Coffee With Mara

Mara Morgan is beautiful. Some of it is simple physical beauty. Her hair is long and wavy. A perfect shade of red. Her body is tall and slender. Her facial features are in perfect proportion. Some of it is the way she holds herself with a sense of natural nobility. Anytime she moves I am reminded of a cat, poised to jump from an impossible height. But really most of it has to do with the intangible field of heightened meaning that surrounds her. It feels like I’ve become part of the story simply by standing next to her. Instead of feeling competitive or threatened I feel like my own sense of beauty is enhanced. Her beauty is such that the whole world seems more beautiful. 

We’re sitting in a cafe on Piedmont Avenue. The sunlight is streaming through the oversized windows, causing Mara’s hair to look like tiny flames. I vaguely wish I could pull out a camera and capture the effect. She is drinking a cup of herbal tea, I’m sipping a large coffee. I’m anxious to talk to her about energy healing. To talk about Julian. But something about the interaction tells me not to bring it up yet. Talking about Julian first would somehow feel reductive. A sign that I am unaware that Mara is independently powerful, interesting in her own right. I’m coming to trust these subtle senses of timing and nuance in interactions more and more. Being around Julian is teaching me to notice the near-infinite depth of intuition that is already present in any interaction. The way a sudden movement might cause another person to slightly startle. And the sense that some part of me already knew that, even before it happened. I’m watching Mara with cautious attention.

The waiter stops by our table to bring food. I’m eating a large salad with a heap of croutons on top. Mara is taking dainty bites out of an almond croissant. Makes me wish I was a dainty eater, but I’m not. Pity. We’re talking about a new yoga class she is developing: Trauma-informed yoga. Between bites of food we talk about the Somatic Experiencing exercises she is thinking of incorporating into the class. Mara runs a small yoga studio. Her classes are the best in the area, at least according to me. I’m a picky yoga consumer. I hate the let’s-get-to-business-and-sweat variety. I abhorr any kind of overly sweet, insincere encouragement to relax. If the teacher starts showing off pretzel shapes I’ll leave faster than they can un-pretzel. Mara isn’t like that, which is why I love her. Her classes have a spiritual quality to them. Her students leave the room visibly more embodied, at ease with themselves. I’ve been going for a little over a year and we’ve become slow friends during that time, in shy little exchanges. 

Mara is the one who brings up Julian first, during a story about a trip to Colorado. They went to film an interview with a buddhist martial arts master who lives there, in a secluded retreat center in the middle of the country. She talks about him with reverence, focusing on his philosophy. The interview is part of their research, she explains. They’re testing what they call the concentration-intention hypothesis, which says that mental models are built wherever a mind routes will through attention and with the degree of precision required for the task. The energy phenomena are an example of this, a trainable, highly skilled sensing ability based in precisely tuned models of attentional flows through the body. I am so enthralled by the intellectual aspects of the conversation that it takes me whole minutes to catch on to the relational implications of their shared travel.

Somehow Mara senses my shift in focus. She cocks her head to one side, then smiles sheepishly. I really really want to ask her about Julian now, but it still doesn’t seem right to do so. Somewhere in the background I feel sheepish too, around my impulse to define what Mara and Julian are to each other. Part of me would love nothing more than to slap a label on their relationship. Friends. Lovers. Research colleagues. Married. But you live in the Bay for long enough and you become cautious with the labels. There’s notable cultural momentum in the direction of relational flexibility, keeping things spaciously undefined. The unspoken rules tell me that it’s up to Mara to choose if and when to reveal the nature of their bond. I nod and stare at my plate. 

After a while the conversation drifts to other interests. Along the way I collect a few more scraps of information about Julian. He’s in his late thirties and spent some time working as an assistant philosophy professor at Stanford. He’s pretty young to have both made a career for himself and become disillusioned with academia, so I’m sort of impressed. Sounds like he was kind of a hotshot. I wonder what happened there. He’s originally from New York and has kind of a mixed relationship with the Bay. Mara, who was born and raised in Berkeley also fancies New York instead. I feel somewhat defensive about my adopted home. But I guess it’s fashionable to act blase about living near the most popular city on the planet.

Back home my housemate Sarah is hanging out in our living room. We’ve been best friends for so long that we’re practically sisters. “How did it go?” she asks excitedly, before I’m all the way through the door. “I think it was good. Kind of hard to read though. I’m not sure.” I give her a summary of the conversation. “What did you learn about Julian?” she prompts, and we dissect the scraps. Sarah thinks that Julian is kind of ominous. She thinks Mara and Julian are obviously dating, and that it’s weird that Mara didn’t say so. Maybe only I got the memo about the spaciousness, then. Sarah and I aren’t from around here, that’s probably why. When we talk just the two of us the rules are different, more relaxed. Sarah embodies the essence of my childhood and adolescence, practical, playful, unworried. Even her style of therapy reflects that, she’s warm, sensible and full of advice. Her attitude on energy healing reflects it too. She’s simply treating it as a new hobby of mine. If it works for me, that’s good enough for her. She doesn’t waste thought cycles on metaphysical agonizing, like I do.

Within half an hour our two other housemates have arrived home from work and we’re knee-deep in food preparation. There’s plenty of real croutons on the salad. In this house everyone has caffeine and nobody is a dainty eater.