In both of our books on synchronicity, we’ve written about the connection between animals and synchronicity. In 7 Secrets, the focus was on animals as messengers that relay particular information about our personal lives or our global situation. In Synchronicity and the Afterlife, our focus is on animals as vehicles of communication with the spirits of our loved ones – animals and human – who have passed on. Now I’m wondering how animals may symbolize our particular creative motif – the way we integrate creativity into our daily lives, how animals spark our imaginations, stir up our intuitions, and lead us into unexplored depths within ourselves.
When I was a kid, we lived in an oil camp in Maracaibo, Venezuela. It lies on the shoes of Lake Maracaibo, the largest lake in South America. Its basin contains large reserves of crude oil, which is what brought Rockefeller there in the early 1930s, to drill. Our house backed up to a vast expanse of rock that eventually led to the hospital. On weekends, friends and I would climb the fence to the hospital property and look for tadpoles in the pools of rainwater that accumulated in the rocks.
There were hundreds of these strange pools, small, self contained worlds where tadpoles no larger than commas swam about, eating I don’t know what. We scooped the tadpoles into jars and took them home and within a few days or weeks, we would have frogs jumping around in our back yards. That’s when my fascination with frogs began.
Over the years since, frogs have appeared at significant times in our lives, as we’ve written about here. But on another level, I’ve since realized that frogs are my creative motif. I started out writing fiction, murder mysteries, then psychic investigations of murders, and finally, with Esperanza, wrote a story that takes place partially in the afterlife. Along the way, my nonfiction reflects the kind of transformation that embodies the frog’s life cycle – dreams, , divination systems, animal totems, synchronicity. The underlying theme remains constant, a way inside the mysteries to explore the mysteries themselves.
Other writers we know have different creative motifs –hummingbird, bumblebee, hawk, dolphin. But since all of us are inherently creative, the motif is as varied as we are as individuals. Sometimes, our motif is an animal that makes our hearts melt. For one friend, it’s the bat. She’s crazy about bats, and when I look into the life cycle and strangeness of bats, I see this woman’s life and decisions reflected there. For other friends, it’s the spider, the scorpion, or even a mythological creature, like the phoenix. And these people come from all walks of life and work in many different fields, not just the so-called “creative” fields.
Animals as creative motifs change over time, depending on where we are in our lives, what we’re doing and what we need. Sometimes the creature that speaks to us most strongly is one that terrifies us – snake, roach, rat, you name it, you own it. Fear is as strong an attractor as love. In this story, one of the earliest we posted, a woman who is afraid of scorpions dreamed of one after surgery on her ovaries. By working creatively with the dream and the scorpion motif, she accelerated her healing.
Other times, a seemingly random encounter with a creature holds particular significance, as in this story that involved ladybugs. To recap: during a long weekend in the Muir Woods, a young couple had repeated experiences with hundreds of ladybugs and then saw a lone ladybug on a rock on a beach, an unlikely spot for this insect. They researched ladybugs and discovered they are symbolic of luck, but can also indicate a time when we’re pushing too hard for a wish to come true. They also found out that the ladybug’s life cycle is nine months, the exact time they had been together. The night they returned home, they broke off their relationship. By using the synchronicity creatively, they realized their relationship had run its course.
Recently, I’ve been noticing dragonflies everywhere – in the yard, outside my window, or as emblems on jewelry, clothes, decorative pillows. After starting this paragraph on dragonflies, for instance, we went to the gym and Whole Foods and I encountered two more dragonflies. One graced the front of a candle holder I was admiring and another was on a wine label. Those two occurred within minutes of each other. Dragonflies symbolize luck, creativity, messages and news, and discovering the Zen of the moment. I bought the wine! Beyond that, I’ll have to see what develops.
