Chancing an Encounter

 

The Book of the Road (Putnik) was on a list of banned books in Tsarist Russia. It was a treatise that attributed high importance to chance encounters. It reflected traditional beliefs about whether it is lucky or unlucky to meet certain kinds of people on the road. To meet a nun, a priest or a blind man is unlucky. To meet someone on a bridge or threshold is ominous  Such views were deeply rooted in traditional Russian culture, even in the mind of Tsars. Ivan the Terrible thought it was a terrible omen if anyone crossed his path when he was setting out on a journey and had such offenders killed. [1]
      I am more in sympathy with the Greek saying that the gods love to travel in disguise, so we should take care of strangers.
     “Mind attracts mind.” Jung observed that this principle is at work in chance encounters where more than chance seems to be involved. Jung described what happened when a stranger sat down next to him on a train. The stranger was a general. “We talked, and although he did not know who I was, he told me all about his dreams, which is certainly unusual for a man of his position. The general considered that his dreams were absurd, but after listening to him, I told him that one of his dreams had changed his whole life, and that otherwise he would have been an intellectual.
      “The general was startled and looked at me as though I were a witch, or at least a person gifted with second sight. But in reality, it was the unconscious which was knowing and directing. The general had sat down next to me because he was unconsciously searching for an answer.” [2]
     Jung felt the general was called to sit next to him because something deeper than his conscious mind was calling for a mentor, to help him make his dreams conscious.
     My friend Carol, a family counselor and addictions counselor or great wisdom and compassion, encountered an elderly man who was praying for an angel.
      Carol went to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription. There were some problems with the paperwork and she was feeling quite grumpy. When she came out into the parking lot she noticed an elderly man pushing a shopping cart, unsteadily, towards his car. When he reached his car, he left the cart by the trunk, still filled with his purchases, and slumped into the driver’s seat, leaving his door open.
    “I knew something was wrong,” Carol told me. “I sat in my car as three people walked past the old man. Then I knew I had to check on him.”
    She walked over to the old man and said, “Do you need some help?”
    “Well, yes. I did ask if you could use some help.”
    “You’re not gonna believe this. Right before you showed up, I was sitting here praying to God to send me an angel. Could you put my shopping in the trunk for me?”
     “ I would be happy to do that.”
      The old man popped the trunk and Carol loaded his shopping bags. The contents felt soft Carol guessed the bags contained products like Depends, for older people whose bodies are failing. She noticed a walker, folded, and two canes in the trunk.
     “I came out too soon,” the old man told her when she had finished loading. He did not explain exactly what this meant, but he told Carol that he was the caregiver for his wife. They were both ninety years old and they had been married for seventy years.
     “Are you sure you can drive home safely?” Carol asked.
    “I’ll be okay. I know there is an angel watching over me.”
    Carol commented later, “If I was an everyday angel for him in that parking lot, he was a kind of angel for me. I felt happy and blessed by this encounter. All my grumpiness was gone.”   
.    Chance encounters may not be caused, in the sense of being made by appointment, but they may be called.

Travel by train, as Jung found, or by airplane can provide almost ideal conditions for a chance encounter with a stranger that may lead to extraordinary things. People are on the move – which may help release them from routine inhibitions – and at the same time the circumstances are contained and relatively “safe”. Contact need last no longer than the ride or the wait at the station or departure gate. 
     On a train in the mountains of Sweden in 1904,a dispirited young Danish artist, Emilie Demant, found herself questioning her calling yet again. A stranger struck up conversation. He was a Sami wolf hunter and trapper named Johan Turi He told Emilie he had a dream of writing a book about the Sami, famous as a shamanic people of the drum. She moved to Sami country and helped him to produce the book and in the process matured into a brilliant artist and a pioneer Sami-speaking female ethnographer, the author of important books from her own fieldwork and fatherig of stories from the grandmothers. Pre-pandemic, chance encounters during my almost constant air travel were a great compensation for missed connections, long layovers, and aching knees. I found strangers willing to open up, drawn together to commiserate about delays or share travelers’ tales. Many clearly felt an active desire to tell and listen to stories, if only to shorten the seeming duration of a flight or a layover.
     Generally, I did not initiate conversation unless I had a positive feeling about the person sitting next to me, or was intrigued by the title of the book they are reading. Often my neighbor on a plane would be the first to speak, especially when I was carrying one of my own books.
     I will never forget the matriarch who took the seat next to me after settling her extended family in various parts of the airplane cabin. She noticed the beautiful cover of the second edition of my book Dreamgates and asked if she could look at it. Naturally, I handed it over. Opening the book at random, she found herself reading a section headed “Designing Your Home on the Other Side.”
     She turned to me in high excitement. “Is that really possible?” she demanded.
     I told her “Absolutely.”
     I explained the group adventures I lead in which we have observed how the creative imagination constructs living environments – and cities, universities and pleasure domes – on the other side of physical death.
    “I will buy this book as soon as possible!” the elegant matriarch declared. “I have spent twenty five years creating a jewel of a home in Carmel, California. I am going to be spending a lot longer in my next residence, and I want to get it right.”

