In the movie The Matrix, the protagonist Neo thinks that he has seen a cat moving in the same direction twice, and casually mentions this to his team. They are immediately alerted, and rapidly explain that the phenomenon known as ‘déjà vu,’ or recalling an event as though it occurred before, is actually a glitch in the simulated world—The Matrix—in which they travel.

In other words, a slightly odd event reflected that their ‘reality’ was fabricated.

That movie is fictional.

Yet, sometimes life reveals cracks, anomalies, oddities and glitches that make us question the fabric of reality in which we live. Is the world that surrounds us as logical, solid and predictable as we have been raised to believe?

Below are three examples (and there are plenty more) of unusual events that made me question how much we really know about our surroundings.

Islands.

In March of 2018 I stayed at Baita 1697 ski lodge in the village of Pattemouche in the Italian Alps, near Sestriere. I spent days with a group from England—Florence and Katie  and Matthew from Oxford. These individuals were wonderful—polite, eager to ski, inquisitive and kind.

On our last night together, we walked to dinner at La Greppia Restaurant, where we ate fondue and drank a bottle of 2008 Barbaresco wine from Pelissero.

Katie asked us where we wanted to live in the world, if we had a choice. Matt said British Columbia in Canada; Florence mentioned somewhere in Italy, and Katie said she was enjoying England. They joked that I already lived in France, so the question wasn’t relevant. Regardless, I told them that above all, I’d like to visit the Canary Islands, because I had heard that temperatures there were temperate all year long.

That conversation took place at about 9.30 p.m.

We soon walked home and slept. According to my phone, I received an email at 11.57 p.m. that night—three minutes before what would have been my mother’s birthday. The message was titled Trip to Islas Canarias. The text came from an American woman I had met at an event in Bordeaux earlier that year. In the text, her organization invited me on a trip to the Canary Islands.

Coincidence? Indeed. I’ll thank the spirit of my mother for that one.

Isthmus.

In 1998 I accepted a job with an international engineering consulting company based in Washington D.C. named The Berger Group. Within weeks of working, my supervisor offered me an opportunity to work in the country of Panama. I said yes, but wondered had I made the right choice.

That weekend an American friend I had worked with in Angola sent me a humorous email, suggesting what to do in D.C. if I had free time.

‘If you find yourself alone in D.C. this weekend, go to Georgetown. Ask any woman if she knows a good used bookstore. Keep asking until you get the answer you need, enter the indicated bookstore and start counting bookcases from the door. Go to the seventh bookcase on your right, the seventh shelf down, and select the seventh book from the left. Displays around the cash register do not count as bookcases. If the bookstore has an upstairs, go up and begin counting there. If it has a basement, by no means enter it. If someone asks if they can help you, do not keep these instructions secret. Loiter as long as you like, buy the book and then peruse it over a mug of coffee.’

I did so. In Georgetown, I asked a series of women until I found a bookstore, and then entered, went to the seventh bookcase, seventh shelf down, and—since books were piled vertically—counted seven books downward on the leftmost pile. I pulled out that book. It was a fictional work written by Eric Zenecy.

The title: Panama.

Suddenly, my doubts about accepting that position in Panama evaporated.

Waves.

Three years ago I wrote a fictional story for this blog. I wrote it at a hotel one evening while on a trip to coastal Abruzzo, Italy.

The story mentions, among other things, meeting a red haired woman named Mary, Frank Sinatra music, measuring gravity waves, coincidences and the movie Blade Runner.

The next day I was introduced to our tour guide—a lovely red-haired woman named Maria. On that day also the Wall Street Journal published an article titled ‘When World’s Collide, Astronomers Watch’—about measuring gravity waves. That issue of the WSJ also included an article titled ‘The Science Behind Coincidences.’ Within 48 hours of writing that piece I also read a New Yorker Magazine article that included a review of the new Blade Runner 2049 movie; it mentioned that the movie included Frank Sinatra music.

Statistical chance? Perhaps.

If nothing else, these events reminded me that we are connected to the world around us in ways we have not learned to understand.

Estuary in Blaye

I had difficulty waking. Felt heavy and tired. Finally, I got out of bed about 8.00 a.m. to go running. Stepped outside the apartment and saw neighbor Lara—also dressed to run. She suggested we go together. I would usually refuse, as she sprints like a rabbit, but the timing of our coincidental meeting appeared auspicious—so I said yes.

Vines along the running route

We ran down the main street of Blaye and then up the path along the side of the citadelle fortress, then back to the bicycle path leading toward the town of Etauliers, many miles away. Lara pulled out her phone, ignored the headphones, and played a podcast aloud so we both could hear. It was from some ‘Oprah’ inspirational series, and included Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert began by saying, generally, that if we believe the universe is indeed benevolent, then at times she wonders why she has been put into a particular situation.

Country scene outside Blaye

Soon, after a mile of running at a pace too fast for me, I said farewell to Lara and returned to Blaye. Yet the words stayed in my mind. Belief, benevolent universe, purpose of particular situation.

Later, Lara sent me a text saying next time we’d listen to a podcast about Wayne Dyer and manifestations.

Lara (foreground) and her visiting friend

I’d already read a few books by Dyer. I searched my past journals and found this from October of 2013.

Today I took a break from work, checked out my online version of the Amazon Kindle ereader, and found a book Wishes Fulfilled by Dr. Wayne Dyer, which I had read before but began re-reading.  He gives ample consideration of the power of imagination in creating our future lives.

 ‘Remind yourself that your imagination is yours to use as you decide, and that everything you wish to manifest into your physical world must first be placed firmly in your imagination in order to grow.’

From a village in Languedoc, France

This excerpt from a past journal ignited memories of opportunity, and power.

In my own writing, I had suggested that the world is partially objective, and partially a creation of our own thoughts. In a chapter titled ‘Greenland’ from my book The Synchronous Trail—Enlightening Travels, is this:

Humans have not yet learned the geology of serendipity; we cannot discern the common strata that underlies the terrain of coincidence. This understanding will emerge with time and bring with it a different respect for the world in which we live, a world that is partly a collection of objects and partially a projection of thought. 

Ancient ship docked in Bordeaux city

Reflecting on those words as well as on the books by Dyer, and what Gilbert said during the podcast, brought a reminder of the power of what I call ‘rotating reality’—changing the very fabric of future events using thought. If a multiverse exists—that is, an infinite number of parallel and alternate universes—why should we not ‘surf’ to relatively adjacent universes that are more benign, plentiful, benevolent and healthier?

12th century copper – showing respect for sharing, and for the printed word

And even if there is no multiverse, sometimes, when we are calm and confident, we all manage to navigate ourselves into situations we have dreamt about.

Which is why it’s important to remember the power of dreams, and imagination.

From the bookshelf of an ally who actually speaks French

Waking later than planned?

It turned out to be most beneficial.

Rural southern France

When people travel, different aspects of their experience resonate with them more deeply than others. For some, it is restaurants and cuisine. For others, it may be local languages, history, theater or archaeology.

For me, it has always been geography.

Landscapes can haunt us, often in profound ways.

No wonder I appreciated non-fiction books by Barry Lopez (Crossing Open Ground) and the fictional work titled The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich when in college. Even The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. These book thrust me into different geographies and landscapes and tethered them with emotion.

Then, there came a high altar of writing that invokes landscape—books by Edward Abbey.

I had finished college in Boulder, Colorado, and had a lover named Katie. She had been my boss when I did a door-to-door job (for $4.15 an hour selling subscriptions to The Colorado Public Interest Research Group) in towns surrounding Boulder. She had an apartment located sort of west of, and a block south of, Old Chicago’s Restaurant on Pearl Street in Boulder. While we were there once, she told me about the author Edward Abbey. She was shocked I had not yet heard of him. He wrote the non-fictional book Desert Solitaire, and the fictional book The Monkey Wrench Gang. I loved both books for their raw honesty about the (then) unappreciated beauty of the southwest canyonlands geography of the United States. The author could skillfully translate the attraction of landscape into words.

Soon, because of an interest in rock climbing and participation as a member of the volunteer Rocky Mountain Rescue Group in Boulder, I applied for—and was accepted—to an Advanced Mountaineering course in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming held by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). More climbing followed, as well as more reading about landscapes and attitudes. Sand County Almanac by Ado Leopold; Touching The Void by Joe Simpson.

Most other instructors at NOLS were truly inspiring—rabidly intelligent, well read, athletic and craving a life far away from clocks and timesheets and pension plans. They told me of other books to read—Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon, Basin and Range by John McPhee. Even A Moveable Feast by Hemingway.

Just before I attended college in Boulder, and long before I Met Katie or heard of NOLS, I read an article in Outside Magazine titled Moments of Doubt, by David Roberts. It stunned  me. It is the true story about a rock climber whose climbing partner died when they climbed the Flatiron peaks behind Boulder. Years later, when I was a volunteer member of Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, a young woman near the base of the Third Flatiron died while I was trying to resuscitate her. She had slipped and fallen while hiking a steep trail. That event, also, stunned me.

It turned out—I learned afterwards in a most bizarre way—that she had grown up in the same small town as my family (population 500) in Illinois, and was known by my siblings. A bizarre series of events pivoting around this incident ignited what was to become a life-long fascination with (and interest in learning about) the power of coincidences—synchronicity. (I self-published a few books on the topic, and begin one with the story of what happened that day in Boulder.)

The memory of that event is saturated with recollections of vast, gorgeous tracts of natural landscape in the hills behind Boulder. Since then the realization has grown clear of how important landscapes are to memories of times, situations and relationships in life.

Landscapes haunt us. The sight of peaks and bays and ferns and snow and rivulets and the sound of flapping guillemots or terns or wood pigeons resonates deep within our cranial cavities—even unconsciously as a memory—forever.

Geography still compels me. Work—as in toil and spreadsheets and organizational meetings and the joy of accomplishing long term infrastructure projects such as constructing a rural water system or road, or the bliss of an article being published nationally or internationally—is still exciting. But most of all when these revolve around an immersion in some diverse and intriguing geography. It is the same with food and history—the  memory of a good wine or meal often brings a memory of natural surroundings.

Different memories are powerful for different people. I recall waking up in a tent on the sands of Kilcoole Beach in Ireland with the sound of Irish Sea breakers; the scent and touch of rock while ascending the 14th and final rock climbing pitch on Mount Sacagawea in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming; the recollection of walking over chestnut covered hillsides in the Ticino, or the strange allure of visually barren deserts. Wild or stunning landscapes are not just beautiful: being immersed in them can harmonize with our own desire for having fewer constraints and bigger spaces for our own thinking.

The association of landscape with memory is also practical in at least two ways. First, it can remind us of why it is always good—for health and alertness—to get out and take a walk, preferably in a ‘cathedral’ of wild space or preferably close to natural settings. Second, it is a reminder that we should appreciate the creation of parks, wilderness areas and national monuments to protect gorgeous tracts of natural spaces on this planet from billboards and unchecked growth.

