16: Kitchen Angel

Kitchen Angel 

“Synchronicity comes along to wake us and fulfill us.” 

THE POWER OF COINCIDENCE

David Richo

          Last spring I waited for the Tiger Lilies to bloom. One morning on my way home from Midland where I went to pick up my weekend papers, I parked my car where I always did a short way down a walking trail, but on the grass and off the trail, and I picked a dozen spotted fiery orange Tiger Lilies and three cattails in the ditch between the trail and highway, which made a lovely bouquet; but when I pulled out across the highway and onto Concession 4, I got pulled over by a police cruiser but didn’t know why. “What did I do?” I asked the OPP officer, wondering where he had come from.

“Didn’t you see the sign back there?” he asked, with a serious look.

“What sign?” I asked, in all innocence.

“You’re not supposed to drive on the trails,” he replied, and asked to see my driver’s license and registration.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see the sign. I thought it was safer to park there than on the highway. I just went in to pick some wild flowers.”

“You’re not supposed to drive on the trails,” he repeated.

“You know, this puts a real damper on my beautiful gesture,” I said, with a nervous but polite chuckle. “I picked a lovely bouquet of Tiger Lilies for the love of my life, and now my little gesture has been tarnished—”

The officer smiled. “What do you?” he asked.

“I’m a writer,” I said, and showed him a copy of Healing with Padre Pio that was sitting on a pile of some of my other books in the back seat.

He glanced at the front cover and read my bio on the back and handed my book and documents back to me. “I’ll let you off with a warning this time. Just remember, walking trails aren’t meant for driving on…”

I told Penny of my adventure, which gave more meaning to my little gesture, and I continued to pick her wild flowers off and on all summer long as I did every year; but then the leaves fell off the trees, and the snow began to fly, and I hadn’t brought her flowers for a while and had to be reminded, and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing… 

Robert Moss, dream shaman and author of The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archeologist in the Multiverse, believes that life speaks to us through signs and symbols. In fact, he makes a practice of going for morning walks just to read the signs and symbols that nature has to offer him for his day’s journey, sometimes asking questions and then watching and waiting for the language of life to speak to him.

I’ve tried this technique, and I’ve experienced some fascinating synchronicities; but when life speaks to me out of the blue, as it were, it gets my attention very quickly; like the other night when our glass flower vase fell from the top shelf of our kitchen pantry and landed on the hard ceramic tile floor with a loud THUMP but never broke. “What was that?” I asked, startled by the sudden noise.

I was in the sun room reading the Post (I buy the Saturday National Post for Conrad Black’s editorial alone; I’m fascinated by his metanoic change of heart since his release from prison), and Penny was in the kitchen making her second batch of Christmas cookies, glazed cranberry pecan this time; the night before she tried her hand at peanut butter shortbread cookies with chocolate glaze. “The flower vase just fell,” she replied, surprised that the vase hadn’t shattered to pieces. “It didn’t break,” she added, marveling at the miracle.

I had to see. I examined the vase, and there wasn’t a crack to be found. “I can’t believe it didn’t break,” I said, wondering what that meant. “How did it fall?”

“It just fell,” she repeated.

Perplexed, I had to ask: “You didn’t cause it to fall?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Penny said, her eyes alight with wonder. “I opened the door to get some pecans and it just fell. I didn’t touch anything up there.”

I laughed. “Maybe that’s something like what Robert Moss calls Library Angels. Sometimes a book falls off a library shelf and it just happens to be what the reader is looking for, even opening to the right page sometimes. That’s happened to Moss a few times. I think the writer Arthur Koestler coined the term Library Angels. Anyway, I think there’s a message here for me. I’m going to put the vase on the table to remind me to get you flowers tomorrow when I go for my paper, which I did; but as I drove into Midland Sunday morning I couldn’t get over why the vase didn’t shatter. It even left a chip on the tile floor.

