Synchronicities
Let yourself be led. Meha Agrawal, founder of Silk and Sonder, says, “The more you trust in something other than our logical brains - whether that’s God, the Universe, your intuition, your future self, or something else entirely - the more you can watch your life unfold miraculously. Cultivate a partnership with the powers that be and take a step back from our own ego, so we can be led.”
Have you ever received an onslaught of signs to do something and it made no sense, really, but you paid attention, then researched a little, and it felt right? What do you do? How do you explain it to the people in your life if it sounds crazy or meaningless?
I spent a lot of last year looking for an escape. I had been attracted to New Mexico before I even moved to Tucson. Outside of Santa Fe was the first place I had experienced total silence and I was hooked. I remember my first night in Taos - it was so quiet I couldn’t sleep! I was up all night, in fact. Last year, I spent a few days in and around Las Vegas, NM, a small town about 45 minutes from Santa Fe that I swear is going to be the next Santa Fe. I drove on the Loneliest Highway in the state and pulled over to cry. Happy tears.
But my explorations didn’t end in a place to live, and I was dejected. No escape had presented itself. Julia Cameron has a nugget about synchronicity. Do one nice thing for yourself, and God will do two. When you just step in a direction, things open up.
And, as crazy as it sounds, when I was especially anxious because I couldn’t find an escape route in New Mexico, where I had thought I wanted to land for more than a decade, I came upon an exercise online. Print a piece of paper with the 50 states on it, cut out each state, and put the 50 slips of paper in a bowl. Mix them all up and think or pray or meditate or whatever it’s called and pull a slip. So, I copied and pasted it on a piece of paper, printed it, cut out each state into strips, put them in a cup and drew names. I put my hand over the rim of the cup and shook it hard.
“Show me, Lord, where do I belong?”
The first strip: Missouri (I felt seen.)
I drew a second for fun: New Mexico
So, my thought was, “Are you kidding me?” And then, “If I were rich, I could snowbird. I’d be a mild snowbird. Not the nether regions of Wisconsin to 30 miles from the Mexican border. I’d be Central Missouri to Northern New Mexico. A day’s drive if I tried hard enough.”
Try explaining doing this to anyone. Missouri?!
Then came the signs about Columbia.
I had a visitor on my karenrutherford.com website who stopped on every page and for several days. From Columbia, MO.
I clicked on USPS. com to purchase stamps (which I almost never have to do). The highlighted stamp was a special bicentenial celebration of Missouri’s statehood.
A friend casually mentioned she had attended an online class she really enjoyed. Hosted by Lynn Rossy in Rocheport, MO, right outside of Columbia.
I attended the MUW’s Eudora Welty Symposium (as I do every year) and had troubles connecting at one point. The sentence said when I wa stable was, “She is currently working on her MFA at the University of Missouri”.
I had a project kickoff meeting at work and the team leader was wearing a Mizzou hoodie.
A YouTube video appeared in my Home screen of a speech Josh Hawley had given about Biden’s infrastructure bill. I had never heard of him. I watched and agreed with his every word. Missouri.
(Now I do know that once you click on something or even say something in your house, things like this can happen, but I’m old-school and pretending not to know that.
I Googled an old friend to check up on her coaching site and she had a new page with information about a friend’s cabin available for long-term rentals. Land of the Ozarks. Missouri.
I joined an online co-working group called the Get Shit Done Club. The first Zoom, in the top right corner Hollywood Squares block was a man in a black sweatshirt with the word, COLUMBIA, large and contrastingly white, across his chest.
I don’t use Microsoft Edge, because I hate it. My laptop opened it when I clicked on the wrong thing - probably yes, I like this picture and it thought I wanted all the information it could find. But it opened a default News website and the Top Story was in Missouri.
I was watching something on TV and a Farmer’s Insurance commercial came on. An actor was sporting a Missouri t-shirt and cap.
And finally, on Christmas Eve, two things: A Missouri license plate in the grocery store parking lot (how often do you see one of those? I’m told they’re rare, because of the state’s central location making flying cheaper and easier) and a holiday Hallmark movie selected specifically for the wait on Santa was set in Missouri.
