Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer. — Carl Jung
It is very rare these days to see anyone with a pocket watch.
It was therefore a surprise to see an attractive Chinese girl, very elegantly dressed, wearing a pocket watch.
I commented on it. She said no, it was not an old watch, and referred to it as an accessory, but said she would like an old pocket watch. I said that could be arranged.
We were both on the Reading to Gatwick train. She had travelled from Bath and was on her way to Austria.
I alighted at Guildford, existed the station, crossed the road and walked along the River Wey into the town centre (a far more attractive route than via the road).
Moored on the River Wey was a boat, from Straford-upon-Avon. It was the only boat moored.
How strange thought I, Bath lies on the River Avon, though not the same River Avon.
William Shakespeare is from Stratford-upon-Avon.
My friend Elaine and fellow collaborator on The Way of the Bow audio book was at a Shakespeare Festival this week.
I walked along the river. There was a Alice reading a book to her sister, a rabbit leaping down a rabbit hole.
The rabbit consults his pocket watch and mutters he is very late for a very important date.
This evening a dramatisation of a case of Sigmund Freud.
Sigmund Freud had his consulting rooms in Vienna. His close associate until they had a very bitter falling out was Carl Jung. It was Carl Jung who expressed the idea of synchronicity.
Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer. — Carl Jung
Synchronicity has strange behaviour. Events are clustered in time and space.
Early today I had the company of Russians on my way to Guildford. I then put them on the London train as that is where they wished to be. Some fool had sent them on a roundabout way to London.
They were from Moscow, and I was very pleased when they offered to take a book for me to a friend. She will be pleased as it is a signed copy of Aleph. She had asked me for a copy of Aleph. It was her birthday, and I have been negligent in giving her a present.
Excellent lunch at the Guildford Institute. I then popped down to the library.
One of the librarians (all volunteers, and all always very helpful), proudly showed me a book they had just been donated on stained glass. A huge coffee table book, but sadly I cannot recall the title.
I expected it to be of the stained glass windows for which England is justly famous. It was not, it was of stained glass worldwide, but also of glass, not just stained glass windows.
Once I saw this, I mentioned a piece of glass I had picked up from Finland and remarked how Sweden and Finland were renowned for their quality glass.
As I said this the book fell open at a page, and there was the very piece of glass I was talking about, the image was from Christie’s!
I also mentioned a piece of glass I picked up last year. It was Swedish, or at least I believe it to be. The shop had no idea what it was they had.
The only way I could describe the glass I had from Finland, was that it was like ice. Exactly the same description in the book.
I then mentioned there was a very famous piece of stained glass in Guildford, in Abbot’s Hospital.
Prior to lunch I had hoped to find a copy of Aleph, but no luck.
In one bookshop, I spoke with a Greek girl, who the previous week I had directed her to where she could find information on Paulo Coelho. I then apologised for not telling her of the video conferencePaulo Coelho did the previous week, but said she could still watch.
Onward with my search. No Aleph, but I did find a copy of The Alchemist, which I bought.
As I was buying, a Spanish lady spoke to me. Portuguese? I corrected her no Brazilian, but he writes in Portuguese.
She then told me her daughter taught Paulo Coelho.
This surprised me as I did not think anywhere taught Paulo Coelho. Though as I write, I did not so long ago meet someone who had one of his books on their course as a set book.
Where, I asked?
Sheffield University, she teaches Portuguese.
She was then surprised when I told her both my nieces studied at Sheffield University.
She told me she was from Santiago de Compostella.
Ah yes, I said, El Camino de Santiago. She suggested I walked it, got my book stamped.
She explained few pilgrims walked the route in modern times, now many.
Yes, I replied, could be because Paulo Coelho walked the pilgrimage and wrote of his experience in The Pilgrimage, and then wrote The Alchemist. If you walk the route you give something back
The two Russians I met told me of how much they liked the works of Paulo Coelho, how popular and much loved he was in Russia.
The Alchemist I will give to them as a present, to say thanks for doing me a big favour.
Many, many years ago, sometime late 1960s, early 1970s, I heard an amazing album, it was a saxophone recorded in Grace Cathedral, making use of echo in the cathedral. I still have it somewhere on reel-to-reel tape. Sadly I have never been able to find it on the net.
I mention this unknown album, as Believe In Peace by Steve Lawson brings back fond memories. The difference being Steve Lawson uses a bass guitar and tape loops. What a pity he did not make use of a building as Gregory Paul did with The Fremont Abbey Session.
The other intriguing aspect is how this album came about. It is an improvisation on an art exhibition by Geoff Bush based around I Ching.
Steve Lawson describes the events that brought about Believe In Peace as serendipitous. What he is actually describing is synchronicity, unplanned events that somehow against all odds appear to be connected.
