Walking a dream

 

I am going to share my report of an ordinary day, without huge events or revelations, just a soft rhyming pattern. When at home, I start the day by lingering in bed for a little while after waking to harvest my dreams from the night. On the day I describe, I woke with a big dream in my mind. There are big dreams and little dreams. You know when a dream rates as big because you feel it, just as you know that coincidence is more than “mere” coincidence because you feel that.

In my dream, I was in London in the time of the Blitz. I returned from this excursion feeling excited and moved and deeply stirred. My dream had taken me, it seemed, into the life of a Royal Air Force pilot in a time of danger and love and romance. He loved women, and women loved him. One of the women he adored was a wartime nurse. They did not get to spend much time together.

It seemed I was in his body, in his situation, sharing his moments of passion and his fierce willingness to put his life on the line for what he believed in. As I slowly came back from this dream adventure, I felt his presence, as if for a moment both of us were in bed. I felt grateful for this deep and renewed connection with someone I believe to be a member of my spiritual family in another time, and outside time. .

When I was satisfied I was holding the essence of my dream of the pilot, I got out of bed, showered, threw on clothes. I had one swallow of coffee – literally, because my little dog was waiting for his walk. Dogs walk you no matter what. So very soon I was out on the street with my dog, heading for the park.

I was now taking the second step in my daily practice. The first step is to hold the essence of the dream, not necessarily all the details, but the essence. I had that. Out on the street, I was walking my dream as well as my dog. I was not puzzling over the dream, and certainly not trying to analyze it. The dream was simply in my mind, and perhaps in my energy field. I was open to the world showing me something that might reflect the dream, as the dream cast its reflection on the world.

As I walked the dream, I was ready to do another daily practice, which is to pay attention to three things that enter my field of perception, through any or all of my senses. These three things do not have to be extraordinary, weird or even surprising. They may be things you might never notice at all, let alone look at twice, unless you were playing this kind of game. A license plate might catch your eye, because it is a novelty plate or has a combination of letters and numbers that intrigues you. You attention might be drawn by the cry of a bird, or the words of a stranger talking on his cell phone or doing karaoke with his headphones. Maybe something dropped on the sidewalk or left on the curb for trash collection will catch your eye. Maybe you’ll smell cooking, or diesel fumes, or a perfume that takes you back to Paris in the spring of a certain year.

Paying attention to things like this, on any street on any day, is a way of consulting sidewalk oracles. When the takeaway is a set of mostly visual images I think of this as playing Sidewalk Tarot. Whatever pops up might be a card from a divination deck. It might be your card of the day, or part of a three-card spread, or a larger spread.     

That morning, while the dog sniffed a hydrant, I noticed a license plate I had never seen on my street before. The plate was distinguished by the red letters RN. It belonged to a registered nurse. Nothing unusual here, but it was very special to me, that morning, because I was walking with the bittersweet memories of a wartime romance with a nurse. I have the soft, cozy sense of confirmation. It feels a little as if an unseen hand has patted me on the shoulder.

I walked on with my dog into the big park. We took the longest path, around the lake. I paused to admire the beautiful weeping willow across water and thin ice. She was green last week. Now winter had yellowed and thinned her gorgeous hair. There was a story in this tree. I resolved to get to know her better.

When I return to my house, I grab a full mug of coffee and went to my study to do my next daily practice. I wrote my dream report, starting with the date and the title I had chosen for my dream. I might have been missing certain details by now, but I had the essence, and key incidents returned to me, vivid and strong, as I wrote. I noted my feelings, and wrote a few lines about the connection between this dream and other dreams and “far memories” of a British pilot in the Second World War. I added a further note on synchronicity, my sighting of the RN’s license plate.

I was now ready to play another game that is part of my everyday practice. I did a bit of bibliomancy. The word means divination by the book. By the book, that's what it literally means, divination by the book. People have done it with sacred and special books, like the Bible the Koran or the poetry of Rumi or Dante or Homer, for as long as humans have had books.

