Synchronicity

On the same day my son returned to school (or would have, if not for the heat and school cancellations), I returned to work.  Though I had been working part-time all summer, I received an offer for a full-time position at the end of August.  My first layoff and summer of unemployment was a journey, one which forced me to grow a lot, but also one which made me question the force behind synchronicity. For several years I have had a lot of faith in synchronicity--for me it has served as proof of a force at work in the world which scientists have yet to understand.  Though at times I do question whether synchronicity is a figment of my imagination, the more common theme for me this year was whether I had been forsaken by the force which had blessed me with synchronicity.  (By the way, I know this terminology sounds vaguely religious.  I'm not trying to hint that I know what's behind synchronicity.  I have no idea.  But my feelings about the forces at wor...

I was laid off in May and have been unemployed for two months.  So now I understand a little bit better what people have been going through the last several years.  I still haven't lost my insurance or unemployment benefits, so I still don't really understand. But I've gone from barely scraping by to not quite.  I still don't know what poverty is and I still don't know how bad it can get, but I'm beginning to understand how it feels to not be able to pay all my bills in a month.  It still feels like a social experiment, like the experiment undertaken by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickle & Dimed , when she pretends not to have her educational background and spends a year working in minimum wage jobs (she tries working at Walmart, as a waitress, and as a maid cleaning houses and hotel rooms) and tries to make ends meet without using any of her usual resources. So I'm grinning like the Cheshire cat...just waiting for everything to fall into place.  Because I...

On June 3rd, my son started drawing a symbol, as far as I can tell, out of the blue, and there was something supernatural about the way he did it which forced me to take note.   I kept thinking to myself that it was like a horror movie when a kid starts drawing the same symbol over and over and no one can figure out what it means until the big reveal later in the movie.  He continued drawing the symbol exclusively for two days--and mysteriously, stopped right after I discovered a synchronous connection.  It still gives me goosebumps, a month later.  My son's typical picture is a bunch of  scribbles, but for two days last month he suddenly began,  without a moment's hesitation, to draw a circle with a cross in it over and over again and then stopped just as suddenly.   When I asked him what it was he told me that it was a window.  So I looked around at the windows in the room where he started drawing them (the basement of a university building)...

I've been reading a lot this year.  I recently finished The Left Hand of Darkness and Wuthering Heights, and yesterday moved on to Beloved.  In the book Sethe describes rememories to her daughter Denver.  She says that the things which happen to us and our memories are never erased, that they live on and are connected to the landscape.  She says that sometimes you are walking and start to see things happening around you--those are rememories of others which they have left behind. Sethe says: "If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think about it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there." I'm also reading a (really poorly written) book about astral projection and the author describes something similar existing on the astral plane--the thoug...

This week, on June 2nd, my son was telling me he wants to learn about Asia. He said he'd been learning about different places in the world at school, but he didn't learn anything about Asia. I pulled up a map of Asia in Google Maps and then decided to see where Google has street view. For those who aren't aware, if you are in Google maps, you can pick up the orange figure of a person which is in the left side of the screen (at the top of the zoom feature) and start to drag it over the map; as you do this, some parts of the map will start to be highlighted in blue--these are the regions which have "street view". Street view is an amazing feature of Google created with a series of panoramic photos taken by vehicles on the road (all done by volunteers, I believe) all over the world. It also includes panoramic photos of the interiors of some buildings so that you can take a virtual tour. Anyway, I zoomed out so that a good portion of the earth was visible on the scree...

I'm going to quote again the book "Synchronicity & You", which reports that of the 100 people the author interviewed, a significant percentage say that they have tended to notice more synchronicity in their lives during times of transition and change. And I again find myself in a moment of transition and blessed by synchronicity.  "It's all going to come together"; I have been encountering this phrase over and over, and I feel perfectly confident that it will. Here's what I can say: Synchronicity has saved my life, made me human, connected me to something greater than myself--in the concrete and the abstract. In this moment during which change is washing over me from every direction, I feel like a rock--no matter what happens, I am me and I trust in myself to make the correct decisions (aided by synchronicity of course).    

Something odd has happened twice in the last week. I've thought about someone who I haven't seen/heard from in a long while, only to have them contact me the next day. While this is a standard example of synchronicity (the person that picks up the phone to call an old friend only to be stopped by an incoming call from the same friend.) In my case, the contact was offset by a day or more from the original urge to contact and happened via email/Facebook messages (or depending how you see it, within the dream world). Since I've rarely if ever had such an experience, I didn't realize what they would feel like. Obviously, they feel awesome, like most synchronicities. But they also feel, in my present perception, a little bit like being at the center of the universe...like the world really does revolve around me. Almost like realizing I am Truman, in the movie The Truman Show. Or like I am living in a simulated world in which my experience is really all that exists....