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The link here will take you to a short story describing synchronicity events I pursued over years to arrive at something I call “pyramid art”–what I claim is the first-ever discovery in fine art. I say first because I can’t think of another, and it also reveals something no other art can. The story provides evidence for my personal awakening to a timeless dimension whose only possible source–the quantum field–is both imperceptible and 99.99% of reality by volume. Physics states that the universe is a quantum phenomenon. Quantum consciousness has only recently been proposed as a means by which to explain the true nature of Mind. Quantum entanglement reveals a timeless, fifth dimension beyond space-time. My pursuit of synchronicity as an observation technique shows that anyone can tune in to the fifth dimension by picking up the thread of nature’s hive mind, questioning, and following synchronicity as feedback. It can transform our notion of beauty and maybe even save humanity and the planet.

https://www.papolona.guru/pyramid-art/section/76031978/0

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Despite being born with his Sun in Pisces, my dad was not a religious man. Far from it–he was a quiet agnostic who read widely on the spiritual affairs of world cultures but wasn’t buying, or even shopping for, a formal creed. He just wanted to know and understand everything, about everything. He was what now might be called a secular humanist, long before that label arose. In fact, he became rather annoyed by my period of preachiness right after I discovered the wonders of mind-altering pharmacopia that opened the doors of perception to a generation in the early 1960s, the attempted suppression of which, like prohibition, tried to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He wisely advised that I tone down my enthusiasm when it might be risking my freedom and get me thrown out with the bathwater, too.

But regardless of his official spiritual ambivalence, he twice found himself–and me–at the heart of unexplainable and deeply meaningful spiritual events, once before and once after his death. The first transpired not long after my harmonica player, Homer, and I nearly found Atlantis off Bimini in 1968 (six months before J. Manson Valentine’s expedition, but that’s another story). I was back in New York City and I woke up to an early morning dream in which I found myself in the upstairs bathroom of my childhood Coconut Grove home, peeing blood. I was terrified, and I was relieved to discover it was only a dream and I was safe in my Manhattan apartment when I awoke. The relief didn’t last long, however, as when I talked to my mom that night on the phone, she gave me the news that my dad had arisen that morning at 6 and had peed blood–in that very bathroom, at exactly the time of my dream–so he was going to see the doctor the next day. That began a long health saga that affected every part of his system and eventually killed him, 10 years later.

After his eventual passing, early on the morning of All Saints Day (a recurring death date in the Townley family) came the second incident. Again, it was just after my return from Florida waters, where this time I had sprinkled his ashes into the sea from a sailboat off Fowey Rocks, that I had a dramatic dream in which my dad appeared. He was seated in the library of the family house in Coconut Grove, but it was well appointed in a way it had never been in real life. His life had been about books (my folks owned the modestly notorious Beekman Place Bookshop on the Upper East Side, hangout of W. H. Auden and other New York poets in the ’30s), but here he was surrounded by elegant, gold-embossed leather-bound volumes, amid massive leather chairs and imposing English antiques. It looked more like the Bodleian Library than my childhood home. What was up?

He explained that he urgently wanted me to know what had happened to him, because it was so amazing and (to him) unexpected–and it was the kind of  thing he knew I was interested in. He said that after he died he went to a terrible place of uncertainty and suffering–he was emphatic about its dreadful quality but not too explicit about the details. He termed it hell, but it seemed more like a sort of purgatory. Then, after that, by the grace of God (his phrase), he was rescued and given this wonderful place to be, to enjoy all the books he could ever want to read and find out everything he ever wanted to know. He was like a perennially thirsty man suddenly given a limitless well to enjoy. I was duly (shall I say, utterly?) impressed, so glad to see him again, and delighted that he was so happy, as the dream faded away.

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An exercise in forethought/foreseeing for me developed years ago, when I noticed that every time I would find myself stepping into a dream that I had had usually weeks or even months before, something disastrous would happen later that day. The dreams were not extraordinary, just run-of-the-mill social situations, but they were situations ithat would lead up to what was going to be a disaster in the later real (nondream) world, such as sunstroke in one instance,a bad accident in another, and so on. But once I got the gist of it, I knew if I suddenly seemed to be stepping into a dream I had had, it was time to reconsider my situation and perhaps deflect the imminent disaster. I first used this insight when I was about to deliver a lecture on astrology in New York City. When the dream déjà vu happened just before I went on stage, I went back and rechecked the material I was about to talk about. Sure enough, one of the charts I wanted to display was utterly wrong, which would have made me look like a fool for having used it to prove my lecture points. Although it was rather central and it was too late to change it, I simply omitted it and danced around the subject from another approach, and it was at least okay and not a humiliation. Since then, I’ve found forewarning to work almost every time. When I walk into a part of a previous dreamscape, I go on alert, double-check my course and surroundings, make big room for error, and brace for potential impact. It has turned a lot of otherwise disasters into thankful near-misses, just by the use of slight sidesteps to avoid something that I had somehow seen coming in my sleep months ago. Go figure …

In April 1949, I was being conceived into the Fish family. At the same time, Dr. Carl Jung had a series of fish experiences that inspired him to write his famous essay on synchronicity. I read the essay in college, at Amherst, but didn’t notice the dates. Twenty-one years after graduating from medical school, I was encouraged to reread the essay. This time, I saw the dates and realized that Dr. Jung was the missing link in my medical career. I have had a positive reception from the medical profession from the story of my connection to the fish experiences. I also had contact with three people who knew Dr. Jung personally, most importantly my email correspondence with his grandson. I know from these contacts that Dr. Jung would/does in Heaven take my connection to his fish experiences seriously.

Living in India in the 1960s, I wanted to study the bass bamboo flute but was told that such an instrument did not exist. I knew it did because I had heard a recording of one, but where I lived in the Ganges Plain, nobody had heard of it. The local flute maker even made me a set of flutes to demonstrate that such a long flute did not exist.

Months later, taking a walk in Old Delhi, I literally heard the flute playing somewhere nearby, followed the sound, and discovered a young man playing the bass bamboo flute in a garden! I entered the garden, we met, he became my teacher, and a year later, when my family was leaving for home in California, he asked if I could help him come to perform in the US. Of course I said yes but had no idea if or how to ever do such a thing. Almost 2 years passed before I acted on my promise, and one day I knew I had to try.  I phoned a local radio station, told them I had a reel-to-reel tape of this man’s music and asked if they might be willing to put it on the air. It turned out they were searching for something to broadcast at 11 a.m. that day. I went to the station, introduced this man and his wish to perform in America, played the tape, and gave out my phone number. When I arrived home, the phone was ringing: it was somebody on the board of the Ali Akhbar College of Music, nearby, who was looking for a bass flute player for their faculty.

The man who called was the person delegated to find him! He swore that he never turned on the radio at that hour but did that day! And heard that this musician was a genius, and how soon could he come, as the semester started in 2 weeks

Two weeks later, my friend arrived. We picked him up at the airport–he was in shock for the first few weeks–and went on to have a 50-year career of performing and teaching all over the world. He lived with his family 20 minutes from where we lived, and they became part of our family for the next 50 years!

When I was newly married, my husband and I took a bicycle trip from Cork to Dublin in Ireland. We both were working across the Channel in Oxford that year; I was helping to catalog illustrated 12th-century manuscripts at the Bodleian Library. When we came to Dublin that spring, we went to Trinity College where the Book of Kells was on view to the public beneath locked glass, one page of the illustrated manuscript on view each day. I longed to see the whole book, but that of course was not allowed.

