Poems from the Universe

Last year, I took a hard spill into the synchronicity stew

Last year, I took a hard spill into the synchronicity stew.

I started having intense dreams about a woman I’d never met, but who soon showed up in my life. I saw a goddess in my kitchen one morning, and then a friend called and said she’d been awake all night in a visionary experience of that goddess’s consort. I had someone tell me I’d “know I was there” when I saw a butterfly on a stone near a waterfall of symbols — and almost immediately my phone started ringing from a friend telling me he was at a property which he described as a flow of symbols, and he’d done some psychedelics and hung out with butterfly spirits by the stones.

This stuff kept accelerating, daily flashing neon signs all around me. It would continue accelerating from August until a crescendo in late October — but somewhere in the middle, I hit a breaking point.

I was at a soul-making retreat with some friends, and an event happened that would take too long to explain, but just trust me when I say it was an explosive and upsetting synchronicity.

Imagine me in the French countryside, my head buried in my hands, muttering something like “What am I supposed to do with all this? It’s exhausting, like I get signpost after signpost but they don’t actually point anywhere, they’re just intense and weird and cross-connect with things I can’t make sense of.”

Then imagine my friend Rosa telling me “I hear you, but does it help to remember that this is all normal? The universe is just a big churning energy soup where everything is connected to ten thousand other things; you can just look at it and not need to make sense of it. Think of each synchronicity as a little poem from the universe. They don’t have to lead somewhere or instruct you to do something — it’s just a poem, then another poem, then another poem.”

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I hadn’t realized it before, but my attitude towards synchronicities and the like had always been closer to Russian novels than poems. They’d show up, and my mind would start sorting them into big thematic arcs and recurring characters and foreshadowing and callbacks. I’d try to understand where everything fit into the bigger picture, what it needed from me, what it was trying to tell me.

When I heard “just little poems from the universe,” something dropped off my shoulders. Ten thousand little weighted hooks fell out of my body.

Each one is just a little poem. And the poems never stop coming. But I don’t have to paste each poem on the wall and connect them with red yarn to find The Center of the grand cosmic conspiracy.

I can just read the poem, breathe it in, and move ahead until the next poem shows up.

It’s all normal.