This is a story about creating reality and letting go.

Three years ago in a business meeting at What the Bleep, Betsy Chasse casually said, "I want to start a newsletter." There was a little contemplative silence, and then everybody in the room turned around and looked at me.

I'd just walked in the door with pizza for the meeting, and had only recently come on-board as a part-time, short-term office manager. It was a local job I never would have taken in a million years had I not been a 50 year-old full-time graduate student in need of a little something extra to help defray the costs of a mortgage and dog food.

I'd known in my soul I was meant to take the job the moment I heard about it - even though the only thing I knew about offices was the fact that I'd managed to avoid actually ever working in one. I'd spent 16 years as a television editor, and then I'd spent another 13 years as a newspaper reporter. I was a journalism escapee, tapped out writing mainstream stories about endless, small-minded conflicts and human woe.

I remember looking back at everybody, thinking, "My god, they haven't got a clue how much work this is going to be to do right." I saw a vista of heaven knew how many monthly articles and interviews and transcriptions and deadlines, then sighed and hazarded, "How about calling it the Herald?" After a hot brain storming session that lasted about two minutes, Melissa from the Bleep Store piped up with "Bleeping Herald" and that was that.

Nobody knew this was the manifestation of a major dream I'd had back in the late 1990s when I was the Northwest bureau chief for a national Native American newspaper, writing about treaty lawsuits and casino gambling, dreaming of interviewing people like John Hagelin and Deepak Chopra, writing about what really interested me - consciousness, spirituality and quantum physics.

Dreams don't die. They linger in the quantum field. They're "us" — a part of our mental patterning — and, as such, they stay with us. We may grow away from our dreams, taking different paths. But the most potent of them — the ones that evoked the greatest emotional commitment and excited the greatest personal passion — are always with us, waiting to be actualized. I can now say from personal experience, that the key to manifesting them seems to be letting go enough personal control to give them a chance to actually get through the door.

My "letting go" took the form of waking up one Monday morning in March 2001, with the usual five disinteresting stories due that week. I called my editor to quit, and after cajoling me into completing half my assignments, he blessedly gave me six weeks off to "take a break and get things together." Halfway through the vacation I knew I was finished with journalism and give in my notice.

What followed was a series of completely odd jobs that always seemed to lead me back to the pen. I took a job mucking stalls at a local stable where the trainer worked with Buck Brannaman of "Horse Whisperer" fame. Thirty-five pounds lighter and starting to train horses myself, I couldn't quite resist writing some articles and scripting a video about this magical training methodology. I was promptly offered a marketing job, which I avoided by taking a job as a cashier at a local garden shop. Within a month I got tapped to start a gardening newsletter. Fortunately I was an absolutely terrible cashier and got fired before I had to actually write anything, but the trend was clear.

To kill the communications bug for good, I decided to go back to school and get a graduate degree in counseling. As a psychologist I would too involved helping others to even think about writing. And then ... I followed an inner voice that brought me to What the Bleep ... and two months later there I was, setting up interviews with John Hagelin and Deepak Chopra, getting paid to learn about the things that interested me most, writing the articles I had always dreamed of writing. I quit school after the first semester.

The last three years have been a blast. I have been blessed with the opportunity to let my curiosity run rampant with some of the greatest minds of today's world. I've learned about the scientific method and come to respect it for what it is — an investigative methodology based in the development of replicable experimentation. I didn't really understand the scientific method until the third time I'd galloped off on some wildly interesting (to me!) tangent during an interview with somebody like John or Fred Wolf, saying something like, "Gee — maybe dark matter is the result of all those other realities splitting off in the ‘many worlds theory.' What do you think about that?" To which there would always be a measured pause as the scientist thought about what I'd asked. Then would come the response, "Interesting. But how would you go about setting up an experiment to prove your theory? In science, interesting isn't enough. A theory has to be able to be proved or disproved to be of any value."

Being editor of The Bleeping Herald has taught me a lot. Best of all it has shown me that dreams always manifest, given half a chance. And now that my old dream has manifested, new dreams have arisen. Enough of remaining outside looking in upon other people's work and reporting about it. Enough books about the brain and quantum healing and the Planck Scale. It's time to play. It's time to dive into life, first-person. Shamanism and plant medicine call to me. Peru is waiting. The realm of fiction is coyly opening up her imaginative vistas, and a screenplay and a couple books lurk in my computer files, partially written.

So — I'm off to new adventures! Thank you Will and Betsy, from the bottom of my heart, for the incredible creation of What the Bleep, and inviting me in to work with you. It has been an honor and a privilege. Thank you to my webmaster Cameron who, month after month, has helped to make this a labor of love and a lot of fun. Thank you to all the marvelous scientists and writers who have contributed to the Herald over the years. And finally, thank you to all our readers for your many encouraging and enthusiastic words. Thank you for your receptivity to the marvels this created world brings ... and your vital interest in what lies beyond.