Mark David Gerson's Blog, page 24

Acts of Surrender 17: All That Matters Is That I'm Writing III

An excerpt from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress.

It's a Thursday afternoon. I'm sitting at Albuquerque's west-side Borders, writing on my screenplay of The StarQuest, sequel to The MoonQuest. Rather, I'm not writing. I'm wondering why the writing is so difficult.

Unlike my MoonQuest screenplay, which was adapted from a novel that was one draft shy of its final version and fairly easy to write, I'm working the StarQuest screenplay from a still-chaotic initial draft of the novel. That the movie version is bearing little resemblance to the book is stressful enough. But as I sit here staring at my computer screen, I begin to see my anxiety in an uncomfortably familiar light.

In March 1994, while facilitating a Toronto writing workshop, the initial threads of an as-yet unknown fantasy story began to find its way out of me and onto the page. It was exhilarating to watch this story unfold, word by word. It was gratifying to realize that the Muse Stream writing techniques I'd been teaching could produce a book-length story. And it was exciting to experience myself writing my first novel.

At the same time, the stress was nearly debilitating.

During those first weeks, I wrote only in bed, figuring that if I got up and launched my day, I'd never get to my still-untitled manuscript. I was on Marilyn and Harvey Diamond's "Fit for Life" diet back then, eating only fresh fruit before noon. As I sat up in bed writing longhand, I would scarf down bowl after overflowing bowl of fruit, negating all the diet's healthful benefits with my obsessive attempts to deaden my fear with food.

Within two months, I knew I would be leaving Toronto for rural Nova Scotia. By October, I had sold most everything I owned and trekked thirteen hundred miles to the Atlantic coast, with my few remaining possessions stuffed into the back of a '94 Dodge Caravan. I thought this was to be the start of a new life in a new part of the country. I thought Yarmouth County, across the Bay of Fundy from Maine at the province's southwest tip, would be my longterm, for-the-foreseeable-future home.

I thought many things in those early, naive days of my conscious spiritual journey. What I didn't think was that my radical upheaval and relocation had anything at all to do with The MoonQuest. Why would I, when I'd barely thought about my hundred manuscript pages since flying out to Nova Scotia in June for an exploratory visit.

Yet whatever else Nova Scotia was for me, it was clearly about a novel that was determined to have its way with me, free of all distractions. During my fourteen months in the province, I spent only two days in the big city (Halifax). The rest of the time, I was squirreled away in one rural outpost or another, writing. When my second MoonQuest draft was done, so was my time in Nova Scotia. I packed up the Caravan, said my goodbyes and headed back to Toronto.

Why the anxiety? And why did I need to shed my full urban life for one emptied largely of anything but writerly pursuits?

That first draft of The MoonQuest was an exercise in stripping away large measures of the control that had long ruled my life. Much about how I'd lived my first thirty-something years had been ordered, planned, controlled — designed, if unconsciously, to help me feel safe. The only major exceptions had been three extended and largely unplanned European rail-pass vacations taken in my late twenties.

By surrendering to a fictional story that would reveal itself ony in the moment (I had no outline for The MoonQuest and no sense where the story was taking me), I began to learn to surrender in much the same way to my story, the one that I was living. It was a powerful teaching and, control freak that I still was, a powerfully stressful one. Every day's writing challenged my status quo. Every day's writing was an assault on how I'd always moved through life. Every day's writing forced me to experience life moment-to-moment.

Every day's writing scared the shit out of me.

Beyond the control issues were deep-seated doubts about my creative abilities. A dozen years as a full-time freelance writer had proved I had some talent. But I wasn't sure that an aptitude for newspaper/magazine writing and copywriting could translate into a gift for storytelling. Hell, I wasn't even a very good joke-teller!

Somehow, though, I pushed through and past my terror. Somehow, I completed The MoonQuest, saw it through to publication and managed to win a bunch of awards for it. Somehow, I even managed to teach myself screenwriting and craft a film adaptation considered adept enough to attract producer interest and kudos from the director of a New Mexico film festival.

Clearly, I was launched and the next phase of my writing journey would be a cakewalk.

Not.

Not, because here I am, terrified by this StarQuest script for many of the same reasons The MoonQuest book so paralyzed me. Not, too, because I find myself, likely for similar reasons, in a variation of my Nova Scotia MoonQuest experience.

The parallels, I'm discovering in writing this, are eerily exact...

Once again, I seem poised for a genre change. In 1994, I was moving into creative writing from more commercial/journalistic pursuits. Today, I'm feeling as though my future is linked more to screenwriting than it is to prose. My experience with the Q'ntana Trilogy (MoonQuest/StarQuest/SunQuest) seems to back that up. If I crafted The MoonQuest script from a fully formed story and am creating its sequel from one in its nascent stages, I'm feeling called to write The SunQuest as an original screenplay. The SunQuest book would, strangely for me, come after the film version.

On top of that, the new project ideas that have come to me in recent weeks have all been for screenplays. Not one interests me as novel.

Sixteen years ago, with no experience or training to support what I was attempting, I doubted my abilities as a novelist. Today, with no experience or training to support what I'm now attempting, my doubts revolve around my screenwriting ability. Part of me can't believe I've got what it takes, can't believe that all I need to know — of story, craft and technique — I carry within and can access at will.

Ironically, everything I've ever succeeded at has been self-taught, and all my credentials have been expressed from within. And although grateful client testimonials, glowing book reviews and multiple awards for both my published books should prove to me both the brilliance of my higher wisdom and the effectiveness of my inner reliance, fearful aspects still try to take over when I sit down to work on The StarQuest. They scream, shout and cry from those deep-seated places of insecurity and low self-esteem that still lurk deep in my psyche.

Let me be clear about one thing: I'm not saying that today's fears and insecurities are identical to those of the past. That would suggest that I've experienced no growth since my MoonQuest days. Of course, I have. In countless ways, that was a different lifetime and I'm a different person. But as I've written here before, life's journey is a spiral — moving us into deeper and deeper levels of our emotional issues from higher and higher levels of consciousness and awareness.

My 1994 leap from one form of prose to another was nowhere near as dramatic as today's leap from prose to screenwriting. Also, what took me years to recognize around my MoonQuest experience has taken me only days to see and begin to process with The StarQuest screenplay.

Clearly, I've made progress. Clearly, I'm moving closer to the core of those issues today than I was able to do sixteen years ago. Clearly, I'm not done with them.

What about the Nova Scotia parallel?

Sixteen years ago, in order for me to access the emotional space that would free The MoonQuest onto the page, I needed to be moved into a focused, distraction-free environment where writing was my top priority. I needed to live the notion, however unconsciously, that The MoonQuest was the only thing that could matter. Rural Nova Scotia met those criteria.

Today, having surrendered to a soul imperative that places writing above all else (All That Matters Is That I'm Writing II), I find myself once again stripped of most of my belongings and many of the ways I've moved through the world. Once again, I've been placed in a setting where writing is my sole priority.

The western fringes of Albuquerque, where I'm now staying, may not be as remote as Yarmouth County. But my current situation carries certain unmistakable likenesses to that one, even if the specifics are different.

For one, having let go so much else, there's not much left for me to do but write. I'm also staying in a place fully supportive of my screenwriting pursuits, given that my current host during this house-less period in my life, is with K, the independent producer who wants to film the Q'ntana Trilogy. Suddenly, in ways it never has been before, the energy of a MoonQuest movie is front and center for me 24/7. That K also happens to be an accomplished photographer is an added bonus, given that photography is another of my passions.

Many of the few distractions I still have may vanish next month when I will likely lose my car and, with it, a chunk of my mobility. (The nearest bus stop is a fifty-minute walk away, so public transit is not a viable option.) When that inevitability became clear a few days ago, I was distraught — less over the loss of the car itself and more because I feared I would be stranded.

Then I thought about Nova Scotia, about how I'd been sent to a place where the only thing to do was write. And I wrote. In spite of my fears and insecurities, I wrote. And what I produced was pretty damn good!

Yes, I had a car. But there weren't that many places to go with it and I didn't use it for much beyond basic errands.

Now, for a time, I may have no car — not as some sort of punishment but to keep me focused and distraction-free, to keep me writing what I need to write, whatever I may think in the moment about the quality of what I'm producing. And like Nova Scotia turned out to be, this is not a longterm, for-the-foreseeable-future situation. It's a brief stop that I will move through and ultimately thrive from.

When I first noticed the parallels between 1994 and today, I spent a few days fearing that I'd made no progress in my creative, spiritual and emotional life over the past decade and a half. Then I remembered the spiral. And then I saw the similarity as the gift that it was, a gift that will fortify my when I return to work on the screenplay in the next days, a gift that will remind me that, truly, all that matters is that I'm writing.

A postscript: Within hours of surrendering to the higher purpose in the likely loss of my car, K let me know that I would be able to use her car. Suddenly, my openness had created an opening. Suddenly, the constriction had eased. And once again, my needs were being met as I focused on what was most important: my writing.

Photos (c) 2010 Mark David Gerson.
All photos are of Albuquerque, NM.
Click here for more of Mark David's photos.
Prints of Mark David's photos will soon be available for sale.

Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Recent excerpts:
• October 1
• October 5
• October 6
• October 20
• October 23
• October 29

Acts of Surrender 17: All That Matters Is That I'm Writing (III)

An excerpt from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress.

It's a Thursday afternoon. I'm sitting at Albuquerque's west-side Borders, writing on my screenplay of The StarQuest, sequel to The MoonQuest. Rather, I'm not writing. I'm wondering why the writing is so difficult.

Unlike my MoonQuest screenplay, which was adapted from a novel that was one draft shy of its final version and fairly easy to write, I'm working the StarQuest screenplay from a still-chaotic initial draft of the novel. That the movie version is bearing little resemblance to the book is stressful enough. But as I sit here staring at my computer screen, I begin to see my anxiety in an uncomfortably familiar light.

In March 1994, while facilitating a Toronto writing workshop, the initial threads of an as-yet unknown fantasy story began to find its way out of me and onto the page. It was exhilarating to watch this story unfold, word by word. It was gratifying to realize that the Muse Stream writing techniques I'd been teaching could produce a book-length story. And it was exciting to experience myself writing my first novel.

At the same time, the stress was nearly debilitating.

During those first weeks, I wrote only in bed, figuring that if I got up and launched my day, I'd never get to my still-untitled manuscript. I was on Marilyn and Harvey Diamond's "Fit for Life" diet back then, eating only fresh fruit before noon. As I sat up in bed writing longhand, I would scarf down bowl after overflowing bowl of fruit, negating all the diet's healthful benefits with my obsessive attempts to deaden my fear with food.

Within two months, I knew I would be leaving Toronto for rural Nova Scotia. By October, I had sold most everything I owned and trekked thirteen hundred miles to the Atlantic coast, with my few remaining possessions stuffed into the back of a '94 Dodge Caravan. I thought this was to be the start of a new life in a new part of the country. I thought Yarmouth County, across the Bay of Fundy from Maine at the province's southwest tip, would be my longterm, for-the-foreseeable-future home.

