The universe conspires.
Posted: October 14, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized 2 Comments
The deeper I get into writing, the more synchronicity I experience. It’s as if the universe is conspiring to help me: everything reminds me of something in my novel, often uncannily so. It may very well be that my subconscious is just alchemizing my sensory input to make me feel that way (I swear I’m going to read this in full soon, Umair). Either way, it feels wonderfully eerie.
My favorite example of this is as follows: Four years ago I was in a boat on Lake Tana, motoring between island monasteries, which was a favorite attraction in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia. I was two weeks into my travels around the country and trying to keep a stiff upper lip, because while I was ostensibly there to research my first novel, the idea that anything resembling a novel would ever result from my chaotic, sleepless, homesick days seemed totally laughable. Honestly, I was just trying to survive enough to resist buying a plane ticket back home.
There were two other American travelers in the boat, Eva and Jessica, from Oakland. They were very friendly and asked me about my novel. I started to tell them the bare outlines of my original proposal, including a character named Yemaya, modeled after a Yoruba sea goddess that I’m sure they’d never heard of, because I barely knew anything about her myself, and as I rambled my proposal seemed to fall apart even as I spoke it aloud, and I was hopelessly lost, in general.
But Jessica’s face lit up and she burst out laughing. She said, “Wow, you have no idea who you just met,” and turned to Eva. Eva said, blushing, with a wry smile, “I’m an ordained Santería priestess of Yemaya. What would you like to know?”
…and that was the first signpost that maybe I wasn’t lost. At all.
Thank you, universe.
Thank you, Eva and Jessica.
And thank you, Yemaya, who brought us together.
Miss Eva Miranda, journaling on Lake Tana, January 2009.
monica byrne 
Happiness is finding another on the same path..
I agree up to a point. I find opportunities are synchronous, but that for me the universe attempts, in earnest, to derail actioning them in any meaningful way. Certainly nothing I have ever done has come easily. Maybe I try too hard!
I find though that the more the universe resists, the greater the reward is in the end. If we want to plumb the depths of the metaphysical, then perhaps it is related to Karma a person has collected?
Or maybe there is some universal balance which is expressed in the emergent properties of a situation? Perhaps so many opportunities come with the price that we have to struggle to attain them in order for us to be worth of the rewards that they bring?
I can always sense those moments approaching, one of those bridges that if you cross over, means your life will never be the same.
I am in one of those places now. Several at once at the moment. It is empowering and also terrifying in equal measure.
The weight of making the most of an opportunity can be crushing if you have barrier to attaining them, like disability or just the British sneering of despair, after all, you are never supposed to try to rise above your station here. And I was most definitely not born to success. Not part of the liberal elite anyway.
Good, living life on the edge of so many potential future lives, each one more extraordinary than the last.
Difficult to know which ones to choose.
So lucky to have that choice.