My favorite, indelible experience of a chance encounter on a plane was my ride with the Death's Head Dominatrix.  It left me in no doubt that forces from behind the veil of consensual reality were in play and that, truly, there are things that like to happen together. The episode still gives me delicious shivers.

1. W.F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia. University Park, PA :Penn State University Press,: 2011) 123-4.

2. Jung in conversation with Miguel Serrano, September 1960. Reprinted in C.G. Jung Speaking ed. W.McGuire and R.F.C.Hull (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) 464-465.

3. Barbara Sjoholm, "The Art of Recalling: Lapland and the Sami in the Art of Emilie Demant Hatt in Feminist Studies vol 40,no.2 (2014) 356-393

 

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

Journal drawing: "Airport Lady of the Veil" by Robert Moss

Journal excavation and the magic of hand writing

I find there is magic in writing by hand. I prefer to write with a fountain pen, or in pencil. In the old days I used to carry rather fancy fountain pens.

In a village cafe where I was signing for a catered lunch that was going to be delivered to one of my workshop groups, I signed the bill with a fountain pen.

The man behind me said, "You're a writer!"

"How do you know?"

"Who but a writer uses a fountain pen. What's your name?"

When I told him, he gasped, "Robert Frost? Oh, I'm gonna die!"

"Robert Frost has done that already."

Things have changed. I am far less at risk of being mistaken for Robert Frost because in these times of pandemic you won't find me out and about signing for things. Also,I got lazy about fountain pen maintenance so instead of those fancy ones I use disposable Pilot Varsity pens and just throw them out when they run out of ink or get hopelessly clogged.

The biggest change, however,is that I'm not writing much by hand because my writing has become largely illegible, even to me. So at home, where I have been nearly all the time since March, when I follow my practce of starting the day by wrting dream reports or writing from my dreams, I go to a keyboard and type. I will often do a sketch a little later in the morning.

I was writing by hand every day during my pre-pandemic travels, which had me on the road roughly half the days of the year. I am still in process of transcribing what is in all those travel diaries - and in the big college-ruled five subject notebooks where I used to record my dreams thirty years ago.

When I embark on tne task of transcribing handwritten pages, I frequently find I am digging up real treasure. Here's an example. In a travel journal from six years ago I found a dream report that came alive in glorious color, pulsing with energy and mystery today, as it did them, when I made a sketch from it. This is the transcription, unedited:

January 17, 2015. Walnut Creek, CA

dream

Ready to Paint It Red

I am wandering through an immense and beautiful art museum. In one of the rooms, the ceilings are beyond cathedral height, and as far up as I can see there are enormous paintings in softly glowing pastel hues. I know these images are sacred and they have something to do with ascension towards successive levels of a Higher Self.
    I am carrying an open can of red paint in one hand and a paint brush in the other. The paint is bright crimson, fire engine red. The brush is large enough for a house painter but I think it is the kind an artist would use to cover a wide area very quickly.
    Through an open doorway, I look at a small group of people clustered around a professor who is talking to them about the large framed painting in front of them. This is a special invited group. The picture shows a stone tub, possibly limestone, that looks like it could be filled with water. Hooded figures in white and light-colored robes are around it, evidently waiting for some event.
    In mid-sky, in the picture, there is an arc of light. Figures are moving along this arc in the sky. Some are mounted, some on foot. They appear to be in many sizes. They are golden, and glowing.
    There is something of the quality of the Journey of the Magi about this painting, but the images are not explicitly Christian.
    I am fascinated by the stone "tub". I can't find the right word for it. It could be a sarcophagus, but the feeling is of coming birth or baptism rather than of death.
    My high excitement and curiosity are with me as I become fully lucid inside the scene.
    I hear these words streaming through my mind:

From life to life, from day to day, I bring essence from the world of soul into the world of time.

