Mistakes Are Not Made Because Synchronicity is Everywhere

A Tale Of Lively Synchronicity In The Time Of Covid And Death

Extempore Piece of Refuge: #2

Guy under falling hot spring water

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Synchronicity Part 1

A couple of days ago I began the process of recent email catch-up after a time of travel into a kind of vacation with a friend in a new-to-me-town, Ajijic, Jalisco Mexíco. The home is beautiful, and I’ve met many interesting covid refugees and a concentration of astounding intelligent awake spiritually alive awareness I’ve not seen or felt before. And so I’ve been busy, and not keeping up with email, including the substack subscription notifications.

And thus I was given the delightful opportunity to pick from the total of 30k+ unread emails, focused, naturally, on the most recent from the last few days. And I chose the wonderful Conspiracy Sarah who doesn’t publish much and when she does it is strong and interesting. Her June 16th essay is no exception.

Mistakes Were Not Made

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Writing these essays has helped me more clearly see the truths of my heart. The explorations have expanded my courage to be compassionate with myself and others. This has greatly improved my life. If these essays have given you some of these benefits, I would be honoured if you would support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you. 🙏

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I chose to turn on some music to accompany my reading of Mistakes Were Not Made: A Video Tribute and more or less randomly chose a new-to-me-group ‘Majnoon’.

Majnoon

Sarah’s essay was again a unique approach to living honestly in a time of bull shit and death: it is the simple and honest exploration of her struggle to remain positive in the time of covid, of seeing the lies and perniciousness of the ideology and practices without becoming venomous and bitter in her life. 

I’ve had a reflective couple of weeks. The heaviness was feeling heavier.

I have struggled to find balance between seeking the truth and having a world view that feels worth having. Calling it out versus calling it in.

Yes, this is a huge challenge!

She segues to having recently completed a video tribute to the young and the old of our society who have been merciless attacked by this ideology and have died or been killed in large numbers. The time to read the essay allowed my ‘music’ to advance though someone with a beautiful voice speaking in a language I do not know and of which I love the sound of. Turkish, maybe.

Sarah’s video is clean simple and strong and is accompanied with appropriate soft music, which, amazingly enough, didn’t clash with what I was listening to because both pieces of music resonated or harmonised somehow. It now included a woman’s voice humming with heart touching mournfulness.  And the tone and timbre fit perfectly with the Sarah’s video, a perfect sounding match. Then I begin to hear, early in Sarah’s video, a sonorous lovely male voice in English, say “When I Die”.

Sarah’s video suggests the natural cycle of birth and death, with the inference of how human folly exacerbates the latter while compromising the former. At first I believed that this was Sarah’s sound-over and I am blown away by the connection. However, there was a slight conflict in the two musics tracks and I wondered and discovered that the voice was from the music I had begun earlier, not Sarah’s video. It was a skin gooseflesh, hair stiffening synchronicity, and which raises the bumps and hairs again, as I write about it. 

To experience that, begin by starting “Majnoon Solo Performance at Küçük Akyaka”. I’ve started it about 5 minutes in:

Majnoon Solo Performance at Küçük Akyaka

Now turn on Sarah’s video:

Sarah’s Video

Or begin Majnoon at beginning and read the essay before beginning the video: Majnoon Solo Performance at Küçük Akyaka.

And Sarah’s essay here:

Mistakes Were Not Made

So I commented about that and Sarah and I exchanged correspondence, beginning with:

Your clear-eyed and heart filled sharing in this essay and video essay are beautiful. And, even though it may sound strange, a joyful beauty that life is comprised of birth and death, youth and senescence, and everything in between.” (Full comment is here.)

And here is the text of Rumi’s powerful poem, “When I Die”:

When I die
When my coffin
is being taken out
You must never think
I am missing this world

Don’t shed any tears
Don’t lament or
Feel sorry
I’m not falling
into a monster’s abyss

When you see
My corpse is being carried
Don’t cry for my leaving
I’m not leaving
I’m arriving at eternal love

When you leave me
in the grave
Don’t say goodbye
Remember a grave is
only a curtain
for the paradise behind

You’ll only see me
Descending into a grave
Now watch me rise
How can there be an end
When the sun sets or
the moon goes down

It looks like the end
It seems like a sunset
But in reality it is a dawn
When the grave locks you up
that is when your soul is freed

Have you ever seen
a seed fallen to earth
not rise with a new life
Why should you doubt the rise
of a seed named human

Have you ever seen
a bucket lowered into a well
coming back empty
Why lament for a soul
When it can come back
like Joseph from the well

When for the last time
you close your mouth
Your words and soul
will belong to the world of
no place no time.

Yesterday, Synchronicity Sublime, Part 2

I had the sublime extension of the above synchronicity with an encounter in an Ajijic hot spring.

In the afternoon, after composing extemporaneous haiku in a hot spring, Janice and I encountered a young Mexícana. She was moving past us through the lovely hot water. I greeted her and the three of us then exchanged simple pleasantries.

As she was getting ready to go I asked her what the words of her tattoo above her left collar bone were. Since I wasn’t wearing my glasses I couldn’t actually see that the smudge of the unusually shaped tattoo was comprised of words, although that it might be words wasn’t an unreasonable guess. She replied, paraphrased – I don’t remember exactly – ‘It is in this moment that I am alive.’

As this is extraordinary phrase I commented on it, suggesting that she is a very young wise yogini. She said ‘No. Not at all! This is a reminder of being alive after trying to commit suicide. I don’t usually share that with people.’

This lead to a long and interesting talk. Louisa then told us that she had noticed us earlier when we had first come into the hot spring facility. At that time she had the thought pop into her mind that she would talk to us.

Then Janice and I encouraged her to compose, extemporaneously, her first Haiku. I don’t know why we did that. She hesitated at the start, about not knowing what to do, and I directed her to use that hesitancy as the beginning. Which she did, and in a beautiful sweep, she went from confusion, to an earth-sky reference then back into her skin as being alive. It is giving me goose flesh writing it, the memory is so strong.

Synchronicity is everywhere. And, more astounding to me, is the recent awareness that synchronicity is also karma. See my surprising exploration of karma in

8. Appropriate Eccentric Action Pt. 1

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Writing these essays has helped me more clearly see the truths of my heart. The explorations have expanded my courage to be compassionate with myself and others. This has greatly improved my life. If these essays have given you some of these benefits, I would be honoured if you would support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you. 🙏

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Now for some closing music. Hmmm. What to pick. Perhaps the antithesis of the coalition of synchronicity, with ‘Havoc in Heaven’ by a recent discovery, Jesca Hoop.

Jesca Hoop - ‘Havoc in Heaven’

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Post Script

After posting the above, I went to find a draft email and came across a forgotten draft from April that I had used to ‘hold’ a photo of a mini hand pressed book titled Ghosts and Apparitions. I had forgotten all about it, and then remembered that I had stuck a photo of a page from the book into a draft from my phone because of the tiny synchronicity at the time: I found the following fifteen minutes after leaving a barber:

“The first time the barber spoke to the baker's wife, it was in verse:

One dies by chance
But with you
If death is like you
Take me."

From Ghosts and Apparitions, a private hand pressed book, Oaxaca City, Mexíco.

Interesting, to me, that a poetical expression of death has once again come to me.