I generally do my book-dipping with whatever book falls to hand. On the day I walked with the dream of the pilot, I decided to go back to Heraclitus. The work of this often enigmatic Greek philosopher survives only in fragments. Because of their brevity, they are good to consult if you would rather play with a sentence than a longer passage.

I opened Charles Kahn’s edition of Heraclitus casually, with my non-dominant hand. My eye fell on a one-liner. The translation read: Gods and men honor those who have fallen in battle. In part of myself, I wanted to ignore that message and try again. The line spoke of war and violence and we have quite enough of those in my world.

But my dream was still with me, the dream that took me into the life of a brave man who was killed in a necessary war, a war for humanity against the unspeakable evil that had taken possession of Germany under Hitler. Once again, I felt a deep sense of confirmation, a firmer hand on my shoulder. Gods and men honor those who are fallen in battle.  I thought of another line in Heraclius, about the dead and the living are constantly engaged, how the fortunes o mortals and immortals interweave, how we may live in the dead and they may live in us.

I felt the deep, deep sense of recognition and gratitude and blessing.  I wrote a one-liner from this: "I am in communion with the dead. They are alive in me, and I am alive in them." I wrote those words in my journal, then wrote them again on an index card, in the neatest hand I could manage. I put the card in a box, with many others composed in the same way. This, too, is daily practice for me. I compose a one-liner of the kind Mark Twain called a “snapper”. It may rise to the level of an aphorism. When I have made a collection, written out on cards, I have a rather interesting deck I can use any time to get a message for the day.

Walking a dream. I recommend it as daily practice, whenever you recall a dream. You carry your dream with you as you go about the day. You notice how the world illuminates the dream and how maybe the dream illuminates the world. You may find that a dream image is playing in the world around you. Maybe the world gives you a second opinion. Maybe something that comes up is a commentary on the dream in a way that you can receive.  Maybe a sequence of incidents and observations extends the dream narrative. Sometimes you may feel that a dream is spilling into the world. When you simply wander with a dream, more of the dream may come back to you. You may be excited to discover, as your memory grows, that your first recollections were a tide pool, not the ocean that feeds it.

Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

AI-assisted street photo

Tarot Cards from the World

 

I have the sense that the world is sometimes slipping us a Tarot card, from an infinite deck. On the literal roads of everyday life, I'm often struck by how the first thing that comes on the car radio, or the first vanity plate or bumper sticker I spot on a car, may contain a clue to the quality of the day. One morning the first vanity plate I noticed while walking my dog read WAT U WISH. This got me thinking long and deep about the nature of wishcraft. What we encounter in life has a great deal to do with what we wish - or fail to wish - and whether our wishes come from the head or the heart, from the little self of the big Self. 

A friend reported that the first bumper sticker she saw that day read "I Won the Time War". That feels to me like an nod of approval from the universe, whether you read it in the mundane sense of managing to get things done in allotted tick-tock time, of in the larger sense of inhabiting a more spacious time in the multiverse (which my friend had been discussing at the moment she spotted the bumper sticker). 

The behavior of birds and animals sometimes has the quality of one of the Major Arcana coming into play. Once when I was speaking to a group about the character of the Trickster in mythology, a fox appeared on a grassy knoll behind my head, visible to everyone in the meeting space except me. Every time I turned my head, he would vanish, only to reappear when I wasn't looking, until that session was done. Hard to miss the fact that the Trickster card was in play that day - as proved to be the case, richly, beyond that workshop session.

For many games of Sidewalk Tarot, please see my book Sidewalk Oracles. 

Fox oracle card by Robert Moss

SIDEWALK ORACLES: An Interview

You begin Sidewalk Oracles by saying, “We are embarking on a path of real magic.”  Please explain.

Real magic is the art of bringing gifts from another world into this world. We do this when we go dreaming and when we remember to bring something back.  We can also walk the roads of everyday life as conscious or lucid dreamers, learning to recognize how the world is speaking to us in signs and symbols. In night dreams and conscious excursions, we get out there; we go near or far into other orders of reality where the rules of linear time and Newtonian physics do not apply. Through synchronicity, powers of the deeper reality come poking and probing through the walls of our consensual hallucinations to bring us awake. Sometimes they work to confirm or encourage us in a certain line of action; sometimes they intercede to knock us back and discourage us from persisting in the worst of our errors.

