Holy Faith II

Saturday, May 10 ~ Santa Fe, New Mexico

It's 2 pm. I'm sitting at my table in The Village at Eldorado shops just outside Santa Fe, exchanging sadly sympathetic glances with my fellow authors and publishers at this day-before-Mother's Day book fair, wondering, as are they, why I'm here.

Billed as a great opportunity to sell books to last-minute gift-givers, this event has been a bust, with few browsers and even fewer buyers.

Although the fair ends in an hour, I'm already starting to pack up. I'm not the only one.

I mutter under my breath as I refill my boxes and bins and load the car. After a week of financial setbacks, I had hoped for a breakthrough day. It's not even a break-even day.

A few hours and several errands later, I'm back on the freeway, heading home and still decidedly cranky. Then I see it: a sign for Santa Fe.

I don't believe in tests and I avoid describing any aspect of my experience here on earth as a "school." Tests can be failed and schools can be filled with bullies. For me (most days), there are no failing grades and no one trying to trip me up. I prefer, instead, to see life as a series of portals and initiations, each leading to higher levels of awareness and consciousness.

I realize as I see the highway sign that it's no accident that this particular initiation has taken place for me in Santa Fe, a city whose name translates as "holy faith."

My journey through this lifetime has largely been about trust -- trust that I'm on the right path...trust that my inner guidance is authentic...trust that, as I write, the next word will come...trust that as I surrender more completely to the highest imperative, I'm always taken care of.

Yet, each time I reach a plateau of trust, it doesn't take long before I'm thrust into a situation that calls on me on to trust more fully still.

That renewed call to trust always comes just as I'm about to step up into a new level of mastery and empowerment. And it nearly always challenges me to transcend my fear and continue to live a life wholly in faith.

In my novel, The MoonQuest, such a mirror for my own journey of trust, the main characters are reminded at a moment of great risk that there is no partial trust. "You either trust or you do not. There is no halfway in between," they're told.

I, too, need that message repeated. Frequently.

I, too, need to be reminded that each call to trust is a divine call, a call to deepen my faith in the power, passion and potential that is the Divine living in, as and through me.

I, too, need to remember the holy faith that guides, supports and prospers me. Always.

On a side note -- and in another reminder of the spirals of life that continue to carry us to higher levels of mastery -- I just discovered that I wrote the blog post titled Holy Faith I a year ago, almost to the day...also in Santa Fe.

Art by Mark David Gerson: #77 The Cathedral of St. Francis, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Desert Spring

Friday, June 8 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

As I amble along a nature path in the foothills of Albuquerque's Sandia Mountains, I feel the stress and high anxiety of the day begin to dissolve.

It began this morning. In fact, I woke with it, with the unsettledness that comes of leaving two and a half months of what passes in my life for domesticity.

Today is the day the (relative) rootedness of a Santa Fe sublet makes way for a return to the mutability of a life in motion.

Today is the day that completes the printing and binding of The MoonQuest.

Today is the day one journey ends and another begins.

It's exciting, of course, but discomfitting too.


And so as my feet touch the feldspar, mica and quartz that comprise Sandia's granite, I'm grateful for the emotional grounding I always feel here. I'm grateful too for the explosions of brilliant color scattered through these desert highlands.

If you've never visited or lived in the desert, you probably think of it as not only dry but barren and colorless. Yet spring here in the high desert -- particularly after a wet winter -- brings with it not only infinite shades of green but the polychromatic splendor of desert flowers in bloom, their intensity heightened by the limited palette New Mexico normally offers.

The new growth and the vividness of the cactus flowers remind me that the same energy of renewal unfolding around me on my Sandia walk is also coming alive within me. Spring is here.

Sandia Photos by Mark David Gerson

Holy Faith I

Tuesday, May 15 ~ Santa Fe, New Mexico

It's Sunday morning. I'm sitting in Santa Fe's Church of Religious Science listening to the service and an image forms in my mind's eye...a series of angles, lines and contours that expresses the energy of Santa Fe and the notion of "holy faith," which is the English translation of the city's name.

I reach for a piece of paper and sketch what I see.

A few hours later, I'm at the dining room table with my colored pencils arrayed before a blank page. Propped up to the side is my rough sketch.

As what takes shape on the page begins to bear less and less resemblance to the sketch, I grow edgy.

Not because of the differences. Many finished drawings veer away from my initial concept.

No, my edginess relates to how much I don't like what is forming on the page. To be blunt, I hate it.

The emergent image, I say to myself, is just not very good. For a few minutes, I consider scrapping the drawing. After all, my judgmental self points out to my creator self, all artists have pieces they abandon. And for good reason.

Then I remember another drawing. Number 15. Titled Stepping into Your Power and Empowerment, I so disliked it that I almost removed it from my catalogue. It was hard to do, though, because people kept buying it. In the end, I didn't delete it.

In that memory, I realize what's going on within me today. My reactions to #15 and what is slated to become #116 (Holy Faith) have nothing to do with esthetics and everything to do with the theme/title of the piece.

In December 2004 I was resisting the next level of my empowerment. Today, as my pencil hesitates over the paper, I am resisting the next level of a faith that Santa Fe always demands.

The first demand on my faith is the drawing itself: Do I have the faith to trust the divine imperative that always guides my hand? Or will I let my judgment (read: fear) overtake my faith?

Faith wins out, as it always does in the end, and I complete the drawing (Holy Faith, pictured above).

