20 May 2009
MS: Multiple Synchronicities
Dec 2006
In the aftermath of the teapots, I launched into a flurry of research into synchronicity – I wanted to know everything that people had written about it in the past, what people were thinking and experiencing today, etc. In this spirit I started a Google Alert for blogs and news mentioning the word ‘synchronicity.’
This led me to several discussions of the Police album and many irrelevant posts by two blogs with “synchronicity” in their titles – one by a guy named Rashad, and the other titled “Sweet Tea & Synchronicity” (which is no longer online, sadly).
When I came across her blog, the author of ‘Sweet Tea & Synchronicity’ wasn’t blogging about synchronicity; she was talking about her struggle with depression, mostly. But I found myself reading her blog anyway.
Then one day, a few weeks after I posted the Teapots story on the Action Squad website, I saw another disheartened post from her – and followed a sudden and unprecedented impulse to send a stranger an unsolicited email:
—————-
Wednesday, December 20, 2006 5:20:16 PM
Hey! Hey lady! Cheer up!
http://www.actionsquad.org/crawlspace1.html
Max
—————-
D quickly responded, and we began emailing back and forth:
Wednesday, December 20, 2006 8:12:54 PM
wow…who are you? may i ask….how did you find me? and why?
when i saw your letter it was right after having a very interesting conversation with a friend.
i feel like the universe is speaking to me. so what do you want to tell me tonight?
—————-
Wednesday, December 20, 2006 8:50:05 PM
That teapots happen, apparently.
I dunno – if I’m being used as a mouthpiece for the universe, it’s unlikely I’d be any more aware of the message I contain than these words are, or these dang teapots are.
… anyway, I found you through synchronicity, literally.
Did a Google Alert that would pull together various websites, blogs, news sources and feed them to me – anything that came for the word “synchronicity.”
Your blog came up a few days in a row, so I saw your ‘bad feeling times’ start up as you posted.
I just had an impulse to contact you, figured I’d send you to the teapot tale. Tied in to your apparent interest in synchronicity, and also seemed a good message for somebody feeling as you were. Some connection to you, not sure how/what …I’m trying to surf the flow of reality a bit, and am learning to just go where intuition takes me. Emailing you was part of that, although I don’t know what, if anything it meant or means …
——————-
Thursday, December 21, 2006 4:19:09 PM
before coming inside to read your letter i had been out with one of my friends. we sat in a coffee shop talking about all sorts of things and…my depression. we talked about how hard it is to cope sometimes. my son who has autism is vey challenging and…i was telling my friend that some days i just want to give up. now…my friend is catholic. i am…well…no religion. i do believe in god but that is as far as it ever went. i am not religious in the least.
but in the midst of my depression i have been having some rather spiritual thoughts…thoughts about my “path” and how i do feel called to do what i am doing…helping my son. there is so much to my life story…i will just stick with yesterday’s events for now. anyway…my friend was telling me that sometimes ordinary folk are saint like…imperfect but on this path…and the important thing is not the outcome but the journey and our faithfulness to this path. and…her words comforted me.
my friend only had so much time and…she had to go…she was already late for getting home and she said to me…”diane i wish we had more time to talk about all this.” know that there is much more to this story and that we had been talking about synchronicities all evening.
when it was time for us to leave…lol…her clutch would NOT work. she asked me to try it. i tried it. it wouldn’t budge. she told me this had never happened before. then she recounted this story about how this one nun had wanted to have this conversation with a bishop…and he had to go…and then a thunderstorm came..preventing him from going. that conversation needed to happen. as we were in her car…we kept talking. she called her husband then to pick us up…and lo and behold…when she and i…tried the clutch…by magic it worked.
then… i come home… i read your letter…and your teapot story and then…you say…”teapots happen” and i am like….what the fuck is going on? LOL more? i am going right out to buy me a teapot. may i please share your link on my blog? would you mind?
and please tell me the teapot story is real.
——————
Several more emails and a couple of days later, while I was at my sister’s house in Illinois for the Christmas holiday, D added a new blog post – not about synchronicity or about teapots as the previous few had been, but about a host of strange physical and mental symptoms she had been experiencing – and how she was afraid to go to the doctor and find out what the problem was.
She revealed that a decade before, she’d had Optic Neuritis in her left eye, and had been told she might eventually develop Multiple Sclerosis.
I was shocked to read it – because what D didn’t know was that the day I got back to Minneapolis from my sister’s house, I was going to be having an MRI – to find out if I had multiple sclerosis … because I’d had Optic Neuritis in my left eye that summer.
–
A new flurry of emails erupted: we were both pretty freaked out by it, and then we shared the experience of going through the limbo diagnosis of “probable MS” – inconsistent, inconclusive symptoms, repeated MRIs, and months of uncertainty in between.
We were both formally diagnosed with MS later that year.
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This story from D’s email kinda reminds me of a weird coincidence from 2007. It didn’t happen to me, but to Mandy, my girlfriend at the time.
She was out with some girlfriends at an indoor water park. When they went to leave, they all piled into her friend’s van … but the key would not turn, and the van wouldn’t start. Finally, frustrated and irritated by her friend’s inability to start the car, Mandy snatched the keys, shoved them into the ignition, and turned – and the van came to life, and she drove them away.
A few minutes later, her friends started to notice that something was … wrong. Items were missing from the van – had someone been in there and stolen it? Then panic nearly broke out when the girls noticed that a sign or note had been taped to the inside of the back window. But the sign was a For Sale sign with a phone number.
Why would … then they realized – they were in the wrong car. This wasn’t her friend’s van at all. They drove back to the parking lot, parked the strange van – which would not start again once they turned it off – and made their escape in the correct van.
(They were found out though, because one of her friends had left her cellphone in the van … the wife of the couple was initially convinced that the phone had been left by a secret mistress of her husband – and there was much relief when it was all cleared up later.)
teapotshappen
May 20th, 2009 at 10:09 pmpermalink
I am laughing so hard reading the story about when I stole the van! We were all drunk, too. And I remember I was like “you girls are so stupid! Gimme the keys! You don’t know what you’re doing!” And the girls were totally panicking. There were like six of us. “Why is my rearview mirror missing? Where is my game system? WAIT! What’s that note taped up in the back, a ransom note!?” It was so chaotic! I could’ve died when we drove by the real van. And when we called the cellphone that was left behind we were SO scared when the lady answered. Oh man!
Mandy
July 13th, 2010 at 2:26 pmpermalink
You continue to shock and astonish.
Trish MacGregor
May 20th, 2009 at 11:08 pmpermalink
I used to read Sweet Tea & Synchronicity too. Wondered why she stopped blogging. Very sad.
jane
May 21st, 2009 at 11:16 ampermalink
I am one, my heart is your heart, my death your death, all is love.
I am one of many, the web of life spans
Tangled ball of light
I feel your pain, I laugh with your joy
Strive for knowing freedom
Anonymous
June 18th, 2009 at 2:48 pmpermalink
hi,
I followed the link from Trish and Rob’s page. WOW. I had heard the teapots story from them, but this one is even more intriguing for me. I do believe that we cross paths with people when there is a purpose. I’m sorry to hear about your diagnosis. Let’s hope we find a cure soon.
anewsoul
August 13th, 2009 at 7:53 ampermalink
[…] about to be really freaked out if she, too, was diagnosed with it (this was shortly after my weird MS diagnosis / blogger sychronicity) … but fortunately, this potential synchronicity remained unrealized.) […]
Poison Ivy and the Mandelbrot Set (July 9th 2007) « teapots happen
September 25th, 2009 at 8:58 ampermalink