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15 Sep 2009

falling cell phones

Posted by Teapots Happen. 1 Comment

fall 2007

In 2007 I was beseiged by several synchronicities involving my new friend Emilie. Many of them were pretty minor – like her best friend Paddy and I both having a single decoration on our car’s dashboards – a dragonfly – and both having human teeth rattling around in our cars (it’s a long story). Some coincidences were more eyebrow raising – like the glass insulator incident I posted about previously.

Anyway, the very first time I ever hung out with Emilie was marked by a synchronicity.

We were in her minivan with her other best friend/sidekick “Little Emily,” on our way to explore some caves in Saint Paul.

We stopped at a station for gas, and all got out of the van – me from the front passenger seat, Little Emily from the rear passenger seat.

When I stood up, I heard a clatter from the ground at my feet – I had dropped my cellphone. As I bent over to pick it up, I saw that Little Emily was doing the same thing next to me.

Straightening up, I looked over to see that she’d also dropped her cellphone as she got out of the car – I hadn’t heard the sound, because it had hit the ground at the exact same moment mine had.

We laughed – and then realized that we had the exact same phone … and laughed some more – but with a good amount of “WTF” thrown in this time.

DSC00017

Same phone – not so weird.

Finding out that we had the same phone because we’d both forgotten them on our laps and dropped them at the same time – downright interesting.


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31 Aug 2009

Poison Ivy and the Mandelbrot Set

Posted by Teapots Happen. 3 Comments

July 9th 2007

One evening I was online, trying not to scratch my wrist, which had broken out in a rash in reaction to poison ivy – which is why I was online trying to find out if steroid cream really expires (I had most of a tube left over from my previous run-in with poison ivy, two summers earlier).

Googling didn’t help, so I posted the question on a forum for such things.

My (now-ex) girlfriend M was busy programming her new cellphone, so I checked my email – and found a new “synchronicity” Google Alert.

I was instantly interested to see a blog post titled “Books, Lightning, Poison Ivy, and the Bizarreness of the Everyday” … since I’d been looking stuff up about poison ivy seconds before, it had been thunderstorming furiously all day – and the post was apparently about synchronicity.

A minor coincidence to be sure, but fresh on the heels of the recent Rubber ducky “chain synchronicity,” I was paying attention …

I told M what I’d found, reading to her aloud from the blog, which started out about the author’s serendipitous, synchronous relationship with a local used bookstore.

Then in one of several PS notes, the blogger talked about having to program all her numbers into a cellphone – which of course was what Mandy was doing at that moment. We laughed at the coincidence.

In the next PS, there was a link to an article about Roger Penrose, a scientist I like. So I clicked and started scanning the article.

Then M asked me to call her cellphone to test the ringtone – so I pulled up her new number on my cell. Since her old number was in there with her real name, I’d put the new number under her nickname – “Mandelbrot.”

I called her, the phone rang, and I went back to the article – and the first paragraph where I’d left off began with “Penrose cites the Mandelbrot set as an example.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVtzcCwLc2o]

I burst into laughter – which seems to always be my response to coincidences, post-Teapots.

(When I dug into the blogger’s past posts a bit, I found that she was worried that she might have MS … and I was about to be really freaked out if she, too, was diagnosed with it (this was shortly after my weird MS diagnosis / blogger sychronicity) … but fortunately, this potential synchronicity remained unrealized.)
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4 Aug 2009

“That is magic.”

Posted by Teapots Happen. 2 Comments

Heinz_von_Foerster_II

“We have to learn to deal with things we can’t explain. This is the way of thinking I call “magic.” Magic is the art of handling situations which in principle you cannot explain. You live in a world which is inexplicable, and you yourself are inexplicable, and you find the art to worm your way through that incredible puzzle. That is magic.”

Heinz von Foerster

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21 Jul 2009

the Nines (movie)

Posted by Teapots Happen. 3 Comments

Saw a movie last night that was really interesting, I had no idea at all what to expect, had never seen a trailer, read a review, anything. I recommend you try it that way too …

It is not what you think it’ll be … I hear it’s on Netflix if you use that, or grab a torrent. Not my favorite movie or anything, but certainly worthwhile and thought-provoking – and a movie you’ll need to watch twice to really appreciate. Deals with a lot of “coincidences” and what they might indicate about reality …

Plus, while watching it,  had more than one coincidence myself … for example, we paused the movie at one point to take a break – couple people smoked outside, I went upstairs to use the bathroom – where I suddenly decided I should brush my teeth. Slightly odd, since I don’t usually do that until just before bed. When I came back and we resumed the movie, the next scene featured a main character (who shared my unusual first name) brushing his teeth – and using an electric toothbrush, just as I had.

It doesn’t sound like much, but it was notable, especially in the context of that movie.
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13 Jul 2009

glass insulators

Posted by Teapots Happen. 4 Comments

June 25, 2007

It was Monday morning and I was at work, my mind wandering back to the weekend’s fun times.

