Acts of Surrender 13: The Wrong End of the Telescope

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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