Mark David Gerson's New Earth Chronicles

A New Era

2009-11-13T17:55:00.003-07:00

If you also read or subscribe to my other blog (formerly The Voice of Your Muse, now simply Mark David Gerson's Blog), you'll know that change is in the air on the blogging front: I've decided to take my philosophy that life, creativity and spirituality are all intrinsically linked and apply it to my blogs.

In effect, I've suspended posts to this New Earth Chronicles blog and am consolidating all my blogging efforts on Mark David Gerson's Blog. The result will be a more dynamic blog, still focused on creativity but with a more eclectic and broadly spiritual flavor that should appeal to writers and nonwriters alike.

If you were already a subscriber to The Voice of Your Muse, nothing will change for you. If you subscribe only to New Earth Chronicles, you will eventually be auto-subscribed to the other blog once Feedblitz merges the lists. If you'd rather not miss out on content in the meantime, simply use the subscription blank here, on my web site or on Mark David Gerson's Blog. Any of those will make sure you get on the mailing list right away.

I hope you'll continue to enjoy my musings on life and creativity on the other blog, and I encourage you to continue to share yours there, too -- with me and with each other.

One more change: I've revamped and redesigned my web site. Please have a look.

The Colors of Enchantment

2009-08-12T17:44:00.000-06:00

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

I don't know what it's like now, but when Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall opened in 1982, its architects were loudly criticized for the auditorium, which, to many, was bland and colorless -- a stark contrast to its bold exterior.

The designers countered that its neutral shades were to be a backdrop for the audience.

And it's true. Before the lights dim, the concert hall is itself a symphony of color, with those filling its seats the star attraction.

I thought of this this morning while out for my morning walk in the high-desert foothills behind my house. And I remembered the first time, in 2005, that I drove into New Mexico.

Until that point, the only other place I'd lived in the Southwest had been Sedona, with its thick stands of juniper always green against striking crimson cliffs. When on the wintry January day I first crossed the state line from Arizona, I was shocked by New Mexico's unrelenting dun. "Where's the color?" I cried, determined to hate this place that had pulled me into it so magnetically.

Turns out, they don't call this the Land of Enchantment for nothing. During my next two years of full-time travel, New Mexico was where I spent most of my off-road time. Yes, it was a comfortable driving distance from my daughter, still in Sedona. But there was more: a numinous quality that transcends logic or explanation, a magic that speaks to the soul of anyone open to it.

Today during my walk, yellows, fuschias, magentas, violets and whites spring from the colorless soil, all the more brilliant because of their neutral backdrop. It's as though the land, in a life-imitates-art version of Roy Thomson Hall, has muted itself in order to give its flowers top billing.

I love this place, especially the granite-studded Sandia Mountains that rise up behind my home.

New Mexico lacks the obvious beauty of other places I've lived -- Nova Scotia, Hawaii, Sedona. But, no less than those, it has seduced my spirit and will, no doubt, keep me here until it has had its way with me. And for now, walking among the flowers that always seem such a miracle here in the desert, I pay tribute to the generosity of a land that steps back to allow all that thrives in its dusty soil to be its star attractions.

Photos #1, #3, #4, #5 (c) 2009 Mark David Gerson: Desert flowers, Sandia foothills, Albuquerque, NM; Photo #2 Roy Thomson Hall interior, by Roy Thomson Hall

Be Inspired!

2009-08-12T17:33:00.000-06:00

Tuesday, August 11 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

I'm excited and gratified to announce that the response to my 9/11/08 appearance as featured Inspirational Luminary on InspireMeToday.com was so successful and popular that they're repeating it this Friday, August 14.

Once a for-pay site, Inspire Me Today is now free, offering you features that will inspire you not only on August 14, but every day. So when you visit to read my inspirational offerings, I hope you you'll also sign up for the free daily inspiration email and free 44 page eBook Secrets to Soaring.

The site is awesome and I'm proud to now be able to call the woman who created it, Gail Lynne Goodwin, a friend. Please check it out on Friday...and beyond!

Snap a Pic for Me and Promote Yourself - Part II

2009-08-12T17:22:00.000-06:00

Monday, August 10, 2009 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

This is a repeat of a piece I posted on my The Voice of Your Muse blog last month, but featuring a whole new gallery of readers! I hope you'll join the fun. Read on to find out how....

Do you have a copy of either of my books? If so, I'd love to include a pic of you reading either The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, The MoonQuest, or both in my Rogues Gallery of Readers Photo Album on Facebook.

And to help you promote your book and/or web site, I'll include in the photo caption not only your name but your promotional info/link. I'll also post a selection of reader pics here in a future blog post.

If you have my email address, simply email me your pic and caption information. If you don't have my email address, contact me via Facebook, Twitter or my web site once you have the photo, and I'll tell you where to send it.

Thanks to Lynn Higgin (top pic, above), Dave Rhodes, Cristina M.R. Norcross, Laurent Delpit, Irene Brodsky and Joanne Allgoewer for their reader pics. I'm looking forward to getting yours!

How Great Thou Art

2009-07-14T17:50:00.010-06:00

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

I originally wrote this piece for a May 2005 issue of my then e-newsletter. But with so many people facing so many doubts about so many things in these so-turbulent times, it felt time to offer this reminder of the fundamental truth of our infinite potential and innate greatness.

May 16, 2005 ~ Victor, New York

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
~ traditional hymn

There's an old hymn you might know titled How Great Thou Art. I discovered it about a decade ago on a country gospel compilation and have loved it ever since. Through that time and until a few weeks ago as I was walking through a riverside park in suburban Detroit, I gave little thought to the words or their current relevance.

Then as I strolled among the emergent greens of an Eastern spring, something shifted and suddenly I got it.

All those church-goers through the hymn's century-long history who assumed they were singing to someone else, to the God-on-high that's outside of themselves, were missing the deeper truth behind the words.

All this time, they and I have been singing to ourselves!

How Great Thou Art is a declaration addressed not to some white-bearded deity, but to the singer. To me and to you: How great thou art.

For you are the God That You Are. And how great thou art!

The God That You Are is mighty. The God That You Are is strong. The God That You Are is fearless. The God That You Are knows only effortless, easy abundance.

The God That You Are is love.

We hear variations of this so often: You are love...God is love...Love is everything...Love is all that is...Love is all there is...

All these are true, even if they have been tritened in the over- and superficial use of those phrases.

But the basic truth is that the energy of love suffuses all. The energy of love fills all. And the energy of love is all there is.

And if that's so, then you are that energy. You are love.

How can something that is love be less than? How can something that is love be not good enough? How can something that is love be not valuable?

You are all these things. And from that place, it's time to step into an appreciation, acceptance and embrace of what you are.

For once you recognize, truly and viscerally, that there is nothing but love and that that's what you are, you can no longer hold yourself down. You can no longer diminish and demean who and what you are.

All you can do is acknowledge how great thou art. How great thou art.

There is a God Presence within and around you that in this moment is expressing itself in human form. It has the eyes the allow you read this. It has the ears that allow you to hear this. More than anything else, it has the heart that allows you to know this.

So stop for a moment. Take a deep breath. Take a deep breath and breathe in the truth. And that truth is the underlying greatness of the love that defines who and what you are.

Yes, the word the love has been cheapened through misuse. But in our human language that we now share as a means of communication, love really is the only word we have.

It's time to reclaim. It's time to re-energize it. It's time to open to the truth of it, which is that love is more than a romantic, red-trimmed valentine that makes you feel good on February 14.

Love is an energy.

It's the energy that created the Universe. It's the energy that created you. It's what holds you together in this body. It's what stitches the Universe together. It's what holds the stars together in their constellations. It's what creates the healthy, healing and whole-making patterns of our lives.

It's a frequency and vibration that sets no conditions for its expression, its giving or its receiving. It simply is. Ever-present, it always surrounds you in its embrace.

Take a moment to feel yourself embraced by that energy.

