Signs: Hooey, Happenstance, or Patterns in the Chaos?

[Darkkin]

Does life send us signs? Of change, portents, or clues indicating the choice is the right one...that gut feeling. What are your thoughts and takes?

Personally this week has been a weird one for me. It has been little things, just glimpses out a window. Saturday evening I looked out and the skies of my neighborhood were full of motion. Thousands of dragonflies, more than I have ever seen in my life. Sunday morning I made a decisions that shattered my heart and minutes later the cardinal was perched on the lilac outside my front window. He sang and CatCat sat inches from him, content and purring. Monday, he returned to the window, he sang and CatCat chattered at him like he was an old friend. We left for the vet not long after...and when I got home, as soon as the car door opened, I heard him again. Oddly, it seemed like she was safely across and in a better place.

Yesterday, when we were looking at cats available for adoption one popped up with the rescue that took in CatCat's mother and siblings two decades ago. His name is Mash Potato, and he fits many of the characteristics we are looking for in a cat this time around. This morning, while going back through photos of CatCat, I took a closer look at one of my favourites...

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The two books beneath her heart are the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings...and one of my favourite scenes in LOTR is Samwise's conversation with Gollum about potatoes...We will see if this pans out. I made the phone call.

[Amnesiac]

Wonderful. I do think that life gives us signs. I believe everything is connected, and in far more intimate ways than we could ever imagine. The whole universe and all that is, is created and made of pure energy, and at the same time, we are loved beyond anything this paltry human consciousness could even conceive of. Everything has our back. Everything is on our side. All is well, and everything, regardless of how it ever looks, is perfectly and wonderfully in its place, busy being what it is and unfolding at its own perfect and unique pace.

[Bard_Daniel]

Sometimes it seems to me like all of the universe is a wild, untamed river that carries all things- winding its path towards an endless horizon.

[Darkkin]

We got a curve ball out of left field. One of our regulars at the bookstore saw a post about my CatCat and that we were looking to adopt another kitty. She messaged me this morning with the picture of a kitten. Things clicked and before I left work today I had a new kitty.



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Say hello to Potato, the Second Breakfast Cat...Called Po.

[Amnesiac]

WONDERFUL!! <3

[dither]

Darkkin,
I am a determined sceptic when comes to the subject of unearthly manifestations, if I may call it that, and then I read something like your o.p., and I almost wish that I hadn't. Weird huh!

[bdcharles]

I love the notion of the universe sending signals or little nudges, as though we're part of a grand narrative. Just this weekend, I received two facebook friend requests from two people I've not seen for between 15 and 25 years (they don't know each other, and I guess they are not people I would immediately expect to facebook-friend me, though it was a nice surprise), and I wondered at what that meant. Possibly that I should attend more to keeping in touch with people from my past, or people in general. It's certainly sound advice, and much-needed. Yes - the concept of a kind of synchronicity appeals to me. I like that idea a lot.

I'm just not sure I really believe there's anything to it. I mean, I've never seen any proof.

[JustRob]

I think that people who merely rationalise everything and pursue the most logical path are missing a trick. My experience is that sometimes following our gut feelings is in fact the most logical thing to do even though we presently have no justification for doing so. Even in my job I had a reputation for coming up with solutions to problems that others couldn't solve because I chose to approach them illogically and simply pull the answers out of thin air. That was surprising given that I designed computer systems, a task which one might expect to involve very logical thinking. Sometimes a problem and its solution are separated by a logically uncrossable gulf and only a leap of faith can connect the two. People could certainly see that I had found the answers but not how.

I strongly believe that evolution has given us feelings as a natural aid to survival, a way to discover the best way forward, and that therefore we should heed them when they push us in a certain direction.

Although I have generally abandoned further research into my strangely prescient novel written in 2011 there was one one thing that bothered me. Since writing it I had found explanations in my subsequent experiences for all of the main characters in it apart from one. The six years that the novel indicated would pass while I was having the experiences had ended in 2017, so recently I decided to try to find the inspiration for my missing character. All that I had to go on was that her name was Yvonne and that she had an eidetic memory, the reason why I had included her in the novel. Bearing in mind that the novel was really all about my own experiences I decided that her eidetic memory was a diametrically opposite reference to my own aphantasia as one is the ability to recall visual images in great detail while the other is the lack of any ability at all to recall them. That's just how my erratic mind works. As a consequence I Googled the two words "Yvonne" and "aphantasia" together in an attempt to find her. Now that was an act of faith and nothing else.

The real Yvonne appeared in the first reference that Google gave me. There was no need for me to search through lists of references, just to look at that top one. She is a pagan who practises Wicca, so completely open to discussion of such matters. She is gender queer, which may explain why I had trouble understanding the character Yvonne in my novel and didn't mention much detail about her. The possibility of her being lesbian only materialised in a draft chapter of my potential second novel, but it took me by surprise and I wasn't sure about it. Now I know why. For some time I have described the nature of the premonitions that seem to guide me in life as being preternatural, a word of which I am now very fond. Yvonne is a copious writer both on the Internet and of books and she likes and uses that word as well. It is too simple to say that it just means "magical" because historically its use has been far more subtle. The real Yvonne had a particularly bad year in her life when everything went against her and she said in a much later blog that the whole universe seemed to be telling her to change direction then. That year was 2011, the very time when I was writing my novel. She asked me for a copy of my novel to read as the parallels between it and her experiences fascinate her. I am yet to hear how far she has got with it and what her conclusions are. Far from being just the inspiration for my Yvonne she also appears to have inspired the more prominent character Lucine, who appears in the opening chapter of the story. I posted that chapter HERE in WF years ago. It is clearly about a woman who has realised that she needs to make a radical change in her life. The real Yvonne's relationship actually was breaking up in 2011 when I wrote it. In 2012 she found her new life partner and is now very happy in her relationship with him. I have watched one of their YouTube videos together and that is evident.

What are the odds that I should so easily find one woman on the entire planet who fits so closely into my story by typing just two apparently unrelated words into Google? What indeed are the odds that she should also be the type of person willing to discuss it with me as she has proved to be? What also are the odds that she herself is a published writer? In the debate about planners and pantsers I am predominantly a pantser. Planners can't comprehend how pantsers can pull stories out of thin air by indulging in free writing, also called automatic writing by some. It happens that that latter term is also used in psychical research to describe a very similar process used by psychics pulling knowledge out of thin air, which hardly surprises me.

Apparently my act of simple faith paid off and not for the first time. May the force always be with you.

[Amnesiac]

There are times that, in spite ourselves, that, out of the corner of our eye, or heart, as the case may be, we catch a glimpse of some great magic afoot in the universe. There is always something new to discover, something wonderful around the next bend, and there are still so many unopened gifts from the day of our birth!

[Darkkin]

Something I never thought I would see...Rue Dog and Potato.