CHAPTER 33
Message from the Woodpecker
“Synchronistic
events urge upon us a view of the world
as a unified field
in which one’s own experiences and actions
are fundamentally
connected to the experiences
and actions of
others.”
Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives
—Robert H. Hopcke
When something out of the
ordinary happens in our day, it means that life is trying to get our attention.
Life uses the anomalous experience to tell us something we need to know to
further and deepen our understanding of whatever it is that needs our attention
(this is why I call the symbolic language of life the omniscient guiding principle of life), like the odd experience
I had the other morning when I was working on my chapter “Dr. Peterson’s
Jungian Gift to the World.” I needed
to see the deeper implications of my chapter.
It’s not uncommon for me to hear
a woodpecker pecking on a tree in our front yard, as I just did this morning
when I began this chapter; but the other morning the pecking was so different and
persistent that I had to look out my window to see what it was all about.
I looked at the usual trees, but
I couldn’t spot where the pecking was coming from; and then, to my surprise and
wonder, I saw a large woodpecker with a red patch on its head perched on the window
ledge of the driver’s door of our Honda Civic parked in our driveway just below
my writing room above our double garage, hanging on as if for dear life but so
fascinated by the image it saw of itself in the car door mirror and its
reflection in the car window that it was fixated on what it saw, and it pecked
the mirror out of position (as Penny learned later when she got into the car to
go to work); and I stared at the woodpecker glancing from the mirror to the
window, back and forth, pecking and not pecking, totally bewildered.
“If that isn’t a symbol, nothing is!” I said to myself, and broke into a mirthful chuckle;
and I watched the woodpecker as it’s neck frantically turned from mirror to
window, pecking and staring until it got fed up and flew off ono the trunk of the
nearest tree, which happened to be the big oak that shades our front deck where
I do a lot of reading, and then it flew off.
I have a book by Steven D.
Farmer, Ph.D., a shamanic practitioner, ordained minister, licensed
psychotherapist, and former college professor with over thirty years experience
as a professional healer and teacher, and whenever Penny and I have an
anomalous experience with nature’s creatures we check out his book to see what
the symbolic meaning of their appearance may mean; so, I took out Animal Spirit Guides and looked up
woodpecker.
“If WOODPECKER shows up, it means: A
storm is brewing, either literally or metaphorically; but have faith, as you
are protected no matter what. It’s a good time to do some drumming
and/or rattling, whether on your own or with a group of friends. You’re
entering into a time of abundance and plenty. Go to a place of Nature
and lie on your back on the ground,
breathe slowly and steadily, and see if you can feel Mother Earth’s heartbeat. Pay particular attention to your own cycles
and rhythms and do your best to honor them by aligning yourself with them,
rather than being contrary to them” (Animal Spirit Guides, by Steven D. Farmer, Ph. D., p. 405, bold
italics mine).
I shared my experience with Penny
when she came into my room for her morning coffee; and as we talked, we set
free what the language of life was trying to tell me with its message from of
the woodpecker. (I’m amazed at how often
our morning conversations have connected dots that I would never have seen, proving
for me over and over again the miracle of the Logos in honest conversation!) “It
has to be telling me something about the chapter I’m working on,” I said,
baffled by the message.
“What’s your chapter about?” Penny
asked.
“Essentially, it’s about how
Jordan Peterson’s message has connected thousands of his young followers with
their own life story. Peterson is following in Jung’s footsteps, because Jung
was the first to discover that we all have a life story that drives us to become
what we are meant to be; but most of us get stuck. Jung helped people get
unstuck, and that’s what Jordan Peterson is doing with his message to the world.
That’s why he was called by life.”
“How does one get stuck?” Penny
asked, cutting to the quick.
“Debilitating life traumas, like
losing one’s job or a bitter divorce. But basically, too much shadow,” I
answered, with no need to explain further because she was more than familiar
with my work (Penny edits and proofs and formats my books for publication on
Lulu). “That’s the problem with our crazy world today, too much shadow—THAT’S IT!” I exclaimed, catching the
meaning of the woodpecker’s message.
“What?” Penny asked, startled by
my epiphany.
“That’s the message! The woodpecker was puzzled by its own reflection!” I
said, totally awakened to the message now. “The woodpecker didn’t know that its
reflection was him—or her, as the case may be; and neither does the world know
its own reflection. That’s what Carl Jung brought to our attention, and now Jordan
Peterson is doing the same with his message to the world. I’ve got a quote in
one of my synchronicity books that speaks to this, which I can look up later;
but do you remember the spiritual musing that I wrote on the bread maker we got
from Tony last summer?”
