Sidewalk Oracles: Week 1

Notes on Week 1 of Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss, Winter 2024

“We can also walk the roads of everyday life as conscious dreamers, learning to recognize how the world is speaking to us in signs and symbols, and how a deeper order of events may reveal itself through the play of synchronicity.” Robert Moss, Sidewalk Oracles

A Willingness to Walk the Path

Today kicks off our shared reading of Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.

Each week, I will post some general discussion, reflection, and thoughts on the chapter or “games" from the week. You are invited to share your experience with this book in the comments section.

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Basic Information

📌 We are reading Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.

📅 The reading timeline outlines a slow reading (with weekly discussion posts) for anyone who wants to read along.

🍥 I encourage you to go into this reading with an open mind and a willingness to consider what is being described/discussed.

🧵 I use the comment area for discussions rather than a chat thread. Neither would be private because this read-along is free to everyone. You are invited to comment on comments and interact with those reading together.

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Getting Started and Week 1

Welcome to the Sidewalk Oracles read-along! I am happy you are here, and thank you to Adah for recommending this title to me in a comment one Sunday. I might never have stumbled over this book, so that feels, itself, like a moment of serendipity.

Leading up to this start, I’ve talked a bit about where I’m coming from in thinking about this book. I will be inviting you, below, to think about where you find yourself in this moment in time. Who are you as you begin this book? What is your relationship with this subject matter? Where do you fall on the spectrum of acceptance and disbelief?

The idea of this book has grabbed me, I think, because I do talk a lot about serendipity, symbols, and moments where I feel the universe is speaking to me. At the same time, my practical nature makes me sometimes awkwardly hold all of that a bit off to the side. I find myself torn.

In the month I’ve had this book checked out, waiting, it’s been like a beacon on the table. Something about the cover speaks to me. I want to dive in. I’m hopeful. I feel like I’m needing something, and maybe this book is a place to begin. What I’ve been asking myself is “what happens if I go all in and let myself really embrace and give voice to this part of me?”

That’s my entry point. It feels vulnerable. It feels a bit confusing. The part of me that thinks all of this may be silly is really strong.

In the past week, two things happened, two things and a conversation.

First, the lights came on. I woke one morning last week around 5AM. It was too early, too cold, and too dark. I was too tired to get up, but I couldn’t go back to sleep. I grabbed my Kindle and read a few pages and then dozed off. I woke again just a few minutes later to find the Christmas tree lights were on. The room was bright, bathed in golden lights that had come on all by themselves.

I puzzled over the how of it. I got up and fished around for the remote control on the table. (Nothing was pressing on it.) I turned the lights off. It took some doing. I had to practically stand on top of the plug to get the sensor to register and shut them off. Feeling the randomness of the moment, I grabbed my phone to make a note. I fell back to sleep only to open my eyes maybe twenty minutes later and find the lights were on again.

There was something magical in the moment and something insistent in the fact that they were on the second time. We have a small space. I’m sleeping on the couch, and my mom (who is visiting) is on a blow-up bed in the same room. The logical part of me can explain what might have happened, but it’s never happened before. In the three years the tree has been up with these lights, they have never spontaneously come on in the middle of the night. While I can see how it possibly could have happened, I don’t really know. I don’t think they can be turned on from the plug. I think they require the remote. 

The lights that morning were unsettling. They were almost too bright. We were in the middle of something happening in those days, and the way I see moments like that, it could have meant something. I felt sure it meant something.

It also felt directly relevant to my mindspace getting ready for this book.

It was later the same day that I saw my next symbol. I was leaving the hospital to get the car and circle around to pick up my mom who had gone with me to visit. (The hill of the road is steep.) It was dusk, minutes before the descending dark, and I was hurrying down the sidewalk to the bottom of the hill, the sky an almost colorless gray. I was still midway down the hill when I saw through the trees that there was a bird perched on some kind of ornamental fixture on top of the house at the bottom of the hill, across the street, on the corner. It was clearly a raven or a crow. It was still and stood out starkly against the pale sky.

I watched it as I continued down the hill, a silhouette against the pale sky. It stayed in the same place as I continued down the hill. I started to think it might not be real. As I got to the bottom, it let out a cry.

Raven or crow, it doesn’t really matter. Back in June, on my birthday, there was also a crow.

Surely that day, I was aware of the two oddities in the day, but if I had told you about this today, I would have said the raven on the house was a day or so after the tree lights. That’s how I presented the sequence when I first started writing. Stopping to think through the timeline, the few days of the week, I checked my notes and discovered the proximity in time, both of these events happening on the same day, early morning and, oddly, almost twelve hours later at dusk. 

