Reincidence and the Triple Goddess

I invented a new word for a run of coincidence: reincidence. While the words "coincidence" and "synchronicity" define a meaningful conjunction of an outer event and an inner sense of significance in a given moment of time, "reincidence" describes a sequence of conjunctions of the same kind, playing out over time. For example, you might dream of a flamingo, or see one on the side of a van, and then it's flamingos all over - on a suburban lawn, on a beer coaster, in the description of staff officers (with red stripes on their pants) in a thriller set in World War II, on a baby blanket.   
     The following sequence, mostly played out in Asheville, North Carolina, shows how reincidence runs:

April 15, 2010 - In Asheville, NC there is a big crowd at Malaprops bookshop for my talk and signing. A woman asks me about the significance of the number 3 in the title of my book The Three"Only" Things. I give her a bit of a lecture about three as the Celtic number, the number of the Trinity and of the Triple Goddess and the Three Fates, ending with the statement, "Three times makes the charm".

April 16, 2010 - I wake from a dream feeling super-charged, with a shimmer of possibility all about me. I have learned to associate this shimmer with the play of numinous forces. In my dream, taking giant steps across a beautiful landscape, I feel that each step I take is being taken in more than one world, and is bringing worlds together. I notice three red haired women walking together up the slope towards me. They move so close together that their bodies appear to be joined, and I notice their heads are all enclosed by a single hood. Am I looking at the Triple Goddess? I have seen them before, going a different way. They look at me with intent interest and I feel a stir of excitement that they are in the field.

April 16, 2010, afternoon -  I sip a glass of wine at a civilized establishment, the beautiful. dog-friendly Battery Park Book Exchange & Champagne Bar, and admire the griffins that guard the entrance of The Grove Arcade across the street. Three women, two of them redheads, the third a blonde, take the next table. In jolly mood, sipping margaritas, they strike up conversation with me and prove to be very interested in dreams. I say to the blonde, "If you were a redhead, I would think that the three of you are manifesting my dream from last night." She replies, "Oh, I'm a natural redhead. I colored my hair just last week for fun. I think I'll go back to red."

April 16, 2010, evening - A cheerful crowd gather for my Synchronicity playshop at Jubilee, a lively community church downtown. I drum for the group, asking them to relax into the rhythm and pull up a dream or memory we can use in a game. My mind turns again to the three redheads of my dream, the many forms of the Triple Goddess and the Three Fates, and the distinctly Celtic quality of all this. Through my stir of images comes the keening of bagpipes. A piper is playing at John of the Wood, the Celtic pub behind Jubilee. The sound of the pipes, skirling over the drumming, is irresistible. When the time comes for us to write on index cards a summary of a dream or memory that came during the drumming, I write: "My ancestors are calling me, reaching through my stir of memories. They want me to honor and celebrate and embody their knowing."

April 17, 2010 - I wake from a dream in which Lady Charlotte Guest, one of the first to translate and make accessible Celtic literature including he Mabinogion, invites me to stay with her at a country house . We discuss how events and opportunities recur in a life or in a day, and how when something recurs three times, we are prompted to pay attention.

Later that spring, in a powerful dream of love and longing, I was presented with a choice of three paths in the greenwoods.

Photo: Site of a Triple Goddess encounter: The Battery Park Boox Exchange & Champagne Bar, Asheville NC.

Daily Kledon: What to do when they take your world away

First old guy on the sidewalk: "They took your world away from under you."
   Second old guy, on walker: "Yeah, they took my world away."
   "What you gotta do is tell everyone, like everyone."
   "Or get a gun and shoot somebody. That's what I feel like doing."
   "Forget the gun. Tell your story. That's more powerful."

The first old guy got that right.
   I logged this exchange, overheard as I walked to a neighborhood store this morning, as my first kledon of the day.
   Monitoring kledons is one of my favorite daily synchronicity games. A kledon is words or sounds coming out of silence or out of the cacophony of urban noise bands. In ancient Greece, kledons were highly valued as portents.
    It was believed that the gods, who love disguises, might communicate in this way. This
was thought to be especially likely when a hush falls in the midst of a social event, like a dinner party. The first words to break that social silence were inspected as a possible hermeion, which is to say an act of Hermes, the messenger god who personifies the play of synchronicity.  
   I am content to receive daily kledons as part of life's patterns. I notice that sometimes a theme that is raised rhymes with something that comes up later in the day, in the kind of riff of coincidence for which I have coined the word reincidence.
   Oh yes. There is often great material for creative writing in bits of conversation harvested in this spontaneous way. 

