Serendipity – John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale. Love this movie.
Serendipity is not exactly the same as Jung’s Synchronicity, but it’s close.
I had always been writing about Einstein’s theory of relativity and Jung’s theories of synchronicity without knowing specifically about them, or rather, being totally aware of them. I should say. I understood them both intuitively. I’m no scientist or psychiatrist, but I knew that science and the unexplainable were compatible. Call it religion, the paranormal, synchronicity, fate, destiny, accidental causation. All this, plus physics.
Then once when I was student teaching in grad school in Marquette, I kept thinking I saw the movie Serendipity in the TV listings — a movie I had once enjoyed. But it wasn’t. (Like when you keep thinking you see someone you know you haven’t sen in a long time and they show up or call? Like that.) Then a night later, it was on. I watched it–it was late at night. At midnight (or later) a show came on about Einstein’s theories called The Fabric of the Cosmos –Briane Greene, put on by NOVA, and then after watching them explain his theories as if Time were fabric (and I had already talked about Time as a tapestry in my short fiction), I flipped to a documentary on Jung and Synchronicity and knew that night was indeed a synchronistic one, that it had been informing my writing all along. And it all jelled.
It informed my novel of linked stories that I wrote and published with Wayne State (Seasonal Roads) in a big way, but I think it all has been leading me to writing my fantasy novel and exploring real-life synchronistic events of my own life. Writing fantasy is more fun and less “too-too high brow” and has been a nice change–even though my nephew says I’m still writing “literary.” I have to argue all time change movies are written in a literary style because they deal with physics on some level: Time Traveler’s Wife, Back to the Future, Somewhere in Time, Sliding Doors--I could go on and on. I am introducing Jung’s dream-life as vehicle in my new novel, so I guess you could include Wizard of Oz in that list and what makes it particularly more commercial than a novel based totally on physics.
I have my novel roughed out and need to get revising, but have been putting it off (as the dogs in my dreams indicate). So I am reading today, re-acclimating myself to the novel and will get on with things.
Have you been ignoring some skill or something you were “meant” to do? Tell me about it.
Dreams: It seems I dreamed I was having chemotherapy for something other than cancer. I’m not sure what I thought about that. Then my dream switched to interacting with a young woman who was so depressed she couldn’t function. I put my arms around her and told her to remember two things: one, that there was always a reason for pain, we just needed to find it (like we know to take our hand off a hot stove) and take that appropriate action, and two, that depression ALWAYS lifts and she should relax and let it do its worst, knowing it was a matter of Time. Then I woke up. I don’t know if it helped her or not. She was earthy looking, blonde, fragile.
Diet: Reading Dr. Mercola this morning was a bit depressing since he claims no-nitrate bacon is just as bad as regular. I’d heard him say this before. It is one of the real joys of the carnivore diet for me. So will have to keep it to family gatherings or when people are here. This includes sausage and lunch meat, of course. BUT I think I can make my own sausage like breakfasts out of plain ground pork that will satisfy! And I will. Save bacon for special. Tonight I’ll do some cheeseburgers, I had some lovely eggs for breakfast and will have some more cheese for a snack, some milk. Always remember, fasting some shuts off MTOR pathway and initiates AMPK (I think those are the initials) and autophagy (body eating old dead cells), so if you do high protein, it’s a must. Plus exercise.
L.E.K. 