I thought many things in those early, naive days of my conscious spiritual journey. What I didn't think was that my radical upheaval and relocation had anything at all to do with The MoonQuest. Why would I, when I'd barely thought about my hundred manuscript pages since flying out to Nova Scotia in June for an exploratory visit.

Yet whatever else Nova Scotia was for me, it was clearly about a novel that was determined to have its way with me, free of all distractions. During my fourteen months in the province, I spent only two days in the big city (Halifax). The rest of the time, I was squirreled away in one rural outpost or another, writing. When my second MoonQuest draft was done, so was my time in Nova Scotia. I packed up the Caravan, said my goodbyes and headed back to Toronto.

Why the anxiety? And why did I need to shed my full urban life for one emptied largely of anything but writerly pursuits?

That first draft of The MoonQuest was an exercise in stripping away large measures of the control that had long ruled my life. Much about how I'd lived my first thirty-something years had been ordered, planned, controlled — designed, if unconsciously, to help me feel safe. The only major exceptions had been three extended and largely unplanned European rail-pass vacations taken in my late twenties.

By surrendering to a fictional story that would reveal itself ony in the moment (I had no outline for The MoonQuest and no sense where the story was taking me), I began to learn to surrender in much the same way to my story, the one that I was living. It was a powerful teaching and, control freak that I still was, a powerfully stressful one. Every day's writing challenged my status quo. Every day's writing was an assault on how I'd always moved through life. Every day's writing forced me to experience life moment-to-moment.

Every day's writing scared the shit out of me.

Beyond the control issues were deep-seated doubts about my creative abilities. A dozen years as a full-time freelance writer had proved I had some talent. But I wasn't sure that an aptitude for newspaper/magazine writing and copywriting could translate into a gift for storytelling. Hell, I wasn't even a very good joke-teller!

Somehow, though, I pushed through and past my terror. Somehow, I completed The MoonQuest, saw it through to publication and managed to win a bunch of awards for it. Somehow, I even managed to teach myself screenwriting and craft a film adaptation considered adept enough to attract producer interest and kudos from the director of a New Mexico film festival.

Clearly, I was launched and the next phase of my writing journey would be a cakewalk.

Not.

Not, because here I am, terrified by this StarQuest script for many of the same reasons The MoonQuest book so paralyzed me. Not, too, because I find myself, likely for similar reasons, in a variation of my Nova Scotia MoonQuest experience.


The parallels, I'm discovering in writing this, are eerily exact...

Once again, I seem poised for a genre change. In 1994, I was moving into creative writing from more commercial/journalistic pursuits. Today, I'm feeling as though my future is linked more to screenwriting than it is to prose. My experience with the Q'ntana Trilogy (MoonQuest/StarQuest/SunQuest) seems to back that up. If I crafted The MoonQuest script from a fully formed story and am creating its sequel from one in its nascent stages, I'm feeling called to write The SunQuest as an original screenplay. The SunQuest book would, strangely for me, come after the film version.

On top of that, the new project ideas that have come to me in recent weeks have all been for screenplays. Not one interests me as novel.

Sixteen years ago, with no experience or training to support what I was attempting, I doubted my abilities as a novelist. Today, with no experience or training to support what I'm now attempting, my doubts revolve around my screenwriting ability. Part of me can't believe I've got what it takes, can't believe that all I need to know — of story, craft and technique — I carry within and can access at will.

Ironically, everything I've ever succeeded at has been self-taught, and all my credentials have been expressed from within. And although grateful client testimonials, glowing book reviews and multiple awards for both my published books should prove to me both the brilliance of my higher wisdom and the effectiveness of my inner reliance, fearful aspects still try to take over when I sit down to work on The StarQuest. They scream, shout and cry from those deep-seated places of insecurity and low self-esteem that still lurk deep in my psyche.

Let me be clear about one thing: I'm not saying that today's fears and insecurities are identical to those of the past. That would suggest that I've experienced no growth since my MoonQuest days. Of course, I have. In countless ways, that was a different lifetime and I'm a different person. But as I've written here before, life's journey is a spiral — moving us into deeper and deeper levels of our emotional issues from higher and higher levels of consciousness and awareness.

My 1994 leap from one form of prose to another was nowhere near as dramatic as today's leap from prose to screenwriting. Also, what took me years to recognize around my MoonQuest experience has taken me only days to see and begin to process with The StarQuest screenplay.

Clearly, I've made progress. Clearly, I'm moving closer to the core of those issues today than I was able to do sixteen years ago. Clearly, I'm not done with them.

What about the Nova Scotia parallel?

Sixteen years ago, in order for me to access the emotional space that would free The MoonQuest onto the page, I needed to be moved into a focused, distraction-free environment where writing was my top priority. I needed to live the notion, however unconsciously, that The MoonQuest was the only thing that could matter. Rural Nova Scotia met those criteria.

Today, having surrendered to a soul imperative that places writing above all else (All That Matters Is That I'm Writing II), I find myself once again stripped of most of my belongings and many of the ways I've moved through the world. Once again, I've been placed in a setting where writing is my sole priority.

The western fringes of Albuquerque, where I'm now staying, may not be as remote as Yarmouth County. But my current situation carries certain unmistakable likenesses to that one, even if the specifics are different.

For one, having let go so much else, there's not much left for me to do but write. I'm also staying in a place fully supportive of my screenwriting pursuits, given that my current host during this house-less period in my life, is with K, the independent producer who wants to film the Q'ntana Trilogy. Suddenly, in ways it never has been before, the energy of a MoonQuest movie is front and center for me 24/7. That K also happens to be an accomplished photographer is an added bonus, given that photography is another of my passions.

Many of the few distractions I still have may vanish next month when I will likely lose my car and, with it, a chunk of my mobility. (The nearest bus stop is a fifty-minute walk away, so public transit is not a viable option.) When that inevitability became clear a few days ago, I was distraught — less over the loss of the car itself and more because I feared I would be stranded.

Then I thought about Nova Scotia, about how I'd been sent to a place where the only thing to do was write. And I wrote. In spite of my fears and insecurities, I wrote. And what I produced was pretty damn good!

Yes, I had a car. But there weren't that many places to go with it and I didn't use it for much beyond basic errands.

Now, for a time, I may have no car — not as some sort of punishment but to keep me focused and distraction-free, to keep me writing what I need to write, whatever I may think in the moment about the quality of what I'm producing. And like Nova Scotia turned out to be, this is not a longterm, for-the-foreseeable-future situation. It's a brief stop that I will move through and ultimately thrive from.

When I first noticed the parallels between 1994 and today, I spent a few days fearing that if I'd made no progress in my creative, spiritual and emotional life over the past decade and a half. Then I remembered the spiral. And then I saw the similarity as the gift that it was, a gift that will fortify my when I return to work on the screenplay in the next days, a gift that will remind me that, truly, all that matters is that I'm writing.

A postscript: Within hours of surrendering to the higher purpose in the likely loss of my car, K let me know that I would be able to use her car. Suddenly, my openness had created an opening. Suddenly, the constriction had eased. And once again, my needs were being met as I focused on what was most important: my writing.

Photos (c) 2010 Mark David Gerson.
All photos are of Albuquerque, NM.
Click here for more of Mark David's photos. Prints of Mark David's photos will soon be available for sale.

Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Recent excerpts:
• October 1
• October 5
• October 6
• October 20
• October 23
• October 29

Dare to Feel. Dare to Connect

"Go to the emotional epicenter, where it hurts most, and write on. If you dare."
~ Bill Donovan, editor/publisher, Creative Screenwriting

"Only connect."
~ E.M. Forster

The call to write is a call to share our emotional depth with others. It's a call to be vulnerable. It's a call to connect.

Thing is, we don't touch others at a deep level when we connect mind-to-mind, though that connection is a powerful and important one. We touch others at a deep level when we connect heart-to-heart.

Unless we write from our deepest heart, unless we tell the stories that move us, we will never move our readers.

I spent the first chunk of my writing career avoiding writing from what Bill Donovan calls the "emotional eipcenter." I observed and reported, intellectually and dispassionately. I told stories, but without heart.

In not revealing my feelings (at times, not even to myself), I failed to engage my readers in any but superficial ways. I failed them and I failed myself.

I didn't connect.

Do you want to write truth, the truth from which both powerful fiction and nonfiction arise? If you want to write truth, if you want to write words that will touch the deepest emotions and connections and truths of your reader, then you must write what your heart calls on you to write. You must go where you've never dared go before -- in your writing, certainly; in your life, perhaps.

You must, as I write in The Voice of the Muse's "Thirteen Rules for Writing," go for the jugular, for your jugular: "Go for the demon you would run from. Go for the feeling you would flee from. Go for that emotion you would deny. Once you put it on paper, you strip it of its power over you. Once you put it on paper, you free it to empower your work."

You free it, as well, to empower your readers. You empower them to feel their emotions, to be vulnerable and to share their stories.

"We tell our stories in order to live," Joan Didion writes in The White Album

We tell our stories, too, to connect.

There is neither life nor connection outside the heart.

• Where are you refusing to be vulnerable in your writing?

• Where are you afraid to reveal your feelings, perhaps even to yourself?

• In what ways are you reluctant to connect, heart-to-heart, with your readers?

• Where, right now, can you go for the jugular -- your jugular -- and dare to write from your emotional epicenter?


Adapted from >The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write.

Part of answering the call to write and birthing the book that's inside you involves tapping into that emotional epicenter. That's some of the work I do as a writing/creativity/life coach. Need help getting there? Drop me a line.


Photo by Mark David Gerson: Autumn by the Tesuque River, Tesuque, NM

Acts of Surrender 16: Past the Point of No Return

An excerpt from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress.

Mornings have never been my best time. I take that back. It's not mornings. It's reentry. I've never been one of those people who leaps out of bed and into the day, eager for action. Whatever realm I gambol in during sleep time must be idyllic, because I nearly always wake up reluctant to reengage with the world. It doesn't matter whether it's a night's sleep or an afternoon nap. That instant of conscious awareness is rarely filled with enthusiasm for what lies ahead.

This isn't a recent pattern, but it's one that seems increasingly exaggerated as I move through whatever journey I'm now traveling. These days, in fact, dread is a regular waking companion. More often than not, I lie in bed wondering how long I can sustain a stripping-away process that is more radical — and radically uncomfortable — than anything I have ever experienced. The stripping away is both material and emotional. So is the discomfort.

The loving generosity of friends has kept a series of roofs over my head since I left Albuquerque in August thinking I was moving to L.A. Now I'm back in New Mexico, uncertain what home even means anymore, let alone what mine might be. I've moved past the financial triage of which bills I can pay to the place where food, gas, cellphone and car insurance are my sole considerations. Soon, there may not even be a car to insure.

