Tag Archives: synchronicity

What Lesson Have I Learned?

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Five minutes after I posted my last blog (which, along with yesterday’s blog post, dealt with mortality) when I was going to see a sick friend and giving Yolanda a ride to her next job,  I ran head-on into a concrete wall and totaled my car.  The engine caught fire and my door was jammed, as was the door of my passenger.  We got one window open, finally, and then it occurred to me there was an override on the passenger door, so I clicked it and we both escaped.

Luckily my gardener was here and he drove me to my doctor’s  office.  I was afraid to move at all until someone showed me how to do so without risking damaging my spine, which was pretty excruciating by now. When after 5 minutes no one came out to help me, (It’s an emergency, Yolanda told them, and they answered that the doctor was with another patient!) I told Pasiano just to drive on to the Red Cross where with some effort and lots of pain and a back brace, I got out of the back seat of Pasiano’s car. (The front door doesn’t open.)

The X-ray tech and the on-call dr. showed me the X-rays, said there was a severe displacement of the spine and that they were calling in a neurosurgeon.  Only then did I start to panic a small bit.  “Breathe slowly,” I told myself and tried to go into a meditative state.  Meanwhile, Yolanda unbeknownst to me, had left with my purse to go try to find my friend Audrey, who lives more than a mile away and who wasn’t answering her phone. It had been clear to me that when I called both her home and cell phone with no answer that she was probably at a rehearsal and definitely not at home, but Yolanda hadn’t consulted me regarding her decision and unfortunately, my insurance info was inside my purse and I didn’t have any numbers to call to tell me which hospital to go to in Guad. and what neurosurgeon they’d recommend.

A half hour later the surgeon arrived to tell me no surgery was necessary and that all of the places that hurt were just pulled or strained muscles or organs.  He gave me two sets of little pills which I couldn’t take until I got home and had food to take them with.

Five hours since the collision event, the claims adjustor is here. He has affirmed the fact that my car is probably totalled. But . . . call me lucky.  In addition to my sore neck and back, I  hurt all over, have a seat belt burn from my shoulder, down my breast and to my waist, a severely bruised abdomen and stomach and two knees that don’t bend too well,  but it will all mend.  Five days in bed, the doctor instructed, and two of those little pills morning and night for seven days.  Having taken one an hour or two ago, I am feeling floaty and I’m sure the adjustor thinks I’m flirting with him, but it is one of those little pills that is flirting with him if anyone/anything is! As the Raquet Club security arrives, and the guy with the fancy tow truck, I continue to babble on. Nothing like little magic pills to help one take such matters in stride. He seems to be enjoying it.  I speak to him in Spanish and he answers in English!

Click first photo to see captions and enlarge photos. You’ll never know why the virgin is in these pictures if  you don’t read the captions!

This little fella has graced the dashboard of every car I’ve had in Mexico for the past 16 years.
His passenger is the Virgin. Although I’m not religious, I am superstitious and I have a particular affinity for her
The virgin of Guadalupe also adorned the tow truck.
Full extent of the damage. My little car looks like a pug!
Very grateful for those inflation bags.
It was no easy task getting the car turned 90 degrees to get its tires to rollup the tow truck bed.
I went in to get a sheet of paper for the claims adjustor to write his phone number on and missed the final exit. Just as well.

okcforgottenman tells me he’s had an uneasy feeling all day since reading my poem. Coupled with the one I wrote yesterday, he had a premonition that something was about to happen.  I can only say that if it had to happen, I’m so glad it happened in this particular way, where no one was hurt except my car and me.  Something like this has to reaffirm the importance of this wonderful gift of life.

What walks on two legs and is black and blue all over?  Me, until I get my rental car in up to 5 days.  Since I’m supposed to stay in bed until then, I guess it’s no loss.

The daily prompt today is adrift

An Agnostic’s (Creed?) Query

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An Agnostic’s Creed Query

Who knows, in the end,
what will be good fortune, what folly?
We make our choices, take our chances,
drawing straws that synchronicity turns long
or misfortune cuts in two.
One person’s good luck
is another’s ruin—
life, perhaps, being the biggest lottery
while the lord of games sits above
in his windowed cage, viewing the results
of his design. The wheel? Blind luck,
but part of some larger mechanism
rigged to keep the house functioning
for purposes that the faithful, those addicted to the game,
repeat like a litany, still pulling the slot handle, sorting the cards,
assuring themselves, over and over,
that they are taken into account.

