I Believe in Miracles. Do You?
"The miracle has just begun / God bless us every one."
– Glen Ballard & Allan Silvestri, sung by Andre Bocelli
In 45 days or so, Kyri and I have to be out of the Sedona condo I have been renting for two years. In this tourist town where Airbnbs are multiplying unceasingly, there are practically no long-term rentals…at least none conventionally available through ads or listings.
If you followed my “pilgrimage” Facebook posts of two summers ago or have read Pilgrimage: A Fool’s Journey, my chronicle of that three-month odyssey, you’ll know of the many miracles that not only got me here but that have sustained me here. You’ll also know of all the ways that my intuition and what I call my “wisest self” pushed me to keep the faith through that emotionally harrowing journey.
Well, I find myself there again. This time, fortunately, a financial collapse isn’t pushing me out of town, as it did from Portland. But I am being pushed out of my home. And while this time I can afford to stay in town, it looks as though there’s nowhere in this town for me to go to.
“If you have read any of my nonfiction or attended any of my workshops,” I write in Pilgrimage, “you will know that I rarely make decisions based on logic or conventional wisdom (which may be conventional, but is rarely wise). Instead, I do my best to surrender to a higher wisdom.
“To be clear, that ‘higher wisdom’ does not derive from some white-bearded, white-robed gentleman commanding the universe from some celestial perch. It is, as I put it in Acts of Surrender: A Writer’s Memoir, ‘an infinite indwelling presence that is simultaneously my wisest aspect and the ineffable universality that is the sum of all that is.’”
That same higher wisdom that has guided me so effectively through most of my major life decisions over the years is now insisting that, against all logic and despite surface appearances, there is a new home waiting for me here in Sedona. Not just any home, but a home that requires no serious compromises in terms of look, size or location.
To be honest, it’s hard to trust that. It’s hard to dig beneath the surface impossibility to get to the real truth, which is that the greater vision and higher wisdom of my wisest self have never let me down, even when I was certain that disaster was imminent.
Why am I telling you this? Because I need to hear it. Because as the days fly off the calendar like in those old movies, I wake up most mornings in a panic, afraid to trust my intuition and reluctant to trust in miracles.
This morning, for example, as I tap this out on my phone in bed, Facebook’s various Sedona groups are filled with people experiencing similar difficulties. Why, I ask myself, even as I write this, would my housing crisis get resolved satisfactorily when so many others are not as fortunate?
I have no answer because there is none.
All I know is that the greater vision and higher wisdom of my wisest self didn’t let me down during the 93 days of mobile homelessness I write about in Pilgrimage. It didn’t let me down during my COVID-triggered financial meltdown less than a year after I got here. Nor did it let me down through the many years and crises that preceded those two chapters in my life.
Even if the directions I have intuited have often proven uncomfortable and the miracles that have shown up have rarely looked as I thought they should, and for all I feared I would be, I have never been abandoned.
Why would that change now?
Some friends online and off are urging me to give up on Sedona and look elsewhere. During my three months on the road, some of those same friends urged me to land somewhere, anywhere, get a job and just get on with my life. My fearful mind agreed with them then; it agrees with them now. In fact, because I’m human and doubt-filled, I regularly scan rental listings in neighboring communities and as far afield as Phoenix.
To be clear, I’m open to leaving. After all, I’ve left Sedona twice before; why not a third time? It may be simpler to stay, but I’m okay to go. I’m okay to leave Sedona, and I’m okay to leave Arizona. Yet every time I go within to check out a wide range of non-Sedona options (and I do it obsessively often!), be it in meditation or through a blend of intuitive “tuning in” and kinesthetic muscle-testing, the answer is unchanged: Sedona is in; everything else is out.
That could change, of course. If it does, I have to believe — no, I have to know — that a new direction will reveal itself.
For now, as all the protagonists in all my fiction must do, my only choice, if I’m to stay in my integrity and live what I write and teach, is to trust. It’s no accident that the following counsel has shown up in each of my Legend of Q’ntana fantasy novels: “You either trust or you do not. There is no halfway in between.”
There is no halfway in between.