Sedona, AZ
I always figured that this Yellow Brick Road would end at a place...that, somehow, it would land me in a new home in a new town. After all, that’s how each of my other open-ended odysseys ended: 1997 and 2019 in Sedona, and 2007, 2008 and 2010 in Albuquerque.
I have now been in Sedona for nineteen days. Has 2023 landed me back where I started?
There’s a precedent for that (not that precedents feel all that relevant in my life anymore): The eight-week journey that dropped me in Albuquerque in 2008 also began in Albuquerque.
And yet...
And yet even as I’m back where I started 179 days ago, I don’t sense that I’m here to stay. At the same time, it feels as though there was a moment during these past nineteen Sedona days when I arrived at the end of this Yellow Brick Road.
I’m not sure I can identify the moment, at least not yet. Perhaps it will be unmistakably clear in retrospect. Or perhaps there wasn’t a single moment. Maybe it has been more of a passageway than a portal.
It could be linked to this audiobook project I fell into soon after I got here. Or perhaps recording a long-desired MoonQuest audiobook is the result of the road’s having ended, not its cause.
The other day, one of my friends suggested that the end of the road might be more a state of mind than a particular place. That makes sense to me, or at least as much sense as these times end my life can make. It makes even more sense to me when I think back to my experience at Mount Shasta last month when I had the sense that a door had shut on much of the life I have lived since that mountain first sent me to Sedona in September 1997. Perhaps the Yellow Brick Road ended not in Sedona but as I drove up Mount Shasta’s Everett Memorial Highway and felt, physically, that twenty-six-year past fall away.
As I lay in bed this morning contemplating all this, I asked, as I have so often through the past nineteen days, whether Sedona is my landing place, whether I have returned here once again to start a new chapter on the spiral that is my life. The answer I sensed from that deep well of inner knowingness was no different today than it has been since I got here, and that’s that I am merely passing through and that my next fixed residential address remains in Southern California. More specifically, what I keep getting is that I’m here to complete the audiobook project and then move on.
Move on back onto the road? Move on to that fixed California address? I can’t know, especially as I each time I seek answers, I’m pulled back to the present moment. Or to quote O’ric’s counsel to Toshar in the early pages/moments of The MoonQuest: “It is best not to know too much too soon. It is best to know only that the story continues and to follow where it takes you.”
So that is what I will do my best to keep on doing in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Meanwhile, the audiobook project could keep me in the Sedona area a bit longer than I’d anticipated. Even should the recording be completed early next week, I still need to listen closely to all the edited audio files to make sure that the sound engineer didn’t miss something or that I didn’t skip a word or sentence. Some of those potential errors could require retakes, which means I can’t stray too far from the studio until that’s done.
That close listening, as I’m discovering, is slow, painstaking work, not to mention somewhat button-pushing. While I often read aloud as I’m writing and nearly always read aloud as I’m editing, I have never heard myself read any of my own books to me, from start to finish. It’s a strange experience and, given how powerful this book remains for me, an energy-activating one.
Just as I am the first reader for all my books and, perhaps, the reader most deeply impacted by each of those books, I am now my first book’s first listener. And hearing my own words read back to me in my own voice, words that remain personally transformational even after nearly 30 years, is both gratifying and, in moments, intense.
As I drove to the studio Monday morning after a restless night’s sleep, I tried to get a sense of why that initial recording session was causing me so much anxiety.
Yes, I was worried that I wouldn’t do the story justice (the same worry, ironically, I often have while writing my stories!). And, yes, I wasn’t certain whether I would be up for the physical demands of such a concentrated recording schedule. As well, there was a concern that I might run out of recording money before the project was complete.
But as I headed west on Highway 89a toward Jerome and Old School Studios, the answer I sensed offered a much more primal reason for my stress. What I heard as I asked the question was, “Nothing will ever be the same again.”
In other words, something about this audiobook project will be profoundly life-changing. Of course, I would like that to mean that the audiobook will not only become a huge hit but will propel all my other books (or at least my Legend of Q’ntana fantasy books) to bestseller status. But it could also mean any of a near-infinite number of possibilities.
Regardless, whether the audiobook is the cause of my Yellow Brick Road’s ending or its effect, the road has come to an end and, with it, these updates.
So all that's left to say, with apologies to Elton John, is Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road!
P.S. Of course, I will continue to post about my life, journey and creative projects, as I always have. And I imagine that, just as I did at the end of Pilgrimage: A Fool’s Journey, I will write an Afterword to wrap up this Yellow Brick Road odyssey for my Hello, Yellow Brick Road! book. Will that happen once I finally land or before? The journey and the book will tell me. For now, though, it really is time to say goodbye to these chronicles and to thank you for sticking with me through these past six months.
If these Yellow Brick Road chronicles have inspired you through these past six months and have helped on your own life’s journey and you feel moved to offer an energy exchange in the form or a donation, this will be my final appeal to you. I gratefully welcome all donations for this or toward the completion of The MoonQuest: via Zelle or Apple Pay Cash (with my cell number), PayPal, credit/debit cards (contact me for details) or GoFundMe (either https://gofund.me/9d5577a5 for the Yellow Brick Road or https://gofund.me/e7e7da43 for The MoonQuest audiobook.
As well, preorders are live on my website for both Hello, Yellow Brick Road! and The MoonQuest audiobook. I hope you’ll support both projects!