I’ve tried different altered states of consciousness in life. These have been induced not only by alcohol but also by other mind altering substances.

And I’ve learned how we can also reach altered states, and serenity, without substances.

One way, for example, is driving a well engineered automobile along a well engineered road (preferably along a winding canyon, while listening to beautiful stereo music). This can lull our mind into a state of serenity. This is actually not surprising, considering that such a state of harmonious motion and control did not exist for most of the long period of human evolution: the experience is bizarre enough to push our consciousness into a state of awe.

Another example is love.

Although it may not be love.

It may be something else.

Entirely.

It certainly has to do with being influenced by another person at a distance, without physical, acoustical, visual or electronic communication. It has happened only twice in my life (not the state of being in love, but encountering love as an altered state) and it was surreally, bizarrely and powerfully positive. It once lasted a week. Another time it lasted only a minute. On both occasions it put my mind into a completely transcendent condition, where fear and worry and concerns about the future became, for a time, thoroughly absent.

The first time occurred over a decade ago while working a job I had no love for. I found myself one day feeling a sense of peace and invincibility, as though there was no need to worry about anything—whether related to income or the future. This feeling stayed with me for days. I felt a sense of peace that lacked all worry. Wondering where this sense came from, I carefully checked whether any of the following had increased or decreased during that time: my exercising, eating habits, or levels and frequency of drinking caffeine or wine.

Nothing had changed.

I also confirmed that I had received no good news or pay raise and had not been subjected to any external factors that would have changed my demeanor or thinking. The weather had not altered significantly. Nothing had changed. Yet the feeling lasted, gloriously, for days. During this time I thought to myself—this must be what heaven feels like! At the end of the week I had a spontaneous and unplanned meeting with friends in another city, including with a woman who had been quite important in the past. We did not know in advance that we would meet again, and our meeting was purely platonic and unremarkable. Yet I strongly suspected that the previous feelings during the past week were somehow linked to the bond previously forged with this individual.

This also happened again last year while I was inside a wine cellar on the Italian island of Sicily. I had communicated that very day with a woman in another country by sending her a message, wishing her the best on her birthday. We had met years earlier, seen each other only a few times, but maintained a correspondence due, I think, to some sort of mutual interest. I was in some part of the cellar (and had not yet sipped any wine that day) when this sense of peace coated me. All of the sudden my concerns about having to take copious notes to write an article about wine evaporated. The same feeling as a decade ago settled on me: don’t worry about anything. Because everything is perfect and will work out splendidly. Again, I suspected that this feeling was somehow linked to this person I had communicated with.

Perhaps not love, but some other bond somehow connected us.

And yet, this is just anecdotal recollection (although I do have journal entries to back up the times as having been remarkable).

The point is this: I believe we can, on this earth, reach altered states of consciousness through connections with other people that are not physical, verbal or acoustic. There is power in relationships that can take us to higher levels, and when we are at those higher plateaus we realize that there is a realm (whether in this life or on some plane that may not exist until after we depart this earth) in which our quotidian fears and worries and doubts and concerns and frustrations vanish. It is an amazing space. And we can, at times, reach that place while we live. The connection with others is critical. Especially when we share with those others mutual intrigue. Just how to make those events occur more often is a mystery.

These experiences also left a lingering question. If that sense of peace says, so confidently, don’t worry about anything, shouldn’t I pay more attention to that message?

Thanks for tuning in.

In the next weeks I’ll review books about Renaissance era Florence, and artists who lived there.

Ample antelope in Malawi

In past posts I’ve written about the power of coincidence and also mentioned  my own writings about synchronicity.

Because I’ll be traveling to South Africa within days, I thought it appropriate to mention past writing related to Africa.

The following is a chapter named ‘Malawi,’ from a little known book I wrote (one of two) about coincidences, titled The Synchronous Trail—Enlightening Travels. This second chapter highlights how notable coincidences can catch our interest. The rest of the book, essentially a travelogue, explains the search for—and discovery of—what ‘meaning’ these events may have in our lives. Chapters in the book are named after locations (such as Colorado, England, Dubai, Guatemala). This chapter begins with a quote from an autobiography written by actor Michael Caine. I took all photos below during three years spent as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi.

“Nothing in Africa is without its purpose, if you look deep enough.”

What’s It All About?

by Michael Caine

Encounter with roadkill

For years after the accident at the Flatirons I often criticized my interest in coincidences. To link tenuous connections together and declare they had ‘meaning’ was nonsensical. Or was it? As time slipped by it turned harder to deny the obvious. Since that day at the Flatirons, the relevance of such events in my life grew difficult to ignore. Much of this awareness came during three years that I spent living and working in the small Central African country named Malawi.

At eleven o’clock each Saturday morning, a British Airways flight from London touches down at Malawi’s International Airport outside the city of Lilongwe. The plane’s final approach throws a massive shadow over green maize stalks below. From inside the plane I looked down at the countryside, mesmerized by the contrast between the sight of simple mud huts and the technological complexity of the aircraft that carried us.

Looking down from Mount Mulanje

After touchdown our group of Peace Corps volunteers paced through muggy air, across tarmac and into the terminal building. For the next two years this little known nation was to be our home. Smaller than the surrounding countries of Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia, Malawi was packed tight with generous people and strange surprises. This nation of eight million citizens had only two traffic lights. The ruling ninety year old dictator—Hastings Kamuzu Banda—had spent decades working as a medical doctor in both the United States and England before he returned to rule his homeland. The Malawian people both despised and loved Kamuzu. Though they dreaded his iron–fisted rule, they danced and sang eulogies to him whenever a helicopter delivered this leader to villages and towns throughout the nation.

Lush, mountainous, and the fourth poorest country on earth, Malawi was steeped in such paradoxes. Yet the land of rolling green hills stayed tranquil as Tumbuka, Ngoni, Yao, and Chewa tribes maintained a guarded peace among themselves. Over eighty five percent of Malawians lived in rural villages, from lowlands scrunched against massive Lake Malawi—the third largest lake in Africa—to pine coated highlands of the Vipya plateau. Though poor, the nation was clean, orderly, and safe.

Myself center, friends Dave on the right and Cathy on left

I was sent to work in the northern ‘city’ of Mzuzu. Living in this small highland town with its British infrastructure, temperate climate and hills was a dream come true. Once there I was assigned to manage the construction of small water supply schemes for rural areas. The work combined organizing local work crews and traveling through lush mountains. With Mzuzu as a base, I untucked my shirt, laced up both boots and began to build pipelines in the bush. For years our work crews hiked over mountain trails and plodded through rivers—surveying, designing, and working to supply villagers with water.

During these years in Malawi, surprising coincidences wrapped themselves around my life like a shawl. My determination to unravel their essence turned into a personal detective story, an esoteric fascination that few others understood. Each such encounter triggered a feeling of richness, a sense that I was somehow playing catch with magic. The more I dwelled on each of these events, the more intriguing each grew. Though I tried to analyze where these scenarios came from, my crowbar of logic never pried these events open to understanding. This left me to speculate on what purpose, if any, such events might serve. These included the following.

&&&

Medicine men – or Gule Wamkuli

One day in the Capital Hill sector of Lilongwe city I sat inside the United States Information Service library. I was turning pages of a Harpers magazine when another volunteer named Fred trudged through the doorway. Fred was short and burly and had eyelashes that seemed to swim when he laughed. For reasons I never understood, he constantly encouraged me to become a writer, a ‘beat reporter,’ and to follow in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac.

I watched Fred select a thick red book from a shelf.  He then sat down across from me at the same varnished table. I spied the title of the book he opened: Poems by Alan Ginsberg – 1947 to 1980. He tilted it my way and pointed to a poem titled ‘Howl.’

“Masterpiece,” he said. “Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassidy—the Beat Generation. Rode the railways together. Hitchhiked west.  Saw life from a different angle than everyone around them.  This poem is Ginsberg’s masterpiece—you have to read it.”

With little conviction, I nodded at Fred and then flipped to the next page of Harpers magazine. I stared in shock: there were the opening lines of the poem ‘Howl,’ followed by an interview with Alan Ginsberg.

&&&

Looking off Mount Mulanje into clouds

Mike, a British friend who lived in the town of Mzuzu, met and married a woman named Sylvia from the country of Sierra Leone. Several of us attended their wedding celebrations on a hillside above Mzuzu. Weeks later, Sylvia became ill. When her sickness worsened she was admitted to St. John’s hospital, a compound of simple brick buildings run by missionary staff. Sylvia soon went unconscious with a rare and severe case of Hepatitis–B. Though Mike kept vigilant by her bedside throughout a long and harrowing weekend, Sylvia remained in a coma. Word of her condition floated throughout town, paralyzing the reverie that we volunteers usually celebrated our weekends with.

Sylvia died on a Monday night. Her sister, the only other person I ever met from Sierra Leone, remained by Sylvia’s bed with Mike. After learning the news at the hospital the next morning, I left the grounds remorsefully, bid farewell to an Irish priest who provided her with last rites, and drove my motorcycle home. Once there I sat on a small concrete porch shaded by a skinny paw–paw tree. I sipped Malawian tea from a cheap green plastic cup and opened a pile of mail. One letter was from a friend in Chicago. She had not written in over a year. On the second page of her letter she apologized that the first page was only a copy of a general letter she had written to her landlord the same day. He now lived, she wrote, in Sierra Leone.

&&&

Northern Region motorcycle tour with then girlfriend (and still a good friend)

One afternoon, while sitting at home down Kaningina Drive, I remembered a short story I had written months earlier. It was about time spent living in Ireland as a boy. The piece described hiking above thrashing waves of the Irish Sea and along the Cliff Walk in County Wicklow. It contained dialog between myself and a friend named Koenraad. After remembering this short story, I searched through folders, found the piece, and spent hours editing paragraphs. I added a new line that described the harbor in the town of Greystones, located where the Cliff Walk begins its coastal ascent toward the town of Bray—five miles to the north. While editing the syntax, I remembered Koenraad. It had been over a year since he last wrote.  I had given up hope of hearing from him in the near future.

Later that day I received two letters, both from Ireland. One was from Koenraad. The other was written by a friend named Susan. She sent me a Christmas card. The cover showed a picture of Greystones harbor.

&&&

Natural jewelry

Several days after this event, a group of volunteer friends stopped at my house to spend the night. They were driving north from the capital city of Lilongwe toward Nyika National Park, where they planned to spend days hiking over highland acres and spying Roan and Sable antelope. They pitched tents on the small lawn behind my house or unrolled their sleeping bags on the floor of my home. On the porch, a woman named Laura started reading a book. I asked her its name.

She tilted the cover toward me: Matryona’s House.

“By Solzhenitsyn,” she said.

Another volunteer standing nearby—Michelle—chirped in.  “I started reading the same book yesterday, without knowing Laura had a copy.  Isn’t that wild?”

“Some coincidence,” Laura agreed.

A third volunteer stood near to us.  She added, in a deadpan voice: “My mother sent me that book last week.”

