$200 in My Pocket

One of the things I adore about reading and writing on Medium, is the sheer volume of synchronicities it seems to foster for me. Maybe not everyone feels this here. Maybe I feel it because I expect it, look for it, and am open to it. I have experienced this phenomenon practically my whole life, with varying degrees of frequency, depending on what life circumstances I found myself in, that seemed to distract my attention from the openness required to experience them.

But now, in my 60’s, there are less distractions, and so I seem to be experiencing them at a very high frequency. It’s tremendously enjoyable, and perhaps, I imagine, like riding the waves at Laniakea over and over again successfully. It’s exhilarating.

Side tangent, here’s a poem I wrote during the last big North American lunar eclipse. Refers to surfing. Came to mind, seems appropriate to reference.

Today, I woke up to finding two beautiful articles. I’d like to share them here with you, and just a little story about why they matter to me.

Here are the articles by Grayson Elorreaga and the other by Rosie Leizrowice

When I was young, I had some really very weird and traumatic circumstances that set about chains of events that affected the trajectory of my life experiences, in ways I could never have really predicted, or even chosen. They involved physical experiences, and because I grew up in a place where family was Swiss-German, stoic, and had embedded belief systems that even they didn’t examine let alone understand, set me about to spending a lifetime unraveling the threads. I may as well have been raised by Christian Scientists. They didn’t believe in doctors either. I plan to write about the weird circumstances of my life likely until I take my last breath, and I look forward to doing that writing.

I was the wunderkind in my family. Speaking of synchronicities, how’s this for one? Just NOW, going out to verify the spelling of wunderkind, what do I find? A podcast that was released just yesterday. By the way, Twilight Zone terrorized me as a child. My mother would fall asleep on the couch, leaving me to play on the living room floor, wide awake, as the Twilight Zone would play on the television, leaving me transfixed and mesmerized to the possibilities.

I digress.

I was reading full books by the time I was 3 years old. Words were my salve, my psychic savior. They helped me immerse myself into worlds that were so far away from the reality I was physically “stuck” in, that I could not get enough. Everyone laughed and called me “the bookworm”. I didn’t care. I was happy there with my nose stuck in the books.

I was a happy student, as long as the books kept coming my way. Weekly Readers and bookmobiles, Scholastic Paperback Book Fairs

were my fairy godmothers. I was a straight A student. Everyone loved how studious I was. I didn’t care about any of that, as long as I could escape my way into other worlds.

As I got older, the worlds became bigger, wilder, more adventurous. I read about things that no one in my community dreamed existed. I knew at some point I needed to leave this place I lived in because it just didn’t get me. I had few people to talk to about my experiences, including the teachers in any of the schools. (well there was this one teacher in high school who helped me figure out that I actually DID love mathematics and algebra, who employed amazing teaching methods he developed working for the Peace Corps in Africa. He turned my head around so much I went on to become an algebra tutor at our local community college. Yeah, the school board fired him and the community ran him out of town when they discovered he was gay.)

We moved from town to town, and that provided some diversion, but not enough to make a significant difference in my self directed education. One of those new home/new town moves was directed by my grandmother and step-grandfather.

My grandmother had abandoned her four children at one point in her life to fulfill her dreams of becoming a doctor. When she was a small child, she looked at her father and told him, “I’m going to be a doctor,” whereupon he looked at her and proclaimed, “no you aren’t, you are going to get married and have children.” She was the second born in the family, the first born, the only son, had died in infancy, and my great grandfather had never forgiven the women. My grandmother had lived. My great grandmother was unable to save that son. My grandmother went on to do the work to become a Ph.D. clinical child psychologist, fortunately for me, as she practiced her theories on me. She did not forgive her father and could only muster vitriole for him in her stories about their relationship, until one day, as we were doing the dinner dishes together in her kitchen, she was in the middle of another story, and I looked at her and asked, “Nana, just how long are you going to stay angry with him?”. It just didn’t seem to make much sense at that point, since he was long dead. She put down her dish towel, and turned to look me in the eye. I could see the light bulb literally go off. She never said another bad word about him. In fact, as she aged and developed dementia, the stories about him transformed into the most lovely entertaining stories about how they made wine and brandy in the basement, and how it used to be her job to go downstairs and fetch the drink for the nightly dinners. She’d tell the story over a glass of white zinfandel, or Gewurztraminer.

