The WordPlay Word-zine Volume VII, Issue 22 June 4, 2018 Word of the Week: synchronicity 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.
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
Upcoming WordPlay
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
NOW TAKING REGISTRATIONS FOR FALL 2018! This class is designed to fulfill your writing dreams and projects. You’ll set goals and support structures and watch your writing flow! You’ll also get feedback on your
work (any genre) and learn revision tools and methods. Each week, writing prompts will generate material for new writing or further a piece in process, whatever your preferred genre. Through examples of accomplished writers, you’ll learn techniques to aid you right where you are in the process.
* For the benefit of participants, an audio recording of the class will be made
each week so that participants are able to listen to classes they miss and/or review material covered at any convenient time and place. These recordings are available throughout the class session, along with all handouts, in a shared Dropbox folder.
WHERE: Covenant Presbyterian Recreation Center, 1000 East Morehead Street, Charlotte, 28204. Click here for map. WHEN: Wednesday mornings from 10:00 a.m. – noon, starting in September 2018. (Other class time/day of the week may be available.) COST: $435
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GIFT OF MEMOIR WRITING PERSONAL AND FAMILY STORIES (Preserving Family History; Writing for and about Your Family; The Art of Memoir)
NOW TAKING REGISTRATIONS FOR FALL
2018! Our life stories are a precious legacy. Putting them in writing is a gift to all who know and love us—they can be treasured and enjoyed for generations to come. It is also a gift to ourselves. As best-selling author Rachel Naomi Remen says in her book Kitchen Table
Wisdom, facts bring us to knowledge, but stories bring us to wisdom. If you are interested in writing family and/or personal life stories—those significant tales of adventure, transition, love, loss, and triumph, as well as lovely everyday moments from times past or the present, come learn specific tools and techniques to retrieve and record
them.
* For the benefit of participants, an audio recording of the class will be made each week so that participants are able to listen to classes they miss and/or review material covered at any convenient time and place. These recordings are available throughout the class session, along with all handouts, in a shared Dropbox
folder.
WHERE: Covenant Presbyterian Recreation Center, 1000 East Morehead
Street, Charlotte, 28204. Click here for map. WHEN: Thursday mornings, 10:00 a.m. – noon., starting in September, 2018. COST: $285 TO REGISTER: Please
email us at info@wordplaynow.com to start the registration process by filling out a short "Clarity Tool" to share your writing dreams and goals and where you are in the process (anywhere you are is a perfect place to begin).
Featured Writer
Gregg Levoy
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
WordPlay Now! Writing Prompt
This is WordPlay—so why not revel in the power and potential of one good word after another? This week,
it's "synchronicity."
PROMPT: How is synchronicity shown up in your life? Or in the life of one of your characters? Here's an example of one of mine, the moment I knew I'd found the perfect cover artist for Spinning Words into Gold:
I found the artist for the cover of this book as I
was collaging with a class. An image of a painting by Nancy Tuttle May fell out of one of my file folders. I’d never heard of Nancy Tuttle May, but that painting… hmm. I looked
her up on the Internet, emailed, phoned, and with each step became more sure she was my cover artist. The clincher was when I walked into her studio
and saw a painting incorporating words. As I stepped closer, I began to read them aloud—from memory, not paint. They were e.e. cummings’s words: “We can never be born enough. Birth is the extremely welcome mystery, the mystery of faith, the mystery that happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves.” I knew them by heart because, 31 years earlier, I had picked them to put next to my senior picture in my high school yearbook.
Such is the magic and mystery of synchronicity. Spend some time mulling over any synchronicities you can remember (or imagine, if you are using one of your characters). Then write about it, in any form or genre that you
like.
It's fun to play with prompts in community with fellow writers, and to be able to share the results when you're done. You can find out about WordPlay classes, workshops, and retreats here. MAUREEN RYAN GRIFFIN, an award-winning poetry and nonfiction writer, is the author of Spinning Words into Gold, a Hands-On Guide to the Craft of Writing, a grief workbook entitled I Will Never Forget You, and three collections of poetry, Ten Thousand Cicadas Can't Be Wrong, This Scatter of Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water. One of her long-held dreams came true in July of 2015 when Garrison Keillor read one of her poems on
The Writer's Almanac. You can listen to it here. She believes, as
author Julia Cameron says, "We are meant to midwife dreams for one another."
Maureen also believes that serious "word work" requires serious WordPlay, as play is how we humans best learn—and perform. What she loves best is witnessing all the other dreams that come true for her clients along the way. Language, when used with intentionality and focus, is, after all, serious fuel for joy. Here's to yours! |
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