&&&

‘Strate perm’ hairstylist in Chitipa

Even as an engineer on the cold–blooded trail of logic in life, I recognized something amiss about these events. None tallied with the diet of cause and effect I had been weaned to believe in. An unknown energy seemed to lasso these events together, though how or why I had no idea. Trying to guess the cause of these events was confusing, though I began to suspect that reality’s fabric might be more pliable than most of us are aware of.

Just as a geologist discerns patterns in granite to help reveal the earth’s history, I wanted to inspect features associated with coincidences to learn more of how they operated. I hoped that doing this might improve my understanding of the surrounding world.

Tea fields at the bast of Mount Mulanje

My fascination with coincidences derived from intuition, not logic. During my years in Malawi I wielded the engineering tools of physics, mathematics and empirical friction loss equations on the job. At the same time I was immersed in a sea of inexplicable phenomena in which events, images and people often seemed attracted to each other for no apparent reasons. When I switched off the inner babble of work details and took the time, instead, to wonder what was taking place around me, I noticed more and more coincidences. It seemed as though an open mind actually amplified the recognition of their occurrence.

Antelope on Nyika Plateau

The more I thought about these bizarre events, the more mysterious they turned. During evenings I often paced down a dirt road behind Mzuzu and onto a trail that crossed three short wooden bridges over Lunyangwa River. One evening during this walk I realized that what bothered me the most about coincidences was not that they existed, but that so few people noticed them.

Something bizarre yet important was going on in the world—a simple phenomenon with potentially massive power—that few others considered relevant. It was as though I had dreamed of a wheel in a wheel–less world. Only when I read about other people’s fascination with coincidences did I feel that my curiosity might one day be vindicated.

&&&

Just saying hi

In his book The World The World, the author Norman Lewis wrote of a surprising incident that took place during the 1940s. He had arranged to have proofs of his new book Within the Labyrinth sent to the address of a friend in London.

“It was to this address that I arranged for the proofs of Within the Labyrinth to be sent so that I could correct them before leaving. The proofs, however, failed to arrive, so I rang up the publisher and was told that by mistake they had been sent to 4 Gordon Square. This was about a hundred yards away so I walked across to collect them, only to discover that a second Norman Lewis lived at this address, and that he, too, was a Cape author who had recently completed a hugely successful updated version of Roget’s Thesaurus. Unfortunately, I was told, the second N.L. had left the country only two days before, and was presumed to have taken my proofs with him. Three days later I stepped down from the Air France plane at Beirut, where Oliver awaited me. ‘We’re having a little party for you at the embassy,’ he said, and minutes later I suffered a surprise from which I have never wholly recovered, for the first introduction was to the man with whom I shared names, who had also stopped off at Beirut on his way to some Eastern destination. It was a circumstance that further encouraged Oliver’s fascination with the paranormal, and inspired him to begin a work to be entitled The Mechanisms of Coincidence, although the book was never finished.”

A little known bay on Lake Malawi in the northern region

In another book, titled One in a Million: The World of Bizarre Coincidences, Philip Schofield described another example of someone being reunited with their text.

“Actor Anthony Hopkins agreed to play a leading role in the 1974 film of the novel The Girl from Petrovka by George Feiffer. His attempts at acquiring a copy of the book to give him an insight into the story were not successful. After trawling the London bookshops he went to catch a tube train at Leicester Square and noticed a book discarded on a platform seat. It was a copy of the novel he had been searching for. Someone had scribbled notes in the margin, but he was pleased to have found it at last.

Well worn tennis shoes on the Viphya Plateau, Northern Region

“When Hopkins finally went abroad to start filming, he met George Feiffer for the first time. The author complained that he had lost his own copy of the novel which he had annotated. Apparently, a friend had borrowed it and mislaid it in London.  The actor produced the copy he had found at Leicester Square. It was Feiffer’s lost book.”

In his autobiography What’s it all About? the actor Michael Caine describes how he first met and fell in love with his wife. He was watching a television commercial about Maxwell House coffee that was filmed in Brazil. Caine thought that one of the women dancing in the commercial was beautiful. He felt so attracted to her that he immediately wanted to fly to Brazil to meet her. Instead, he discovered from a friend that she lived just down the road from him in London. After sharing telephone calls and then meeting, a romance between the two soon blossomed. He and Shakira were soon married. After describing this in his autobiography, Caine wrote: “Coincidence is a funny thing. I have been writing these last few pages on 14 February 1992, St. Valentines Day, and Shakira called me a little while ago to watch television for a few minutes, as they were playing that commercial and telling the story of how I met her.”

Paddling youngster on Lake Malawi

In her book Out of Africa, the author Karen Blixen described how a bad train of fortune disturbed her life on a farm in Kenya. She then reflected on the wave of events.

“All this could not be, I thought, just coincidence of circumstances, what people call a run of bad luck, but there must be some central principle within it.  If I could find it, it would save me.  If I looked in the right place, I reflected, the coherence of things might become clear to me. I must, I thought, get up and look for a sign.

“Many people think it an unreasonable thing, to be looking for a sign. This is because of the fact that it takes a particular state of mind to be able to do so, and not many people have ever found themselves in such a state. If in this mood, if you ask for a sign, the answer cannot fail you; it follows as the natural consequence of the demand.”

Usisya village on Lake Malawi (I designed that white house on the hill)

Blixen described how she walked outside and witnessed the spectacle of a chicken pecking the tongue out of a lizard’s mouth. This action ensured that the lizard would die a slow, labored death from hunger. Blixen interpreted this event as a sign, an arrow that pointed toward her future. She suspected that bad harvests would continue to ruin the livelihood of her farm, causing it economic death, as slow and painful as that suffered by the lizard. She then decided to leave the farm. She believed that the coincidental timing of her searching for a sign and the unfolding of this scenario reflected the truth that she was ready to leave Kenya.

Fishing for ‘usipa’ fish on Lake Malawi at Usisya

These stories make amusing anecdotes. The problem is that the only rational way to explain coincidences is to attribute them to sheer chance. Believing that coincidences might be anything else butts heads against the thought processes that built the dams, bridges and highways pictured on the walls of the engineering college in Colorado where I spent five years studying. Most of the professors who drilled calculus, physics, mechanics and thermodynamics lessons into my head would probably have labeled my interest in coincidences as wacky. For them, looking for ‘meaning’ in such events would likely ring with the sound of mysticism.

While I wrestled with the truth that I stayed intensely curious about something illogical, coincidences kept dropping all around me, like leaves in autumn.

Excerpt From The Synchronous Trail – Enlightening Travels, by T. Mullen. Roundwood Press.

Thanks for reading Roundwood Press again! Please also check out posts from my wine blog: Vino Voices.

My latest Forbes posts are here, and include three fresh pieces posted yesterday, about Italian wine, Azorean tours and Bordeaux dining.

1.

When I woke up the universe was different.

Let me modify that. It was fundamentally—no, wrong word—operationally, similar.

But not the same.

It was a modified universe.

First was the fog. There’s never fog where I live. Well, not much. But on this Tuesday morning ground fog was everywhere outside. Pervasive. Like the famed London fog of a century ago, before they stopped using chimney fires. There it was. Some of it as thick as soup.

I woke at 5.30 a.m. and, dang, it was still there by 9.30 in the morning. I was working from home and this struck me as slightly weird.

But, hey, no big deal.

I mean—it’s just fog.

Next, bicycles. While I sat on the porch drinking coffee a couple rode past on their mountain bikes.

And, whoaa, if they didn’t both have three wheels!

Not like a tricycle, but three wheels in a row. One behind the other. In sequence.

Never saw that before.

I thought, well that’s some new trend. Like motorized paddle boards. Or goat yoga.

Ten minutes later, some older dude pedaled right past my porch on this ancient Schwinn. It was like a 30-year old ten speed. And—no kidding, three frickin’ wheels. One-after-the-other.

I stood and shook my head and soon noticed Major Paradigm Discrepancy Number 3:

A Honda Civic drove past with lights on because of the fog. The left back light was about half as bright as the right back light. It also blinked.

Big deal?

Well, yeah.

Because ten minutes earlier a UPS truck had driven through my neighborhood.

And, guess what?

Same thing. Dimmer back light on the left, blinking.

Remember that Tom Hanks movie where he was a castaway on a desert isle and then came back home? He worked for Federal Express. But in the movie the Fedex box he had kept and later delivered had gold angel wings painted on it. And we wondered what that was about—because normal FedEx boxes don’t have gold angel wings.

But you just had to accept it.

That was how it was. Mildly tweaked reality: fog, extra wheel, wonky brake lights. Like being in a movie that is slightly different from reality.

But I accepted it.

I left my second cup of coffee on the porch table and went for a walk. On the way I opened a cell phone and began typing a text to my editor.

Then I noticed that the keyboard had no X.

None.

Do you know how unsettling it is to wake up in a world with only 25 letters in the English alphabet?

2.

I understand, from an avid reader and a lay person’s point of view, the basics of quantum entanglement, of worm holes linking black holes, of multiverses and of Schroedinger’s cat never really being quite dead or alive but statistically leaning one way or the other. I get it.

I read the Dancing Wu Li Masters in youth and recently bought a special edition of Scientific American where all these physics wizards from John Hopkins and Oxford and Berkeley and the CERN laboratory near Geneva explain all this mind-boggling stuff in an easy to grasp lay persons’ terms.

Sure.

I still have to reread and learn to difference between the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the cosmological theory of the multiverse. I mean one was caused by the Big Bang and the other just reflects the nature of reality.

Something like that.

Right?

So on this foggy Tuesday morning about a block and a half from my house an ambulance whizzed past, flashing pink and green lights—think about those colors—and, instead of blaring a siren, it blasted Frank Sinatra’s I Did it My Way. It must have been a bad accident because three minutes later a cop car whizzed past.

You guessed it.

Same again: pink, green, Sinatra.

Here were my choices: I could tell someone in authority about having woken up in an altered universe, but no one else looked rattled by these colors and siren sounds and they might try to put me into a loony bin.

I could wait to wake up, and meanwhile do nothing.

Or, being quite certain I was actually awake, I could learn to surf this dip into an alternate reality.

Maybe my bank account had more funds? Or maybe women asked dudes out on dates?

Heck, maybe eating carbohydrates and drinking red wine would actually make me thinner.

Regardless, I was quite satisfied at having adopted this new mercenary attitude.

Maybe I could pedal a bestseller: How to Get Rich and Improve Your Love Life By Slipping into An Alternate Universe in 6 Easy Steps. The first being somehow to wake up and seek confirmation by looking for three wheeled bicycles.

Only I wasn’t sure how to go about consciously doing that.

3.

Then I met Mary.

I drove to my editor’s office and on the way got a flat tire and was fixing it along the roadside when a car pulled up beside me and this redhead exited and insisted she help. So I let her hand me lug bolts and thanked her before she left, but first she leaned over and rubbed her left cheek against my left cheek, cat style, before she walked away. She told me her name was Mary.

