Synchronicity: When the practices leading to dazzling innovation, creativity, inspired problem-solving, and spirituality collide. It happens!
“The world is suddener than we admit. We know it’s true. The world stragifies every time we’re startled awake from a disturbing dream, astounded by a vision, or are struck by a revelation. Each time the world surprises us with its twisting time-beds, a shiver runs through our souls. … Early one spring morning, the light in the park seems to dance, and there is the smell of an impending storm and – suddenly – we are eight years old again and ecstatically playing in the rain, and a wave of longing sweeps over us.” – Phil Cousineau, Coincidence or Destiny: stories of synchronicity that illuminate our lives
My first memory of a synchronized moment came in the 1990s. I had been the community development director in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, in what people from that period describe as the “Golden Years.” We cleaned up the downtown, and the Roaring Fork river, built trails and brought transit and affordable housing to the community for the first time. Old businesses began to flourish again, and new businesses started up with a bang. I was fascinated by how the community came together and brought all this progress on in a relatively short period (a few years).
I began studying successful communities and what characteristics caused them to thrive. The Heartland Institute for Leadership Development captures them here. I noticed that these “clues” are also good approaches to life. Before that time, I had thought my work life (developing communities), my creative life (visual artist), my nerdy science explorations, my personal development journey and my consulting life as a strategic planner and facilitator were all separate pursuits and processes. I spent a lot of time learning about each and practicing to improve. Then one day, my mind unveiled that all these things were linked and interdependent. At their core, the practices and approaches share deep roots.
“When can unlikely experiences occurring in close time proximity be considered more than mere coincidences? At what point might they constitute “synchronicity” or “divine providence”? As theorized by psychologist Carl Jung, synchronicity results from causally unrelated events occurring improbably and meaningfully together. Many attribute such synchronistic meaning to God.”
– Mike McGrew, The Baltimore Sun
While someone who isn’t actively cultivating creativity practices can experience synchronicity, if you consistently practice creative process in a way that works for you, synchronicity will show up more often in your life. Things will fall into place without striving for them. Wonder and awe will blossom all around you. This is the place where seedbops thrive and burst into unexpected and extraordinary life changes.
In what Phil Cousineau calls “the sagacity of serendipity,” serendipity, coincidence, and synchronicity are cousins. And when we have those moments, we experience awe and wonder. Horace Walpole came up with the word serendipity when describing the fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip” (now Sri Lanka), where they “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of….”
Have you had moments where a seedbop moment of brilliance came upon you that you were not in quest of?
Here is how this happened for me during my yearly retreat. My daughter never met the children’s chart minimum “healthy weight” requirements when she was young. She did not have an eating disorder and was very active and thriving. She was just super thin. She loved carbs and didn’t like meat. Every year I took a two-week break at a Carmelite monastery in Crestone, Colorado. The first week I usually just slept because I was exhausted. In the second week, I devoted myself to creating artwork. As I went through these healing days, all of a sudden, a very specific solution came to me. She and her twin brother had breakfast favorites – French toast, waffles, cinnamon rolls, etc. I began to protein pack everything with more eggs, non-fat milk, anything I could get into that breakfast without changing the taste. It worked. She’s thin to this day, but the concern that her bones would not develop well was set to rest.
I didn’t go on that retreat to think about protein, breakfast, or kids’ health problems. But a solution to something that hung out there for years just appeared.
So back to my ongoing message that if we consistently incorporate the practices of creativity into our life, solutions to things you never thought of will also flow to you. You’ll make connections you never thought to make or knew were possible. All kinds of options will open up to you.
“The underlying depth below our surface approach waits for us like an invitation and a reproach, an ocean seen from a cliff, Another life, Informing this life, on the one hand, a spur to boldness and a deeper participation when we realize how much in this life the other life breathes, or on the other, if distanced into the abstract, a source of shame, a life un-braved, un-lived, misunderstood, no matter how much it whispered conspiratorially in our ears.”
David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning
Download my primer on creative practices, the “Seedbop Navigator,” by signing up here. Message me for a free initial coaching session.
“We see quite clearly that what happens
to the nonhuman happens to the human.
What happens to the outer world
happens to the inner world.
If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur
then the emotional, imaginative,
intellectual, and spiritual life of the human
is diminished or extinguished.
Without the soaring birds, the great forests,
the sounds and coloration of the insects,
the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields,
the sight of the clouds by day
and the stars at night, we become impoverished
in all that makes us human.”
— Thomas Berry
Download my primer on creative practices, the “Seedbop Navigator,” by clicking here: https://seedbop.com/the-seedbop-navigator/. Message me for a free initial coaching session.
