Manifest

It seems to come in waves. There are months, years, when I don’t hear the word “manifestation”  - used  in a psycho-spiritual context at all, followed by periods of time when I am surrounded by offers of how and when to manifest my goals simply by imagining that I have achieved them already.

I don’t think I would even want that much control over whatever comes next.

I’ve never had the confidence to imagine that I could not only bend the trajectory of an incomprehensibly complex universe to meet my ego desires.

Maybe I just chafe at the word because I’ve seen it used as a cudgel of abuse, the bait of exploitation. In the early eighties it seemed that all my newly HIV positive gay friends had immersed themselves in A Course in Miracles, hoping to “manifest” health and prosperity.  I bit my tongue tried not to express my fury at the organization that was taking their money for workshops and products that I saw as exploiting their desperation. I knew they needed any comforting illusion in the face of a nation that had abandoned them and their whole community to death.  But I have frankly never forgiven the current presidential candidate (with the initials M.W.) who was willing to tell my frightened, beautiful, intelligent, talented friends that they could control something that they could not at all.

Whatever it may mean for others (and I’m truly not trying to yuck your yum if this word means something to you) “manifesting” too often, in our capitalistic and acquisitive culture, it sounds to me like an act committed by an inflated, hungry, slippery ego.

How can I ever wholly trust my unknowable motives or anticipate unintended impacts?

Why would I want more control, more impact and responsibility over the multi-directional causal chain than I already have? My footprint is too large already, for good and ill. I have left behind long trails of impacts and effects – positive and negative, intended, and unintended, generative, and damaging – in every direction just by living, eating, driving, earning, spending, and merely walking and breathing on this earth.

Someone tells me that now is a good time to “manifest” my desires and I hear inside of me:

Be careful what you wish for, sometimes the cruelest thing is to receive your heart’s desire.

My desire, is perhaps, to be desire-less. Or at least for my desires to get out of my way so that I can just play my part – whatever it may be – as the world around me changes and shifts.

To ride the waves.

To recognize a leading, a call when it rises up inside of me.

To receive whatever comes to me in this world with discernment and grace.

To live in alignment, responsive, not reactive to forces and happenings beyond my control.

Life manifests me. My story, my fate manifests itself.  

I can move with it, or against it, support it, receive it, attempt to reject it, or mitigate it – but I don’t think I can (and don’t want to) be the manifester.

It manifests.

I respond.

That is where my power lies, in my responsiveness, in my attempts to love and embrace whatever is thrown at me, no matter how heartbreaking, shattering, challenging, frightening, or joyful.

“I could not worship a God who would jump when I pulled the strings. I couldn’t trust him” Howard Thurman said. How could I trust a cosmos that bent to my extremely fallible will?

How many times have I wanted something, and I was wrong, so wrong?

How many times has a call descended upon me, or risen from the depths and I thought –“No, no, no no – I do not want this. This will be too much work. This makes me feel too exposed. This is more that I can manage. This is not for me.” – and the leading would not release me until my ego and its desires surrendered to it, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed to do?

Too many times to count.

I sit in the empty and wait. It is not for me to fill it with my noisy wishes.

I stay in the not knowing.

Eventually, something, some idea or impulse takes hold and I wrestle it to the ground, and test it every way I can:

Does it promote something other than myself?

Does it serve the work that I think the world needs?

Is it something I can believe in? Does it feel meaningful?

Can I see a clear potential benefit to myself and others all at once?

Does it make me feel alive? Well-used?

What problem does the impulse address? What problems will it create?

Does it suit my positionality and capacities?

Are there others who could or are doing it far better that I should support?

Is it explicitly for me to do because there is no one else?

Does it deplete or inspire me?

Is this something I need, whether I want it or not?
Is this responsibility truly mine? Is this coming for me?

It manifests. I don’t.

The path emerges and I follow it, or a certainty emerges (that does not feel like my own) that there is a direction I must move toward, even if my compass is wacky, even if I must start hacking a path through a thick and tangled jungle by all myself.

Believe me, I never want to do this. This is not my desire.

My own desires are much lazier:  I’d love to be a little more (not a lot more) financially secure. I’d love not to have to explain and prove myself to strangers repeatedly.  I’d love to be one point in a wide net that covers and connects an amazing collection of comrades with brave hearts, ready to support each other in a flash – without having to build it myself.  

I’d love to be scooped up as an eager junior by an already intact healthy community, surrounded by mentors and elders who find joy in mentoring me. And I am ridiculously wrong to still want that, at this age, in this era - as it has never been my fate, my karma. Not manifestable by me, and not for me to manifest.

My leadings and my desires rarely head in the same direction. I’ve learned that leadings bring meaning into my life, and desires set me up for disappointment.

Perhaps not everyone experiences this dichotomy. Maybe some feel like it is too risky to follow an idea that seems to descend on them from someplace else and put all their energies in behind a small still voice that comes to them through the silence.

But mine is a stubborn thing and only stops nagging me when I surrender and obey. The bee in my bonnet just keeps buzzing until I listen and act:

“Bzzzzz - It is time to write an essay, to start a project, to stick your neck out – even if it is messy and imperfect. The outcome isn’t your business. Get on it. bzzzzzz”

“Okay! Okay, let me think for a moment – about what I should try, where I should start, is this even possible?”

The buzzing bee persists: “Bzzzz. Start. The rest is not your business until it is. bzzzz”

Sometimes it generates something very quickly. Sometimes it serves one other person and nothing else. Sometimes it produces something in my life, or in someone else’s life in completely unanticipated ways and only after decades of laying there, apparently inert until it isn’t. Sometimes I can tell the gesture is generating something, but I have no idea what.

The outcome, the endpoint, the goal, what manifests or what doesn’t isn’t really my business. I just play my part.

Here is what has grabbed hold of me recently: A great urgency to get people, teachers, clinicians, community organizers, shamans, natural helpers, leaders, healers, younger-elders up and running in ways that that are simultaneously healthy for them and for others (because if it isn’t healthy for the practitioner, it isn’t healthy for others).

Up and running for what? – I don’t know. But I know many people whose voice needs to ring out in the world. I’ve been holding groups, reaching out, scheduling calls and asking folks what they need to get in the game, or get back in the game after a period of rest and recovery.  What is missing? Support? Infrastructure? Community? A new vision for a path forward? Let’s roll up our sleeves together and get on this.

Is this a desire of mine? I can’t say that it is. Is it meaningful? Does it feel important? Necessary? Does it make me, for the moment, feel alive, and responsive to the era upon us and the needs of the wider world?

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

There are better things, deeper, more heart-filling things than my desires have ever given me. And when I shut my desires down and serve such leadings it is precisely that moment I find myself most grateful to be alive on this spinning earth.

And it is so much more rich, more beautiful than merely getting what I want.