Be Inspired Today

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

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

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

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)"

Freedom's Dream

Wednesday, August 20 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

"To the Vilda'aa it marked The End of the Known World. To me it promised a new beginning."
— The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy

I had a dream last night.

I dreamed I was on a large prison campus, large enough that it seemed like a small city. 

As I stood there, watching prisoners and guards and at least one politician walk by, all dressed in civilian clothes, I knew something that none of them did: This prison campus had no walls, fences or gates. Anyone could leave at any time if they opened their eyes to the truth and made that choice. 

In the dream, a friend and I had made that choice.  

I remember kneeling on the lawn in front of some official building, going through the contents of my backpack as I decided what to take with me and what to leave behind. I remember now only what didn't make the cut: a variety of maps, articles and documents that linked me with my past. 

When I woke up soon after, I was both exhilarated and disconcerted. 

Absolute freedom does that. We both long for it and are disoriented when we get it.  

The irony is that, as my dream demonstrated, we all have it. All of us. Always.  

But it's our choice whether we claim it, whether we act on it...whether we open our eyes and heart to a truth that has always been present, to a choice we have thus far declined to make. 

As my dream also demonstrated, our past is often a big part of that prison.

How often do we view and thus limit our choices through a prism of the past? How often do we assume that the way something has always been done proves that it's the best way, or the only way? How often do we let the burden of our past slow our awareness of the present and hinder our walk into the future? 

For me, one of the most powerful scenes in my novel The MoonQuest remains the coronation, where Crown Prince Kyri is directed to throw all the jeweled accoutrements of the old king's regalia into the fire as he and his subjects-to-be chant, "The past is passed. We let it go." 

Only when all that has encumbered Kyri to the old reign is consumed in the ceremonial flame is he ready to chart his own course as monarch. 

Later, King Kyri honors his father, now a simple subject, by kneeling before him. His father pulls Kyri to his feet. 

"Do not bow to me, my son. I stand here as the past, and you must never worship the past. ... Set your sights on the future by seeing to the present. Don't, I beg, let your vision linger longingly on the past. Let it go, my son. Let it all go. ... Let me go." 

Of course, the past is not without value. It's one of our greatest teachers.

Yet we not only condemn ourselves to repeating our mistakes by ignoring the past, we condemn ourselves to paralysis by residing there, by refusing to recognize each new moment as its own life with its own imperatives — imperatives that must be informed by the past but not directed by it. 

Of my Ten Rules for Living, the first two speak powerfully to that concept. 

Rule #1: There are no rules 
Rule #2: What works today may not work tomorrow  

Only by stepping away from the limitations of "how things have to be" and "how things have always been" can we free ourselves to step beyond our known world and into the limitlessness of our infinite potential. 

Only be seeing the prisons we have created for ourselves can we recognize that nothing but our own choices keeps us locked within them. 

Only by daring to see the truth of our innate freedom, can we live all the wondrous, as-yet undreamed-of gifts that our freedom has already granted us. 

In my dream, I tell my prisoner friend that he, too, can be free, that there is nothing to keep him locked away. I then invite him to leave with me, to walk out of the prison city and be free.  

Won't you be that friend? Won't you leave with me? Won't you walk with me into the freedom that's already yours?   

Photo by Mark David Gerson: "Flying Free," Mission Beach, San Diego, California

Song & Spirit of Liberty

Wednesday, August 20 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

The United States was founded on a break with the past, on the notion that a fresh start could be the spark that ignites a new world of liberty and freedom. 

That America hasn't always lived up to that ideal doesn't diminish freedom's call. Nor does it diminish the powerful symbols of liberty and of America's potential that continue to move and inspire freedom-seekers around the world.

As you meditate on this image, inspired by the Statue of Liberty, the Declaration of Independence and the Liberty Bell and by my 2005 "Freedom Trail" travels and writings, remember that freedom is your choice, that liberty is your birthright and that the prisons you have built for yourself have no walls, fences or gates.

In this moment, you are as free as you allow yourself to be.