Sidewalk Oracles is full of fun everyday games. You call one of them Sidewalk Tarot. What is Sidewalk Tarot and how do you play it?

I invented the phrase Sidewalk Tarot after I noticed that things keep literally popping up, like tarot cards, on the streets and sidewalks of the small city where I live. Anything that enters your field of perception, through any of your senses, within your chosen time frame may count as a card in play, even as one of the greater trumps.
     There are two basic ways to play the game of Sidewalk Tarot. The first is to put your question to the world. Do you have a question or theme in your life on which you would like help or guidance right now? Then try to state that theme as clearly as possible. A simple way to that is to fill in the blank in the following statement: “I would like guidance on……”      The game now is to be ready to receive the first unusual, striking thing that enters your field of perception as the tarot card the world is dealing you in response to your question.
      The second basic way to play Sidewalk Tarot is to schedule ten or twenty minutes of unscheduled time to let the world put its question to you. Using all your senses, you gather impressions during that short period of time and then study them as you would look at a tarot spread. I make it my intention, the first time I leave the house (or wherever I am staying) in the course of a day, to gather three observations from my external environment. These do not need to be extraordinary in any way, just things that pop up on the street. As in drawing from a tarot deck, you can choose to play with as few or as many cards as you like. The big difference is that a tarot deck offers you only 78 cards; the number of cards in the world deck cannot be counted.

You invented a new word – kairomancy – for the practice of navigating by synchronicity. Please explain.

I invented the word “kairomancy” to describe the practice of navigating by synchronicity. It builds on the idea that a key feature of the experience of meaningful coincidence is that we know this is a special moment when things operate differently. The Greeks have` a word for a special moment of this kind. They call it a Kairos moment. Kairos is also a god, the antithesis of Chronos, the old god of tick-tock linear time. Kairos is jump time, opportunity time, the special moment you have to seize before it is lost.
    So: Kairomancy. The word literally means divination by special moments. But it means more. It means being poised to seize time by the forelock – to recognize a special moment of opportunity (or warning) and act on it tight away.

You invite us to become kairomancers, which sounds romantic and mysterious. What is a kairomancer and how does someone become one?

A kairomancer is someone who is ready to recognize the special moments when synchronicity is at work – and to seize on the revelation or opportunity that is now available. To be a kairomancer, you must be:

Open to new experience
Available, willing to set aside plans and step out of boxes
Thankful, grateful for secret handshakes and surprises, and ready to
Honor your special moments by taking appropriate action.

If you want to become a kairomancer you need a poet in your soul. You need to grow your ability to recognize what rhymes in a day, or a week, or a life and to build that “talent for resemblances” that was held to be the primary requirement for a dream interpreter in ancient Greece. So, yes, this is quite romantic. Walk this path, and you’ll find there is a champagne fizz of excitement in the air any day.

Explain what you mean when you say “coincidence multiplies when we are in motion”.

When you are on the road, outside your regular commute, you are more likely to notice novel things around you. When your plans get screwed up, and you can avoid Type A personality disorder, you may find that  Trickster energy comes into play, making new connections.
     Synchronicity often becomes especially strong when we are going through major life passages, involving birth or death, falling or out of love, losing a job or taking a creative leap. Our emotions are stirred up, and the world seems to be stirred to move in different ways around us.

You give us a synchronicity game called “Listen for Your Daily Kledon”. What is a kledon and how does this work?

I borrowed the word kledon from the ancient Greeks. A kledon is sound or speech coming out of silence or undifferentiated noise. Sounds and voices heard in this way were one of the most important oracles in ancient Greece. A kledon is often something you overhear — a snatch from a stranger’s conversation, a song from a passing car radio, the croak or cry of a bird, the siren of an ambulance.