It had been a while since I had given Penny flowers, and I felt guilty that I had to be reminded so bluntly; but only because the vase didn’t break. I just couldn’t believe it. The shelf was above my head, well over six feet, and it landed on a hard ceramic tile floor; why didn’t the glass vase shatter? It must have landed on the solid edge of the base; but still?

I couldn’t help but read it as a message, the vase wanted flowers; but had I been so neglectful? I didn’t think I was. I had learned to pay attention to our relationship, often anticipating Penny before she even asked; so why the message to get her flowers? Was I reading the sign correctly, or was I giving it a meaning that wasn’t there? After all, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

This opens up the question of the language of life, which has fascinated me from the day I became aware of how the Way speaks to us; and by Way I mean what has been called the Logos, the Word, and secret way of life. But I was re-reading some of my books on synchronicity for my spiritual musing BEWEL 262 (on the symbolic meaning of the license plate of our new Honda), and Dr. Kirby Surprise’s book Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Choice, and Unlocking Your Mind made me think about the language of life in an entirely new way; and I had to question the message from our “Kitchen Angel.”

In Chapter 6, “Satori in a Can,” Dr. Surprise (even his name is synchronistic with the “surprise” message from our glass vase) states his case, which resonates throughout the book as his basic theme that we are responsible for the synchronicities we experience: “I’m still not a big believer in outside intelligences that direct SEs (synchronistic events). In fact, I’m deeply suspicious of anyone who claims SEs result from personal relationships with unseen supernatural forces,” he writes, with dispassionate professional candor.

I don’t disagree, especially given how I winced whenever a member of the spiritual community that I belonged to would share yet another inflated example of how Divine Spirit had given them another sign to guide their life. So dependent had my spiritual community become upon Divine Spirit’s guidance that I had to explore this crippling dependency in a story (“Blue Jeans/Red Roses”) for my new book Enantiodromia that was inspired by C. G. Jung’s understanding of the shadow side of life; but, still, I couldn’t help but feel that as much as we may be responsible for the little coincidences and synchronicities that speak to us because of the state of mind we are in, I could not dismiss the possibility of providential guidance. And divine intervention, even. In fact, for me the two perspectives were not mutually exclusive; and that’s the mystery of the message I got from our “Kitchen Angel” when our flower vase fell off the top shelf of our kitchen pantry and didn't shatter.

So, how do I explain this mysterious guiding force of life that goes by many names—the Hand of God, Divine Spirit, Guardian Angels, and Library Angels? I called it the omniscient guiding force of life because it seems to address our concerns from a place of all knowing and seeing, just as Ascended Master St. Padre Pio addressed my concerns from that same omniscient state of consciousness that I wrote about in Healing with Padre Pio?

I can’t dismiss my experience with St. Padre Pio, who communicated to me through a gifted psychic for the ten spiritual healing sessions that became the basis of my novel; what the Good Saint had to say was much too personal, too true, too real, and too outside the sphere of my subjective consciousness for me not to accept Padre Pio as an individual in his own right; and so impressed was I by what he revealed to me that I even asked him if he spoke from a state of all knowing because he had become one with Divine Spirit, and he agreed—which is why I saw him as an Ascended Master and not just another Roman Catholic saint.

So it all comes down to a question of perspective, and for me both are true—Dr. Kirby Surprise’s view that we are responsible for the coincidences we experience (“Synchronicity is a mirror of the content of your psyche, made manifest as meaningful events,” he writes), and the view that they are blessings from some divine agency, call it what we will. Robert Moss refers to this agency as Library Angels, among other names like Trickster, and many spiritual acolytes call it our Higher Self and/or Inner Master; but I prefer to simply call it the omniscient guiding force of life, and I believe our “Kitchen Angel” was reminding me to show my love for Penny with flowers because the deed speaks louder than words.