Uncle! I get it, God. I was sure enough, anyway, to search for a monthly rental on AirBnB. Reserved. Owner contacted me about another property that was better and less expensive. Booked. I went to the UHaul store and started boxing up my things. I pretended like I was moving. I felt like it was an offering of intention and gratitude to the Universe.
I voiced the plan for the first time, telling a friend. She asked, “Colombia?” “South America?” “No, Columbia. In Missouri.” “Oh, okay, that makes more sense. I guess.” “Yea, I guess.”
Then, I told my son. I assumed he’d laugh and give me his old teenage “you’re nuts” look. I told him about all the signs. And he actually understood!
So, that was the final thing I felt like I needed, and I left.
I stayed for three months, then spent a month in various parts of Wisconsin. Explain that one! (I wasn’t ready to leave cold weather and mostly, I just didn’t want to go home.) Then, I spent a month in Memphis (my original home), and realized I wanted to go back to Columbia for one last-ditch effort at a rental home search.
Can you move to a place because you like its radio stations? What about for Bob Evans? Andy’s Custard? What about a fantastic haircut? At a salon that had a rule prohibiting Covid conversations allowed inside? Because nobody was wearing masks? (Tucson people were still wearing masks to walk their dogs.) Or a food truck with homemade pasta that bought a storefront while you were there? What about because of a park that was deserted in winter and perfect for walking? What about because of hills and trees that you knew would turn all the oranges, yellows, and reds in the fall? What about country drives with lush, rolling hills all around?
My home search didn’t pan out. (It’s a college town and a real seller’s/landlord’s market. Homes are snatched up in minutes, and I don’t work that fast.)
So, I headed back to Tucson, but to an AirBnb. A rental house popped up in my phone, and I finalized that in 72 hours. Obviously, God wanted me back in Tucson. (My son was finishing his PhD, and I was happy to be here for that, if only really in “presence” of it.)
But, the desire to stay didn’t last long. I was ready to search again. Columbia wasn’t pulling me so much anymore; I had followed God there and it was in His perfect time.
But why was I there? Why did I follow all those signs, just because I felt like God wanted me to? Did it serve a purpose? I don’t know yet. But I do know that it’s happening again.
In October, I attended the virtual version of the Erma Bombeck Writing Workshop held biannually at the University of Dayton. I had completely forgotten about this every-other-year event. Because of COVID, the last one was in 2018, when I was in the thick of all things Tucson, still living like a tourist in a foreign land. Katrina Kittle spoke to me. Just to me. I couldn’t have loved everything she said, her approach, and demeanor during her talk, even if she’d been Cheryl Strayed.
I’ve been posting a Daily Self-Challenge on the Instagram for the last few months. It’s been working wonders for me and my commitment issues. Recently, I admitted that I had contacted the University of Dayton to request more information about their Senior Fellows program. I say “admitted”, because who would think to head to Dayton, Ohio, for something.
Since this IG post:
On Monday night, I picked a holiday Hallmark movie to watch from the 30+ I’ve recorded. In Merry Measure. Story set in Dayton, Ohio. (They kept referring to Dayton, Ohio, like it was all one word and the most ridiculous place someone could be and yet where they all were and where the poor misguided Christmas gal would happily end up.)
On Tuesday morning, I suddenly remembered a 2015 quick jaunt from Indianapolis to meet a friend who was attending a reunion in Dayton. I didn’t know at the time that Erma Bombeck’s resting place is here. We visited and sat for a long while in a park at the top of a hill near or in the cemetery, I can’t quite remember now. And “Bombeck” was a clue in my morning crossword puzzle.
On Thursday night, I watched another movie, Traffic, from 2000. It popped up on some streaming service along with the 500 a week that pop up on any given streaming service. Parts in Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio. I Googled someone I had read about earlier that day. Born in Dayton, Ohio.
On Friday, I watched a documentary that included testimony from a funeral home/embalming company in Lebanon, Ohio.
