“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 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…

“The Fool does not hold himself to conventional expressions of probability or improbability. The Fool does not hold
herself to established definitions of possibility or impossibility. In the world of the Fool, everything is probable and all
is possible. There is no other way."

"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."

People are always commenting on my prolific creative output (20 books and five screenplays). But what you might not know is that I was a late bloomer. I didn't start writing my first book, "The MoonQuest," until I was 39, having spent many of the preceding years doing my best to avoid all things creative!

I had no choice: I would have to trust. Unconditionally. And I would have to reassure those fearful parts of me that I have always been taken care of. Even during those three harrowing months between Portland and Sedona, a 2019 journey I chronicle in Pilgrimage: A Fool’s Journey, I was never abandoned. There was always a miracle…then another…then another. I didn’t run out then. Why would I now?