 However it was choreographed then, that’s how the language of life speaks to me; so, Sunday morning I picked up my Sunday Star at Food Basics in Midland, along with the items that Penny needed for her Christmas baking, and then I drove to the Super Store because they had a much better selection of flowers to choose from, and I picked up a luscious bouquet of yellow roses (my favorite) and gave them to her with my deepest apologies for having to be reminded by our “Kitchen Angel” how much I loved and appreciated her.  

♥

HAVE A WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS,

AND MAY THE NEW YEAR

BE GOOD TO YOU.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15: What's In a Name? The Jian Ghomeshi Scandal

15 

 What’s In a Name?

The Jian Ghomeshi Scandal 

“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?’ asked the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. This reminds me of the advice that talk show host Shelagh Rogers gave to the guest host that usurped her position on the CBC radio show Sounds Like Canada, which eventually became the popular cultural affairs show Q, advice that was solicited by the impertinent usurper. Shelagh told him to repeat his name as often as possible, “to get it out there,” which he did with such orgiastic glee so many times throughout the show that was cunningly rebranded into Q with Jian Ghomeshi that I could no longer stand to listen to the show because he grated my nerves every time he said his name; it was obscene.

I listened to Q for the interviews, and I listened to Q with Jian Ghomeshi for the interviews, a habit that I had gotten into from listening to its forerunner Morningside initially hosted by Don Harron and then by the inimitable Peter Gzowski who made it Canada’s favorite talk show, but Jian Ghomeshi rebranded the show so successfully that it was picked up for syndication care of Public Radio International, and by the time CBC was forced to let him go it was airing on more than 180 stations in the States; but I sacrificed Q with Jian Ghomeshi because I could no longer suffer Jian Ghomeshi, who after years of hosting the show and becoming the entitled 47 year old golden boy superstar who preyed on young women was fired by the CBC and criminally charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of choking and is now awaiting trial.

When the story broke, I wrote a poem and posted it on Facebook under the heading “The disgraced talking head.” But—surprise, surprise!—no one caught the reference: 

Puer Aeaternus 

Icarus flew too close to the sun

And the light of all the attention he craved

Singed his wings

And he came tumbling down,

And down, and down,

And down. 

In Jungian psychology, “the archetypal image of a boy reluctant to mature is referred to as Puer aeternus, Latin for “eternal boyhood,” an adult man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level. He lives out experiences for their excitement, lives in fantasies, and ‘flies high.’ Trapped in his boyish ways, he has poor boundaries, flees from commitments and difficult situations, sees the world and himself through rose-coloured glasses, and essentially resists growing up.” If the shoe fits…

 

I knew that one day Shelagh Roger’s advice to Jian Ghomeshi, whose fantasy ideal was the androgynous British rock star David Bowie, would inspire a spiritual musing, so I kept the thought neatly tucked away in the back of my mind; and as I was reading The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss this morning, his chapter “Mark Twain’s Rhyming Life” set my thought free with the title “What’s in a Name?” and I wondered why; so, I called upon my Muse to explore this intriguing question of personal identity.

Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens’s pen name, borrowed from the Mississippi River boatman’s cry “Mark Twain,” meaning two fathoms, safe water; a name that Samuel Clemens immortalized with what has been called “the Great American Novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that Hemingway praised in Green Hills of Africa as America’s finest novel—“All American literature comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since”—and I couldn’t help but feel that Jian Ghomeshi wanted to immortalize his own name by repeating it ad museum on his show; but there was something so wrong about the way he went about staking his claim to immortality that I knew one day he would come tumbling down, hence my poem Puer Aeternus.

“He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal,” said Jesus, addressing man’s paradoxical nature. This speaks to what C. G. Jung called the individuation process, the essential premise being the integration of our outer self with our inner self—or what Jung called Personality No. 1, and Personality No. 2, and what I simply refer to as our authentic/inauthentic self; a process that requires so much wisdom, skill, commitment, and sacrifice that it keeps most people from realizing their true identity, or what Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self” and Jesus called “life eternal,” and I knew that Jian Ghomeshi had taken the wrong path in his life’s journey.