Another everyday game you suggest is bibliomancy. What is that and how does it work?

Bibliomancy is literally “divination by the book”. You have a theme on your mind, and you open a book at random and look for guidance in what you see on the page. People of faith have often used sacred books in this way, as Abe Lincoln turned to his family Bible (the one on which Preseident Obama swore his oath) for a second opinion on his prophetic dream of his assassination. You can use any book you like, and instead of setting an intention you can simply let the text in front of you offer a spontaneous message for the day.

One of your rules for navigating by synchronicity is “Notice What’s Showing through the Slip”. You say this even led you to your present publisher. Talk to us about that.

When I first spoke to Georgia Hughes, the wonderful editorial director of New World Library, on the phone, she spoke to me as if we had been close friends for ages. I was surprised, and asked if she knew who I was. “You are Robert Moss,” she told me. “You are the author we are publishing.” This was strange, because I had never discussed any book project with Georgia, though I now had one in mind. When I mentioned this, she realized she had confused me with Richard Moss, one of her stable of authors. I begged her not to apologize. “There are Freudian slips and then there are cosmic slips. This one is an opportunity.” I was now emboldened to lay out the idea for the book that was published as The Three “Only” Things. A day later, we had a contract. I have stayed with New World Library ever since. An editor’s slip turned me into a constant author. So: if you hear a name misspoken, or spot a typo, pay attention. Something may be showing through the slip.

Physicists speculate that we are living in Many Interactive Worlds. You say that through dreaming and monitoring synchronicity, we can acquire evidence of the existence of parallel worlds and use this to do some good. Please explain.

It is an emerging consensus in physics that we live in one of numberless parallel universes and that the “many worlds” are interactive in ways that escape our ordinary attention, Synchronistic encounters and moments of déjà vu can help to awaken us to these possibilities. When we keep dream reports over time we sometimes notice that we seem to be living continuous lives in other realities, near or far from our present one. Once you awaken to this possibility, you may start to observe how choices you are making now are bringing you nearer or farther from parallel selves who made different choices in the past. This discovery can equip you to make the conscious effort to draw gifts and lessons from those parallel selves

How do you explain what you do to people who are meeting you for the first time?

When I am asked by a stranger on a plane, "What do you do?" my favorite answer is this: "I am a storyteller, and one of my greatest pleasures is to help people discover their bigger stories, and live those stories and tell them so well that they want to take root in the world."

What is the most important thing you have learned about reality?

The only time is Now. All other times - past, present and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.

-

Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss is published by New World Library.

How you know your world just changed

The Many Worlds hypothesis in physics suggests that the universe is constantly splitting, that we are living at any moment in one of uncountable parallel universes. We find ourselves in parallel lives in dreams. Careful reporting of these episodes in a journal over time can provide state-specific evidence of the reality of parallel worlds. Can we catch a moment when the world shifts with our eyes open? For me, this means staying alert for anomalies, like the moment in the movie "The Matrix" when the black cat walks across the room the same way twice and you know that a world simulation is about to change. In Hiruko Murakami's magical novel 1Q84, Aomame realizes there has been a shift in her world when she goes down an emergency staircase from a clogged expressway and notices the cops are wearing different sidearms, heavy pistols instead of stubby revolvers. When did that happen? Starting with this single observation, the anomalies multiply until she - and eventually some others - are looking up at two moons in the sky and it is obvious that they are in a different world (unless they have gone crazy). I noticed an anomaly on my street this week, small in itself but of the kind that may be a marker that the world just changed. One of my everyday synchronicity games is to note unusual license plates. I spotted a plate on a silver Audi: DSB 1914. This drew my attention because "1914" carried me back to the Great War, which has often featured in my dreams and historical interests. I wondered who or what DSB might stand for. Then I noticed something more interesting about the license plate. it was German No doubt about it. To the left DSB 1914 was a panel with the twelve stars of the European Union and a D for Deutschland.