“I’m going to ask, anyway,” I told my husband, and I knocked on the office door, to his dismay. The door was answered by the one Irish person I knew, a fellow student from years before at an institute of medieval studies in France! We were astonished to meet again. I told her of my wish to see the whole, precious manuscript; she asked the curator, telling him that I had the right qualifications–which in fact, I did not have–and the next morning I was allowed to see the complete Book of Kells in a private room–as a visiting scholar!

My husband was astonished, but over the years he saw one synchronicity after another happen to me and decided he had married a witch!

In fall 2001, we moved from New Jersey to Indiana after Notre Dame made a great teaching offer to my husband. What with getting our two kids started in a new elementary school, learning my way around a new town, and being riveted by the horror of 9/11 and its aftermath on TV, I hadn’t had time to make new friends or find a new babysitter that first semester. The Sunday before Christmas, my husband got on his exercycle and, 10 minutes later, called out to me to phone for an ambulance. He was in the early stages of a heart attack, which he recognized right off because he’d had one a couple years earlier. The ambulance came and off he went. I was desperate to follow, but what to do about the kindergartener and third-grader? I stood in the kitchen shocked and panicky and trying desperately to think who could watch the kids. The one set of neighbors I had met were out of town. The two academic couples I’d met had already left town for the holiday.  I literally couldn’t think of anyone.

Then the phone rang. A week earlier, we had finally gotten around to posting an ad for a Saturday-night babysitter on the university’s e-bulletin board, but we hadn’t heard from anyone. When I answered, a young woman named Amber said she’d seen the ad and wanted to set up a time for us to interview her. I was so stunned I could barely speak. Finally, I said, “Are you free now by any chance? My husband has just been taken to the hospital with a heart attack, and I really want to get over there.” She gasped sympathetically and said she’d be right over, and 10 minutes later there she was! The kids loved her, she loved them, no interview necessary! It was such a gift! It seemed like a message that help would always be there when I needed it. Amber came for a few hours every day that Tom was in the hospital. She was always very reliable and became our regular sitter until she graduated and got married.

In perhaps another small miracle, after the doctor told me Tom would not be able to be home by Christmas Day, his condition improved enough that the doctor changed his mind at 6:30 Christmas morning. The kids and I had been so sad that he wouldn’t be home for Christmas, but when he called me and said he was being discharged, my joy was mixed. We’d had a major blizzard during the night, snow was a foot and a half deep, and they only had enough plow drivers on Christmas for the major highways. “We had a blizzard and nothing has been plowed–I’m not sure I can get the car through to the hospital,” I said with tears in my eyes. He said not to worry, the hospital was going to send him home in a cab–if they could get one. All I had to do was dig a path from the street to the door and have money to pay the driver. I broke the good news to the kids and, to my relief, they did not whine about shoveling snow before opening presents. They were quite satisfied to wait until their dad was home to do that. So we immediately rushed out with snow shovels and were down to the last few shovelfuls of the path just as some brave taxicab driver with chains on his tires got Tom home–just in time for Christmas breakfast.

Of course, that was what it was. I learned that these are Category Two Synchronicities. What happens is that someone, a very good friend, did die when I saw the birds.

I saw a dead bird outside my garage and also outside my front door within one week.

It is rare for me to see dead birds. I know it happens for a lot of reasons. And  I’ve run across other premonitions with symbols but the timing was special for me.

:March 5, 2023

Just before we arrived home from shopping, we heard a radio commercial for the language app Babbel, which helps people learn a foreign language. The commercial evoked the idea of Babel in my mind. They’re pronounced differently; whatever I think is latent depends on thinking more about it.

The program resumed, but about a minute or two later we unloaded the groceries. About 15 minutes later, I decided to take a look at An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method by Cohen and Nagel, a book suggested to me by a University of Chicago professor whom my cousin chauffeurs from time to time.

I am very interested in synchronicity logic–the technical categorization and quantification. There are many approaches, typologies, morphologies, parameters, attributes, and so on.

We could identify four categorical statements made by Jung that we can use as axioms. From those we can conclude one universal affirmative propositional statement.  I chose this book to help comprehend what it is that I am trying to work on.

I did not want to arbitrarily see what it said. I just wanted to start at the preface. I just got this book because  the last one I got was so musty that I could not open it without gagging and coughing. In any case, in the first paragraph, it read, ” … there is a bewildering Babel of tongues as to what logic is about.”

A coworker of mine originally from India related that as a teenager he wanted very much to go to college at the University of Southern California (USC) and therefore planned to take the requisite exams to apply for American universities. But the day of the exam his car broke down. He got a ride to take the train but all cars were packed as there was a transportation strike. He tried to rent a car or hitch a ride, but this took so much time that once he finally arrived at the test site, the exam was in progress and he had only 15 minutes left to do the 2-hour exam. He did the best he could but he failed to pass. He felt it was ruining his future for so many things to go wrong. He did his undergraduate studies in India, and after that he landed a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Southern California, and so was able to get his visa to come to America. After a few years he found that JPL would let him go back to college and get a higher degree. The college program was at USC. So he ended up doing what he had aimed to do. I asked him if there was any difference that was positive in doing the degree later? Yes, he said. If he had been accepted earlier, his parents would have had to pay his USC college tuition. By going via the JPL program, JPL paid. So the “bad luck” was actually good luck, as it saved his parents (who were not wealthy) from having to pay those college expenses.

In 1948 at age 14, Vera ran away from home to New York City. Her strict Mennonite parents highly restricted her life, not allowing movie-going and other activities most young people of the time enjoyed. Once in the big city, Vera got a social security card but couldn’t get hired because she looked too young. One night she decided to stay in an all night movie theater at Radio City Music Hall on Broadway and 42nd street. One man seated near her asked to “take her to dinner,” but she began to realize his motives when he put a hand on her knee. Vera rebuffed him and left her seat, then saw an older woman sitting alone in the back of the theater. She asked if she could talk to the woman and confessed she left home. The woman took her to the street corner to speak to a policeman who might help her reconnect with her family, since the woman said they must be worried about her. As Vera was taken under the constable’s wing, a clock struck 9 p.m.

Meanwhile in Allentown, PA, her parents were meeting that night with their pastor at their home. They had called him to ask for his help praying for their missing daughter’s return. As they knelt in prayer, the pastor finished his intercession and said, “She is safe now.”  The time was 9 o’clock, Vera later learned, when she was indeed safely in the company of the kind policeman.

Many coincidences slip by me.

A few years ago we enjoyed a tour for seniors hosted by Kendall County, IL near the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery. . On a patch of government land was a bomb shell factory displaying papers, actual bomb shells, instruments, and suchlike that gave us a sense of being there. After completing the tour, the bus driver guide asked if we wanted go back (we were seniors) or if we could handle going up about a half-mile or so up another dirt road to see some tree that had a story.

We chose the tree. Turns out that they discovered some “body with no name” there. I’m not sure what the whole story was, as interesting as it was, and we finished our tour. That was Tuesday.

Thursday evening after dinner my better half, Joanne, decided that we should watch a CD. Out of maybe four dozen stacked neatly under the coffee table we chose The Complete First Season Newhart, a hilarious 1982 sitcom.

This episode was about finding a body with no name in the basement. Joanne and I started to wonder, “That sounds familiar. Why does it sound familiar?” We remembered that just a couple of days on the tour, the same thing happened.

I had done remote coaching for an organisation in Tunisia. When finished I had a debriefing call with a (for me unknown) coordinator of PUM, who did the matching with me and Tunisia. At the end of our call he said, suddenly, “You live somewhere in the north of the Netherlands, don’t you?” Yes, i replied. Then he told me he was going to visit an old friend in the north with whom he used to work in Africa. His friend just moved to a new house, bought from an old lady, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It did not take long  for me to discover he was talking about my new neighbor!

