Delight
“The more stuff you love the happier you will be.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
The nature of synchronicity* is surprise and delight. Those moments when the gods seem to collude in unexpected ways to make astonishment manifest. All kinds of things happen without any apparent cause, conspiring to make the impossible possible. It’s the feeling that something outside you has unexpectedly touched and answered an inner yearning.
You have all had moments of synchronicity, moments that confirm the connection between the inner and outer world. Something that has no causal explanation. I find I am often more open to this while traveling, wandering, or being in a strange place. Generally when I am away from my long list of things to do. I am not trying to get from A to Z. It happens when I am no longer expecting to know what I will find, but just noticing things. Transitions are a good time for synchronicity.
There was the time I decided to move from Colorado to Kentucky. Steven called and left a message at the office at Ghost Ranch, where I was teaching. He announced he had found the house of our dreams. We had two weeks to sell my house in Colorado, and it wasn’t even up for sale. I was unprepared, and told my long time hairdresser about my dilemma. I had lived there over twenty years, raised both of my children, and the attic was piled with boxes, toys, letters and mementos. My studio alone was packed with antlers, baskets, feathers and banners hanging from the rafters. My hairdresser said, Oh I just got my real estate license. So even though he had never sold a house in his life, he became my agent. I called Steven and said: People here in Colorado say you need to bury a statue of St Joseph upside down in the dirt in order to sell your house….Steven was skeptical, but when walking around the property of the house we hoped to buy, he unexpectedly came upon a statue of St Joseph greeting him in the doorway of the little greenhouse. He was skeptical, and a little spooked, but willing, and so he buried it in the ground. Within days, we sold my house in Colorado.
Our first night in Louisville was spent at the Seelbach Hotel. The next morning we went to the grand dining room for breakfast. There were only two other people in the large vaulted room. The young woman playing the piano, as it turned out, was born in the house Steven was living in at the time. At the other end of the dining room sat one woman. I did not know then that she was the owner of the 450 acres across the road from the house we now live in, and where I have permission to walk everyday. I did not know that the first person I would meet in Kentucky is the gatekeeper of the wild woods. Steven’s old house and our new house were both in the room of arrival.
We spent time walking around the house we wished to buy, and there was a “rabbit” fountain in the garden. We called it the rabbit fountain because there were five stone rabbits in a circle on top of the fountain. They were the kind of rabbits you would see in Beatrice Potter’s illustrations. All except one, who wore a bowtie, and looked like he came from a Disney cartoon. Strange, I said, this one doesn’t look like he belongs. Later that day Steven was at the house he had lived in for the past five years, moving things out. In the backyard he uncovered a stone rabbit that he had never seen before, that was in the same family and size as the other four. We placed him on the fountain, and the one with the bowtie at the front door, making a bridge between the new and the old.
It was dizzying, the number of synchronicities that happened around us buying our new home. A feeling that the house was waiting for us.
Synchronicity occurs when I teach, when I have forgotten all about myself; a story or poem will come to mind that unknowingly speaks specifically to a particular student’s pain. Or when I am in my studio and am no longer trying to make something happen, but open to what wants to come. My hand moves seemingly without my will, my finger dipping into white paint, making marks across the canvas. There is a sense of invisible hands, something touches you. The part of you that is touched by these hands is not the public person, but the place inside that is reaching for confirmation, courting the unknown. This kind of recognition is of a different and deeper order than any kind of public acclaim. It is not so easily toppled as the image that the public, family or friends ascribe to you. It has nothing to do with accomplishment. It has everything to do with the deeply confirming sense of other.
Many of you have been introduced in earlier posts to the series of short essays by Ross Gay: The Book of Delights. In spite of the title, it is not lightweight. Ross Gay is aware of the proximity between death and joy, terror and delight. Delight and synchronicity.
His essays are well written, short and often humorous. They can be read as a meditation each morning.
“It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
So Ross Gay had me thinking about developing my “delight radar”. Yesterday I was walking in my garden, searching for delight in these sobering times.
Walking up the steps in my garden, at the edge of the woods, I notice a small plastic container sitting alone on the stone wall. It stands out as something that clearly does not belong. When I pick it up, I see that it is unopened, and is clearly labeled “International Delight.” Imagine my astonishment. Finding delight printed out in my garden! Perhaps it is for a Keurig? This is something I don’t own. Nor have I ever imagined that a drink could be called international delight. Where did it come from? At first it looked like one of those containers for fake cream for your coffee, which I confess to always being suspicious of, not only because of infinite plastic filling our oceans, but also being a long-time scrutinizer of labels listing ingredients. My allegiance is to the real thing, like milk or cream from the cow. But there it was, waiting to be opened.
In spite of my reservations about content, this Caramel Macchiato, left by an unknown stranger, with Delight written in bold letters with a capital D that has a curl … this unopened container of Delight is a confirmation. Synchronicity makes you smile. Like Ross Gay says, that in looking for delight, you find more of it.
Then I went for a long walk in the woods. I came around a bend in the path, and a mockingbird stopped me. She was way at the top of the tallest tree, singing and singing. A beautiful and unpredictable song, having freely borrowed from whoever delighted her. I stayed a long time and listened. She was still singing when I left.
Against all odds, in the midst of transition, doubt and uncertainty, it seems that when you set your intention to look for the smallest sign of delight, delight and synchronicity find you.
Where are you finding delight? What stories do you have of synchronicity? I’d love to hear from you.
* A term coined by Carl Jung in the 1920s, when it was not a popular idea.
