We have finally rounded the bend from the Winter Solstice into the new year, a time for reflection and planning by the wood burning stove. My thoughts run the gamut from questions about what we will plant this year in our garden (it’s almost time to buy seeds), to my goals for the year for my business, to what piano pieces I want to work on, and what house projects to complete. But I have not yet settled into concrete planning, and for now at least, am content to sit by the fire and muse about broader, more existential questions that I know I cannot answer.
The idea of synchronicity — that there is a deeper, non-linear dimension to reality, bridging the gap between the inner psyche and the external world, is an idea that comes up for me time and time again, when “coincidences” that defy logic manifest themselves in my life. I don’t particularly look for them, but they jump in my path in such a way that I can but stop and wonder if they are something more than happenstance, playing a role in the different turning points which have propelled me through life.
I remember when I spent a semester abroad in Paris, in 1983. I had been visiting friends in Augsburg, Germany and hopped onto a night train back to Paris. The train was bursting at the seams, and seemed not to have a single vacant seat. I walked down several carriages checking each compartment for a place to sit. The trains weren’t just rows of seats, but had sliding doors to compartments with bench seating for 6-8 people. Finally, several carriages deep, when I was about to give up and plop myself down on my bag to spend a sleepless night in the corridor lining the compartments, I finally found a single vacant seat. When I gratefully pulled open the sliding door and sat down with a sigh a relief, I noticed that across from me, one of the passengers looked eerily like a friend from college. Soon enough, he smiled at me as if to say “yes, it’s me, you dodo, who else?!” The one available seat on that entire train, turned out to be facing my classmate from another continent. Those random encounters have happened more than once in my lifetime (and I’m sure you too have similar anecdotes), and I suppose they could be just that: random.
Equally, there have been times where someone special to me, unbeknownst, was living not far away for a matter of years, and we did not find ourselves miraculously sat opposite each other on train or in a café. I suppose, that too could be a-synchronous. Like we were not meant to find each other. Not then, or there, in any case.
There have also been surreal happenings which provoked turning points in my life, in what feels like more than a random “triangulation” of events. One of the most dramatic occurred at a very magical spot. When my mother and stepfather lived in Ethiopia, in the late 80’s, I was lucky to accompany them on a New Year’s trip with a group of expats living in Addis Ababba, to Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile.
One morning we left the lakeside hotel, piled into vans, and drove up to a bluff where you could clearly see the Nile flowing outward from this beautiful lake dotted with islands populated with age-old monasteries. There was a young man on this trip, who was also visiting his parents (from Paris), and over the course of the journey, we discovered we had a some feelings emerging for each other. As we stood on the bluff, I noticed a vulture circling overhead, and as the bird circled lower and lower I could see that it had something in its beak. I don’t think anyone else was watching this bird, most were focused on the view of the Nile, and so when it opened its beak and dropped the object right onto the head of said boy, he was startled indeed. And what was this object, dropped out of the heavens onto his head? The guide identified it as a piece of papyrus — a wetland sedge that of course was the plant used to make the famous Egyptian papyrus scrolls.
What an incredible moment: high on a bluff overlooking the source of the Nile (a mystical life source if there ever was one), with a vulture swooping down over us (a symbol of death, rebirth, and new beginnings), dropping papyrus from the sky (knowledge) — onto the head of a boy I was interested in! Needless to say a romantic correspondence between us followed as I finished my last semester of college back in the States. As soon as I had completed my thesis, and without even waiting for the graduation ceremony, I boarded a flight to Paris, purportedly to reunite with the Papyrus-sticken apple of my eye. But clearly that wasn’t the invisible message inscribed for me on the papyrus: the moment I got off the plane we looked at each other and realized maybe this romance wasn’t meant to be. But I did stay in Paris for years despite the aborted romance, and to this day, I think of that moment overlooking Lake Tana as the turning point in my life which prompted 25 years of living abroad and all the adventures which ensued. The vulture was my celestial travel agent; the papyrus; the map.
Currently, there is an aspect to my move to Maine which unravelled another strange synchronicity, and I am not sure what it might reflect in the grander scheme of things, but let’s explore this particular tangle which has to do with my partner Beau and his family history colliding with my own family history (by marriage anyway)!
My connection with Beau was rather unlikely to begin with. I broke every one of my “dating rules” when I saw his profile on a dating site. No photo, and openly still not fully untangled from a 30 year marriage: both very bad signs! But there was something about the way he wrote about himself in his profile (including a love of foraging for mushrooms), and above all, the “non”-photo with a blurred out face, which did however show his hands resting on a café table in a posture that seemed somehow so deeply familiar and compelling, that I broke all my rules and we started a conversation. Eight years later we are still in a deep conversation and it is together that we embarked on this adventure in Maine.