I've said I'd be okay if I were to lose the car, but I'm not sure that's true. On my walk this morning, I witnessed what looked like a repo and felt a lead ball drop into the pit of my stomach.

"How far from that scene am I?" I wondered.

Car aside, it's hard to know what there is of any emotional or material substance left to let go of. Yet there must be something. Through much of my life, two of my most enduring physical complaints have been related to some form of clinging: constipation/gas and chronic sinus congestion. Even during periods when I have willingly shed patterns and possessions and have leapt off cliffs, tarot Fool-like, into the unknown, there's always a physical reminder that there's still some clinging going on.

Often it's mild. Since yesterday, it's been uncomfortably present.

(Sinus issues, like all immunity-based ailments, can also relate to a profound reluctance to be embodied in the world. When we perceive the world to be a dangerous place, our immune system goes into overdrive to try to protect us. Those "protections" can be somewhat benign, like my overproduction of mucus, or deadly, like cancer.)

"Walk the earth naked, clothed only in your truth." It's been a motto of sorts since the phrase first emerged 13 years ago in my Dialogues with the Divine manuscript. Is that where I'm headed, I wondered this morning. Literally?

Am I truly prepared to go that place where it's just me and my truth? Just me and my writing?

Am I truly prepared to give up everything?

Recently, I wrote that "I'll either go splat or I'll survive the fall." To some of you reading this, I already went splat a while back and am now just writhing around on the pavement.

This morning, still in bed, I wondered whether that might be true.

Have I walked away from everything, and done it for nothing? Has this been some sort of spiritually delusional exercise in futility? Is there a way back? Or a way out?

As I wrote those words just now, the song "Past the Point of No Return" from The Phantom of the Opera began playing in my head.
Past the point of no return, no backward glances
The games we played 'til now are at an end ...
Past the point of no return, the final threshold
The bridge is crossed, so stand and watch it burn
We've passed the point of no return.
There is no going back. I can't return to the life I left any more than I can step back into a past life I may have died out of centuries ago. Nor can I try to recreate some new version of what I've come from.

I'm not sure there's a way out, either. For all my suicidal fantasies, I'm reminded of an experience my friend Karen Weaver once shared with me. During a particularly rough period in her life, and she's had many, she declared hopelessly, "I'm throwing in the towel." In her mind's eye, she saw a towel being thrown back at her.

For all my human anxiety about a relentless journey that feels more extreme in each moment, there's clearly a higher part of me that's determined to see this one through. One night, a few weeks back, I woke up every few hours with this John Denver lyric playing in my head:

I want to live, I want to grow
I want to see, I want to know
I want to share what I can give
I want to be, I want to live
Those life-affirming words show up again and again for me, whenever I'm at my most despairing. They showed up again this morning.

Yesterday, I was privileged to sit in on a rehearsal of Sugartime, an all-women singing group that my friend and current host, Karen Walker, is part of. As Sugartime performs most at hospitals and seniors' residences, its repertoire is largely upbeat and always life-affirming. One of Karen's solos was "What a Wonderful World." The song has never made me cry before. Yesterday it did. And this morning, in the midst of my fearful anxiety, it showed up again, playing in my head moments after the John Denver refrain.

As for moving forward, all I can do, as the Osho Tarot kept reminding me while I was in Santa Fe earlier this week, is stay in the moment, moment-to-moment.

So what is it I'm still clinging to?

Last night I had a dream that I was in the supermarket that anchored the Montreal strip mall near where I grew up. As I stepped inside the store, Pauline Vanier, wife of Canada's 19th Governor General, stepped out of her attached apartment to join me. Together, we mourned the radical renovation soon to be undertaken on both the store and the shopping center. For Mme. Vanier, it would be the end of her tenure. For me, it would be the end of my childhood and of my past. For both of us, it would be a sort of death.

(If the Queen is Canada's head of state, the Governor General is her representative in Canada, acting on her behalf when, as is mostly the case, she's not in the country. Pauline Vanier died in 1991.)

I can't say specifically what piece of my past I'm still clinging to. Nor can I say what piece of the "old established order" (Mme. Vanier) is still in my life. What I see from the dream, though, is that they're on their way out, that it's healthy to grieve them and that, whatever they are, I must let them go.

On a larger scale, what I appear to be doing is following Christ's dictum to live in but not of the world. To use a more recent metaphor, I'm unplugging from the matrix, while continuing to engage with it, but on my terms.

I've let go many of the trappings of the outer world, including many aspects of the codependent, marginally abusive relationship I've had with creditors and official agencies. Because they hold the power of consequences over me, I have related to them from a place of fear-based self-preservation. Put another way, as I've mentioned here before, I've now declared myself sovereign — not above the law, but no longer under it.

Think of a European church that's built on the foundations of other churches, which, themselves, were built on the foundations of pagan or Roman temples. Every time I dig down to what I believe to be the foundation stones of my life, I discover earlier structures beneath them...and earlier structures beneath those, as well.

All those structures, like all the social structures we live under, have been based on fear. All of them. Fear of pain. Fear of loss. Fear of judgment. Fear of death.

What am I still clinging to? Whatever shreds of those structures still rule my life. Whatever shreds of those structures still give me the illusion of security. Whatever shreds of those structures still insist on their supremacy and significance.

What am I still clinging to? A reality that appears real but is anything but.

What must I let go of? Any and all shreds of fear, worry and anxiety. Any and all shreds of a world built on those same principles. Any and all shreds of life beyond this moment.

One of the reasons writing remains so important to me is that it helps makes sense of my world and of my feelings. Writing, as I've pointed out in coaching sessions, in workshops and in The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, is not about regurgitating what I know (that hoary "write what you know" diktat). It's about discovering what I know. Better put, it's about rediscovering what I know at deeper levels but haven't been able to access or remember consciously. Through this writing, for example, I've gained a clearer understanding of why I felt the way I did this morning: Deeper and deeper levels of who I've been and how I've related to the world are being radically renovated. For better or for worse, the work isn't done yet.

What else will fall away? I don't know.

I can't promise I won't be anxious about it. Or fearful. I can't guarantee that tomorrow's exit from sleep time will be any easier than today's. All I can know is that the only direction is forward or, as demonstrated in another of last night's dreams, upward.

In the dream, I've been scaling a cliff. When I reach the summit, which feels like the top of the world, a sleek, sparklingly shiny new car is waiting for me: the new vehicle of my beingness.

Tesuque River and butterfly photos by Mark David Gerson.

Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Recent excerpts:
• October 1
• October 5
• October 6
• October 20
• October 23

Acts of Surrender 15: Declarations of Independence

I've been revisiting many things in recent days. One of them is my relationship with my email list. While I won't be sending every blog post out to my list, I will send selected pieces...including this one. One thing I won't be doing, though, is manually updating the list. So if your address changes, please resubscribe with the new address.

Every time I think I'm done, for now, with Acts of Surrender, my memoir-in-progress, an other installment shows up. Here's the most recent...
penned two declarations of independence last week: one to my ex-wife and one to the world.

"I will never stop loving you or Guinevere," I wrote Aalia after an emotionally charged phone call on Tuesday. "But I can only express that love genuinely by loving myself and by honoring what I know in my heart to be true, regardless of fallout or consequences."

Six years almost to the day after Aalia had left me, I finally left her.

To the world, I wrote: "[I'm] digging deeper and deeper and deeper to identify the life that's worth living, the life that expresses my soul's deepest yearning. And I'm saying that I'm no longer prepared to let fear pull me from its pursuit, as I have over the years, despite the great strides I know I've made. Nor am I prepared to let anyone or anything outside of me pull me from that pursuit, regardless of the consequences."

IThese were more than declarations. They were personal manifestos: empowered expressions of who I have become and of how I see myself moving through life. And if I felt omnipotent sending them out into the world, I spent the next days drowning in a backwash of anxiety.

What had I done? By declaring myself sovereign, I had risked alienating my family and had stripped myself of a lifetime of structures and foundations. Suddenly, I was grounded but rootless, detached from an old life, yet with no clear sign of the new one. It felt as though I had passed through a door that had slammed shut behind me. There could be no take-back. I was scared.

What if I lost everything? What if the other side of nothing was more nothing? What if nature actually adores not abhors a vacuum? Was I really ready to give up everything for writing, for my passion?

Was I insane?

One of the dictionary definitions of "insanity" is "extreme foolishness or irrationality." By that definition, perhaps I was insane.

Long ago I chose to live as The Fool does in the tarot — always stepping off the cliff on a faith-filled journey of infinite possibility. Longer ago still, I subscribed to the one newspaper horoscope I've ever read that transcended the trivial. It urged Librans to "follow your heart and lose your mind."

"Is it crazier to choose to be poor or to spend forty years of your life hating forty hours a week?" I came across that question last week on a social network. When I saw how many respondents chose poverty, I did the math: Four decades of forty-hour weeks equals 83,200 hours, or nearly a decade. For anyone living eighty years, that's one-eighth of a life spent hating that life. That's got to be crazy!

Or am I still the one that's crazy?

When I got to Santa Fe on Friday, I hadn't decided. All I knew was that I felt more hopeless, helpless and despairing than I'd felt in over a decade. A world that would choose spiritual poverty over passion made no sense to me. Nor did a world built on an illusion of security, a world where fear trumped everything. Funny, I thought, how the word "conventional" begins with the word "convent," a closed community where innovation is discouraged and conformity is enforced, well, religiously.

When Christ spoke of living in but not of the world, he couldn't have been calling on us to exchange one brand of conventional wisdom for another. To my mind, he was urging us to see the conventional for the prison that it was and to step out of that controlled, falsely secure environment into the chaos of freedom and creativity, into the sovereignty that is the Kingdom of Heaven within.

On Friday, the Kingdom of Heaven was looking pretty hellish.

When I got to my friend Shoshana's, where I would be spending the weekend, I wondered if I'd ever get to the other side of this rebirthing process.

"You're already on the other side of it," she said. "You've never been so yourself."

In the days after Aalia left me in November 2004, when I was feeling the shittiest I had ever felt, everyone I ran into kept telling me how great I looked. It was true. Despite the emotional earthquake, I had shed, with the marriage, more baggage than I even knew I'd been carrying. When I looked in the mirror on Friday at Shoshana's, I was startled. I couldn't remember the last time I'd looked this clear...and this young.

I was clear. With my "declarations of independence," I had unburdened myself of levels and layers of accreted emotional sludge. And I had done it. It hadn't been done to me.

"Now that you're this clear," Shoshana continued, "have you considered re-starting your coaching practice? You're an incredible coach, and therapist."

I started to argue that I had so committed to my writing that I couldn't go back to a place where writing had to fit itself in the available cracks and crevices of a my life.

She shook her head. "You don't get it. You've already declared your commitment. Your passion comes first. Your creativity comes first. It never won't again. Who you are now will never let that happen again."

She watched me as I let her words sink in. She was right. I was basing my attitude toward coaching on who I had been, not on who I now was.

