Surrendering to the Uncertainty

Santa Fe, New Mexico

In September '94, in an earlier version of my current odyssey, I left Toronto with all I owned in the back of a Dodge Caravan and moved to Nova Scotia on Canada’s Atlantic coast.

I thought, in my naiveté back then, that I had found a new place to establish a new life — sort of like the Pilgrims must have felt when they landed at Plymouth Rock.

Nineteen ninety-five was still in its infancy when I received guidance that not only would I be moving again — this time to a different part of Nova Scotia — but that I would also be returning to Toronto some time after that.

I was stunned. Startled. I felt betrayed. Fear mingled with anger in my gut as I swirled both prospects around in my consciousness.

As a postscript, let me add that I was in the midst of the first draft of my novel, The MoonQuest at the time, and that I had no clear idea yet what the story was about or where it was taking me.

I’m reminded of that confluence of circumstances today, 11 years later, as I probe my emotional response to the information contained in my two previous posts: that it’s time to work on The MoonQuest’s sequel and it will soon be time to move on from this Santa Fe casita.

As I lie in the tub, scratching these words on a water-splattered notepad, I’m struck by the similarities of then and now, by how the spiral of my life has butted up against a higher vibration of my Nova Scotia experience of a decade ago.

I can still see myself, standing in the wintry wind on a rocky Atlantic point as I received this higher guidance. I remember being so upset by the news that, obsessive journaller though I was, I refused to dignify the guidance by committing it to the page.

Today, stronger and wiser, I’m able to write about what’s going on and share it with you. It’s in the writing of it that I see what I didn’t see in yesterday’s panic — the link between the two circumstances that have come together at this time: the need to move and the call to write, specifically on The StarQuest.

In an e-mail to a friend this morning, I described the combination as a 1-2 punch, without really understanding why I was using that metaphor.

Now, through the act of writing about it, I do.

Both relate to uncertainty and the discomfort that can so easily generate, even as that discomfort lies alongside a seemingly contradictory exhilaration.

You see, I don’t know what I’ll do when I leave this casita in five weeks, any more than I knew what moving back to Toronto would be about for me in 1995. I don’t know whether I'll stay in Santa Fe, move on to someplace else or hit the road again.

The StarQuest, too, is an expression of uncertainty.

Like The MoonQuest before it, I am writing it blindly, knowing little from one word to the next what will happen in the story, trusting that each word will lead to the next and to the next and, ultimately, to a satisfying conclusion.

My next five weeks — and what lies beyond them — leave me just as blind in this moment.

All I can do in my life as in my writing is surrender not only to the unknown but to the unknowable, in the only certainty and knowingness that counts: that in my surrender and commitment, I am supported, guided and never abandoned.

Everything else is (as it should be) out of my human control and in the full and loving control of my highest and divine self.

When I return work on The StarQuest, it will be in much the same energy as when I left Arizona in December 2004, not knowing where I was going or what my life would be about. That same energy informed an earlier adventure: the three months on the road in 1997 that ultimately led me (in ways I could have never predicted or controlled) to Sedona, a marriage and a child.

The StarQuest’s story, like mine — like yours — will reveal itself moment by moment, word by word, in the writing and living of it.

In the short term, that’s not a comfortable thought. But it is a powerful one, for what I cannot in this moment see or imagine is undoubtedly more wondrous than what I can.

I can’t see the ending of The StarQuest yet. Nor can I see the ending of this phase of my journey.

Both will reveal themselves in their time, in the being, in the surrendering, in the trusting.

Until then, it’s important to feel all the fear and anger that rise up around the uncertainty. For moving through those emotions is the portal to the next level of my mastery, and yours.

I know all this. I have written about this. As do we all, I still need the reminders.

Final postscript: Nine months after that traumatic Nova Scotia moment and a month after having completed a second draft of The MoonQuest, I was uncomplainingly on my way back to Toronto.