Later, a client describes the image as "faith in the midst of chaos," which is perfect. For it's in the midst of (apparent) chaos that we most need our faith.

Demands on my faith in subsequent days, like all such demands, are similar to those I experience with the drawing and ask similar questions: Do I have the faith to trust the divine imperative that always guides my life and choices? Or will I let my fear take precedence?

So many demands on my faith in this city of Holy Faith: they revolve around finances (always a stand-in for deeper fears), around this publishing enterprise I have launched, around The MoonQuest itself, around where I will go when my current sublet runs out in a few weeks, around every aspect of my life that is steeped in transformation and uncertainty. And what aspect isn't, these days?

This morning, a new demand: Even as The MoonQuest has yet to leave its Michigan printing plant, a sensing emerges that its long-stalled sequel, The StarQuest, is calling to me.

If, as I realized in A Stunning One-Liner During Dinner at the Diner, publishing The MoonQuest frees me to move forward and stop wandering, that forward motion now appears to be an acceleration toward The StarQuest. In other words, my wandering will come to an end when it's necessary to complete the next book.

That completion will require all the holy faith that Santa Fe can send my way. Or maybe not. Perhaps all that's required to write the second book is to come to completion on the first, "to fix The MoonQuest on parchment," as the story itself demands.

For now, all I can do is remain grounded in this moment as I anchor all aspects of my beingness in faith -- Holy Faith -- and in that divine imperative that always guides me foward in love.

~ View a larger a copy of Holy Faith (#116) or order your own

~ Listen to a free audio excerpt of The MoonQuest

~ Read about The MoonQuest as a journey of trust

All copies of The MoonQuest ordered before June 11 will be autographed to you (or to whomever you're gifting it) and will get free U.S. shipping. (Normal shipping charges apply as of June 11.)

Body Talk II

Sunday, April 1 ~ Santa Fe, New Mexico

As I lie in bed this morning nursing a cold that I know to be fear-induced, I recall words that first came through me four years ago in the Melchizedek-inspired Book of Messages:

Self-consciousness is your ego mind’s protection against the very force and beauty of your power. So look at those areas in your life where you carry self-consciousness and know that in those areas have you the greatest power.

I think of this as I ponder Batman Begins, the movie I watched last night. In the 2005 film we discover the caped crusader's origins and learn how Bruce Wayne's greatest fear -- of bats -- becomes his greatest strength.

I think too of the unconscious truth I uttered a few days ago when describing my cold to a friend: "It's all in my head," I declared, then laughed, realizing what I'd said.

Both the cold and the fear underlying it are, truly, in my head. As uncomfortably real as the symptoms feel in this moment, they're manifestations of my reluctance to fully embrace my greatest strength and power.

And my greatest desire.

You see, the symptoms kicked in pretty much the moment I arrived back in Santa Fe Wednesday for a projected ten-week stay. The purpose of this sojourn? To launch LightLines Media, my vehicle for publishing and marketing my novel, The MoonQuest (see my 3/27/07 newsletter, Manifestation: Beyond "The Secret").

Yet I don't think I realized just how scared I was until Friday, when it was time to e-mail the manuscript to the designers who will be creating the cover and laying out the book's interior.

In that moment, I knew that however overwhelmed I might feel at the prospect of launching this publishing enterprise alone, the true source of my fear was the same as that of the The MoonQuest's main character.

"It is time," Toshar is told in the book's opening lines, "to set The MoonQuest on parchment...to fix it in ink, to set the truth down for all to read.”

It's funny. Over the years I've sent versions of the manuscript to agents and publishers. I even had an agent for a time who pitched it relentlessly. For a while, I excerpted it for free on my web site and made it available for sale as an eBook. So why be so fearful now?

Two reasons:

• Every other version was subject to change. Revisions were always possible. I could always go back and make it better. Now, as was Toshar, I'm being called to fix it in ink and type, to stop it in time, to say, "This is The MoonQuest in its final form," to give up the illusory goal of making it perfect, to open myself to the judgment (and praise) of the world.

• Every other version was untold steps away from my greatest desire: a final, printed book with the potential to reach, touch and transform many. This process of self-publishing is the closest I have ever come to realizing that goal.

And so the parts of me that fear my power, that fear others' judgment, that are deeply self-conscious of the story that birthed through me and of the particular words that now form that story, is crying out to be noticed, to be reassured, to be loved...and is doing so through yet more body talk.

My call is to not let myself be paralyzed by fear or its physical manifestations. My call is to push ahead despite the doubts and second-guessing, to love all parts of myself through this initiation and to assure them that they are safe, secure and protected.

There is no safety in hiding. There is no security in turning down the wattage of my power and light. There is no protection in the kind of armoring that conceals my truth.

Walk the earth naked, clothed only in your truth.

Those words came to me a decade ago on the rocky shores of Lake Huron's Georgian Bay. Three thousand miles and many lifetimes later, they are as valid here in Santa Fe (a city whose name means Holy Faith), as I launch Lightlines and The MoonQuest.

One final note: When I complained about how overwhelming it felt to be putting The MoonQuest out by myself, a wise friend reminded me that there's no such thing as self-publishing.

"You're co-creating with Spirit all the time!" she rightly insisted.

So I'm dropping the term self-publishing from my vocabulary. The correct term is now Higher Self-Publishing!

And the journey continues.