2: When Coincidences Pile Up

INTRODUCING SPIRITUAL MUSINGS, VOLUME. 4

THE MAGNIFICENCE OF SOUL

 

2 

When Coincidences Pile Up 

When coincidences pile up, you can’t avoid the message; and coincidences piled up on me this week. They started with a quote from Picasso that I came across online the other day, which resonated so blissfully with me that I had to record his words in my notebook: “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”

I’m sure this insight was born of the artist’s long and fruitful life, the same man who at the age of ninety also said, “It took my whole life to learn how to paint like a child,” which reflects the gnostic wisdom of the Way (the path to one’s true self) that Jesus expressed in one of his most popular sayings, ‘Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” I heard the call to be in Picasso’s words, but I didn’t want to heed the call; and then came another coincidence.

I was reading my Globe and Mail (Saturday, January 4, 2014) this morning and came to Johanna Schneller’s column FAME GAME, which I read faithfully because I enjoy her point of view, and something that Steven Van Zandt said to her jumped out at me.

Steven Van Zandt, the lead guitar player for Bruce Springsteen who also starred as Tony Soprano’s consigliere in the TV series The Sopranos and currently starring in a Norwegian television series, said to Johanna in a phone interview, “You’re planning your life, working hard on various things, and then your fate just walks in the door. Most of the great things of my life have been things that found me.”

I highlighted his words, because I could no longer avoid the call to be. But just to confirm the salvific message, another coincidence popped out at me last night as I watched an online Bill Moyers interview with Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, who revealed how she felt when she didn’t write every day.

She said she could be busy as a kitten all day, but regardless how satisfying it was if she didn’t write that day she felt her day had been wasted, like she wasn’t being true to herself; which reminded me of Picasso’s words—“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” In her own way, Doris Lessing revealed the moral imperative of Picasso’s insight into the meaning and purpose of life to heed the call to be.

And then to top it off (the call to be can be relentless), a fellow writer shared a post on Facebook this morning that read: BY BEING YOURSELF, YOU PUT SOMETHING WONDERFUL IN THE WORLD THAT WAS NOT THERE BEFORE; and I knew I had to put myself out there with the stories I’ve been putting off writing for years because I did not want to revisit those emotions; but how could I deny sharing my gift after spending so much time and effort cultivating it? Like my mentor Hemingway said to Scott Fitzgerald, “But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful as a scientist.”

I knew how Doris Lessing felt, then. In fact I felt a thousand times worse for wasting a day of writing, because instead of wasting my day by not writing I cheated by writing something else just to avoid writing the stories that I was called to write.

“Memoir is the facts of life. Fiction is the truth of life,” said Alice Munroe to Shelagh Rogers on her CBC show The Next Chapter; that’s why all those coincidences piled up on me this week to prick my conscience, I was being called to write about the truth of life that I did not have the courage to write about in stories.  If I may, then… 

Writing is a calling. Just ask any creative writer. Alice Munroe for example heard the call to be a writer as a young girl, and her calling garnered her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 because she was true to her calling. Hemingway also heard the call to be a writer in his youth and went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1954 because he was true to his calling. And Doris Lessing, who sold stories to magazines when she was only fifteen, was true to her calling also and won the Nobel Prize at the ripe old age of eighty-eight.

Not every creative writer who is true to their calling will win the Nobel Prize for Literature, of course; but they live the life that they were called to live, and as much as I wanted to be true to my calling in my youth to be a writer, I could not heed the call.

I heard the call in high school and had romantic notions of living the writing life (Hemingway’s apprenticeship days in Paris really got to me); but my life got interrupted in grade twelve when my daemon flooded my consciousness with the volcanic eruption of the shadow energy of my karmic self that poured into my symbolic poem “Noman.”  

I wasn’t myself when I wrote my poem “Noman.” It was my daemon—the “inner genius” (as the Romans used to call one’s daemon) of all my past lives that took the best part of my current lifetime to cultivate into the gift that has been calling me this past week to write the stories that I’ve always put off because I never had the courage to write them.

In grade twelve my daemon announced itself in my poem “Noman,” the unresolved karmic energy of all my past lives; and once my daemon was set free from my unconscious it refused to go back; that’s why I had to go on a quest for my true self instead of pursuing my dream of creative writing like my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway, which is what my last book Do We Have an Immortal Soul? was all about—my quest for my lost soul; but no sooner did I bring my book to closure and I heard the call with all those coincidences this week to be the story writer that I was called in my youth to be.

“Welcome, O life!”—I can now shout with Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” and again with Stephen, “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” I cannot not write my stories now…