Photo0122

inside the brewery ruins

 

Remembering that we’d scavenged some greenish glass electrical insulators from some brewery ruins, I did a little Googling to see if I could find out more about what the insulators I’d found were.

I quickly discovered that there’s a whole hobby devoted to he collection of glass insulators. Since Jeremy and Mandy had grabbed a couple of the brewery insulators too, I emailed them a few URLs:

Sent: Monday, June 25, 2007 9:35 AM

Subject: RE: green insulators

http://www.rainbowriderstradingpost.com/green.html

http://www.insulators.com

http://www.nia.org

Then I left my office and went out to my car, to get the brewery insulators I’d found (now that I knew more about how they’re classified, I wanted to see what color they were, what markings, etc).

 

glass insulators (not my pic, just examples)

glass insulators (not my pic, just examples)

When I got back to my computer, I found an instant message waiting from my friend Emilie – who had no idea that I’d brought insulators home.

While I’d been out at my car getting my insulators, she had typed me a tale of synchronicity she’d experienced that weekend … about glass insulators! (She had not been with us at the brewery and had no idea we’d gotten some.)

Here is our chat exchange:

[09:42] Emilie:

oh yeah hey i did one a them damn teapot things u did

i was at the flea market, and i love old glass, like bottles, i love colored glass, and etched, i just like glass damnit.

i have a few a them colored glass things that go on the old telephone poles

and i used the last one i got from Osceola as a flower pot, but i wanted one for my water dragon

so i was on a mission at the flea market

and the last table i finally found one

a light blue one, and i was disappointed cuz it was small, and i wanted a big one, but at this point i wasn’t picky, so i bought it for a buck 50


[09:46] Me:

oh, fucking weird


[09:46] Emilie:

then yesterday i went down my crawl space (mines upstairs)

so i went all the way down there cuz i saw a box with treasures in tit


[09:46] Me:

hell yes you did a teapot thing, it’s still happening now

I am forwarding you an email I sent maybe 3 minutes ago


[09:47] Emilie:

so i got out my box, but something else pulled my hand into the other box the treasures were in, and i felt it!

my clear glass thing like that!

same size

same insignia

now they both sit in the lizard tank!


[09:48] Me:

in that brewery, we found some old greenish glass insulators.

I’ve never collected them before but I thought they’d make a nice keepsake. so we took em, Mandy and I got 4 between us

a few minutes ago

I started thinking about em

looked up some stuff online

sent some links to mandy and junkyard about em

then I went out to my car to look at em quick to see what style they were

when I came back, you had typed a whole bunch about glass insulators


[09:50] Emilie:

uh huh, weird, thats what theyre called huh?

i just did that on saturday

[09:50] Me:

on Sunday, I went glass insulator happy


[09:51] Emilie:

and sunday i found my older one, exactly the same, i havent seen it for years …

 

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26 Jun 2009

cultivating randomness & trusting intuition

Posted by Teapots Happen. 4 Comments

I just got back from an aimless cruise with my friends Dan & Cleo the dog, enjoying the sunshine and beauty, down east Lake Street, across the river, and up into some cool old industrial/residential part of Saint Paul that I didn’t recognize.

I don’t know how I decided when to keep going and when to turn, the car and the road just worked together, without any input from me.

Good music, good vibes, no place to go.

DSC03129

Finally, Dan asked me where the hell we were.  I looked around a bit and told him I had no idea – in fact, I didn’t think I’d ever seen this road in my life.

On reflection, I added, “well, I suppose I probably have – I’ve lived in the (Twin) Cities for over thirty years. But I don’t remember it.

This started me thinking – about the synchronicity thing – about how “being in the flow,” and opening myself up to randomness and intuition seemed to bring about synchronicities, and how other people often experienced the same thing. About how hard it sometimes was to just let go and go forth without thought or planning, and about how I’d managed to successfully do it just then – because I really had no idea where we were or even where we were in relation to anything else.

I looked around at the vine-covered houses and run down industrial buildings, saw a road sign for the street we were cruising down – it sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

On the right, I saw an cool old green building that rang a bell, and pulled me out of my musings about flow and synchronicity – hadn’t I just seen that place recently?

Before I could figure out when I recognized it from, my cellphone vibrated in my lap – it was Emilie. She was calling to suggest that we go cruise around, but use her car (since it had AC, unlike my old black beast).

I told her the name of the street we were on and she said “yeah, that’s a good road,” laughing.

Then I remembered – this was a road she and I had driven down a couple of months ago together, while randomly cruising around, checking out vacant buildings – she’d been driving, and we’d talked about how we might sneak into that green building – shortly before we saw a vastly bigger and more abandoned structure just down the road.

(While we talked, that building slowly slid past.)

