The Boy Who Died and Came Back by Robert Moss

Author:Robert Moss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New World Library

28. WHEN the UNIVERSE GETS PERSONAL

Synchronicity is when the universe gets personal. Our inner sense of meaning meets an external event that we know is related. Even though there is no apparent causal or rational connection, we feel that something is speaking to us. Meaningful coincidence of this kind can feel like a secret handshake, or like an unseen hand tickling you, or mussing your hair, or pushing you back, or pulling the rug from under you.

Jung coined the word synchronicity because he was fed up with people struggling to describe meaningful coincidence. We often say “it wasn’t coincidence” when we mean that it was coincidence and it meant something important to us. Synchronicity sounds like something respectably scientific, so I often use the word although its root meaning is very limited. It refers to events that are happening at the same moment in time. But the experience of meaningful coincidence is not confined to a single pairing of inner and outer events in a single moment of time. It may run in riffs over days or weeks.

While working on this book, I dreamed that I had written an epic in the style of the ancient Greeks, complete with an opening invocation of the Muse. The dream inspired me to pull translations of the Odyssey and the Argonautica off my shelves. In my favorite used bookstore, just down the street, I found an excellent scholarly translation of a Roman retelling of Voyage of the Argo previously unknown to me. I went further to honor my dream, by writing an offering to the Muse in the old style (“Sing in me, creative spirit”).

With editions of the Greek epics as my carry-on reading, I boarded my first flight to Denver, en route to Boulder, where I was scheduled to read from my poetry collection at the wonderful Boulder Bookstore, one of the great independents, before opening a weekend workshop. The lively, elderly lady sitting next to me introduced herself as Helen of Troy. Her name was Helen, and she had recently moved to Troy, New York. Had I heard of it? Well, yes. As I told her, I had once lived in Troy because of a sequence of dreams and synchronicity, although when I first heard of Troy — in a dream visitation by a dead psychic — I thought the reference was to Homer’s Troy. My conversation with Helen of Troy on the plane was rich in nested coincidences, starting with the fact that she was a fellow Australian who spoke in the same Anglo-Australian accent as myself and shared my mother’s maiden name, but I’ll leave these aside to follow the epic line.

When I got to the Boulder Bookstore, I was greeted by a lady at the desk whose name was Athena. Quick as a discus thrower, I asked, “Where’s Odysseus?” “Odysseus works for the store,” a manager promptly informed me. “I’ll have him paged.”

Odysseus immediately appeared, an athletic young man whose flowing long hair and beard were suitably Achaean in style.

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