The reason for his visit was the big premiere of a theater play my neighbor organized. I had in vain been trying to buy tickets online for one of the other evenings. “Call your neighbor now, there must be place tonight,” the coordinator said. And so, that evening we found ourselves sitting next to each other by coincidence with our VIP free tickets at this wonderful show!

We ended up discovering a whole range of coincidental mutual friends !

One day several years ago I received a note from a stranger, asking if he might learn about my work with sound and healing. He arrived for the session with an armload of papers for me, on the subject of sound, which had, among them, a few articles from the Princeton Energy Anomalies Research group, PEAR. As I have a son who teaches at Princeton, I brought those papers along the next time I visited. I contacted the PEAR research group when I was there, met the folks, and made a strong connection with Brenda Dunne, who shared the running of the organization. We looked alike, thought alike, and became good friends, eventually working together within the publishing arm, ICRL (Institute for Consciousness Research), which brought out two of my books. We named ourselves the Eastern Witch and the Western Witch, as I lived in California when we met, and magic always seemed to happen around us.

But the coincidences do not stop there, as Brenda died this year before my third book came out, and her son Jeff Dunne took over the press and ICRL. He recently offered a talk on Zoom to members that featured a marvelous speaker from India, Rahul Gotswami, who talked about the indigenous mind and the importance of embracing indigenous ways of thinking and living, something I wholeheartedly embrace.

I have, in the past, lived in India, so I asked him where he lived and taught–and it was the same place I had lived and my husband taught at! A campus in the Ganges Plain most people have never heard of (IIT Kanpur). Adding one more synchronicity to that, I met here in Vermont a woman, Lakshmi, who had grown up on the IIT campus, right next door to us! She was my 5-year-old daughter’s best friend! (They finally met again here, mature and beautiful women, just a few weeks ago, and it was a joyous reunion!)

Her mother came to visit shortly after that. We recognized each other immediately even though it had been 60 years since we’d last seen each other, and many happy tears were shed. I would not be surprised if someone in the Coincidence Project may also be part of this story!

One more thing: The books of mine published by ICRL may be of interest to this group:

In the Beginning: Creation Myths from Around the World

Worldshift Happens: Facing Down the Fear, Waking Up the Mind

Freeflow Stories: Musings on the Passing Scene

I had just finished a meditation weekend retreat that was wonderful as well as relaxing. We played with colors.  And the one color that was highlighted was magenta.  We used magenta in our meditations.

I traveled home from the retreat and was tired after the long flight.  My husband had gone shopping in my absence for some new mugs. He had them on the table.  I looked one of them over, flipped it upside down to see where they had been made, and in big dark letters saw the label “MAGENTA”!

I have noticed that many times I depend upon news headlines to help determine what I was doing on that date.

For example, on Saturday, July 20, 1974,  when Turkey invaded Cyprus.

My uncle “G” had owned a couple of Shell gas stations and sponsored a baseball team in Chicago.

I played only one day on the team at a ballpark on 31st Street just west of Pulaski, across the street from  Home Run Inn Pizza. I don’t believe I hit any home runs.

This might not seem like much, but these “landmarks” appear to be sort of  a “watermark” etched over reality,   as if a record of our mental and physical whereabouts while on Earth are part of a set director’s inventory list.

During an eclipse, the moon perfectly coincides with the sun.

This is just a coincidence, an exception. The size of the two objects and their relative distance are not correlated; indeed, millions of years ago the moon was closer and it will be further away.

in the universe billions of billions of planets may have satellites, but very few of them could project a mask, like the moon now.

This had to be the first half of the 1970s. Curiously, I had asked a group of friends if it was okay to record while we just sat and talk. We soon forget it was on.

Perhaps a few days later, maybe a week, the friends were over again, and as we started talking, the player with the past recording was turned on. At the time, the recording gave us all a spooky feeling because the pauses and words seemed to participate as present participants responding live and ad hoc.

Although the incident involved a small close group and our parameters of knowledge and discussions may have been limited to our own concerns, this “experiment” seemed to extend beyond that gauge.

Which comes down to other phenomena. Objects, especially electronic media gadgets, may suggest coincidences, carrying information sometimes from the past even if the actors are dead. Movies and/or live broadcasts appear as if participating in our mental and physical whereabouts with uncanny attention to detail.

I am not good at chemistry nor science and math. Most of my comprehension about the nature of reality appears to involve a world beyond physical objects. That is not to suggest that we are not real because we do feel. For me the right to claim existence is very important.

But whether or not “nature” and/or our concept of nature, responds to us, I don’t know. During a chemistry class the instructor was going over the “octet rule” [the theory that atoms tend to have eight electrons in their valence shell]. This must have been February 10, 1983.

I had already started and completed a sonnet with names of countries and people and was more or less finding out if the process had something to do with the octet rule. I started to write,  “Share on Share own Sharon Octet Rule.” (See “Thinking Earth Sonnet.”)

On February 11, 1983, the newspaper headlines announced that Israeli politician Ariel Sharon had resigned from a position. His name plays a part in the sonnet as well, in a “sharing of heaving and earth” theme.

But as if the physical reality were to mimic the same theme, later Sharon becomes a minister of construction and housings overseeing a comprehensive expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  This is an ironic twist in the “sharing” element.

The first coincidence I remember had a weird, ominous sort of meaning. It was in the early 1950s, when I was a grammar school kid.

I remember crying because I sat on a tall chair facing the corner of two walls and was wearing a dunce cap. My cousin Mary Lou was staring at me from outside the classroom. Maybe she had been notified about something but I never found out.

After that day,  I remember not going to that school. It had burned down and we were forced to attend another school. The church and school that burned down had a common church name, “Sacred Heart.” Christians most likely have seen a prayer card on which Christ Jesus is depicted with a “fiery” Sacred Heart. It was not until decades later that I made a connection between the fire and the icon in the prayer card. I admit the “profound” psychological impact it had is subjective.

Sometime during my teens, around the mid 1960s, three friends and I decided to go to the lake.

The water was still as we sat at the edge, enjoying the warm yet refreshing breeze and philosophizing a bit.

Each of my friends turned out pretty well. Frank, for instance, became mayor of a California city. His father was something like an ambassador at the time, and his mother was the head librarian at a Washington DC hospital. They lived next door to my family in Sleepy Hollow (an official neighborhood in Chicago).

But young and free, just joking around, we might blurt out crazy things like, “what would happen if the lake just grabbed us and carried us away?” Just as one of us said it, from that calm lake emerged a big wave that seemed to fiercely rush at us. And as if a bunch of loving angels filled the atmosphere, we were just as swiftly reassured that something prevented us from being dragged in. The lake again was calm, and we experienced another simple appreciation of nature.

It must have been around the middle to latter half of the 1980s.  At a little after 2 a.m., a knock at the side door woke me,  and I found out it was Tony  B.

The bars close at 2, and now Tony says he is really tired and that he can still work in the morning but just wants to sleep.  I reluctantly let him in. He found a spot on a roll of padding.  I on the other hand was awake, and the only thing open was a White Castle.  I told him I was going to get a couple of hamburgers and asked him if he wanted a bite to eat, but he said no, I’m ok.

As I was about to go out the side door, I bowed my head, asking for some kind of sign. I forgot about it, and opened the door. It was the second year of a drought, and I looked up att he clouds filling the entire sky and wondered, ‘Will it train?’  I stepped down to a concrete landing and closed the door behind me. After another step down to open the gate at sidewalk level, I looked up and wondered again, ‘Will it rain?’  I had no idea.