~ — ~

This was not the first time this kind of coincidence happened with Emilie and I – I think it was last spring when I took a carload of us (me, Emilie, Workman, and Ron) out ‘randoming’ one evening – we left town in a random direction, with no discussion of where we were going. I wound up taking us to the same obscure, out of the way park down near Hastings that she had spent her lunchbreak at that day.

It was the first time I’d ever seen it, and that lunchtime had been her first time there. She’d told me via IM that afternoon that she’d randomed into some park with the remains of a cleaned deer on the edge of the parking lot – but I had no idea where she was talking about (I’d pictured her over in Burnsville for some reason).

And while neither of these random-driving coincidences imparted some kind of cosmic message, they do mean quite a bit to me.

They seem to indicate that when we let go of trying to consciously predetermine our course, we are not by any means rudderless. Something – whether you conceive of it as the universe, god, the subconscious, the psychic soul, whatever – can take the wheel and bring us where we want to be – in my case, laughter, love for this reality, a feeling of profound connectedness was all I really hoped for from the afternoon cruise, and that’s what I got.

Because I love it when it feels like the universe is winking at itself, at me, at myself. When I feel connected, when the boundaries swing open and possibility opens up wide.

Like orgasm – not be something I really want or need to feel constantly –  but I sure think life is better when it is experienced, hopefully frequently, throughout life. Like vitamin D – it’s good for you, and too many people today don’t get enough of it.

lol

OK, I’m not going to go into this topic too much or try to justify it, or explain it fully all at a go.

But I did want to put this out there quick while it was on my mind: if you want to experience synchronicity for yourself, for whatever reason, one vital piece – perhaps neither necessary nor sufficient, but vital – seems to be the willingness and ability to experience the world as directly as possible, not from within usual frameworks of plans and timelines. To trust randomness. To have faith in your intuition – it’s a well-honed machine, far older than mankind, far deeper than our meager analytical abilities … tap into it and be rewarded.

The more you open up to what is really around you, right now, and pay attention to it instead of the ideas of it you hold, abstracted, in your head, the more able you’ll be to coinci-dance.

I recommend it.

~ — ~

Hip-Hop PS:

These three ‘automotivesque’ Gift of Gab songs came to mind when I reread the post above – they aren’t my favorite songs from him or his group (Blackalicious) but they’re the most apt:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh4bHFJxsDE]

[Gift of Gab]
It’s automatic
sporadic movements on the brake
The moment’s magic the last thing that I should do is think
A burst of energy that hints there really is no time
At birth you start to think that after death back to no mind
A rest that makes you new again now you embrace the planet
And stand in awe of all the thing you daily took for granted
The trees are posin’ all unique in form make this perfection
The most important time is now tomorrow’s a projection
A co-creator if you only just believe in that
Right here today inside is where I find my freedom at
It’s automatique
Its simple as a lyric from my soul to yours as felt
I didn’t write this I just let the pen move by itself
It’s art-o-matic

[Natalie of Floetry]
So blessed we rest in a space over-standin’
This breath’s so unique we must trace where we landed
Magnetizin’ mirror tracks is subliminal
So fiendn to the evidence is evident I’m bein’ true
True to the moment the channelin’ the callin’
True to the heartbeat the passion and the formin’
This rollercoaster’s the one I stood in line for
Hands in the air these upside downs here are paid for
Make this relevant and here what you gotta hear
I’m recordin’ all the secrets of my silent shed
Don’t think about it just absorb everything you taste
If it set you free you gonna find the ways
You’re who you gonna be unless you choose otherwise
If you let it flow the universe will empathize
Check your programs they monitorin’ your sanity
Now close your eyes inside you find the clarity
It’s automatic!

[Floetry]
Free your body know this ought to be open
Then lose control just let it happen then
Live at it and set it
Move again your clarity start to assume again
I know this one twist will feel it in
You think you don’t know the engine (???)
But it’s so automatic
So so so automatic

[Gift of Gab]
It’s automa-tive, beyond the common logic native
Beyond the ball around my drama now I’m divin’ waitin
So stop and wait this, now operate it on the wavelength
A thought of way is presented by true laws of nature
Across the nation a lost of patience is cost inflation
So caught in waitin’, and contemplatin’ obligations
Read up inaugurations politrations violatin
And all the haters all up it cannot invadin’
The honest tension, two orders sacred not created
Good thought I made it!! I’m born beyond the constellations
So concetratin’, and follow man we all are awakin’
It’s automative, you gotta make it follow faith in
Come on come on!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eok7z17Ad3M]

“buckle up and get your ride on

you gotta get into it
to get intuitive

synchronicity;
cause nothing is really coincidence …”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuE86rmJxKU]

