Hello, Yellow Brick Road! – Day 167 – 2023-07-14 / Evening
Sedona, AZ
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.
The surface motivation for my radio silence may have been a series of toxic and unsupportive comments, but I realized within a few days that deeper reasons were at play. As the journey stretched out longer than I’d ever thought it would, my traveling-all-day/writing-into-the-night routine had become too exhausting, emotionally as well as physically. I didn’t realize just how exhausting until the pressure of my daily (sometimes, more than daily) posts was gone.
I quickly saw that I had been feeling more than the time pressure of getting the writing done and the emotional challenge of what I was writing. I had been feeling the challenge and pressure of journeying so publicly.
Yes, my 2019 Pilgrimage journey was entirely public, from days before I left Portland until the road dropped me in Sedona. And that writing was just as vulnerable and, often, just as raw. Rawer, perhaps.
But that journey lasted only ninety-four days. By the time I suspended this journey’s posts, I was on Day 144. And I needed, as I recognized only after I’d pulled back from posting, the kind of “me time” and “me space” that daily sharing wasn’t allowing.
For all I have been wandering the highways and byways of, now, eight states, this has been largely an inner journey. Once I stopped writing for public consumption and once I stopped posting that writing, I began to understand that what I was really doing was taking the journey back...taking it out of the public realm...making it private and more fully honoring its intensely personal and self-transformational nature.
From that place, I can’t say when or even if I will return to regular posting about these inner and outer travels. It could be tomorrow. It could be next week. It could be next month. Or it could be never.
I remain certain that a book will still emerge from this journey. I am even fairly certain that it will still carry the Hello, Yellow Brick Road! title and the existing cover. I’m not quite as certain, however, that the book will take the form I originally conceived for it. Why would it, when the journey itself isn’t taking the form I originally conceived for it?
So, where have I been and what have I done in the more than three weeks since my last post?
I returned, finally, to Mount Shasta, after having been repeatedly urged throughout this journey to avoid it. As I drove up the mountain last month, I had a profound experience of letting go...of ending, in effect, the chapter of my life that began there in September 1997. For it was at Mount Shasta that I first felt called to Sedona and to the many radical life changes I began to experience there.
I returned to Portland and released another layer and level of the grief I felt four years ago when circumstances forced me onto the Pilgrimage road.
And I returned to Sedona, not to stay, but for a kind of reset and reboot. Of this journey, certainly. Of my life, possibly.
Part of my Sedona reboot is a new project I’m undertaking, one I have been asked to take on (including by many of you!) for years. I am not ready to disclose any details just yet. But soon. Perhaps even in the next few days.
I have been staying with friends in the Sedona area since I got here last Friday. If a last-minute housesitting gig comes through for a local client, I’ll stick around for a few more weeks. Otherwise, at least as things now stand, I’ll be hitting the road again on Sunday for...well, I don’t yet know for where.
Meantime, the miracles continue to manifest, and, somehow, I am managing to continue the journey. Those miracles have included this Sedona sojourn, new coaching clients from unexpected sources and surprise book sales, as well as continued donations, for which I am particularly grateful, given my lack of public posts.
For now, wherever it takes me and however it gets me there, my journey along the Yellow Brick Road continues…
Photos: 1/ Kyri by the sea near Eureka, CA. 2/ The view from Mount Shasta, CA
As always, I continue to welcome all your support on this journey, however it shows up — from heartfelt cheerleading to book purchases, coaching sessions, workshop bookings and paying speaking gigs, as well as, of course, direct donations using any of the following…
Zelle (via my cellphone number)