“Wasn’t that something?” Penny said,
with a big smile. “Why?”
“That’s just how life works for
us, sweetheart,” I replied, with a chuckle. “When we need something, life comes
to our assistance. We needed a new bread maker, and life provided. And don’t
forget the voice that told you to go to the casino; not once, but two or three
times. We needed money for unexpected expenses, and life provided. God, life is
mysterious. Well, I couldn’t see the deeper implications of the chapter I was
working on, so life sent me a woodpecker to inform me. That’s why it behaved so
strangely.”
“What was the woodpecker’s message?”
Penny, in all her innocence, asked.
“It’s all about self-reconciliation,”
I replied; but I didn’t want to explain further until I had finished writing my
chapter on Dr. Peterson’s Jungian gift to the world, because my high school
hero and literary mentor had taught me to never talk about something you’re
going to write about because it will lose its magic, like a butterfly losing
the dust on its wings.
But just to make the point about
how the omniscient guiding principle of
life works in our life (and everyone’s life for that matter, even if they
aren’t aware of it), let me quote the spiritual musing that I wrote on our new
bread maker coincidence that I posted on my Spiritual Musings blog Saturday, September 30, 2017:
The Bread Maker Coincidence,
and Sharon’s Comeuppance
In our house, we call her Sharon.
She’s Murphy’s nasty sister, the Murphy of “Murphy’s Law.” As I joked with our
neighbors one day when they walked over with a glass of wine to join us on our
deck, “If you think Murphy’s bad, wait until you meet his sister Sharon. She’s
ten times worse than her brother.”
Murphy’s Law states that if
anything can go wrong, it will; and to make the point with our neighbors that
our life had really been thrown off kilter the past few weeks, starting with the
stupid accident I got into with our Honda Civic, which I explored in my
spiritual musing “The Old Trickster,” I had to kick Murphy’s Law up a notch;
that’s how his nasty sister Sharon came into being.
Well, Sharon struck again this
past week, following in her brother footsteps, starting with the leak in
Goober’s new tank. Goober is our goldfish, which we brought with us when Penny
and I moved to Georgian Bay fourteen years ago, so Goober is old as goldfish
go; and Penny got Goober a new tank a few months ago at Walmart in Wasaga Beach,
regretting that she did not get the larger tank which was only a few dollars
more; and then our bread maker died the other day when I put on dough for pizza;
and the following morning our coffee maker sputtered in that familiar way that
coffee makers do when they’re about to give up the ghost; so, we had to replace
all three items, and Penny and I went shopping Sunday in Midland after we
treated ourselves to a late breakfast at Captain Ken’s in Penetanguishene.
Penny had gone on Amazon to check
out bread makers, so she had a good idea of what she wanted; but there wasn’t
much selection at Canadian Tire in Midland, and what they did have were too
pricey for our budget; so, we went to Walmart and came home with a larger tank
for Goober and new coffee maker but no bread maker, and Penny decided to order
one from Amazon. But when we got home, Murphy’s nasty sister stepped in when
the garage door wouldn’t open when I pressed the remote control affixed to the
sun visor of the car. I tried several times, and when I went in to check I saw
that the screws holding the bracket attached to the automatic door-opening
track had ripped loose and had to be re-screwed, which I had done twice
already, and this final indignity was like a slap in the face; but strangely
enough, this set into motion the merciful
law of divine synchronicity, and Sharon’s comeuppance…
I love coincidences. I look
forward to them every day, and I’m always tickled with joy when they happen
because you cannot plan a coincidence. Like Murphy’s Law and his nasty sister
Sharon’s Revenge, coincidences have a mind of their own, and they only happen
for a good reason; and that’s what I’d like to explore in today’s spiritual
musing.
Because I’ve been engaged with
the synchronicity principle most of my life, which was fully realized when the
merciful law of divine synchronicity introduced me to a street in Tiny
Township, Georgian Bay, named after me, STOCCO CIRCLE (my surname is Stocco)
where Penny and I built our new home fourteen years ago, I’m not surprised when
the dots for a new spiritual musing begin to connect, because that’s how the
synchronicity principle works in the service of soul’s imperative for wholeness
and completeness, and something that Zen poet Jane Hirshfield said about her
relationship to poetry in Bill Moyers book
Fooling with Words, A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft, caught my
attention the other morning when I felt “nudged” to read Moyers book again; and
as I always do when something speaks to me, I highlighted the passage: “Sometime I think that poems use us in
order to think, to do their own work,” said Jane Hirshfield. “You know, most of the time I feel as if I
am in the service of the poem—a poem isn’t something I make, it’s something I
serve.”
