Rule of Three

I was working on a revised draft of an account of a journey I made into the country of the Scottish Merlin, around Hart Fell ("Deer Mountain") in the Western Borders. The last words I typed, from a voice I heard on that mountain, by the rust-red chalybeate spring, were: -

Follow the Rule of Three.
Everything that matters will come in threes.

    I printed out my draft, and grabbed for a three-ring binder on a shelf at my right hand, to give it temporary shelter. A different binder fell out. It was one I had quite forgotten. I had given it the title "The Celtic Otherworld" and embellished this with the image of a triskele, the Celtic triple spiral. Naturally I picked up this binder, full of old notes from my studies of the immrama - the "voyage tales" of Celtic otherworldly journeys - on my desk for new inspection.
   As I moved, my shoulder brushed an upper shelf in the same bookcase, and three index cards fluttered to the floor. The writing on the cards was by three different hands, none of them was my own. Though I did not recognize the handwriting, the cards, in themselves, were no mystery. They were three of the hundreds of cards I've collected playing my Coincidence Card Games with people in my workshops.
     In the simplest, oracular version of the Coincidence Game, the members of a circle are asked to write anything they like on one side of a small index card. The cards are made into a deck. Then we all get to pull a card at random from this one-time deck, and we are required to pretend that whatver we find written on it is a direct message to us from the universe, manifested through the magic of synchronicity. Sometimes we formulate a life question - a theme on which we would like some help or guidance - before pulling our cards. Sometimes we are simply open to what the cards have to say.
    Well, of course I had to read the three cards that seemed to have thrust themselves into my field of attention. I had drawn them on three different occasions, at some point in my past, but had no exact recollection of what was at issue then.
    I now read the cards in the order they had fallen. The first was written in three lines, like this:

1. Golden Eagle.
-----The power of relating.
---------Seeing in relationship

The second card had a title:

2. Synchronicity:In dream session, I asked for information about my sore shoulder. One of the responses was to "open" my shoulder. I saw two road signs last night: "Shoulder work ahead" and "Shoulder closed".
-

The third card left me in no doubt that there was "news" for me tonight:

3. Wind blown newspapers on the front lawn

The writer of the third card had added a little drawing of a wavy, breezy line with twin arrowheads, at either end.

I had been about to take a break, but I needed to take just a quick peek at the contents of that binder with the triple spiral on the cover. I opened it at random and found myself in the midst of a bardic narration, with these lines in my direct line of sight:

There are three times fifty distant isles
In the ocean to nthe west of us
Larger than Erin twice
Is each of them, or thrice-

A glimpse of the mystical Western Isles, in Kuno Meyer's translation of the Immram Brain meic Febuil ("The Voyage of Bran Son of Febuil"). There's the Rule of Three again.
---Life rhymes. Tonight, my life is rhyming (to go Dantesque for a moment) in terza rima.