When I moved to Sedona over four years ago, I unpacked a great deal of optimism and ignorance along with my personal belongings. Having just abandoned a high paying and prestigious corporate job in Chicago, for this “clean slate,” and no plan other than to give Sedona a whirl, the only certainty I possessed was that I had no idea what I was doing. Yet, like so many who come to Sedona, I anticipated greener pastures, which of course, was bereft of any basis in reality.
Over the last two years, I had developed quite a track record of quitting stuff. First drinking, then smoking, then coffee, and on Christmas Eve, that great paying and relatively cushy job. I had, as my bartender friend, Peter, reminded me, become a quitter. “And you know John,” he quipped as he took a drag off his smoke, “No one likes a quitter.” I still laugh when I think of that.
But seriously… when indulgences begin to produce undesirable consequences, foregoing further involvement has proven to be a wise move. Enough said on that.
Fresh off a month long stint in Peru, Sedona did not have the impact on me that it does for so many. Its suburbanesque layout of one strip mall after another down 89A -- West Sedona – and the many “New Age” shops that peppered it emanated a contrived, even antiseptic sensibility, lacking both soul and creative touch. The image of fish sticks popped in my mind. Indeed, if this was the best “woo-woo” aesthetic Sedona had to offer, many would be rightly underwhelmed.
Where was the theatre? The metaphysical and aesthetic fireworks that make us utter, “Oooh… Aahh, or Woooo”?
Answer: The same place it has been for the past 300 million years. The red rocks themselves in their raw and natural state. Now that’s some good woo. Of course, it should be stated that really good “woo-woo” is never seen as “woo” at all. Enter the “vortex” spin on the ancient rocks. And voila! We have entered the “woo-woo” zone.
But then again, I did just return from Peru, where spirituality is a way of life, not a spectacle, and certainly not compartmentalized to any zoning laws. Actually, the whole country – save for Lima – is one big spiritual venue, except you won’t find a shaman castle or posters for an ayahuasca fair. You simply jump in and experience most things in their raw, natural states. Sedona could have been this way too, but instead, opted to become a suburb in the middle of nowhere. Yet, despite all of this, some 300,000 curious visitors flock to Sedona each year. That’s a lot of people for a town of only about 10,000, but ironically, not enough to keep the Cultural Park open. (Head shaking.)
To this end, Uptown Sedona fairs somewhat better in that its “old west” veneer actually makes an attempt to conform, or at least, play homage to its surroundings. Yet, in contrast to Jerome and “Old Town” Cottonwood, Uptown is clearly a pretender. Just don’t tell the tourists.
Still Sedona’s reputation as a “woo-woo” spiritual hotspot remains despite the aforementioned, and for one reason only. No on has found a way to screw up the Red Rocks, at least not yet. That’s right. Sometimes the best theatre comes out of hundreds of millions of years of natural erosion and climatic change.
So is this what good “woo-woo” looks like?
During my first two and a half years in Sedona, I had bigger fish to fry, like just trying to survive, a common tale of the Sedona newbie. This culminated when I was down to my last 37 cents, and the rent was due at the end of the week. My dad always used to say, “Work hard and you will succeed.” And I believed him. By the time I was 25, I was making more money than he was, and by the time I was thirty, I cracked $100,000 for that year. Hard work had never been my problem. Material success didn’t come easy, but it did come. After all, I was a white male, college educated American. Pretty hard to complain with all that in my favor.
Yet here I was. Down to my last 37 cents.
Sometimes you can have all the odds in your favor, play your cards right and still fail. My early years in Sedona taught me that. But what this also taught me was that “action,” that quality indelibly etched in the American Dream, is not enough. It’s at about this time when I decided for the first time, that I would try something totally “woo-woo.” I would try to have faith that things would work out. I would trade in my “nocebo” – belief that my life was about to implode – for “placebo” – belief that things would work out, despite being down to my last 37 cents.
Mind you, this did not result in financial security manifesting as the result of meditating really hard in the middle of my living room. Sorry folks. Magic doesn’t work that way. Not even in Sedona. It’s more like a really good stew. All about getting the right ingredients, and the right proportions, and then just letting the flame bring it to a slow boil. For me this meant developing a positive attitude – faith – to accompany my work ethic. So simple, yet something that took me forty years to learn, mainly because my ability to perform always managed to compensate for a cynicism, which in the big city, is often seen as “being cool.” In other words, I succeeded despite myself, much like Sedona still manages to draw 300,000 visitors a year, despite all the strip malls, overpriced art, and guys who wear spurs to drive tourists around in jeeps.