Just as I closed the gate on the sidestreet sidewalk, what appeared to be a headlight beam on the other side of the clouds from the west headed toward my direction.  At first I thought it must be a low-flying plane from Midway Airport, about 5 miles away.  Even perhaps a helicopter, but there was no sound.  But as I stepped down on the street to cross, I noticed that an opening appeared at 11 o’clock from my position.

My first thought was that I could now see where that light was coming from.  So, already in the middle of the street, I moved about a car length to the left, to stare through.

It was the moon.  But at least I could see the dark sky and the stars. The city lights could not obstruct the view.   After perhaps a few moments of appreciation, I realized I was standing in the middle of the empty street.

Just as I had turned again to step up on the curb, a very bright light filled the street at Archer Avenue and Elias Court. Instinctively I turned to look at the opening, but now as if it had been abruptly edited, it was a perfectly shaped translucent silvery white cross.  From my view, the cross appeared just above and behind the four-story apartment building on Elias.

I stood and asked myself, ‘Am I seeing this?’ I had seen a lot of crosses in my life by that time, and none could compete. A fluorescent fixture hanging there, very large

I am still doubting but realize I am seeing it.  Superlatives flew through my my mind–“commanding” and so on–and again, after what might have been 20 seconds or maybe  half a minute, it was still in the middle of the street. I continued to stare.  As if it were coming from behind, another beam, thinner and less bright, seemed to be about to pass through the cross. For some reason, perhaps still struck by awe, I became frightened that that light was about to shine on me as a sort of spectacle.

I quickly hurried to the front of the apartment building and decided to turn my head around to look up. The cross was still there!  But that other light beam did not hit the spot where I was standing. It touched the steeple of one of the two churches on the other side of the dead-end street. It was the one in direct line with the street,

About 10 years or so later, my business grew and I had acquired an account with the largest Chinese realty in Chicago. They had been successful at usually getting more than property owners were asking in Bridgeport surrounding Chinatown. Now, as I am visiting the area, I am just south of the Archer-Elias Intersection and want to find out which church would line up. On 31st I found the two churches about a block or two from each other, and then I figured out the one that the beam of light had pointed to. The sign in front of it read, “Monastery of the Holy Cross.”

When I began experiencing synchronicities in the 1980s–which, not knowing any better, I called “parallel situations”–they often cued me to something about to happen. Once I thought I saw a nearby car crash while driving on interstate 10, but then realized I was mistaken even as the fright it gave me didn’t subside very quickly. I wondered if a real accident was imminent, so I paid close attention to cars around me. Not too much later, the car in front of me had its left tire blow out, but I was ready. I slowed, turned my hazard lights on, and stayed behind the car until the driver got into the left shoulder. I felt I had done my part, as the driver could now safely fix the tire or use the call box from there.

Similarly, on the day before Thanksgiving, I was again driving on interstate 10 and could not get around a tour bus in front of me due to heavy traffic  I started to wonder if I was stuck there for a purpose, when I realized this bus had a glaring typo in its branding letters. The bus was from Scenic Bus Tours, which operate all over New Orleans, but this bus said SCCNIC BUS in huge block print on the back. What a mistake, I thought. How did someone not fix this? Then I wondered what huge mistake have I made, that this bus is “telling me” about.  I had been thinking that I had everything at home to make Thanksgiving dinner. Had I forgetten something? I reviewed again what I had at home and realized I had no breadcrumbs. I could still stop at the store and get them. Just then, a lane opened up that allowed me to pass the SCCNIC bus. I was so thrilled I waved at the bus as if to thank it. I turned up the radio and enjoyed the moment. As my exit approached, suddenly the SCCNIC bus passed me! It then dawned on me:  I had passed the supermarket exit–and again forgotten to stop for those breadcrumbs! I detoured to another market and got that essential ingredient for a turkey dinner.

When my daughter, Rachel, was about six years of age, we arranged to go on holiday to France with friends who had two young children. We had a four-berth caravan and a tent that slept six. The friends were to borrow our tent. As we lived in the Midlands and they were travelling from Dorset, we arranged to meet them at the port, prior to taking the boat over the Channel. 

 We drove down overnight and stopped in a lay-by for an early morning breakfast. The tent was in the caravan, and, as was our custom, we took it out and put it under the caravan to give us room inside.  Whilst we were eating, a minibus pulled up behind us. I realised that my daughter was paying them a lot of attention out of the window, and saw that one of them was relieving himself close to our van. I closed the curtains, telling Rachel to get on with her breakfast. When we had finished, we went to fetch the tent, to find it had gone. The young men had apparently not only relieved themselves but had relieved us of our belongings! This put us in a fairly dreadful situation. Our friends were dependent on us for their accommodation. We were none of us well off in those days and could not afford to either buy another tent nor pay for alternative accommodation. The caravan was hardly big enough for us, far less sleep four additional people. 

At our wit’s end, we decided we might as well go to the campsite we were booked onto, as there seemed no better alternative. When we reached there, I asked the person at reception whether she knew of anywhere we could hire a tent very cheaply, as ours had just been stolen. The woman gave us a strange look and said we were in luck. A family had left the day before and had given her their tent prior to leaving. Apparently they were to buy a new tent for their next holiday and would have no use for their old one. They thought she might be able to find someone who would have use for it. The woman had not had this happen to her before and wasn’t quite sure what to do with it; so when we turned up, she was glad to have it taken.  That was coincidental enough, but the real shock came when we saw the tent.  Ours was about 20 years old, blue and orange with two sleeping compartments, good quality but well worn with two or three tears in different places. This tent was virtually identical: same age, colour, size, condition–to all intents and purposes, the same tent.  It wasn’t ; the tears were in different places.  But if you didn’t know the other tent as we did, and put the two together, you couldn’t have told the difference. We were staggered.   

I remember vividly thinking that if I had doubted there being a Power that lay behind our daily experience, I should not do so again. The whole thing just seemed to go far beyond the bounds of meaningless coincidence.   

:

In 1981, the idea of composing a sonnet using only names of places and people started with a draft. Each name had to have some kind of ironic sense, and the ideas expressed would have some philosophical, if not theological, significance. There should be a general acausal order, but with the iambic style. The cross-connections of names would become as if they were expressing what the planet was thinking and articulating through this symbolic language.

By 1983, each of the 14 lines was in iambic pentameter with the classic rhyme format. As the years and decades passed, the world at large seemed to reflect the same themes. For example, the phrase “IQrackow Pole Boot Argentina” for my subjective intent and knowledge, would involve manifold references: Iraq, Krakow (Poland), the Polish Pope, Boot for Italia (Italy), and the “shoes of the fisherman” with an ironic intent; “Argentina” did reflect a expectation that the cardinal from Argentina would become Pope.

It did not happen that way. Instead, Pope Benedict (meaning ‘the Good Word’) was chosen.  I suppose it was disappointing for me. I actually believed for all the effort that it was the Word of the Holy Spirit moving the world.

I did complain by questioning the Spirit, Why should I have written it thus if it were not true; itis no longer the Truth. As if radioactive decay were occurring, at that inevitable given moment to appoint the time and place, there was news that a lightning bolt had struck the Vatican and that Pope Benedict had announced his retirement. He had lived rather lavishly, and I had wondered if the lightning were some kind of nature’s expression about what a holy cosmic act is when judging our Vatican stage.

The vote to install the cardinal from Argentina also came with a remarkable coincidence.  A seagull landed on the chimney when the pope named after St. Francis was chosen.

