The Pilot Knows Best

Mon., Feb. 27, 2006 — Santa Fe, New Mexico

One of the things I have not yet managed to manifest for my casita is the washer-dryer that has been on order since weeks before I arrived here.

And so today, having held off as long as I could, I make my way to the laundromat on Alameda and stuff my clothes into two super-size washers.

Thirty minutes later, in the midst of my washer-to-dryer transfer, I notice great gobs of black ink on a few, fortunately dispensable items. A few seconds later, one of my ubiquitous black Pilot gel pens clatters to the floor.

I don’t know where this one came from or how it found its way into my laundry basket. Nor am I pleased at the mess it has made.

But it definitely gets my attention.

Whenever I write longhand, this is the kind of pen I use. It’s writing this piece. It writes my to-do lists. It would, if I let it, write The StarQuest.

To be fair, I have spent the last several days reading my eight years of mostly off-again writings on that novel, sequel to The MoonQuest, in preparation for a return to writing. I even brought the manuscript with me here today, though first a phone call and now the ink have distracted me from reading it.

If I’m honest with myself, the ink is less a distraction than an indelibly dramatic statement, a reminder that not only am I a writer but a novel-writer.

The StarQuest will be written!! the Rorschach blots shriek at me.

I wrote in my February 22 newsletter about heart’s desire and how the heart expresses itself in earthly ways to achieve divine results.

It’s clear that The StarQuest is part of my heart’s desire — for higher reasons that I may never fully understand. And it’s clear too that even though the mechanics of writing it lie far from my personality desire at this time, there’s a higher purpose to be achieved by surrendering to my heart, by allowing myself to activate that heart’s desire in my life.

It’s no accident, of course, that all this is occurring in the lead-up to my March 1 teleconference on Activating Your Heart’s Desire.

There are no coincidences.

As I write these words, with my Pilot pen, I’m suddenly struck by the pen’s name.

Pilot.

When I teach writing, I talk about trusting that all you are to write exists in the inkwell of your pen...about surrendering to your pen...about letting the pen pull your hand across the page.

Until this moment, it never occurred to me that that’s what a pilot does: it steers a course. The passenger surrenders to the greater wisdom of the pilot. Whether in writing or in life, the pilot is our highest wisdom. The pilot knows the way.

For reasons I’m only now understanding, whenever I switch pen brands, I always seem to return to Pilot.