“Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.”

-Henry Miller

A Certain Perhaps Non-algorithmic Coincidence

I regard this as a subset of the possible world of synchronicity: a mere coincidence, or a tech-related algorithm working out its marketing scheme. Who knows?

So my sister loaned me a book, which she found fascinating, about Hunter S Thompson, Savage Dreams, by Richardson.

She bought the book at an independent bookstore- it has the anti-theft device pasted to the cover, and no dust jacket, just the book in a plain board cover. She had removed the dust jacket, probably to preserve it from damage from me- all my books have coffeee stains and are warped from rain or sticky from Danish pastry or candle wax or whatever. So this book was unidentifiable by the outside cover.

We talked about Hunter, his influences and his activities in San Francisco and Big Sur.

We talked in person and never mentioned details that would denote a specific reference.

I’m aware that cameras and microphones in phones, as well as online posts, are routinely picked up by marketers, but this is rather a obscure remove from such specifics.

Henry Miller was one influence at Big Sur, of course. We may have mentioned him in passing, but in no detail.

So I read in the book from my sis that Hunter was a hired hand on a property that eventually became Eselen, the New Age vortex on the coast. Richard Price, Brautigan’s Confederate General, was there around that time, and Ferlinghetti had a place by Bixbie Ridge. Late fifties early to mid- sixties.

So one book Thompson espoused was a Henry Miller book called “The World of Sex.”

He tauted it, and sent a copy of this thin obscure volume to a friend. Maybe Norman Mailer. Back in 1966 or so.

So that’s what I read.

So yesterday I open FB and the first thing I see is a quote on a poetry feed from…

“The World of Sex” by Henry Miller. Surely one of his most obscure works.

Boinnnng!

What is that?

This is the third such coincidence. The last one was opening a page of a library book while a random song played on YouTube which contained an exact phrase from the page, in real time without any forethought.

The phrase in that instance was undistinguished and buried in the text. A complete coincidence.

The quote below, in photograph, from Henry Miller may be a key.

If I reverse the proposition, that rather than shut one’s eyes, or deny, or run away, or repress, but instead be willing to change course, by following a quiet little intuition, to be consciously open to a positive impulse, a little joyful inner voice- one might just be following the way.

So perhaps there is a bit of spirit guidance here, and not merely an intrusion of our weird weird world.

My Woo Woo life. Spirit dabble, table tapping Dept.

I play a little spirit guide game.

A theosophical friend and I used to discuss hints we sensed from the Other Side: cigarette smoke, for example, when no one is smoking; a song that reminds you of someone no longer with us; a bird appears on a branch and you just know; signals that suddenly get your attention that are associated only with a particular person.

My clue is coincidence.

I’ll hear a catching phrase, and at the same time it will repeat in another form. Then I’ll know it’s a spirit thing, saying hello.

It’s harmless. Don’t be scared.

Today on the news I heard a commentator use the cliche “best and brightest” in a story about today’s headline. It was just on and audible as background noise, really. It actually could be time stamped, if I wanted to. It’s just a turn of phrase. No biggie.

Anyhoo, at that exact moment- exact- I turned a page in a random book I was reading at a random time, and simultaneously read the phrase, “Why bother to try when the best and brightest have floundered?”

Then I raise my index finger and count one for my spirit guides. Word coincidence in multiple form.

It’s just a humble affirmation.

It’s not the content, it’s the simultaneity.

I’m not any smarter obviously. But it’s actually fascinating to me.

PS This morning out walking, we saw a goldfinch and Ingrid said, ”Oh, that’s my dad.”

My Woo Woo Life, continued.

I was just saying how simultaneity, word coincidence in multiple forms, synchronicity, is a little game I play with -what? Spirit guides? Guardian angels? Prankster spirits? Who knows.

Anyhoo. Here’s how slightly complicated this gets.

Just last week on vacation in Ohio we bought a tiny wind chime at a place we used to visit with Aunt Vera when we were kids in the sixties. Hixon’s Flower Barn, in Lakewood Ohio.

I almost didn’t buy anything but just before we left I saw the wind chimes by the door. It was the perfect souvenir! I really didn’t want to leave this beloved old antique hutch without supporting them. We had so many happy memories there back in the day.