It is very unusual to see a vehicle with European plates in my small rustbelt city in Northeast America. But this bit of Sidewalk Tarot was not the kind of anomaly that sows the thought that the world just changed. That came the next day. Walking my dog along the same block, I came to the silver Audi parked in the same spot. The license plate had changed. It was no longer German. It was an orange New York plate. I was glad I had snapped a photo of the German identity the Audi had worn before the world shifted. I shall be watching the moon very closely.

Art inspired by 1Q84. Seeking artist's identity in the world with one moon.

Playing Sidewalk Tarot: "He Can't Kill Both of Us, Can He?"

One of the everyday oracles the Greeks valued most highly was the kledon. A kledon is sound or speech coming out of silence or undifferentiated noise. On a gritty city street, I received a kledon that gave me exact guidance on how to handle a conflictive situation.
     My kledon that day was inspired by my little dog Oskar.
     Oskar is a miniature Schnauzer who weighs about twenty pounds. Walking my little dog towards the park, I was debating with myself whether I could manage to take on two big new projects. Each would demand a great amount of time, energy and focus. Worse, it was possible that they could prove to be mutually competing.
      I had this theme on my mind when a stranger got out of his truck. As he approached me, he pointed his chin at my dog and said, "He can't kill us both at the same time, can he?"
     I felt that behind the joke, a joker of a larger kind was in play.
     I had been asking myself:  Can I handle two new projects at the same time? The kledon I received was “He can't kill us both at the same time, can he?” It did not cause brain damage to figure out the connection. I had been told I could not tackle more than one project at a time.
     I would have to “kill” one of the new projects. I made an instant choice, but now had to find a way to break the news to the project manager I was about to disappoint.
     When I made the call, he was not happy at all. The conversation was strained until I told him my dog story. When I repeated the line, “He can't kill both of us at the same time,” the manager roared with laughter. He shouted, "I get it!"
      I thanked him, and gave a nod to the joker I sensed behind the joke on the street that day.

      This is an example of one of the ways I play the game I call Sidewalk Tarot. I started using the phrase after I noticed that things keep literally popping up, like tarot cards, on the streets and sidewalks of the small city where I live. Anything that enters your field of perception, through any of your senses, within your chosen time frame may count as a card in play, even as one of the greater trumps.