Close your eyes and think back to a time and place, where you felt fully nurtured, loved, embraced, present and in remembrance of all that you are. And if you cannot now recall such a moment, simply allow these words to create one for you, as you remember how great thou art.

Wherever you do not feel love in your life, wherever you do not feel that nurturing, nourishing, all-embracing, all-accepting energy of creation, breathe it in. Allow your breath, your connection with the Divine Being that you are, to embrace you, to nourish you, to nurture you...to love you

You are the God That You Are, and that God, all triteness aside, is love...the infinite and ultimate expression of love.

There is much baggage around the word God. Yet it is simply a three-letter word we have chosen to describe an energy that our minds cannot, at this time, comprehend.

How can your mind comprehend the infinite nature of all that is? How can your mind comprehend love as that infinite expression?

So we create words like God -- or Universal Spirit, Great Spirit, Goddess or All That Is. The words aren't important. What's important is that you attune yourself to what that energy represents, an energy that is beyond your mind's grasp.

Your mind is an important part of you. But it is only one part of you. Honor your mind and the roles it plays in your life. Don't allow your mind to be your life.

Your life is the energy represented by the concept of God. Your life is the energy represented by the concept of love. Your life is the frequency of your highest potential, a potential that your mind cannot begin to grasp.

So step out of your own way and into the God That You Are. Or better put: Get out of your own way and allow the God That You Are the freedom to step into your life.

Many evangelical Christian religions talk about accepting Jesus, which can sometimes, in some situations, be off-putting.

Yet if we take that call as a metaphor for opening your heart to let the love that Christ represents flow through you, then we're essentially talking about the same thing.

We're talking about opening our hearts to allow the highest energy to express itself through us, not only in Sunday church, not only in meditation, not only in the midst of some other experience of touching the Divine.

We're talking about being that Christ Light. It's being the Jesus within you, the Mother Mary within you, the Buddha within you, the Moses within you, the Allah within you, the Great Spirit within you. It's in being those energies in every moment.

Too easily and too often, we disempower ourselves by seeing those God energies as separate from ourselves. We sing How Great Thou Art to the outer God.

We do that, in part, because our minds cannot grasp that these energies reside within us and are part of us. We also do it because our minds, or some fearful parts of our beingness, cannot accept that we are that love, that we are that greatness.

So your assignment for this moment is to surrender to the concept that you are great, that you are love, that you are God.

Your assignment is to read or sing the words how great thou art and apply them to you. Your assignment is to see every expression of the word God as an extension of who you are.

The Divine God of your beingness is you. Not your human body or personality mind but the God That You Are, which encompasses everything -- all that is, was or ever could be -- and brings it together in a greatness that longs to express itself through you.

So open your heart, mind and soul to the greatness that you are, to the God That You Are. And in doing that make the choices for that higher resonance. In every moment.

When you stand at the crossroads of any choice, notice which fork in the road carries the higher resonance, which choice is the God choice.

Do your best in that moment to take that path, the God path, the Jesus path, the Allah path. Take that path as the Divine-in-human form that you are, and move forward in that energy, spreading the love and greatness that you are through each word, thought and action, in each moment.

You are the God That You Are. Repeat that:

I am the God That I Am.
I choose the God That I Am.
I surrender to the God That I Am, and I allow that highest potential, that highest presence, that highest expression of who I am, to live through me, to love through me, to act through me, to speak through me, to breathe through me.

I am the God That I Am.
I am the God That I Am.
I am the God That I Am.

Bless yourself with that energy in every moment of doubt, uncertainty or fear: I am the God That I Am.

The word namaste means I greet the divine in you, I greet the God in you, I greet the God That You Are.

And so I complete this by blessing you, by honoring you and by acknowledging how great thou art, by acknowledging the God That You Are.

I know who you are. I know the Divine Presence and God Potential you are. I know the miracles you are capable of. I know the love that you are. I know how great thou art. And I believe in you.

Namaste.

Photos by Mark David Gerson: #1 Albuquerque sky; #2 Yucca in bloom, Sandia Mountains; #3 "Bridge to Your Potential," Albuquerque sunset; #4 "Rough Crossing," Brookfield, WI; #5 Stone cairn, Meditation Mount, Ojai, CA

Upcoming Writing Workshops in Albuquerque

2009-07-14T17:45:00.003-06:00

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

Dear Friends,

I'd forgotten how much I loved sharing my passion for writing with other writers until last month's workshop here in Albuquerque. You see, it had been a couple of years since I'd offered a full-fledged writing class or workshop -- partly because of my travels and partly because I'd been so focused on getting my own books out that there'd been little time to teach.

But June's event was so fulfilling, for myself and the participants, that I've decided to do it again.

More to the point, I've decided to make Albuquerque -- and New Mexico -- the hub of a new series of classes, workshop and, ultimately, retreats.

It wasn't easy to declare any place as "home" after my 30 months of full-time travel. But two years after having landed here at the end of those travels, Albuquerque has finally come to occupy that place in my heart. I'm home. And I want to do as much of my work here as possible.

For now, I have two Albuquerque workshops coming up:

• Birthing Your Book...Even If You Don't Know What It's About ~ July 18
So many of us know we have a book inside us but either aren't clear what it is or don't know how to start. Through a series of powerful exercises, I'll help connect you with the book that's been inside you all along and show you how to use that connection to get your book written.As well I'll offer you practical tools to get going and keep going...through to completion.

• The Call to Write: Answering the Voice of Your Muse ~ August 8
Bring your questions, issues and concerns about writing. And prepare to write -- naturally, spontaneously and from that deep place within you where your muse resides, waiting for her call to be answered. (By popular demand, this offering of The Call to Write will involve more hands-on writing than any previous version.) I've offered versions of this workshop over the years and it's always more about the people who turn up than any fixed curriculum -- which means that every Call to Write is different from its predecessors.

It doesn't matter what your genre or experience level is, these workshops will transform your creative process and revolutionize your creative life. You'll never feel the same about writing again!

Both Saturday workshops take place from 1-5pm in the Tramway/Candelaria area of Albuquerque's Northeast Heights.

And if you sign up for both by July 14, you'll pay only $99, a savings of up to 34%! July 14 is also your deadline to get into the Birthing Your Book workshop for $55, instead of the regular $75. (PayPal and all credit cards accepted.)

But call soon: Space is very limited and my June 20 Call to Write was sold out!

If you feel any pull toward joining us, I encourage you to honor it. So often, the call to participate only makes logical sense once you're in the midst of the experience. And each workshop will be a powerful, supportive, nurturing and accelerating experience. I hope to see you there.

Remember, space is limited. So register today.

Warm regards,
Mark David

P.S. My calendar of upcoming book-signings, classes, workshops and other events is always posted on my page at booktour.com.

Leaps of Faith

2009-05-11T16:11:00.006-06:00

Monday, May 11 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

"You enter into this lifetime in the leap of faith your soul takes into the being in your mother’s womb. You take that one huge leap only to discover that such leaps never cease being demanded of you."
~ from "Leaps of Faith," The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write

As a writer, mentor/coach and teacher, I never seem to be entirely done with the words that move out into the world through me. I always have an ear cocked to my own issues when I counsel a client or teach a class. And although my books are snapshots in time, reflecting who I was the moment final corrections were appended to the final galley, they, too, contain messages for me long after I've moved on to other projects.

I pulled the "leaps of faith" quote from The Voice of the Muse a few days ago to include with the dolphin image in a friend's e-birthday card. In the end, I used neither the image nor the quote on his card, because I realized the message was more for me than for him.

Like many of you, I am moving through one of the most challenging times in my life. Whatever their outward appearances, those challenges have nothing to do with finances, employment or the economy. They're all about my determination to shed all that stands in the way -- all that I have placed in the way -- of a free-flowing life...a life of profound passion, joy and fulfillment...a life open to love in all its forms.

Having called that in, I'm now in the midst of an alchemical process that is, at times, terrifying and emotionally painful, an alchemical process that requires all the faith I can muster.