"Can you make space to allow coaching back into your life?"

Could I?

"The new level of commitment you've come to would give your coaching practice a whole new depth."

She was right. I'd written The MoonQuest under duress. It was a story I knew I had to let out of me, but the level of surrender it required was so foreign that it had been a painful, stress-filled experience. After two false starts on The StarQuest, its sequel, I had sworn that I would resume work on it only when I could do so from a place of joy. Obligation could have no place in the process. Two years ago, I was the closest to that place that I'd ever been. Nine months later, I completed a draft of the book.

In recent months, I've finally come to a place of a passion for writing that's no longer intellectually based. Now, my commitment to my stories is my rootedeness. Now, I know — from the depths of an emotional core I could never before access — that writing is the only thing that makes sense. Not head-sense. Heart-sense.

The night before I wrote the first of my manifestos, I was in Albuquerque, billeting with Kathleen Messmer, another friend. Kathleen is the film producer who's committed to making The MoonQuest into a movie, and she'd been urging me to get started on a StarQuest screenplay. A trilogy, she'd explained, would be far more attractive to potential investors. So that afternoon, instead of revising the book manuscript, I'd finally launched the film adaptation...and I'd had a blast. The writing was easy, effortless and magical.

After I shared the opening scenes with Kathleen, our conversation veered toward family history and dysfunctional family stories from our respective pasts.

"That would make a great story," she said after I shared how I'd had three fathers but had never been fathered.

"I've tried to write it," I said, "but I could never find a story line that worked." A few minutes later, I interrupted her. "I've got it!" I exclaimed, and proceeded to tell her the fictionalized version that had just come to me, complete with opening scene.

Opening movie scene, because as certain as I was of the story, I was equally certain that it had to be a screenplay, not a novel. It was my first-ever idea for an original screenplay and, in that moment, I knew that it was my commitment to my passion that had delivered it to me. Also in that moment, I suddenly realized that I had six writing projects on the boards, seven if you included another round of revisions to my MoonQuest screenplay. Never had I had so many heart projects on the go at once.

Clearly, in ways I'd never before been, I was a writer.

From that place, my declarations of independence had to come. From that place, I had to experience the grief and despair of letting go who I had been in order to become all that my soul yearned to express.

Friday night, just for fun, Shoshana and I pulled cards from the Osho Tarot deck. The first card I pulled, related to self, was "Moment to Moment." The second, related to work and/or relationship was "Ice-olation."

What I interpreted from the initial card was the need, in this time of personal upheaval and stripping away, to be more in the moment than I'd ever been before. Instead of stressing about what might happen in the next moment or next week (would I have grocery money? what would happen to my car? where would I sleep?), I would have to find the discipline to practice radical presence. What is true in this moment? In this second? In this breath? The rest I would have to banish from my mind and turn over to whatever higher intelligence was running the show. My commitment to my passion and my path demanded it.

The second card suggested that, in the midst of the natural isolation of my creative pursuits, I needed to make room for community. How perfect that my financial situation was pushing me into the homes of like-spirited friends...was, in effect creating community! It also suggested that a return to coaching could also be a community-builder and could bring a new depth to my work as the newly impassioned and committed writer I had become.

I slept well that night, and woke the next morning more optimistic than I'd felt in days.

Wow! I said to myself when I opened my eyes...and suddenly these lines from the musical Sweet Charity's "If They Could See Me Now" rang through my consciousness: All I can say is, "Wow!" / Look at where I am. / Tonight I landed, Pow! / Right in a pot of jam.

My pot of jam may not yet be lined with gold leaf, but it's still a pot of joy, regardless of outward appearance. I don't believe I'm choosing poverty over a decade of misery. I believe I'm choosing sovereignty. I believe I'm stepping into the Kingdom of Heaven.

I've declared my independence, and like those courageous colonial rebels back during the American Revolution, it can only be unconditional. There is no take-back. There is only forward motion.

And I'm launched.

Sunflower photo by Mark David Gerson.


Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Previous excerpts:
• April 28
• July 30
• August 25
• September 1
• September 9
• September 10
• September 12
• September 24
• September 27
• September 29
• October 1
• October 5
• October 6
• October 20

Acts of Surrender 14: All That Matters is That I'm Writing (II)

Much has occurred in my life since I last posted an installment here from Acts of Surrender, my memoir-in-progress. In some ways, the most significant is the change in the book's subtitle, from "A Writer's Journey of Faith" to "A Journey Beyond Faith," which is a truer reflection of how I see this particular journey unfolding.

"Who am I? What do I want from my life?"

I asked these questions a few days after my 56th birthday as I drove down to Crystal Cove State Park in Newport Beach for a meditative walk. It had been storming all morning, and I was counting on a misty, moody beach walk to match my gray state of mind. But by the time I pulled into the parking lot, all but scudding white powder-puffs had fled the sky, which was a blue so deep it seemed more Southwest than west coast.

Earlier that morning, in Abrahamic sacrifice, I had been prepared to give over everything to God, including my writerly identity. "For now," I wrote, "I'm more naked than I've ever let myself be...more empty than I could ever have imagined possible." Who I was and where I was going were mysteries I couldn't even begin to fathom. But when I stepped onto the deserted beach, the sands still damp from the morning's downpour, a series of aha's began to fill in some of the void.

My first awareness was of a hand pulling away mine — the one that held the knife of sacrifice to my writing. In agreeing, like Abraham, to give up what I held most dear, the need for sacrifice dissolved. Writing would remain a central pillar of my life.

Next was the clear certainty that my departure from Orange County now needed to occur on October 10 — 10/10/10, which in numerological terms signified a trifecta of new beginnings. I would travel through Sedona to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, the principal stops on the solo portion of my journey since coming to the U.S.

If my first day in Sedona, in September 1997, marked my entry into a life I couldn't then have begun to imagine, my return, 13 years and one month later, seemed to signify a rebirth of equally dramatic proportions. With no conscious planning, October 11 turned into a replay of that first day, including a miraculous pilgrimage back to Rachel's Knoll, a site that had closed to the public within months of my 1997 arrival.

Rachel's Knoll is now part of the Seven Canyons Resort property at the end of Long Canyon Road, about 15 minutes outside of town. I drove along Long Canyon Road that morning, looking for the trailhead pullout where I'd spent my very first Sedona night sleeping in my car as the full moon rose over me. When I got to the end of the road, I planned to ask the guard at the Seven Canyons gate if I could come in, just to turn around.

"Welcome to Seven Canyons," he said, beaming, as I pulled up.

"Thanks," I said, astonished by a warmth I'd never experienced the other times I'd turned around here. "I used to live in Sedona," I added, "before this resort was built."

He nodded. "That would have been at least seven years ago."

"Nineteen ninety-seven."

He nodded again.

"I used to come up here all the time, to go to Rachel's Knoll."

He paused for only an instant.

"It's still there, you know."

"Oh?"

"Would you like to go up?"

My heart raced. Would I?

The guard gave me instructions and sent me on my way. Five minutes later, I was standing atop the hill whose panoramic views and sweet, powerful energy had so seduced me from my first day in Sedona.

No one in town could believe that I'd not only been allowed in, but that I'd been invited in. I barely believed it. Along with that day's other magically unlikely events, it felt like a sign of big changes to come.

Running into Martha Martyn at Wildflower Bakery a few hours later was an equally portentous sign.

I first met Martha, then Martha Baer, within weeks of my arrival in Sedona. Ever since, she has continued to show up in my life at profoundly pivotal moments.

It was Martha, for example, who introduced me to the woman who would become my wife and to the sound healer who would trigger nearly a decade of my own work in the sound-energy field. The house Aalia and I moved into weeks before our marriage broke up in 2004 was a rental that, unbeknownst to us, Martha had backed out of. And when I ran into Martha three months later at Wildflower, at a time when I was giving up the name Aq'naton, a legally changed spiritual name I'd been using since 1998, it was she who suggested that I combine my first and middle birth names to become "Mark David."

My return to Albuquerque a few days later didn't play out quite as dramatically. But it did contain an echo of my first drive into the city, which had taken place days after my name-change experience with Martha. On the final stretch of both drives — each launched from the Sedona area — I suddenly grew so tired that I could barely keep going. In both instances, I had to pull into the parking lot at the Route 66 Casino about 20 miles west of town to take a nap. It was as though I was being energetically prepared for some major life-changing experience.

Little did I know, that first time, that Albuquerque would become my home. Little did I know this most recent time, what would be waiting for me: an unassailable clarity about what was now most important in my life.

There's a scene in The StarQuest, sequel to The MoonQuest, where Q'nta, the main character, must pass through The Coil, a serpentine tunnel in which she will be forced to face "all the horrors you can imagine...and then more on top of them." To her surprise — and to mine as the writer — her greatest fear turned out to be the loss of her storytelling ability:

I shook my head. It wasn't the nightmare I'd expected. Never seeing my child again: Wouldn't that be a greater nightmare? Failing at The StarQuest: Wouldn't that be the worst nightmare of all? How could losing my stories be worse than those? What kind of mother would I be if I put my stories before my son? Before my family and friends? Before my homeland?

If I recognized in that writerly moment that Q'nta's fear must also be mine, it was only after arriving back in Albuquerque that I began to see Q'nta's story play out in mine.

Two years ago, in a blog post titled All That Matters Is That I'm Writing, I wrote, "I cannot follow my soul's call to write if I keep worrying about how I'm going to live and what I may have to give up to do it. All I can do is do it." At that time, I had taken an unpleasant, poorly paid job as a stockman at the Hobby Lobby craft mart to help me through a severe financial crunch. What kept me going then was that realization about my writing and an accompanying determination to complete a first draft of The StarQuest in spite of the job's long, physically draining hours.

Today, I'm once again at a financial brink. And once again, in Albuquerque, I find myself in Q'nta's Coil, knowing more deeply than I have ever allowed myself to feel, that writing — telling my stories — matters more to me than absolutely anything. Like Q'nta, I can't quite believe it. Like Q'nta, I feel parental guilt. And like Q'nta, I know that the best gift I can give myself and my child is the legacy of a life passionately lived.

Unlike two years ago, though, I'm refusing to step back from the brink. Unlike two years ago, at least in this moment, I'm saying that the only thing I'm prepared to do is live my passion.

As I look back over the years, I see all the ways I've compromised and settled — out of fear. I see all the ways I've stepped back from the brink of seeming disaster, only to have that brink show up again. And again. And again.

The image I have of myself is of a drowning man, thrashing his arms in the water, struggling fearfully to avoid sinking that final time. I see now that, in one way or another, I've been thrashing and struggling for 56 years. I've gone through the motions of surrender, but I've never surrendered fully, unconditionally. How could I when my surrender was always predicated on an outcome? "If I do this one thing, Spirit will reward me in this other way. I'll be safe. I'll be protected. I'll have money...or fame...or success." Unconditional surrender would say: "I do this because I know in my deepest heart that this is the right choice. The only choice. And I do it with no expectation of reward and with no regard for the consequences."

