The Queen of Hearts

Today on our podcast, we talked with Gregg Levoy, author of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. The way he describes callings in his book is similar to how synchronicity “calls” to us

He was a fantastic guest and related one of the most powerful and unusual synchronicities I’ve ever heard. In 1982, Gregg was eager for a change in career. He’d spent eight years as a journalist with the Cincinnati Enquirer and was given “a most elegant job offer.”

The company that owned the newspaper, Gannett, was starting up what they were calling America’s first national daily, USA Today, and they took 100 or so reporters from nearly that many of its newspapers and offered them a kind of trial subscription. “If, at the end of four months, the paper flew and you fit, you became a journalist in Washington D.C., working for the nation’s newspaper,” Gregg wrote. “If it didn’t fly or you didn’t fit, you were guaranteed your job back at whatever paper they took you from. I leapt at the chance, and considered it a mere technicality that I sublet my apartment in Cincinnati instead of closing up shop. It never entered my mind that I would be coming back.”

When he returned because he hadn’t made the grade, he felt completely lost and unable to answer the question, Now what?

“A few days after returning, I was driving home from work listening to a song by The Eagles called Desperado. As I pulled to the curb in front of my apartment, the last line I heard before turning the engine off referred to the queen of hearts, and as I opened the door and stepped out, there on the curb next to my left foot was a playing card: the queen of hearts.”

Here are the lines in the Eagles song that Gregg is referring to:

Don’t you draw the queen of diamonds, boy
She’ll beat you if she’s able
You know the queen of hearts is always your best bet
Now it seems to me, some fine things
Have been laid upon your table
But you only want the ones
That you can’t get

Dumbfounded, Greg didn’t know what to make of it. “Even more remarkable than finding that queen card when I did, was that over the next few years, as I searched for a sense of direction, I found five more queen playing cards, in improbable locations such as a sand-dune in Oregon and a mountain wilderness in Colorado six miles from the nearest trailhead. It made the Twilight Zone seem like Mister Rogers’ neighborhood.

“Each time I found another queen card, the sheer unthinkability of it took another giant step forward, and eventually the synchronicities went so far beyond the laws of probability that I only barely hesitate to say it’s impossible that there was nothing more going on than blind chance and dumb luck. Such an adroit arrangement of events and timing– such stagecraft–seems orchestrated by something with wits.”

He started researching queen, the archetype. “I came to understand this rather profound administering of chance as directing me toward something that both my writing and my life needed at that time: more heart, less head; more intuition, less intellect, more confessing, less preaching, more of the inner life, the emotional life, the life of the senses; more listening, more following, more of what Carl Jung referred to as the anima, the force of the feminine in a man’s life. The Queen, of course, is the archetype of femininity–of powerful femininity–and I felt myself being compelled toward this energy by the kind of meaningful coincidence that Jung called synchronicity.”

Think about it, the staggering odds that within seconds of hearing that line about the queen of hearts, he gets out of his car and sees a queen of hearts on the ground next to his left foot. And then over the course of a couple years, found more  six queen of hearts cards in random places around the country.

And he finally followed his heart. He left journalism and made the leap to his “calling,” to freelance. He has been doing it ever since.

His book is terrific.