Enter in to the spacecraft filling up
That won’t touch back again ’til the job is done
Way outta the range of normal
So far where ya are that ya no longer see the sun
It’s a journey not of sight but sound
Ready or not your bound
To also embrace the light
And drift on
Let your soul be again reborn
For these songs buckle up it’s the ride of your life
Riffin in the octave of the
Infinite provactive
Come get within a rocketship
Dimensions of a positive
Inventions that is monstrous
I’m givin it my all
It’s just my sentiments
Took over and as I give in
To the power of just livin
In the now, I put the div-idends
I holler from the spirit
Within all of us
I’m driftin on a cloud up in
You’re meant to feel the shower
Follow in, as I devour
Y’all with synonyms and vowels
Ladies and gentlemen
It’s our time to dig within a tower
Over ignorance, the final hour’s
Here so come and crowd around
And listen up on how I’m stayin driven
By the sound I feel it liftin
Higher how my daily livin
Is the style it’s like my children
Seem scattered through the villages
And towns, and when the Gift
Is in the house
I bring the lyrics
That come down from up
Inherent to the sound
From a mysterious, profound
Very indigenous way out
Chief innervision, and
I think I’ve really truly found religion now
Enter in to the spacecraft filling up
That won’t touch back again ’til the job is done
Way outta the range of normal
So far where ya are that ya no longer see the sun
It’s a journey not of sight but sound
Ready or not your bound
To also embrace the light
And drift on
Let your soul be again reborn
For these songs buckle up

it’s the ride of your life

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26 Jun 2009

rubber ducky, you’re the One

Posted by Teapots Happen. 12 Comments

June 5, 2007

I was in downtown Seattle for a conference.

I’d flown in two nights before, and had been having a great time randoming around town, getting into the flow, oogling entropic beauty, and sneaking into tunnels with newfound partners in victimless crime.

~ — ~

The next morning, I woke up around seven and walked to the conference center through the rain, which was the heaviest I’d seen there yet – not a downpour by any means, but not the lightt misting rain from the previous day, either.

 

view from the hotel window - bay almost visible over the rooftops

Being a Minnesotan, the chill was no problem – but I didn’t really want to have to sit through the afternoon sessions with puddles in my pants.

Crossing over the railroad tracks and Alaskan Way on the “skybridge” (aren’t they all?), I made a note to self and reality that I could use an umbrella – I’d pay attention on my end, and asked that reality provide on its end.

After breakfast, I was going to skip the morning debate – Bid Management is not a part of my job, and I needed to spend some time by the water. Even though it’s next to impossible to find an inch of shoreline in Seattle that isn’t piers or docks or otherwise developed, I was determined to make due with whatever I could find.

Magic, negative ions or evo-psychological programming, there’s simply something about the water that kicks ass, whatever it is. And being from a landlocked homeland, I was starved for the refreshing that only time spent with Big Water can provide.

But first I needed to ditch the laptop I was carrying – a friend of mine was staying at the Edgewater Hotel, right next to the conference, and she’d agreed to hold onto the laptop while I traipsed up the shoreline. We met in the lobby, where I noticed a blue umbrella propped in the corner behind the concierge podium.

No one objected when I befriended it on my way back out, and so my new umbrella and I started walking along the waterline, with downtown Seattle to my right and Puget Sound to my left. Jellyfish bobbed in the waves, unconcernedly straddling the imagined line between a colony of single celled organisms and a multi-cellular organism.

I hadn’t gone far when the rainfall started to slowly taper away – just as the shoreline turned from piers and docks to a rocky shore. I was glad to be able to fold up the umbrella and use it as a walking stick, as I left the running path and clambered down among the stones – which were slippery with a varigated green scum of seaweeds and algae. Finally, I felt like I’d gotten close to the water – no railing or 15 foot drop preventing me from getting near enough to feel the spray.

I moved slowly up the shoreline, looking to see what the waves might have washed ashore for me.

 

rocks slippery with rocks

rocks slippery with life

As it often seems to do, the ocean began to strip away my normal perspectives, and I found myself idly pondering the umbrella, and how almost as soon as I’d put the mental call out for one, one had appeared. Most me me wasn’t having any of it, though – finding the umbrella was nothing weird, not even really a coincidence – rainy Seattle had to be the umbrella capital of the world, after all.  (or so I’d thought – as natives later informed me, almost no one in Seattle actually uses umbrellas.)

But regardless, something was building in me, or around me, through me – and in spite of myself, I felt the ocean vibe sinking in – a mystical flashback from my experience on the Point Reyes coast, maybe – and I soon found myself pondering our self-generated realities, and the evidence for unaccountable blurring between our minds and our ‘external’ environments.

Which was, itself, was just one step toward blurring of all distinctions – the hallmark mystical experience – the ‘oneness of all things.’

I wasn’t there yet, but I was on the path.

I watched the sky and the waves and thought about rainy day weather – how here, in a different city, by the water, a grey, cloudy & rainy sky was both beautiful and stimulating – yet a grey day at home could create a bad mood that seemed mandated by the sky, an internalized gloom both inevitable and inescapable.