This album came about via one of those unplannable serendipitous internet chains of events that you look back on and wonder if someone had planned them after all…
Lobelia and I had two house concerts booked in the Milwaukee and Madison, WI. Jason Bush – a musician from Minneapolis who had found us on Twitter, was considering the long drive down to Madison to see us play. However, this was right in the middle of the Union struggles in Madison, and our host was very involved, and quite rightly chose to focus on that rather than our show. So we had a free night. Jason putting his entrepreneurial hat on, invites us to play at an art exhibition of work by his dad, Geoff Bush. There’s an open studio weekend (Art-A-Whirl) and Geoff was exhibiting. We chatted on the phone, liked the sound of each other and booked it.
Intending to play a ‘normal’ Steve and Lo house concert-type set, I found on first seeing Geoff’s art that I was moved to want to react to it musically in some way. His art is all based on the I Ching – the ancient Chinese book of wisdom, used by some for divination, but by others just as a source of deep inspiration. Geoff’s work featured the various hexagram symbols heavily, contextualising them in mixed media works. My favourite was a granite carved cube, with one of four hexagrams on each vertical face. These are where the four track titles come from.
So Lobelia and I split our set in two. The first half, me solo, is what you hear here. A series of four improvisations, played while those in attendance were encouraged to continue walking around looking at the art, seeing how the soundtrack and the visual work interacted, informed or complimented each other. We then did a more typical duo show in the second half.
I feel a great affinity for Geoff’s work – his focus on the iconography of the I Ching Hexagrams roots his work in wisdom, in words, in ideas, in a quest for deeper inspiration and meaning. And his overall theme is also the title of this album: Believe In Peace. Geoff’s quest for peace has caused him to explore the themes as expressed in the I Ching, and I feel enriched by his journey and art. I hope some of that comes across in the music.
You can download the album for free from bandcamp, but if you cough up some money, Steve makes a contribution to Reprieve, a very worthy cause.
Steve also has another interesting, hard to refuse, offer, twenty albums on a 4 GB memory stick. All as mp3 320, but some are also available as lossless high quality FLAC. [see mp3 v FLAC]
To all with mental health problems, just think – they may not always be problems. — Stuart Olds
Where do our thoughts come from?
Last weekend I was in Alton for the Alton Food Festival. I came across a copy of Veronika Decides to Die. I almost bought it, I had it in my hand, but I put it back, a decision I was to regret later.
I wandered around the market which was something of a disappointment, looked in St Lawrence Church, then bumped into Stuart Olds who was doing a book signing.
I told him about Paulo Coelho being locked away in a mental hospital and told him this was the subject matter of Veronika Decides to Die. He looked at me as though I had looked into his soul.
What I did not know was that he had gone through something similar. He talks about this in Hope’s Truth, of which I have a signed copy. This came to him in a manic period, as though downloaded into his brain, though what he describes is not manic depression or bi-polar, it is schizophrenia.
At a press conference in Istanbul, Paulo Coelho responded to a quote from Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk on mental health and writers. I think it was Orhan Pamuk saying he would go mad if he did not write and Paulo Coelho responding it was because he was mad that he did write. But not sure, maybe it was the other way around.
I was in a bookshop today in Guildford. I let a lady go before me as she was laden down with books. There is one book you have missed I said, and you are very lucky I have not taken it, The Witch of Portobello. Her eyes opened wide. That was the one book that caught me eye she told me, but I did not get it as I did not know the author. Well now is your chance I told her, and she added it to her purchase.
I will tell you a story I said.
I then told her the story of a stone as told by Ken Crane at the end of Paulo Coelho’s St Joseph’s Day party. His wife Yumi picked a stone. When he was asked to pick a stone, Ken picked the same stone. The stone was the Alchemist Stone!
I explained to her that these were examples of synchronicity, a term coined by Carl Jung
Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.
I gave her another example. The previous week I had come to Guildford for lunch and had hoped to find a friend. Sadly I did not. I was again in Guildford on Monday. Before I left the house I had a message from Paulo Coelho to say O Aleph (Elif in Turkey) had been released in Hungary and had shot straight to No One. I arrived in Guildford, was on my way to lunch, when there was my friend sat by the river reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. My friend is Hungarian!
The Witch of Portobello tells the tale of Athena. Sherine Khalil, or Athena as she is known, believed to be of gypsy descent, was rescued by her adoptive parents from an orphanage in Transylvania in Romania. Her early childhood was in Lebanon, then in London. My Hungarian friend is from Transylvania.
When I chatted to my Hungarian friend, I said Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a good choice to read. I commented on the love you put into your work, something I said Paulo Coelho had said at his press conference in Istanbul. I had long forgotten I had written something similar when I wrote of the film of The Witch of Portobello.