I began to see that while I was in Orange County. It's become even clearer since arriving in Albuquerque.

What I have come to know here, with as much certainty as I can muster, is that I'm no longer prepared to step back from the brink. I'm no longer prepared to thrash or struggle or make compromises to stay afloat or, if it comes to that, to stay alive.

No, I'm not contemplating suicide. What I am doing, though, is digging deeper and deeper and deeper to identify the life that's worth living, the life that expresses my soul's deepest yearning. And I'm saying that I'm no longer prepared to let fear pull me from its pursuit, as I have over the years, despite the great strides I know I've made. Nor am I prepared to let anyone or anything outside of me pull me from that pursuit, regardless of the consequences.

I now see myself in sink-or-swim mode. I've stopped thrashing. The only pursuit that means anything to me right now is writing — the writings of my heart. While I've embraced writing from that place before, it's always been conditional and it's always been secondary to paying the bills.

Put another way, I've stepped off the brink. I've detached myself as best I can from the fear of consequences and have launched myself fully into the dark void of this journey — as fearlessly as I can manage.

I've reached a point where I'm either powerful enough to magnetize to me a life that's worth living or I'm not. I'm not looking for anyone to rescue me. I'm not looking for anything or asking for anything — from anyone or from God. I am, however, open to what comes to me and am open, perhaps more than ever before, to receiving the gifts of the universe, however proffered.

At root, I'm doing what I now know I must do if I'm to continue living. I'll either make it or I won't. I'll either sink or a tidal wave will carry me to shore. I'll either go splat or I'll survive the fall. But I'm no longer prepared to shrink from the full-body, full-hearted attempt.

As I experienced so presciently through Q'nta in The StarQuest, I now see that this choice may have implications on my relationship with my daughter and her mother. (In one of life's unending ironies, Aalia's birth name is Kentia, very close to that of the Q'nta character who first showed up peripherally in The MoonQuest, long before Kentia and I met, and is the protagonist of The StarQuest.)

If there is a short-term disruption in those relationships because of any choices I'm making, I will accept them. Because I know in my deepest heart that my biggest responsibility as a father is to model, to the best of my humanly imperfect ability, a willingness to make the fearless life choices that will enrich my daughter's journey in the years ahead. I believe equally that's the best legacy I can leave her.

In conventional terms, I'm homeless — counting on the loving generosity of friends to keep me off the street. In conventional terms, I'm irresponsible — detaching myself from everything the world deems important. In conventional terms, I'm close to penniless — with no credit, little cash and no known prospects to keep me going. In conventional terms, I'm foolish — putting passion ahead of all else.

It turns out I can't live in conventional terms.

Once upon a time, I gave my power to convention and lived largely by its rules. Once upon time, fear of consequences enslaved me with false promises of security. Once upon a time, I believed that the prison of my life had walls.

Today, I take back my power from the places, people and situations to which I've abdicated it. Today, I know that I created my own prison gates and my own jailers. Today, I know that I am free, even as I recognize that that freedom comes with consequences of its own.

Who am I? Someone who strives to live fearlessly, moment-to-moment.

What do I want from my life? The fullest expression of my deepest heart's desire — unconditionally and unapologetically, regardless of fallout or consequences.

How will it play out? There's no way of knowing.

All that matters is that I'm living from the highest imperative I can see in each moment.

Today, all that matters is that I'm writing.


Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Previous excerpts:
• April 28
• July 30
• August 25
• September 1
• September 9
• September 10
• September 12
• September 24
• September 27
• September 29
• October 1
• October 5
• October 6

Photos by Mark David Gerson: #1 + #2: The beach at Crystal Cove State Park, Newport Beach, CA; #3: The view of Rachel's Knoll, Sedona, AZ; #4 + #5: Albuquerque, NM; #6: Self-portrait at Rachel's Knoll

Acts of Surrender 13: The Wrong End of the Telescope

If you're receiving this via email, this will be the last such message you'll be getting from me. With this post, I'm disabling my email list.

I don't yet know if I'll continue to post excerpts to my blog from Acts of Surrender. In this moment, I don't even know if I'll continue to work on the memoir. Perhaps it's already served its purpose for me.

Regardless, the best way to keep up with whatever writings I do post is by using a blog reader such Google Reader or any of the others listed on the "follow on news reader" pull-down in the right sidebar on the blog site, especially as I'm not yet clear about the fate of my social networking profiles.


Adam was lying on the leather couch in the family-room area off the kitchen when I walked in Monday night. Other than the waning daylight filtering in through the window, the gas fire dancing in the grate was the only light in the house, and it took me a moment to realize that he was even there. He was neither friendly nor unfriendly, still distant. A short while later, he began to watch a movie with the volume cranked up to ultrahigh. For the first time since I'd moved in, his energy so aggressively filled every inch of the house that all I could do was retreat to my room.

I tinkered with what I'd written earlier in the day, prepped it for posting on my blog, then chose not to post it. By ten, I couldn't keep my eyes open.

Two hours later, I was awake.

"If none of the things I thought my life was about are still true," I tapped into my iPhone, "and I've become so detached that nothing at all seems to matter anymore, why am I here? If, after all this time, even writing makes no sense, what does?"

Suddenly, I felt claustrophobic. Suddenly, not only Adam's energy but Orange County's pressed into me. I didn't want to be in this room or this house. I didn't want to be in Southern California. Was it time to return to some version of the open spaces I'd given up to come here?

I had no answers at midnight, nor when I woke again at four and again at six. All I had were more questions.

"If life has no purpose except to have carried me to this place of purposelessness, what's the point?" I asked at midnight.

"Where's the heaven on earth in that?"

At four, I added: "If my heart's desire is to live in joy, where's the joy in solitary emptiness? If the way much of the world lives is soulless and if soulful living is also empty, where's the joy in that?"

"Right now," I wrote with the first glimmer of dawn, "it feels as though life is a fraud, as though the so-called 'ascension process' is a fraud. If enlightenment, as Jed McKenna puts it in his books on spiritual enlightenment, brings nothing, what's the point? Why clear away all the shit if the only thing at the end of the line is no-shit?"

Then, at eight: "Why even get out of bed? Why bother with anything at all?"


Once out of bed and dressed, I knew I had to get out of the house. Adam seemed less distant, and we exchanged a few words. But I still needed space. Lots of it.

I got into the car, not sure what to do or where to go. If I'd had a home of my own, I wouldn't have left. I might have stayed in bed, or taken a long bath. But I didn't have a home of my own. I sat in Adam's driveway for an uncertain five minutes, then drove around the corner to get gas. From there, I hit the freeway and headed back to the San Joaquin Hills and Los Trancos park — this time armed against hunger with a thermal cup of tea and an almond-butter sandwich.

As I drove, I thought about what I'd written the day before and about the existential angst I'd experienced overnight.

"What does it mean to live for myself and not for others?" I asked myself. "How do I shift a life so other-focused to one fully inner-focused?"

The weather at the park was as brooding as I felt: a sky textured in shades of gray and, in the near distance, an ocean of steel. The rain, like my tears, had held off thus far. But who knew for how long?

I don't think I realized until that moment just how locked in to others' view of me my life has been lived. I don't think I realized until that moment how much my thoughts, actions and beliefs have been built around other-directed consequences...are still built around other-directed consequences.

In my financial life alone, my world has revolved around actions to avoid consequences: If I don't meet this deadline, someone will threaten me. If I don't pay this, I'll lose that.

In my personal and professional life, I've walked on eggshells to avoid being criticized, judged, attacked or shunned.

Of course, I've made huge strides in these arenas. If I hadn't, I couldn't be writing this. I certainly couldn't be contemplating sharing it.

But I seem to have reached another turn of the spiral on this journey, one that's drilling deep into who and how I have been, one that's stripping away multiple layers of identity. Hell, it's not stripping them at all. It's slamming explosive-packed airplanes into the twin towers of my self-construct. And just like the World Trade Center towers, mine have crumbled and crumpled, leaving a gaping void where the illusion of identity used to stand.

There was a moment on Monday, sitting in the car in the rain at this same park, when I considered stripping off all my clothes and running naked into the canyon, never to return.

I've had moments like that in the past.

Once, early in my time in Sedona, I was hiking in Long Canyon. Off in the distance, an arched cave set into a red-rock cliff wall seemed to beckon. There was nothing visibly special about it. I just felt a magnetic tug. I kept moving toward it, almost hypnotically, as the autumn sun began to sink. Suddenly, I realized that if I didn't turn around in that moment, I would keep going and never go back.

I turned around and went back.

A second time, not long after we returned to Sedona from three and a half years in Hawaii, I was taking an early morning hike. Guinevere and her mom were still asleep. As I walked deeper into the trail-less desert scrub, I contemplated never returning to the house. I would just keep walking until...

Nothing particular had triggered that morning's hopelessness. All I knew in those moments was that my love for my wife and daughter couldn't compete with the despair I was feeling. I don't know whether it was fear or responsibility, but I turned around and went home.

The word "suicide" never consciously entered my thoughts that day. It did five years earlier, though, when I was living in Penetanguishene, two hours north of Toronto.

Although I'd never been overweight and was never a junk-food junkie, I'd become increasingly conscious of the ways I was using food in emotionally unhealthy ways: to fill emotional and spiritual voids, to assuage fears and anxiety...to fill me up so I didn't have to feel. My behavior, I realized through that long Penetang winter, was addictive. With few distractions, a marginal social life and little to occupy myself but my own thoughts and feelings, meals and snacks took on obsessive significance.

"I'm afraid of the emptiness," I wrote one dark January morning. "I'm afraid it will devour me, destroy me, annihilate me. I'm afraid if I don't stay full, I'll die.

"Emptiness," I added, "is death."

For a few moments, I wondered what would happen if I took my life. Other than the Emerys, whose flat I was renting, who would notice? Then I thought about Roxy, my 33-month-old cocker spaniel and sole companion. What would happen to her? In logical retrospect, nothing. Nine-year-old Jeremy Emery would happily have adopted her. At the time, though, that question was enough to snap me out of it.

Monday's Los Trancos experience wasn't born from despair. Neither was it some magnetic imperative. At the same time, it came from a similar place as had the Penetang incident: Faced with a chasmic void of unprecedented dimensions — one I'd just deepened by deciding to leave Adam's — I was overwhelmed by the emptiness.

I had left my New Mexico home, had shed nearly all my material belongings and was shedding more and more of my personal and professional identity every day. Even the "writer" label was now at risk. Most of the ways I've related to others, to myself and to the world have also been imploding. My bank account might not have bottomed out on my birthday, but is still, at this writing, in crisis, at least in conventional terms.

I wrote the other day that it was time now to create my life, whatever the fallout or consequences. I also wrote that I didn't know what that meant.

Truly, I don't.

