Synchronicity

I've written in the past about synchronicities involving my four-year old son.  My son is very perceptive in general and this weekend he has again blown me away--this time by inspiring me to continue learning to cook. My husband is a great cook who can whip up a nutritious dinner out of nothing and I am a very insecure cook who has learned almost everything I know in the kitchen directly from him. Every once in a while I will get into a cooking-kick--once when I checked out Anna Venturi's " Secrets from an Italian Kitchen " from the library, once when I began following recipes from Rick Bayless' " Everyday Mexican " and for several years using my husband's recipes.  I've been taking a MOOC the last two or three weeks ( Just Cook--Child Nutrition & Cooking ) which has kicked me into action in the kitchen again. On a coworker's suggestion, I checked out Aaron Sanchez's recipes, and printed off his recipe for Birria on Friday.  My...

My last post was about losing synchronicity and the feeling of being abandoned by whatever force was engineering it in my life.  Over the course of the last several months I have had several interesting synchs, many of which I felt were leading me toward a big change in my career.  I was waiting to post about them to see if they would pan out, but they apparently led to nothing. This is not the first time this has happened.  I'm not sure if it is my fault for attempting to make sense of the coincidences that I stumble upon...it could be that the coincidences mean nothing and are really just coincidences, or it could be that I am misunderstanding the point of the synchronous occurrences in my life. It is, after all, easy to explain synchronicities so that they fit my own very limited perspective about what SHOULD happen.  It's harder to continue believing in them when what I was expecting doesn't happen. If I continue believing in synchronicity it has to be with ...

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...