Noelle Oxenhandler - The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire

The Wishing Year

Contents

PART ONE | PUTTING IT OUT THERE
In which I openly declare three desiresto heal my soul, buy a house, and find a manand am initiated into the art of wishing

CHAPTER ONE | JANUARY
Shrines: Honoring Desire

CHAPTER TWO | FEBRUARY
Arrows: Aiming for Love

CHAPTER THREE | MARCH
Gold: Gathering Money

CHAPTER FOUR | APRIL
Shit: Facing the Darkness

CHAPTER FIVE | MAY
Craft: Wishing Well

PART TWO | RAKING IT IN
In which, as I set out to explore the ancient history of wishing, my own wishes surprise me by beginning to come true

CHAPTER SIX | JUNE
Magic: Tracing Primal Roots

CHAPTER SEVEN | JULY
Grace: Seeking Divine Favor

CHAPTER EIGHT | AUGUST
Guides: Discovering Their Presence

PART THREE | HOLDING IT LIGHTLY
In which, as I move through a modern history of wishing, my journey expands in new directions

CHAPTER NINE | SEPTEMBER
Thoughts: Tapping Their Power

CHAPTER TEN | OCTOBER
Body/Mind: Trusting Connection

CHAPTER ELEVEN | NOVEMBER
Abundance: Realizing the Dream

CHAPTER TWELVE | DECEMBER
After Wishing: In Praise of Whats Here

FOR

Alicia, Daniel, and Dawn

If wishes were siblings,
Id wish for you.

And in memory of

George Levenson,

who risked everything
for his wish.

Were never truly separate from what we wish for.

KYTHE HELLER,
IMMOLATION

Authors Note

This is a work of nonfiction. The names and certain identifying characteristics of some of the people who appear in its pages have been changed.

Introduction

It is, in itself, an ancient wish: the wish that a wish makes something happen. Wish for a palace, and the fishermans shanty becomes a palace. Wish to be home, and ones glittering red shoes are suddenly planted in Kansas.

Which one of us, throwing a coin into a fountain, is entirely immune from the belief that the act of wishingfrom the thought in the mind to the coin making its plink in the waterwill somehow provoke an actual outcome? We will pass the exam. Overcome illness. Conceive a child. Find a house in the country.

Is such belief merely childish, superstitious, unscientific? Wishful thinking, people say, and the expression conveys disdain for the act of wishing. Disdain, and the belief that wishing is impotent. After all, if wishes were horses, wouldnt beggars ride?

For Sigmund Freud, who considered himself first and foremost a scientist, the wish and the real are fundamentally opposed. According to him, we are each born with the grandiose and deluded notion that the world exists to gratify our every wish. As we grow older, this primal pleasure principle must yield inexorably to the reality principle. At night when we dream, we return to the primal world of the wisha world that Freud regarded, with great respect, as an inexhaustibly rich reservoir of meaning. If were truly adults, however, we must open our eyes and let our wishes die back in the harsh morning light.

Some of the most dynamic and successful people I know have insisted to me, with an edge of indignation in their tone: I dont wish. I make plans. Strong adherents of the reality principle, they see wishing as the very opposite of the clear-eyed, self-reliant, 100 percent pragmatic approach that brings about tangible results. And they seem to have little of Freuds empathy for both wishes and wishers. For them, wishing is not much more than a sign of weakness and a temptation to be avoided. The province of airheads, fools, quacks, and losers.

Yet other peoplequite serious and substantial peopleinsist that there is, indeed, true power in the act of wishing, and an art in tapping it. For them, wishing is not only perfectly compatible with a pragmatic approach to life but a crucial component. They would tell us, If a beggar genuinely wanted a horse, and effectively harnessed the energy of his wish, then the chances are good that he would find himself riding. Indeed, much better than if hed never permitted himself to wish in the first place!

The Wishing Year dives into the heart of this controversy, setting out with analmostequal mix of hope and skepticism. I say almost because by temperament I tilt toward a certain pessimistic melancholy, at least where earthly happiness is concerned. And I am also cursed with a need for rigorous argument, which means that a certain kind of positive thinking doesnt seem so much like real thinking to me as a kind of incantation or trance.

Yet despite my penchant for both logic and melancholy, I persisted, and this book reveals the fruit of that persistence. It is the record of my own deliberate attempt to make three very different wishes come truethe wish for a house, the wish for a new love, and the wish for spiritual healing. And it is simultaneously a reflection on the quintessentially human act of wishing, which begins with ancient cave dwellers beseeching the gods for rain, deer, fertility, and extends all the way to New Age prophets preaching affirmations, visualizations, the law of attraction, and the practice of Putting It Out There.

In its reflection, the book focuses on these fundamental questions: Does a wish have power? If so, what kind of power is it, and how can this power be tapped? Is there danger in wishing? If so, what sort of danger is it, and how can this danger be avoided? At the root of these questions is one perennial mystery: the connection between mind and matter, psyche and substance, soul and world. Ancient human thought assumed a continuity between these two dimensions (Being and thought are One, declared Parmenides in the sixth century B.C.), but with the rise of scientific thought, a gap arose. Now, as the latest medical and scientific research begin to dissolve this gap, it becomes more and more urgent for a thinking person to distinguish between fact and superstition, between real power and false promise.

But before going any further: what is a wish?

As I see it, a wish begins with a desirea desire for things to be somehow other than they are. Thus, when I say I wish, it means first of all that I have a desire to possess something that I dont yet possess, to ward off something that might be a threat, to become or to experience something that at present eludes me, or to hold on to something that might otherwise disappear.

We often use the words wish and desire as though they were one and the same, but I want to say that a wish is a desire with something added. For while a desire can remain quite passive, latent, held within the realm of possibility, a wish, as I intend to use the word, takes aim. It tries to cross the threshold between the possible and the actual. Its a desire with ambition, a desire poised for action. Hope is the thing with feathers, said Emily Dickinson. And a wish, as I understand it, is a desire with feathersan arrows feathers and an arrows sharp point.

So then, how is a wish distinguished from a hope? To me, its the sharp point that makes the difference. For while hope implies loft, the aspiration to soar toward what is yet to come, I see it primarily as an inner state, a kind of trusting readiness that does not necessarily propel itself into the air to snag its object. As for a wish: only with both feathers and sharp point can it reach what it aims for, crossing the threshold from idea in the mind to actual occurrence.