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.