The dolphin image, by the artist Apollo, was one reminder of that. I experienced another yesterday while visiting the studios of photographer David Cramer. One of the photos on display was of a cougar caught in midair as it leapt from one cliff to another, with nothing supporting it other than the faith -- the knowingness -- that it would safely reach the other side.

We, too, are being called to leap off the cliff of our certainty and into the void through which will birth the magnificence our souls are yearning for. Like that cougar, we are caught in the space between breaths, living our faith as best we can, allowing the alchemical fires to purify, lighten and transform us into a more perfect physical expression of our divinity.

It's not an easy journey, nor is it one for the faint-of-heart. But it helps to know that it's one we all travel together.

Even if, in this moment, you don't believe in yourself, I believe in you -- in all that you are and in all that you are becoming. And I know you possess the courage, wisdom and inner strength to land, firmly and joyfully, on solid ground.

I wish you a wondrous journey, filled with the miracle that is your flowering spirit, expressing soul and opening heart. Thanks for being part of mine.

The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write just won its first award, an IPPY Silver Medal, from the Independent Publishers Book Awards. Click here to order a copy or for more information, including excerpts.

You'll also find audio clips from my 2-CD set, The Voice of the Muse Companion: Guided Meditations for Writers, on the same site.

Image credits:
• Dolphin: "Leaps of Faith" by Apollo
• Cougar: "Leap of Faith" (c) David Cramer 2007

Love Changes Everything

2009-03-28T11:22:00.001-06:00

"I am here to remind you that without love, your MoonQuest cannot succeed."
~ The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy

Love will turn your world around, and that world will last forever / Yes, love, love changes everything ... Nothing in the world will ever be the same.
~ from Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Aspects of Love"

Saturday, March 21 ~ Gallup, New Mexico

The black jeep drives out of Denny's parking lot, my daughter Guinevere waving from the back seat. It turns south on Muñoz Drive, then west on I-40 on its way back to Sedona, Arizona.

For ten minutes, I sit numbly in my car, unable to turn the key in the ignition and follow Muñoz to I-40's eastbound ramp, for the two-and-a-half-hour trip home to Albuquerque. When I do, it's a long time before I can turn on the radio or call a friend, the two distractions that often ease long drives for me.

Today, I need silence.

I've experienced many versions of this sadness since December 2004, when I drove out of Sedona in the wake of a marriage breakup and launched the odyssey that ultimately landed me here in New Mexico. But this is one of the most intense, and it takes me several days to figure out why.

Over the next two days, Guinevere emails me a half-dozen YouTube video clips from Easter Parade, Meet Me in St. Louis and Singin' in the Rain, the three classic movie musicals I introduced her to during our March Break visit, each accompanied by a love note. But, unusually, I don't hear from her at bedtime.

On the third night, I call. Her mom explains: Guinevere was more distraught than usual at leaving me and was afraid that talking to me would make her even more upset.

I understand. In those early months after I first left Sedona, I too hesitated to call Guinevere some nights for the same reason.

The next night, I have a seemingly unrelated experience: Someone I would never have considered pursuing romantically because of the yawning gap in our ages, pushes many of my buttons by flirting with me.

My first instinct is to recoil. Then I remember both the counsel I've given friends on that same topic in recent months and words I wrote just two weeks earlier in an online discussion thread on the subject. I was writing about two men. But the words apply to any two potential mates, regardless of gender or orientation:

"It's not age difference by itself that presents the potential problem," I wrote. "It's differences in maturity, psychology, life experience, goals, energy levels and interests that can get in the way. Sure, age differences can exacerbate those issues. But the same issues can easily arise between two men who are the same age.

"Dating someone young enough to be my son would push all sorts of buttons for me. But I wouldn't walk away from the potential for a deep, abiding love based on numbers alone. Love is too rare and special to make up artificial rules that ignore the mystical, magical illogic of the human heart.

"When love comes calling, I'm not going to ask for a birth certificate. I'm going to explore the heart connections that make love so wondrous."

When love comes calling....

Suddenly, I realize that what I've been experiencing is isn't only about me and Guinevere. Nor does it really have anything to do with this guy, who for reasons other than age may not be mate material. It's about how open I truly am to love -- however it chooses to come calling, whatever form it takes.

Back in January, I overcame some of my antipathy to The Secret movie and watched it again. The most profound thing it left me with was a call to write out all the things I was grateful for -- both those already visible in my life and those I desired but had yet to see or experience. The result was a comprehensive, four-page, ever-evolving list of statements related to every aspect of my personal, professional, creative and financial life.

I've been reading it aloud daily ever since.

When, Tuesday night, I get off the phone first with Guinevere and then with this young guy, I run to the computer and add this gratitude/joy statement to the others:

"I am so happy, joyous and grateful, now that I fully embrace and am unconditionally open to all the love directed toward me and flowing to me -- now and in all dimensions of time and space."

At first I think it's only about allowing myself to feel the fullness of my daughter's love and allowing myself to let in the kind of "loving, physically intimate and committed relationship" I've described in one of my other gratitude/joy statements. Then I realize that, as the Beatles so simply put it, "love is all there is."

Love is the energy that fuels everything and is the true source of every item on my four-page list. The only way to achieve my personal, professional, creative and financial goals is to keep opening my heart wider and wider to receive that love, however it comes calling.

The more open-hearted and vulnerable I can become, the more I can allow love in all its forms to touch and transform me. These forms can include the words of my next novel as much as the success of this one. They can include financial freedom as much as loving relationships.

They can also include pain.

The love from an unexpected source that led to my marriage became the pain of its dissolution. The joy of a week with my daughter is also the heartache of our parting.

What last week reminded me was that love can bring pain as well as joy, and that unless I'm open to a full experience of love's pain, I will never experience the heights of its joy and passion.

It also reminded me that the best inner and outer work I can be doing in these times of intense upheaval involves not only keeping my heart open but doing everything in my power to open it yet more...and more...and more -- to myself, to everyone else and to all the ways love presents itself, even if they're potentially painful to me or to someone else.

When love comes calling, whatever form it takes, I choose to be the open vessel that welcomes it and allows it to fill me with all my heart desires -- the four pages' worth that I know about as well as the infinite realms of desire I cannot yet begin to imagine.

Love does change everything. Everything.

I'm now ready to embrace it. Unconditionally.

Are you?

Please share your thoughts here.

Our Inauguration Day

2009-01-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

Monday, January 19 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

Tuesday at noon ET, when Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America, it will not only be his inauguration but ours. It will be an inauguration for each of us willing to step into a new world with him.

If only 10 percent of us -- in this country and around the world -- leap across the threshold today into that new beginning saying "Yes, I can. Yes, we can," and if we not only believe it but act on it and live it, this country and this planet will be changed forever.

Are you part of that 10 percent? Are you ready to turn your back on fear? Are you ready to embrace all parts of you and of each other in love and respect? Are you ready to embrace possibility, hope and potential?

What can you do in your life today -- right now -- to anchor this new beginning? How can you embody your possibility and your potential?

Share it here. Then be it. Now.

Coming Out (Again) for Christmas

2009-01-03T06:08:00.011-07:00

Friday, January 2 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

It's December 14 and I'm at the New Mexico Gay Men's Chorus's "Come Out for Christmas" concert with my friend Kathleen. It's our second year attending this event together and although this year's show is not nearly as good as last year's, there's something about being here this time that feels inexplicably right.

After the concert, Kathleen and I are chatting about this and that at a nearby Starbucks when I ask her, "Have I ever told you my 'gay story'?"

If you've been following this blog for a few years, you'll have read various versions of the story. What I told Kathleen was this:

For the first 20 years of my adult life, I lived as a gay man. Yet, as I awakened to my spirituality, I felt called to stop identifying myself as gay -- or straight. Rather, I began to see myself as a sexual being open to all possibilities. Still, I was somewhat surprised when, a few years later in Sedona, AZ, I fell in love with a woman.