Scribes had an important role in early Judaism, theirs was the task to copy out ancient scriptures. They had to be in the correct frame of mind. The same was true for illustrators of early Muslim texts. It does matter what you do, be it write a book, paint, draw, compose music or carve a piece of wood. Robert Pirsig captured the essence of this in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Only then do you cross the transition zone.
I wandered to the Castle Grounds and flipped through the two books I had picked up, one of which was 500 Illustrations by G Curtis Jones and Paul H Jones, a collection of inspirational and thought-provoking stories and anecdotes. Or as the subtitle says: Stories from Life for Preaching & Teaching. One of the stories which caught my eye was Good Samaritans, a tale of a random act of kindness, a motorist stopping to help a fellow stranded motorist. When I got home in the evening I found Carolena Sabah had posted as a facebook note a very similar story Kindness is Contagious involving herself. Not only that, the time when she posted the story was at the same time I was sat in the Castle Grounds in Guildford reading Good Samaritans!
I knew Paulo Coelho had posted on his blog today a story about dance, but it was only when I got home this evening I saw it was taken from The Witch of Portobello! [see Dance!]
I have no solution for Learned Helplessness (check the post and the moving comments). But I know one thing:
Everything moves. And everything moves to a rhythm.
And everything that moves produces a sound; that is happening here and all over the world at this very moment.
Our ancestors noticed the same thing when they tried to escape from the cold in their caves: things moved and made noise.
The first human beings perhaps looked on this with awe, and then with devotion: they understood that this was the way that a Superior Being communicated with them.
They began to imitate the noises and movements around them, hoping to communicate with this Being: and dancing and music were born.
When we dance, we are free.
To put it better, our spirit can travel through the universe, while our body follows a rhythm that is not part of the routine.
In this way, we can laugh at our sufferings large or small, and deliver ourselves to a new experience without any fear.
While prayer and meditation take us to the sacred through silence and inner pondering, in dance we celebrate with others a kind of collective trance.
They can write whatever they want about dancing, but it is no use: you have to dance to find out what they are talking about.
Dance to the point of exhaustion, like mountain-climbers scaling some sacred peak.
Dance until, out of breath, our organism can receive oxygen in a way that it is not used to, and this ends up making us lose our identity, our relation with space and time.
Paulo Coelho posted a different video on his blog, but I could only watch the video for less than a minute as I could not stomach watching the anorexic dancers. It made me feel ill looking at them.
The Bolereo performance, which I have used, is the breathtaking routine by Torvill and Dean at the 1984 Winter Olympics for which they were awarded a Gold Medal. They were awarded perfect 6 by all the judges. Something that had never been achieved before and has never been achieved since. Watching one loses all sense of time and space, it seems to go on for all eternity, one is spellbound. It is one of those performances that sends shivers down the spine.
To quote William Blake
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
I agree with Paulo Coelho, there is something about dance, and to that I would add music, that lifts the spirit.
What is underlying is rhythm.
Why?
Maybe, and I am guessing, it is rhythm that underlies the very foundation of life.
Visit any culture, be it in time and space, and music and dance are at the heart of that culture.
I can be in Puerto de la Cruz during La Carnaval. The people do not walk, they move to the rhythm of the music.
That is why it is sad and depressing that music has been hijacked by big business and lousy programmes like X Factor to the detriment of music. I can find better music on the streets of Brighton. And why is it better, because the people enjoy playing it, they are communicating with the Soul of the World.
Dance has been degraded to clubbing.
Clubbing: go out, get drunk, throw up in the street and pick a fight.
A friend is a Street Angel. Street Angels are volunteers who patrol the streets at night looking out for the vulnerable and defusing trouble. In essence picking up the pieces of a broken society. [see Talking with a Street Angel]
I love where in the film of The Witch of Portobello Carolena Sabah who plays the part of Athena does her dance routine.
Hildegard von Bingen talked of herself being ‘a feather on the breath of God.’
Handel’s Messiah was an inspiration from angels and an attempt to capture their voices. On completing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ Handel is reported to have exclaimed ‘I think I did see all Heaven open before me and the great God Himself.’
If there is one thing that makes us difference from the rest of God’s creatures it is not what we arrogantly claim to be our superior intelligence, it is music. Yes, other creatures may sing, but they do not make use of musical instruments.
For my lovely Hungarian friend who likes dance, skating and Paulo Coelho.
And for my lovely friend Sian who loves to dance.
