Time to Move On...Again

It was on the morning of the harvest moon in September 1997 that I drove into Sedona, Arizona for the first time. Although I’d felt powerfully called here, a story I tell in my Acts of Surrender memoir, I didn’t consider Sedona to be anything more than a weekend whistle stop on the open-ended road odyssey I had launched three months earlier when I left Toronto with everything I owned packed into my Dodge Caravan. 

That Sedona weekend turned into a week, the week extended into a month, and the month stretched into nearly a year and a half, before it came time for me to move on. 

If that sounds familiar, it should. I was three months into an open-ended journey of a different sort when I stopped in Sedona on August 28, 2019. Then, too, I didn’t expect to stay. Yet, here I still am. 

But not, apparently, for much longer.

The harvest moon is seen as a time to reap the fruits of our past efforts...a time of abundance in all its forms…a time of endings and new beginnings. As such, this 25th anniversary of the harvest moon that first brought me here feels like the perfect moment to let go of the Sedona season that has enriched me in so many ways and to fully embrace a new one.

Where am I going, when and why? As the storyteller I am, the only way I can answer those questions is with a story… 

It’s about thirty minutes after sunrise on the morning of July’s thunder moon. And as I walk Kyri through the midsummer stillness, the wispy tendrils of an unwelcome realization float into my awareness. I try to bat them away, as I would a mosquito, but this realization is no less persistent. It’s this: After nearly three years back in Sedona, it’s time to move on. Not right away, but by the end of the year. 

By itself, this aha isn’t disturbing. A hassle, perhaps, but not disturbing. What is disturbing is the prescribed destination: Laguna Beach, south of LA on the California coast. 

It isn’t that I don’t love Laguna Beach. I do. It’s that Laguna Beach is outrageously expensive, even more so than Sedona, and the current state of my finances can't begin to support such a move. 

Beyond that, I’m simply skeptical. I have lost count of the number of times over the years that I have felt drawn to Southern California, only to have the energy shift or dissipate at the last minute. The one time I did manage to get myself there, in 2010, my relocation lasted barely ten weeks — ten weeks of emotional upheaval and financial distress.
 
“California has messed with me once too often,” I mutter as I shut my mind to the possibility and determine to share this questionable inner wisdom with no one. 

Eight days later, a less challenging piece of inner wisdom directs me down the road to the store jointly owned by my daughter and her mom. 

“I’m moving back to LA,” my daughter announces almost immediately. She moved there from Sedona in 2010 with her mother and stayed until she left for college seven years later. She’s now back in Sedona. Until this moment, she has given me no indication that she has been considering a return to California. 

“W-when did this happen?” I stammer. 

“Sometime last week,” she replies. “Why?”

“Around the full moon?”

“Yeah. Probably. Why?”

“I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone this, but...” And I share the story of my Laguna Beach intuition.
 
It’s out in the open now, and like the mythical Pandora’s Box, what has been released can’t be stuffed back into hiding. 

Nor, apparently, does it want to be, because over the next few days, I’m bombarded with Laguna-related signs and synchronicities. The most dramatic comes the morning after my daughter’s revelation, when I open the Maps app on my iPad to Laguna Beach. 

There, in the lower left corner with other local attractions, is a photo of the Victoria Beach Pirate Tower.

It's the same tower that’s featured on the cover of The Lost Horse of Bryn Doon, a fifth book in my Legend of Q'ntana fantasy series and the novel I’m working on alongside a new nonfiction book, The Way of the Abundant Fool: How to Bust Free of “Not Enough” and Break Free into Prosperity...in 12½ Super-Simple Steps! 

I see that cover image multiple times a day, yet I have somehow forgotten that it’s in Laguna Beach. 

A few days later, having surrendered to a California move, I write up my new Laguna Beach insights as part of The Way of the Abundant Fool’s Step #12½, “Reach for the Stars...then Soar Beyond Them!”

That could have been the end of the story. 

It wasn’t.

I’m visiting Meditation Mount in the hills above Ojai, California when I have a powerful intuitive insight that it’s time to realize my longstanding dream of moving to LA. A few days later, having stopped in Sedona on my way home to Albuquerque to see my daughter in a school play, I run into Sao, a shamanic astrologer friend. In quintessential Sedona fashion, he gives me an impromptu reading.