I determined to try to remember this vista and feeling the next time I was feeling flat-lined by a grey day – that euphoria is found where you make it, and beauty where you look for it, and that this is just as true in rainy weather as it is when it’s gorgeous – you can’t change the weather, but you can change your mind. (Hopefully, anyway.)

Suddenly, my wandering thoughts were derailed as I was struck with a powerful compulsion to stop walking, bend over, and examine a particular patch of rocks and debris.

Although I told myself I’d probably subconsciously seen something interesting down there, the intuitive voice I was ‘hearing’ felt familiar from my last visit to the west coast – the one that eventually led me from California to a paradigm knocked off its foundations, in the crawlspace beneath my own house.

I immediately picked up a rounded rock marked by several intersecting rings of various thicknesses – it was pretty cool, I’d keep it – but although I didn’t see anything else noteworthy, I felt rooted there, bent over at the waist, eyeing the ground.

So I picked up a piece of seaweed that interested me – an algal surface surrounding a twin-lobed pocket of trapped air, a living green ballon. This was neat, but it wasn’t what I was looking for, either.

Then I glanced to my right, back toward the walking path and, beyond that, Seattle’s skyline. There was a bright yellow something in a crack, a couple of feet beneath a boulder, only visible due to my low angle. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked an awful lot like a rubber ducky. Hmmm – hadn’t Mandy (my girlfriend) told me about how as  a little girl she used to take baths with several rubber duckies at a time?

I’d just decided that I would retrieve it to bring back for her as a gift from Seattle, when doubt crept in. My memory is a hole, and I can’t usually trust it. Was this something I made up, or worse, was it actually some other girl that had a thing for rubber duckies?

Just as this question crossed my mind, my cellphone started to vibrate in my pocket.

In the mental state I was in, I was instantly convinced that it had to be Mandy, calling just at the moment I was wondering about her. When I saw that it was, I laughed aloud, and the sense of some kind of moment building grew stronger.

“Do you like rubber duckies?”, I asked, by way of greeting.

My memory hadn’t misled me – she’d had a collection of them as a girl. I told her how good the timing was, her calling me just then – she told me that she was at work, when she’d been hit by a sudden urge to call me – even though she’d figured I was in a conference session.

As I picked my way toward the ducky crack, I told her about the serendipitous umbrella and my thoughts about the rain and grey skies.

By the time I’d caught her up, I’d started groping in the crack, trying to pull out the duck. However, I could just barely get my fingers on the base, and when I tried to pull it out there was no room for both the duck and my fingers on it. So I propped the cellphone to my head with one shoulder, and used a rock to knock out a brick that was part of the problem.

“OK, I think I’ve got it now,” I said, and reached in.

I wish I could have seen my face when I pulled it out and discovered that the smiling duck was, itself, holding an umbrella.

 

Rainy Day Duckie

Rainy Day Ducky and friends

Mandy actually didn’t believe me at first, as I laughed and babbled – I’d already thought her calling when she had was weird, to then to find this smiling duck – marked on the bottom as a “Rainy Day Duck” – while on the phone with her talking about having fun in spite of rainy weather and of umbrellas – was enough to convince me again, at least for that moment that yes, the universe was all one thing, and you bet it was alive, and of course it was talking to itself, all around and through us.

When I decided to use the umbrella as a specimen bag – an over-the-shoulder hobo-style carryall for the rocks and driftwood and detritus I was rapidly accumulating – I noticed for the first time that the umbrella had a logo on it  – a swirling, wavey logo with the all-too-apt “Seattle Waterfront.”

(the umbrella handle had broken off from the weight of the rocks, so I gutted it to take the fabric home)

 

None of the coincidences – the found umbrella, the intuition that led me to see the duck, the phone call just then, the rainy day duck with umbrella, the apt umbrella logo – were a big deal on their own. Some of them are barely coincidences. And even strung together into one long chain as they were as I experienced them, I know they aren’t objectively amazing – especially to a skeptical mind.

So I’m not surprised or offended if none of this means shit to you, gentle reader – but to me, it was a confirmation, a blessing, a ‘what’s up’ from the omniverse.

In that moment, caught up as I was in such thoughts of synchronicity and intuition and reality-creation, high on life, the water, and everything – it was as though I’d peeked beneath the skirts of reality just the tiniest bit – and I’d really liked what I saw there.

“Thanks, Seattle,” I muttered aloud through a huge grin. Then I felt like I should turn to face the water – and so I did – adding, “thanks, ocean.” (Yeah, it’s only a bay but whatever.)

But this was still too narrow, I realized – I should be thanking reality itself, all of it, the big om, the unified shebang.

So I did. “Thanks, reality!” and then added – “I appreciate it.” This struck me as somehow important, so I repeated it aloud, truly feeling deep appreciation for my life and times. The “it” I was appreciating was Everything – and the chance I’d been given to exist as me.

At that exact moment, waves started crashing into the rocky shoreline, loud and hard.

