The Story Knows Best
Day #547 – July 27, 2024
Sedona, AZ
As my 18th month with no fixed home draws to an end tonight, it’s hard not to wonder what this time of wandering has been about.
When I welcome people to my workshops, classes and coaching groups, I often invite them to reflect on the deeper reasons that brought them to the event. We all have conscious reasons for making the choices that we do. And more often than not, we assume them to be the only reasons.
Yet underlying those surface reasons are always reasons that our conscious minds cannot immediately identify. Those who attended my "Birth Your Book NOW!” workshop this morning, for example, likely signed up because they have a book to write, even if they’re not yet sure what that book is. That was their conscious reason, and it was a valid one.
But what if it something beneath their conscious awareness was the real driving force for their decision to sign up?
What if there was something they needed to hear, either from me or from one of their fellow participants, something that had nothing to do with their book? Maybe it was something that would take the book they thought they were writing in new directions. Or maybe it was something that would reveal an unanticipated topic or theme for an altogether different book, one they had not previously thought of writing.
When I drove out of Sedona 18 months ago, having gotten rid of most everything I owned and packed the rest into my Prius, my conscious reasoning had to do with the fact that my income, which had never recovered from the hit it took during covid, couldn’t cover pet-friendly housing in Sedona. At the same time, I assumed that some version of the miracles that had landed me in Sedona after a similar journey (the one I chronicle in Pilgrimage: A Fool’s Journey), would show up after a similar period of time, if not sooner.
My Pilgrimage journey spanned three months. I have now been on this one six times as long. And while I have experienced many miracles through that time, the ones I was hoping would "land" me have yet to materialize.
In my workshop this morning, I mentioned that one of my “rules” for birthing your book is to “be in the moment.” I also talked about concepts like allowing the writing to happen…like flowing on the current of creation… like trusting the story to unfold without having to know where it’s going or how it’s going to end… like abandoning control…like acting as though the story is smarter than we are…like surrendering to the higher wisdom of the stories that choose to write themselves through us.
I urged the group to see themselves as passengers in the vehicle of their creative experience, with the book in the driver’s seat. That is how I have written all 20+ of my books, and the results have been nothing short of astounding, far beyond anything my conscious imagination could ever have conjured up…or even thought it desired.
Wait. Isn’t that what I have been living these past 18 months? These past 33 years?
I could never have imagined, for example, being a writer. Hell, I never thought I wanted to be a writer. More accurately, I knew (or so I thought) that I did not want to be a writer. Not ever.
Today, writing is nearly as important to me as breathing.
Later, once I'd surrendered to that call, I had no conscious desire to write fantasy. Yet, somehow, my first book turned out to be a fantasy novel, The MoonQuest. Today, The Legend of Q’ntana fantasy series initiated by The MoonQuest feels like my most significant writing.
I could also never have imagined being a father. For gay men who came out in the mid-1970s, as I did, parenthood wasn’t an option. Yet, here I am, the father of an amazing young woman.
Proud Canadian that I had always been, it would never have occurred to my limited imagination that I would one day live in the United States, let alone become a citizen. Yet, this country has been my home for nearly half my adult life, and I will celebrate my sixth year as dual US-Canadian citizen in January.
Those are only the most dramatic of my life’s unimagined, unimaginable and, at least consciously, undesired turns. There are many, many more.
In the end, I write as I live and I live as I write: in surrender. That’s the only way I know how to move through the world with any degree of authenticity.
Given that, how can I wonder what this ongoing journey is all about? How can I question it? How can I doubt it? How can I do anything but trust in the superior wisdom, the infinite wisdom, of the journey?
I don’t know what happens next — in my life any more than in the book I’m in the midst of writing, a fifth Q’ntana story.
I don’t know whether I will stay in Sedona after my current housesitting gig ends or whether I will move on. Yet, I don't have to know, for no decision I must make today rests on that information.
I don’t know how I will continue to support myself, only that I will.
I don’t know when or how I will ultimately land in a more permanent home, let alone where that home will be. I only know that I will.
The only thing I know for certain is what Eulisha tells Toshar early in The MoonQuest, the same thing Pyrà tells Kamela in the opening scene of The Bard of Bryn Doon, soon-to-be rereleased fourth Q’ntana book: "There’s more to every story."
There’s more to my story as well. And all I can do is listen for it and follow where it takes me, in the ongoing act of surrender that is my life.
“There will be more acts of surrender after this one,” I write in my Acts of Surrender memoir. “There always are.
"Each one will push me harder than the last. Each one will nudge me closer to my essential truth. Each one will require a greater leap of faith. And through each, I will continue to trust in the story.
"Whether it’s the story I’m writing or the story I’m living, it always knows best.”
Photos: 1/ Kyri and I are housesitting in Sedona, until sometime in August. Beyond that...? As much as I'd love to know what happens next, I don't need to. Not today, at any rate. Today, I trust that when the time comes that I need to know – the where, the when...maybe even the how – I will. 2/ "I will celebrate my sixth year as a dual Canadian/US citizen in January." 3/ "I write as I live and I live as I write: in surrender."