 

 

The prompt today was “folly.”

My Karma Ran Over My Dogma

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My Karma Ran Over My Dogma

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This picture was taken two sunsets ago from the porch of the beach house I’ve rented in La Manzanilla, Mexico. Not a bit of color editing has been done.

She felt the small disk glance off the steering wheel and land on her lap as they jolted over the rutted dirt road. She picked it off her leg before it was jostled off and onto the gray carpet covered with dirt, gravel and slips of paper containing quickly-scribbled lines of inspiration for future poems.  Quickly, she glanced at the words printed on its front. “My karma ran over my dogma.” What did it mean, this button she now stabbed back into the sun flap over the steering wheel of her dusty van?

She had thought it hilarious when she saw it pinned to the poetry sweater of the stranger at the reading at the L.A. coffee shop almost twenty years ago, and now here she was, driving eleven young men, one young woman and a puppet theater complete with sound system and fifty 3/4 scale puppets to a tiny village on the other side of the largest lake in Mexico.

This simple button had led her to this and now the man who wore it for every poetry reading they’d attended for 15 years was fulfilling his karma on another plane while she fulfilled her own in the life she’d planned out for him on this one. So had this entire adventure of living in Mexico simply not been part of his karma, or was karma such an intricate tapestry that it was impossible to untangle yours from that of those near and dear and even strangers met in passing?

Surely, the unbelievable interplay of serendipity was more than coincidence. Some force that is called karma by some, fate or synchronicity by others, and God, Allah or The Great Spirit by others, may be what determined who walked into your life; but it was up to you to decide whom you let walk away, whom you let stay, or whom you refused to let go.

“The school is here, Judy,” said Eduardo, as he pointed to a dull gray building much-enlivened by a huge mural no doubt painted by the students themselves. She pulled up in front of the school and  Isidro, Jose Luis, Mario, Roberto and the other young men who formed the membership of the loosely-jointed cultural council of her own small pueblo started to assist the husband and wife team who constituted the entire backup cast of the puppet theater to unload their equipment.  When their own truck had broken down enroute on the other side of the lake, villagers had told them to call the leader of this young band of artists, poets and dancers, and inevitably, she had been the one they called.  How many times had she proven to be their backup player when plans, money or a vehicle had been needed to further their plans for the cultural enrichment of their small town?

Here in this life she had fashioned to be free of the regulation of a job, applications, shows, schedules, boards of directors, groups, clubs and all of the “have to’s” of her former life, she had not resisted the charms of synchronicity and so had allowed herself to be pulled into the slow current of life in Mexico that, although it was not free of obligation–to family, friends, community–was nonetheless contingent on another sort of energy not so dependent upon schedules or clocks or calendars.  Here things happened because they happened and you were drawn into them because you were present or known or because you had been willing to be drawn in in the past and so were known to be someone open to chance and willing to play along in this great jigsaw puzzle known as Mexico.

She had planned it all out.  Her husband, sixteen years older than she, was wearing out fast, she could see. They would move to Mexico to live simply so he could retire. They found the town, bought the house, sold most of their worldly goods and packed their van. It was only then that they’d received the results for his final checkup before they hit the road.  Cancer.  He’d lived three weeks.  She dealt with what needed to be dealt with and hit the road for Mexico.  Who knows, from day to day,  whether we are part of someone else’s karma or whether they are part of ours?

The Prompt: Karma Chameleon–Reincarnation: do you believe in it?

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Lucky Star.” Today is your lucky day. You get three wishes, granted to you by The Daily Post. What are your three wishes and why?

Well damn. I just spent 45 minutes writing a poem and before I could save it, WordPress crashed and opened a new document!! I know, I know I should save as I go along, but I get into the creative process and forget. So, a new vow. After this I create in Word and copy into WordPress. But, that doesn’t bring the old poem back. Hard lessons. Okay, starting over again–totally new poem as I can never remember what I’ve written:

 Epiphany

A glitch in WordPress lost my wishes–
wiped them clean as fresh-washed dishes.
As though the wishes were taken away
before they saw the light of day.
So I must take a different tack
to try to get those wishes back.

When you wish upon a star
how does that star know where you are?
You are a dot in outer space.
It does not know your name or face.
So you must make those dreams come true–
what no one else can do for you.