And herein lies the mystery of
the synchronicity principle that Jane Hirshfield failed to see, that not only is
she in the service of her poetry, but that the spirit of poetry, what I call
“it” in the poem I wrote that she inspired, serves her no less than she serves
the spirit of poetry, the omniscient
guiding principle of life that serves every soul in their destined journey
through life—
She almost has “it” but does not quite
know it; another experience, another
poem, another nanometer closer to “it.”
Something she said gave her away:
“Most of the time I feel as if I am
in service of the poem,” but not until
she sees that “it” is in equal service
to her will she have “it” and be
whole and complete.
Being a writer compelled to
write, I know what Jane Hirshfield
meant by saying that sometimes she feels like she is in the service of her
poems, because when I’m called to write a poem I often do not know what the
poem wants to say, thus affirming Hirshfield’s insight that our poems do our
thinking for us (as do my spiritual musings, but with less mystifying imagery);
but what is the poet serving if not one’s own destined purpose to wholeness and
completeness?
A poem shines a light upon one’s
path, making one’s way easier because it brings one’s outer journey into
harmony with one’s destined purpose to wholeness and completeness, and coincidences
are life’s way of confirming the natural harmonization process of inevitable
self-reconciliation; but
what does this have to do with Murphy’s Law and Sharon’s Revenge?
Aye, there’s the rub; because
life has a way of throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of our life. But how
can we expect our life to run smoothly all the time when there are built-in
faults and obsolescence into the human condition?
If something can go wrong, it
will; and our bread maker had to wear out eventually, as did our coffee maker,
so why be surprised when they do? We didn’t expect our fish tank to spring a
leak so soon after our purchase, though; but the fatigue-factor built into
everything eventually catches up to us, and our tank sprung a leak because the
fault was in the assembly, thus affirming Murphy’s Law that if anything can go
wrong, it will. And our bread and coffee makers had a limited life span, so
there shouldn’t have been any surprise there either. But because these items
gave up their ghost in such close temporal proximity to each other (the
superstition of three “bad” things happening in a row), we attach some kind of
nefarious meaning to their occurrence. But there’s nothing sinister about
built-in defects and obsolescence; that’s just the way life is.
And as to our garage door, the
final indignity, I should have seen it coming because I knew that the metal of
the door was too thin for the screws to hold indefinitely (a manufacturing
fault), which was why I decided that this time I would fasten a ¾ 6 x 12 inch
piece of plywood to the door to fasten the screws to that held the bracket
attached to the automatic track; but I didn’t have a piece of plywood, and I
was going to walk over to my neighbor Tony’s place later because I knew he
would have it, as well as the screws; and
that’s when the remarkable coincidence with the bread maker happened…
Penny went for a walk around STOCCO
CIRCLE after we brought our new fish tank and coffee maker and other sundries
into the house, and I sat on the front deck to read my Sunday Star just to pause and catch my breath; but when Penny came
back from her walk, she said to me: “Tony’s home. He’s out in his garage.”
“I’ll go over and see if he has a
piece of plywood and some screws,” I said, and Penny went into the house. But unbeknown to me, while I was talking with Tony in his garage Penny had gone
online to select and order a new bread maker from Amazon.
I rode my bike to Tony’s and saw
him standing by his work bench studying something that was making a funny but
familiar sound. I greeted Tony and asked what he was doing, and he told me he
was trying to figure out what that unit he was studying was.
“That’s a bread maker,” I said,
“and it’s supposed to work like that.” Tony had the unit plugged in but thought
that it was malfunctioning because the little paddle that kneaded the bread
dough wasn’t revolving as he thought it should; it pulsed, revolving
interruptedly.
Tony was cleaning out his garage
and back-yard shed and old lawn chairs and other collectables from under his
back deck that had been there for years and loading everything onto his trailer
and then he was going to make a trip to the dump, that’s why he was checking
out that appliance which just happened to be a perfectly good bread maker that
an Italian lady for whom he had done a small job had given to him a few years
ago, and he was going to throw it away because he didn’t know what to do with
it.