In my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, I explored how Hemingway’s No. 1 Personality (his insatiable ego and monstrous shadow) fueled his desire to become the best writer of his generation, and he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 with the publication of his most popular novel The Old Man and the Sea; but he paid such a dear price for his accomplishment that he could no longer repress the guilt of his betrayals and self-betrayals, and with brutal honesty (his literary credo was to “tell it  the way it was”) the 61 year old suicidal depressive confessed that he would rather have died than betray his first wife, which led to three more contentious marriages and the iconic writer that he became. “When I saw my wife (Hadley Richardson) again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her,” he remorsefully confessed in his melancholy memoir A Moveable Feast, the book that he was working on before shooting himself with his favorite shotgun.

Driven by daemonic passion, Hemingway took the ersatz way of ego to realize his lifelong dream of stepping into the ring with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the world’s great writers, but it brought his full but incomplete life to a sorry, tragic end; and though he still has time to redeem himself (which I seriously doubt), Jian Ghomeshi took the selfish worldly way of ego also and sabotaged his life with his preference for what he casually referred to as “rough sex,” which he foolishly confessed to on Facebook to cleverly pre-empt the inevitable consequences of his behavior. So afflicted was he by the sexual passions of his obsessive shadow that he had become morally obtuse in his relationships, until reality caught up to him when he brazenly showed his bosses at the CBC a video of him having “rough” but “consensual” sex with a bruised young woman. 

Gosh darn, they didn’t overlook his kinky private pleasure. Quelle surprise!

Debbie Ford called this kind of stupid self-sabotaging behavior “the shadow effect,” which can take a lifetime to repair, if at all; but whatever we call it, it’s all part of the inherently self-correcting karmic dynamic of the natural process of individuation, and Jian Ghomeshi’s aberrant little chickens finally came home to roost.

We all pay for our sins eventually, and for all of his wit, charm, and intelligence CBC’s 47 year old golden boy was played for a fool by his own shadow; and although Jian Ghomeshi got all the attention that he craved, it cost him dearly, and I can’t help but feel that Shelagh Rogers, who happily hosts her own show The Next Chapter that I enjoy for all the writers she interviews, is smiling to herself at her usurper host’s Faustian fall from grace—“for God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil,” concluded the Preacher in Ecclesiastes.  

♥

 

 

 

 

 

 

14:The Full but Incomplete Life

14 

The Full but Incomplete Life 

“In every living creature the urge for its own totality

is perhaps the strongest and most fundamental of all urges.” 

Striving Towards Wholeness

Barbara Hannah 

A great sadness came over me and I began to cry, but I couldn’t understand why; and as we drove down the Trans-Canada Highway from our short visit to Penny’s cousin on the shores of Lake Superior just north of Sault St. Marie, I pondered my inexplicable sadness.

Penny’s cousin was in his early eighties and his wife in her late seventies, and they were getting ready to go down to Brownsville Texas for the winter, which they had been doing for the last twenty-some years; that’s why we dropped in to see them.

It was just after eight in the morning when I rang the front door bell, but no-one answered, and I was afraid they had already left for their winter residence; but then we went around to the back and I saw Barbara sitting at the dining room table and knocked on her patio door. Surprised to see us, she waved and let us in; her husband was still in bed.

She poured us coffee and went to tell her husband we had dropped in for a visit, and twenty minutes later he joined us at the table and we talked for an hour before we said we had to be on our way. It was eleven years since I had seen them last, and I knew we would probably never see each other again; this was evident in Tom’s eyes as we stepped out the front door. He was standing in the hallway leaning on his cane when we said goodbye, and as we drove down the highway I couldn’t get that look in his eyes out of my mind; that’s when a wave of sadness overcame me and I welled up with tears.

