Rhodes, Greece
We love travel synchronicities. They’re always intriguing in one way or another and underscore the mysterious nature of the world/reality in which we live.
Mike Perry’s blog on synchronicity often features a travel synchro. And, like Butternut Squash, whose travel synchros we’ve posted here, Mike travels to the most fascinating places. I always feel like an armchair traveler when I read their blogs.This synchro of Mike’s takes place in Rhodes, Greece, and has such a positive spin to it that we asked if we could re-post it.
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I was about to sit down to dinner with my wife when I had this clear picture in my mind of a woman wearing a yellow dress. She was someone we had seen some seven or eight years ago, while in the village of Lindos on the Greek island of Rhodes.
At the time we had been staying in a fisherman’s cottage built into the mountain side overlooking the village. Lindos is on a hill which seems to erupt from the blue sea with sparkling white houses glistening in the sunshine and peaked by a monastery. It’s a very magical place.
One day we had been to the beach for the morning, swimming in the clear water and generally enjoying the sunshine. In the early afternoon we strolled back to the village and in the main square a wedding group were forming after the ceremony. Music started to play and there was laughter and happiness everywhere.
We decided to have a glass of red wine and watch what was going on. It was a real Zorba the Greek occasion and the wedding guests were soon dancing and enjoying themselves. Amongst them was a woman wearing a yellow dress.
She was so radiant that she stood out from the other guests. She danced, laughed and sizzled with being alive and enjoying the moment. Even as outsiders my wife and I couldn’t help but get caught up in the moment – and, for some reason, I was transported back to this scenario when sitting down to dinner a couple of nights
ago.
I said to my wife, “Do you remember that woman in the square in Lindos?”
“Oh yes,” she replied, “The one with the yellow dress. We had such a fun time in Lindos, didn’t we? Do you also remember ….”
And over dinner we relived our time in Rhodes.
It’s always odd how an image from the past can form in the mind. When I went to my office later that evening I pulled out some papers from a file and there amongst them was the programme to a play we saw last year at the Minack Theatre.
The play was called The Greek and it was roughly based on Zorba the Greek and how a young studious traveller meets up with the life loving Alexis Zorba. The author Nikos Kazantzakis wrote:
“We stayed silent by the brazier until far into the night. I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else. And all that is required to feel that happiness here and now is a simple frugal heart.”
I feel that my mind’s picture, of the woman in the yellow dress, combined with The Greek programme was there to remind me what happiness is all about – and that sometimes, perhaps, I take life a little too seriously.
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That’s a very uplifting story from Mike, an enchanted description of a time, place, and a dazzling individual. Now if you want somewhat darker, but compelling read, go to The Girl in the Yellow Dress, from Aug. 25, 2009.
hey shadow – good to see you and to know you're still out in blogland somewhere!
just reading these happy memories, made a happy too. i love how the mind gets to where it does, seemingly without prompts???
Off-subject for a moment…anyone see anything new on any news media today about the oil spill? I've searched. Sudden silence on the subject. And a new crop cirlce has appeared. CC#5. cjc
Gypsy – very cool. Need to go open your email!
ok, connie – am sending you a separate note so that i can attach a photo of my own "johnny" in louisiana! 🙂
not 20 minutes ago my daughter lisa and i were sitting in the dining room with alejandro playing with all his new birthday stash and i mentioned an old house that lisa had come across out in the country somewhere – it looks civil war era and is obviously not lived in – she had said it seemed to "call to her" when she drove by it so she had taken a photo and showed it to me – and in that context i remembered my little bungalow in shreveport and asked her if she remembered how i had come to own the bungalow etc – and we sat and talked about my little 1926 bungalow – then i went to my computer and turned it on to this post which is a re-telling of one of my bungalow stories – very neat!
and of this post, what a happy memory – sunshine and good times and the carrying forward of them to be re-lived by mike and his wife and lived now by us – a beautifully vivid story of such happy times – and a dazzlin' woman in a yellow dress! here's to dazzlin' women everywhere and to those who remember them!
Great OBE story, Connie!
Mike,
Thanks for a wonderful post. Rhodes is such a beautiful place to have these memories. As I was reading your post I was seeing your woman in yellow at the same time I was recalling my own memories of Rhodes.
Ray
Morning Guys. I'm not sure the first part of this is a 'synchronicity story' but definitely involves travel and high weirdness. When I was 16 and 'going steady' with my boyfriend Johnny in Montgomery, my Dad was transferred to California. Johnny was my 'first love', and I adored him. (He looked exactly like the late actor James Dean, so he wasn't average by any means.) Anyway, as my family pulled out of our driveway, leaving for the long roadtrip to CA, Johnny stood on the front step of our house there and watched us go. He wore jeans and a black-and-brown-striped polo shirt with a collar. He didn't smile, or wave. He just stood there with his right hand over his heart, fingers splayed. We stopped that first night at a chain motel in western Louisiana. It was close to twilight, not yet dark, and I was sitting in a lounge chair by the pool, deeply mourning the loss of everything I knew and loved as we were in route to a totally new kind of life. My older sister was sitting beside me. Suddenly a motion caught my eye, and I looked across the pool towards the upper balcony of the motel. A boy was standing there on the balcony wearing jeans and a black-and-brown-striped polo shirt with a collar. He was gazing directly at me, with his right hand over his heart, fingers splayed. He wasn't a mirage or an imaginary illusion. He was tangible. Real. It was Johnny. My older sister also saw him and almost screamed but was too stunned. I was afraid to breathe, afraid he would disappear, and he and I just stared at each other. After a couple of minutes, he simply faded away as my sister and I watched. In a letter from him a week or so later, Johnny wrote me that the evening we left, he had fallen asleep out in his yard, thinking about me, and had dreamed he saw my sister and me sitting by a pool outside a motel! Needless to say, my teenage heart broke and I sobbed. I've never forgotten those few frozen moments in time, or the way they made me feel, or his letter. Many years later, of course, I learned that he had obviously had an OBE and was actually briefly THERE. The strength of our connection was apparently unusually powerful! (During the following months after we'd settled in CA I had prayed that it would happen again; that Johnny would appear again, but he never did.) It was a singular experience, and an inexplicable gift. Another VERY odd thing about Johnny and me, and this is without a doubt a synchronicity, is that although we had both lived in Montgomery, Ala. as teens going steady, two years ago I began to think about him constantly. Couldn't get him off my mind. So I obsessively started a "peoplesearch" on the computer. It took me close to six months of synchronistic 'links' to locate a person I thought could be him, same name and age, and I contacted that family via snailmail, not sure if it was the right Johnny because it was in FL. It was. I received a response letter from his adult daughter, and it turned out that Johnny had lived in S. FL., had become an alligator trapper with the FL Game and Wildlife Commission; that he had had a heart attack and died just four days before I located him and mailed the letter. In the response letter from his daughter, she told me that Johnny had made many visits to my town and to the Alligator Farm here, which is less than one mile from our home! Less than ONE MILE! I believe he and I probably passed each other on the street and in stores and restaurants, close enough to touch, and just didn't know it….but I was utterly grief-stricken that I finally found him and that he'd died a mere four days before I made contact! His daughter corresponded with me on the computer for a few weeks, scanned me photos of him, and sent me a copy of his obituary. The synchronicites abound in our 'story'. Sometimes he comes to visit me in my sleeping dreams, so I know I'll see him again SomeWhere, SomeTime, and it will be a glorious reunion! cJc
Thanks for publishing the post.
Mike.
Mike writes well, I could see the entire story so vividly in my mind. Something about yellow, to me, speaks of light, happiness, and celebration.