There's a coronation scene in my novel The MoonQuest, where Crown Prince Kyri is directed to throw all the jeweled accoutrements of the old king's regalia into the fire as he and his subjects-to-be chant, "The past is passed. We let it go." 

Only when Kyri stands naked before the crowd, with all that could encumber him to his father's reign consumed in the ceremonial flame, can he begin to chart his own course as monarch...can he truly begin his own life. 

As I was scanning an old blog post for a description of that MoonQuest scene, I came across a dream I'd had in August 2008. In it, I'm on a large prison campus, large enough that it seems like a small city. As I stand there, watching prisoners and guards and at least one politician walk by, all dressed in civilian clothes, I know something that none of them does: This prison campus has no walls, fences or gates. Anyone can leave at any time if they open their eyes to the truth and make that choice. 

In the dream, a friend and I have made that choice.  


I remember kneeling on the lawn in front of some official building, sorting through my backpack as I decide what to take and what to leave behind. I remember only what fails to make the cut: various maps, articles and documents linked with my past. 

"The past is passed. We let it go."

I'm in a similar place today, leaving not the central prison I escaped in my dream but the outer one it opened into. This time, there's no backpack. This time, like Kyri, I'm moving toward nakedness. For now, I'm more naked now than I've ever let myself be...more empty than I could ever have imagined possible.


When, in 1997, I finally got the aha! that would launch me on the three-month open-ended road odyssey that ultimately and unexpectedly landed me in Sedona, I spent a week shutting down my Toronto life. I got rid of more of the few belongings I still had and rearranged the logistics of my pre-cellphone, pre-internet existence to accommodate an extended absence.

These remaining days leading up to my departure from Adam's feel similar. There's little left to go on the material plane, although there's some. The bigger preparation revolves around the people, places, situations, emotions, attitudes and beliefs that, like the contents of my dream backpack, can't follow me wherever it is I'm going.

Already, it feels increasingly as though I'm looking at the world — at my world — through the wrong end of a telescope. One by one, things I considered critically important for my physical and emotional survival are getting smaller and smaller. One by one, they're vanishing from view.

Where are am I going? Unlike the other times in my life when I hit the road, my financial situation doesn't support that. Not in this moment, at least.

On Monday, after I was done writing, I told my friend Joan about my Oneg Shabbat dream.

"You're not only turning your past over to God," she pointed out. "You're turning your path over, too."

I understood her words intellectually as I sat in the car watching the far-from-pacific Pacific crash on the shore at Crystal Cove State Park. But only in the wake of Tuesday's discomfiting journey into the void, could I feel them.

What's next, I realized yet again, is not up to me.

What's next can only emerge out of the same chasmic void God faced on that first day of creation.

What's next will be whatever it is — whatever it takes to get there.

Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Previous excerpts:
• April 28
• July 30
• August 25
• September 1
• September 9
• September 10
• September 12
• September 24
• September 27
• September 29
• October 1
• October 5

Photos by Mark David Gerson

Acts of Surrender 12: Time to Move On

If I've learned anything on this journey, it's how rapidly and radically things can shift from one moment to the next. For me, this seems even truer around birthday time, as I write about in this excerpt from Acts of Surrender, my memoir-in-progress.

It was Monday, the morning after my birthday. Adam was lying in the recliner in his office, his eyes closed.

"I need to commit to being gone from here," I said.

He opened his eyes. I sensed a distance.

"Why?" His tone wasn't a shocked "I want you to stay" why. It was more an "I know something's going on because something's also going on with me, too" why.

"If I don't commit to leaving this house, nothing's going to break open for me. I don't really know any more than that."

That wasn't true. I did know more. I'd been feeling unsettled since driving back from San Diego the previous afternoon and had felt the shudders of some alarmingly revealing aha's moving through me during the night. I got dressed first thing, thinking I'd leave early to go write, but then launched into a cleaning frenzy to avoid it. If the notes I'd jotted down upon waking were any indication, the writing would be deep...and deeply disturbing.

Adam nodded. "I need to be alone now, too," he said. He looked up at me. "This will probably pass, but right now I need to keep my distance from you. If I don't, I'll want to claw your head off."

This time, I nodded. We both needed space. I left.

I didn't know where to go. I didn't want to go to our usual Starbucks, not because I thought he he might show up. I didn't want to be anywhere near people. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I didn't want to be seen by anyone.

I sat for a time in the car at Los Trancos Canyon View Park, writing and watching the misty rain dribble onto my windshield. I opened the window for a while, inhaling the moisture-awakened sage. But I couldn't write with the rain coming in, so I shut the window. When the car got steamy and I got hungry, I drove to the nearby Pavilions supermarket for lunch, and then down to Starbucks.

Adam wasn't there.


When I came home from speaking at the Body Mind Spirit Expo in San Diego on Saturday night, Adam and I shared our day's experiences. His, involving his brother, had played out far more dramatically than mine. It was all about ways he had been deceiving himself, he said.

Given how parallel our journeys have been, it was natural for me to examine the day just passed for some analogous epiphany. The only similarity I could find related to detachment. Adam described how he'd moved through his revelatory experiences without emotional charge. I shared how surprisingly detached I'd been — around book sales, around interactions, around my talk. For the first time ever, I'd stood up to give a presentation with zero preparation, zero anxiety and zero concern about how I would be received. It went beyond lack of concern. Frankly, I didn't care. For a long-time people-pleaser, that was an earth-quaking shift.

As it turned out, it was probably the best talk I'd ever given and, possibly, the most fun.

As I was packing up the booth the next day. I thought back to all the people who had been so clearly inspired by me over the course of the weekend. In the past, that would have brought me great satisfaction. In the past, I would have described my passion as inspiring others to awaken to theirs. Suddenly, I didn't care about that, either.

I wasn't sorry that words I had spoken might help change lives. But I no longer saw that as my passion. It wasn't even my job. What people got or didn't get from my words — spoken or written — was irrelevant. I wasn't here to teach. I wasn't even here to inspire. I was here to be.

For me.

I was here to live my joy, independent of anyone else. I was here to live my passion, independent of anyone else. Again, I was here to be.

If people chose to find parallels in their own lives and alter their worlds accordingly, they were free to do so. It didn't matter to me one way or another. The only changes that could matter in my world would be the changes I would make to my world, inner and outer. Everything around me would shift to reflect that. How could it not when, as I wrote the other day, there's nothing outside me — from the local to the global — that isn't a reflection of what's going on inside me.

While I'd already been living some version of that, this latest aha! took it to an even deeper level.

I used to say in classes and workshops that I wasn't there to teach but to remind. Now I see that it's not even my job to remind. It's my job to be.

No one else matters in that process.

And if they are somehow relevant, they will find their way not because of what I write or say and not because of how I work with them, but because I'm on my right path.

No wonder my interest in teaching and coaching has waned.

"Walk the earth naked, clothed only in your truth," I wrote all those years ago in Penetanguishene, and it's a motto I've tried to live by ever since. I now realize that those words said nothing about jumping up and down to make sure the world saw my nakedness. It was about living nakedly. Period.

I have to wonder whether I'll even want to write anymore the moment I fully integrate that. If I do, what and how I write are bound to change. Meantime, I'm no longer sure that it's appropriate to call myself a writer. "Writer" suggests an outward focus, that I'm writing for others. Am I?

One of my Monday-morning jottings spoke to that. I'd been thinking back to one of the things I'd said in my talk, about the importance of writing for no one else but ourselves. If I said it to in my talk, I knew I was also saying it for me.

But wasn't I already doing that?

Then another aha.

"I still care about what people think about me and about my words. I'm not writing for myself enough."

Bingo! I heard.

That means I'm not living for myself enough, either. That means I have to write my words and live my life independent of what it might mean for anyone else. Not partly independent, which I've done. But fully independent, which I've not.

I also realized that all the places I haven't been independent are all the places I've attracted emotional dependence from others — from my daughter and her mother, from students and clients, from some friends. They're all the places I'm still needy and codependent.

I wrote the other day that I was now largely independent and empowered, that neediness and codependence had largely receded from my life.

What bullshit! If I'm looking for my version of the self-deception Adam experienced on Saturday with his brother, this is it.

All I have to do is look at my daughter's neediness: clearly my own. All I have to do is look at her mom's neediness: clearly my own. All I have to do is look at client neediness: clearly my own.

The same is true of codependence.

For all I've let go, they're still too front-and-center in my life.

Monday morning, I saw threads of my marriage in my relationship with Adam, and I was horrorstruck. The parallel isn't exact and the dysfunction is nowhere near as pronounced, but I see a clingy, dependent neediness in myself in relation to Adam that's neither independent nor empowered. That well may be what was making Adam want to claw my head off. If so, I wouldn't blame him.

I know Adam well enough to know that he will own whatever else is going on from his side.

Meantime, I must fully own what's going on from mine.

Meantime, I must look in the mirror more honestly than I've ever dared and see all the places where I still crave attention, love and approval. I must subject every word, thought and action to rigorous examination and root out all the ones that diminish me by denying my innate worth and intrinsic value. I must be fearless and unsparing within myself and in relation to others. I must recognize that every authentic action taken in my highest good must be in the highest good of all, however it looks on the surface. It must be because there's no such thing as isolated or conflicting highest goods. We're either all connected in an energy grid of oneness or we're not. If we are, my highest good can only be yours, even if it sometimes doesn't feel that way from a personality-mind perspective.

My earliest experience of that insight came in February 2005. It was President's Day weekend and I was lying in the bathtub of a Howard Johnson Express in Albuquerque. My thirty-month road odyssey had barely begun and I was wracked with parental guilt at having left Sedona in the wake of the collapse of my marriage, because it had also meant leaving my daughter, then five, behind. At the same time, all inner guidance had insisted that I "get the hell out of Dodge," that Sedona was not a healthy place for me to be.

I don't remember what initiated this particular pity party. Perhaps Guinevere had called in tears, triggered by another row between her mom and new stepdad. Or perhaps I was just lonely. All I know is that as I lay there, eyes closed in the dark bathroom, I felt the presence of Guinevere's higher self.

"Don't worry about me," she said. "I'm fine."

I started to cry.

"You do what you have to do," she continued. "Whatever it is will be the best thing for me, too."

Ironically, Guinevere's higher self had known that it was time to move on from Sedona even before Aalia told me that election night that she would be leaving me. When I'd returned home earlier that evening, I'd found Doreen Virtue's Magical Mermaid and Dolphin Deck deck on my desk, where Guinevere had been using it to practice her writing. In clear view on a yellow notepad, scratched out in her preschool scrawl, were the words "Time to Move On," as copied directly from the mermaid card of the same name.


Now that her mom's relationship has ended and we all find ourselves in the same geographic orbit, I've sensed Aalia trying to recreate some version of the old mother-father-daughter trio. In fact, I realized this morning that I've yet to spend alone time with Guinevere since we all arrived in southern California — me from New Mexico, they from Arizona. The only time it wasn't a threesome, it was a five-some, with my former father-in-law and his wife.