Synhronicity: I was in a bookshop today. I let a lady go before me as she was laden down with books. There is one book you have missed I said, and you are very lucky I have not taken it, The Witch of Portobello. Her eyes opened wide. That was the one book that caught me eye she told me, but I did not get it as I did not know the author. Well now is your chance I told her, and she added it to her purchase. I then told her the story of the stone as told by Ken Crane at the end of Paulo’s St Joseph’s Day party. His wife Yumi picked a stone. When he was asked to pick a stone, Ken picked the same stone. The stone was called The Alchemist Stone! I knew Paul had posted this story about dance, but it was only when I got home this evening I saw it was taken from The Witch of Portobello! [see The Witch of Portobello in a bookshop]
Synchronicty: I knew Paulo had written on dance, but my thoughts on dance were before I had read what he had written. I then read what he had written and found he had written similar to myself! All I had noticed was the anorexic dancers and decided Torvill and Dean gave a far better performance of Ravel’s Bolero.
Synchronicty: I am currently reading The Eight (highly recommended) and if there is one underlying theme it is that of rhythm.
A reflection on what Athena is thinking. Haunting.
For my lovely friend Sian.
Synchronicity: I was thinking of Pilar, the central character in By the River Piedra I sat Down and Wept. Like The Witch of Portobello, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept is a refection of the feminine side of religion. Whilst thinking these thoughts, Hildegarde Follon wrote to me, which caused me to stumble upon her refection of what Athena was thinking!
Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer. — Carl Jung
I was thinking of my lovely friend Sian and The Girl on the Landing by Torday, a chilling novel about schizophrenia. I turned on the radio and caught Open Book on BBC Radio 4. The first item was an interview with Paul Torday!
Paul Torday writes quirky novels though once you have read a couple you find like novels by Agatha Christie they are peopled by the same characters in similar settings.
I behold with these eyes
the softness of beauty
I yearn to touch
life
the fragrance
of the heart
which has been torn away
from me.
A ghost
reaching
with wonder
how you rest before me
torn away from your own earthen bed,
how long must it be before you wither and fade?
I behold with these eyes
the vibrancy that still catches with the light
beyond this shadow
I long to caress
with wonder
if only I could
plant you within this heart
to retain your precious life
and grant back to me
the gentle tones,
growing in strength
of substance
to my being.
– April Higney
A few days ago I was sent by Juan Carlos Hernandez the poem Passion within written by April Higney to illustrate one of his photos. It was strange as I had not heard of either of them before and Passion within came unbidden out of the blue and yet it captured my mood at the time.
In The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho calls it communication with the Soul of the World. Santiago learns to read the signs. I often refer to it as synchronicity. Deepak Chopra would call it crossing the transition zone. Professor Adel Sharif would probably refer to it as communication from God.
Monday I found I had been sent by Juan Carlos Hernandez a poem by April Higney called Passion within. Nothing remarkable about that you may think, until I tell you I had heard of neither of them before. The poem came unexpected out of the blue.
Oh well, so what you get a poem, we get scam e-mails from Nigeria.
Except. Except the poem summed up better than I could the mood I was feeling that day. The poem was inspired by a photo of a woman taken by Juan Carlos Hernandez. She was very special to him and that was last picture he had taken of her. Earlier that day I had dropped of for a lovely friend Sian the last pictures I had taken of her. I had not seen her for some weeks as she has been very poorly and I was feeling very miserable.
The following day I was in Guildford for their farmers market. As I was in Guildford, Professor Adel Sharif asked would I drop by the university and have a chat with him, the previous week having attended his excellent talk The Role of Science and Faith in the Development of Civilisations. We were talking of faith and social enterprises. I mentioned Grameen Bank and Professor Muhammad Yunus founder of Grameen Bank. Adel Sharif said he had met him.
That night I got home to find a message from Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho telling me that he and professor Muhammad Yunus would be jointly addressing a conference on innovation in social enterprise.
After our meeting, Professor Adel Sharif kindly dropped me off at Guildford Station for me to catch my train home. As I walked through the station there was my friend Margaret who I had not seen for a while. I have just been talking about you she said. I have just been at a meeting on Santiago de Compestella and recommended reading what you had written on El Camino de Santiago.
When the birthday of St James falls on a Sunday it is a Holy or Jubilee Year. They have big celebrations in Santiago de Compostella. This was Jubilee Year and was no exception. Christina (wife of Paulo) had an art exhibition outside the cathedral to which I was invited (though at the time of the invite I did not realise where it was). Paulo was there for the celebration and on the night of the celebration he sent out a message to all his friends, followers on twitter, facebook (now exceeds 3 million) etc that they must read what I had written!
El Camino de Santiago is a medieval pilgrims route that all Christians had to follow, cf Muslims to Mecca. At its height maybe a million pilgrims a year. It had dwindled down to a few hundred until Paulo Coelho walked the route in the 1980s and wrote an account, The Pilgrimage.
These occurrences of sychronicity now happen so often it has become the norm. How do I explain? I don’t. I do not even try. I just accept.