At the completion of the poem,  the Russian Andropov and American Ronald Reagan were in office. So, when the line “Andropov Stalin Khrushchev” appeared to mirror the fall of the Berlin Wall, I felt another sense of the world as a whole.

At  one time there were remarks on public radio about how thinktanks can choose a poem by a carpenter and rally around it. I suppose that I took that kind of rationale for how the poem expressed itself.

In the late 1980s, a friend, Pat, and I were still attached enough to our college-town hairstylist in Columbia SC that we’d drive an hour and a half from our new city, Charlotte NC, to get our hair cut. The stylist’s name was Blake.

One day I decided to take up another college friend’s offer to visit him in New York City, where I’d never been. So I flew to New York for a weekend and saw the usual sights. One night we were hanging out in Greenwich Village, browsing stores. In a trinket shop, I heard my name, looked up, and beheld Blake, who’d apparently traveled to New York on a whim.

The situation got more interesting when I returned home to find my friend Pat fuming. Before I could tell her about my trip, Pat ranted that she’d driven all the way to Columbia for an appointment with Blake, who’d called in sick without notice.

I was in a unique position to rat him out.

This kind of coincidence involves “books, ” as the Latin phrase suggests. I seem to have relied upon some of these coincidences without trying to get carried away.

It is remarkable how sometimes we can be wondering and asking about ‘it,’ whatever ‘it’ is, and somehow something or a person carries the information as if to answer. The “messenger” might not be consciously aware that they are figuring in this play.

Perhaps a couple of dozen, probably lots more, that I personally have had the privilege to experience.  Some are simply amazing.

I’ve had where just as I had a question, arbitrarily opened a book, and read the first page “wherever the book has opened” (Ad Aperturam Libri), that not only did I find that particular statement relevant, but also the radio had appeared to echo a phrase. On at least a few occasions, a light beam from the moon, the sun, or another passing light shone exactly on the spot, at the same time. It feels as if it is part of a coherent light all converging and locking in.

Each becomes an element in the set to increase the “degree.”

Writer Arthur Koestler calls these book coincidences “library” or “angel” types.

My better half, Joanne, chihuahua Oreo, and myself, the driver, headed from Yorkville Il to Wood Dale, Il, about an hour’s drive. I decided to listen to an audiobook, One Second After, by William R. Forstchen, an interesting guest on the “Coast to Coast” morning radio program.

Joanne does not like to think about doom and gloom, so I needed to turn down the sound, low enough for her to talk when she felt like it. I decided to go east on the Illinois 88 tollway and use the 355 tollway north and get off at North Avenue (Illinois 64).

As we approached the North Avenue exit ramp, something occurred in the story at 53 and 64. I just shrugged off the 64 thing, but interestingly, the tollway 355 is the new Illinois 53.

After we got off and turned right, the next light was at old route 53. When the red light turned green and I was crossing 53, the CD just stopped playing. The player light was still on. I started pushing buttons–forward, rewind, stop–and gave up.  After about a half minute, it just started again where it left off!

But that was not the end of it.  We were about three-quarters of the way to our destination. Now we had to go to Wood Dale Road, about 10 or 15 minutes down North Avenue, and turn left.

As we made the turn, the story now involved two towns arguing about water rights.

A few minutes later, the younger daughter and the father were looking for Elizabeth, the older daughter. They continued talking about Elizabeth as we came up to the next street with a traffic signal.

There we stared straight at the yellow street sign, “Elizabeth.”   And as I had a feeling,  I stopped,  lowered my window, and stuck my neck out to look straight down the street on my left. Just then the little sister said,  “That’s Elizabeth.”

One day I was sitting and looking at a “How to Draw” book. It was “garbage day,” so I put the book down and took the cans out to the street. At the time, the subdivision was not complete and seemed desolate.

No one was outside. I positioned the two cans next to the curb and started to walk away back to the house.

I noticed a piece of cardboard in the street, so I picked it up, walked back, and put it into the can.

As I was putting the lid down, another piece of cardboard flew into my hand (pneuma again). I  was just going to drop it into the can too and walk back, but I thought maybe I should read what it said. It was the empty box for an art easel.

Two of us were doing a residential carpet job across the street from St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church near 24th and Western in Chicago.

As usual, we were being thanked as we left. But this time, they were really pleased with Bob.

At the door ready to walk out, I found out that Bob had found a $100 bill when we moved a dresser to do a room. Evidently he asked the customer about it, and they were happy. As we walked out, the church bells started ringing. I thought it was maybe on the hour, but it did seem appropriate. When I asked Bob what time it was, he said it was about 10 minutes after 2. He felt special.

Sometime during the 1970s I sat at a card table in the middle of a room about 12 by 12 feet with the door closed. I was trying to figure out what some words meant. Atop the table was an opened Webster Unabridged Dictionary, a few other books, some pages, and some article written by Minkowski about his multidimensional world point spiral as it can be visualized through a simplistic filmlike universe.

As I sat studying, a heard a buzz.  I wondered what it was and realized that up above to my left was a tiny mosquito.

I was just about content to accept the source to resolve my question, when the mosquito simply glided down, as if it on a mechanical spiral, to land on the dictionary. I did not want to swat the mosquito but was curious.  It had landed inside the definition of onomatopoeia, on the example “tinkle, buzz.”

I’ve had my share of coincidences working most of my life on my knees installing carpets and other floor coverings. This one time, after cutting a couple of pieces of carpet, maybe one about 14 feet and another 29 feet, I laid both out on the floor.

The first carpet started against an east wall and ran from the north to south wall in the living room. The second piece had to line up with the first so they could be seamed together.  This piece was longer in order to avoid a seam between the living room and the hallway.

Once the carpet was adjusted to make sure I had enough overhang, a couple of inches to trim the seams, I just needed to get rid of a few inches from one side of the second piece and maybe six feet wide on the other because it was going to drop down a 4-foot-wide hallway.

After the carpet was rolled, lined up, and folded so that the back could be cut to drop into the hallway and there was enough to meet the floors in the bedrooms and doorways, I was ready to cut.

I usually follow a “groove” in the backing of the carpet when cutting the length.  I choose one and just do it. This time I was making sure to measure more than once, and I noticed that what looked like a blue ink pen line drawn not even a quarter inch on my tolerance of a half inch that helped me just cut it out, drop it in, and finish the job.  Coincidences like these save a lot of time and effort.

I had one dog, Dante, that I adopted a year after my 13-year-old dog Terry passed away in 1995. I began looking at SPCA listings of dogs in late 1997, thinking of maybe getting Dante a companion.  In early 1998 I saw a listing for a Sheltie and mentioned it to my boyfriend. We went down to see the dog and ended up looking through the entire kennel.

One dog I began to focus on looked interesting. As I stared at her, she seemed to realize I could be the one to get her out of there and she got very excited. We brought her home and immediately she had chemistry with Dante.

But as she walked into the house, she approached me with her ears flat, which made her look like old Terry. She and Terry had the same gold coloring, and because of that I named her Amber. Her papers said she was picked up on the street on December 15, 1997. I had had a dream about Terry a few months prior and so checked my journal to see if it was around that time. The day before she was found, I had this dream: “Terry runs and jumps into trunk of my car, he wants to go along. He has to stay there, tho. I carry him in my arms. He’s scared, and as big as Dante. I hold him on my lap.” Amber was indeed as big as Dante. Was Amber actually Terry? Whatever the case, I was searching the rescue dog ads for some reason, and it appeared I found what I was looking for. Dante and Amber both lived 16 happy years.

