We live in a collective sea of signs and symbols. Nature, the universe, Source, God, whatever you want to call it, constantly chatters to us. But we’re so mired in the business of physical life that we don’t always hear that voice. Or we hear it and ignore it. Or we hear it and think, Yeah, sure, I’m kinda losing it here.
You’re in your car. Maybe you’re on a road trip. Or picking up your son or daughter from school. Or maybe you’re backing out of your garage to head off to the library, the park, a friend’s house. Your car dies. It just goes flat out dead. What do you do besides call AAA? Your spouse? A friend?
When our daughter was in elementary school, Rob and I had an arrangement. He would take her to school because he was the lark, up at the crack of dawn, and I would pick her up in the afternoon because I’m an owl, rarely in bed before one or two. On this particular day, I was in the pickup line and my car suddenly went dead. There I was, my car refusing to move, cars behind me honking because hey, why wasn’t I moving forward?
In those days, I had a clunky mobile phone, called Rob, and he came over and jumped the car. We got Megan home. There was a message on our answering machine from a writer friend. The literary agent we’d had for 15 years had died suddenly of a heart attack.
Standstill. The battery dies. The car has to be jumped started.
If there are no accidents, as Robert Hopke theorizes in his book by the same name, then the death of the car coinciding with our hearing about the death of this agent isn’t random. This connection, this experience, though, has puzzled me because we had left this agent eight months earlier. I did, in fact, become somewhat superstitious after this about departure, about ending relationships. Less than a year after Kate Duffy, my editor at Kensington, didn’t renew my contract, she died.
Just how are all of us, the dead and the living, connected, anyway? How are we connected to the larger world beyond us? I think of it as synchronicity, that phenomenon that exists between what we see and what we sense, that border between what quantum physicist David Bohm called the implicate (enfolded) order and the explicate (unfolded) order. The inner, the outer. Right brain, left brain.
I’m pretty sure, though, that the next time my car battery goes dead, that I find a dead frog in house (frogs here) that something unexpectedly good happens, signs and symbols will hold a much different importance for me.
OMG!!!! Just this past week I sent an email to the MacGregors about a lucid dream I had the previous night. I’ve kept a dream journal for forty years because I get valid, often precognitive messages through my sleeping dreams. But this particular dream…in it were TWO RAINBOWS. That was all, just the two rainbows.They were perfect; the colors exquisite. One was above the other, with a space of blue of separating them. I spent most of that day researching RAINBOWS as symbols! And now, this blog! I’m stoked! WOW! And, Trish and Rob, please put me in your luggage and take me to the CAVES in Cuba with you! Caves are mysterious and wonderful to me. I WANT TO GO! Please please????? 🙂
Interesting thoughts. I wonder the same myself, its sometimes like trying to decode your own personal hieroglphics, no? Sometimes it seems to me we are at different states of consciousness that enable us to better glimpse the “language”. Today I happened to listen to a great interview of a Jungian psychologist and visionary named Veronica Goodchilde (she talks about synchronicity a lot too). One of the things she said was that it was a difficult time to be alive, because we’re entering a archetype or aeon of consciousness having to do with the change into the Aquarian era, and there are two mythic patterns, the old and the new. She said those who chose to incarnate now have often been called the “rainbow people” because we’re able to bridge the old ways with the new ways that are coming, we have the advantage of being able to see what new creative events and happenings might be occurring at the same time as the conflicts between paradigms are happening.
I felt the hairs go up, because I named my Tarot deck the Rainbow Bridge Oracle. I started it 30 years ago, and have no idea, really, why I called it that. But I kind of think maybe she answered my question.
Very much like personal hieroglyphics! I always loved the name of your tarot deck. Interesting connection.
I think the Jungian is probably right. I’ll have to look her up, It was my hope that the old paradigm would out with a whimper; instead, it’s going out with what may become a dictatorship.
YEP! Thanks!
Wonder what the synchro is that my comments kept ending up in trash? Must be one! Maybe that my remarks weren’t relevant or something, who knows! Hopefully it’s good to go now! About signs and symbols…my life is lived in a web of signs and symbols because of my work with frequencies and numbers and because of my sleeping dreams being directly connected to universal and/or personal and seem to be a book of codes.
I suspect this “connection” is true for most but as you say, we are mired up in the busy-ness of our daily lives and they go by unnoticed!
It worked!!