I thought that was just some hippy-dippy college crap like girls saying ‘namaste,’ or maybe something cultural like French folks kissing each others’ cheeks. But after that, I pulled over to a 7-11 store and bought some unleaded gas and a Kit Kat bar, and damn if the girl behind the counter—ponytails and dungarees—leaned over and did the same!

It felt good. Like a more intimate version of ‘Have a nice day.’

Maybe this alternate universe had changed not only in nature and engineering but also social and cultural norms. Alhough I can’t grasp the benefits of that bizarre third bicycle wheel I certainly felt happier after those cheek rubs. It was like sharing a family cooked dinner in rural Italy. There was something intimately, unquantifiable beneficial about those cheek rubs.

It’s hard to share verbally. Sort of like being unable to describe an altered state of consciousness because, well, adequate words have not been invented.

4.

A month later there was still all this damn fog.

Beside that, a few other reality modifications arrived as surprises.

You didn’t have to pay credit card bills by any date for years, and the interest didn’t get higher. Newly constructed churches had no roofs and congregations brought their umbrellas. The Central African Republic and Guyana didn’t exist. And China had not one, but nine time zones. Mick Jagger was a born again Christian and had quit singing. The solar system still included Pluto as a planet, but had two other new planets. And, most tattoos were phosphorescent.

5.

Beside that, life stayed much unchanged.

I kept writing articles with words that didn’t include X’s, and my pay slips were the same (although bonuses were given at Halloween instead of Christmas).

The fog was like that incessant rain in the original Blade Runner movie, so I just got used to it.

I still baked bread during weekends and went running for exercise because I wasn’t getting near one of those three wheeled bikes.

One day I took my car in to get the radio fixed and damn if the mechanic didn’t turn my way, wipe her hands on a dingy towel and smile.

It was Mary.

Two weeks later my father in law (this is weird: he now sported an earring) was walking with me around Home Depot. He was telling me about problems he was having with the transmission in his Ford truck and at that very moment red haired Mary pushed her cart around the aisle and almost hit us.

Cheek rub. Smiles.

I noticed that there was an association with meeting Mary and automotive issues. This was a strange but not unwelcome coincidence.

Okay.

Read the next words carefully. Because they are really important.

I noticed this coincidence thing with Mary because, knowing that I was living in a somewhat benevolent but Kafkayesque Wonderland, my awareness of everything that was even mildly different was heightened. Otherwise, I would probably not have thought much about the Mary/car thing.

6.

One reason that the multiverse theory exists, at least from my simplistic reading and understanding, is because—theoretically—about 68 percent of the universe is made of ‘dark energy.’

That’s a shocker. Only about five percent is made up of atoms and molecules and stuff that we usually think about when we think of the word ‘matter.’ I mean, that’s what we grew up with.

Dark energy is probably the stuff that is making the universe expand. That means stars are moving away from each other faster and faster and in about a trillion years from now, if we even exist, we would not be able to see stars in the next galaxy because they would have high-tailed it way away from us faster than the speed of light (don’t ask; I really don’t know).

The problem with this theory is that, in reality, there’s still too little measurable energy floating around our universe to tally with this hypothesis.

So, one explanation is that there are many universes, perhaps clustered like bubbles, and that ours just happens to have an abnormally low dose of dark energy. That energy forcing the universe to expand has the pretty cool name of ‘Cosomological Constant.’

Apparently Einstein thought of that. Something to do with his general theory of relativity.

But that reason they gave for the existence of a multiverse?

I don’t buy it.

Here’s why.

When I read about this in Scientific American (picked up at the airport), I thought it was a sort of brazen scientific cop-out.

Let me explain.

Imagine that your dad had asked you, when you were a kid, why you had already spent the allowance money he gave you. And then you told him not to worry because, in an alternate universe, you had not only saved it but had invested it and made a bundle.

See? Think your dad would buy that?

No way!

But some guys were getting away with making up these theories. They added a doctorate to their title, published a few photon related studies, quoted Einstein and somehow literally swept uncertainties away by pointing to a lil’ old otherly dimensional universe (or universes, plural) as the carpet under which to hide their loose ends.

Nice try.

But I don’t buy it.

Not yet, anyhow.

7.

The Mary events were the first time I really took notice of coincidences. I don’t know why. Maybe because she was kind of cute. I’d never really paid much attention to them before. After that, I noticed more coincidences. God winking, as someone once said. Were they meaningful? I have no idea. Vehicle problems and poof! Mary appears. But they showed me that the fabric of reality, the viscosity of experience, was different than what I had considered before. The very engine that drove and sustained evolution appeared to have one very slight gear cog ratio alteration that no school teacher had ever clued us into. I mean, this crap was illogical.

In other words, the very underyling physics of this new reality in which I woke up to differed slightly from the two bicycle wheeled paradigm I had once lived in.

It’s like living in Africa and realizing that events occur differently there. When your car breaks down on a remote road in the middle of a desert, another vehicle will almost certainly appear out of nowhere to aid you, simply because the very bedrock of that old continent exudes this almost inherent connectedness, even benevolence, that helps generate the appearance of assistance—although statistically unlikely—right when you needed it.

But that’s another story.

8.

My clever and eloquent Scientific American writers explained that one way to describe the similarities between the two types of singularities—black holes and those that occurred with the Big Bang (singularities are where space and time operate differently than we know)—is to realize that black holes have a boundary (even though it’s a bit wobbly and ill defined and is, oddly, two-dimensional) called an ‘event horizon.’ Slip inside this and you can never come out again. Not only because gravity is too strong, but because the interior is in the future and to get out, well, you would have to go back in time. Which is impossible.

At least improbable.

So that’s a black hole. The analogous boundary to the Big Bang is something we can’t see because we are inside of it. Basically we are a three dimensional universe wrapped, like a cheese and beef filling inside a taco shell, within a four-dimensional spatial universe. The interface between these two universes is akin, in terms of being a boundary, to the event horizon of a black hole. They call our universe a brane, and the larger universe a bulk. These sound to me like words from a Marvel comic strip. (At least they’re easier to remember than the current model for the history of the universe, which is the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Cosmological Paradigm. I think you’ll agree that’s a mouthful. And not easy to remember.)

Here’s another interesting tidbit that the magazine taught me: when black holes collide at the speed of light they create gravity waves (talk about an extreme event) that send out reverberations in the fabric of space and time. People measure this, like to the width of a proton, both in Washington State and Louisiana in the U.S., as well as in Italy.

Seriously.

I’m not making this up.

Don’t buy it?

Click this link.

Told you.

But instead of hearing about this on the mainstream media—we’re just told about Hillary’s book tour and Trump’s tweets.

Talk about dumbing down our population.

Anyway, the point of talking about these articles is that there is some strange stuff going on in the universe (or in multiple universes) that most of us are completely unaware of.

9.

Remember when Samuel Taylor Coleridge (apparently in 1797), after smoking opium, began writing his poem Kubla Khan and then a stranger knocked on his front door and he answered it and when he came back his inspiration had vanished and he couldn’t finish his magnificent, luscious poem that takes us to the magical land where Alph the river ran?

Well, this piece I am writing is no poetical masterpiece, but I think it’s time to wrap it up – quickly. Before eating breakfast.

Otherwise I may forget the point.

Here we go.

10.

As my friend who works in TV tells me, when they stop shooting at the end of the day, they say, “Let’s wrap.”

Here’s the wrap.

Times change. The boundaries of our perceptions change. Our models of the universe change.

When I was in college, multiverses were not the rage and quantum entanglement did not equate with worm holes between black holes. And no one had ever measured a gravity wave.

As for what I wrote above?

Let’s say that my universe did not change overnight, but that these described events occurred over the space of, say, six years.

Maybe climate patterns shifted, or a volcano eruption had impacted worldwide weather patterns which generated more fog; maybe bicycle engineers found that three wheels worked more efficiently than two (and dealers even retrofitted old bikes); maybe traffic engineers decided to modify back lights for safety reasons, and that rubbing cheeks became more fashionable than handshakes. Maybe economists urged more flexibility in credit card payment dates (okay, that may be a bit far fetched) and scientists discovered more planets, and that a relative—after watching the new Blade Runner 2049 movie—learned that in real life the actor Harrison Ford had an earring, and so he decided to get one too. And consider that perhaps linguists convinced us that the letter X was superfluous and more planets were discovered and China decided to use time zones and new tattoo technologies emerged. Perhaps emergency rescue vehicles changed flashing light colors to reduce the impact on epileptic bystanders, and also realized that familiar music drew more attention than sirens.

Maybe religious leaders decided to cut costs and get people closer to the almighty by removing church roofs.

You get the idea.

Over a greater span of time, these changes would appear to be less bizarre.

But a person in that ‘normal’ timeline may never have noticed that coincidences can play a role in our lives, even though we may not yet understand them.

Unless pointed out by others whose opinions we respect, sometimes we only pay attention to common phenomena when our awareness is heightened—by being placed in a new or unusual situation.

When you read the story above and enter a fantasyland you will accept the Mary coincidence as both intriguing and agreeable.

The bizarre reality is that (although this was fiction) such events happen in our own lives.

That quantum mechanics/cosmological stuff?

Our contemporary scientific acceptance of the bizarre nature of physical reality (as highlighted with some of the astrophysics mentioned above) may allow more people (without fear of criticism), to stop being afraid of discussing unusual events, such as bizarre coincidences.

Regardless…if Scientific American proposes multiple universes with infinite possibilities, that’s like reading a religious text.

And, if true, meaningful coincidences certainly occur within that new paradigm.

Postscript.

I wrote the above in two bursts—one time at night and the other during the following morning.

This was along the Abruzzo coast of Italy.

Here is what happened within 48 hours of writing those words.

The following day the Wall Street Journal published an article titled When World’s Collide, Astronomers Watch. On the same day I wrote that piece, scientists apparently measured gravity waves from the collision, not of two black holes (which had already occurred in 2016), but between two very much more compact and denser neutron stars. The fact that this event commanded mainstream media attention is refreshing.

In the same issue the WSJ published an article titled The Science Behind Coincidences. It’s refreshing to see that the phenomenon of coincidences is gaining more mainstream attention.

The New Yorker Magazine included a review of the new Blade Runner 2049 movie, and mentioned that apparently Frank Sinatra music is played in that movie.

I began writing an article for Forbes about a new Rothschild resort in the French Alps. I then read that apparently it was in this village that Jacques Revaux composed the song ‘Comme d’Habitude’ in 1967, which is the French version of what became the song Frank Sinatra song ‘My Way.’

Within six hours of scribbling down the above piece, a group of us met and spent hours with an intelligent, energetic tour guide.

Her name?

María.

She has light red hair.

I kid you not.

Fortunately, no car problems.

**

Thanks for tuning into this less than usual edition of Roundwood Press. If you want to read my own books about coincidences, try clicking here and here.

Land of the Thunder Dragon

A few years ago an unexpected and unusual event occurred in life, for which I am grateful.

It may still change the course of future events.

Three years ago, while working in Pakistan, I took a vacation to the country of Bhutan. The flight in from Thailand—corkscrewing through mountains—was wildly beautiful, though unnerving.