Living the epic

Boulder, Colorado, and the wine-dark sea

"That's the end of it, my story. May the next who tells it tell it better."
    This is the way I once heard a traditional Irish storyteller conclude a spoken tale. What a lovely encouragement for us to improvise and claim the power of a story that calls us by making it our own.
     Great stories are like this. They are more than twice-told tales; they may be neverending in their variants. Over the past two weeks, I've been recalled by dreams, bursting through in synchronicity, reincidence and mythic irruptions in daily life, to revisit the world of the epic poems beloved of the Greeks and of many who have heard them since.  I dreamed I discovered an epic poem, in a neat typescript of maybe 200 pages, that I had started composing in 1987. This seemed just-so. I emerged from that dream feeling that the epic was complete; it was just a matter of reclaiming those pages and getting them to the write people. Why 1987? Well, that was a year when I started keeping very copious and detailed journals that helped me to write my way through a period of immense shamanic crises of ordeal and initiation that involved braving monsters and sirens and clashing rocks, on the inner planes and sometimes in the physical world too.
     I dreamed that I had brought through a book - perhaps the same one - that delighted me and many others, and that this accomplishment had required me to make an offering in words. So I composed a short poem ("Sing in me, creative spirit") that I offered last weekend in a fire ceremony in the midst of a circle of 30 active dreamers on the mountain where we have been gathering for many years.
     Reflecting on all we have shared on that mountain last Sunday, many of us recalled the weekend we devoted to bringing alive the wild odyssey of Jason and the Argonauts in quest of the mysterious Golden Fleece. We thrilled to the tale of passion, sorcery and jealousy in the romance of Jason and Medea. I found myself cast in the role of Phineus, once a king and always a truth-seer, who was punished by the gods because he always aw true and thus exposed secrets of heaven. They set the Harpies on him, to steal his food and crap on the remnants, until Argonauts drove the Harpies away. No shortage of volunteers in our group to play those Harpies!
     Though the best-known version of the Argonautica comes from the Greeks - specifically from the Hellenistic writer Apollonius Rhodius - the story is much, much older, at least as old as a Hittite tablet from the 14th century BCE, now in an Ankara museum, that contains a tale remarkable similar to that of Jason and Medea. And since Apollonius (and before Hollywood) there have been other retellings that are worthy of close study. In my favorite used bookstore in my home neighborhood, last week I chanced upon a book that had just been paced in New Arrivals: David Slavitt's remarkable translation of the Argonautica of Gaius Valerius Flaccus, composed in the 1st century.
     Little is known of Valerius except that he was a member of the group that had custody of the Sibylline Books and the supervision of foreign cults. His special knowledge must have helped him to present fascinating descriptions of many ancient modes of divination. And he is no slouch at describing what happens when a goddess becomes enraged! Through his lines - as rendered into supple, sinewy English by Slavitt - I was transported to the nightmare battle at Cyzicus, and into a dream of Hercules grieving for his lost boyfriends, and to the deck of the Argo on stormy seas, hearing Athena's voice in the timbers of the ship she has infused with her power.
     In all the versions that count, those early poets and storytellers remembered to invoke the Muse. Valerius calls on Clio, the muse of history, as well as Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. Famously, Homer begins the Odyssey with the words

Sing in me, O Muse, of the man of many ways.

The adventures of the Argonauts are rich, and the mystery of the Golden Fleece - stripped from a ram that could take its rider flying and swimming - is something to dream on. Yet Jason, sent on a suicide mission by a paranoid tyrant, is a less interesting protagonist than Odysseus, the homecoming warrior who must be healed and cleansed in the world of the Feminine, and transit a land of dreams, before he can reach his native shore, where his hardest ordeal, that of truly coming home, yet awaits him.

with Odysseus at the Boulder Bookstore

So when I arrived at the Boulder Bookstore on Thursday evening to read poems in my new collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming, I was delighted to be welcomed at the desk by a young lady named Athena. "Where's Odysseus?" I demanded, recalling how he was guided and saved by that goddess. "Odysseus is in the store," said a manager. "I'll call him." Within minutes, Odysseus appeared, a well-built young man with the flowing hair and beard appropriate for "the strong-greaved Achaeans, breakers of horses." He works for the bookstore. How did he come by the name of Odysseus polytropos, the "man of many ways"? his parents lived in Greece and chose his name.
     There are moments when it is impossible not to notice that powers of the deeper worlds are pushing through the curtain walls of our consensual hallucinations, enjoy interplay with humans. When I arrived at the Gaiam TV studios on Friday morning to record an interview, I was offered a cup of espresso by a young lady named Gaia, with a magnificent tattoo of the great Earth Goddess on her arm. Then I was introduced to a studio producer whose middle name is Icarus. "I hope you don't fly too close to the sun," I quipped. He heard me, and raised me. "I don't think Icarus fell to earth," he told me. "He shed something and went on shining."
     That's my Boulder epic, for now. May the next installment be even better.