I've been complicit in this. I still enjoy Aalia's company and we've always talked easily. And that's fine. What isn't fine is that I'm being tempted back into my old husband/helper/enabler role. I'm also allowing this dynamic to get in the way of quality one-on-one time with my daughter. If I'm honest, I have to admit that I'm doing it partly to avoid being more emotionally and authentically engaged with Guinevere and partly to avoid having to be more fully in my power with her mom.

It's not that I've acted like a spineless wuss. I've taken many empowered stands over the years, including vis-à-vis Aalia. But there remain disempowering situations that I've refused to see, refused to act on or refused to be upfront about. That has to stop.

The time for fear has passed. The time for courage is gone. The time for fearlessness is here.

It's now time to create my life, whatever the fallout or consequences — for myself or anyone else.

I don't yet know what that means. I do know that any tendency toward codependent neediness is guaranteed to distort or destroy that path.

On the morning of my birthday, I had a dream that I was leaving an Oneg Shabbat (Sabbath eve) gathering that I'd led for many years.

"I'm stepping down," I told my followers. "In three weeks, on the twenty-fourth, I will pass leadership of this group to Sam. At that time, I will announce what I'll be doing next."

Three weeks from my birthday is the twenty-fourth. In those weeks, I commit to the path I outlined here earlier: stripping from my life anything that I can identify as personally disempowering, demeaning, diminishing and devaluing, along with anything else from the past that no longer fits the more authentic me I choose to be. Then, I can give the old over to God (Sam, from the Hebrew Shmuel, means "name of God") and truly move forward with my rebirth.

Meantime, I've already taken some action.

• I "fired" a client who was chronically unable to honor her commitments (even as I own all the ways I enabled her behavior), and I did it even though I don't, in this moment, have the money for her refund.

• My talk on writing at the Conscious Life Expo in L.A. on October 16 will be my last of that nature and in that sort of venue. As I texted Adam before leaving San Diego, somewhat presciently, "Feeling somewhat done with the Voice of the Muse energy. The book will remain a great tool for those who now are where I was. But I'm not sure what my relationship with it will become. Time to move on. I don't know what that even means."


The other day, I told my friend Joan that if a windfall were to suddenly show up, I would continue to stay on at Adam's (assuming that it worked for him). The only difference would be that I would feel able to contribute financially in a more meaningful way.

In this moment, regardless of the state of the "authentic relationship" I described here the other day, I know it's once again time to move on — even as I have no idea where I'll go or whether the material resources will show up for me to take this next step.

Just as I had to empower myself to leave my mother behind in Montreal when she had cancer, just as I had to empower myself to leave Guinevere behind in Sedona when her mom left me, and just as I had to commit to leaving Albuquerque without knowing what was next, I must now empower myself to take this next right step...unconditionally.

In keeping with message of my Oneg Shabbat dream, I told Adam on Monday that I would leave on the twenty-fourth. Barring any changes in the three-week lifetime ahead, I will.

I doubt that Adam and I are "done"...though if we are, I'm detached enough to be okay with that. What I suspect is that we're each experiencing a further refining and redefining of how we relate — to each other and to the world.

Whether we live together or not, whether we speak again after the twenty-fourth or not, I'm grateful for this time with him — for what he's taught me and for what I've seen of myself through him.

The journey continues.


Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Previous excerpts:
• April 28
• July 30
• August 25
• September 1
• September 9
• September 10
• September 12
• September 24
• September 27
• September 29
• October 1


• "Time to Move On" image Doreen Virtue's Magical Mermaid and Dolphin Deck

Acts of Surrender 11: The Adam I Am

I've mentioned Adam so often in these excerpts from Acts of Surrender, my memoir-in-progress, that it finally came time to for me to explore at least some of what our relationship is all about.

"Are you going to the bank today," Adam asked me Wednesday morning. I had offered him a largely token hundred dollars the previous week when the security-deposit refund on my Albuquerque rental had arrived. He'd turned me down then, but I'd renewed the offer on Tuesday when I learned that he was down to the baggie of quarters he keeps in his car.

"I can," I said.

He handed me back the check I'd written him. "If I deposit this, it'll get eaten up in overdraft fees. Can you do cash?"

"Sure," I replied. Whether cash or check, that hundred dollars was less than 25 percent of what I still had. I'd had some anxiety about making the initial offer, was relieved when it was turned down and knew, when I made it again, that I could not take "no" for an answer. It wasn't even about trusting I'd be taken care of. It was about knowing that sharing what I had left was the right thing to do, just as Adam had been so generously sharing with me since my arrival.

Like me, Adam has let go mountains of possessions and even bigger mountains of ways of being. He's also let go sources of income that brought him no joy. In the six weeks I've lived with him, his bank account has also shrunk. At this writing, it's below zero because checks he's deposited from a friend have bounced. And while he continues to receive a monthly disability check from his negotiated retirement from the Huntington Beach police department a few years ago, this month's hadn't come in yet...nor would it fully cover his expenses when it did. (It was his book about his police experience, Friendly Fire: The Illusion of Justice, that first connected us — months before he unwittingly found himself inviting me to stay with him.)

"Wait," he said. "The only thing I need money for is gas. Do you want to just give me your debit card to use at the gas station? I've got enough quarters for coffee."

We were on our way to Starbucks for our daily writing ritual — he on his new book, me on one or the other of mine. We were going to take separate cars so I could stop at a favorite park on the way. I met him in the kitchen on my way out and tossed my debit card onto the counter. Then I pulled my Starbucks card from my wallet and handed it to him.

"Don't mess with the quarters," I said. "There's got to be enough left on this card for two coffees."

He laughed. "Now you're supporting me!"

As I drove onto Bear Street toward the freeway, a thought struck me that was so obvious that it shouldn't have shocked me: Adam and I are in intimate relationship.

I've thought about this fleetingly in past weeks. And at the beginning of my time here, I actively fantasized about some happily-ever-after fairy-tale version of it. But until the naturalness of this morning's exchange, I didn't spend any time with it.

The irony is that the previous day, I'd suggested he write something about what intimate relationship might look like in a post-neediness, post-codependent era. Now I'm doing it.

"It wouldn't exist," he retorted at the time.

I think he's wrong. But I think it would look radically different from anything most people have experienced. I think it might look something like what he and I are currently experiencing.

No, we haven't been physically intimate. There's a good chance we never will be. We've barely even hugged. Even so, this time with Adam has proven to be the most authentic relationship I've ever experienced.

In 2005, a few months after my wife left me for what would turn out to be an emotionally and physically volatile relationship with the father of one of my daughter's school friends, she asked about the possibility of us getting back together again.

"I won't rule anything out," I replied, even though I had largely ruled it out. "But until we can come together as two independent, empowered individuals, I just don't think there's anything to talk about."

Back then, I hadn't yet acknowledged the crippling codependence of our six-year marriage. (Not that ours was singularly codependent; I'm increasingly aware that most relationships, intimate and otherwise, carry some of that energy.) Regardless, some high inner wisdom found and expressed precisely how I now view the evolution of my relationship with Adam and how I now view the potential for other evolved relationships.

After having addressed some of our individual codependent tendencies early on in our time together, Adam and I seem to be living some version of precisely what I expressed to my ex: Two largely independent, increasingly empowered individuals who have come together for as long as it serves us, not from a place of need or neediness but from a place of profound respect and in a place of love that has nothing to do with adolescence, romance and valentines and everything to do with seeing the other both in and as ourselves.

A few weeks ago, after a particularly impassioned conversation about some spiritual topic, I turned to Adam, in shock, and said, "It feels like we're the same person." Then I added, "It's kind of freaky."

It's not freaky anymore. Why would it be when you and I are also the same person, when we're all individual expressions of the same God or unified field or whatever phrase we use to describe an ultimate truth our minds may never be able to grasp.

What made it freaky that evening was that it was my first emotional experience of unity consciousness.

I believe in oneness. I know it intellectually. I've even had glimmerings of it while making love, though in retrospect, those have been cluttered by neediness.

This was different. This was an innate knowingness that transcended the mind and required no physical union to experience.

This was oneness.

Take that oneness, which, of course, everyone shares (even if we don't feel it), add the many hours Adam and I spend in each other's company and the fact that we live under the same roof, toss in a deepening connection over time (itself an expression of realized oneness) along with a love largely devoid of neediness, mix in a commitment to authentic interaction...et voilà: intimate relationship.

I say largely devoid of neediness because I still catch mercifully diminishing and increasingly infrequent glimpses of it in my own thoughts around Adam. The same is true around codependence: I may not be done with it, but when the old patterns emerge, I'm now able to notice and neutralize them far more quickly than in the past.

Strangely, I can't say that I'm "in love with" Adam. I don't see that as a bad thing. I'm beginning to view the in-love-with paradigm as inherently needy, insecure and codependent, premised on a romance-novel perspective that is largely unhealthy and patently unrealistic.

Even when I tell you that there are moments when I love him from a place of astonishing (to me) depth, I have to add that it's the me in him I'm discovering that I love. In the same way, when I marvel at the dizzying acceleration and formidable fearlessness of his forward movement, it's my own I'm seeing — through him because I've not let myself see it directly in me.

Of course, the same applies when he says or does something that makes me want to slug him. It's me I'm seeing. It's me I want to slug. He's just there to mirror my stuff back at me — the good, the bad and, most definitely, the ugly.

Everyone in my life presents that same mirror to me. When my daughter acts overwhelmed and needy, I must ask myself where that's going on in me. When a client refuses to let go of an old way of being, the same question comes up. When a colleague is stuck in an outmoded way of seeing, same question again. When, like Adam, a friend is doing magnificently, I also owe it to myself to acknowledge and celebrate my own magnificence.

While none of this mirroring is new, Adam's constant presence and the astounding similarities we share at this stage of our journey push it up to my nose multiple times a day.

Our deepening connection has also shown up in our writing. More often than not, even though we're writing different books that involve different experiences, we find out at day's end that we've tackled the identical theme. That's also largely true in the life issues that have come up for us. If something surfaces for Adam, some version of it nearly always surfaces within 24 hours for me, as well.

Of course, there have been challenging moments between us. You've read about enough of them here that you probably think that Adam is some kind of monster.

He's anything but that.

Rather, he's the most evolved, authentic spiritual journeyer I know...also the most fearless and committed. He's been one of my most valuable and valued teachers on the road to my own fearless authenticity, and one of the least gentle...which is a good thing. I require that in-your-face energy in my life right now. Adam provides it. He's forceful and does his excellent best to accept no bullshit — not in himself and not in anyone else.

And, possibly without knowing it, he's shown me what authentic relationship can look like.

I mentioned earlier that we haven't been physically intimate. While a sexual component might be a pleasing bonus for me in all of this, I'm probably still needy enough for that to be more hindrance than help. My goal is lovemaking with passion but no charge. I'm certain it's possible. I'm not certain I'm there yet.