Art by Mark David Gerson: "Song & Spirit of Liberty (#62)"

Trust. Now.

Friday, August 8 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

Mistrust has deformed this land,
twisting it until lies are truth and truth is a lie,
embedding it with layers of fear so thick
even the brightest light can't pierce through. ...
It has spread so subtly we don’t even see it.
Yet it's there. And it must be stopped.
We must stop it and begin again.
~ The MoonQuest

How do we begin again? By trusting ourselves.

From there, we regain trust in our highest God selves. Then we regain trust in each other.

We trust what we know. We trust what we see. We trust in the possibility of the impossible. We trust in love.


"You either trust or you do not," M’nor stated. "There is no halfway in between."
~ The MoonQuest


Where do you still not trust yourself? Where do you still not trust others? Where do you doubt that you're capable of miracles?

How can you more fully surrender to your highest God self and trust your alchemical power to bring Heaven on Earth into your life? Beginning today.

The MoonQuest is available at selected retailers across the U.S. and through various online sites, including Amazon.com and LightLines Media.

The Art of Creative Living...and of a Creative Life

Wednesday, August 6 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

If you've read my words or heard me speak, you'll know that how passionately I believe that life and creativity are one, that there's little difference between the principles and precepts that foster success in one or the other.

In fact, the 10 Rules for Living you'll find on my web site and in an earlier post on this blog were adapted -- with little effort -- from the 13 Rules for Writing that appear both in my book, The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, and its companion CD.

Twice this week, I was given an opportunity to share my thoughts about creative living and living your creativity. And although my talk at Saturday's Albuquerque meeting of Southwest Writers wasn't recorded, this afternoon's radio conversation with Rev. Jamie Sanders of Unity of Pensacola was.

During our hour together on Jamie's Spirituality Today book club show on the Unity.fm radio network, we talked about life, spirituality, creativity and all that link them together.

To hear the interview, click on the player icon below. If the icon doesn't show up, use this link.



How do life, creativity and spirituality come together for you?

Art by Mark David Gerson: Portal to Your Passion (#117)

Let the Abundance Flow!

Wednesday, July 30 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

The image in my mind’s eye, as I began this drawing, was of a waterfall. I saw an infinite free flow of abundance that would bless all it touched.

Once on the page, though, my waterfall looked more to me like an angel wing, a symbol of lightness, protection and grace.

When I showed the drawing to a friend, she saw neither wing nor waterfall. To her, the image was of a dolphin, the embodiment of playfulness and joy.

In the competed drawing, the three energies merge -- an angel of abundance, joyfully blessing all who are open to receiving its gifts.

As you meditate on this image, ask yourself if you're open to receiving the gifts that now wait for you. Acknowledge all the ways your heart is already open. Then ask yourself where your heart is still closed.

We all have those places. Don't judge them. Simply reassure all parts of yourself, lovingly, that they are safe, that growth and change are not dangerous, that an open heart is your passport to an abundant life. And let the abundance flow!

Art by Mark David Gerson: Angel of Abundance (#402)

A Leap into the Unknown

Saturday, July 26 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

Most of my previous drawings have been linked to sacred Earth sites or to a predetermined topic. When I sat down to draw today, though (for the first time in over a year), I had no sense at all of what this drawing would be about or where it would take me.

As first one purple arc and then another formed on the blank page, all I could do was surrender -- fully and unconditionally -- to something that dwelt beyond all imagining, something that could only emerge as I abandoned all control, something I could not know until I stepped away from all expectations.

The Cities of Light incubating within us and the New Earth we are now birthing require this same willingness to leap into the unknown, to step beyond the familiar world of our experience and imagination and into a Heaven on Earth that will create itself...to the extent that we let it.

Are you ready to birth Heaven on Earth in your life? In what ways are you open? In what ways are you blocked? As you meditate on this drawing, let yourself leap beyond your known world and into the wonder and joy of all you cannot yet imagine.

Art by Mark David Gerson: City of Light (#401)