“It works just fine, Tony,” I
said. “Maybe Maria can use it?”
A widow also, Maria was Tony’s second
life companion (his first was an alcoholic and didn’t’ work out); but Maria was
old fashioned, and she kneaded her dough by hand, that’s why Tony offered it to
me, and I was strongly “nudged” to leave my bike and carry the bread maker over
to our house after quickly telling Tony why I had come over. He did have a
piece of plywood and screws, but I wanted to surprise Penny first with the
remarkable coincidence of the bread maker that Tony had just given me.
Penny was in her office upstairs,
and as soon as I walked into the house, I shouted up to her: “Have you ordered
the break maker yet?”
“I’m just about to,” she said.
“Well don’t!” I shouted.
“Come on down here. I got a bread maker
from Tony!”
Penny couldn’t believe the
coincidence. She had just taken her Master card out and was about to order the
new bread maker when I shouted up to her not to, and after giving the bread
maker (which was a higher end model called Bread
Chef) a thorough cleaning, she put on a batch of dough to make fresh buns
for dinner; and while she was doing that, I went back to Tony’s and explained
my garage door problem, and being such a good neighbor Tony walked over with me
and sized up the problem, and together we got the automatic garage door opener
working properly (plus another little job), and then we sat on the front deck
and had a nice cold beer, and that’s how Sharon got her comeuppance.
———
As
ironic as it may be, in the woodpecker’s message I saw how the archetypal shadow
of our crazy modern world was getting its comeuppance with Jordan Peterson’s
no-nonsense message of self-reconciliation that he was called upon by life to
give to the world through his international bestseller 12 Rules for Life and book tour talks throughout North America,
Europe, and Australia, which sparked such an interest in his ponderous Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief that
it spiked up to the Amazon bestseller list; and when the woodpecker’s message
finally sunk in, something I read in David Richo’s book, The Power of Coincidence: How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know, came
to mind, and I went to the assigned book shelf in my writing room to look it up:
“Perhaps
all is happening in life just as we intend. Then suddenly we meet someone, or
find out something, or have an accident, or hit bottom and our world spins in a
new direction that ultimately makes all the difference. Those unexpected events beyond
our control are the forces of synchronicity that make us who we are—and who we
were meant to be.
“Synchronicity
is a mind-boggling and sometimes eerie rendezvous between the world and our
inner selves. Something happens in the external world and it fits exactly with what
we need right now, showing that our human nature and mother nature are two
sides of the same coin. In nature, each season produces just the
conditions that the ecology and the earth require for its evolutionary growth.
Likewise, in our human story, we keep finding just what we require so we
can evolve as psychologically healthy and spiritually aware beings. Synchronicity
comes to us as an assisting force in this evolution. We
are helped in finding ourselves and we help others find themselves. Thus,
synchronicity contributes to the joyous fulfillment of our personal destiny in
an always luminous world that longs for more light” (The Power of
Coincidence, by David Richo, Ph.D., p. 2, bold italics mind).
Was
it a coincidence that professor Peterson stepped up to the plate to defend free
speech and was instantly catapulted onto the world stage with his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, and
was he called by life to answer the angry question of my poem that I wrote the
year before which spoke for myself and the collective unconscious?
“What the hell is going on out
there?” I asked,
and professor Peterson provided an answer that satisfied my desperate need to
know, and not only my need to know but the collective need of the world to know
what the hell was going on out there; hence the overwhelming attention that Jordan
Peterson was getting with his book and talks and online lectures, because, as
my oracle informed me in my spiritual musing, “coincidences are life’s way
of confirming the natural harmonization process of inevitable self-reconciliation,”
and it had to be one of the most meaningful coincidences I had ever
witnessed for Peterson`s book to be called Maps
of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, which provided maps of meaning for
an answer to my poem’s angry question, “What the hell is going on out there?”
But professor Peterson stirred
the pot with his message of self-reconciliation in his sudden bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,
and a wicked storm was brewing in social consciousness, beginning with the
Cathy Newman interview on Britain’s Channel 4 News, and it’s not about to stop.
I’ve just learned that his 60 city book tour has expanded to include more cities,
and his talks are really stirring the pot of social consciousness, which speaks
to the message the woodpecker gave me with its strange behavior; and as impossible
as it may be to believe, here’s what I think is happening with the Jordan
Peterson phenomenon that’s taking the world by storm.