During Saturday’s Egg Bowl rivalry game, the announcers talked about an Ole Miss player relentlessly. This game is the only time I ever see Ole Miss on anything. <evil spell spit 3 times here>) Wide receiver Dayton Wade.
I make an easy candy treat for Christmas each year and let my son pick out which ones to make. This year, he pulled a recipe from my newly organized book. Buckeyes.
During my holiday movie-watching hermit season, I watched a movie with Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker that I had never seen. Never Say Goodbye. For some reason, of all the people in the film, I only googled Ms. Parker. She was from Cedarville, Ohio, a town outside of Dayton but that now is considered a part of the Dayton Metro area.
Then, another movie called O. Henry’s Full House. I didn’t understand the premise, but upon googling found out that iJohn Steinbeck created this anthology of ten of O. Henry’s stories. I hadn’t heard of O. Henry, but when I read, I discovered that he was imprisoned in the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus, where he wrote and had 14 stories published.
Last week’s Snapped episode was a family from Urbana, Ohio, whose two sons had moved to Maricopa, Arizona.
I was looking for the three teams I follow in this year’s Bowl game schedule and saw that this year’s Barstool Bowl (in Tucson) hosts Wyoming vs. Ohio.
Four Hallmark holiday movies this year were set in Ohio. Not filmed there, but their storylines were set in Ohio. (In each one, nobody understood why they wanted to be in Ohio, but by the end of course, everyone wanted the smaller life.)
Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way weekly task was to use the Morning Pages as a prayer for guidance, if you’re lost about something. I did mine today, closed the notebook and put it in its place on the shelf, and logged in to a webinar I had signed up for. First thing I heard was the speaker asking everyone to put where they’re from in the chat and he said, “Oh, it’s going by so fast now. We have Ohio…Australia…”
I’ve recently just read the first book in Jan Karon’s Mitford series (I’m late; she started 20 years ago) and loved it so, that I ordered the second and third in the series via a used bookseller on Amazon. Both shipping via USPS from Dayton, Ohio.
A trending Google search last night was a snow emergency in Franklin County. Where is Franklin County? Columbus, Ohio.
I looked up my son on a social media app and the person directly below him with his same name is in Columbus, Ohio.
I attended Silk And Sonder’s Create Your Vision Board Event. The facilitator was from Zanesville, Ohio.
My buddy sent me a New Year’s gift of a book called Chill Factor. It’s about how a hockey team came to be from a minor league team that won the city over. (Last year, he sent me Battle of Alberta about the history of the hockey war between Calgary and Edmonton.) Which hockey team is this year’s book about? The Columbus Blue Jackets.
A few new movies on TCM this month that have been on my want-to-see list, one of which was Annie Oakley. I’ll watch 1930s Melvyn Douglas eat lunch. During the movie, I of course went down the Google rabbit hole about the actors and Annie herself. Come to find out, she was born in what’s now called Willowdell, OH, and died in Greenville, OH, both within 30 miles or so of Dayton. After this, I switched things up and re-watched Bad Words since it popped up on Netflix’s home screen. Columbus, OH. And then, the Lifetime movie about Nancy Brophy who killed her husband. They found his body at the Oregon Culinary Institute in Dayton, Oregon.
A recruiter I worked with a decade ago found me in a database in his new role at the company I just ended a contract with and contacted me about a possible role with Abbott Labs. Remote, but I asked where the team was based. Columbus, Ohio.
Then, I remembered my cup-o-states. I poured them out, mixed them up and up and up, and pulled. Ohio.
Another somewhat less-than-idyllic destination to most, based on nothing but signs. It’s still hard to explain, but I think that’s just my ego/vanity, as they say. I am grateful for the opportunity to follow these things I see as signs. I feel connected and “obedient” (not the word I want, it’s more of a realization that all the times I thought God hated me, he really didn’t and maybe this is Love and I want to love Him back?) in God’s flow. And God knows I’m a simple gal. He’d never send me signs now for Colombia or long-ago thoughts of seeing Ireland or Norway. He better not, anyway.