Looking outside the windows as the plane descended we saw peaks on both sides of the plane, above us!

Sizable Buddha

To enter the country and take this five day stay I was required to hire a guide and driver, and pay all lodgings in advance. This government requirement is intended to filter out indolent visitors or those unable to contribute to the economy.

The actual daily price for the vehicle, guide, driver and lodging was very reasonable.

Directing traffic

Thoughtful message to visitors on a woodland trail

The country turned out to be fascinating.

During work hours, locals are required to wear traditional formal dress; smoking and tobacco are prohibited in the country; climbing high peaks (where spirits dwell) is forbidden; there are carvings of penises all over the country—protruding over entrances to doorways, hanging on walls (a myth supports this); archery is a national sport played by locals wearing traditional costumes; there are no traffic lights.

We crossed mountain passes with arrays of prayer flags and prayer wheels fluttering in the wind; at one our guide Tshering pointed out Mount Everest in the distance.

One of many beautiful monasteries

Here is an excerpt from my journal:

Four and a half hour drive across mountains today. Never seen such twisted roads, and marvel how they could have been hacked out of mountainsides decades ago. 

My guide is Mr. Tshering. The driver is Sona. He looks like Kato from the Green Hornet. They are both affable, laid back, cool. Sometimes we see others take covert smoke breaks behind trucks, because tobacco is pretty much illegal in Bhutan. Which is progressive. Way progressive.

Young monks

My guide, Tshering, told me how he recently had been introduced to the highest spiritual figure in the country, the Rimpoche. He told me how the 22-year old Rimpoche was one of some dozen or more Rimpoches who had held the position in the past. However, most had been assigned the position, whereas this one had been selected as the seventh reincarnation of the original Rimpoche. He had displayed wisdom and intuition at a very young age, and therefore was chosen to be the next spiritual leader. Tshering had met the Rimpoche a few times, and had also introduced him to a Vietnamese businessman who had donated to the monastery, then found that his own life and business became more prosperous the more he gave away.

Hillside living

Tshering then asked if I would like to meet the Rimpoche in person.

Of course! I said.

What a wonderful opportunity.

Hand made and colorful

From my journal:

My guide, Mr. Tshering, will try to set up a meeting with the Rimpoche. Considering he will soon vanish for three years while he meditates and prays, and will afterwards be appointed the official spiritual leader of Bhutan, this is an opportunity not to miss.

Weighing goods at the market

It turns out that young Rimpoche, though he had poor eyesight, often met visitors at a room in a monastery, a building located below, and separate from, his own living quarters.

Tshering made the arrangements on his cell phone.

Phobjihka nature reserve – one of many national parks

On the day we were to meet, we woke at high altitude at a hotel near a nature reserve. It was brittle cold outside. Our vehicle ignition did not work. The battery was dead. We were in a rural region a long way from any mechanic.

This is from my journal about that day:

Yesterday, we were supposed to leave the Phobjihka nature reserve to drive to Tango Monastery, outside Thimphu city, to meet the Rimpoche. My guide, Mr. Tshering, has made friends with the Rimpoche in the past year.

But our Hyundai SUV did not run, because the battery was dead. So, as I sat before the guest house on a log drinking tea with the most amazing vista of the glacial valley below, both Sona the driver and Tshering worked on the car. They had coasted it downhill and tried to jump start it, without success. The guest house owner would not let us borrow his car because he needed it.

Pathway advice on a hillside trail

After phone calls and requests, Tshering and the driver had arranged for a someone else to come jump start the vehicle by towing it.

Eventually the SUV started.

The delay meant we were too late to visit the Rimpoche at his monastery, as he would have gone home by the time we arrived.

Instead, we had the very rare invitation to come directly to the Rimpoche’s residence.

The short term setback (dead battery) led to a greater benefits (amazing invitation).

We parked and hiked up a hillside and arrived first at the monastery where I had the fortune to informally dine, relatively quickly, with a group of monks. We were then ‘summoned’ to the Rimpoche’s residence. We hiked uphill for more minutes and entered a comfortable dwelling, where we sat in a room with the Rimpoche’s mother and his tutor. This was an unusual situation, because they usually did not have foreign visitors. In fact, according to Tshering and the others, I was the second person ever (after the Vietnamese businessman) and the first Westerner, ever to meet the Rimpoche in his home. There was silence, so I joked about our dinner with the monks, which Tshering translated, and which his mother and tutor found somewhat amusing.

Pathway to Rimpoche’s residence

During days of traveling in Bhutan I had learned a few phrases of the local language from Tshering. While in the vehicle on the way to the monastery, I had asked him to translate a few more simple phrases.

Eventually, I was summoned to the room with the Rimpoche. He was in a chair, wearing glasses, and looking thoughtful. I had brought a pashmina scarf purchased in Pakistan as a gift. This was made from the fine gruff hairs of immature goats. I had brought a few of these along on the trip as possible gifts. I presented this as instructed, draping it across outstretched forearms. I understood the Rimpoche would accept this and then present me with a cloth to take away. Before he did, I uttered my Bhutanese phrases, and the Rimpoche suddenly stopped moving. It was clear, I then realized, that visitors did not speak to the Rimpoche. But I had! In the local language I said—basically—”Hi Rimpoche! All well? I’m a visitor from America.”

He turned his head, slightly. It was obvious he was fascinated and somewhat amused, and yet not at all unhappy by my remarks. I believe he then spoke some words, presented me with a scarf and some twine to tie into wrist loops, and soon I was on my way.

Back in the room with Tshering, mother and tutor, a massive flash of bright white light crossed my mind.

I then realized the power and positive nature of the Rimpoche; unlike anything I ever encountered before.

Tango Monastery at dusk

From my journal:

January 3^rd, 2014

After a bizarre set of serendipitous events including a dead car battery and running into the right person at the right time, I had the rare privilege of being, I’m informed, the first non-Bhutanese westerner to personally meet and receive a blessing from the 7th reincarnation of the Rimpoche in his private residence—rather than at the Tango monastery. In March he will begin 3 years of meditation seclusion before becoming spiritual leader of Bhutan. 

Precariously placed Tiger’s Nest Monastery

Archery in the countryside

Monks practicing dance for a forthcoming festival

Soon we descended the hillside in darkness.

Soon after that, the Rimpoche left to another monastery to spend three years alone, meditating. Tshering told me that when these three years of solitude had finished, he will undergo a ceremony which the King and Queen of Bhutan will attend.

And I will be invited.

Of course, Tshering added, I would have to arrive early to secure proper local clothing for the event.

Hotel dining room the final night in Bhutan

We’ve communicated recently. I believe the event shall be held in the spring of next year.

I look forward to the chance of attending the ‘inauguration’ of a reincarnated spiritual leader in the Himalayan mountains.

And yet, searching for information about the Rimpoche on the internet, I have found nothing.

How refreshing.

Royal Bhutan Airlines

Years ago I wrote another article about Searching for Wine in Bhutan, which includes a video with a lively local woman (I also speak a few local phrases).

Again, thank you for tuning in!

A bend in the road

Just as we inhale, then exhale, there are times in life when we need to exert effort, and times when we need to relax. There are times to work, and times to play.

This is like pushing a car out of a ditch. You don’t just push the car, you rock it back and forth until the time comes for one mighty heave (preferably from several people at once) that slips the vehicle out of the ditch and onto the road.

It is by working together with the rhythms of nature, and the rhythms of people, objects and situations, that we minimize effort and maximize results.

Once we understand the naturalness of such rhythms in life, and tune into them, our own lives can become more balanced, healthier, and better attuned to our surroundings as well as to other people.

Quite the flow

We are surrounded by systems that ignore this. The linear, barely interrupted office work day and 50-week work year are unnatural remnants of the Industrial Revolution, in which squeezing labor out of subordinates was adopted as a cultural norm. Humans perform best when they focus on a mental task for 4 to 6 hours in the morning, then switch gears to physical activity, then work mentally again later. The Latin culture understands this with the concept of the siesta, where the body and mind work and rest in accordance with soaring and waning daily temperatures. This also respects the human craving for variety.

These oscillating rhythms of life can also apply to times when we stay in control, and times when we surrender.

Sometimes we plan out a route with perfect precision. And sometimes events occur along perhaps that same journey where we lose control. Rather than fight uncontrollable events, it can be prudent to surrender. There is economy and efficiency in the fabric of reality that we need to give into at times—in order to achieve often far more than we originally planned, or to attain levels of peace not previously anticipated.

Here is an excerpt from the book I’m now re-reading now titled “Lost Horizon,” written by James Hilton and first published in 1933.

Here is the background: A group of four Europeans being evacuated from Baskul in Afghanistan to Peshawar in British India (now Pakistan) find themselves on a plane that has been hijacked, and which (after a re-fueling) crash lands in the high peaks of northwest Tibet. There they are found by a group of locals who take them on a mountain trek back to their home, a locale named Shangri-La. Together with the locals, these passengers hike through the mountains for hours—wet, cold, tired and confused. One passenger (Mallinson) speaks with another passenger named Conway—the protagonist of the story.

Photo of the Himalayas…taken years ago when flying to Bhutan

The track went on, more sharply downhill, and at one spot Conway found some edelweiss, the first welcome sign of more hospitable levels. But this, when he announced it, consoled Mallinson even less. “Good God, Conway, d’you fancy you’re pottering about the Alps? What sort of hell’s kitchen are we making for, that’s what I’d like to know? And what’s our plan of action when we get to it? What are we going to do?”

Conway said quietly, “If you’d had all the experiences I’ve had, you’d know that there are times in life when the most comfortable thing is to do nothing at all. Things happen to you and you just let them happen. The War was rather like that. One is fortunate if, as on this occasion, a touch of novelty seasons the unpleasantness.”

“You’re too confoundedly philosophic for me. That wasn’t your mood during the trouble at Baskul.”

“Of course not, because then there was a chance that I could alter events by my own actions. But now, for the moment at least, there’s no such chance. We’re here because we’re here, if you want a reason. I’ve usually found it a soothing one.”

[Hilton, James. Lost Horizon: A Novel (p. 43). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.]

The rest of the story, which I’ll not reveal, is about finding a paradise—and learning to enjoy it there and then.

Monks in Bhutan

The point is not to wait for desired events to plop into your lap. But once we realize there are rhythms in life we must sometimes surrender to, our own situations can become more colorful, vibrant and rewarding.

Many situations in life that I fought against ended up providing situations for the better. The pain of a relationship breakup? The hate of a course you needed to study? The fear of moving to a different location?

In retrospect, fighting against the tide of circumstances can be a waste of time and energy. That does not mean you should just give up—but realize when you have no control, and wait until a situation plays out.

Sometimes you should just let events unfold.

This may even lead to prosperity, as Shakespeare understood when he wrote Julius Caesar. In this play Brutus speaks to Cassius, saying:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune…

…On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves

Or lose our ventures.