After a few moments these abated – in my entire time walking along the shore, before and afterward, this phenomenon was not repeated. I had to laugh out loud – it was just too much.

Teapots or not, I simply couldn’t let myself believe that the crashing waves were really the universe saying “you’re welcome,” and so the mystical moment crested, and broke, and slowly began to fade away … but never completely.

~ — ~

epilogue

I spent about an hour more on the shore, sometimes roaming, sometimes sitting … and constantly collecting rocks, which I have always had a thing for. Quickly, the large coffee cup I’d been using for a specimen bag was filled to bursting, so I transformed the umbrella into a carryall by loading it up with rocks and driftwood, then closing the strap tight. Held over the shoulder like a hobo’s hankerchiefed belongings, it worked out great.

 

Seattle rocks, seaweed, driftwood, shells, rusty Underground iron, and a chunk of barnacled & eroded brick with mortar.

Seattle rocks, seaweed, driftwood, shells, rusty Underground iron, and a chunk of barnacled & eroded brick with mortar.

Some seagulls reminded me that my mom – who was currently undergoing radiation treatment for aggressive cancer – also loves big water. I called her from the shore and made plans to bring her to Lake Superior that summer.

(She didn’t remember to remind me that when I was little we’d had a dishtowel embroidered with a umbrella-wielding duckling – but later, when I did a google search for “rainy day duckie” and the first result was a replica of the towel from my childhood, I remembered it immediately – and yeah, I bought it.)

Soon enough, it was time to head back toward the conference – I wanted to meet up with my friend, grab some lunch, and get back to the hotel to drop off my umbrella full of rocks before the afternoon sessions began.

 

 

back toward the SMX conference

back toward the SMX conference

synchronicity

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25 Jun 2009

Secrets of Synchronicity

Posted by Teapots Happen. 4 Comments

May 21st 2007

While randoming around alone in Uptown one day, I decided that I should stop thinking of experiences I am experiencing in the abstract – especially when said abstraction is bundled with negative connotations.

My mind was full of them.

I don’t like Uptown. I don’t like busy commercial areas. I don’t like stores. I don’t like people from Edina.

Instead of classifying present moments under such self-defeating, negative frames, I opened myself outward, to the actual moment, the unique and irreducible Now.

(I’d done this before, I remembered. As a student at the U of MN, walking across campus in the frigid winters – choosing to straighten my spine, ungrimace my face, and open my eyes to the beauty around me.)

It felt excellent.

I decided that it was a good idea to remember it. I am not good at remembering things.

So I mentally repeated – ‘there are no TYPES of experiences, just unique nows,” and as I did so, breathing consciously, I walked past a white paint-marker tag scrawled across the frame of a bus stop shelter.

The tag said “WISE WISE WISE WISE WISE.”

I read this with a smile. It did not seem at all implausible that this markered message was the Universe’s response to my thoughts.

I walked into that bookstore near Hennepin and Lyndale, went downstairs, and from the top shelf pulled down a book with an appealing cover – sci-fi and barbarian fantasy paperback art.

It turned out to be by Boris Vallejo. I knew him. A couple of years before, I’d found a Conan paperback boxed set graced by his art in a trunk on the side of the road – and kept the box, pinned to the wall at work.

Vallejo had painted a lot of pleasant-to-look-at women. I opened the book.

The page I opened to did not feature a voluptuous, scantily-clad woman – it was a naked dude.

 

Huh.

My eyes skipped down to the painting’s title, in small type at the bottom of the page:

“The Secrets of Synchronicity.”

I laughed out loud.


– — –

PS stuff

Later, at home, I looked up the painting and the artist. It turned out to have been a book cover, like most of Vallejo’s work. I found it for pennies on Amazon, ordered it.

A couple of years later, that book would lead into the previous blog post on here – Apple-Eaters Anonymous.

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24 Jun 2009

Apple-eaters Anonymous

Posted by Teapots Happen. 9 Comments

OK, this is long and odd – one of what I call a “chain synchronicity,” in which minor coincidences start stacking up, more and more – perhaps not impressive to outsiders, but impossible not to be awed by from the inside, as it continues to unfurl …

“The trouble is,” Teddy said, “most people don’t want to see things the way they are … I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters.”

Part I

I was upstairs on the bed, enjoying the air conditioning and reading a collection of JD Salinger shorts, when Becky called me from downstairs.

The story I was in the middle of was “Teddy,” a tale about an unusual ten year-old boy.

All of the stories had been good, but this one was unexpectedly starting to feel like it might be special and relevant – first Teddy had explained how he’d had his first mystical experience; “I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that.”

Since my relationship with synchronicity had been kicked off by such a mystical experience, it’s a topic near and dear to my heart – and I was eager to see where the story was going to go.