When I told my gay friends that I was getting married (a sort of reverse coming-out), I explained that I had fallen in love with a wonderful spirit who just happened to occupy a female physique. From that place of love and passion, I said, gender and orientation were irrelevant and anything was possible. And it was.

Yet as profound, intimate and wonderful as our relationship was, it ended six and half years later, for reasons unrelated to sexuality.

In the four years since, I've often revisited the sexual orientation question. "Am I gay again?" I would ask in meditation. The answer was always, "Nothing has changed. Don't label yourself. Be open to all possibilities." Even though my primary physical attraction remained toward men, I honored that counsel and refused to categorize myself.

Something changed when I returned to Albuquerque in November after 40 days on the road. It was as though after 15 years of traveling in the spiritual realms, I had crash-landed back on earth and was reconnecting with the 38-year-old I had been before my spiritual awakening.

Suddenly, people from my past resurfaced, as did work opportunities disturbingly similar to those I hadn't pursued in 16 years. And at the very physical (read "earthly") job my financial situation pushed me into last month, I have been "Mark." Only friends and family from years back know me as Mark. To most everyone else I'm "Mark David."

I was starting to believe that I was living my own version of the infamous dream season of the 1980s Dallas TV series and that I would wake up and discover that nothing of the past decade and a half had really occurred.

Of course it all did, and I have a beautiful nine-year-old daughter (and all of you) as proof. What I have been experiencing, rather, is a giant turn of the spiral I wrote about in Everything Old Is New Again, a "full circle" far more comprehensive than any I remember having lived.

In spiritual terms, it's time to take all I have experienced on my spiritual journey and bring it down to earth -- into the practical, into the physical...to reconnect who I was with who I am now.

"Perhaps," as I wrote so presciently in The MoonQuest, "it is time...to allow the boy I was to touch the man I have become..."

When I leave Starbucks that Sunday evening, having shared my story with Kathleen, I feel the same kind of rush I felt 24 years earlier when I began coming out as a gay man to straight friends. I feel as though a tremendous burden has been lifted from me. I feel lighter.

Four days later, I go to see Milk, the film story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the US, who was assassinated in 1978 by a fellow San Francisco city supervisor.

The movie is brilliant, compelling and moving (as is Sean Penn's portrayal of the title role) and I find myself wiping away tears at frequent intervals.

It's compelling for another, more personal reason: the film's time frame covers the period of my coming out, and the gay activism it portrays is a bolder version of my activism in the Montreal of the mid- to late '70s. It's like watching my own life play out before me.

I leave the theater in an altered state and when I got into the car, I begin to sob uncontrollably. I sit there -- crying, heaving, releasing -- for 20 minutes. And when the tears stop I see that I have come full circle, that I have allowed the Mark I was to touch the Mark David I have become, that as open as I remain to the infinite realm of possibilities in life, I am a gay man. Again.

Even as I share this story with close friends in the days that follow, I'm not sure what to do with this realization. Is it appropriate to come out a third time? Is it necessary to be as openly gay at 54 as I was at 24 and 34? Does it even matter anymore to anyone but me?

This morning, in the midst of an interview with Joan Sotkin on her Prosperity Place radio show, I realize that it does matter. And I realize why.

During the show, Joan shares her spiritual coming out story and reveals how difficult it had been to let her spirituality have a place in her coaching work. And I note how vulnerable I felt putting out my most recent blog post, All That Matters Is That I'm Writing.

As we're talking, I remember how important it is to be vulnerable, how healing it is to share our truth and our stories out into the world. I remember, too, how much of my work is about helping give people permission to do those very things by doing them myself.

That's largely what this blog has been about. That's largely what Harvey Milk's message was about. He insisted that we must be who we are out in the world, and it's a message that's as valid today as it was 30 years ago -- whoever we are, whatever our orientation.

I realize, too, this morning that like Joan we all have many parts to ourselves and that each of these is more potent and transformational when operating as part of a oneness. When we fragment ourselves -- being spiritual only with our spiritual friends, gay only with our gay friends, Jewish only with our Jewish friends, vegetarian only with our vegetarian friends, Democrats only with our Democrat friends -- we cheat the world and ourselves of the strength, power and paradox of the human soul.

Each of us is a unit within which lives unparalleled diversity. Only when we can be at peace with that diversity within ourselves will we be at peace with that same diversity in others. And only then will we see peace in the world.

That peace begins in me. That peace begins in you. And it begins with me honoring all of who I am by integrating all of who I am into all that I do. One of the ways I achieve that integration is by being open and vulnerable with you, by letting you see more of me than I might always prefer you to see in the hopes that you will be inspired to share all of you with others.

Tikkun olam is a phrase in the Jewish tradition that translates from the Hebrew as "healing the world." That healing begins when I open my heart to myself so that I can see who I am. It grows when I open my heart to you and let you see who I am. It grows further when you do the same.

Won't you open your heart and share your light -- all of it -- with a world so desperate for healing? Won't you come out of hiding and be?

What parts of yourself are you hiding from yourself?

What parts of yourself have you hidden from the world?

Where can you integrate more of who you are into what you do?

Where can you be more open to others' diversity?

Where can you be more open to your own?

Won't you share some of who you are here?

Photos: #1 Gay Santa from The Austin Chronicle; #2 me and my daughter, Guinevere; #3 Book cover for The MoonQuest, designed by Angela Farley; #3 Poster for the movie Milk, starring Sean Penn; #4 Hebrew lettering for "tikkun olam"

All That Matters Is That I'm Writing

2008-12-26T05:55:00.006-07:00

Friday, December 26 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

What does this Muse want of you? Why won’t it go away?
It won’t because it can’t. It can’t any more than you can ignore it.
As long as that siren sings to you, neither you nor it can rest until you answer...
~ The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write

All that matters is that I'm writing... I repeat this phrase, mantra-like, in the hours before dawn -- in the hour before my alarm goes off -- trying to drown out the fear and anxiety rattling around in my head. All that matters is that I'm writing...

Like many, these days, I find myself in the throes of financial uncertainty, not sure how I'm going to stay afloat...not sure if I'll stay afloat.

After four years of financial miracles -- miracles that got two books completed and published, miracles that allowed me to travel this country countless times, miracles that freed me to bring the gift of my voice and my words to many of you -- it has been feeling as though the well of miracles has run dry. With money seemingly running out and bills appearing unpayable, I'm now completing my fourth week as a retail stockman in a seasonal job that will likely stretch beyond the holiday season.

It's a relentlessly physical job with long hours and with a paycheck that only begins to cover my expenses at a time when more remunerative coaching, editing and speaking gigs are not showing up. And I've spent most of these past weeks more resentful than grateful, more worried than trusting, more afraid than alive.

I realized on Christmas Day, though, that the well of miracles never runs dry. It just takes on different forms for different times and different needs.

Among those miracles is the job itself, one that fell into my lap with no interview (when other applications went unacknowledged, when interviews elsewhere reaped no offers) and one that pays more to start than similar positions in town. Another is one of my co-workers, who always makes me laugh, even when all I want to do is cry. A third is my ability, surprising even to me, to manage the job's physical rigors without ill effect.

Then there are my close friends, whose combination of loving support and tough-love pep talks have kept me going through these challenging times.

One of those friends sent me an email earlier this week in which he repeatedly reminded me to "write, write, write." "It is your soul work," he wrote. "It is your gift."

I read his words and, sobbing, remembered a revelation I had last month as I was heading back toward Albuquerque after six weeks on the road. I knew that after a decade of fits and starts, it was time to complete The StarQuest, one of two projected sequels to my novel, The MoonQuest. "Regardless of what it takes and what is required of me," I remembered saying, "I commit to getting it done. It's time, and I'm ready."

That realization receded somewhat in my early days back in town, preoccupied as I was with home-hunting, job-hunting and a Thanksgiving visit from my daughter. It pushed back to the surface with my friend's email, which made me teary not only every time I reread it (which I did often) but every time I talked about it.

