“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 bigger miracle, however, showed up a few days later: One of the people who listened to my DIY recording , someone I barely knew, offered me a generous seed money donation to get The MoonQuest audiobook project started at a local recording studios. My acting as though was making it so!”

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 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…

"When was the last time you told your story — honestly, vulnerably, courageously? Whether it was last night or last year, it’s time to do it again — for yourself and for all those fortunate enough to share in it."

When I woke on 11/11 wondering whether I had used up my lifetime quota of miracles, I recalled an 11/11 dream of a few years back that helped me when my faith was equally challenged. It helped again that day.

In classic tarot iconography, the Fool is always represented accompanied by a small dog. On the Fool’s Journey I embarked upon, reluctantly and fearfully, back in May 2019, that dog was Kyri. I had rescued him eight months earlier in Portland, but he would rescue me daily through the 93 days of that open-ended road odyssey.

It was a journey that would carry me more than 20,000 miles across half a continent and through 14 states.

Although I don't write "gay fiction," Bernie Freed and Erik Donnekin, major characters in all three of my "Sara Stories" novels are gay, and their stories, including Bernie's coming out, are integral to the plots of Sara's Year, After Sara's Year and The Emmeline Papers.

And although the following scene from Sara's Year didn't play out identically in my life, I did have a similar experience with a friend who, with good but misplaced intentions, tried to push me out of the closet by telling me that I was gay. He was right, of course, but it would take another year for me to get to the place I describe in yesterday’s Acts of Surrender excerpt.

It took all the courage I could muster at age 20 to call Gay Montreal and stammer "I-I think I'm gay" into the phone, then take the bus downtown and purposefully talk about it, face-to-face, with a gay man.