At the same time, I'm no longer convinced that an intimate relationship requires a sexual component (as engaging a component as it can be). What it does require is what I expressed earlier: Two independent, empowered individuals who live their relationship as they live their lives, in the moment, and who stay together for as long as it serves them both — from a place of loving detachment and from a place of oneness experienced and expressed.

From my perspective, and to my great surprise, I seem to be living that with Adam.

He might not agree with any of this. He might still say, of the potential for evolved relationship, "It doesn't exist."

I don't know because we haven't discussed "us."

What would there be to talk about? Of course, we talk through what needs to be talked through (communication was a bit shaky at the beginning, but it's improved). But it strikes me that the moment two people start talking about The Relationship, there isn't much left to talk about, whatever kind of relationship it is.

Regardless, I don't need Adam to agree with me in order to have the experience I'm having. I simply have to have the experience. From it, I believe that evolved, authentic relationships are possible, if still rare.

I'm grateful for this one.

A postscript: Adam and I often share our writing. This is one piece, though, that I'm reluctant to share. The codependent place in me worries about rejection, fears abandonment.

The codependent place in me will have to move aside. An authentic relationship has no room for that kind of bullshit.

By the time you read this, Adam will have heard it, will have called me on any part of it that doesn't ring true and will have begun to process any part of it that pushes his buttons.

That's a good things, because his buttons are also mine.


Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Previous excerpts:
• April 28
• July 30
• August 25
• September 1
• September 9
• September 10
• September 12
• September 24
• September 27
• September 29


• If you're in the San Diego area, please join me at the Mind Body Spirit Expo at the Doubletree Mission Valley this Saturday, October 2. I'll be speaking at 2pm on Answering the Call to Write and will spend most of the rest of the day at the Lighted Bridge booth.


Oneness image by Sarafina420

Acts of Surrender 11: The Adam I Am

I've mentioned Adam so often in these excerpts from Acts of Surrender, my memoir-in-progress, that it finally came time to for me to explore at least some of what our relationship is all about.

"Are you going to the bank today," Adam asked me Wednesday morning. I had offered him a largely token hundred dollars the previous week when the security-deposit refund on my Albuquerque rental had arrived. He'd turned me down then, but I'd renewed the offer on Tuesday when I learned that he was down to the baggie of quarters he keeps in his car.

"I can," I said.

He handed me back the check I'd written him. "If I deposit this, it'll get eaten up in overdraft fees. Can you do cash?"

"Sure," I replied. Whether cash or check, that hundred dollars was less than 25 percent of what I still had. I'd had some anxiety about making the initial offer, was relieved when it was turned down and knew, when I made it again, that I could not take "no" for an answer. It wasn't even about trusting I'd be taken care of. It was about knowing that sharing what I had left was the right thing to do, just as Adam had been so generously sharing with me since my arrival.

Like me, Adam has let go mountains of possessions and even bigger mountains of ways of being. He's also let go sources of income that brought him no joy. In the six weeks I've lived with him, his bank account has also shrunk. At this writing, it's below zero because checks he's deposited from a friend have bounced. And while he continues to receive a monthly disability check from his negotiated retirement from the Huntington Beach police department a few years ago, this month's hadn't come in yet...nor would it fully cover his expenses when it did. (It was his book about his police experience, Friendly Fire: The Illusion of Justice, that first connected us — months before he unwittingly found himself inviting me to stay with him.)

"Wait," he said. "The only thing I need money for is gas. Do you want to just give me your debit card to use at the gas station? I've got enough quarters for coffee."

We were on our way to Starbucks for our daily writing ritual — he on his new book, me on one or the other of mine. We were going to take separate cars so I could stop at a favorite park on the way. I met him in the kitchen on my way out and tossed my debit card onto the counter. Then I pulled my Starbucks card from my wallet and handed it to him.

"Don't mess with the quarters," I said. "There's got to be enough left on this card for two coffees."

He laughed. "Now you're supporting me!"

As I drove onto Bear Street toward the freeway, a thought struck me that was so obvious that it shouldn't have shocked me: Adam and I are in intimate relationship.

I've thought about this fleetingly in past weeks. And at the beginning of my time here, I actively fantasized about some happily-ever-after fairy-tale version of it. But until the naturalness of this morning's exchange, I didn't spend any time with it.

The irony is that the previous day, I'd suggested he write something about what intimate relationship might look like in a post-neediness, post-codependent era. Now I'm doing it.

"It wouldn't exist," he retorted at the time.

I think he's wrong. But I think it would look radically different from anything most people have experienced. I think it might look something like what he and I are currently experiencing.

No, we haven't been physically intimate. There's a good chance we never will be. We've barely even hugged. Even so, this time with Adam has proven to be the most authentic relationship I've ever experienced.

A few months after my wife left me for what would turn out to be an emotionally and physically volatile relationship with the father of one of my daughter's school friends, she asked about the possibility of us getting back together again.

"I won't rule anything out," I replied, even though I had largely ruled it out. "But until we can come together as two independent, empowered individuals, I just don't think there's anything to talk about."

Back then, I hadn't yet acknowledged the crippling codependence of our six-year marriage. (Not that ours was singularly codependent; I'm increasingly aware that most relationships, intimate and otherwise, carry some of that energy.) Regardless, some high inner wisdom found and expressed precisely how I now view the evolution of my relationship with Adam and how I now view the potential for other evolved relationships.

After having addressed some of our individual codependent tendencies early on in our time together, Adam and I seem to be living some version of precisely what I expressed to my ex: Two largely independent, increasingly empowered individuals who have come together for as long as it serves us, not from a place of need or neediness but from a place of profound respect and in a place of love that has nothing to do with adolescence, romance and valentines and everything to do with seeing the other both in and as ourselves.

A few weeks ago, after a particularly impassioned conversation about some spiritual topic, I turned to Adam, in shock, and said, "It feels like we're the same person." Then I added, "It's kind of freaky."

It's not freaky anymore. Why would it be when you and I are also the same person, when we're all individual expressions of the same God or unified field or whatever phrase we use to describe an ultimate truth our minds may never be able to grasp.

What made it freaky that evening was that it was my first emotional experience of unity consciousness.

I believe in oneness. I know it intellectually. I've even had glimmerings of it while making love, though in retrospect, those have been cluttered by neediness.

This was different. This was an innate knowingness that transcended the mind and required no physical union to experience.

This was oneness.

Take that oneness, which, of course, everyone shares (even if we don't feel it), add the many hours Adam and I spend in each other's company and the fact that we live under the same roof, toss in a deepening connection over time (itself an expression of realized oneness) along with a love largely devoid of neediness, mix in a commitment to authentic interaction...et voilà: intimate relationship.

I say largely devoid of neediness because I still catch mercifully diminishing and increasingly infrequent glimpses of it in my own thoughts around Adam. The same is true around codependence: I may not be done with it, but when the old patterns emerge, I'm now able to notice and neutralize them far more quickly than in the past.

Strangely, I can't say that I'm "in love with" Adam. I don't see that as a bad thing. I'm beginning to view the in-love-with paradigm as inherently needy, insecure and codependent, premised on a romance-novel perspective that is largely unhealthy and patently unrealistic.

Even when I tell you that there are moments when I love him from a place of astonishing (to me) depth, I have to add that it's the me in him I'm discovering that I love. In the same way, when I marvel at the dizzying acceleration and formidable fearlessness of his forward movement, it's my own I'm seeing — through him because I've not let myself see it directly in me.

Of course, the same applies when he says or does something that makes me want to slug him. It's me I'm seeing. It's me I want to slug. He's just there to mirror my stuff back at me — the good, the bad and, most definitely, the ugly.

Everyone in my life presents that same mirror to me. When my daughter acts overwhelmed and needy, I must ask myself where that's going on in me. When a client refuses to let go of an old way of being, the same question comes up. When a colleague is stuck in an outmoded way of seeing, same question again. When, like Adam, a friend is doing magnificently, I also owe it to myself to acknowledge and celebrate my own magnificence.

While none of this mirroring is new, Adam's constant presence and the astounding similarities we share at this stage of our journey push it up to my nose multiple times a day.

Our deepening connection has also shown up in our writing. More often than not, even though we're writing different books that involve different experiences, we find out at day's end that we've tackled the identical theme. That's also largely true in the life issues that have come up for us. If something surfaces for Adam, some version of it nearly always surfaces within 24 hours for me, as well.

Of course, there have been challenging moments between us. You've read about enough of them here that you probably think that Adam is some kind of monster.

He's anything but that.

Rather, he's the most evolved, authentic spiritual journeyer I know...also the most fearless and committed. He's been one of my most valuable and valued teachers on the road to my own fearless authenticity, and one of the least gentle...which is a good thing. I require that in-your-face energy in my life right now. Adam provides it. He's forceful and does his excellent best to accept no bullshit — not in himself and not in anyone else.

And, possibly without knowing it, he's shown me what authentic relationship can look like.

I mentioned earlier that we haven't been physically intimate. While a sexual component might be a pleasing bonus for me in all of this, I'm probably still needy enough for that to be more hindrance than help. My goal is lovemaking with passion but no charge. I'm certain it's possible. I'm not certain I'm there yet.

At the same time, I'm no longer convinced that an intimate relationship requires a sexual component (as engaging a component as it can be). What it does require is what I expressed earlier: Two independent, empowered individuals who live their relationship as they live their lives, in the moment, and who stay together for as long as it serves them both — from a place of loving detachment and from a place of oneness experienced and expressed.

From my perspective, and to my great surprise, I seem to be living that with Adam.

He might not agree with any of this. He might still say, of the potential for evolved relationship, "It doesn't exist."

I don't know because we haven't discussed "us."

What would there be to talk about? Of course, we talk through what needs to be talked through (communication was a bit shaky at the beginning, but it's improved). But it strikes me that the moment two people start talking about The Relationship, there isn't much left to talk about, whatever kind of relationship it is.

Regardless, I don't need Adam to agree with me in order to have the experience I'm having. I simply have to have the experience. From it, I believe that evolved, authentic relationships are possible, if still rare.

I'm grateful for this one.

A postscript: Adam and I often share our writing. This is one piece, though, that I'm reluctant to share. The codependent place in me worries about rejection, fears abandonment.

The codependent place in me will have to move aside. An authentic relationship has no room for that kind of bullshit.

By the time you read this, Adam will have heard it, will have called me on any part of it that doesn't ring true and will have begun to process any part of it that pushes his buttons.

That's a good things, because his buttons are also mine.


Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Previous excerpts:
• April 28
• July 30
• August 25
• September 1
• September 9
• September 10
• September 12
• September 24
• September 27
• September 29


• If you're in the San Diego area, please join me at the Mind Body Spirit Expo at the Doubletree Mission Valley this Saturday, October 2. I'll be speaking at 2pm on Answering the Call to Write and will spend most of the rest of the day at the Lighted Bridge booth.


Oneness image by Sarafina420