I’m experiencing some major synchronicities this week. Not the kind that "strike" like luck, but the kind that land deep in our soul and soften our hearts. Perhaps I've primed myself to receive these synchronicities? I am reading the discomforting prose in Maggie Smith's memoire You Could Make This Place Beautiful describing her internal efforts to process and navigate a painful divorce. I listened (twice) to an interview with author and spoken word artist Andrea Gibson who shares with such clarity and beauty about the transformational experience of receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. Another wedding anniversary came and went without my children's father alive on this earth. I didn't know what date it was that day. And then I was reminded. Whatever the road traveled, whatever the reason, I found myself opening to something softer. In my book, Braving Creativity I share the first of this kind of "softening synchronicity" after my husband died.
The first.
It happened in a moment, as synchronous moments do, while I was standing between the living room and the foyer on my way to the kitchen when I was struck. A feeling of enormous love emerged from me and enveloped me. I knew for certain in that instant that my love was not tied to the wellbeing of another. I understood that love was born from me and for me - and also held all the love in the world. My love did not die with my husband. My love was bigger than us both. The second. A graduate professor once said to me, "Naomi, sometimes things can be simple". What she was trying to tell me was that I needn’t try so hard. That the brilliance she saw in me was hiding underneath the exertion she could plainly see. I've carried her observation with me all these years.
The third.
When what I feared the most happened. When my husband's addiction broke our family up. When he died as a result. When I could not save, resuscitate or convince him that his life was worth living, I finally stopped trying. I laid down the effort to make it any other way than how it was. That was the gift that death gave me. I could stop fighting what I couldn't control.
It both boggles and buoys me to experience the soft synchronicities in my encounter with other peoples grief. It touches on the sublime. It touches the tender inconsolable place where everything that ever mattered lives. All the beauty and all the sorrow. All synchronicities benefit from priming. Preparing for synchronicities that feel like luck require only that we lay it all down -- the beliefs, the stories, the monstrous fear. Lay it all down at our feet. We may not be able to keep it there 24 hours a day every day of the week, but we can open a softer place in our hearts that makes it possible to deepen our courage and connection to ourselves. How can you prime yourself to receive soft synchronicities this week?
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