“I can’t get over the look in Tom’s eyes,” I said to Penny, opening up a dialogue on our short visit with her ageing cousin. “He knew this was the last time they would see us, but it was more than that; it was a look that bared his soul.”

“What did you see?” Penny asked, curious to know what I was feeling.

“I don’t know if I can explain it. Your cousin’s had a good life, which he worked very hard to realize; but I saw a longing in his soul that brought tears to my eyes, and I can’t get over the sadness that I feel for him. You know, sweetheart; Tom had a full life, but there’s something missing. That’s what I saw in his eyes as we said goodbye.”

Tom asked us to drop in on our way home from up north, inviting us to stay the night in the guest suite that he had added onto his garage to spare us the expense of a motel room in Sault St. Marie, but we all knew this was probably the last time we would see each other and our parting was filled with unspoken sorrow; but that wasn’t all that I saw in his eyes.

Something about the way he looked at me, a curiosity that troubled him, as though he couldn’t figure out what we had that he didn’t, and this puzzled him deeply; and I pondered that sad look in his eyes until they opened up onto his soul.

“If I were to put it into words,” I mused out loud, “I’d say that your cousin has lived a full life, but his eyes told me that something was missing in his life; something we had that he couldn’t understand. That’s the look I saw in his eyes, and the sadness.”

“He may have lived a full life, but it’s not complete,” Penny answered, quickly grasping the point that was just beyond my reach—

“That’s it!” I exclaimed. “That’s what I saw in his eyes!”

“I see a musing coming up,” Penny said, and broke into laughter.

“The full but incomplete life,” I replied, and laughed with her; but it was long after our second trip up north the following month that I began to ponder writing my spiritual musing on the full but incomplete life. I tried once or twice to write it, but it didn’t feel right; like I had to wait to find the right entry, and so I gave it to my unconscious to work out.

Why, I didn’t know; but I got an urge to re-read some of my Jung books, and I started with two or three essays from his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul; and this inspired me to re-read Barbara Hannah’s book Striving Towards Wholeness, which gave me the entry point that I needed for my spiritual musing on the full but incomplete life.

One of C. G. Jung’s most insightful students, Barbara Hannah wrote one of my favorite books on his life: Jung: His Life and Work, A Biographical Memoir; but her book Striving Towards Wholeness explained that sad look of longing that I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes, and I knew it was my point of entry into my spiritual musing. She writes: 

“Jung has always compared the process of individuation to the formation of a crystal; the framework or lattice is in the solution from the beginning but only hardens and becomes visible much later as the crystal itself. In every human being there seems to be a similar framework or lattice of the process of individuation present from the beginning. It is as if this pattern—although its structure follows its own laws—depends for realization in some way on the individual becoming conscious of it…” (Striving Towards Wholeness, p. 214). 

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung tells us that the central concept of his psychology is the process of individuation, but this presupposes so much that I don’t know where to begin to explain what I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes; because that sad longing in his eyes was the same look that I once saw in an old German Shepherd’s eyes when I was working on the new house that my neighbor built for his retirement (ironically, his wife left him shortly after their new house was finished, and their dog died) was the longing for wholeness that every soul that comes into this world strives for but never realizes until they are ready to finish what nature cannot complete. As Jung wrote in his memoir, quoting an ancient alchemist saying, “What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,”

This “art” is what Jung finally came to call the process of individuation; but how can I possibly explain soul’s inherent longing for wholeness?

That’s the musing that I’ve been called upon to write; and even though I’ve explored this mysterious “art” in all of my books (the most succinct being Do We Have an Immortal Soul?), I feel compelled to spell it out in today’s spiritual musing; but to do that I have to call upon the infinite resources of my faithful Muse… 

“The truth is that no matter where I went I was always looking for myself,” said Shirley MacLaine, the well-known actress/seeker/writer, which can be said of every person whether they know it or not; and not until we find our true self will we feel complete.