Lorenzo Costa's version of the Argo (16th century)

Reincidence and the Rule of Three

I dreamed a new word for a run of coincidence: re-incidence, or reincidence. Waking, this seems to me to be a very useful term to describe a run of coincidence.
     While the words "coincidence" and "synchronicity" define a meaningful conjunction of an outer event and an inner sense of significance in a given moment of time, "reincidence" describes a sequence of conjunctions of the same kind, playing out over time. For example, you might dream of a flamingo, or see one on the side of a van, and then it's flamingos all over - on a suburban lawn, on a beer coaster, in the description of staff officers (with red stripes on their pants) in a thriller set in World War II, on a baby blanket.
      Back in April, 2010, I shared my oneiric word invention with a gathering of my frequent flyers on a mountain in the New York Adirondacks where we have been engaging in group adventures in shamanic journeying, mythic theater and dream exploration for many years. I had quite forgotten this discovery, and failed to make use of this handy neologism in my writing on synchronicity, until a friend reminded me about "reincidence" up on that same mountain over the past weekend. As we walked by a mountain lake, she also reminded me that I had cited my experience of a run of threes - as in three redheads, and the Triple Goddess - in Asheville shortly before my dream of "reincidence" as an example of how this phenomenon runs.
    I pulled out my 2010 journal and noted the following sequence:

April 15, 2010 - Big crowd at Malaprops for my talk and signing. A woman asks me about the significance of the number 3 in the title of my book The Three "Only" Things. I give her a bit of a lecture about three as the Celtic number, the number of the Trinity and of the Triple Goddess and the Three Fates, ending with the statement, "Three times makes the charm".

April 16, 2010 - I wake from dream feeling super-charged, with a shimmer of possibility all about me. I have learned to associate this shimmer with the play of numinous forces. In my dream, taking giant steps across a beautiful landscape, I feel that each step I take is being taken in more than one world, and is bringing worlds together. I notice three red haired women walking together up the slope towards me. They move so close together that their bodies appear to be joined, and I notice their heads are all enclosed by a single hood. Am I looking at the Triple Goddess? I have seen them before, going a different way. They look at me with intent interest and I feel a stir of excitement that they are in the field.

April 16, 2010, afternoon -  I sip a glass of wine at a civilized establishment, the Book Exchange & Champagne Bar, in the former Battery Hotel, and admire the griffins that guard the entrance of The Grove Arcade across the street. Three women, two of them redheads, the third a blonde, take the next table. In jolly mood, sipping margaritas, they strike up conversation with me and prove to be very interested in dreams. I say to the blonde, "If you were a redhead, I would think that the three of you are manifesting my dream from last night." She replies, "Oh, I'm a natural redhead. I colored my hair just last week for fun. I think I'll go back to red."

April 16, 2010 - evening. A cheerful crowd gather for my Synchronicity playshop at Jubilee, a lively community church downtown. I drum for the group, asking them to relax into the rhythm and pull up a dream or memory we can use in a game. My mind turns again to the three redheads of my dream, the many forms of the Triple Goddess and the Three Fates, and the distinctly Celtic quality of all this. Through my stir of images comes the keening of bagpipes. A piper is playing at John of the Wood, the Celtic pub behind Jubilee. The sound of the pipes, skirling over the drumming, is irresistible. When the time comes for us to write on index cards a summary of a dream or memory that came during the drumming, I write: "My ancestors are calling me, reaching through my stir of memories. They want me to honor and celebrate and embody their knowing."

April 17, 2010 - I wake from a dream in which Lady Charlotte Guest, one of the first to translate and make accessible Celtic literature including he Mabinogion, invites me to stay with her at a country house . We discuss how events and opportunities recur in a life or in a day, and how when something recurs three times, we are prompted to pay attention.

Later that spring, in a powerful dream of love and longing, I was presented with a choice of three paths in the greenwoods.

The mountain lake where my friend reminded me that I invented the word "reincidence"