The adventure to Maine began because we both shared a desire to steward a property somewhere more affordable to us than the West Coast. We explored various solutions (I was the primary Zillow scroller), from old Victorians in St. Louis to crumbling colonials in Philadelphia to adobes in Taos, to farms in upstate New York, and even Europe. Having finally established the East Coast looked most likely to yield us what we were looking for (not to mention being closer to my mother), we decided to take a road trip from Philadelphia to Maine, where my mother lives, to explore — though much of this area is not new to me (I grew up in DC, and went to boarding school and college in New England), it was fully new to Beau and he needed to take a barometer reading of his own.
When we arrived in Falmouth, where my mother lives (and my step father was still living until last year), Beau was triggered (not in a good way) by the sight of the expansive, meticulous lawns and stately manicured homes, reminding him of painful childhood memories in a comparable area outside of Chicago, and family members who had scoffed at his more bohemian lifestyle. Nevertheless there were things to like. One day we were walking down the dirt road lining Mussel Cove, an inlet that my family’s home overlooks on Casco Bay, and he was delighted to spot some Ghost Pipes.
Ghost Pipes are an interesting plant as they are fully white and don’t get nutrients through photosynthesis like most plants with green leaves — rather they draw energy through mycelium and tree roots. In the context of the spirit world, the ghost pipe plant is often associated with the realm of the dead, spiritual healing, and connection to ancestors, due to its pale, ghostly appearance and the fact that Native American tribes traditionally believed it held significant spiritual power, often using it in ceremonies related to the spirit world; its presence is seen as a link between the physical and spiritual realms. We admired the plants, took some photos, and then moved on. I should have known they were telling us something more. (Another Papyrus moment?)
Soon after returning to California from Maine, Beau and I were assembling a glass-fronted bookshelf to contain his favorite books, when he showed me one of his treasured tomes: a genealogy commissioned by his industrialist grandfather Dorr Felt (who lived outside Chicago in the leafy suburbs of Beau’s painful childhood memories). I opened the book, and on page one the chapter began with the history of his forebear George Felt who in the early 1600’s was one of the founding fathers of Yarmouth, Maine, where he lived on Casco Bay. How odd, we both agreed, given that Yarmouth is the next town north from my parent’s property in Falmouth. Beau had no idea about this history, and had never paid much attention to the details in this dusty tome.
We read on and discovered that Beau’s ancestor had abandoned his 2000 acres at the mouth of the Royal River due to raids by the local tribe, and lived the rest of his days in colonial Massachussetts. In a later chapter, however, we discovered that George Felt’s grandson had returned to Maine and his mother-in-law had gifted him and his new bride 100 acres of land in Falmouth — on Mussel Cove — the very spot where my family has been living since my step-father’s ancestor, a General in the Civil War, had acquired their property in the 1860s. This is where General Brown had built a “Gentleman’s Farm” with a dairy and cows — to this day there is still a cursive B for Brown on the wrought iron entrance gate, and my mother has shown me a milk bottle from this endeavor. George Felt Jr. died on one of the islands in the Bay, in 1676.
Was this the message from the Ghost Pipes we saw growing along Mussel Cove? That the ancestors were there and revealing themselves to Beau? What strange twist of fate had brought Beau to Mussel Cove nearly 400 years later? On some cosmic level, was this connection of place part of what prompted me to overlook all the rules which I broke when we first connected?
With some help from AI (Claude to be exact), we have determined that the 100 acres on Mussel Cove actually were on the side of the cove facing my family’s home — and include the property where Uncle Charley used to hold court in a grand mansion with a herd of buffalo in the yard and a large dock — which you could swim to from my family’s property across the cove — as well as the area which is now the shopping mall where my mother buys her groceries most days.
Beau and I ultimately landed in a home located a three hour drive up the coast, nowhere near Mussel Cove, and yet the family history and roots, and even the discovery of the Ghost Pipes on the bank of the cove, do give an added dimension to our life here, and certainly raise many more questions about what it all means: the cosmic tangle — perhaps a form of quantum entanglement (where random particles are forever connected), is a knot too thick to unstitch, but does give us ample cause to reflect, and marvel, at the invisible ties between us all, and the messages sent to us from vultures, papyrus, and Ghost Pipes…
The mysterious workings ❤️
You are such a wonderful writer. Such a beautiful and interesting story.