to a daughter I don't see nearly enough. I could say any of these things and they're all likely accurate.

But the deeper truth is that I'm moving to Los Angeles because I have no choice. I'm moving to L.A. because that's where I feel alive.

Even as fears and stresses continue to show up, I know with the deepest of certainties that this move heralds that radical rebirth I mentioned earlier, a rebirth into a wondrous life too amazing to imagine. All I can do in each moment is trust in that rebirth as I listen to the same spirit-wind Kyri heard and step into the unknown.

Barely aware of his actions, Kyri ... shouldered his way through the sand-filled air to the edge of the oasis, to an arch formed by two adjacent palms. Here, long before memory, he had passed into the oasis.

Spitting out the coarse grains that blew into his mouth, he stood uncertainly before this threshold. He turned back but saw nothing. Ahead, the palm arch grew fainter.

“Now," the palms moaned.

“Now," the sand rasped.

“Now," Kyri whispered, and stepped through the arch.”

1 • What can you do to feel more alive in your life?

2 • Where in your life is fear paralyzing you?

3 • Where in your writing or your life can you trust more fully? Where can you more fully allow faith to guide you?

4 • What challenging situations have you experienced that others could benefit from hearing about? Allow yourself to write about them from a place of openness, non-judgment and vulnerability. Allow yourself to write without censoring.

Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Journey of Faith, my memoir-in-progress.


• Hollywood photos by Mark David Gerson: Palm Reflections; Hollywood Sign; Hollywood Blvd Billboard; Old-Style Office Tower; Kermit welcomes me to L.A., Jim Henson Studios.

• Excerpts from The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy (LightLines Media)
(c) 2007 Mark David Gerson

• Image of The Fool card from Joseph Ernest Martin's Quest Tarot

Inspired Quote: On Perfectionism

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one."

~ Elbert Hubbard