I am still The MoonQuest story, just as I was that March evening in Toronto 30 years ago…the story of a bard who follows his heart and lets the tales that move through him reveal the way forward as he journeys on a quest to return story, imagination and vision to the land.

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.

Sedona has kept me here just long enough to launch two extraordinary (and unanticipated) projects. Now, it’s time to move on. But where?

“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 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…

Not for the first time, I'm finding it hard to dig beneath the surface impossibility of my current situation to get to the truth, which is that the intuitive vision of my wisest self has never let me down, even when disaster felt imminent. Why am I telling you this now? Because I need to hear it.