1. Hands of Time

Welcome, October.

Do you believe in spirit communication?

I do.

For me it’s coincidences.

Example.

I had the opportunity to visit artists in studio, and one of the artists, while painting, told me she pushed her students in a strident way by clapping her hands to urge them to get busy. “Chop chop!” Let’s go! Get to work!

We discussed how weird and jarring and probably racist that old hackneyed expression is. We laughed about it.

Well, a few days later my wife and I were watching tv and a random program I wasn’t paying any attention to was on in which a character was killed by bad guys, but was awakened by magical powers and the first words the character said coming back to life were: “Chop chop! Let’s go!”

-What?!

I’ve heard psychics say that those weird word coincidences, well, that’s your spirit guides letting you know they’re there.

This happens all the time now.

So tonight I was listening to a nice song called “The Wheel” online -it just appeared while scrolling for a minute before bed. The verse goes “Let us off this Wheel of Karma, let us stop the hands of time.”

And, while listening to this “Hands of Time” thing in bed, I was reading my library book of essays from an art writer I’d never heard of which I just checked out at random to see what it might say about Joan Brown, an artist I’m interested in- (the critic is brilliant by the way- Ingrid Sischy)- I turned the page and the chapter, chapter two, totally random, was entitled:

“Hands of Time”

The random song was playing the exact same words at the exact same time as on the random printed page.

Welcome, October! Veil is thin.

Perhaps it all had something to do with the musician friend that I heard had passed, it happened years ago, but whose passing I just found out about, so new information.

(That would be just like him. Miss that guy. Old roommate. Poet, composer. Always had a band. Really had fun. Brilliant. Creativity everywhere, every minute.)

Or perhaps it was just about Daylight Savings Time. Turning the clocks back for no good reason. Who knows?

Oh now the coyotes have started howling. I like them, too. This universe is quite interesting.

***

Here’s another:

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 you 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.” It just was audible in the background, I wasn’t paying close attention. It actually could be time stamped, if I wanted to. It’s just a turn of phrase. No biggie.

Anyhoo, at that exact moment in which I noticed those words- 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, 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 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.)

2. Woo-woo Friday!

-You’re Gonna Miss My Lovin’ -by Lou Rawls.

So this damn song was stuck in my head all day, and when after work I got to the Ferry Building for empanadas for Ingrid – (because a quiet voice in my mind was absolutely insistent, even though I didn’t really feel like it)-

Well, no sooner had I approached the Ferry Building, than this guy started playing the same damn tune that had been running in my mind all fricking day, live on the plaza. Total lounge-singer swank, completely convincing delivery.

He started playing the stupid song that had been driving me nuts all day- from the beginning!… I put $5 bucks in his hat- (I’m usually a cheapskate)- and that very minute the bell starting ringing on the Ferry Building.

It is ye top of the hour.

Spirit guides, if you’re there, hello. Nice job.

I can’t stand this song!- but now I’m having a great day!

3. My Woo-woo Journey continues

“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.

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

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

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. Basically an anecdote.

So yesterday I open up social media 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. (It’s not viral.)

Boinnnng!

This is the third such coincidence. The last one was opening a page of a library book while a random song played online, which contained in its lyric, in real time, and without forethought, an exact phrase from the page in front of me.

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

I know there may be no bounds to surveillance, but this may be… something.

The quote, 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, continued:

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Watch Out For Quicksand!

I keep a Notebook of Coincidences and note the weirdest ones just for fun.

Coincidence/ Synchronicity must have a somewhat supernatural implication. Like a ghost knocking at the door, or a spirit saying “hi.”

Or perhaps they are projections of an organized mind. But we’re talking about MY mind, so not sure about that.

So today I did some lame smart-ass writing about- duh- Republican Party stupidity, and used “quicksand” as a satirical device.

And then, when I was feeding a patient dinner at the facility, he had on MeTV, with all the old tv shows from the fifties and early sixties. “Rifleman” with Chuck Connors was on. The last five minutes of the episode.

And the photo shows what? It shows what was on tv when I walked in the room. Scary quicksand finale.

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This is random in so many ways, so many possibilities- including not selecting the program, the unplanned time I walked in to serve dinner, and that the patient wasn’t watching his usual station. And I never watch tv.

I arrived just in time to see Chuck Conners pull the people out of… quicksand.

I wrote this thingie below a few hours before going to work, but decided not to post it.

Here’s the editorial piece – really an editorial cartoon- that I had decided too stupid to post. I note that, as a little kid, I thought getting stuck in quicksand was a completely horrifying scenario for tv. Easy to understand if you’re a five year old, and hopeless in every sense known to a kid.

In it goes, to my file on spirit knocking etc.

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The sign says: Quicksand.

Another sign says: Danger! Keep out! Quicksand Ahead!

A third sign says: You are in a Quicksand Zone! Turn back!

A final sign says: Quicksand Beyond This Point! Beware of Quicksand!

And then you see the Republican Party is stuck in… quicksand.

They are just about up to their necks in quicksand!

