HOW I MANIFESTED MY MANIFESTATION PARTY

A totally unscientific practice of engaging in dreams

collage from Jessica Snow’s meditation website

There are only a handful of people I can invite to a vision board party with a straight face and I met them all at once. We went to a retreat together in the spring to do yoga amidst the redwoods where, as one person in the group remarked when we met again, we did very little yoga. We all met before the retreat because I offered to drive at least one person up and someone on the car pool thread organized us by neighborhood and before you know it there were five of us in my Subaru Forester headed to Mendocino. I made them all listen to the same mournful middle age playlist I had been listening to for a year straight, despite the fact that they were in their 20s and 30s. It was embarrassing and also, much of the road there crosses through mountains without service, so they didn’t have much choice. Maybe I felt bad for the sad songs, when I had the urge to invite them all to come to my house on a Sunday afternoon some six months after the retreat had passed.

We decided on a date and I bought the science fair boards and the glue but it’s expensive to buy a bunch of glossy print mags and also that’s what you need for a proper group facilitated collage. I stole an image from my favorite Los Angeles located meditation guru, slapped on some text and asked everyone to bring one magazine of their own, figuring I would find the rest some other way. At the very least I could pick up free National Geographic magazines from Scrap on the east side of the city. The week flew by and it was Thursday before I realized it was Thursday. I looked at my phone, noticed the date, and then stepped into the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

What happened next I can only describe as a kind of slowing down of my usual experience of time. Things I would normally rush past instead caught my eye and connected to one another in an unusual fashion. It was like a slip of paper, once curled up, now expanded in front of me to reveal that there was more to it than I would have been able to notice before. Inside the front doors the librarian was looking up: her face open and friendly and available. She seemed to be asking without asking if she could help me and I figured my answer was no. But then I remembered that the library has a magazine section, and wondered what they did with the past issues. 

I asked her just this and then it became clear that I had entered some kind of gray zone. There were magazines, there were past issues, they did just get recycled. But as far as getting access to them, for free, well there wasn’t any official policy. I interrupted our conversation to ask about her sweatshirt, wherein she had cut a heart and sewn a mesh piece of fabric in place of the gray material. There was an arrow running through it, only half of the arrow was not there. I asked her about the arrow. Had she intended to leave it undone? Or was it a piece of fabric that looked like half an arrow and had she just sewn the shape on to just to see? She said that it was the shape that she noticed, before she picked up the phone and left a message to someone else about me inquiring about the leftover stash. She didn't say who she was calling or tell me how I might follow up about their answer but just that it was a matter of intersecting with the person in charge of that turnover at the right time. 

Ok well, I said, waving my hand a little, I’ll just be here for a while. 

When I walked away I realized two important things: 1) I hadn’t asked specifically what to do next to get in touch with that person and 2) I let go that I hadn’t asked specifically. It felt, just kind of, too pushy. I felt that I had done what I could and that maybe I’d check in with her again after I left. 

As I sat down to write a young person tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was the person the librarian had left the message about. When I said that I was he pulled me a bit to the side of the tables and made sure I knew that this was just a one time thing. I was pretty straightforward about what I needed: just the most image rich publications possible for a small collage party. I hovered a bit by the magazine area and watched as he opened the shelves behind the standing issues to reveal a stack of past issues behind it. He asked me to wait at the table where I was writing while he processed the past issues before returning to put a pile of about a dozen design magazines in front of my face.

There were more miracles: a free tai chi class in the community room at the library, downstairs. Another breadcrumb leading to a bounty courtesy of Empress Vintage who gifted me a bunch of old Vogues. A trip to the Japanese bookstore where I would have spent a fortune, if I had one, on the cutest collection of cookbooks you’ve ever seen. An abundance of figs from the farmer’s markets for a nice spread when the guests arrived. Then the party where we sprawled out on the living room rug, big boards in front of us, cutting and pasting for hours during which I regularly stopped us to say aloud that this scene already was my deepest dream come true.