After reading the book written by Marco Pierre White titled The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef I wanted to learn more, so found a YouTube video of him speaking to the Oxford Union Society. What an amazing speaker! The interview is about an hour long (though it passes rapidly because of the quality of White’s storytelling abilities), but if you are limited with time, then watching even part of it is worthwhile.

White spins a compelling story when talking about his youth and his transition to the world of cooking. What is clear in his book, and is amplified in this video, is the role that luck played in his life.

For example, after some years of working in kitchens he wanted to work at the renowned La Gavroche Restaurant in London. He wrote them, and they replied with an application – in French. Not knowing the language he tore it up in frustration, then traveled to London and onward to another city for a kitchen job interview. They asked him to be a pastry chef, which he didn’t want to do. He told them he’d think about it. He returned to London, crossed the city to Victoria station and found the last coach bus that would take him home had already departed. He knew that he had to spend the night walking around the city to catch the morning bus, not having the money to afford a hotel. He walked somewhat randomly, saw the windows of a beautiful restaurant with guests inside toasting glasses and enjoying life, then moved back to see the restaurant’s name: La Gavroche. He decided this was somewhat of a sign, and in the morning knocked on the door, explained his situation, and landed a job.

Luck, White says, led him to success. Yet when luck arrives, he emphasized to the listeners, you must seize it.

He says:

“It’s all been about luck. Success is born out of luck. It’s awareness of mind that takes advantage of that opportunity. You will all be confronted with opportunity. You must take advantage of it, ’cause if you don’t take advantage of your opportunity, you’ll never realize your dreams. Whether you want them or not, it’s an irrelevance; you don’t know that until you achieve it.”

His story is inspirational.

&   &   &

Anthony Bourdain gives a great explanation of why any writer getting paid money should not be whining. It’s a long video interview set in Australia, but the first 10 minutes are enough to get the gist…although if you have the time, it’s worth listening to all.

“Writer’s Block?” Forget it.

Bourdain gives reasons how having previously been a heroine junkie (from which he recovered) oddly prepared him for Hollywood. Because in Hollywood, he said, many people are not telling the full story. It was the years of dealing with backroad junkies in New York city that tuned his inner radar into who was reliable and who was not. He had to tune that ability if he didn’t want to die. He also makes the excellent observation that some people in life promise and deliver, and some people promise and don’t.

First – all Roundwood Press books have been reduced to $2.99 apiece (at most) for the finale to summertime.

Second – am now reading Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, by Adam Grant (2016, Penguin Random House, New York). It’s a good read, and recommended. The gist is that many individuals whose actions changed the world were normal people who held onto their day jobs even when they plunged into a business venture, uncertain of whether their notion would work or not.

Third – also recommended – a quick video where Oprah speaks to Anthony Robbins, and he gives a hint about a ten minute ritual each morning that can change your life.

Fourth – here are sage words about food, life, and respect for locality – from a powerful Scandinavian character I may soon have the fortune to meet (yes, will keep you informed):

Fifth – Here are some quotes  about life, and living, from some ‘success gurus.’

The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life, by Deepak Chopra M.D.

“If it weren’t for the enormous effort we put into denial, repression, and doubt, each life would be a constant revelation.”

“Ever since you and I were born, we’ve had a constant stream of clues hinting at another world inside ourselves.”

“Clinging to old behavior is not an option.”

“Thus we arrive at the second spiritual secret: You are not in the world; the world is in you.”

“Violence is built into the opposition of us versus them. “They” never go away and “they” never give up. They will always fight to protect their stake in the world. As long as you and I have a separate stake in the world, the cycle of violence will remain permanent.”

“Now step into your social world. When you are with your family or friends, listen with your inner ear to what is going on. Ask yourself: Do I hear happiness? Does being with these people make me feel alive, alert? Is there an undertone of fatigue? Is this just a familiar routine, or are these people really responding to each other?”

“Just by paying attention and having a desire, you flip on the switch of creation.”

“Instead of seeking outside yourself, go to the source and realize who you are.”

“So you have to give up on the idea that you must go from A to B.”

“Everyone knows how to choose; few know how to let go. But it’s only by letting go of each experience that you make room for the next. The skill of letting go can be learned; once learned, you will enjoy living much more spontaneously.”

“The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision.”

“For most people, the strongest externals come down to what other people think because fitting in is the path of least resistance. But fitting in is like embracing inertia.”

“Now let’s reframe the situation in terms of the operating system programmed from wholeness, or one reality. You come to work to find that the company is downsizing, and the following implications begin to come into play: My deeper self created this situation. Whatever happens, there is a reason. I am surprised, but this change doesn’t affect who I am. My life is unfolding according to what is best and most evolutionary for me. I can’t lose what’s real. The externals will fall into place as they need to. Whatever happens, I can’t be hurt.”

“Nothing is random—my life is full of signs and symbols: I will look for patterns in my life. These patterns could be anywhere: in what others say to me, the way they treat me, the way I react to situations. I am weaving the tapestry of my world every day, and I need to know what design I am making.”

“Today is for long-term thinking about myself. What is my vision of life? How does that vision apply to me? I want my vision to unfold without struggle. Is that happening? If not, where am I putting up resistance? I will look at the beliefs that seem to hold me back the most. Am I depending on others instead of being responsible for my own evolution?”

“…a musician coming out of the Juilliard School of Music hears every note on the radio through a different nervous system from someone who has just graduated from M.I.T. as an electrical engineer.”

“The absolute break between life and death is an illusion.”

Wishes Fulfilled: Mastering the Art of Manifesting by Wayne W. Dyer

“If you would like to become a person who has the capacity to have all of your wishes fulfilled, it will be necessary for you to move to that higher plane of existence where you are a co-creator of your life.”

“You must begin by replacing your old set of truths with a belief in the existence of a higher self within you.”

“Your concept of yourself that includes any limitations can be revised by you, and only by you.”

“You simply no longer choose to form your identity on the basis of what you’ve been taught.”

“The greatest gift you were ever given was the gift of your imagination. Within your magical inner realm is the capacity to have all of your wishes fulfilled. Here in your imagination lies the greatest power you will ever know.”

“In order for something to get into this world where things exist and are proved, as Blake says, they must first be placed firmly into your imagination.”

“Be willing to dream, and imagine yourself becoming all that you wish to be.”

“Highly functioning self-actualized people simply never imagine what it is that they don’t wish to have as their reality.”

“Do not let your imagination be restricted to the current conditions of your life…”

“In your imagination, you can replace the thought of I will one day be in a better place, with I am already in my mind where I intend to be.”

“Remind yourself that your imagination is yours to use as you decide, and that everything you wish to manifest into your physical world must first be placed firmly in your imagination in order to grow.”

“Let go of all doubt, forget about the when.”

“It is absolutely imperative to learn how to assume, in your imagination, the feeling of already having and being what you desire.”

“You want to decide to live from the end you’re wishing for—not toward an end that others have decided for you.”

“As William Shakespeare put it, “Our doubts are traitors.” Anyone or anything trying to diminish your inner feelings with doubt is a traitor to be banished.”

“I always loved the words of Michelangelo regarding this subject: “The greater danger is not that our hopes are too high and we fail to reach them, it’s that they are too low, and we do.” ”

“My story concerning the manifestation of abundance throughout my life is never allowing anyone, no matter how persuasive, to infiltrate my imagination, which feels prosperous and able to attract unlimited abundance.”

“State your intention to live a happy, contented life…”

In the year 2001 I quit my job and bought a pickup truck and small camper. I spent five months traveling along the Missouri and Colombia rivers in the US. I then wrote a book (Rivers of Change – Trailing the Waterways of Lewis and Clark) about the people I had met, and how changes to these rivers had impacted their lives.

One of the stories I collected and wrote about is below. It was not included in the book because it’s not about Kansas or Missouri or rivers.

It’s about Ireland.

Dusk on the dunes in western Ireland

Hearing the Past

While traveling alongside the Missouri River, I stepped into the Benedictine college library in Atchison, Kansas. I was curious about how monks had first arrived there.

“Speak to Miriam,” the sleek attendant at the front desk whispered. “She’s in charge of rare books.”

Miriam looked trim and cautious. She was light, buoyant, and articulate – a woman enraptured with caring for such volumes as the library’s 1538 Speculum Monachorum – or Mirror for Monks. She led me upstairs past white cinder blocks and a poster of Pope John Paul. I sat down at a table surrounded by tall bookshelves inside a sort of literary kennel. She vanished, then reappeared a minute later. She laid down a copy of the book Kansas Monks before me.

“Did you grow up near here?” she asked, prying to learn what I knew of local history. Like her long dress, Miriam’s voice flowed.

“No. Chicago, then Ireland,” I told her.

The last word charmed her.

“We have this son,” she sighed. Stiffness disappeared from her shoulders. I noticed her shake of head and tweak of dimples and recognized the signs: another river was opening up.

I pushed Kansas Monks aside.

Beside the Missouri River there were other flowstreams along my route, meandering creeks of history and anecdote that opened of their own volition. Some stories spilled with convoluted, often brilliant connections. Inside this college library one of these now flowed from Miriam, a tale that made me wonder whether humans can, at times, hear their ancestry.

“Our son heard the bagpipes and Irish flutes when he was fifteen,” she began. “He got it into his head that that’s what he had to do. How would you say, he just ‘had it in him.’ Course someone had to make a set of bagpipes for him which cost us thousands of dollars – which was supposed to be his college tuition.”

Her smile broadened.

“But he was driven. He was also good at languages. He went to Lebanon to study Arabic for six months. When he came home he went to New York and met a fiddler who invited him to his house in western Ireland. The fellow probably didn’t expect him, but one day Ciaran showed up at his doorstep. Stayed a few weeks and hitchhiked all over County Clare. Ciaran now says that his two favorite places in the world are Doolin Bay and Corrofin.

“He returned to study Arabic at Georgetown. Course the east coast of the U.S. had Irish music. Maybe that influenced his choice. But they closed the Arabic program down during the Gulf War. So Ciaran went to study at Trinity College in Dublin and continued with music. Now he plays professionally. Has a fiancé. She’s a fiddler and he’s a piper. But it’s not an easy life – feast or famine.”

Looking west across the Atlantic

She sighed, then asked about my trip.

I yakked on about Nicholas Biddle’s map and Manuel Lisa’s fort and how axe-swinging hoards of settlers had moved up this continent’s rivers to crisscross yellow rimrock, sloppy geysers, and wilting sagebrush – a route I had chosen to follow.

“Everyone’s dream,” she said. “Get up and go.”

Her words formed a poultice. Recent rains, a leaking camper and nail biting slumps of loneliness had thrashed at my days, invoking doubts about the value of this solo excursion. Already I had reached a discreet state of mental exhaustion. Yet Miriam’s simple phrase banished so many clawing uncertainties that day. Refreshed, I reignited the subject of Ireland and told her of having published a short story about bicycling through County Clare. This admission kindled a curious response.