A few years ago, when I was still traveling and offering regular inspirational and sound-healing teleconferences, one of my talks was about passion, heart's desire and purpose. We must follow our passion and heart's desire, regardless of cost and consequence, I said at the time. More recently, in The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, I quoted Abraham Lincoln as saying, "Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way."

What I've come to realize is that it's now time for me to live those words. All of them. More fully than I ever have before.

I have to write. I have to complete The StarQuest.

Yes, my Muse demands it of me. But, more importantly, my soul demands it of me.

If I've such a powerfully emotional response to this renewed call to write, then it's a call I must answer -- regardless of cost or consequence. I cannot write, speak and teach what I write, speak and teach without honoring that soul imperative, without surrendering to this profound yearning.

I love inspiring you to follow your soul's call in all the ways I have done over the years -- through coaching (writing, life and spiritual), through sound healings and activations and through transformational art and energy portraits. As well, I love sharing my life with you through these newsletters and blog posts. And I will continue to do all these things as opportunities arise. (I'd much rather generate income from these avenues than from my current job!)

But I cannot inspire you to follow your soul's call unless I'm following my own. And I cannot follow mine 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.

If doing it means working as a stockman, then that's what I must do. If doing it means I have to move or do without, then that, too, is what must be done. Whatever it takes is whatever it takes.

Another gift of my current retail stint is the discipline it is teaching me. Not the "hard discipline" of having to write a certain amount or for a certain period each day. But the "soft discipline" of being a disciple to my writing, of recognizing that if this call is so important to me, I have no choice but to follow my own advice in The Voice of the Muse and carve out whatever time I can, recognizing that I have no greater priority in my life right now.

The rest is up to God, however you define it. There is no other way. Because, in the end, all that matters is that I'm writing.

What is your soul calling you to as you launch into 2009?
What sings to your heart?
What are you not doing that would feed your essence?
How is your fear holding you back?
How are you allowing your light to be dimmed and your life to be diminished?
What are you afraid of losing?
What are you afraid of gaining?

Please share your thoughts and comments, your fears and desires, here.

May the new year bless you as you open to the yearning of your soul. And may you recognize your innate strength and limitless courage as you answer its call.

• If writing is your passion and you're having a difficult time acknowledging it and/or acting on it, this guided meditation -- an audio excerpt from The Voice of the Muse Companion: Guided Meditations for Writers and my holiday gift to you -- may help...

Image of The Muse by Richard Crookes from the cover of The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write (LightLines Media, 2008)

Mark David Gerson Wins 2008 New Mexico Book Award for The MoonQuest

2008-11-22T09:55:00.001-07:00

Friday, November 21, 2008 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

Mark David Gerson’s win, for The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy, was announced on November 21 at an Albuquerque awards banquet designed to honor authors in more than 30 categories from New Mexico and beyond.

His award, in the statewide contest, was in the Fantasy/Science Fiction category.

The MoonQuest, Gerson’s first novel, is part of a fantasy pantheon that includes The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia.

It’s the compelling tale of a young bard’s quest to restore vision and imagination to a mythical land where stories have been banned and storytellers put to death.

This is The MoonQuest’s fifth award and its second this year. In March, it won a Gold Medal for Visionary Fiction in the Independent Book Publisher Awards.

The fantasy, popular with adults and young adults alike, has also been recognized in the USA Best Book Awards (visionary fiction), the Reader Views Awards (young adult fiction) and the New Mexico Discovery Awards (unpublished fiction). This is its first fantasy/science fiction prize.

As well, The MoonQuest has been lauded by U.S. critics as “an evocative and emotionally moving tale of adventure” (Midwest Book Review) and “an exceptional, timeless novel” (The Mindquest Review of Books). Library Journal praised it as an “emotionally solid tale” whose “songlike prose [offers] a match for its ethereal characters and allegorical message of inner truth.”

For Gerson, who moved to New Mexico in 2005, this award carries particular significance. “This is where I finally finished The MoonQuest,” he says. “It’s also where I finished my second book, and hope to complete my third!”

Gerson is also author of The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write (LightLines Media 2008), based on his 15-plus years of teaching creative writing in the U.S. and Canada. He is now seeking a producer for his screenplay adaptation of The MoonQuest and is working on a sequel to the novel.

This is the second year for the New Mexico Book Awards, established to acknowledge the best in New Mexico books. Over the next year, The MoonQuest will be featured, along with other winners, in special displays in bookstores and libraries across the state, including in all New Mexico Borders outlets.

Both Gerson’s books are available from Amazon.com and other online retailers, from the publisher at www.lightlinesmedia.com and at selected U.S. retailers coast-to-coast.

Everything Old Is New Again

2008-11-19T20:22:00.006-07:00

Wednesday, November 19 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

Everything old is new again, as the Peter Allen lyric suggests. Here I am, back in Albuquerque, my unexpectedly brief journeying complete. And I move into a new rental here on Monday.

When I left town on September 30, I didn't know if I'd ever be back. All I knew was the call to the open road, a call I (once again) had no choice but to obey.

Through 40 days of driving, I traveled south and east into Texas, then back north into Louisiana, crossing it and the Mississippi before veering up through Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. After a pit stop in Albuquerque, I continued west into Arizona, then south toward San Diego and north to Sacramento.

That rainy night in Sacramento, dining with a minister friend and her husband (who, themselves, are planning a move to Albuquerque), I knew that Albuquerque was calling me home.

As if to emphasize the point -- and to remind me that I wasn't going back, I was moving forward -- I woke up two mornings later with "everything old is new again" playing in my head. (And in case I missed the message, the song reprised itself for me the following morning.)

I don't like the expression "coming full circle" because it suggests that we're returning to a place we've already been, having learned nothing and grown not at all. My preferred image is that of a spiral, where we return to a place along the same axis, but at a higher level of consciousness and understanding.

As I wrote in The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, "Each cycle’s completion returns you not to where you began but to a higher level of awareness, mastery, openness and trust." I wrote that about the creative process, but isn't life the ultimate creative process?

So here I am, ready to embark on my own version of the Peter Allen song. Everything old is new again.

For a start, I'm committed to returning to The StarQuest, the first of two projected sequels to my novel, The MoonQuest.

The StarQuest has been in my life for more than a decade, having begun to work its way out of me before The MoonQuest was finished (even if, at the time, I thought it was finished). I've worked on it in fits and starts since then and have yet to complete a first draft.

This week, I began reading through its 200-odd manuscript pages. The book is far from complete. But it is ready to be birthed, and I'm ready to be its midwife. Everything old is new again.

Another renewal is my relationship with the Sandia Mountains. This magical range, which marks the eastern boundary of Albuquerque, is a large part of what keeps calling me back to this place.

Like my previous home here, my new condo is in the Sandia foothills. As wonderful as my last location was (half a mile from a trailhead), the new one's is even better: nothing across from it but open land and mountain trails. Everything old is new again.

This past Sunday while at church, the passenger-side rear-view mirror assembly vanished from my car. I don't know whether it was an accident, vandalism or theft, but a way of looking back -- into the past -- was taken from me. A new mirror was installed yesterday. Everything old is new again.

As I was wondering this afternoon, in the midst of writing this piece, how I would be supported in this re-newed Albuquerque life, I received a phone call from a local magazine that is seeking an editor, its content similar to one I worked on in Toronto more than 15 years ago.

I don't know whether I'll get the job -- or will even want it if it's offered -- but it, too, suggests that everything old is new again.

The turn of the spiral is complete, and here I stand at the threshold of a new life that resembles the old one in surface details only. Where do I go from here? Across the threshold and into a beginning still veiled but replete with the promise that all new beginnings offer.

Once again, from The Voice of the Muse: "From silence to silence, word to word, trust to trust -- the spiral is an infinite one, carrying you from one beginning to the next and one ending to the next on a journey with no beginning or ending."

The spiral is an infinite one... How perfect that through my 40 days of travel I, somehow, unconsciously, drove an infinity symbol through those 10 states, with Albuquerque as its center point.

