Mana

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Driving home along a familiar stretch of highway on a dark and rainy evening a few short weeks ago, I saw headlights come at me through the driver’s side window for what felt like several breaths. Then came the crunching shatter of the impact, catapulting me into a dreamlike state. I spun, my body completely surrendered to my vehicle crashing through what felt like the layers between dimensions. My mind had the time to think, “This is it.” To think, “Shoot – I’ll miss my collage workshop”. Then I came to a rest on the highway, facing backwards, cabin full of smoke and the smell of burning. My awareness gradually returned through the ache in my knees, my back, my neck, the burning on the back of my hand from where the airbag dust had landed, the shaky fragility of my awakening body. After holding so many tears, so much rage, so many adventures, and shielding me from the impact of three accidents, my stalwart car gave her life to save mine. And my life, at least for a time, despite all my other pressing plans, would become about rebuilding.

Just one week earlier, my sister had listened to me recount my experiences over the past few years, telling of the sheer will it’s taken day after day to do what needs to be done with so little to sustain the deeper parts of my soul. She had a vision of the mana that fell on the Israelites as they wandered in the desert. It was an arid, arduous journey with no clear timeline or direction. And yet what drifted down from heaven gave them just enough nourishment to keep moving. That is precisely how I feel. And as I sat in my crippled car breathing airbag smoke and feeling into my stiffened joints to see if they still worked, I saw two young men run over to my window. I rolled it down, grabbed the nearest hand, and began sobbing and shaking. This was not the time to be stoic or poised. This was the time to shake like the wild animal who has just escaped the jaws of the predator. This was the time to gather up the mana that was falling around me without shame, without apology, and feast.

One of the young men, Max, lent me his raincoat in the downpour as I stood shaky in the dark surrounded by police and flares and trucks rumbling by as they reopened the roadway. My sister on the other end of the line validated me and asked me orienting questions even as the officers told me there was no damage to my car that indicated I had been hit – implying I had spun out on my own on the slick pavement and my muddled brain somehow fabricated the story about the collision. My housemate, Gina, woke blurry-eyed and sleep-deprived with no hint of irritation to drive me to urgent care. Keisha at the ER was fresh and bright at midnight despite the cold, sterile surroundings and more traumatized patients. The cab driver on the early morning ride home told me stories of dealing pot, reminding me how much life is out there beyond my own rhythm and routine. Mana.

A brush with death like this brings community together. The collage workshop I was determined to host the next day for a wonderful group of warm-hearted women brought a balm of beauty and depth to my raw and open heart. I let my friend Chris come over early to prep the workstations and stay late to share dinner and hold me. The outpouring of compassion and practical support I received on social media was an extended salve. Several people have checked in on me in the weeks since, concerned about residual trauma to my body and spirit, and I can honestly say I feel amazing. I shook too hard in the hour after the crash and was held too closely for the imprint to burrow within me. The deepest parts of me remain intact, serene, more receptive than ever and with so much still to give. What had been shaken from me felt less like my roots and more like the soil that clung to them, preparing me to transplant somewhere new. Mana.

I was already shifting from a space of facing the darkness head-on to focusing on what brings me joy. What comes to me now is that while I am wandering I can choose focus on the desert, or focus on the mana. They are both crucial part of a complete scene that must be taken in together. Am I railing against the lostness and the thirst? Or am I letting each morsel that falls onto my tongue rest there, savoring, praising, cherishing its memory, knowing it will come again? In this way I can feast even during a famine, and my very real hunger transmutes into moments of delight I could not have relished otherwise. I idealize the monastic life and I rage against being unable to dedicate myself to the life of a poet philosopher, but here – holding Max’s hand in the smoking car, petting Chris’s hair with her arms wrapped around me, stranded with strangers at a bus station in the rain, staring deep into the eyes of someone who is similarly lost and hopeful – I have something sacred to write about. Life lived as an artform doesn’t need the elusively perfect comforts of home, job, relationship. It thrives in the precious moments that are mine, and it’s up to me whether I check-out and miss the grace, or lean in to what’s falling all around me.

I get why I so often miss the feast; why it takes a crisis for most of us to open up and receive. It’s vulnerable in the desert. I’m exposed and needful, and I’d rather pretend I’m somewhere else. And yet it is the need itself and the flesh revealed by the armor torn away that lets life get inside of us. Many of my experiences have taught me that’s not okay. Life hurts. It abandons and destroys. David Whyte describes loss as a tumbling towards the center of what we once were and finding it gone. It feels as though we free-fall infinitely, but eventually we do find the ground again, and a new foundation. Even at its worst, life brings this gift. And at its best, life gets inside and inoculates us with such tender awe. National Geographic taught us in our youth that life is all about predator and prey, territory and outcasts, feeding frenzies and starvation, the alphas and the runts. But the mycelial network under our feet does not distinguish between individual trees or even species. It confounds our concepts of evolutionary hierarchy with its communal flourishing. How much of “how the world works” is just the story we overlay onto the events of our lives to justify the familiar and uniquely poignant way we suffer?

I choose to focus on the mana. Chris and I joke about the cars we test drive, bring laughter to the used car lots, and share a late-night bread-free English tea on my bedroom floor. The cost of an extra week’s car rental are just numbers on a distant spreadsheet that give me a few more hours of rest and a warm and dry commute. A new friend offers a courtesy energy work session in my own room so I can roll off the table right into bed. There is always more to do. The territory of risk and the unknown will always be vast. But today I simply treasure realizing that I, like the sun, will look out across the galaxy and see nothing but utterly inky darkness unless some body steps in front me. I experience them as luminous, but what I really see is my own light in the only way it is possible for me to see myself: reflection.

I can look inward and see that glimmer shining forth from its source and I can look outward and see it reflected back to me in all things. Either way, it is mana and it is as abundant as it is diverse. I find my ray in sweetness and enthusiasm, in the imaginal and archetypal stories, in warm hearts and hearths, and in gathering together bits and pieces to assemble something beautiful. If I choose to eat sand and feel hungry, it does not mean I am not surrounded by nourishment. Sometimes I need trauma to make me desperate enough to taste anything. Sometimes grace brings me the right mirror to show me who I am. And when the dust settles and solitude finds me once again, I get to choose what to eat.

Nancy