“There’s an odd quirk to this whole piping thing,” she added. “Ciaran went to County Clare in 1987, when he was sixteen. A very young sixteen. He played pipes in his room at first, then got out and played with others. When he told us we decided to visit. My husband Mike’s great grandfather was born in 1841 and came over from Ireland. Before our trip to Ireland we got interested in family history and searched for the gravestone at a cemetery in south east Kansas. It was an Irish cemetery, surrounded by a wall. The gravestones had Celtic crosses. We found the headstone. The spelling of the name had changed, but it told where he was born, which we never knew.”

Miriam smiled.

I knew what was coming.

“County Clare,” she said.

Roam well. Roam wisely.

That’s our philosophy at Roundwood Press. We believe that creating a unique path through life can provide personal satisfaction.

Our message here is simple: choose your own path, and then change your thoughts to change reality. We believe that a fresh vision, combined with a positive attitude and open mind, can cause the world to expand, and opportunities to multiply.

Sometimes when we focus on the positive and expect the best, oddly coincidental – or ‘synchronous’ – events can help point us toward desired outcomes.

Here are a few stories about well timed reminders.

Blue skies over Colorado

Belief

Ten years ago I was writing stories and books outside of work hours. I suddenly became disheartened. Why put in this effort? Would this writing eventually find an audience? I wrote down the following in a journal about the first of three events that occurred one day:

“At work today, I ‘remembered’ again how to bring good things into life – how we picture what we want in our mind – sometimes fuzzy, sometimes sharp – but we know the key elements we desire – maybe a home, a better vehicle, or a fun partner – a few specific desires. Then we cultivate the expectation – the belief – that we are going there. We don’t know how. We don’t know the details. But we’ve decided we’re going to move into that bubble of imagination. We relax and do things daily to help move us toward that place, because we’ve decided on the destination. We know that with time and desire, all things are possible. One step at a time. We create that bubble of desire and slowly, patiently, move in that direction.”

New day, fresh opportunties.

Later that day I pulled a package from my mail box in Laguna Beach. I then walked around the corner to Hapi Sushi restaurant to drink a beer and eat California rolls. Inside the envelope was a wrapped present. I decided not to open it until Christmas. But the card had one word written on it:

Believe.

At home that evening I cleaned up – throwing away papers, sorting bills, filing papers, doing laundry. I picked up a card recently sent from friends in Ohio and was about to toss it away, but decided to open and read it again. The words at the bottom read:

…He who believes has everlasting life

This combination of recalling the power of belief and then reading two cards mentioning ‘belief’ (on the same day) provided the needed incentive to help me believe in, and stay focused on, specific writing goals at that time.

Life’s terrain is not always smooth

Faith

One April a few years ago I flew from Islamabad to Chicago, then to Kansas City, to attend the wedding of friends. After getting off the flight from Chicago to Kansas City I realized my passport was lost.

Replacing the passport took only a few days. However, obtaining a replacement visa to re-enter Pakistan – where I worked on a contract basis – took two months. At first I became frustrated at not having work or income and not knowing when, or if, a replacement visa would be issued. A friend from England who had also attended the wedding mentioned that this delay in returning to work was likely for the better; that I would be immensely grateful for this unexpected time off. He implied I needed to have faith to realize this unexpected ‘problem’ was actually beneficial.

You can never be certain what’s around the corner

Within days my friend Lisa and I stayed in Glen Ellen, fifteen minutes north of Sonoma, California. On the first evening we attended a wine and appetizer gathering in the front lobby. There, we met a woman and her husband and parents. I spoke to the mother, who looked to be in her early forties but told me she was sixty years old. When I asked the secret to looking so lively, she said, “You live one day at a time.” She then added, “It’s also important to have faith.”

The next day Lisa suggested that we g0 to a movie. We drove into the city of Davis, then walked to the theater. The next movie playing was Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. We had never heard of it, but paid and entered. The story revolves around a Yemeni sheik teaching a doubting fish expert – Ewan McGregor – the importance of faith.

Days later I was at a Holiday Inn in New Mexico where a young lady at the bar was having an animated conversation with a friend. She invited me to join the conversation, and described how she was flying to India the next day to spend months at a spiritual center. She spoke with high energy about the importance of having faith.

During these unpaid months while waiting for the visa, I had time to organize and launch this Roundwood Press website, and to clean and scan hundreds of color slides now included in books sold at this site. My friend from England was right – losing the passport turned out to be a gift. The coincidental reappearance of the word ‘faith’ several times within a few days of this happening also nudged me toward relaxing, accepting the situation, and believing that all would work out for the better. Which it did.

Coincidence

About a year after that last event, my brother phoned me while he was shopping at Costco in California. He said he had picked up a book in the store by Robert Ludlum and flipped through it randomly (I’ve since figured out that the book title was The Lazarus Vendetta, though I’ve not read it). He told me that one chapter included a scene set in Zurich; another chapter was about a scene taking place in Albuquerque International Airport. He encouraged me to write this type of fictional book, based on my own travel experiences.

We hung up.

Street cars of Zurich

Five minutes later I called him back, having realized something surprising: a month earlier I had finished writing a fictional book titled Trailing Tara (which he knew nothing about) where one scene takes place in Zurich, and another scene takes place within Albuquerque International Airport.

Seriously. I could not make this up. How many authors write scenes set in Albuquerque airport and Zurich in the same book? This synchronous event encouraged me to keep writing.

Synchronous events often remind us of topics that interest us, or hint at topics or persons about to enter our lives, or provide catharsis to overcome past pain (as psychologist Carl Jung – who created the term ‘synchronicity’ – learned).

The events described above encouraged me to stick with writing and publishing.

Hindsight often provides clarity

These events also reminded me that life is rarely a neat package. Sometimes it’s a series of waves to be rolled with, or a mountain trail to be climbed. When we believe in ourselves and keep faithful toward our genuine interests, unusual events often conspire to remind us of, and point us toward, the direction where we really want to go.

*

(Books I’ve written about coincidental events and travel include Synchronictiy as Signpost, and The Synchronous Trail).

“Remember, the universe takes care of the “how” through coincidences, serendipity, and synchronicities. We just have to take care of the “what.” 

Jonathan Manske

From the book: “The Law of Attraction Made Simple – Magnetize Your Heartfelt Desires.”

Ocean waves may roll, break, and crash, but there is rhythm to their motion. Birds vary their migration paths, but the annual long-distance flights they take follow a general pattern.

So it is with life. There is, as Shakespeare said, a tide in our affairs which, when seized at the right moment, can lead to fortune.

Yet our daily lives are bombarded by thousands of details – picking kids from school, shopping for food, paying bills, cleaning dishes. Who has time to discern WHAT important patterns we would be wise to pay attention to? Even if we did, would we have the courage and faith to focus on those patterns with the unknown hope that they could somehow improve our lives? By ‘improve’ I generally mean by providing us with greater control over our circumstances – allowing us to have more free time and less stress, more opportunities to do what we want, and a greater ability to free ourselves from multiple daily tasks, many of which we resent.

This is where coincidences can help. Meaningful coincidences, or what Carl Jung called ‘synchronicities,’ are often little signposts indicating in which direction we can adjust the course of our lives to better follow our strongest desires.

As author Manske expresses well:

“The more that you listen to and act on intuition and nudges, the more that synchronicity will show up in your life. The more often that synchronicity shows up in your life, the easier your life will get.”

You cannot look for coincidences. There is no formula for making them appear. But when they do show up, pay attention. Below is a chapter from my book titled Synchcronicity as Signpost, highlighting a decision I once made, and how synchronicity helped me fully accept the value of that choice.

Signpost: Good Choice 

Synchronicity can not only help us make choices – but confirm when a choice aligns with our profoundest desires.

I was working in a coastal town in southern Angola when a friend relayed a message via radio: another company from the United State had called to offer me a job in Washington DC. My friend encouraged me to take the position.

Two weeks later I moved to DC. The city, job, and work mates turned out to be excellent. A month later this friend sent me a cryptic e-mail from Africa that he later told me was simply a joke. His message instructed me to do the following:

“If you find yourself alone in DC this weekend, go to Georgetown. Ask any woman if she knows a good used bookstore. Keep asking until you get the answer you need, enter the indicated bookstore and start counting bookcases from the door. Go to the seventh bookcase on your right, the seventh shelf down, and select the seventh book from the left. Displays around the cash register do not count as bookcases. If the bookstore has an upstairs, go up and begin counting there. If it has a basement, by no means enter it.  If someone asks if they can help you, do not keep these instructions secret. Loiter as long as you like, buy the book and then peruse it over a mug of coffee.”

I replied immediately. There was big news. That same day the company director had told me that in two weeks I would move to Panama City to work and to live for at least a year. Panama was an ecologist’s playground and a banker’s heaven. A fifty-mile long canal split the nation. I also knew that Panama was home of the Darien Gap, the dense jungle that separates Central from South America. The Darien is so thick and wild that in the 1960s the first vehicles to cross it had to float across its swampier portions by raft. Members of a later expedition recruited the British army to push and winch a fleet of laboring Land Rovers sixty seven miles across the Gap. The effort took ninety nine days, half of the total time the expedition took to descend from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

I knew that Panama was also home to the Kuna Indians, bawdy and spiritual folk who defend their autonomy with a vengeance. Most Kuna live on the San Blas islands, more than three hundred lush mounds splattered across the Atlantic like drops of tan and green paint. Binding tradition pokes through Kuna customs: women are forbidden to marry non-Kuna men; lobster divers cannot use compressed air to descend through water; men (both elders and youths) are obliged to spend three full days inebriated on chicha homebrew during a woman’s coming-of-age ceremony.

Excited about this upcoming move, I wrote this friend to share the news. Still, I wondered about his bizarre Georgetown instructions.

That Sunday in Washington DC I caught the metro from Bethesda to Dupont Circle. I walked up Q Street into Georgetown and asked a petite woman where I could find a secondhand bookstore. She shrugged her thin shoulders and waved me off in another direction. I then ambled below a curbside maple tree and asked directions from a tall brunette. There’s one in Dupont Circle,” she replied,” wrinkling her nose coated with adobe brown freckles. I thanked her, started off in that direction and then stopped. My friend’s directions were explicit: find a bookstore in Georgetown, not Dupont circle. While considering this I bought an orange juice and a chocolate chip cookie, then moved north on Wisconsin Avenue. A pizzeria employee taking his break leaned against an alley wall. He sucked a cigarette and then coughed out a cloud of gray smoke. When I asked about where to find a second-hand bookstore he wiped his hand on a tomato smudged apron and pointed downhill.

“M Street,” he mumbled.

I then realized – shocked – no way! My friend’s instructions were clear: ask women – not men. I next flagged down a collegiate blonde and again spewed out the by then well-oiled query.

“Reservoir Street,” she said and twirled her wrist, indicating that I should turn around. On Reservoir Street I asked a young Asian woman for this elusive bookstore.

“I’m new around here,” she replied.

Exasperated, I was prepared to forget this chase when she spoke again.

“But I did see one around that corner,” she said.

