Acts of Surrender 20: Back to the Future

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

When I returned to New Mexico from L.A. in October 2010, barely two months after I'd shed most of my belongings to move from Albuquerque to the West Coast, I didn't know why I was leaving California. I knew only that I needed to return to three of the key cities in my U.S. life: Sedona, Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Beyond that, I knew nothing, other than that writing was to once again be paramount in my life.

What I didn't realize at the time was that, in another of the bizarre ironies that rule my life, I would be leaving the quintessential movie town (L.A.) in order to accelerate The MoonQuest film project -- in Albuquerque, of all places.

New Mexico may not have birthed the notion of a MoonQuest movie (I'd envisioned the story as a motion picture even as I was writing the first draft of the novel, back in 1994). But it did help birth the unexpected idea that I would write the screenplay.

For months in early 2006, a Sedona friend with her own filmmaking aspirations kept urging me to try my hand at screenwriting. Finally, some unknown imperative impelled me to start, even though I knew nothing about writing a movie script. I picked up a copy of Viki King's How to Write a Movie in 21 Days: The Inner Movie Method and, in Santa Fe, put my first tentative Courier-font words to the page.

I was on the road in those days, on an inner-guided full-time odyssey that had me crossing the country multiple times over 30 months. One of the advantages of having the open road as your home is that it doesn't much matter where you are. So when, a few weeks later, then in Albuquerque, I saw that the Screenwriting Conference in Santa Fe was happening in a few days, I signed up on the spot.

By the time the conference was done, I was on fire. I booked a week at Sunrise Ranch, a Colorado retreat center I'd first experienced the previous year. When I checked out, my first draft was well underway.

A year and another screenplay draft later, my focus and energy had shifted back to The MoonQuest book. My road odyssey had just come to an end, dropping me full-time in Albuquerque, and I was at one of my first book-signings for the novel, at a local Borders.

When you're an unknown author, book-signings can be lonely affairs. You sit alone at your table with a stack of books and you try to engage the store's customers, who do their best to avoid you.

On this particular Sunday, a woman walked up to my table, intrigued by the colored horses on the giant book-cover blow-up I had on an easel next to me. She picked up a book, glanced at the cover to make sure it matched the poster, flipped it over and began to read.

"Oh," she said suddenly, glancing from the author's photo to me and back again. "You're the author!" I nodded, and she returned to the blurb.

"You know," she said, as she passed me her card so I could sign a copy of the book for her, "this could make a good movie."

Her card said: "Kathleen Messmer, Script Supervisor." I didn't know then what a script supervisor did. I knew only that it had something to do with filmmaking. I perked up.

"Funny you should say that," I said. "I've written a screenplay adaption."

"Funny you should say that," she retorted. "I've just started an independent production company and I'm looking for projects."

My eyebrows shot up.

"Keep my card," she added. "If I like the book, I'll want to see your screenplay."

She loved the book and, to my amazement, loved my script as well. And thus began the journey that now has me living in her Albuquerque house and has both of us preparing for a MoonQuest feature film.

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My first stop after leaving Southern California in October 2010 was Sedona. And one of my Sedona priorities was figuring out where I would stay when I got back to New Mexico. Unlike my years on the road, I no longer had the cash or credit to stay in a hotel. I would need a billet. But where? As I was driving up Hwy. 179 toward Oak Creek and the heart of town, an inner voice replied: "Ask Kathleen."

Kathleen? We'd been meeting for coffee semi-regularly but she was hardly a close friend, hardly the kind of person I'd feel comfortable asking for that kind of hospitality.

"Ask Kathleen," I heard again. "Think MoonQuest movie. Think synergy."

Reluctantly, I pulled into the parking lot in front of Garland's Navajo Rugs and called.

"It's so strange you're calling," she said. "I had a dream last night that I was angry at you because you hadn't turned in the MoonQuest film-trailer script I'd asked you for."

Kathleen had, in fact, asked me to write a trailer script. But things seemed to have been moving so lethargically on the film front that I'd felt no urgency.

"Then," she added, "you turned up at my front door, in the dream. I think you'd better come."

I did. And apart from a ten-day period in November, split between Santa Fe and a former client's in Albuquerque, I've been at Kathleen's ever since. Neither of us ever imagined I'd be here this long. Neither of us ever imagined what kind of synergy my presence would spark. With two of us living, eating and sleeping MoonQuest movie in the same house 24/7, things began to happen. Quickly.