That is, until you’re down to your last 37 cents, which served as my bright red indicator light that “cool” doesn’t work here. In fact, Sedona is unapologetically “uncool.” It is a place where suburbanites go to get cultured. A place where mainstream ideologies and religions are exchanged for usurious crystals and flavor-of-the-month alternative healing modalities, providing a much needed opportunity to scratch that “rebellious” impulse, but without taking any real risk or exerting any real effort, and almost certainly not uncovering any hidden truths.
My new faith medicine – part of taking that “uncoolness” plunge –could not have been more antithetical to the behavior patterns that had become synonymous with my personality. But I could not have picked a better place to do it than in Sedona, Arizona, where faith runs exceedingly disproportionately high to action. After all, I was the weird one who was always talking about doing things, and then, actually doing them. Yet the irony is worth repeating. I was down to my last 37 cents.
True. I wouldn’t find a bunch of over-educated, multiply addicted, underemployed creative geniuses hanging out at the local pub, slamming shots of Wild Turkey, doing one-hitters in the john, and quoting Plato better or as well as any Philosophy professor at NAU. I wouldn’t find Lou Reed living across the street from me, or Keith Richards passed out at a stoplight, cigarette dangling.
Nope. Faith just isn’t cool.
The story doesn’t end there. In about a year’s time, I began to fully realize that my new positive attitude softened my demeanor. I started to listen better to what people had to say, found myself smiling and laughing more, and began to attract people who shared those qualities. That’s when I realized that you don’t have to be sitting in jail to do “hard time.” And finally, by simply making a conscious choice to give faith – that mystical quality that says “believe” despite what the evidence may say – a chance, I looked in the mirror and saw the guy I always wanted to be.
Pretty anticlimactic, I know. You were probably expecting me to say I went to a psychic who saw my future and told me to stay here – that the divine had called me here – that my luck would soon change, or some white shaman guy gave me a magic elixir to drink that would chase away the bad energy around me so that I could better “manifest” my aspirations, or better yet, I would sit my ass on a vortex until wisdom oozed out of my frickin’ ears.
Good “woo” is never a fad, or theatrical in quality. It never seeks the lime light, nor does it horde its magic for an elite few, using its self-declared “sacredness” as an all-too-common smokescreen as an analog to modern day “slight of hand.” Good woo is ubiquitous and modest and seemingly “unmagical.” It makes no claim that you were of great nobility during a past life. (Any decent statistician could debunk this claim in not time at all.) In fact, it lacks theatrical (magical) props in general.
To accentuate this point, I will now quote fone of the most uncool people ever to live.
“Whether you believe you can, or believe you can’t, either way, you’re right.” – Henry Ford.
While bad woo is nothing but an illusion, neither founded in truth or some higher good, but of course, claiming both, “coolness” is the perfection of a personality to the point of art form. As such, certain truths are contained within its expression. But that is not truth. For that we must ascend to higher levels of the metaphysical food chain, where moral polemics are irrelevant; where all opinions and positions cease to exist.
Truth is a place, a state of mind, which is achieved by letting go of all indulgences. Once we do this, there is nothing left but… the truth. Considering the egotistic sacrifices that are mandated here – which means complete surrender of the ego – a mass cultural leap from righteous positions, be them religious, scientific, political or otherwise, should not be expected. As such, the future of “woo” and “cool” is very bright.
Yet the higher road is remarkably simple to understand. In order to “win” the game of life, you have to walk off the playground… again and again. Only then can you confirm unequivocally that the game itself is rigged against you (and everyone). But this knowledge is also insufficient. Without willingness we are forced into only bad choices, but with it, it’s quite literally, all good.
Pretty “cool” stuff.
John David Balla is a corporate dropout freelance writer, marketer, web designer, and dabbler in mysticism. He currently lives in beautiful Sedona, AZ. He can be reached at jballa@woowoochronicles.com or by visiting http://www.woowoochronicles.com or http://www.ilovesedona.com
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