I moved to LA from New Orleans with my dog Terry, a sheltie-corgi mix. By 1995, Terry was having problems walking due to age and could not get up by himself after lying down. By November, on a Sunday, he began coughing in a disturbing way. At the vet, they said he had heart failure. I decided it was time to put him to sleep.

Afterward, I left the vet shell shocked. Once home, friends came over to take me to the Doo Dah Parade. I forgot about them coming. I didn’t want to go, but what else was I going to do? So I went to the parade with them.

Once at the parade, we sat down at a corner where the different participants stopped to do their skit or show. One group came up and reenacted the death of Julius Caesar. I suddenly thought, did Terry think I betrayed him by putting him to sleep? I killed him like the senators killed Caesar. But at that moment a participant raised up a sign that said, “STOP!” It startled me. Then she flipped the sign over and it said, “Thank You. Now Move on.”  It was someone giving directions to the participants. I was seeing the back of the sign.

I immediately felt that the messages were from Terry. He was saying, “Stop feeling that way! I am grateful. Now move on and be happy.” I told my friends that Terry just spoke to me, but of course they didn’t believe me.

I was working a Memphis, TN job that had just finished up and I was packing my belongings in my truck, going back and forth from the room I had rented to my truck. On one trip, I happened to notice a business card laying on the ground. I picked it up and saw the name ‘Dave Smith’ printed on it, and it was from the company I had just been employed with.

I finished packing and hit the road. Flash forward 1-2 hours, I’m traveling on I-40 heading home, not really paying much attention to anything, I look up and find myself ‘trapped’ behind a 18-wheeler with a whole ‘freight train’ of vehicles in the other lane. Nothing I could do but wait for an opening to go around the truck in front of me. I glance around and happened to notice the rear doors of the truck in front of me on which was printed “Expect something special from Smith”.

I finally arrived home, too late for supper, but noticed a very nice aroma coming from the oven. I ask my wife what she was cooking and she replied ‘apple pie’. Not really liking apple anything, I finished unpacking then joined her at the TV about the time her pie finished cooking. She got herself a slice and suggested I do the same, to which I declined. A bit later she said it was delicious and I should try a bite. I did so and she was correct: it was great. I asked her if she had made that pie to which she said no she had bought it. I ask her the brand. she said ‘Mrs Smith’.

At this point I wish to ask a question. I have had numerous events of this sort and I have always wondered:  how is it possible being Synchronicity is a fact, which I know unquestionably it is, how is it possible for Synchronicity and ‘Free Will’ to co-exist? If anyone has an answer I would love to hear it.

During a drive, my life partner Joanne was reminiscing about her first job as part of a high school coop. This is the short version of her story:

As diligent and responsible as anyone, she still made a mistake and was called on it by a supervisor. It meant that her job was in jeopardy because it was a significant problem.  The owner was informed by the supervisor, but realized she could still be valuable. Thankfully, the man who had hired her for the job therefore kept her on.  She was told, “All you have to do is ask.”

About a minute or two after she tells me this story, we are a mile up the road and pass an industrial building with a large sign that was painted on the side of the building, that read, “All you have to do is ask.”

This happened maybe a year after the release of the movie “E.T.” A personal business issue led to a confrontation between myself and Bob, in a courtyard between three apartment buildings. A set of sheds for storage blocked the back, except for a door that ran through the passage between the sheds, that led to the alley.

That day, it was cold, the falling snow was sticking to the ground, with a topping of ice. Bob, to whom I was teaching the carpet trade, had a hammer and as we faced off over our conflict I asked, “Are you going to hit me with that hammer?”

Just as he was about to answer and/or make his move, we heard the alley door swing open, with a sound like it was playing the tune from “E.T.”

We stared at each other, and then nodded, confirming we had both heard it, and then the door did it again, playing the same tune!

That was enough to break the ice, and we were okay again. We figured out that the door had been opened by the wind, and as it rubbed against the hard snow, between the creaking and squeaking of the door, it created a sound just like in the movie, and that was funny.

As absurd as one can imagine when playing around with using personal pronouns as if they are regular vocabulary words, this occurred when the senior George H. W. Bush was the 43rd president of the United States.

I think it was around the Noriega ousting when I toyed with other poetic phrases that sounded like the names of physical geographical locations and persons. That day, I wrote without thinking:

WATT INDIA BAGHDAD

Uzno Watt Amin

The next day, twice on PBS, former President Bush said, “There’s nothing in the bag.”

It must have been between 1980s – 1990s. Dolly, my friend Joe’s mother-in-law  was managing a carpet store on 34th place and Western Avenue in Chicago.   She turned out to be a very good  friend, as well. Mondelli Carpets was the name of the business and catered almost invariably to a higher end by appointment.  Typically, when I needed to stop there, I would say, “Hi or Hello” to her daughter Lynn, Joe’s wife, or Dolly.

This day, Dolly was behind the counter watching her TV when I opened their front door. After the bell stopped and the door closed, I called out “Hello Dolly” that sounded like a echo of the TV, that was playing the same phrase in an ad, “Hello Dolly.”

One day, a few years ago my husband made a joke about the Hollywood actor The Rock.  I had never heard of him and thought I would google him later to see what such a strangely named person looked like.  I then took my computer to be mended in a part of town I don’t normally go to.  The repair shop wasn’t open yet, so I decided to get a coffee in a nearby cafe.  It was a really nice cafe and for some reason I found myself wondering who owned it and asked one of the wait staff. I googled his name and the search engine returned a picture of the Hollywood actress Florence Pugh who (I discovered) was the proprietor’s daughter.  And standing next to her was…The Rock!

I was in a new relationship with someone but we had to be apart for a few days. During this time I was out on a a walk and noticed that I had started singing the Paul Simon song ‘Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes’ and wondered what had prompted me to start singing it.  A few minutes later I texted the person I was seeing and on a whim added a shamrock emoji at the end, not really knowing why.  On receiving the text he told me that he was surprised to see the shamrock as he was wearing a pair of golf shoes that a friend had given him that had shamrocks embedded in the soles of the shoes. I had no idea that he owned such a pair of shoes.

Note of interest: I was just pondering whether to post this story when I received an email from my brother who I was arranging to meet somewhere between both our houses.  He suggested a golf club (neither of us play golf) so I have taken that as a sign that I should post!

My stepfather had passed just before my parent’s Sleepy Hollow house was up for sale.  They had purchased another house a couple of miles further south, two blocks north of Midway Airport in Chicago near Archer Avenue and Cicero Avenue where they planned to move.

It was a situation where I was somewhat estranged from the family and had been put into a “house sitting” position. The first day, after I moved in during the first half of the 1990s, I had time to relax, sit atop my car in the garage, and stare across the alley at a prairie yard that filled between the railroad tracks and a printing business. It was time to lay back and read.

For some reason, the book at hand was a 1964 book, The Conscious Mind written by Kenneth Walker. In 1971, the teacher of my Introduction to Logic class was also named Kenneth Walker (same name, but not the same person as the author).

As I was reading, behind my mother’s 2nd house, I started to doze off, and the last thing I remember before putting the open book face down on my chest was,

“The mind ‘bloweth where it listeth’.  Instead of remaining silent as we wish them to remain
during contemplation, our lower associative minds, or what the Hindu calls ‘manas’,
continue their ceaseless chatter about totally irrelevant matters.  We may manage to
interrupt this mechanical flow of talk but a new theme immediately presents itself,
and off ‘manas’ goes again, like a dog after a rabbit” (The Conscious Mind, p 145).

I’m not sure, perhaps 10 minutes or so later, as I was still resting, I started to feel something wet on my right cheek.  A second or so and I realized there is a big dog leaning over the side of my car licking my face. Then someone comes from the alley and yells at the dog and the dog goes off and the man said,  “I’m sorry, he’s a greyhound, he went after a rabbit.”