Suddenly, it was no longer just about The MoonQuest movie. Suddenly, it was about the full trilogy of movies, which, also suddenly, had a name: The Q'ntana Trilogy.

Suddenly, I found myself writing not a new draft of The StarQuest novel, as I'd planned, but a first draft of The StarQuest screenplay.

And just as suddenly, the trailer project (designed to be part of a presentation to potential film investors) was no longer just about The MoonQuest. Now, it would encompass scenes from The MoonQuest, The StarQuest and the as-yet-unwritten SunQuest: the full trilogy.

With the trailer scripts written, I was launched into an intensive fast-track course in filmmaking. I was no longer just the screenwriter. I was an associate producer involved in every aspect of production. I was in on the casting calls and decisions. I helped interview directors and crew members. I was in on design decisions. And, of course, I was present when the first scene was shot and all through our two March weekends of filming.

Now, even as I finish a feature script for The SunQuest and launch into research on another screenplay project, I'm involved in the editing decisions for The Q'ntana Trilogy trailer, now on the final leg of its journey to the screening rooms, where it will help woo investors. On top of that, I'm working closely with Kathleen and my fellow associate producers on making the choices and decisions that will, at last, move us into preproduction on The MoonQuest movie.

I knew none of this when, like the Tarot Fool I have so often been, I stepped off the cliff of apparent certainty (my Orange County billet) and headed west on I-10, back toward Sedona and New Mexico.

I knew nothing.

Yet, I knew everything...which was that nothing beyond the present moment mattered, that if I stayed true to that infinite mind within me, I would always find myself on a true path and I would always be taken care of.

The months since have once again proven the incontrovertible truth of that philosophy. Somehow, with almost no income and, now, no car of my own, I have been held in the arms of the God (the God within), as I have been propelled forward along a path of deeply held passions I didn't even know I possessed.

If I hadn't felt an inexorable pull to L.A., I wouldn't have left Albuquerque. And if I hadn't left, I couldn't have come back into a situation that was required to both midwife The MoonQuest movie and launch me more fully and forcefully into screenwriting.

And if I hadn't come back to Albuquerque, I couldn't have had the experiences that would prime me for an eventual return to L.A.

Even as I left Southern California on October 10, I knew I'd be back -- to my future. I didn't know when, how or under what circumstances. But I knew, with that deep inner knowingness that has never steered me wrong, that my future lay in L.A. and that my presence in Albuquerque was but a minor detour on that journey.

That day is getting closer, and it's a return that I welcome...even as I carry a bit of apprehension: As accurate as my sensings tend to be at a big-picture level, I can easily misinterpret them when it comes to the micro-details. My last L.A. round, for example, wasn't remotely what I'd expected, though it was no less powerful and miraculous for that.

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When I left Albuquerque in August, I parked much of my book and CD inventory, along with two dozen boxes of worldly goods, in a former student's garage. Last week, in an act that felt profoundly significant, I consolidated it all in Kathleen's garage. I even went through my paltry collection of belongings and got rid of a handful of them.

The next day, just for fun, I picked a card from Doreen Virtue's Magical Mermaid and Dolphin Deck. The card was "Time to Move On," the card out of the deck's 44 that carries the most significance for me: Hours before my ex-wife told me, on election night 2004, that our marriage was over, I'd come home to the mermaid deck on my desk, where my then five-year-old daughter 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.

This week's card-draw wasn't as dramatic. But I'm certain that it was no less prescient. Somehow, soon, L.A. will pull me back. Somehow, soon, I will return to the future that was necessarily interrupted to prepare me for it.

And although I have even fewer conventional resources at my disposal than I did last year, I know that whatever's required will show up, conventionally or otherwise -- both to get me there and support me there.

I know it because it's always been the case. I know it because that inner voice has never let me down. I know it because it's true.

• To help move the energy around my return to L.A., I've launched The Best Sale of My Books You'll Ever Experience. Save up to 37% on my books and up to 52% on my CD, for one week only!

Photos by Mark David Gerson: #1, #3 + #4 Hollywood Boulevard; #2 Sunrise Ranch, Loveland, Colorado. MoonQuest book cover by Angela Farley. Q'ntana Trilogy poster by Richard Crookes. Tarot Fool card from the Osho deck. "Time to Move On" card from Magical Mermaid and Dolphin Deck

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 Acts of Surrender excerpts:
• October 20
• October 23
• October 29
• November 15
• March 7
• May 22

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