I wonder if there is some hidden use for the political mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. What can we learn from these times of breakdown and break-up that leave us bereft and frightened, not quite knowing where to turn? When I was growing up Jewish in a household of helpless grief during Hitler time, I bided my time, telling myself that “every dog would have his day” sooner or later—even me! I just had to trust that the world would change in time for me, to keep my eyes open wide, have patience and move fast when I saw the crack in the world that could change my life. And it worked! I saw my opportunity, before I was 20, in an Art History class where I fell in love with the picture of a dancing figure sculpted on the façade of an 11th century pilgrimage church in France, and knew I had to go there to find him. One thing led to another, and soon I was enrolled in an Institute of Medieval Studies in France, where I slipped into the world of the Middle Ages, fell in love with Romanesque art (as well as a few fellow students), had adventures galore, and knew that my life had finally taken root.
Altogether, after a dangerous and lonely childhood I have found my own footing and lived an adventurous life with good luck and bad; magical coincidences and close disasters; deep sorrow and ecstatic fun—and every bit of it has been grist for my mill.
As the current news gets bad—and then worse, I tremble, like everyone else, and eat chocolate for breakfast. If a neighbor smiles ‘hello’ to me on my daily walk and we stop to talk, I take it as a sign the world will survive another day; other times I might feel fearful and alone under the sun, but this morning my friend was a bright-red male cardinal swooping from a high branch in the maple tree towards a female who awaited his attentions on a lower branch. When they eventually swooped off together I smiled after them, grateful for the reminder that however badly we humans behave, however much we misuse the natural world, it still surrounds us and continues to be full of wonder and grace.
That’s when looking out for the Big Picture helps reassure me that I am not here alone, and there’s no knowing what’s coming next from who-knows-where. I try to keep my eye out for surprises, those unexpected coincidences that pop out of nowhere when I’m not looking. Synchronicities, they are called, a word originally coined by Karl Jung.
I seem to be a magnet for them, in fact, and tend to watch for the surprise meet-ups that life brings when I least expect them. By now, I can recognize the feeling in my body of ‘the right next step’: when to slow down, and when to move quickly; how I feel when to trust my own intuitions and when to wait for that feeling; where it is safe to go … and, sigh, where it is not so safe to go.
I have done both…
I am remembering an evening, decades ago, when I was first recognizing this uncanny ability I had to ‘know’ things before they happened, like the time I was washing the dinner dishes, and thinking of a friend I had last seen in Paris years before, and our hitch-hiking adventures around France during that summer of my freedom. She also was named Carolyn, and we had met on the boat going over to Europe, had bonded with a shared sense of adventure and decided to go on the road together before our studies began in the Fall.
And what a lark we had! “Les deux Carolines,” people called us as we hitched rides around the Provinces, making new friends and talking non-stop in 2 languages until it was time to get back for the new semester, and go our separate ways.
After my year of studying in France, I returned home to marry my own dear love in New York before moving across the country to California, where he would teach Science in Berkeley, and we would start our family. Years later, washing the dinner dishes, our children fast asleep in their beds, I found myself recalling my old friend Carolyn, our long ago adventures sur la route that summer in France, when the phone rang and, to my shock, it was the other Carolyn!
“You won’t believe this!” I shrieked. “I was JUST thinking about you! Where are you, and how’d you ever find me here?” She told me she had just gotten off the plane from New York, and recalling that I had gotten married and moved to San Francisco, she took a chance and looked me up in the phone book—and found me!
In an instant we were les deux Carolines again, laughing and quite impressed by our own daring. She had even remembered my married name!
She was in California to visit her old college roommate and on a hunch had looked me up in the phone book—“and here you are!” she crowed triumphantly. She sounded as irrepressible as I remembered her. What were the odds?
The next day we got together, Herb and I and our daughter Rebecca, at her friend’s house for this unexpected reunion! After 12 years, an ocean and a continent behind us, we were reunited on another continent! Her friend, as it happened, was named Rebecca, and Rebecca’s husband had the same name as my husband, so when we got together we were 2 Carolyns, 2 Rebeccas and 2 Herbs!
I think we all have odd experiences like this, and I believe they are significant. In my life, synchronicities seem to happen when I least expect them, but they always help me move a notch up along my path. In my experience, they are never boring! (this particular one led to an important friendship with the other Rebecca, that years later included one of my adult children and an Astronomical Observatory … but that is another story.)
By now, I rely on synchronicities to help me through my days, noticing details I might otherwise pay little attention to: weather changes; time of the full moon; physical sensations; following quirky cues and trusting odd details that come up in ordinary life but often show themselves to be significant after the fact. For awhile I kept a notebook of these stories, but once they became more of an ordinary reality, I simply lived them. By now they tend to include people on other continents, and often extraordinary stories across generations!
