All posts in category synchronicity

indicators and implications

Water main break sends me scurrying yesterday from the building. I tried to stay but the fire alarm went off. I think they were trying to flush us out. Begone, you office trolls! It seems there are water mains breaking everywhere in this city. Our aging infrastructure simply cannot handle a violent shift from warm to below freezing to warm again. Get home, pull up the shade to a turkey vulture gliding overhead. I resent the implication this bird is making toward my general state of liveliness. I am not dead. It’s simply not true. Maybe the vultures should go feed on all the dead water mains instead. Crunch, crunch.

This may sound familiar to long-suffering regular readers, but how one reacts from inside an elevator to the sight of another person walking (hurrying, even) toward said elevator, defines at a base level the kind of human being one is. Most other indicators are largely irrelevant to me; they require too much interaction, too much time to reach a satisfactory conclusion. If I want to know in an instant, a blinding flash, what kind of person a certain human is I will hurry toward the elevator in which she or he stands, looking out at me with either compassion or disgust, and I, at her or him in return with either gratitude or disappointment. What transpires in that brief moment shall inform me of what stuff they [sic] are made. I am reminded of my experience at the revolving door the other day. The simplicity, the stripped-down bareness, of this moment, two humans moving in opposing directions, yet united in one shared motion to move themselves, and each other, forward to where they needed to be. To ignore the sublimity of these moments would be tragic.

5 Comments

by sean on January 30, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in birds, city life, cold, elevators, horror of humanity, human behavior, human nature, kindness, rapid-fire litmus tests for qualities in a human being, revolving doors, swirly patterns, synchronicity, the opposite of synchronicity is to be avoided, trolls, turkey vultures, warmth, weather, wednesdays are weird, work

Posted by sean on January 30, 2013

https://sd-stewart.com/2013/01/30/indicators-and-implications/

unfinished studies in probability

I am trying to determine how it is possible that I never see my immediate neighbors. We literally share walls. And I am out in the streets at least twice a day walking Farley. Yet I never encounter them. How is this possible. What are the odds of me seeing even one of them? That’s what I’d like to know, though I’m not at all a gambling man, just a curious one. Is it because I leave at random times, and they also leave at random times, making our odds of intersection quite low? Or is it because I leave at random times and they leave at the same times, also making our odds of encountering each other low. I know that I never leave at the same time, so perhaps I am the reason we never meet. My erratic behavior may be the cause of our never meeting. However, some people in the neighborhood I see quite often, even though they don’t even live on my street. Why them, I ask, why not the ones so close by. This I don’t understand.

Sometimes I look out a window and I see my immediate neighbors but they appear so far away, like they are in another dimension, another world even, or as if in a dream, and I consider that I may never know them for it is too late, too much time has passed and so we are destined to remain strangers. Somehow, in some hidden unreachable part of my insides, I think I know this is true, and for some reason it saddens me, though I don’t quite know why, but I think it may have to do with how I have created personalities and lives for all of them and the stories of their lives in my head are ongoing and can grow quite elaborate at times, and for reality to now impose on these stories would ruin them and probably depress me.

Meanwhile, the other day as I approached the revolving door at work from outside, someone also approached it from inside, and we pushed simultaneously and the door swung with ease, depositing each of us in places opposite of where we had been, and this was pleasing to me, for it rarely happens, and in general I am ambivalent to revolving doors, yet when serendipity such as this occurs I am reminded of their occasional magic, leaving me with a lingering sense of connection to my partner in door-pushing whom I didn’t know and didn’t speak to nor do I want to know or ever speak to.

4 Comments

by sean on January 17, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in amateur mathematician flies into the sun, daydreaming, human behavior, human nature, i feel vagulous don't you, inner life, introversion, neighbors, please don't peer-review this, probability, proceedings of the society for purveyors of the unscientific method, revolving doors, serendipity, swirly patterns, synchronicity, the opposite of synchronicity is to be avoided, the unrequited nectar we all feed from, thursday is my salvation

Posted by sean on January 17, 2013

https://sd-stewart.com/2013/01/17/unfinished-studies-in-probability/

gargling truth serum

Never swallow, never swallow, but keep that golden truth serum swirling around in your mouth. That way it can become anything you want. A brilliant answer to a dusty question, a missing piece to a bruised and broken puzzle, a misplaced passion found again. Passed by the stairs at the top of this page again a day or so ago. Stairs to the future…stairs to wildness…stairs out of this purgatory. Traveling through the woods with my avian friends…walking the Mason-Dixon trail…coulda kept walking and walking and never stopped. There was no real reason to stop. The birds just kept singing and they just kept moving, and I just kept moving with them, ticking them off as I went. The water was there, too. And the sky. And the trees. The ground below my feet felt good. Everything felt good and right and I felt alive. I felt so good, high on the experience of being where I was and nowhere else at that moment. Something extraordinary seeking to burst out from inside…seeds laid to rest on bare soil and rising toward the warm sun. Rich feeling pervades for mere moments, gulp enough to sustain another few days, few weeks, few months. Don’t wanna be the second-guesser anymore…don’t want to renege, reinterpret, revisit, re- anything. Just clearing the path, one heavy stone at a time….all we can do, all we know to do.

1 Comment

by sean on May 17, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in bill callahan, inner life, nature, parts of the whole, synchronicity

Posted by sean on May 17, 2010

https://sd-stewart.com/2010/05/17/gargling-truth-serum/

wind watch

We are under a Wind Watch. So this morning I watched the wind. It was snowing and the world outside looked like a snow globe shaken by a vicious god. The relentless wind blew the flakes in every direction, hardly ever allowing them to touch the ground. The vent on the skylight rattled, and I found a feather that had blown in through it and landed on the bathroom floor.

I listened to Fahey’s “America” and watched the frenetic flakes dance outside the window to the rich, odd twanging of steel strings. The coffee went down smooth, as did Heinrich’s ruminations on a winter spent in Maine’s woods. There was a certain synchronicity to my morning that doesn’t often visit.

I fed the birds and repotted a few plants. I recorded my dreams of the night before. Everything seems to be in order, for the moment.

2 Comments

by sean on February 26, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in dreams, existence, fridays, john fahey, parts of the whole, synchronicity, wind, winter

Posted by sean on February 26, 2010

https://sd-stewart.com/2010/02/26/wind-watch/