Photos (c) 2008 by Mark David Gerson: #1 Sandia foothills, Albuquerque, NM; #2 Myriad Gardens, Oklahoma City, OK; #3 Stone cairn, Meditation Mount, Ojai, CA; #4 Sandia foothills, Albuquerque, NM; #5 Winterville Mounds, near Greenville, MS.

More photos from the journey at "Forty Days on the Road."

Forty Days on the Road

2008-11-19T20:11:00.009-07:00

Tuesday, November 18 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

A selection of photos from my recent journey.

Photos (c) 2008 by Mark David Gerson: #1 Salida River, Salida, CO; #2 Downtown water towers, Pratt, KS; #3 Sunset near Marfa, TX; #4 Hot Springs Mtn., Hot Springs, AR; #5 Hwy 49, near Bear Valley, CA; #6 Stupa of Enlightenment, Crestone, CO.

A Prayer for Prosperity

2008-11-11T20:11:00.004-07:00

Friday, November 7 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

Geri O'Hare and her husband, Art, have been dear friends and great supporters of my work and my writing for quite some time now.

When I visited them in California last month, Geri handed me this Science of Mind treatment for prosperity she had written some years back as a Religious Science Practitioner. It's been such a powerful inspiration for me that I asked her if I could share it with you here. It feels particularly relevant in these times.

After you read it, use it or meditate with it, please return here and share your thoughts, comments and experiences. Our shared stories are always part of the healing and transformation.

A Guest Post by Geri O'Hare, R.Sc.P.

Prosperity Treatment

I know that within me there is a Universal Power which is God.

It is Infinite Spirit and I am one with this Spirit. It is Universal Mind, Intelligence and Love operating through me at all times. It guides me into Right Action, prosperity, greater abundance, peace and harmony. It knows no limitations and recognizes no lack. It knows exactly what I need and when I need it. I only have to believe, and I do this ardently.

With childlike faith I now state that all my affairs are in order. No longer do I harbor fears for my future. Instead, my heart is filled with confidence and certainty.

I am aware that Divine Intelligence is my partner and we are never separated. Together we accomplish everything, and my todays and tomorrows are assured.

Every move I make is for the best. I always have an abundance of money or whatever it is that I need to make my life happy and complete. The supply is constantly moving towards me because my Divine Partner knows exactly what to do.

All my anxieties and fears have evaporated. I see that I have everything and that I am lovingly protected at all times.

Thank you, Infinite Spirit, for the tremendous changes in both my life and in my thinking.

I now enjoy perfect abundance and perfect prosperity. All the good in the Universe is my good now and there is no limit to it.

It is my birthright because God and I are united in Spirit and I am deeply grateful.

I know, I believe and it is so!

Lovingly,
Geri O’Hare, R.Sc.P.

Photo of Geri O'Hare by Mark David Gerson

TGIM

2008-11-11T20:08:00.002-07:00

Monday, November 10 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

TGIM? Don't you mean TGIF?

Well, my colleague Scott Stratten would like you to start thinking about why we bless Fridays and curse Mondays. More importantly, he'd like to help us bless all days and to praise Mondays with the same passion we now praise Fridays.

Check out Scott's message, "Thank Goodness It's Monday" and be part of the paradigm shift.

Yes, You Can!

2008-11-05T00:22:00.001-07:00

I think I can
I think I can
I think I can
I know I can
~ The Little Engine That Could

Tuesday, Nov. 4 ~ Needles, California

On this historic night in the United States, it's important to remember that whatever our dreams, whatever our challenges, whatever our hopes, whatever our fears, yes we can!

Yes, I can.

Yes, you can.

Whatever it is, however unlikely it seems, it is possible. For you...for me...for all of us.

Believe it.

Know it.

Embody it.

Be it.

The Power of Being

2008-10-28T16:44:00.003-06:00

Friday, Oct. 24 ~ Surprise, Arizona

I'm sitting on the patio of the Olive Garden restaurant here in Surprise, Arizona. Dinner is done and I'm waiting (and waiting and waiting) for my check.

Frustrated, I set down my book and am immediately aware of a vortex of energy spiraling out of me and around the patio, touching everyone and everything in its path.

As I focus my attention on the swirl of light I seem to be radiating, the young man sitting by my left shoulder darts a quick, wary glance at me, as though I had tapped his arm. Just as quickly, he looks away.

I've been on the road nearly 30 days now, a tiny fraction of the 30-month duration of my previous road odyssey. In both instances I've sensed, without objective proof, that part of the purpose of the journey is as an activational presence -- in effect, doing energy work on everyone and everything I encounter, including the land I drive or walk across.

In 1997, just before my first such journey, my then-Reiki Master likened all who are initiated into the Reiki energy to crystals. Without making any conscious effort, she said, we would be radiating healing energy -- just as a crystal does. There was nothing we needed to do but be the energy.

In the years since, I've come to expand her dictum in the realization that we are all energy vehicles and that our energetic presence -- our beingness -- is always a crystal-like presence in the world.

It can be a presence for en-light-enment or not. That is our choice and it depends on the resonance or vibration we are holding at any given moment.

If we are in fear, mistrust, anger or hatred, then those are the energies we project around us and those are the energies with which we affect others.

If we are loving, compassionate, grateful and forgiving, if we are walking in the path of our highest calling and potential, we can be a powerful force for healing and transformation.

"Be the change you want to see in the world," Gandhi said. He didn't say "make the change." He said be the change.

When we live from our hearts, practice compassion and surrender to the highest imperative we can access and touch in any given moment, we are agents of change, angels of light and healers of the highest order -- without having to do anything.

It's happening through us, whether we're aware of it or not, regardless of what we're doing. Of course, our actions are important. But they will flow naturally from this place of beingness and will be the most appropriate actions possible, even if they don't seem that way in the moment.

I understand this. I know it. And I believe that this journey I'm now called to is powerful work -- in my life and in the life of the planet. Yet my doubting mind still seeks proof at times, still seeks validation, still yearns for confirmation...even as I know that none of these are objectively necessary.

My Olive Garden experience -- though not as dramatic as parts of me would have preferred -- offered a hint of what's really going on in my life and reminded me that all I need to do is open my awareness and I will get all the "proof" I need.

Yes, I still wonder some days why I'm not doing more. I wonder why I'm doing so few sound-healing events and sessions, why I'm not promoting my books as aggressively as I was a few months back.

I'm open to doing all these things and do them when called or when the moment feels right. But I'm learning to accept that my beingness will always be a more powerful and effective tool of healing and transformation than any doingness I can muster up.

When we hold the resonance of trust, faith and love out in the world, that's the highest work we can be doing -- regardless of external circumstances. We can't always see the impact of that "work" (and might, in my experience, not always prefer to see it), but it's happening.

By being all we can be, by surrendering to our highest imperative, by living from our hearts, we not only transform ourselves and model that transformation for others, we activate everyone and everything into that same force field of change.

One final note: There are many days, here on the road, when I wonder how just "being" will pay my bills when there's little that I'm consciously doing to bring in money.

Then I remember the many miracles that have turned up for me over the years -- just when I've needed them. I remember, too, that God, however you define it (God Self, Higher Self, Spirit, Universal Mind, etc.) is the true source of my support and supply -- not my books, not my clients, not an employer.

My only job is to be -- open, receptive and surrendering -- and to let that beingness define and determine what I do. From that place, I trust that I will be supported, not because of what I do because of what I am. I trust, too, that all will be well...as it always is.

Art by Mark David Gerson: "Heart of Fire (#403)" -- As you look into this drawing, hold your hand to your heart and become aware of the fire within it. Feel the passion that burns in the center of your beingness, a fire that burns eternally yet destroys nothing but your own sense of your own limitations.

Rebirthed from the Earth

2008-10-02T18:31:00.010-06:00

Thursday, Oct. 2 ~ Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Whites City, New Mexico

It's an hour's hike down 755 feet of spirals and switchbacks to the floor of Carlsbad Caverns in southeastern New Mexico. My knees protest the unrelenting steepness of the trail and my emotions protest the loss of light, the descent into darkness.