But here, I will tell you a love story that started that same year I spent in France, and the ongoing connection with the next generation of the same family; it happened like this:
I took off by train from France to Italy, for a solo tour of early Medieval churches in preparation for my upcoming year at the Institute of Medieval Studies in Poitiers. I wanted to explore early Medieval depictions of the Last Judgement in which ‘sinners’ got kicked into Hell while ‘goodies’ got escorted into Heaven by sweet angels, wondering why the fear of Hell has been so prominent in Medieval Christianity. Who made these rules, I wondered, and why?
In the Milano train station I got lost and ended up on the wrong platform. So I made the quick decision to go where the wrong train took me, and call it an adventure, so when the train rattled in, and its final destination was Ravenna, an ancient town on the Adriatic Sea noted for its early mosaics, I got on, stepping in just as the doors were closing, noticing that I would be sharing the car with an Italian fellow about my age with a cello case propped between his knees, his gaze turned towards the window. After taking quick glances at one another, we both looked away. I took my seat on the opposite side of the aisle and pulled out my map of Ravenna, hoping to find the Youth Hostel located close to the Train Station—but it wasn’t.
The fellow across the aisle continued to gaze out the window, a smile hovering on his face and his fingers tapping on his instrument case; I suppressed my own smile and pretended to reach for something in my backpack, slightly shifting my flutecase so it peeked out… he noticed; I looked the other way. For the next few stops we played our game of cat and mouse, both wondering, I daresay, who would get off first. But by the last stop, Ravenna, we were both still there and met on the platform, grinning shyly. Hefting his cello against his hip, he told me he lived in Ravenna, noticed me consulting my map and asked if he might help me find my way. I, in very broken Italian, told him I was looking for the Youth Hostel and he smilingly mentioned that he lived right by the Youth Hostel, and would be happy to show me the way. It never occurred to me not to trust him, but when he added that I would be welcome to stay with him if they were full, I backed away, afraid. “With my family!” he corrected himself, “mia Mamma, mio Babbo…” and giggling, we got onto the correct tram (which, in fact, I might not have found on my own) and discovered that we both spoke enough French to communicate in a patois of made-up words in 2 languages and begin our first conversation. We understood one another perfectly.
“The Hostello is normally filled by this time of day,” he warned me, inviting me again to his home. When I protested, reminding him that we were strangers, he simply said that we were compagnons de la musica which made us like family. Pointing to himself, he said, Moi, io sono Franco, deliberately mixing up French and Italian.
Moi, io sono Carolina, I replied, more grateful than he would ever know. Indeed I was welcomed like family by his parents and 2 sisters. I insisted upon spending the first night at the Hostel, but after that I moved across the street to live with the family when he left for a week-long tour with the Opera Orchestra; sleeping in his bed and sitting at his place at the table, loving the smell of him on his sheets, and comfortable with the open-hearted people who were his family. In the short week he was away I picked up enough Italian to make myself understood, to help in the kitchen and to learn secrets about him from his giggling sisters, who were already planning our wedding!
When he came back, our friendship was already neighborhood gossip, and when he had to return to Bologna for rehearsals, I went with him—which also became neighborhood gossip! This time we sat side by side on the train and held hands for the whole journey.
It was an enchanted time altogether, and the music we made together, and the people I met there still heartwarm my soul, but before long it was time to return to France to begin my school year, promising to return, although I had no idea when or how I could do that.
“Christmas” he whispered before I left, “to play together for the midnight Mass at Sant Appolinare in Classe,” he teased at the last moment. What? He simply smiled. Did that mean I would play music with Franco, for an audience?
“To improve my Italian” I later told my classmates in Poitiers, mumbling with pretend modesty. Franco had given me the score for a flute and cello Sonate to practice while we were apart, hinting at surprises to come. It hardly took much to convince me, of course, so of course I would return to Ravenna for Christmas—although in my excitement, I managed to get the date wrong, and arrived one day earlier than I was expected—so the family’s excited plans to surprise me at the train station the next day with ribbons and flowers sadly fell flatter than a pancake.
