A Cauldron for Miracles

From the Smallest Storms to Ripples of Laughter

“Believe in Miracles” is printed on my favorite shirt — a dark gray muscle shirt with stars and the phases of the moon and the palm of a celestial hand offering a promise. I like the suggestion that we can rely on it — this phenomenon called miracle. It’s inexplicable except to call it magic, or we might consider it a science we simply haven’t decoded yet. While I am a scientist—admittedly the most woo woo scientist I know, using candles and herbs and altars and offerings to the goddess and to my ancestors and to the Universe, and although I do perform spells — underneath it all I tenuously believe that miracles are available to us. There is evidence to support this theory. Let me give you one example.

Anna got dressed up to go out, making herself into the most beautiful object I could not have. I made advances and she rejected them. Angry and wounded, I got dressed up, too, looking as hot as I could in a tight black outfit with a little faux leather jacket. I wanted to go to the gay bar and get drunk and hook up with a stranger. Anna would be sorry, I thought. Looking hot and desperate, I walked past her out the door. Riding the train, I worried about myself: would I really do it? Would I drink and give up my nearly 18 months sober over a relationship ending? I remembered the last time I’d been drunk and how close to my own end I’d felt. A small voice kept asking me, are you sure?

“Shut up,” I shouted. Aloud on the train and clearly by myself, my red-faced admonishment to the air made people look at me with an altogether new expression. They inched away, perhaps in fear. Arriving to my stop, I marched forward with conviction. The small voice would not sway me; I would have my relapse, it would feel perfect, and she would be sorry. Persistent, the small voice told me how hard it had been to get sober, how I may not ever be able to do it again, how my hard won 18 months would poof— disappear. Mourning it already, I teared up as I walked.

Arriving to the bar, I placed my hand on the door handle only to have it swing open on its own. There in the doorway, reeking of booze, was a man I’d seen in a recovery meeting just the day before. We looked at each other and mutual recognition lit our eyes.

            “What are you doing here?” I asked, temporarily jolted out of my trance.

            “I was in there at a bachelor party. Everyone started getting drunk and someone just spilled their drink on me, so I decided it was time to leave.”

            “Oh,” I said and looked past him into the beckoning darkness, watching it twinkle in disco-ball glimmers. My heart hammered.

            He asked: “What are you doing here?”

            “I was just going to go in there…” Water filled my eyes. I blinked, spilling it onto my face.

            “Let’s go for a walk,” he said, and swept me away with his arm around my shoulders. We walked and talked and I have no memory of the conversation, only that I shared a Coke with him at a café.

After dark, the light jacket weather plummeted into winter parka weather. At the elevated train platform, I hugged myself and shivered against the bitter breeze. When I arrived home, I changed into pajamas and lay on the couch under a blanket, trying to sleep. Anna was still out, of course, and I was the only one who would have been sorry.

All around me, the sounds of the city popped and whirred — people out and about, joyful, laughing, riding in cars with loud music with smiles on their faces. I saw Anna that way too: terribly beautiful as she moved her body to music and bumped up against the admirer of her choosing. Rather than deepen the contrast between my aloneness and her imagined good time, the thought of it lifted me to the surface of my sadness, buoyed me there, fed me fresh air, open-mouthed. Imagining others with Anna experiencing joy was not a threat to me then. In the light of the apparition man who had intervened so magically on my near self-destruction, their joy felt like my promise. A promise that I would walk through this smallest of storms and emerge into the sunlight, face upturned, eyes bright but squinting, because the brightness of that future was too much to see. Too much to know.

In that brightness, half a lifetime later, I would be tucking my small son into bed and performing a prayer ritual with him in which we pressed our palms together and said: “Dear Goddess…” My instinct was not to teach him of a higher power that would grant his wishes like a genie, but rather of one that was the great womb-like progenitor of absolutely everything, and we had her to thank for all we have and find beauty in. “Thank you for sunsets and the ocean, thank you for good jokes that make us laugh, thank you for that feeling we get when we are hugging each other…” When we ran out of specific things to appreciate, he would inevitably thank the Goddess for something silly, like pooping and peeing, and his ripples of laughter would light up the dark room like a disco ball, lifting my face into a smile I didn’t will, but one that was the natural byproduct of the gratitude filling my entire body.

Another time, we made a bet about something I can’t remember anymore, but the bet was for a bajillion dollars. When he lost, he went to his room for a while and emerged with a slip of paper. Handing it to me, I saw the dollar signs on all four corners, and across the middle he had written: “One bajillion.” This magical currency has lived on my altar ever since, reminding me where the wealth in my life truly exists. 

There are hundreds of stories of miracles in my life as profound as the one about the man at the bar who saved my life, and thousands more that shine like mitochondria at the hot center of such ordinary moments in every day. These big and small manifestations of magic — they share the same DNA — and their relative size is directly proportional to the amount of attention I bring to each present moment.

For as much as I would love to explain this magic, I am but a human animal, with limited sense perception. Michelle Tea writes in her book, Modern Magic, “Scientists cannot definitively claim that we are not living in a computer simulation.” This playful speculation about the explanation, the source, the why, the how — it’s perfect. It outfits my urgent, anxious questioning with the proper amount of levity. In the end there is magic. There are miracles. And I admit it; I believe the cauldron for these can be none other than the celestial womb my son and I have nicknamed Goddess.