After confirming my birthday, he tells me to start asking who I want in my life, what I want to be doing with my life and where I want to be living. To the first two parts of the question, I feel nothing. But at “where do you want to be living,” I hear, with crystal clarity from somewhere deep inside me, “Beverly Hills.” 

Beverly Hills? Of all the areas in the vast LA metropolis that I have considered as a potential home, none is Beverly Hills. Not because of the cost. It simply isn’t on my radar. “Maybe,” my logical mind inserts, “Beverly Hills is nothing more than a stand-in for greater Los Angeles.”

Maybe. Or Maybe not.

Back in Albuquerque, on my way to my car through a slushy Target parking lot, I pass a silver Ford Escort bearing a faux California plate under the front grill. Instead of a number are the words “Beverly Hills.” 

Maybe Beverly Hills is more than a stand-in…

When I look it up later, I discover that this Beverly Hills is the Beverly Hills Ranch campsite. Still, it’s Beverly Hills, which is seemingly calling out to me again, this time from the middle of nowhere. 

I’m at the deserted front desk of the Candlewood Suites in Medford, Oregon. While I wait for a clerk to check me out, I notice two business card stands off to the left; one holds the cards for “Beverly Hills, operations manager.” 

Maybe it isn’t California I'm heading to.

It’s four days before the harvest moon. I’m lingering over my morning coffee as I finish the novel I’m reading, which is all about following “the hints of your heart.”

For no particular reason, I turn my head to the left, and my eyes light on the Q’ntana flyer in its plexiglass stand that sits on a table by the front door. As soon as I see its “The Legend of Q’ntana” headline, I hear “that’s my life’s work,” and I start to cry.

A moment later, a quote from  The MoonQuest, first book in the Q’ntana series, pops into my head: “Every choice you have ever made, Toshar, has led to this moment. Your moment. Still, the power to make a different choice remains yours.”

Suddenly, I feel as though I’m at the same moment of choice in which Toshar finds himself early in the story...as though every choice I have ever made has led to this moment. My moment. 

I can remain buried underground and “safe,” like the bards-in-hiding in the story. Or I can embark on my own MoonQuest, leaving the comfort and safety of my Sedona cave for the perceived dangers of the larger world…the more public world. The more successful world. Whether or not I ever get there, that's what Beverly Hills represents.

Is Beverly Hills just a symbol? Worse, is the fact that it keeps showing up as it does nothing more than some form of tricksterish meaninglessness? Regardless, will it fade as it has so often in the past? Or is it real and now is the time? 

I don’t know, any more than I know how it could possibly manifest by year’s end. All I know is that there is nothing about my life as I have lived it these past three decades that I could ever have imagined, predicted or consciously desired. So why would what's coming next be any different?

I also know that it’s no coincidence that California showed up for me again as I was midway through writing The Way of the Abundant Fool, which feels like an instruction manual that I wrote for me, to enable me to manifest this move.

In the book's Step #6 (see below for all 12½ steps), which I wrote hours before my daughter told me about her planned return to LA, I say, “In the world of the Fool, everything is probable and all is possible. There is no other way.”

For now, I'm choosing to believe that. And until I sense something different, I am setting my sights on Beverly Hills and doing my best to apply every step on the Way of the Abundant Fool to getting there.

• I’m doing it my way, not the way others might think best.
• I’m focusing my attention on my existing abundance, not on any false perception of lack.
• I’m holding my passion for the life that Beverly Hills seems to be promising at the forefront of my awareness.
• I’m writing, acknowledging that that’s one of the key ways I foster flow in all areas of my life.
• I’m trusting my inner wisdom and dissolving as much doubt, fear and second-guessing as I can.
• And as I have done through the years, I’m letting miracles find me, taking leaps of faith as required and directing my gaze beyond the stars and into the infinite reaches of the cosmos.

As I put it in Pilgrimage, “When I surrender to the voice of my heart, when I agree to follow the path of my soul, anything is possible...even the seemingly impossible... perhaps especially the seemingly impossible.”

I have to believe that…and not only about Beverly Hills.