Facing Truths
Do you find meaning in synchronicity?
Carl Jung invented the term synchronicity - which he defined as “the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.”
I am a pathological, habitual pattern chaser. I feel hyper attuned to nudges from the universe - maybe you do too? I find pattern recognition a pleasure, sometimes ominous, and it’s a trait I find in other artists. People looking for the seams of meaning, places where the invisible strings are woven together, touching.
Two weeks ago, I spent some time in (beloved) Monterey, working with graduate students in environmental policy. I was doing what I love - helping people with scientific expertise and passion translate that expertise and passion to inform and captivate the general public. In an era with decreasing federal protections, I see this work taking on new importance. I want scientists, lawyers, and policy makers to connect with the public - tell us about the chemical causing cancer in our makeup; let us know about the microplastics in newborns; help us feel the staggering loss of birds in the sky.
Unfortunately, my week in Monterey was also the week where the current administration’s damaging cuts to NOAA - think ocean and climate research - became clearer. It’s an understatement to call the time we’re living in a heartbreak.
One of the parts of Monterey I love best is the visual evidence of the power and necessity of National Marine Sanctuaries. You can walk the coastline and witness the blossoming biodiversity - rafts of otters floating in the kelp forests, riding the wild waves - seals jostling for sunny rocks - or the blow of a gray whale moving along the so-called “whale superhighway.” (someone once described gray whale blows this way: “a double-plumed, misty jet of vapor, resembling a heart-shaped spout, as they exhale.” How beautiful is that?)
This is health and vitality you can see. This is ecological health as beauty. And though I’m happy to stop there and see no need to anchor it in human prosperity, you can also see the interconnectedness of ecosystem health and community. Ecological health anchors the entire system.
I got home from California and returned to my undergraduates. I was teaching one of my favorite books - Rebecca - to my advanced fiction class, a course focused on how to technically evoke a strong sense of place. I had the students watch Alfred Hitchcock’s movie based on the British book. The film’s early scenes feature frothing waves bashing against rocks - and I knew, instantly, that I had been looking at that same coastline along Point Lobos and Big Sur just days earlier. Synchronicity.
That same day I went back to my office to answer student emails - and my eyes lingered on my Mac’s stock screensaver. (If you know me, you know I am exactly the type of woman who gets a new computer and doesn’t customize the screensaver for months because I hate reading directions. Intuition or nothing.) The screensaver image showed an ocean view, and a cliff covered in ice plant - a beautiful but invasive and problematic plant that has now become an iconic visual hallmark of the California coast. Synchronicity overload.
I can’t tell you what it means - or more specifically what it means to me - yet. What I know is that the coastline has been a meaningful place of fieldwork (on interconnectedness) and learning for me (notes on Cannery Row and heroes), but that it also affects me in some metaphysical way. It is part of my underlying structure of being. It has a ripple effect on my life, and has for years - you’ll see it in my fiction, like Inheritance, from How Strange a Season.
*
Once, on a bird walk, an editor friend of mine suggested I read Rudolph Steiner, as Steiner felt that bird migration was spiritual and an example of interconnected movement in the world. Friends, I tried to read Steiner, and the prose was dense and my will was weak and I didn’t get far. But his ideas excite me - mostly because Steiner was fearless about connecting realms, exploring the spiritual aspect of scientific processes from dance to bird song to agriculture and education, including biodynamics.
In a lecture, Steiner once said:
Yes, you see, we here find remarkable connections. Initiation science everywhere leads into the inner aspect of relationships…
In everything good and in everything evil, in some way or other beings are present. Everything in world-connections is so ordered that its relation to other beings can be recognized. For the materialistically minded, butterflies flutter, birds fly, bats flit. But this can really be compared to what often happens with a not very artistic person, who adorns the walls of his room with all manner of pictures which do not belong to each other, which have no inner connection. Thus for the ordinary observer of nature, what flies through the world also has no inner connection; because he sees none. But everything in the cosmos has its own place, because just from this very place it has a relation to the cosmos in its totality. Be it butterfly, bird, or bat, everything has its own meaning within the world-order.
As to those who today wish to scoff, let them scoff.
I tend to naturally ascribe meaning to certain landscape markers - trees I come to love, for example. And I have a tree - really a snag - on The Walk where I always pause. My dogs Nash and Radish came to know that I would pause at this tree; my new dog Winnie learned quickly as well.
Yesterday I turned the corner on The Walk and it took me a moment to metabolize what I was seeing - the snag had come down, the tree where I have photographs with my children as infants, the snag I have put a hand on a thousand times in passing. I felt an instant pang of grief.
I don’t know what it means, only that I feel as though I have turned some painful corner, and maybe that the world is turning some painful corner. And that I hope after some pain we are turning toward something beautiful and real that we can face. Synchronicity.
My gut feeling is that these synchronicities are both personal and professional nudges from the universe - or from my most inner voice - about the painful realities of the times we’re living in, and how the person I aspire to be shows up in them. I know each of us has a unique version - but I think these are “those times.” Which means we each have to summon “that version” of ourselves. What were we doing as democracy faltered and the planet burned? What role did we play? Were we scrolling and wringing our hands in private, or did we make meaningful attempts to reduce suffering?
If one has the will to penetrate into these inner world-connections, Steiner said in his lecture, one must not shrink back from facing the truths contained in them.
*
It feels increasingly dangerous to be an academic right now, an environmental journalist, a progressive voice on climate. I’m feeling this pressure more than ever and I know you may be as well. I hope you’ll add your voice to a necessary conversation this week, or take a small action in your local sphere of influence.
In solidarity -
xo
MMB
PS: I’ll be announcing new benefits for paid subscribers soon. (Thank you! I appreciate you and your very clear support of my work and time here.)
PSS: I still do creativity consults (on projects, career moves) at $225 an hour, or manuscript consults for $2500 with 2 zoom sessions.
PSSS: I’d like to celebrate some strong environmental work in the world:
A Middlebury College Climate Action Fellow, Devin Santikarma, just published a piece with Planet Forward on water and irrigation in Bali. Gorgeous visuals and important work.
I’m looking forward to reading a book by Mark Lynas by Bloomsbury called Six Minutes to Winter - How to Avoid Nuclear War. Feels timely, right? It is.
An important 78,000 acre tract of land has just been preserved in Western Maine by the Northeast Wilderness Trust. Connectivity and scale!
From Julie Packard of the Monterey Bay Aquarium: Please use your voice and stand up for NOAA! The most effective thing you can do is to call your senator or representative. You can contact them directly through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 -- and even more directly through their District offices in your home state.
At times, synchronicity knocks you over the head so you know it's there with a message
The way that California permeates film and television and Silicon Valley tech is underestimated. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, in Los Angeles, and I just assumed until late childhood that Los Angeles was the center of the universe since all the television series we watched, from Zorro to Star Trek (as I wrote in a piece posted on my Substack Mixed Borders recently) were filmed in places I knew well from family outings and where I rode my horse.