My inspired poem shouted loud and
clear that religion, science and politics have failed to satisfy our need to
know what the hell was going on in the world, and so unbearable was our need to
know that life had to provide an
answer, just as David Richo intuited: “Something happens in the external world and
it fits exactly with what we need right now, showing that our human nature and
mother nature are two sides of the same coin.”
So, along came professor Jordan
Peterson to satisfy our desperate need to know what the hell was going on out
there with his studied maps of meaning that he brilliantly rendered into his
international bestseller 12 Rules for
Life: An Antidote to Chaos; but what is it that the world so desperately
needs to know? That’s the puzzling question.
Every seed must become what it is
meant to be, said Carl Jung; but one doesn’t need Carl Jung to see the obvious.
A tomato seed cannot become an oak tree, and neither can an apple seed become a
donkey; every seed must be true to its own nature, and this is the mystery that
Jordan Peterson’s message speaks to—the divine seed of our essential nature
that is sown in this world to grow and evolve in its own identity; which is why
the core of Peterson’s message is the sanctity of the individual self that has
been so abused by the pernicious soul-denying nihilism of the world that life had to step in to redress the
imbalance.
“As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so
man must become what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get
stuck,” said
Jung (I know, I keep quoting this; but it does sum up everything about the
individuation process); but why do most of us get stuck. That’s the real issue
of the human predicament.
Drawing upon the wisdom in Ecclesiastes, imagine a river of individual
souls flowing through life and then coming upon a dam that impedes its flow (“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher,
vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which
he taketh under the sun?”), and the river backs up and backs up and creates
an immense ocean of frustrated souls longing to continue on their way to
wholeness and completeness but cannot because the impenetrable dam of their own
vanity holds them back, and religion, science and politics cannot open the floodgates
and let them free to continue on their destined journey; and as metaphorical as
this may be, this is the sad reality of the human predicament.
But some souls do manage to get
free and continue on their journey, great souls like Carl Gustav Jung; and in
their compassion for humanity, they inform us on how to continue our own
journey to wholeness and completeness. And as presumptuous as it may be, I know that professor Peterson also found
a way to continue on his journey, and in his compassion for his fellow man he’s
compelled by his own imperative to share the gnostic wisdom of his way, the
same wisdom of self-reconciliation that all cultures have been teaching for
centuries in their myths and secret teachings that professor Peterson ferreted
out in his Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, and what we
have to reconcile is our outer self with our inner self, because this is the
only way we can become what we are meant to be.
But we can never reconcile our outer
self with our inner self until we become aware of our own shadow, the dark
repressed side of our ego personality. The woodpecker saw its own reflection in
our car mirror and window, but it didn’t know that it was its own reflection;
and the message that life gave me with the woodpecker’s odd behavior was that
our crazy modern world can see its false shadow self everywhere (the Toronto Star Washington bureau chief Daniel
Dale fact-checked president Donald Trump’s tweets and utterances and found
1,075 falsehoods in the first 365 days of his administration, proof positive of
Trump’s false shadow self) but cannot recognize its own false self. That’s why
Jung said that it takes great moral courage to see our own shadow; which is what
keeps us from getting past the dam.
And this is what the language of
life was telling me with the woodpecker’s strange behavior. We can see our
shadow like the woodpecker saw its own reflection, but we don’t know that it’s
our own false self that we’re looking at just like the woodpecker did not know
that it was seeing its own reflection (the mote in the other person’s eye, said
Jesus). That’s why the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn became Jordan
Peterson’s hero, because he had the courage to look at his own life-lie and do
something about it, as did Jordan Peterson who chronicled his own experience in
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of
Belief which he rendered into his bestselling 12 Rules for Life: And Antidote to Chaos that’s taking the world by
storm and consigned to be translated into forty foreign languages.
Solzhenitsyn chronicled his longsuffering
experience in the Soviet Gulag and garnered the Nobel Prize for Literature,
which helped bring down the Soviet empire that was founded upon the socialist lie
of a utopian fantasy; and not unlike his hero, Jordan Peterson’s iconoclastic
message of hope poses such a threat to the archetypal false shadow self of our
crazy modern world of moral relativism, identity politics, and political
correctness gone mad that he’s created a firestorm of soul-wrenching
self-reflection with his gobsmacking honesty and truth-telling, and the world has
taken notice. And if the second part of the woodpecker’s message augurs true,
according to the shamanic wisdom of Steven D. Farmer’s Animal Spirit Guides, we will be “entering into a time of abundance
and plenty.”
I sincerely hope so…