The conversation happened a few days later. I was at a nearby lake, a favorite spot, taking a walk on New Year’s Day. Thinking about this read-along starting, I said something about how I should be looking for this or that to appear, and it would be a sign. That spiraled into a bit of a conversation in which I ended up feeling silly. My attempts to articulate why signs and symbols can seem to have meaning, why it is “okay” if we look at things like that and interpret them as meaningful and construct meaning, and why the alternative (not believing in signs and symbols) doesn’t strike me as better…. fell flat. It was a disappointing moment.

“Here’s something else I’ve learned: The world speaks to us through coincidence and chance encounters. It’s a kind of magic.” (6)

It was an unusual, and short, conversation. I ran into the wall a time or two, and, feeling protective of my bit of whimsy, I changed the subject. I hadn’t been looking for buy-in, but I was surprised by the absolute rejection of my own openness. I felt like I was making a game of reality in ways that were completely artificial. I don’t expect people to agree with me, but I always hope we can respect that there are many ways to see, seek, interpret, and navigate the world.

Surprised to feel a bit stung, I dropped the subject completely, unwilling to have this fragile ball of hope I’m carrying be dinged further. I know it may already be a bit out of tune. We continued walking, rounding the far side of the lake, and immediately spotted a night heron and something else I couldn’t identify. (There had, of course, been tons of ducks and gulls and coots and turtles. The night heron and the mystery brown heron-looking bird next to it were more rare sightings. There was another, too, something turned away from us that looked almost like the top of a broken tree trunk, except it kept shifting its back feathers. I still don’t know what it was. It might have been another night heron from behind. I pointed it out, and someone else on the path was also looking and replied, “that’s a bird?”)

The trees with the great blue heron nests were empty.

These things set the stage for today.

Sidewalk Oracles, Chapter 1

In the first chapter, Moss offers three stories as examples of moments of synchronicity: 

1. Encountering (and helping) a young man at the Firkin and Fox, a bar in the airport

2. “He can’t kill us both at the same time,” a random comment that helped him resolve a struggle he was having thinking about committing to two projects

3. Backyard squirrels at night and a midnight walk to the dog park where he encounters another lone walker who recites a Yeats poem with him

Moss introduces the concept of synchronicity and then “kairomancy,” a term he uses to describe the process of navigating life by synchronicity.

“Kairomancy is the art of divination through special moments.” (13)

Here are some phrases, concepts, words, and quotes from this chapter:

• “Synchronicity is when the universe gets personal.”

• “When we pay attention, we find that we are given signs by the world around us every day.” (2)

• “Beyond these signs, we find ourselves moving in a field of symbolic resonance that not only reflects back our inner themes and preoccupations, but provides confirmation or course correction. A symbol is more than a sign: it brings together what we know with what we do not yet know.” (2)

• Reincidence … “riffs of coincidence” (3)

• “This book provides roadside assistance for the conscious traveler in the dream of waking life. We will learn how the world is speaking to us in many voices through signs and symbols and synchronicity, and how we can bring from these many voices guidance, joy, and a deeper sense of what it is all about.” (3)

• Kledon… “a sound or speech coming out of silence or undifferentiated noise.” (6-7). Common form: something you overhear.

• The Yeats Code (referenced as something he was working on cracking)

• Movie Interstellar

• The role of the Trickster

• “You need a poet in your soul… because navigating by synchronicity requires you to grow your ability to recognize what rhymes in a day, or a week, or a life.” (15)

The “You” Factor

“You will not find magic in your world unless you carry magic within you.” (15)

This feels important, this need to take ownership of the journey, be present, open, and looking. This takes me back to the potential power of affirmations and the sense that dismissing them out of hand may simply be closing off the door to manifesting what we want, dream, wish. If we are closed to the signs and symbols, to the moments of serendipity or synchronicity, what is left?

Some will say, coincidence.

If we ignore and reject the signs around us, or simply close our eyes, what wonder and mystery are we missing, failing to realize that the answers may have been there all along?

In summarizing how he feels he has tried to simplify the book, Moss writes this intriguing line:

“The path will never be straight, not in the territories we are entering here. Gorgeous hybrids, flying fish, and great felines with golden eyes will prowl at the jungle edge and shimmer overhead.” (16)

Coincidence or synchronicity? This book will be taking us down a path of seeing moments of random happenstance (or coincidence) through a lens of synchronicity.

What will we each discover in this process?

Your Thoughts?

The first chapter is short, so this week, I really just want to open things up for people to respond to the first chapter and to really think through where they are at the outset of this book. That might include:

• Where you feel you fall on a spectrum between being open to things that fall into this kind of “symbols are all around us” mindset and thinking this is all a bit hokey (or “woo-woo”)

• What you feel you are looking for or needing

• What drew you to the book

• What you hope to get out of this reading

• What did you think of the three stories shared? Did anything jump out at you while reading these? (I think it will be important to remember that what is a sign or symbol to one person may not make sense from the outside. This is a personal path!)

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