Dear ,

Hope you are having good weather today, wherever you are! Richard and I were delighted that we had a rain-free block of hours to hike together near the Blue Ridge Parkway on Saturday. 

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I think it's a stretch to call good weather a synchronicity, but I do believe it was a bit of a synchronicity to find a great article  on synchronicity while I was working on last week's zine. I knew immediately I'd found today's featured writing. How had I never thought to use synchronicity as a word of the week before?

I've been a huge fan of synchronicities (and being on the lookout for them), ever since I encountered this idea in The Artist's Way back in the early 1990s. The idea that some greater power/loving source, however I understood it, would support my creative endeavors if I jumped in and began them, and that I would see signs of this if I looked, excited me. And I found it to be true—and astonishing. As Gregg Levoy in this week's featured writing, an article in Psychology Today by called "Synchronicities: A Sure Sign You're on the Right Path" says: “In fact, maybe the most important thing synchronicities offer is astonishment. How often, after all, in the course of a day or a week or a month, do you find yourself thunderstruck, flabbergasted at life, amazed by its finesse?”

And to make life fun, on Friday I had a tiny synchronicity. Richard and I were sitting in comfy chairs at our campground, reading together, and at about 6 p.m., he said, "What are you making me for dinner?"

"Nothing," I shot back. We'll have some sandwiches or something in a bit." And I went back to reading. Just a few pages later, there was a scene in a Texas barbeque joint. When I read about the barbequed brisket, beans, hushpuppies, and cornbread the characters ordered, I got a terrible craving for . . . barbeque, of course! 

Richard was excited. He loves the stuff, and, in fact, is always the one who has to talk me into it. But we were in the tiny, tiny town of Swannanoa, and didn't feel like driving far. I opened up Yelp, punched in "barbeque," and discovered that "Swannanoa Swine Dining" was available at Okie Dokies Smokehouse, just 1.2 miles away! It had a rating of 4.5 out of 5 by 143 reviewers, and only one $. What a deal!

I know this is a "slight" example, so I've put another, much more meaningful one in this week's prompt. Sometimes, synchronicities can knock our socks off. I've been writing mine down for years, and have found this to be a meaningful and heartening practice. I hope you'll take this on. Once you start becoming attuned to life's little—and big—finesses, you might just find that you are astonished.

Love and light,

Maureen

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Featured Writer

Gregg Levoy

Gregg Levoy is the author of Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion (Penguin) and Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (Random House). 

In Print: Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion

Online: http://www.gregglevoy.com/

Featured Writing

Synchronicities:

A Sure Sign You're on the Right Path

by

Gregg Levoy

I used to be a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, back in my 20’s, and for roughly half of my decade-long tenure there I kept hearing a call to quit and become a freelance writer, a decision I largely ignored for years because it was Scary Stuff.

However, after years of trying to ignore this call, the signs pointing toward it took on a whole new tack. This is how it began:

I was driving home from work one day, listening to a song on the radio called “Desperado,” by the Eagles, and as I pulled up to the curb in front of my house, the last line I heard before I turned off the car was “Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, she’ll beat you if she’s able; the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet.” I turned off the ignition, opened the door, stepped my foot onto the curb, and there at my left foot was a playing card—the Queen of Hearts.

I just sat there utterly dumbfounded, and wondering, of course, what it meant?

When I mentioned the incident to a friend that evening, she said, with an extravagant quality of assuredness, that when you’re on the right path, the universe winks and nods at you from time to time, to let you know. She also said that once you start noticing these little cosmic cairns, once you understand that you’re on a path at all, you’ll begin to see them everywhere. It’s what happened, she reminded me, when I bought my Toyota and suddenly started seeing Toyotas everywhere.

I didn’t know I was even on a path, I told her, much less whether it was the right one. I simply found myself unable to make heads or tails of the episode, and ended up filing it under “Unexplained Phenomena,” along with esp, déjà vu, spoon-bending, water-witching, spontaneous remission, and certain incomprehensible acts of human forgiveness.

But even more remarkable than finding that Queen card when I did, was that over the next two years, as I searched for a sense of clarity (and courage) about this call, I found five more Queen playing cards, in incredibly improbable locations all around the country: a sidewalk in Cincinnati, a conference room in Santa Fe, a sand dune in Cannon Beach Oregon, a mountain wilderness in Colorado six miles from the nearest trailhead. The whole thing made the Twilight Zone seem like Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

And every time I found another Queen card, the sheer unbelievability of it took another giant step forward, and eventually it went so far beyond the laws of probability that I only barely hesitate to say that it’s impossible there was nothing more going on here than a statistical aberration. This was orchestrated by something with wits. Which shot my rational view of the universe pretty much to hell.

I come from a family of scientists, detectives, journalists, non-fiction writers, and New Yorkers—and you don’t get a more cynical bunch than this—and this stuff just doesn’t happen in our universe. And yet, though the phenomenon became more inscrutable with each find, in a way it also began making more and more sense. A pattern—more, a passageway—seemed to emerge.

I came to understand that this rather profound administering of chance was directing me toward something both my writing and my life needed at that time: more heart, less head. More intuition, less intellect. More of the inner life, the emotional life, the life of the senses. More listening. More of what Carl Jung referred to as the anima, the force of the feminine in a man’s life. And the Queen, of course, is the archetype of powerful feminine energy, which I felt myself being compelled toward by the kind of meaningful coincidence Jung called synchronicity.

Synchronicities are events connected to one another not by strict cause-and-effect, but by what in classical times were known as sympathies, by the belief that an acausal relationship exists between events on the inside and the outside of ourselves, a crosstalk between mind and matter—which is governed by a certain species of attraction.

Jung believed that synchronicities mirror deep psychological processes, carry messages the way dreams do, and take on meaning and provide guidance to the degree they correspond to emotional states and inner experiences.

To continue reading, please click here:

ttps://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/passion/201712/synchronicities-sure-sign-youre-the-right-path