“the experience of hearing Judy Garland sing ‘Over the Rainbow.’ When the song and the credits end, I am left with the feeling that ought to be a paradise, and I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’s famous quote: ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’ We do not need to only participate in dark or troubling stories, but we do need to give priority to stories that haunt us, unsettle us, and expand us, whether through beauty and delight or tragedy. We also need to make time and space to interpret the stories through dialogue with others. Living in an atomistic culture, our default response to receiving a story is not to interpret it in community. We may have a personal opinion about it. We may tweet a 280 character review. We may debate parts of the story. But most of us are not inclined to take the time to slowly work through the meanings of the story and dialogue with one another. In other words, the prolonged, thoughtful, charitable dialogue about stories I’m recommending will not happen naturally. We need to intentionally pursue it.”
Alan Noble Disruptive Witness
No, it isn’t that surprising ’cause when you are looking, say, for a new brand of car, it’s all you see. Your brain would have run right over the book title, if you hadn’t lodged the title of the book in your memory for you to trip over!
But it IS fun to have happen.
Apparently, according to my psychic sister, it means you are in the right place at the right, in the universe.
Barbara – Well, I’m glad I’m in the right place/time. It feels as if I had a message from my grandmother . . .
As if she’d reached out and taken your hand. Nice.
Barbara – Yes.
I remember loving the dove in the eagles nest as a young teenager. Amazing it had language like that.
Not sure I’d tackle it today.
I love random connections such as you found!
Lorna – Great! I’ll mail it to you!
In “The Celestine Prophecy” James Redfield claims that there’s no such thing as coincidence.
Jim T
Jim – Only happenstance or enemy action, per Aurie Goldfinger? I think it might be as simple as Barbara’s observation, that I’d have blown past that book title if I hadn’t just made a fuss about it.
Purely by coincidence — ahem — I ran across this quotation from Vance Morgan, who has a blog called “Freelance Christianity”:
“To persons who pay attention to such things, synchronous events often feel like much more than coincidence—they feel more like the universe is either confirming or is trying to tell us something.
Such connections, as Jung tells us, are made primarily in the mind of the observer. If I choose to see two unrelated but similar events as connected in some meaningful way, then they are meaningfully connected. ”
Jim T
Jim – That seems right to me. It’s the human mind that invests things with meaning: both a tremendous strength and (sometimes) a fatal weakness in the way we think and interact with the world.