          On the cusp of eighty, Shirley MacLaine wrote another book called What If…, and on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday show she was asked what would she like people most to know after all her years of seeking; and Shirley replied: “The notion that all you really need in life is some fresh water, a good hat, and a really good pair of shoes.”

She was obviously making reference to her pilgrimage on the road to Santiago de Compostela in Spain which she made when she was sixty years old and wrote about in her controversial book The Camino; but her reference speaks to the outer and inner life.

Shirley MacLaine was a very successful movie actress known throughout the world for her belief in reincarnation and UFOs, and despite all the ridicule that she received for her “eccentric” beliefs she continued to seek an answer to what she called the “Big Truth.”

“Everywhere I’ve travelled in the world I’ve found that people are looking for something to fill the loneliness inside them,” wrote MacLaine in her memoir I’m Over All That; “they are after what I think of as the ‘Big Truth.’ It doesn’t matter how wealthy or well suited they are, after surface talking, joking, eating, Hollywood gossip, and cultural politeness, the conversation always turns to why are we here, what is the point of life, is God real,  are we alone in the universe?”

Like Shirley MacLaine, I was also a seeker looking for the “Big Truth,” and after years of seeking and living what Gurdjieff called “work on oneself” and Jung called “the secret way” I came to the realization that our greatest need in life is to be who we are meant to be; which made our true self the “Big Truth” that everyone is looking for.

“There is nothing but the self and God,” said Jesus in Glenda Green’s book The Keys of Jeshua; but the self that Jesus is referring to is our inner self, or divine nature. But as I and every seeker learns in our quest for the “Big Truth,” to find our true self we have to bring our outer life into agreement with our inner life; and that, sadly, is the most difficult thing in the world to do—as Christ’s parable of the rich young man tells us; because not everyone wants to sacrifice their outer life to their inner life. “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal,” said Jesus (John 12:25).

That’s precisely what Shirley MacLaine intuited with her sage little notion that all we really need in life is some fresh water, a good hat, and a really good pair of shoes; because unless we let go of what we think we are (our outer life), we will never make the pilgrimage to our inner self and satisfy our inherent longing to be whole.

That’s the sadness that I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes, because I felt that desperate longing in his soul to be whole. Despite having lived a full life, her aging cousin had not made that connection with his inner self that would satisfy his inner longing, and for some strange reason his longing to be whole cried out to me and touched my soul.

“Are you happy,” Oprah asked Shirley in the same interview; and Shirley MacLaine replied, “O yeah.” But Oprah, ever the curious seeker, probed a little deeper: “In that Derek Walcott poem where he talks about sit, and feasting on your life; were you able to do that?”

Very thoughtfully, Shirley replied: “Not so much my life. I sit and feast on the now. I really do that; I really do that. And so that’s why I’m so intertwined with nature; you know, my animals; my thoughts of other people. When I’m with them, I’m really feasting on the now of who they’re trying to be. What an entertainment.”

“Who they’re trying to be.” That’s the teleological pull to our inner self, the natural process of individuation which will one day bring us to our true self that Derek Walcott so presciently captured in his poem “Love after Love” that Oprah referenced— 

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. 

          After a lifetime of questing for her true self, the courageous actress/seeker/writer finally met her true self and began to peel her image from the mirror of her life; that’s why she could feast on the now. Her quest was over, and all that remained was for her to be herself.

Shirley MacLaine lived a full life, but not until she made the pilgrimage to her inner self did she feel whole enough to feast on the now of her life; that’s why I was brought to tears by the sadness that I saw in Penny’s cousin’s eyes. His life was nearly over, but he still had a long way to go to satisfy the longing in his soul.

“Maybe in his next life,” I said to Penny, somewhere near The Canadian Carver where we stopped to gas up and catch the Carver’s end-of-summer sale.

 

♥

 

 

 

NEW BOOK COMING SOON

THE SUM OF ALL SPIRITUAL PATHS