Adapted from SidewalkOracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

When sidewalk tarot gives you a card you don't want

Prague

One of my everyday games is to look at whatever turns up in the street as a tarot card being played to me by the world. Sometimes I have a question in my mind. Most often I am simply open to what the world gives me. Anything may count as a card in sidewalk tarot. Sometimes you feel you are getting a specific message. Sometimes the game is more about recognizing patterns of connection.
    While a tarot deck has 78 cards, the number of cards the world can give you is limitless. The cards in a deck are numbered and ordered in suits and kinds - number cards, court cards, major arcana. You can look up their meanings in a book. Cards in sidewalk tarot - unless they are literally spilled cards from a deck - do not have assigned places in a system, and you'll have to figure out meanings and connections for yourself. This makes the game very interesting indeed.    When you play sidewalk tarot, as with a tarot deck, you may not like the card you draw. Let me tell you how that worked out for me on Tuesday, in the midst of one of my odysseys of airline story.
    Prequel: I was due to leave on Monday on the first leg of a long journey to Prague, where I am teaching at Maitrea this week. This gave me a very definite deadline for delivery of my new book, Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life. I made my deadline, sending the book to my editor before dawn on Monday. A few hours later, I learned that my flight had been cancelled, due to snow storms in the Northeast, where I live.
     I got on the phone and managed to rebook my flights. I was now scheduled to leave 24 hours later, on Tuesday on a revised itinerary. I would travel via Washington's Dulles airport, as before, but would go on to Prague via Munich instead of Brussels. I was not enthralled by the historical echo in "going on to Prague via Munich", but I was grateful to have snagged the last available seat and resigned myself to enjoying a snow day befor taking off.
     On Tuesday morning, I took care of a few chores, and walked to the bank. Walking back, I came upon an upturned shopping cart, directly in my path. Uh-oh.
     I noted that it was a cart from Price Chopper. Put that together with the fact that I was returning from the bank, and I had little doubt that the upturned cart might be connected to a possible tumble in my modest "shopping cart" of investments. When I got home and checked stock market prices, I saw that this was correct. A stock that I owned had taken a major tumble.
    I was uneasily conscious that when we talk about something upsetting an apple cart we might be talking about any kind of plan or situation at all. I hoped that the cautionary message in the spilled cart would not relate to my travels - or anything else - in addition to the investment spill.
    My first flight on Tuesday got to Dulles a couple of minutes early. So far so good. We boarded on time, and seemed to be taking off on time when suddenly the plane halted its run along the tarmac. Monitors went dead, reading lights went out. Electrical problems, we were told. An hour later, we were told that everything was "fixed" and we were airborne. We were somewhere east of Boston, heading towards open water, when the plane turned around. The captain informed us that the electrical problems had not been fixed after all. We had bee re-routed to a different airport, Newark, and he would let us know what would happen next when we go there.
     Relatively good news on the ground. They had found us another plane. While we waited at the departure gate in Newark for re-boarding, I struck up a delightful conversation with an academic who agreed with me that the trick in life is to find your pleasure in your work so you never have to distinguish them. He also proved to be a considerable expert on German beers.
    We out on the runway again five hours after our original scheduled departure. We set on that runway at Newark for ninety minutes. We were given no information for nearly all that time. Eventually the captain said something incomprehensible about a "passenger discrepancy." A couple of irate passengers confronted flight attendants who had no more information than we did.
    I had a row to myself, and diverted myself with my in-flight reading, Jaroslav Hašek's grand comic novel The Good Soldier Švejk,, an immense, rambling satire about the incompetence of those in authority and a mode of passive resistance through irony, feigned idiocy and parody. I decided after ninety minutes that the Švejk approach could not go on indefinitely, or else we might never take off on that plane just as Hašek never finished his novel.
   So I went to the forward galley and had a quiet word with the flight attendants. They were very good people, as frustrated as we passengers were with the lack of communication from the cabin and the authorities at the airport. One of the flight attendants decided to take action. She leaped into it, clarifying that the "passenger discrepancy" involved a triviality - a baby car seat occupting a vacant passenger seat. Now she was on the phone to the boss, laying out crisply and briskly what was wrong about holding up the flight over such a minor issue, and what was especially wrong about leaving everyone outside the pilots'cabin in the dark.
     Two minutes later, the captain told us we were on our way, number three for takeoff.
    "Congratulations," I told the feisty flight attendant. "You did it."
    "It was probably just a coincidence."
    "It is very rare, in my experience, for anything to be just a coincidence."
    I explained that I had delivered a new book that is all about coincidence the previous day, and that my book The Three "Only" Things opens with an account of five chance encounters on airplane trips. After cabin service, when the lights were dimmed, the flight attendant curled up for a bit with the copy of The Three "Only" Things that I loaned her.
    As we disembarked at Munich, over six hours late, she promised, "I will never say, 'It's only a coincidence' again."
    At Munich airport, when I was getting a new boarding card for my new connection to Prague, a Lufthansa agent told me he knew all about the history of my flight from Dulles, which was the talk of the ground crew. "You know," he said, "when something goes as wrong as that, you always have a story."
    "Thank you for saying that. I agree completely. It's one of my keys to survival.


This is why Upset Shopping Cart enters my personal guide to sidewalk tarot as a challenging card. The sequence of upsets reminds me that for every challenge there is an opportunity, at least the opportunity to make a new story.