Luckily, in one of those moves during my childhood, we found ourselves with neighbors who were from New York. The parents were well educated creatives, having come from on the paternal side, old Dutch Hudson Valley river sloop captain money and on the mother’s side, she was also from old money, was a debutante actress, and creative artist who worked in every possibly imaginable media. The two had met, married, lived and worked in New York City, had three children in a 3 story walk up in Brooklyn, before his job took them to the countryside of Pennsylvania. It was in their home, in Lucia’s wonderfully welcoming community arts program that she ran for her daughters and all their school friends, that I found my way out of the purgatory that I had been born into.

Lucia was a mother and grandmother to all of us. She studied philosophy, art, she made all her family’s clothing, rugs, curtains, food. She tapped into the world of books for creating a living the way I tapped into books to rescue my soul. She became a surrogate mother for me.

I had been writing and keeping journals for a long time, something my grandmother had got me started doing, as a healing practice. At 16, I shared with Lucia some of my ridiculous meanderings in my journals. I, of course believed it to be great literary work. She very politely read my words, smiled, held my hand and said, “my dear, if you want to be a writer, you must go and have a life. You need to have something to write about.”

I’m not clear to this day if she was telling me to just give it up. I don’t believe she ever would have had that sort of spirit in her. She was just being realistic. And from her view, given my background, my family, and all she knew about me, and what would have been possible for me, even given the financial circumstances I had come from, I believe she was just being a responsible mother, and also, magnanimous. I think I had shared the story with her that when I told the high school guidance counselors I wanted to be a veterinarian as a profession, and they told me I was not smart enough, I went home to complain to my parents who told me, “well dear, that’s their job, they must know.”

But I did take her comment as advice, as a directive even. So I figured out a way to get out of the house, out of the town, out of the state. It’s a long story that, and one I’ll share in another tale. It does involve though, a sense of “dropping out”, of leaving things behind, including people, schools, some hopes and dreams, forming other hopes and dreams, and then doing that in an iterative manner. Until I got to where I am now.

So at one point, after I put myself through a two year Associate’s Degree program in humanities in our local community college, this straight A student who accomplished that two year degree in 18 months, all while raising a toddler and having my own apartment, decided it was time to get out of Dodge and go have a life and become a writer. I sold everything in my apartment including my 350 piece vinyl record collection including Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, YES’s Fragile, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven and Moody Blues’ A Question of Balance, not to mention some wonderful Harry Nilsson pieces, Janis Joplin, Melanie Safka….. oh I could go on an on, it was hard to part with — took the $200 in my pocket, my 1966 VW Beetle and a 3 year old and moved to Nyack, New York, with dreams of becoming a writer. Those early days, too, are a separate tale.

It’s amazing to think about the planetary mycellial threads that lead you from one place to another.

My road to here and now was just as wild a ride as Alice’s down the rabbit hole. I’m forever grateful that my grandmother introduced me to Lewis Carroll and made that story one of my favorites, one that’s stuck in my psyche for life.

Someplace eons ago, a dinosaur roared. A volcano erupted. An asteroid hit this ball of earth and disturbed the ecosystems, and all of that led us to where we all are sitting, right now — you breathing the same air a dinosaur breathed, and me drinking a glass a water from the primordial ooze. We are all connected, and to think otherwise is folly. We know so little about the spores that infect our brains and our autonomic nervous system, and that allow our psyches to be connected to the level that when I think a thing, up pops a reference on the internet. Or a crazy song pops into my head out of nowhere. Medium doesn’t get credit for THAT.

I may not understand how stuff works, (thanks to Gutbloom)

but I do sense that trying to figure it all out isn’t going to make a difference in the synchronicities I witness every single day.

We have only just begun. I’m just hoping that the reset button that wipes out humanity doesn’t come from our silly notions that we are in control of any of it. I for one, choose not to fool myself into thinking that I have any control whatsoever. I’m just here to surf.

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” said the Cheshire Cat to Alice — Lewis Carroll

Relax. Medium may or may not make money. People will make money. People will lose money. Ecosystems will change. Enjoy the psychic connections that pop up for you. Because no matter what company succeeds or fails or when they do, a psychic connection is forever.

Meantime, digest another psychic mushroom.