teapots happen

Two years ago, I drove to my sister’s house in Illinois to celebrate Christmas with my mom, her dog, my girlfriend, and my dog – and a whole lot of coincidences went down.

This year, I took the same roadtrip to my sister’s, but this time with Kristin (Becky and I broke up in 2010), a different (and smaller) car, and at Thanksgiving instead of Christmas. (However, we were celebrating Christmas early, so it was pretty similar.)

This trip, there were not as many coincidences, but the one I did notice was a good one, right on point for me …

Shortly before the trip, Kristin bought a new teapot for my house, which she’d found at a thrift store (in classic teapot style). It was a green shade that almost matched my kitchen’s green – we commented on how it was just a little bit off, but it fit perfectly even though it was slightly different tone from the paint.

my teapot & kitchen

When we walked into my sister’s house, one of the first things I’d noticed was that she had the exact same teapot, in a blue that went with her kitchen:

my sister's teapot & kitchen (hard to tell due to my crappy pic, but the walls and cabinets are all light blue)

And like my teapot, my sister’s didn’t perfectly match her kitchen color scheme – it was a slightly different tone of blue (which she pointed out to me when I said that it “matched”).

Needless to say, given the background of my original teapot synchronicity, I was delighted by the coincidence.

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One lazy evening in late June,  my roommate Erin was making rhubarb pie in the kitchen, while I sat in the armchair in the living room. As we talked about something, she came into the doorway, holding a large green glass bowl that my mom had given me – and which she always made a  point to ensure I still possessed when she came by.

Although Erin has never broken any of my kitchenware and was not doing anything threatening toward the bowl, for some reason I jokingly said “don’t break my bowl!”

She laughed and looked at it, scoffing “don’t worry, I’m not going to break your green bowl.”

Then she walked out of sight toward the sink. The water ran for a moment, and then I heard her curse in surprise.

I jokingly yelled something like “what of mine have you ruined in there?!” (Although I’d just made the comment about the bowl, I’d already put it out of my mind – it was just a random comment – and besides, I’d heard no breaking glass.)

But then Erin returned to the doorway, still holding the green glass bowl – a shocked look on her face.

She held up the bowl, which looked intact – at first.

Then I noticed that three jagged cracks ran through it. No pieces had come apart – it had simply cracked when she’d put the frozen pieces of rhubarb into it.

Huh.

It felt too coincidental to be a coincidence …. but what? Did I somehow know, at some level, that it was coming? Did it happen because we thought about it? Did I unconsciously pick up from her body language when I saw her with the bowl that she, at some unconscious level, was aware that the hot water & ice cold rhubarb that she would soon be adding to the bowl might crack it?

Even if ‘merely’ the latter, still fascinating!

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This last winter, my friend Nick helped me learn how to snowboard – the new hobby I’d chosen to keep me active during the snowy season, when longboard skateboarding isn’t an option.

Nick planned a snowboarding trip to Lutsen Mountain for early March, for his birthday. Six of us went, and I had a great time – the first day was all clear skies and amazing views of Lake Superior far below, and the second day graced us with well over 6″ of fresh powder.

That trip was my final snowboarding for the year; afterward, winter and snow slowly relinquished their hold on Minnesota. By the end of March, the snowboards had been put away, the snowboard rack removed from the top of my car, and one of the final remnants of the snowboarding season was my parking pass from Lutsen Mountain, which was still floating around the car, getting stepped on and coffee stained.

This parking pass surfaced as part of an amusing synchronicity on one of my earliest Spring trips out longboard skating …

—

It was late March, and I was out with Jay and Andrew driving around Minneapolis, hoping to find a decent place to ride the longboards around a little – someplace without snow or rivers of snowmelt. This quest was proving difficult; it really wasn’t skating season yet, but I was really chomping at the bit, eager to get out and get my body moving after a long cold winter. (Snowboarding had been great, but it just wasn’t the same.)

We wound up driving alongside Lake Calhoun, and I noticed that the paved lakeside path looked sorta dry – certainly not ideal, but we’d been hunting for awhile and I was getting impatient.

So when two cars pulled away from their parking spots at once just as we approached, I impulsively turned the car around 180 degrees and pulled into one of the open spots.

Jay protested that the Lake path looked crowded with people, and he was not feeling like such a lengthy skate. I argued that it was as good as we would find, it wasn’t a very long skate, people can be dodged, and fuck it – we were there and parked, let’s just roll!

As we discussed it and Andrew and I pulled the longboards out to test out and prepare for action, a car pulled in behind us, into the other newly-open spot. A young woman got out and started to prepare her small child and stroller. She started talking to us – her name was Susan, and she was quite friendly and easy to talk to. It turned out that she used to skate, pre-baby and pre-Achille’s tendon injury, and she missed such activities. Now her ankle was finally healed, and her daughter was getting old enough to bring along on outdoor adventures. She repeatedly told us that she “used to be cool” – and she took my board around a little bit to see how it felt on her ankle.

Although Susan joined me in encouraging Jay to skate the lake, it was to no avail. So we all said goodbye – Jay walked home (he lives nearby), Andrew and I went to skate the lake clockwise on the bike path, and Susan the friendly mom left stroller-jogging counter-clockwise on the walking path.

The bike path was wet and sandy and gross and clogged with wayward pedestrians – but it felt so good to be out on my board that I still enjoyed it heartily … even though the sandy slop on the griptape and the wet wheels made it almost impossible to generate momentum by ‘pumping’ the board back and forth. It was joy enough just to be out without winter gear, pushing along, re-energizing slumbering muscles and tendons and movement patterns.