I said,  “Look at this.” And pointed at the line in the book that reads “like a dog after a rabbit.” He said, “Wow, that’s a coincidence!”

That was the first time I met my neighbor Tony.

This story happened around 1997/1998 when Phillips introduced their first CD Recorder for public market. I was working a computer show at McCormick Place for Czarnowski Exhibits.  The show used up all three buildings, and lower levels. I wanted to visit the Phillips booth and so did my friend Pete, who was getting excited about computers.

We agreed to meet for lunch at the Phillips booth to get some literature.  But I got trapped at my booth all day (in another building) and could not let Pete know, as we did not yet have cell phones. I knew he would realize something changed and would just get the info on his own.

About 2 o’clock or so, we were finishing up. The last thing that comes up from a booth is the carpet. So I knelt down, stretched my arm to lift the carpet, and I was in a position to watch the large back dock opening with heavy plastic curtains being forced inward by a strong gust of wind. I stared, as all over the convention hall papers started flying, spiraling, hundreds of thousands, as I watched surprised, still with my hand opened to lift up the carpet– and then some piece of paper hit my palm, and I instinctively closed my hand.

Of all the thousands of papers and bits of litter flying with the wind, the one that flew into my hand was about the Phillips CD Recorder. But that was not all!  As we were waiting for the final check out from the boss, another fellow named Jimmy comes up to me, and says, “You know about these kind of things.”   I looked at what he was holding out to me. He said, “One of the clients used this for demonstration.”   I asked, “Was it Phillips?” As if I knew.

He said, “No, it’s another client, but they can’t use it again because it has a dent. I wonder if you can use it.” I confirmed that Jimmy didn’t want to keep it for himself (he didn’t).

And that was how I got my first Phillips CD recorder.

Years ago, my friend Eric Wadman and I were in the line to see a movie at Northpark shopping center in Dallas. For some reason, the name Walter Longacre came up in conversation. It turned out that we both knew him. While we were talking about how we met him, Walter walked up to us and tapped one of us on the shoulder. “It’s nice seeing you guys here.“ We were quite surprised and answered him, “Walter, we were just talking about you!”

In 2006, I was working in a carpet business and was in Louisville to install carpet for Cover-All. I became involved with the initial hiring of other carpet installers, and was in charge of a few dozen different crews that had to go out and check out jobs, respond to customer complaints, and so on.

This day, was just like the rest, hectic and miserable. I had requested the help of a carpet installer to help me with one unhappy lady, to make good on her job. There were no available installers and I was in a fix.

So along comes Oscar.  He walks into our office, a clean cut guy, and he lets me know some of his past accounts to get a good idea of his experience. I get excited realizing, this is the guy that could help me make my appointment.

But, there was a snag.  We could not hire until they passed a background check and to make him a badge — that takes almost two weeks. So I reminded the managers that I was a separate contractor there and had the authority to take responsibility and bring him to the carpet installer to the job with me, since no one else was available.

The first time I went to this ladies house, she kept bragging that she should have gone to Sears, because they did their job right…on an on, bragging about how great some installer from Sears was.

So, this is the second time I go there, and Oscar followed me with his van with tools, and as we got out to walk across the street, he said, “You know, this looks really familiar.” I thought to myself, we all did thousands of jobs, we get around.. and kept walking.

We knocked on the lady’s house, she opened the door, then all of a sudden she blurts out, “That’s the carpet installer!”  I’m thinking, yeah, that is a carpet installer, that’s why  I brought him.

But she was thinking, no,  “That’s him.  That’s him. That’s the same carpet man they sent from Sears!”

That was Oscar!

I had been thinking about having French onion soup for dinner. With that in mind, I took a container out of the freezer to leave on the counter so it would defrost while I was at the theater that afternoon. Got in the car to drive to the theater and my books on tape started to play as I drove out of the garage – – the character is making French onion soup. Got to the play and the theme running through the play was the French onion soup. 

In 2004, I had a horse, Harold. His grand-sire was Luskin Star, a very famous race horse here in Australia in the 1970s.

I bought an apartment here in Sydney last December. The lady next door said she wanted to buy my apartment at that time as well (mind has more water views and is a bit quirkier).

Chatting over coffee, my neighbor admired the huge door sticker of a cute horse. It’s on a barn door to the bedroom, so I thought a horse photo would suit it.

I told Melissa about Harold and his grand-sre Luskin Star: turns out Melissa went out with Luskin Star’s jockey in the 1970’s! Hugely amazing!

She still wants to buy my apartment, and I think the horse sticker will stay. I’m waiting to hear what she decides this week…fingers crossed. I have a feeling it will happen after that huge synchronicity!

9 JANUARY: I had a dream that I lost my ring, which has my engagement, wedding and eternity rings remodeled into one ring. I had to get up to see where it was: and it was there, next to my late husband’sring on the photo shelf.

That night I went out walking along the promenade, a few metres from my apartment, where thousands of folks walk every day. By the 6 (shout out to you Chris!) flagpoles on the brick pathway, I saw a dazzling flash of light. I picked it up and it looked to be maybe a diamond! Round, traditional cut.

I did the glass of water test, and it sank to the bottom like a stone. Looks to be twice the size of my engagement diamond, so at least 1/2 carat!

I put a cryptic message out on the local FB page, asking if anyone had lost something off their fingers ‘of great value.’ Anyway, I took it into my local police station and hopefully the owner will contact them and the love story will continue!

What’s more amazing is for me to see something like that, with being blind in one eye and not seeing much with the other!

On November 23 2022, I was walking on Mont-Royal mountain in Montreal (Canada) and also listening to the recording of Yvonne Kason’s share about her near death experiences. https://youtu.be/py5BrWxwY_k

At the 43 minute mark in her share, she’s about to describe the Shaman depiction of an animal on the Peterborough (Canada) Petroglyph. At the same moment, i see a rabbit crossing my path and running into the woods. A rare event in this area. I felt it was a sign… but what sign? Then in the following seconds, Yvonne says the depiction was a rabbit. Wow!!! …

In the early 90s I had a penfriend from London who’d contacted me via The Young Archaeologist magazine, whose name was Keeley. I woke up one morning and my first thought was Keeley’s granddad is dead. In the next couple of days a letter arrived telling me her grandfather had died, which made me sit up and take notice. I looked through her old letters to confirm she hadn’t mentioned her grandparents previously, regarding any illness or in any other context. I remember that based on our tender ages, it felt surprising to me she had a deceased grandparent.

Few months ago, I had a dream with a colleague and friend. He was driving, I was in the car, there was a big curve, so we went out of the road. Finally we landed safe. I called my friend, shared the dream and told him to be aware of driving and curves. Immediately, he sent me a PDF document which title “coincidences”, it was an article of the Wall Street Journal, he translated to Spanish and wanted to share with friends. He did not know that I have studied synchronicity for more than 25 years! The original title of the article is: “The Hidden Power of Coincidences”, and mentioned the Coincidence Project and Dr. Bernie Beitman. I was very happy to discover that I had already read Dr. Beitman´s book, it was part of my Kindle library.

I made some research in order to contact Dr. Beitman, who kindly invited me to join the Coincidence Cafe. I feel that the dream is a symbol to “get out of my comfort zone” and to land in a safe land, a land of opportunities, connections, synchronicities and serendipities. When I attended to the first coincidence cafe I felt I was landed in the perfect moment, with similar people, I felt very happy. I am happy.

Thank you to all the people who participates in this project and specially Dr. Bernie.

