aftershocks and manifesting
on coming home, a year after the earthquake in Morocco
I had my cards read on my 50th birthday. I’m agnostic about these things; I neither believe nor disbelieve. One of the oracle cards was a master manifester.
I like to think I, we all, have the power to manifest. It wasn’t until this morning, a year after the earthquake in Morocco, when I looked back at what I wrote six months after that night, that I realized it’s happened.
I want to walk my dog to a park, unafraid. I want to look out my window and see trees. I want to take the exit to my home and not see blight, that abandoned house being strangled by overgrowth ... I love the neighborhood brewery that opened last year, and I want to have more than one bright spot. I want to walk to our friends’ homes. I want to stop imagining buildings falling down and stop looking for emergency exits when I go inside a new place. I want to be grateful for what I have, but I want more. I want to feel once more like the earth won’t open under my feet and I want to be in a place that feels like home.
Here we are. Since the earthquake, since that visceral longing I put down on the page half a year ago, we have moved.
Our new home is sheltered under a canopy of trees, beautiful, life-giving greenery that glows every morning with the rising sun, alive with birdsong and woodland creatures rustling, all living their wild lives. The house is perched up on a hill, the front room open via a picture window to nothing but treetops and sky.
Down the hill and across the road lies one of the largest parks around, its old growth forests and hills a respite from the city. Cash gets to run and play there every day.
Also down the hill or down the road we can find coffee, pizza, the best sushi in town, a book store, international markets, a beloved Vietnamese restaurant.
We walked to our friends’ house last night, goodies for dinner carried in a basket I bought on my first trip to Marrakech, gathered around a fire under the stars, stars we can see this far from the city.
The only thing I haven’t manifested is a feeling that the earth won’t open under my feet. Because it can, at any moment, and that knowledge can’t be un-known. That knowledge is the chasm between me and the rest of the world, the billions that take it as a truth so ingrained that it’s not even a thought.
I know now there are no promises, maybe not even absolute truths. The world and everything we know about it can shift in a heartbeat. My new friend, whose house I can walk to, said it’s about trust now. Maybe none of us can trust the ground under our feet, but what I’ve learned is I can trust that I will navigate upheaval. Fleeing our riad when the quake struck, when the world closed in on nothing but that shuddering, heaving building and the race to escape it, I grabbed the things we would need — passport, phone, water — without even realizing it.
Floundering in the desolate neighborhood where we felt stuck for nearly a year, low moments nearly felled me more than once. Putting up a Christmas tree in an effort to make this foreign place feel like home, I couldn’t bring myself to hang the ornaments we’ve brought home from around the globe. Instead I slumped in a chair, gave in to the hot tears sliding down my face. Gave up. For a while.
But we took another trip. Faced the extremes of the Arctic Circle in the polar twilight of the new year. Lifted our faces to magic of the aurora even as our lashes froze. Found wonder. I tackled a new project, leading a trip to Paris, lost myself in creating joy for other humans. And we found our new home.
My room, because I have my own room to write in here, is painted pink, a color I picked out in a shop in Paris. The southern and eastern light is gold, a little like the shimmering golden lanterns whose beauty made my cry that last day in Marrakech, hours before the violence of the ancient buildings sliding into rubble. It’s messy, littered with pictures and art, and flowers, and the detritus of a life that unfolds between and during travels. And I hear birds and see green outside. It’s what I wanted before knowing it was here.
What I have to manifest now is courage to continue out into the sacred and beautiful and terrifying places of the world.
In two months we fly to the Himalayas. I’m being pulled there even as I’m frightened to go. It’s a part of the world with a history of catastrophic earthquakes. Once you’re in the mountains there are few ways out. Life is lived much closer to the edges here. A drive on horrifically dangerous roads ends in tragedy, and often. Watching a show about one road in particular triggered panic for me so severe I couldn’t take a real breath for 10 days. I cancelled the leg of the trip that took that road, and days later 60 people died in a crash there. I’d be astoundingly stupid if I weren’t afraid.
But the unrelenting need to go, to see, to feel, to hear, to experience the furthest reaches of the globe is who I am at my very essence. Fear might be my companion, but it can’t stop me.
I kept waiting, after the earthquake, for the wisdom or transformation that’s supposed to come after a near death experience. It didn’t. What came is this: now I know. I know how fragile, how fleeting this time, this place is. I’ve been seeing a life coach, a soul who sees immediately through the layers upon layers I wear to go into the world. The more you know, the less you fear, he told me, because you’re strong enough to know. Look directly at it and into it, he urged me. Identify what on this trip can trigger the fear that lives in my bones since the earthquake, and plan for it. Make a map of the journey before leaving home, he said, so I did. I painted the trip, plotting the points where I risk the fear taking over. I brought it to life.
It’s not an accident that I’m going to one of the most spiritual places on earth, this man who sees the big picture surrounding me (the picture I often can’t see myself) says. And it’s not about a walk in the mountains. I’ll be pushed in many ways, he says, and I know they are ways I can’t imagine yet. My hope, which surfaces even as I type this, is to find more of who I am in this part of life, more of what I need to manifest what’s next. More of what I need to just be, something I’ve never really known how to do.
And today, a year after the juncture that was so violent but that also brought my humanity into stark focus, I feel hope. Will I ever stop jumping at sudden sounds, stop feeling my heart hammer against my chest when something startles me? I don’t know. Trauma never goes away, I’ve learned. It’s not an aftershock, but a repeat, as far as my body and brain’s response to a trigger goes.
But the earth has completed a full trip around the sun since that night. It’s remained solid under my feet. And I’m here. I’m home. A place I seem to have manifested. And that home will be waiting when I return from this next chapter.