Just before Becky called me again, and I decided to pause in my reading and bring the book down there with me, I’d read the part where Teddy tries to explain how he attains mystical awareness at will – but hits a wall as he tries to make a rationalist understand:

“You’re just being logical,” Teddy said to him impassively. “You’re just giving me a regular, intelligent answer. I was trying to help you. You asked me how I get out of the finite dimensions … I certainly don’t use logic when I do it. Logic’s the first thing you have to get rid of.”

When I got downstairs, I wound up on the laptop, I can’t remember why, but the first thing I did was open up my iGoogle page – where I immediately noticed a blog in my RSS feeds titled “Divine miracles: you could never dream this stuff up“and went to read it.

The article was about true tales of synchronicity, and how some doubt they could be true, since they are so irrational. Near the end of the article, the author wrote:

“Anna’s letter reminded me how important the suspension of ‘logic’ is in these cases.  Prayers such as these open us to what transcends the limitations of the rational mind.”

When I realized how well it fit with what I had just read in the Salinger story, I laughed – and then remembered something else – earlier that very morning, someone had commented on my ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ post, and I’d responded with a ramble on the topic of learning to suspend logic, get past the limitations of rationalism:

it’s a weird balance to strike between my extremely rationalist and extremely mystical tendencies … I do lean/yearn more toward the latter, but that very bias makes my rationalist side all the more suspicious of all this … part of what I’m hoping to do with this blog is achieve some kind of integration/truce state between these extremes … starting this blog felt like “coming out of the closet” for me, I think it will be useful in nailing the coffin shut on knee-jerk fundamentalist rationalism once and for all. “Don’t stop believing,” indeed …

Laughing, I explained the coincidence to Becky …  I would not have thought much more about it, but just as I finished talking, a single narrow sunbeam shot into the dim living room sideways, like a golden spotlight – perfectly illuminating the sculpture that I sometimes consider to be some kind of intuitive shrine to Transformation:

intuitive transformation art/shrine, enlightened

intuitive Transformation art/shrine, enlightened

 

(For years I had a bleached, sterile cow skull atop my entertainment center  – over the last few years it’s become green, growing, beautifully complex – and the closest thing I have to a shrine or reliquary … while I don’t practice any type of ritual magick, it has often felt magical, energetic, and meaningful to me.)

I’ve lived here for years, and I’ve never before seen the sun do this – it came in at such a strange, oblique angle, in such a narrow beam – and in the context, it was impossible to ignore.

After two minutes (from 8:29-8:31 PM, according to my digital camera’s records), the sunbeam moved off of the shrine – and then suddenly vanished entirely, its trans-rational message delivered – in style, with echoes of ancient pyramid holes that align with the sun’s light only once every thousand years.

I felt a shift in my mind as the weight of that rogue sunbeam dislodged something small and heavy, and it fell away from my mind – another corroded chunk of my resistance to nonrational thought, to intuitive living, to coinci-dancing through this magical reality.

Or as Teddy would say – I’d “thrown up another chunk of the Apple” …

Part II

It’s now 12:30 AM – I was just working on this post, and filling out my brief notes about “Teddy” – and was pondering a line from Salinger’s story:

“You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible? You know what was in that apple? Logic. Logic and intellectual stuff.  That was all that was in it. So – this is my point – what you have to do is vomit it up if you want to see things as they really are.”

 

"from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."

"from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat." - Genesis 2:17

It just occurred to me that no one had brought the snake-in-paradise angle up yet in the lively comments/discussion on Slim Jim’s Snake Synchronicity.

Knowing Slim Jim as I do, the notion of his snake being a synchronistic message about his hyperrationality had occurred to me as soon as I heard it – in its obvious parallels to Carl Jung’s classic story of synchronicity – the scarab beetle coincidence that helped a hyperrationalist patient overcome her rigid thinking.

But until just now, in spite of my religious studies background, I’d failed to make the connection to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and its role in convincing Eve and Adam to eat from the “tree of knowledge.”

~ — ~

Sitting here at the keyboard musing about how the Biblical tale might mesh with Jim’s synchronicity, I suddenly sat up bolt upright and literally smacked myself in the head, as I made another connection that should have been obvious:

In Slim Jim’s synchronicity, he first had a dream about multiple snakes swarming after him:

In the dream, I was sitting in the middle of the woods.  I’m not sure why I was there.  Dreams often don’t make sense.  There may not have been a reason.  Right next to me was a pile of dead branches.  After a while, several snakes came out of the underbrush without warning and slithered around me really fast.  They were so close to me that they almost touched me.  The snakes were about three feet long and an inch in diameter, not particularly large but not particularly small.  Up until that day, I knew very little about snakes, and I basically assumed that most snakes were poisonous.  The fact that the snakes were so close to me and I thought they could kill me with one bite scared me to the point that I sat up in bed and was jolted awake.