Sigh…how I still wish I could do that one over, correctly. Even so, our appearance together at the altar ‘making a beautiful noise unto the Lord’ made up for a lot on Christmas Eve at the hour of Midnight, when our music filled the Basilica’s resonant vaults with glory. Franco and I, who had been strangers on a train only 6 months earlier, who had met only by the heavenly accident of the wrong train, but the right train, he corrected me, played like angels, our music meeting in mid-air and shining the bits of colored glass in the mosaics surrounding us, in the presence of his family and his neighbors, his cello touching his shoulder and held by both his knees, his eyes glowing and our music introducing his people to the mysterious Americana he had met on the train. His parents and the girls sat proud as the mosaics glittered rainbows in the candlelight, and holy incense filled the air. Franco and I poured love into the ancient Basilica, on that clear night when Jesus had been born, and we celebrated His birth through our shared music, for we played like angels in love. Our music rang off ancient mosaic-covered walls; gentle sheep stood in green meadows watched over by their Good Shepherd, their flowered meadow twinkling with ancient bits of colored glass. We two sang our song, cello and flute, with inspired sweetness, praising Our Lord with music that brought tears even to our own eyes. We made love with music in the sight of God, and everyone felt it.
Together with the whole community, during the holy night of Jesus’s birth, we played our song ecstatically, reaching towards the grand Hallelujah! with the love we felt for one another and the gracious world that brought us to this moment in this ancient holy place.
As the walls continued to ring with our sound and our bodies longed to come together in private space, we felt our last chord ring throughout the Basilica. We put aside our instruments and gazed at one another, replete and in love.
The mass was achieved.
In fact, we did not marry, confessing to one another later in the darkened Basilica that we each were already engaged to other people, laughing and crying in one another’s arms, declaring our own love all the same. But we have remained “family” on our respective continents, sending gifts and pictures of the children over many years. From Franco’s son, also a professional cellist, I have recently learned of his father’s death, and this piece is my Momento Mori of the gracious man I met on the wrong train, and have loved across Time and Space.
I still wonder how synchronicities happen, and why some of them are life changing. Whatever led me to wait on the wrong track that long ago day, to meet the young Franco on the ‘wrong’ train,’ and continuing to know him for the rest of his life—even though we chose to marry other people?
I have no idea, really, although, for me sychronicities happen on a regular basis, helping me to recognize the magic implicit in my ordinary life, all our ordinary lives. In fact, most of the world’s Mystical traditions describe an integrated, multi-dimensional Cosmos in which all parts are inter-related and reflect the Whole. The sacred and the everyday intersect, and everything is in communion with everything else: Heaven and Earth; past, present and future; humans and the natural world. I believe Contemporary Western thought is catching up, and soon all modes of thinking will recognize that everything is in communion with everything else, and we humans are simply part of the design. Our synchronicities may be one of the ways we recognize a world in which everything participates in a sensitive web of active information, taking us by surprise each time this magic happens to us personally.
Synchronicities may be inherent in the Universe, appearing in the natural course of events and popping out of the common matrix like bubbles in a boiling pot of soup. I take these coincidences as wake-up calls, reminding me that everything is connected to everything else even when I am not paying attention. I just love it when they happen, and find that the more comfortable I get with their presence in my life, the more they tend to happen. On some days, I look out for Who it is that plays at taking me by surprise!
Like the day in Dublin when my husband and I stopped by the Trinity College Library to see the ancient Book of Kells on display in a hermetically-sealed case, opened each day to a different page for public viewing. At the time, we were living in Oxford where we both were continuing our studies. I was working on precious Medieval manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, so I took a chance and knocked on the door at Trinity College that said OFFICE to ask if I might look at the whole Book of Kells. My husband was skeptical, but the door was opened by a woman I actually knew, the only Irish native I knew personally, a fellow student from my earlier years at the Medieval Institute in France!
Whispering to her my bold request, she winked and asked me to wait. She must have desribed me as a professional Medievalist to her boss (which was hardly the case) but I was granted my wish, and the next morning I showed up before the doors officially opened to the public, and in a silent back room was treated to the whole Book of Kells. A Mentor in white gloves carefully turned the pages, waiting until I nodded for the next page, and for most of an hour I got to see, up close, the whole Book of Kells!
So take heart, is my message to everyone, we never know how everything fits together, nor what the Biggest Picture looks like. And what is ultimately the biggest picture of All, I suppose, looks like Love. Your guess is as good as mine, but frankly, that is the only thing that makes sense to me right now.
“Trust the Universe,” is my own personal motto (maybe because I do not know what else to do.) But Franco was real, and if I could find him on the wrong train, then I figure anything is possible.
I’ll stick with that: TRUST THE UNIVERSE! And accept with open arms the synchronicites of our lives, because they are a Godsend, and mostly open our hearts with wonder.
That is my mantra, and that is my heartfelt wish for all of us.
I bow to you, and to us all who are struggling to make sense of this world. We are in it together.
I bow to you—and to myself.