No stars can make you lose that weight.
What works is just an emptier plate.
Discipline and time will do
what no wish can do for you.
And yet much easier to wish
than to avoid that favorite dish.

My other wish was for long life
away from illness, grief and strife–
a harder wish to make come true
without some magic helping you.
Diet and exercise once more
might keep me longer from death’s door–

Both things I have to do myself
to keep my place on this world’s shelf.
My third wish was a sort of pact–
a pledge I vowed that I’d enact
if my books began to sell,
I’d bring the plan you know so well

from earlier posts to light of day
and give the money all away
to make a place for language, art,
dance and music all to start.
A cultural center where kids could go
to learn to paint or sculpt or sew.

A place where they’re encouraged to write
so hidden selves could come to light.
A place where they could have a chance
to express themselves in song or dance.
A place with books and art supplies
to fill their hands and hearts and eyes.

My earlier poem was all a dream.
A bit of fluff—a hopeless scheme.
Wishes, wants and hopes and lies.
Visions seen behind closed eyes.
Yet when that poem was lost to me,
I suddenly began to see

How these wishes could all come true–
simply, what I have to do
piece by piece and bit by bit
to start to make the pieces fit.
It is now clear and I can see
the one to grant these wishes is me!

We will see if I stay true to the sudden insight gained by the sacrifice of a better poem than that above, but one that told less of a truth. As I wrote a second poem, I suddenly realized that we really do already have a cultural center in our town. It is the building next to Agustin’s restaurant where we held Camp Estrella—where kids are already learning English, taught by Agustin, as well as music–an orchestra and chorus of 150 kids. All I need to do is to help to expand the program into dance and writing and to do more art activities than the one or two a year I’ve done in the past. Eureka!!! And I don’t have to have a best-seller to accomplish that. I’m going to start today to see what it would take to establish a dance program and I’m sure it would be within my means to sponsor it. I have no kids to support. Why not adopt a lot of them??? Stay tuned for what happens.

A further insight: Is it just coincidence that Camp Estrella was the experience that helped to spark this sudden insight and that the other factor contributing to it is this prompt entitled “Lucky Star?” (You all know estrella means star, right?) I once wrote about the effect synchronicity has had in my life and it seems it has emerged again.  Lets hope I continue to follow its pull.

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In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “The Kindness of Strangers.” When was the last time a stranger did something particularly kind, generous, or selfless for you? Tell us what happened!

I was about to tell a story and then had a fleeting memory that I’d already written about this occasion, so I searched backwards in my blog and although I couldn’t find that story, I did find a poetry version of two kindnesses by strangers that changed my entire life.  If you’ve read it before, I apologize, but since I don’t even remember my own poems and stories, perhaps you’ll read this with new eyes as well. It’s a bit long.  Sorry, Ann and Audrey. I’m trying for more brevity lately and I have shortened this by one stanza. Hope you enjoy this or get something from it, be it new for you or a repeat:

Unsolicited Kindness

The stranger on an airplane in the seat right next to me
never said a single word, and so I let her be
until our arrival, when I prepared to stand
and she produced a paperback—put it in my hand.

“I think it’s time for you to read this,” she said, then went away.
I didn’t say a word to her. Didn’t know what to say.
That book, however, changed my life and attitude and choices—
encouraged me to listen close to interior voices.

Buscaglia, Jampolsky and all of Carl Jung’s books
drew my mind away from appearances and looks
and into that finer world of instinct and of mind;
then drew me westward to the sea and others of my kind.

After a writer’s function, a stranger sent to me
“The Process of Intuition,” which I read from A to Z.
I read it twenty times or so, then sent it to a friend.
Then bought up every copy left to give as gifts and lend.

I don’t remember talking to the one who sent it to me,
but if I need a proof of faith, I guess that this will do me.
For if I follow instincts that hint and prod and clue me,
I believe there is some force that draws the next thing through me

I don’t believe in any faith that has a name or church.
I do believe, however, that I’m guided in my search
by something that unites us and sets our pathways right
so long as we listen to our own interior sight

that urges us to follow the right side of our brain
even though those choices are logically inane.
I know that it takes many types of brains to run the world,
but for me it’s intuition that when carefully unfurled

guides me best—towards art and words and unplanned days and oceans
and prompts me make a Bible of what others may call notions.
And so to simplify I’d say it’s vital to have faith in
that voice we’re all a part of that leads us from within.