F*ck manifesting

Here's how to sing a praise song, and why

Just a quick one this week, because I’m finishing an essay for my MA (“How do we, as modern humans, create a cosmology around us?”—pinching myself every day that I get to study this stuff). I’m also making a zine: “Fuck Manifesting: Here’s How to Sing a Praise Song, and Why.”

(More info on getting hold of a copy at the bottom of this email.)

My GOD it is fun to use my hands again.

The zine is born out of lots of digging and thinking and epiphanies I’ve had while studying for this MA in mythology. The first module is on “oral thought”—meaning, how did people think, and interact with the world, when the stories their cultures lived by were held orally, rather than written?

It’s such a rich seam to mine. Recording stories in memory alone requires people to determine what’s really important, and then hold those truths bodily. In this way, a culture’s stories become part of the flesh. And when they’re spoken aloud, the speaker’s body resonates with them, a resonance passed down through generations along with the stories themselves. It’s a way of tuning the flesh to deep truth and to relationship with the living world.

In any case, it’s a far cry from silently wailing our despair into the digital abyss all day long, in 280-character instalments.

As I swim through all these ideas, I’ve been thinking a lot about my time in Los Angeles, where I lived for six years until I moved back to England last autumn. There were great and good things about LA, but it was never right for me. And it’s only now, with a bit of distance, that I’m fully realizing how profoundly uncomfortable the city’s manifestation culture always made me. LA is full of fancy people drinking fancy juices, who’ll tell you what they’re currently manifesting before they ask your name.

The usual slap-down to manifesting culture usually runs something like: “Your good fortune is not manifestation. It’s inherited wealth. It’s whiteness. It’s capitalism and ableism and the legacy of slavery and colonialism.”

And of course I believe in these social injustices, and the need to address them.

And I also believe in the power of manifesting. I agree with every ancient mythology that says the world is energy and, as such, our relationship to it is energetic.

And I believe that words are energetic events. They’re spells. Oral cultures knew this, and were very careful about which stories they held in the body and spoke into being.

When you accept that words are spells, a manifestation culture built on individualism (and juice) very quickly starts to look both deeply dangerous and like the absolute worst way to build a meaningful life—as individuals or a collective.

Hence: “Fuck Manifesting: Here’s How to Sing a Praise Song and Why.”

Because when we’re so busy trying to manipulate the world, we can’t help but see it as passive.

But the Earth’s beauty is not passive; it’s constantly calling out to us, asking us to see it, to feel it, to sing it back.

The world is energy, and we can influence the way it unfolds. But the only responsible, joyful, alive way to do that is to forever reflect back to the living world the impossible beauty of each moment it offers us.

If we’re going to do any manifesting, please let it be this. The manifestation of our own voices as part of this chorus.

As usual, there’s actually no need to make this zine at all or ever do anything, because Ursula Le Guin already said it better than I ever could:

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world.

—A Wizard of Earthsea

Still. I’ll offer this zine up as my praise song to this moment. I’ll also be drawing on the phenomenologist Jean-Louis Chrétien, the mythologists Sean Kane and Sophie Strand, a treasure trove of old myths, and—you guessed it!—probably some ideas about caves and the earliest origins of human culture.

I’m still figuring out how to distribute this baby. If you’d be interested in receiving a copy, it would be super helpful if you could drop a comment and let me know, including whether you’d like a digital or printed version. Printed copies would likely cost a few pounds, to cover printing and shipping.

Love to you all,

x Ellie