OK, so I’ve had a new blog post in “draft” mode for the last week and a half now – it’s the next unwritten synchronicity story, chronologically:

secrets-of-synchronicity-blog

Just yesterday Becky asked me why I hadn’t posted for awhile on here, and I told her I didn’t really know – it just wasn’t time, I wasn’t motivated, I was rereading the short book involved to see if there was anything in there I might want to include in the post – and I was considering skipping the post entirely – it just seemed kind of weak and hard to explain.

Well, I don’t have that post done yet, but now I know that I will be posting it, after all.

Here’s the book cover image I had uploaded for the upcoming post – which until just now I never connected with Slim Jim’s dream:

secretsofsynchornicity

Part III

Shouting and hopping around the room a bit, amazed that I’d failed to connect the slithering snakes synchronicity cover art with Jim’s slithering snakes synchronicity dream (I didn’t think it necessarily meant a darn thing, but it was an amusing coincidence),  I went to Google’s image search to find an image of the cover of the book (to show Becky and to send to Jim).

But when I searched for “secrets of synchronicity,” I didn’t see the book cover.

In fact, this was the #1 result:

secrets-of-synchroniciteapots

A picture of my Teapots.

(I finally had to yell at the universe to knock it off with the synchronicities already, so I could finish this post and get to sleep!)

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15 Jun 2009

Don’t Stop Believing

Posted by Teapots Happen. 9 Comments

I wasn’t going to add this, but then the allure of back-to-back 80’s pop culture posts changed my mind …

Saturday night I went out to a birthday party with Becky. We had parked the car and were walking to the party when Becky gasped happily – having spotted a piece of graffiti that warmed her heart:

dont-stop-believing-sign.gif
don’t stop believing

I took a photo with my crappy cellphone camera and we continued onto the party in good spirits.

We arrived amidst some drama – a female friend of the birthday girl had brought her jerky boyfriend with, and no one liked him or the way he treated his girlfriend – and the host of the party had just let him know it.

This led me to ruminate a bit about the differences between when Becky and I had dated years ago and our relationship now … and how I was glad to be in a place where her friends didn’t regard me with justified suspicion.

—–

Waking up the next morning, we talked a bit about the differences between then and now, and the conversation about our younger, punker, dumber days turned to reminiscing about the night Becky and I had first met – she told me that with the facial hair I’d had at the time, I’d reminded her of Wolverine, from the X-men movie.

Still laughing about the idea of me as Wolverine and Becky as Jean Grey (she has the same color hair), I went over to the computer, wanting to check to see what the day’s weather was gong to be like.

We both still had “Don’t Stop Believing” in mind from the night before, because just as I pulled up my iTunes to find the song, Becky requested I play it.

But I didn’t have it somehow. Becky suggested I download it – but I wanted a quicker fix, so I went to Google and typed in “youtube dont stop believing.”

dont-stop-believing-youtube

We we both quite entertained when I clicked on the #1 result (which gave no indication in Google of its apt content*) – and saw that the video perfectly synched up with our morning’s discussion – not just the characters, but even the couple lines of dialogue that were allowed to come through the song …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGzwNdTVHJo]
*the video creator added “xmen” to the title months after this occurred)

 

Jean Grey: Girls flirt with the dangerous guy, they don’t bring him home; they marry the good guy.

Wolverine: I can be the good guy.

Jean Grey: Logan, the good guy sticks around.

 

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14 Jun 2009

pirate ship, a la Goonies

Posted by Teapots Happen. 7 Comments

 

March 26, 2006

In my Max Action alter ego, I am often asked why I love exploring tunnels and caves and abandoned buildings so darn much.  When you have to answer the same question a lot, you develop short, snappy answers.

Action Squad crest / tattoo w Goonies quote

Since the Goonies was a hugely influential movie in my boyhood, one such quick rationale that I often used was that Action Squad is trying to find a pirate ship:

 

letter to the City Pages editor, Oct 2001

letter to the City Pages editor, Oct 2001

(In case you’re some kind of weirdo who has never seen the movie: the Goonies – a group of misfit kids – discover some ancient tunnels that lead to a cave containing a lost pirate ship full of treasure.)

 

"it's our time down here!"

Well, it took several years, but I finally found my pirate ship booty; in the wake of the Teapots, while exploring with Megh (the former college atheist group member who I first wrote about the teapots to a month before, and who would bring me the coincidental chocolate cross about a month later).

 

hauling booty back to the car (click for closeup)

 

Found buried behind a pile of debris in a vacant industrial building in Saint Paul, the wooden ship was huge, handmade, ornate, and of unknown antiquity.

 

True, it was discovered hidden in an abandoned building, and not underground as I’d expected – but regardless of such details, finally finding my pirate ship while urban adventuring really made my day … especially since Megh and I had been constantly talking about coincidences and synchronicity for the past couple of weeks.

Synchronicity, coincidence, the power of repetition of stated intent? I don’t even care – I’ll just call it “awesome.”

Skull & Crossbones

 

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