There it was. I pressed my forehead against its windowpane and looked inside: small, bulging with books, and filled with promise. A cardboard sign taped to the window said it opened at noon. It was eleven twenty five. I crossed the street, sat in a twee café and drank a cup of coffee. At midday I entered the bookstore. A bearded man with a Middle Eastern accent perched next to an ancient black cash register. We swapped nods. I started to count bookshelves from the right. One, two…and then came across a pile of milk crates filled with loose hardbacks. The crates were stacked so I decided they constituted a bookshelf. Three, four, five, six…  There were no other bookshelves along the same wall. I wheeled around and faced the opposite side of the aisle and faced bookshelf number Seven. Next I counted down seven rows.  One, two, three….

The books on the seventh shelf stood in a vertical pile. I counted from the top down and plucked out the seventh book.

The paperback had a blue cover, gold border, and raised white lettering. The publisher had artfully removed a square from the cover to reveal a portion of an inner page drawing – a man silhouetted below a gaslight at the top of a subway staircase. The back cover highlighted the book’s merits: “National Bestseller…a choice of the Book-of-the-Month club…a New York Times Notable Book of the Year…written by Eric Zenecy.”

Stunned, I read the title aloud:

PANAMA

I took the job. For the next three years I lay in hammocks on the Kuna islands during weekends, or boated up the Panama Canal, or consulted with Embera Indians in the Darien region for work. I learned from Panamanians how life can be woven as a tapestry as well as forged like a metal. My days in Panama stayed varied and full.

From time to time, however, I still marveled at the strange prescience of that past e-mail and the book it delivered. I also mused over one quote that came from the text of the book Panama:

“Adams drew the thick, cool air through his nose. Seven years, he thought. Six Decembers. The year was sliding toward it. But this year it might go more easily; perhaps, he thought, there was some magic in the number seven.”

The event had startled me – but jolted me into fully accepting the chance to work in Panama.

“Life assumes meaning and purpose when we accompany others in the ordinary events of life.” [Tom Whelan]

I’ve been in Ireland these past days – visiting friends known since we were teenagers. One mentioned how fortunate we were as children – free to wander and do as we liked. One benefit is that we could take a bus or a quick drive to the countryside to take walks. I took these photos below this past Saturday and Sunday during cold, clear, winter afternoons with low light in the Wicklow Hills. This was the outdoor playground where we rambled as kids. This is the wonder we still explore as adults.

At a local retailer in County Wicklow – The Village Bookshop – I found the book titled Saol – Thoughts from Ireland on Life and Living, edited by Catherine Conlon. Saol means ‘life’ in the Gaelic language. This book includes quotes from seventy individuals – Irish, or living in Ireland. Snippets from a few are included below. These may be appropriate as we make the transition from 2014 to 2015, with free hours, to consider the ‘bigger picture’ of life. The book was published in 2014 by The Collins Press in Wilton, Cork. All quotes are partial, taken from fully copyrighted works by the authors mentioned in this post.

“I had always believed all art to be just that – storytelling.” [Noelle Campbell-Sharp]

“Over the years, I have come to see the importance of ‘living’ a life, rather than ‘postponing’ a life…The fact is that if you want to make changes to your life, or to do something you’re passionate about, you have to seize the moment and do it now.” [Eleanor McEvoy]

“When I was younger I never thought much about chance. Now I do, constantly.” [Carlo Gébler]

“As I’ve gotten older I have learnt to stop, to enjoy silence and to reflect a lot more, enjoy nature, sharing time, to be more spiritual in essence.” [Fidelma Healy-Eames]

“Coincidence is God’s way of prompting while remaining anonymous…when something does happen three times I take it as a gentle hint that I am to do something about it.” [Mark Patrick Hederman]

“Whenever such support comes our way, it is invaluable: a bonus to be cherished. For our own part, if we make a habit of granting goodwill, it will spread like rings on water.” [Ann Henning Jocelyn]

“Four billion years of life on earth, just so we can answer emails? I hope not.” [Arminta Wallace]

“…as I grow older the mystery of life and death deepens rather than becomes clearer…part of the mystery is discovering that what appears to be tragedy can often turn out to contain within it a great blessing, a new growth, a new direction, maybe a new understanding.” [Tony Flannery]

“Grammar is one of the great evolutionary wonders of the world. People have a profound need to communicate. We should chat with each other. It is a comfort.” [Colm Keena]

On the 26th of December, 2004, Sonali Deraniyagala’s friend named Orlantha stood in the doorway of a hotel room in the Yala National Park on the southeastern coast of Sri Lanka. She praised Sonali’s two children and her marriage and said, “What you guys have is a dream.”

She then looked out the window and saw a tsunami wave flushing toward the hotel.

Minutes later Sonali’s ‘dream life’ vanished when her husband, children, parents and friend Orlantha were all killed by the tidal wave that ripped thousands of lives apart in Sri Lanka.

Calm before disaster

Wave is a quick, unsentimental read. Sonali first recalls strange memories of being swept up in water. Her mind recalls unexpected imagery while this nightmare unfolded, while she was temporarily trapped in a car, then swept away. At one point she looked up to the sky. “Painted storks, I thought.  A flight of painted storks across a Yala sky…”

After finding out that her family has been killed, she stays with other family members who live in Sri Lanka. At first, she is resigned to end her own life. She writes, “The next morning my aunt called doctor. A bit pointless, I thought, I will kill myself soon.” And, “I kept Googling ways of killing myself.  I needed to know how to do it successfully, I couldn’t mess it up.” The result of her mindset was that “An army of family and friends guarded me night and day.”

The story describes time in Sri Lanka, and then Sonali’s return to her London home years later. It was there where she had lived with her children, as well as the husband she  had met while studying at Cambridge. For years, Sonali oscillates between depression, denial, and drug abuse.

“This could not have happened to me. This is not me. I teetered endlessly. Look at me, powerless, a plastic bag in a gale.” And, “After my evening of drinking I’d pop two pills, then another two, another four, four more, and two more again, in quick succession. Then a mug of gin.”

She blames herself for the death of their family, though there is no reason to do so.

“How I have fallen. When I had them, they were my pride, and now that I’ve lost them, I am full of shame. I was doomed all along, I am marked, there must be something very wrong with me. These were my constant thoughts in those early months.”

Tranquil, and powerful

The years pass and her ability to handle the loss increases. There are also glimmers of the inexplicable and the synchronous that she, a professor of economics, does not question. One event regarded the sister of her deceased husband.

“Steve’s sister Beverly sat on my bead wiping her tears. On the morning of the twenty-sixth of December, she had woken up in London, weeping. At the time she hadn’t been able to imagine a reason for this….before someone phoned her with news of a tidal wave in Sri Lanka, she had been crying.”

Another occurs when she visits the site of the demolished hotel in Sri Lanka with her deceased husband’s parents. They wander around the wreckage.

“When I came back to my father-in-law, he was holding a sheet of paper, peering at it. He showed it to me. He told me he’d stood in that wind and spoke a few words into the air, to Steve and the boys. That’s when something fluttered by his foot…..just a scrap of paper…It was the back cover of a research report written by Steve…”

With time, her ability to cope increases – not by blocking out the past years with her family, but by embracing them.

“I can recover myself better when I dare let in their light.”

As she re-establishes her life and works not only in London but also in New York, Sonali faces a recurring problem when people she meets ask if she is married or has children, or where her parents live. Mostly, she shrugs off these questions and ignores them. This book, however, is her answer.  It is Sonali’s way of admitting that the past with her family was not a dream, but a beautiful reality, where she learned – as any of us may – how all we cherish can be lost within minutes.

Wave – A Memoir of Life After the Tsunami

by Sonali Deraniyagala

Published by Virago Press, a division of Little, Brown Book Group, London.

This story begins in Boulder, Colorado, and moves through…

Completed years ago, The Synchronous Trail – Enlightened Travels has been updated and is now available as an e-book. It’s available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Here’s a little history about the book.

I finished a draft fifteen years ago, then edited and updated the text several times. The book explores powerful coincidences, and how they can have a major impact on our lives. It’s about a search throughout the world for why and how ‘synchronous events’ – as psychoanalyst Carl Jung called them – occur.

…northeast England…

This was a tough book to write. Why? Delays and uncertainty. At the beginning I had no idea why some events can knock life off its trajectory or open our minds to view reality in a different way. This meant that writing the book was like making a movie before the screenplay is finished, or constructing a building before the blueprints are ready. There was also the added complication of not knowing if I would ever conclude why these ‘synchronous’ situations impact us. In other words – why start a book if there might be no ending?

…the highlands of Guatemala…

…Africa’s Great Rift Valley…

…the Persian Gulf…

I originally wanted the structure to resemble that of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig – to provide an engaging, entertaining, simple story. Originally, this ‘story’ was going to revolve around my experience of building rural water pipelines in Malawi. But after beginning to write in Africa, I realized that synchronous events were still a mystery. In other words, I could start the story, but not finish.  So I scrapped the idea and instead wrote Water and Witchcraft -Three Years in Malawi – a memoir about colorful years spent in that country.

…Morocco…

…New Mexico…

Eventually the puzzle unraveled. I learned powerful reasons why synchronous events can impact our lives. When I was finally ready to assemble this book, an excruciating task lay ahead: gathering and dissecting past writings and journal entries and weaving these into something that resembled a coherent whole (not as coherent as I would like). This involved paring down often intricate and complex events into simple scenes to provide a clear and simple narrative. The years rolled by as this came together. Finally, I assembled the story as a travelogue – where colors, scents, sounds, and imagery from multiple geographies help ground the context of each chapter.

…and the Namib Desert

The resulting book is a journey of discovery about how life is far more pliable than most of us realize. Incidentally – my other book titled Synchronicity as Signpost is just the distillate of lessons learned while writing The Synchronous Trail. The difference between these two books – Trail and Signpost – is that between writing the two, I realized that sometimes you just have to relax, and listen to what life is trying to tell you.

I hope you enjoy.

Click here to read more about The Synchronous Trail.

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Welcome to Roundwood Press.  Millennia of battles, raids, subjugation and victory forged the character of Irish people, while years of writing shaped these books.  I hope you find a topic you enjoy.

These books were written over a span of decades. Whether you like fiction or non-fiction, or history, adventure, romance, philosophy or self-help – something here should suit your tastes. Some reads are quick and easy, while others are longer and more intricate.

Click on the Home tab – there are a dozen books available.  Here are suggestions about what to choose from any series:

Water and Wine Series –

Wine and Work – is an easy read that includes words, stories, and insights told by more than 50 people from around the world.

African Raindrop Series – 

The Deep Sand of Damaraland – is a simple read about quirky people working in a stunning land.

Curving Trail Series – 

Synchronicity as Signpost – is a fast, easy read that may open your mind to fresh possibilities.

Rivers of Time Series 

River of Tuscany – includes tales of battle, genius, and even cookery based on real events.

Vagabond Series –

Trailing Tara – skips around the world with unusual surprises, determined characters, and a hunt that can change the course of civilization.

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