Buying the wind chime started a lively conversation with the proprietor (up to then I was feeling sad and sentimental) and we were all laughing about being kids drinking water from a garden hose and cleaning tar off our feet with gasoline and all the crazy stuff we would never do today. It was so much fun, we left laughing.

I hung that wind chime from Hixon’s in the garden deck when we got back to San Francisco and was just admiring it now.

So when I sat down to drink coffee just now, I opened up social media and randomly scrolled to a little short video posted on Mother’s Day a few days ago. In it, the mom’s young son had just made her a … wind chime.

(On another level, while driving in Ohio we accidentally set our navigator app to the wrong city! so ended up taking a turn off the freeway and down country roads to correct our course so a. We missed a horrid traffic accident that tied up traffic ahead; and b. the alternate route we corrected took us through the most beautiful countryside in N Ohio and quick and easy back roads all the way home. So was it really a mistake? No. It was little gift.)

***

My Woo-woo Life continued

I’ve shared a running game I have with The Other Side.

It’s not a Ouija board or a table-knocking session or a séance, but it is kind of funny.

If an obscure phrase comes to mind and then within a day that gets repeated randomly from some other source I’ll chalk one up for the “spirit guides”.

(Don’t do this at home.)

So today I was describing the earthquake we had yesterday to my coworkers. Although small on the Richter scale it felt like a giant stump-digger burrowing under our four-story apartment building and it sounded like a hundred maracas shaking the furniture.

So, enchanted with my exciting tale, I went to assist a patient at dinner time.
We watch tv and I feed him little portions.

“I Love Lucy” was on tv- looked like a pilot episode with Milton Berle.

Lucy had a book under her arm on the show that she was going to have signed by the author in the scene. I didn’t watch closely but I looked up from the spoon and the book was called

“Earthquake”

So there ye be.

***

I collect coincidences. They have a spooky/ spiritual component I find intriguing.

I’m reading a literary study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, which delves into Homer’s Odyssey, and Joyce and Pound. It includes the outline of the discovery of archaeological sites that, at the time Joyce and Pound were researching, gave evidence that the ancient texts had a basis in actual places and events, so was breaking news at the time.

I’m reading an old used book from my storage in the garage – a book I haven’t touched in decades- so no online interface. It’s a rare book too and came from a free box decades ago. (Water damage.)

While reading I glance at some online news and see this week’s lunar landing story.

I guess I have to ask Nicholas Cage what it all might mean.

Edit

Space Oddites

I collect coincidences. They have a spooky/ spiritual component I find intriguing.

I’m reading a literary study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, which delves into Homer’s Odyssey, and James Joyce and Ezra Pound. It includes the outline of the discovery of archaeological sites that, at the time Joyce (writing Ulysses) and Pound were researching, gave evidence that the ancient texts of Homer’s Odyssey had a basis in actual places and events, so was breaking news at the time.

I’m reading an old used book from my storage in the garage – a book I haven’t touched in decades- so no online interface. It’s a rare book too and came from a free box decades ago. (Water damage.)

While reading I glance at some online news and see this week’s lunar landing story- the touchdown of lander Odysseus was two nights ago, but the coincident post for me was just now. (Full moon today, in the sign of Virgo.)

As for the moon, an astrophysicist noted that
the landing represents a new era of exploration. Like every adventure, the consequences of ramping up exploration-not yet written.

I guess I have to ask Nicholas Cage what it all might mean.

***

Synchronicity is the divine organizing principle at work and indicate spirit is present and you are not alone

***

My Woo-woo Life continued.

“I never get respect.”

-Rodney Dangerfield

When you read to yourself do you hear the words in your inner ear? I do. Sometimes I borrow voices of famous actors.

I pick up books from my library that call to me and read chapters at random. I read deeply and take my time. Apply imagination.

In my imagination yesterday I used the voice of Rodney Dangerfield to internally vocalize the text of Higher Laws by HD Thoreau, so Dangerfield was performing it as a stand up routine- it works.

Stand up comedians and Thoreau have the same general approach to material and transmission. Plus it was very funny, Dangerfield reading Thoreau. So I read Higher Laws from Walden and final word in Thoreau’s essay was …

“respect”

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy,

and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs,

is more elastic,

more starry,

more immortal

-that is your success.

-Thoreau Higher Laws