Ricardo Escamilla, México.

In December 2022, I wrote a letter to a friend who lives in Montana, U.S. I made a bit of a mess of the envelope, with a little scribble on its edge. I opened my desk drawer in my living room and thought I wish I had some liquid paper, because the only one in my drawer was so old, it was crusty and useless. The next day I went into the office unexpectedly, when I had planned to work from home. At the end of the day, the guy I sit opposite from was packing his laptop away behind me and apropos of nothing, turned to me with an old chocolate tin, lifted the lid, and said ‘liquid paper? In the tin was 20 – 30 bottles of liquid paper. I had mentioned nothing about the night before. 

In early January 2023, I was reading Philip Merry‘s fantastic book, The 9 Keys of Synchronicity . Specifically, as I read Key #4 on Awe, he mentions the science of awe that has come out from UC Berkley. Reading that, I thought to myself, “Oh, I loved that workshop I did in 2015 with the guys from UC Berkley on The Science of Awe at the Wisdom2.0 conference in San Francisco…. Too bad the Pandemic put a pause on that conference, it was always my favorite conference.” Then, I closed Philip’s book, walked into the kitchen, and picked up my phone and …. THIS IS THE FIRST picture I saw. (See picture). My jaw dropped and I had a strong sense that I should sign up right away. I remembered that another of Philip’s keys is to “Act on Intuition” … but, I hesitated, thinking I need another sign to confirm that I should go to this conference. I checked the time and saw that it was 5:55 AM, a power number. So, I signed up right away. I’ll be there if anyone else from the TCP community wants to meet up at Wisdom2.0 April 27-29, 2023 in San Francisco!

In 2000, I travelled across Canada from Montreal to Vancouver Island, mostly by Greyhound. I ended up stopping in Thunder Bay, which the 2021 census tells me is the 36 biggest city in the country – so not an obvious destination. I ended up staying in a hostel about 16 km from the city-centre, run by an elderly couple, who had been missionaries. They were only there for one night, as they were going travelling – though I stayed there for 2-weeks. In around January 2002, I was traveling around New Zealand and stayed in a hostel in Wellington – The Terrace. I got chatting to a Canadian guy in the kitchen. I started to tell him about some of the places I had been in Canada and a few stories about some ‘quirky’ folk I had met, and he cut me off and turned to his friend, and said don’t your parents run a hostel near there? It turned out his friend’s parents (or possibly adopted parents?) were the owners of the hostel I had stayed in Thunder Bay, which was where he had grown up. So, when you add up all those probabilities – that I had been to Canada, that I stopped in this relatively small city, picked a particular hostel run by his parents, and that we would both be in New Zealand at the same time, chose the same hostel in Wellington, AND that we would end up chatting…..Well, it made me smile. On the same trip, also in Wellington, I would walk through the aisles of the main and impressive library, sometimes running my finger-tips along the spines, stopping at random to pick one, and borrow it if the blurb and a few pages spoke to me. I did this perhaps over a 3-month period. I was random walking/stopping, as per normal…and picked a book, The Second Bridegroom by Rodney Hall. I flicked through a few pages and it caught my attention that it mentioned the Isle of Man, where I grew up. In fact, the main character was from the Isle of Man. More than that, the character was born about a 15 minute walk from where I grew up from about 12-onwards.

I was postponing my work, I had to call a professor in mathematics for an interview. I was a little nervous about this. So I put it off a little more by typing in an invented word on Google with my eyes shut. Then I read  bat25grghdk48jns. I thought,” all right, this will lead to nothing”, but pressed Enter anyway. Yes, one hit showed up which was at the University of Groningen, on the website of this professor I was about to call! My random typing was part of his mathematical formula! Impossible! This crazy event helped me to grab the telephone; we had the interview and I told him about the coincidence. You can probably imagine how this mathematics professor reacted… Yes: he smiled politely. You can hear a lot more of my amazing, unlikely coincidences in the TEDx talk that I gave on this subject, “Remarkable Coincidence, a Valuable Compass?”: https://youtu.be/0_npCvKc730.

I had bought the book, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales by Marie-Louise von Franz, at least six months before I opened it on Sunday, January 31,1999 and found a section on the Chinese tendency to consider events which coincided in time to be meaningfully related. A footnote is appended to the section that mentions that people in the West also engage in this type of associative thinking: “The stock market usually goes up in years when a particular football league wins the Superbowl or in months with a blue moon.” I wouldn’t have considered this mention of coincidence especially noteworthy — except that I happened to be reading it on Super Bowl Sunday when a blue moon was also occurring.

A common form of synchronicity is propinquity – a coincidence reflecting the psychological connection between people. A caller to our radio segment at K ROCK in Geelong, “Talking Synchronicity” described an amusing example. She was walking with a friend in a supermarket entrance when a public phone unexpectedly rang nearby. She jokingly told her companion, ‘That’ll be for me’ and answered the call. To her companion’s surprise, she had an engaged chat with the person at the other end of the phone. It turned out the caller was her best friend who had ‘randomly’ called the wrong number. I’ve had a number of experiences like this in my life! You can hear more stories as well as my thoughts about propinquity in this “Connecting with Coincidence” podcast episode where I was interviewed by host Bernard Beitman, in an episode called “Propinquity, the Surprising Nearness of You”: https://youtu.be/1raVsrW0B0M.

One day synchronicity played a co-directing role for my documentary film, “What Is Synchronicity?”  When I visited the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California in 2009 to interview scientist Dean Radin, an unexpected interview awaited me.  Upon my arrival, Dean told me about a colleague, Robert McDowell, who had a surprising experience that morning.  During meditation, McDowell spontaneously wondered if there had ever been a documentary on synchronicity.  Only minutes later he noticed an email Dean had sent earlier inviting him to be part of my film that day if he had a story to share.  After interviewing McDowell, I thought, “When the unexpected expects you, it may be synchronicity.” You can learn more about this documentary here: http://www.davidstrabala.com/whatissynchronicity.

In 2022, I was working on the release of a new song, sung in Spanish, “Mi Estrella.” The song is a tribute to two twin daughters who died very young. The lyrics come from a longer poem their mother Yiuvany wrote. I had Yiuvany check my lyrics from a demo version before I was going into the studio to record the final version, since I am not a native Spanish speaker. She noted an error on the word for dawn: it needed to be “amanecer,” not “amenecer.” So before my final recording session, I was practicing that word by singing that line of the song over and over, while driving in the car. As I’m singing it, I notice the small food delivery truck in front of me, and it has the business name painted on the back: “Super Amanecer”! It reinforced the correct spelling of the word, just as I was mentally rehearsing it. I had not idea that a business in my area had this word in their name, so it really struck me as such an unlikely coincidence to see that word exactly at the moment that I was singing it out loud! Here’s the link to listen and see the Official Music video of “Mi Estrella,” by my band Webweaver: https://youtu.be/Irlw3dQmVRQ.

I’m heading home from visiting my favorite chemistry student, son Daniel, in Durango. My heart is wide open, I’m deeply happy, driving through gorgeous mountains with glorious vistas. I’m listening to an audio book, The Prosperous Coach, about getting more coaching clients. Just as I’m climbing a mountain pass, the author asks “WHO would you LOVE to work with? What kind of client would you be REALLY excited to work with”? I didn’t have to think. I immediately say out loud “Doug”, who is a cool, successful CEO of a global, publicly traded company that he built from scratch, doing really interesting work. I reach the top of the pass, and cruise down the other side. As I come back into having cell reception, the phone rings “Hi, It’s Doug, could I hire you as my coach”. Jaw drop.