We saw Susan and her daughter briefly as we zoomed past in the opposite direction, and waved.

I got back to the car a couple minutes ahead of Andrew, and stashed my board in the back … and then felt an impulse to leave a note for Susan. I wasn’t trying to hit on her; I just thought she seemed really positive and pleasant, and the first skate of spring has left me in a mood very open to connection and following flow and coincidence.

So I looked for something to write a note on – and found that parking pass from my Lutsen snowboarding trip. I scrawled a quick message, and stuck it under her windshield wiper before we drove off.

A week or two went by, and I’d almost forgotten about the incident when I got an email from Susan. We emailed back and forth a bit, and I decided to look her up on Facebook.

I found her – and was surprised to find we had one friend in common. I started to email Susan to mention the coincidence – but it wasn’t until I was describing how I knew the mutual friend that I realized that following the flow/my intuition had led me to synchronicity yet again:

Our mutual friend – Nick – was my snowboarding friend – the same guy who had planned and booked the trip to Lutsen Mountain, and who had handed me the parking pass that I’d used to connect with Susan when we’d met.

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moved the site to its own domain to get away from WordPress’s annoying ads and CSS extortion, some things are broken (random post links, some youtube videos, my old blog/website link lists, etc) … working out the kinks (and have a new post ready to go as soon as I get my mitts on the relevant artifact for scanning).

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“The stream of human knowledge is impartially heading towards a non-mechanical reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of this realm.”

- Sir James Jeans

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I just woke up and read over last night’s entry, and realized there’s another coincidence to be explored in there.

Before yesterday, the last time I’d posted in this blog was way back in the earliest morning hours of February 27th (“Wearing Red“), having started writing the previous night and not hitting “publish” until past midnight.

I had been inspired to work on the blog that frigid evening by a beautiful, magical-feeling daytrip I’d taken earlier that day to a frozen swamp with my friend Megh (who, in fact, blogged about the trip on her website here: http://www.deepsicks.com/2010/03/07/winter-swamp-walkabout)

So, yesterday – after the worm incident at Black Dog Road – Andrew and I set out further upstream along the Minnesota River – him navigating sporadically with an old school paper map, and me just turning when he said to. We got ourselves good and turned around, did a huge circle or two … and then after a couple of hours of closed bridges, blocked roads, and failed efforts to get down by the water we wound up pulling into the Louisville Swamp – the same swamp I’d first discovered and last seen back in February with Megh, the day I’d came home and updated this blog last.

I’ve been there twice in my life, both times I came home and posted in this blog – and didn’t post at all in between those trips.

Coincidence?

I know, it may seem like it couldn’t be anything else … but there’s something meaningful in here, for me at least.

And I think it’s something good.

Megh: Louisville Swamp companion February 26 2010

Andrew: Louisville Swamp companion September 29, 2010

Cleo and I approach the mighty oak on the savanna in winter

Cleo approaches the mighty oak on the savanna in autumn

Cleo beholds the frozen Louisville Swamp / Minnesota River Valley

Cleo beholds the flooded Louisville Swamp / Minnesota River Valley

dead lightning-blasted oak tree

the not-dead-after-all lightning-blasted oak tree

=

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I woke up this morning at 6:30 am to an incoming text message on my phone – it was my friend Andrew, who’d just gotten off work at his nightshift job, saying that “we need to go check out that flooding river right now today” … yeah, right. I rolled back over to return to sleep.

But … by 7:15 I was still lying in bed awake, so I decided to call his bluff.

By 8:00 am we were rolling down the highway in my ’71 Buick, heading south toward the still-rising waters of the flooded Minnesota River.

Cleo is ready to roll

Our first stop was Black Dog Road, which had been closed to traffic due to the swelling river. We parked the car nearby and hiked in on the deserted roadway, with Cleo the (black) dog scouting ahead.  We weren’t far past the barricades when I almost stepped on a huge nightcrawler worm that was out in the middle of the road. The morning sun was starting to heat up the day, so I said “oh, little worm, you are SO lost!” and picked him up and hurled him out into the woods toward the river.

We continued onward – and soon saw that the waters were totally covering Black Dog Road not far ahead. On either side, water rose up and spilled onto the high ground crest of the roadway. Abruptly I realized that the road here was squirming with dozens and dozens of nightcrawlers and scrawled by their wet trails, where they’d wiggled onto the blacktop away from the rising river.

I’d never seen such a swarm of nightcrawlers before, and paused to take it in.

“You should collect a bunch and let them loose in your yard,” Andrew suggested.

It was a good idea – I’d been doing a lot of planting and gardening this year, and knew the huge worms would be helpful in conditioning the soil.

But I didn’t have anything to put worms in, so I looked around, pretty much expecting to find a coincidental piece of useful litter – a plastic bag, a water bottle, anything I could carry some worms in. But the sides of the road were surprisingly free of garbage – the only piece I could see anywhere was several yards ahead in the weeds along the road, white and papery looking.

As I walked nearer, I could start to make out words on the side of what appeared to be a cup … words that seemed oddly in line with my intention.

I burst out laughing as I stooped to pick up the only piece of debris in sight – a paper cup that once contained 20 nightcrawlers, sold as fishing bait.

nightcrawler cup

wild nightcrawler passes the worm cup

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