This journey into the womb of the earth scares me, which surprises me. I recall neither physical nor emotional intensity during my last visit here, in 2005. I remember only the sculptural beauty of the calcite formations and the ghostly otherworldliness of this underground realm.

This time, though, the trek has me close to tears at times, and I'm embarrassingly relieved when I complete the mile-long circuit of the 8.2-acre Big Room and find myself waiting for the elevator to whisk me back to the surface.

As I return to the light, I'm suddenly aware of the powerful metaphor I have just experienced. On this day before my birthday, I have had my own rebirth: into the womb, which, however embracing, is still dark and confining for a spirit accustomed to infinite light and space...up through the birth canal with remarkable speed and ease...and into a new day, a new life, a new outlook and a renewed purpose.

Tomorrow, on my birthday, I expect to ascend to the heavens and touch the stars -- with a visit to the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of west Texas.

The rebirthing continues...

Carlsbad Caverns NPS photos by Peter Jones: #1 Cavern entrance; #2 Big Room formations

Reach for the Stars...and Touch Them

2008-09-25T09:26:00.012-06:00

With all there is
Why settle for just a piece of sky?
~ from the score of Yentl, Lyrics by Alan & Marilyn Bergman

Thursday, Sept. 25 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

I'm walking on a nature trail in Albuquerque's Sandia Mountain foothills, the late-day sun gilding the granite outcroppings and illuminating the sage, cactus and juniper.

This is one of my final farewell walks in a landscape that has so nurtured and inspired me.

You see, in five days I will be gone from here, launched yet again on an open-ended, Spirit-directed odyssey into the unknown and unimagined -- my third such journey of faith in the past 11 years.

My first, in 1997, opened me to marriage, parenthood and life in a new country. The second, which spanned 30 months and was sparked by the end of that marriage, led to my two books and CD and kindled for me a more empowered professionalism. Both journeys pushed and expanded me, challenging me to surrender more fully to the divine imperative that directs and prospers me -- when I let it.

In each case, I knew nothing of what lay head. I simply stepped off the cliff of my certainty and into the void from which all creation emerges.

Was I afraid? Sometimes.

Did I allow that fear to stand in my way? Rarely, and never for long.

As I think ahead to what's next, this lyric from Osibisa's song "Woyaya" plays in my head:

We are going
Heaven knows where we are going
We'll know we're there
We will get there
Heaven knows how we will get there
We know we will

I'm also reminded of the scene in The MoonQuest where Toshar and his three companions must step through an opening that will carry them "beyond the end of the known world."

Dense smoke chokes them where they stand as the jungle through which they have trekked burns up. There is no way back.

The only way is forward -- into the unknown, with its challenges and opportunities. With its secrets and mysteries. With gifts more wondrous and miracle-filled than any they could imagine.

When I left Toronto in 1997, the only direction I had from my GPS (God Positioning System) was to head west. Ultimately, it landed me in a new life in Sedona, Arizona.

When I left Sedona seven years and a Hawaii sojourn later, my GPS also sent me west -- at first. In the many months of cross-country travel that followed, I always managed to find my way back to the New Mexico that has been my full-time home for the past year.

Now, as I prepare to leave Albuquerque, my divine compass points eastward, directing me to the McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas.

I've felt pulled toward the home of National Public Radio's StarDate since August, when I knew I would be returning to the road.

It was a mystifying pull because, as stunning as is the observatory's setting and as fascinating as is its planetarium show, I've been there -- twice -- and never experienced any life-altering epiphanies.

At a conscious level, at least, it was a fun place to visit. Nothing more.

Yet if I've learned anything through my years of personal and spiritual growth, it's the importance of surrendering to the highest imperative I can access in any given moment. (There's a reason why the word "surrender" appears 67 times in The Voice of the Muse!) Like Toshar and his friends, I too must surrender to whatever lies beyond the end of my known world and be open to all the wonders that await me on the other side.

And so, if that highest imperative is sending me back to southwest Texas, I'll go -- whatever it means.

I've asked what it means countless times in recent weeks. Today, on my Sandia walk, I ask again.

For the first time, I hear an answer: "To remind you to reach for the stars."

Now, as I write these words, that same inner voice adds: "Reach for the stars...and touch them."

We all need reminders to reach for the stars, that potent metaphor for our highest, most divine potential. In these challenging, turbulent times, we also need to be reminded that those stars are not beyond our grasp. We can touch them. All it takes is a hand, outstretched to the infinite...the infinite we already are.

Photos by Mark David Gerson: #1 Sandia Foothills, Albuquerque, NM; #2 From the McDonald Observatory, near Fort Davis, TX

Getting the (Common) Sense Knocked Out of Me

2008-09-11T00:11:00.005-06:00

Tuesday, Sept. 9 ~ Sedona, Arizona

I'm walking along Hwy. 179 in Sedona's Village of Oak Creek, nursing a bashed nose that's still tender and a bit bloody after its run-in this morning with a plate-glass slider.

Sedona, which has always been good to me through the two times I've lived here and through countless visits since, seems to have taken on a Mommie Dearest persona on this trip.

Although Saturday's talk and book-signing at The Well Red Coyote went wonderfully, I've had no end of challenges with my hotel: locks and keys that don't work, a mattress that leaves my back aching each morning, rowdy guests who wake me in the wee hours and, of course, the glass slider in the breakfast room.

If this is a dress rehearsal for a return to on-the-road living, it's not going well.

You see, when I get back to Albuquerque on Friday, I'll be packing up and preparing to return to some version of the road odyssey that I've written about so often on this site.

Meantime, in true Sedona style, I'm sort of stuck here. That's because my daughter's ninth birthday is the main reason I'm in town, and that's not until Thursday. I suppose I could change hotels, but it doesn't feel as though this particular hotel is the real issue.

As I continue my walk, trying to clear the fuzziness from my head, my cell phone rings. It's a dear friend who has been experiencing challenges of her own. Her call is not about challenges, though. It's about the angel who volunteered to help her out over the weekend and then gifted her with a massage.

I don't often get direct messages for people when I'm not in session mode. But in this moment, a powerful inner/higher voice urges me to say to her, "Don't doubt that you're being taken care of."

As I speak the words, my voice catches and I feel a surge of emotion. These words are also for me.

I realize in that moment that all the mishaps that have been feeding my anxiety about going back on the road are because of my anxiety about going back on the road.

Why am I anxious? Because I'm afraid I won't be supported.

Of course, there's no reason to feel that. Through 30 months of full-time travel I was always supported. Miracle after wondrous miracle kept me going, and never did I feel abandoned.

Yet I fear abandonment now because this journey isn't like the last one. How could it be? Why would I repeat something I've already mastered?

No, this is a new level -- of something. And not knowing what kind of void I'm about to drive into leaves me feeling fearful.

Conventional thinking and common sense support my fear. But conventional thinking and common sense also argue against the way I live my life: leaping off cliffs and trusting that I'll sprout wings on the way down...stepping into one void after another in the certainty that I'll be supported...surrendering unconditionally to the highest, most divine nature I can access in any moment.

It's no accident that my friend's call came after I bashed my head. Perhaps I needed common sense knocked out of me to make room for the higher, divine sense that generally directs my life. Perhaps I needed to be reminded what is true (my faith) and what is illusion (my fear).

Twenty-four hours have passed since I walked into the glass slider. I'm sitting in the same hotel breakfast room wearing the same Voice of the Muse t-shirt I wore yesterday.

Today, though, a fellow hotel guest notices my shirt, asks me about it and, ultimately, buys a copy of the book. Ten minutes later, I've sold a second book. Within an hour, I've sold a third.

All three sales occur right by the plate-glass slider that knocked common sense out of me yesterday -- to remind me that I'm always supported on this uncommon journey of faith.

As I travel east this fall, I'll be looking for opportunities to present talks and sound activations, offer classes and workshops, and do book-signings. If you have any thoughts, ideas or suggestions or are open to hosting an event, please drop me a line.