Do you hand them a branch? They are yelling “we got this!”

(Extra point if you are a Democrat.)

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(Photo is the live screen coincidence as it occurred! Believe it- or not!)

Same day, coyotes again:

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.

So “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.

Coincidental symbol in a note on Ezra Pound and in a detail from Sherwood Anderson’s Horses and Men collection, “The Man Who Became a Woman”; Pound says poets are the centaur, Anderson, that writers would write like horses run. These lines were encountered hours apart but are intuitively interlocking.

1. Centaur – Pound’s symbol for poetry. Though at the beginning of the canto he sees the goat foot among the nymphs, he likes to think of it as firmly planted in reality: 
   “Poetry is a centaur. The thinking, word arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties. It is precisely the difficulty of this amphibious existence that keeps down the census record of good poets” (LE 52).

(From The Cantos Project, online Ezra Pound studies.)

“He wanted to be a writer later and what he said was that when he came to be one he wanted to write the way a well bred horse runs or trots or paces.”

-Sherwood Anderson. “The Man Who Became a Woman”

***

A woo woo story

Three Angels

One day I woke up and wondered how much time I have left.

I thought about mortality and the challenges we’ve all faced lately.

So here’s the woo-woo part.

We took a Sunday drive to Pescadero, beautiful summer day, gorgeous, and we’re excited by our favorite little town. We took pictures of flowers and we stopped to look at the site of a restaurant we used to go to, that burned down years ago. A family place with a general store and a pizza oven and a big garden yard to relax in.

It’s rebuilt. Still empty, but a new building is complete.

Right then a gentleman came and answered our questions without being asked. He just joined us.

He insisted on telling us a joke or two. Usually that’s a sign to get walking asap, but he was really kind.

How come bananas have lots of friends? -They have a peel. You get the idea.

I’m eighty years old, he said. But I have friends who are over a hundred!

I was astonished- he actually was so healthy and fit he looked to be fifty.

He told us he walks the range of hills between Berkeley and Fremont and told us did you know you can find sea shells in the foot hills? It was once ocean floor.

He said look and opened his phone: here’s Mt Diablo, I walk with two waking sticks- and here’s a rock they call “Spock” because you can see a profile of pointy ears right in the crashing waves on the shore by Santa Cruz.

So ok, here’s a crazy old man who looks like he’s thirty but he’s close to one hundred and we’re starved let’s close this colloquy, am I right?

But he was so kind and generous with his positive outlook on life.

He walked us to the general store and there we parted to buy sandwiches and begin our outing.

While we were chatting I noticed he had dentures.

I’ve lost some teeth -part of my health challenges in the last 6 months; I’ve lost some of my uppers and it’s really tough- in this society we are all so harshly judged on our appearance and yes, I noticed he appeared to have dentures and noticed that they looked comfortable and like they fit well. I just noted that observation quietly to myself. It’s a personal anxiety. On my mind.

So that was a total interruption in our day, occurred as soon as we had parked. He just appeared there. And as quickly left.

So later I was thinking how in the morning I awakened with deep almost dangerous thoughts of mortality, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps sooner than later.

And within an hour we had met this guy, who put himself on our path, lifted our spirits, was a picture of health and vitality at an advanced age, and appreciated the ancient landscape of California as we do, and even the geology, which is kind of a hobby with me and he had the teeth thing figured out. And pretty quickly he was gone.

I thought that must be what it’s like to meet an angelic being. His message met the demand of the moment, my desultory meditation on death, with a message of life and continuing adventures.

Then I had the thought that mystics have asserted, that spirit-signs come in threes.

So right after sandwiches at the little general store, Ingrid bought a silver cookie cutter at an antique store right across the street- an angel. She loves it!

So I thought, well, possibly that’s the second angel but what about the third angel, if guidance comes in three?

I couldn’t see another angel sign, I scratched my head and thought.

Wait! What is the name of the country store where we all went and parted?

Arcangeli Grocery.

Archangel!

And -postscript -I shook hands (fist-bumped) with the gentleman and introduced myself and he told me his name: Manuel. Which is short for “Emmanuel” which is spiritual for divine presence.

You tell me.

Oh- later, while I was noting these things at home, I listened to a speaker online talking about our recent full moon and solstice (Summer!) and she mentioned the symbolism of how the deeper self seems to arise from the source as from depths of the sea, and the gentleman told us he saw sea shells up in the California hills.

***

(Later that same week)

Woo woo -ology.

These unpredictable things are becoming predictable.

What the…? Dept

So I was just musing about an art project for no particular reason – the Day of the Dead altar we do each year. I was at work where we assemble it in the fall.

Then on my desk someone left an old jewelry box; a bit later my supervisor said oh that’s for your altar this year. I’m having another one turned into a music box and I don’t need this.

Then 20 minutes later I went to do residents laundry and 1/2 way done with folding. All Saints Day. Which is part of the two-day festival for Day of the Dead. Completely random -two unrelated people’s objects- and nearly simultaneous too.

The resident just brought that laundry from his apartment this week.