I rise into the California morning charged with energy and excitement.
    I want to know what my dream self means to do with that red paint. I think of it now as life blood, blood of spirit. I feel I want to fill that hollow tub with this blood of spirit and see whether this will provide a medium of manifestation for those glowing spirits in the sky.
    I am reminded of a big dream from many years ago in which I led a special group of invited guests along a spiral path, past a great stone lion with a huge carnelian on his back, into a gallery space with an immensely high ceiling. We studied an unfinished painting of incalculable size. Within it, a life size human figure was as small as a candle flame in proportion to the shapes that rose around and above him. I understood that this was an unfinished portrait of the Higher Self. I was the professor in that dream. In the new one, I am watching my second self - I am almost certain - play professor while I get ready to lay on the red paint.

 

Why travel

“Ma tu perché vai?”

“Per tornar altra volta la dov’io son.”

“Why are you traveling?”

“So I may return to where I am.”

-          Dante, Purgatorio II 90-92

In my travels around the world, I often find myself thinking of this exchange in Dante’s Purgatorio. Wherever I go, I try to be fully present, to the people, the culture, to the physical landscape and the mythic fundament. I get lost at times, in more than one sense, and that is a special moment of opportunity since in order to find ourselves, we may first need to fall off our maps and our certainties.
     Dante's adventures begin when, at the mid-point of the road of life, he finds he is lost in a dark wood. He must journey through all the cycles of Hell until he at last ascends to the gate of Purgatory and - after knocking on his heart - is at last able to meet the beloved of his soul face to face. The guide takes the form of Beatrice, a beautiful young woman he loved and lost, but in her eyes he sees reflected the beauty and terror of the griffin. The guide is more than human: she is animal, and she is divine.
    What are her first words for the soul traveler? She reproaches him for losing years of time and his soul's direction because he failed to hear her when she called him in dreams, again and again.

Dante and Beatrice (14th century illumination in the Libreria Marciana, Venice)

When I did not ask for adventure

When people ask what they should bring to my workshops, I tell them to bring their sense of humor (of course) and their openness to adventure. I find, in general, that these are also vital prerequisites for travel.
    I'm generally relaxed when my travel plans get screwed up because the Trickster comes into play and an unexpected story begins to unfold. I open one of my books (The Three "Only" Things) with five tales of extraordinary encounters that came about because I missed connections and found myself on itineraries I did not plan, on the "wrong" planes.
    It's been said that unless something goes wrong, you don't have a story. I have often quoted this with appreciation, and have even been known to say that I'll put up with just about anything that happens on the road as long as it has story value.
    I stopped talking this way prior to my recent return journey from Brazil. I had been spooked by a strange series of misadventures and long delays in flying back from Europe in mid-October, after being driven part-way off a cliff by a fox-cursed demon driver on a mountain in Romania. I was trying to keep up with the progress of Hurricane Sandy, with only sketchy wi-fi access. So I announced to my host, at Florianopolis airport last week, "I don't want any adventures on this trip. I'll be very happy to get home safely without a new story."
    Check-in was a breeze, first at Florianopolis, then at busy São Paulo Guarulhos airport. The flights left on time, and the news was that, while New York City was a mess, Sandy had barely touched my home area 150 miles north, and my home airport was open. I relaxed in my seat for the ten-hour red-eye flight from São Paulo to Atlanta, the middle leg of my journey.
     A man with a subcontinental accent excused himself to take the window seat next to me. As soon as he had settled into his seat, he turned to me and announced, "I had an adventure."
     Three days earlier, he told me, he had a major heart attack in São Paulo. He recognized the symptoms - chest pain, numbness in the left arm - because he had had a heart attack before. The hotel arranged to get him into a hospital with an excellent cardiac unit. After tests, the surgeon inserted three stents; he pulled up his right sleeve to show me where the tubes had gone in. He was able to leave the hospital the previous night, and here he was, taking a long overnight flight to Atlanta en route to his home in Arizona.
     I was amazed by the speed and smoothness with which this man had apparently got through his crisis. He explained that there had been a bit of a problem. The São Paulo hospital required cash up front; 1,000 reis (about $500) to get in the door, $30,000 for the whole procedure. Fortunately for him, the company he works for had wired the money. "And if you had not been able to produce $30,000?" "Then I would be dead."
     What was he doing in Brazil? He told me he is a veterinarian who specializes in chickens. He advises on how to reduce disease risks among poultry.
      I asked the chicken doctor, "What effect has this knock on the heart had on you? Will it change you in any way?"
      He allowed that he might pay more attention to diet and exercise. But his response went much deeper. "I think I'll have more compassion now, because people have been kind to me. I'll spend more time with my nine-year-old daughter."
      He thought a bit and added, "I'll probably find myself asking, in the face of many choices, what really matters."
      I did not ask for an adventure on that trip, but I got one seated beside me.
      My final flight, from Atlanta to Albany NY, landed early. 
     

São Paulo Guarulhos airport photo by Rafael Matsunaga.