Photos #1 & 3 by Mark David Gerson: #1 Sedona Red Rocks; #3 Hwy 167 near Mono Lake, California. Photo #2: The patio by my hotel's breakfast room.

Be Inspired Today

2008-09-11T00:09:00.004-06:00

Tuesday, Sept. 9 ~ Sedona, Arizona

Just in case you missed my newsletter invitation, I'm repeating it here: Please join me online on Thursday, Sept. 11 when I'm the featured Inspirational Luminary on InspireMeToday.com.

The site's basic inspirational features, including mine, are free. But you can also sign up for an enhanced membership that will continue to inspire you every day.

It's easy, whichever level you choose. Just click on this link on 9/11, register (using this code: IVYIBTZCXT) and be inspired! (When you click on the "View Luminary Profile" link, it will take you to my inspirational resources.)

Thanks for joining me, and be sure to come back here to leave your comments!

Recognizing Blog Brilliance

2008-09-11T00:01:00.001-06:00

Tuesday, Sept. 9 ~ Sedona, Arizona

My fellow author and blogger Marvin D. Wilson has had his Free Spirit blog nominated for the web's Brilliant Blog Appreciation Awards, a singular recognition.

Marvin's blog focuses on both spiritual evolvement and good writing and is certainly worth checking out. If you do, please add your vote to push him over the top in the award competition's "Best Christian/Inspirational" category.

You can vote using this link. Just be sure to cast yours before the midnight (PT) deadline Friday night, Sept. 12.

By the way, I'll be featured on Marvin's blog in a Sept. 11 post. Please check it out!

Vehicle of Faith

2008-09-04T04:44:00.000-06:00

Saturday, August 30 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

I'm sitting in the showroom of a local car dealership. It's been a long day of car buying. Nearly eight hours long.

Although the quintessential auto-purchase experience in terms of time spent (why does it have to take so long!?), my day here belies all stereotypes about car salesmen. Brad and Kelly, my salesman and his sales-manager boss, have been warm, engaging and genuine.

Still, I'm exhausted and stressed.

After two failed attempts at car-buying in recent months, I was reluctant to give it a third try, even as I knew it was time for a new vehicle.

Then, seemingly from nowhere, I got an e-mail and follow-up call from this particular dealership. They claimed they were responding to an internet request for information -- a request I have no memory of having made.

I put them off for several weeks, somewhat gun-shy after my previous experiences. Finally, today, I relented, no longer able to ignore the many synchronicities of the situation (not to mention the end-of-season discounts).

Now, the test drives are done, the credit apps have been processed, we've negotiated back and forth on terms and down payments and I'm staring at final figures -- the figures I said I would need to see in order to make a decision today.

When I drove in this morning, I asked Spirit for a sense of what a new monthly car payment would look like. Not surprisingly, the resulting figure pushed my financial comfort-zone buttons...just as a comparable figure had three years ago under similar circumstances. Yet I knew that if I acted today from a place of trust, centeredness and integrity I would be taken care of, as I always have been.

The "final figure" now before me is uncomfortably higher than the one I sensed this morning. Yet despite my fears, I know I must say yes. Not because I've been worn down after eight hours in this shabby showroom. But because all my higher senses tell me to.

I say yes.

When I get home, I’m so fearful and frazzled I can't get out of the garage and away from the new car quickly enough.

I spend a restless evening and sleepless night mired in doubt and distress and wake up exhausted and barely functional. Fortunately, pep talks from a couple of friends give me the courage to begin to take ownership of the vehicle. I browse through the manual, marveling at all the gadgetry, and call my insurance company to switch my coverage.

And then the phone rings. It's Dana, the dealership's finance manager. My heart sinks.

Eight years ago in Hawaii, I drove a new car home from the lot only to get a call the next day from the dealership, sorrowfully advising me that I would need to kick in more money or the deal was dead.

I had warned the Albuquerque dealership that if that were to happen here, I would return the car.

"Yes?" I answer tentatively.

"Could you come down to the dealership this afternoon?"

Oh, God, I gasp silently. "Why?" ask hesitantly.

"We'd like to lower your monthly payment."

"What?"

"We’d like to lower your monthly payment."

A few hours later, I’m back at the dealership, signing a new set papers. My interest rate has dropped by a third, my payment has dropped 14 percent, and my new monthly payment is within the range I had (erroneously, I thought) predicted.

As I drive home, considerably lighter-feeling than during the same drive yesterday, I think of the journey of trust the biblical Abraham went through when God asked him to sacrifice his son, Isaac.

A man of infinite faith, Abraham began to prepare for the unthinkable and unconscionable. Only when his knife was a whisper away from Isaac’s throat did an angel appear, praising Abraham for his faith and releasing him from his vow.

I feel like Abraham right now.

During the past 24 hours, my faith has also been stretched beyond all reasonable limits. Like Abraham, the only thing I have been asked to give up is my fear.

Now, having let it go, I have been rewarded for my trust and am free to move forward on the next leg of my journey -- in my vehicle of faith.

Art by Marc Chagall: "Sacrifice of Isaac," Musée Marc Chagall, Nice, France

Stepping into the Void...Again

2008-09-02T18:33:00.001-06:00

Friday, August 22 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

O'ric raised his hands over my head in benediction. "Ride north one league at a time. Aris will guide you at night. A path between the suns will guide you in the day. Your heart will guide you always."
~ The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy

I knew it could happen any time. I knew my days in this house were numbered. But when I listen to the woman who owns the house I’m renting, I'm numb with shock.

"This isn't working," she says of her attempts to sell the house with a tenant (me) in it. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to give you notice."

This isn't how it was supposed to be. I expected to stay in the house until it sold, which in this market could have taken months. Meantime, I've been scouring Craig's List for suitable alternatives.

Now...what?

It takes me a few hours to settle into an emotional state conducive to meditative activity. Once there, I feel out the energy of my known options:

1) Find another Albuquerque rental
2) Find a rental somewhere else, in or out of state
3) Hit the road for some indefinite, transitional period

If you've followed these Chronicles for any length of time, you know that the last time I did #3, I ended up on the road for 30 months!

Although I'm not keen to embark on another open-ended odyssey, the romance of the road still carries a certain appeal. Still, my first choice is #1...though it’s proving hard to find anything that measures up to where I now live. As for #2, I'm open, but nothing solid has presented itself.

Frankly, I'm open to all options, despite my conscious preference. I’m particularly open to the options I can’t yet see or imagine.

That's just as well because whatever inner/higher/heart intelligence is guiding this human journey, it keeps urging me to "expect the unexpected" and to pack in a way that offers me the most flexibility (#3).

Like Toshar, the questing protagonist of my novel The MoonQuest, all I can do is follow the path that presents itself in each moment -- wherever it carries me, whatever the consequences.

If there's one thing I've learned through my years of personal and spiritual growth (and writing The MoonQuest was a potent teacher in that regard), it's that the unimagined and unimaginable is nearly always far more wondrous than the known and predictable.

Travel beyond the end of the known world, Toshar and his companions are told. A similar voice constantly offers me the same counsel.

Not for the first time in my life (and, undoubtedly, not for the last), what's ahead is beyond my ability to predict or project. Not only is there a catalog of options betyond nos. 1, 2 and 3, there are variations -- 1a, 2c, 3f -- that my mind can't yet figure out because it can't yet see them as possibilities. They lie beyond the end of my known world.

Living in this place of unlimited openness isn't without its stresses. Not knowing whether I'm moving or roving, not knowing which contingency to pack and prepare for -- these information voids catapult me well beyond what's left of my comfort zone.

Yet through it all, I have an abiding knowingness that when I trust and surrender, when I let go and leap, I end up somewhere magnificent, somewhere I could never have imagined, predicted or chosen.

For today, all I can do is to start packing and let tomorrow take care of itself...and me. It always has.

Art by Mark David Gerson: "Surrendering to the Mystery, Surrendering to the Void (#34)"