Sidewalk Tarot: Gotta Try for the Big One

The experience of meaningful coincidence can come like a slap in the face or a passionate embrace. It can leave you gasping, knowing that the universe has become very personal and is speaking directly to you. Such big encounters with the deeper order, in which there is really no separation between mind and matter, can leave you stunned, or aroused.
    However, I love the smaller encounters with synchronicity that may do no more than give a little fizz or tickle to the day. When I am home, I start my morning by walking my little dog up a street of brownstones in a small city to the park where we take a path around a lake. Coming and going, I'm mildly alert - in a relaxed, undemanding way - for signs and symbols from the world about us.
   I will note the first kledon of the day. "Kledon" is the Greek word for speech or sounds coming out of silence. I wrote here recently about how deeply I was aroused by a man whistling for his dog who made what sounded to me like the call of a rainbird.
    Today's little story starts with a kledon from the path around the lake. "Gotta to try for the big one!" the cheery mother of a large family greets me. They have set up a veritable fishing camp on the path round the lake: canvas fold-out chairs, hampers, rods and reels, jars of bait, drinks and snacks. I've never seen anything big that has gills and fins caught in this lake, but then there are many kinds of "big ones" in life.
    Walking my dog back from the park, I'm open to playing what I call Sidewalk Tarot. This means noticing things that pop up on the street - a kid's chalk drawing on the sidewalk, the logo on a van, a dropped coin or earring or an abandoned shoe - and seeing whether they are offering a message or image for the day, or at least the moment.
     I notice the huge fish banner flapping from a brownstone near my home. It's been here for a couple of weeks, but today, as it blows back and forth, it seems to reinforce the theme that we want to try for the Big One. At the least, there is something fishy going on.
    Just down the block, a young man is strumming a guitar on one side of a car, singing what sounds like an original - but imperfect - composition. His girlfriend watches and listens from the other side of the car, which is full of stuff. They are moving in, or moving out. Could be a big one.
    A few paces further, and I come to the Reject Books of the day. In my neighborhood, where there are quite a few transient college kids, unwanted books are frequently left out on stoops or steps or on the sidewalk, So I have made Reject Books a subcategory of my Sidewalk Tarot.
    Today's spread is pretty interesting. It takes no imagination to see the books laid on on a neighbor's steps as a five-card spread. What do we have here? A princess card, surely (lower left). The suit of Jewels is dominant.  Is that Children's Bible the Hierophant, or High Priest? Is "I Do" the Lovers card?
    I love outrageous correspondence, when we know we are dancing or teetering on the mythic edge, and that the powers of the world-behind-the-world are poking or thrusting through the curtain walls of our limited everyday understanding. I love it when I walk into a bookstore in Boulder to read from some of mythic poems and am greeted by a young woman named Athena who introduces me to Odysseus. I am thrilled and chilled when a fox-cursed demon driver takes me half-way over a cliff in the Carpathian mountains. I can never forget what it meant to me when I had written down a theme for guidance that included the name "Indiana Jones" and a man dressed as Indiana Jones sat down next to me on a plane, a story I tell in full detail in my book The Three "Only" Things.
    Yet I also love the little patterns of resemblance and connection, the way life rhymes in smaller ways. Noticing these things is essential to poetic health, and we need poetic consciousness to come fully alive to the rhyming universe.
    It's enough for me, for now, that I have my bumper sticker for the day: Gotta Try for the Big One. Yes, ma'am.

Sequel: Landing the Big One

The next morning, I come upon another fisherman, casting his line from a gap in the bull rushes at the western end of the lake. "Have you ever caught anything in this lake?" I ask him.
   "Oh yeah. I just caught a bass as big as my tackle box. The biggest fish I ever caught in my life."
   The tackle box is large and chunky. A bass that size would certainly be a Big fish. My inner skeptic tells me I'm listening to a wannabe fisherman's wishful tale. I have never seen anyone catch anything big in these waters.
   I am rounding the end of the lake when I hear shouts, "Hey! Hey! I got one!"
   I can't see clearly through the rushes, but when I walk a little further on I see the fisherman hoisting his rod high in the air, for me to see what he's hooked. That fish really is as long as his tackle box. He unhooks the fish and lets it drop back in the water.
    Has he got a bass trained to appear on command? Is this the Law of Eternal Return (in two senses)?
    Whatever. I'll carry yesterday's catch phrase with me today. "Gotta Try for the Big One."
    A snatch of Ovid returns to me. 
   Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.