Sidewalk Oracles: Week 2

Notes on Week 2 of Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss, Winter 2024

“The word synchronicity speaks only of things that happen at the same time, that are synchronous. But this is not the essence of the phenomenon. The experience of meaningful coincidence is not so much about things happening at the same time as it is about things happening in a special moment or a series of such moments.” Robert Moss, Sidewalk Oracles

A Willingness to Walk the Path

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.

📌 Weekly reading notes and discussion (the timeline links to the weekly posts)

🍥 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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From Within the Fog, Week 2

In week 2 of our Sidewalk Oracles read-along, we read Chapter 2: A Walk Around Jung's Tower. This was a relatively dense chapter, with a character sketch of Jung and Jungian theory and then a trip around the world looking at how synchronicity is understood and how meaning is sought in various cultures and spiritual frameworks.

Tuesday, Jan 9…. It has been a sluggish day. Up at 4AM to take my mother to the airport, the rest of the day has felt a bit off kilter. Work was busy and long. I’ve moved in and out of tasks in a stupor. This is an important week, one that I have to show up for fully and with light. I focused through my day, and yet I have felt submerged, quiet, as if in a space where sound is being dampened, weighed down by the pressure of the air outside, or by fog, or by a blanket of falling snow. When we drove home from the airport, the fog was lower and more dense than it had been on the ride out. The roads, shiny and wet from an unseen rain, cast brilliant red light reflecting from the stoplights on the empty roads.

I know today I feel this sense of daze because of the early morning, the change, the goodbye, the return of reality, the emptied house, the pressures of work. But I feel, at the same time, that I am in this cocooned space, sound dampened, thick fog, and it is somehow related to the reading. (I have had a similar experience with other books. I mentioned The Wander Society last week, for instance.)

I am caught in the heaviness of this shroud of contemplation and reading. The feeling of being “caught up in” is intense. I am walking through a labyrinth, knowing there are logical strategies, always turn left, I believe they say, or maybe it is follow the left wall, but I am caught up wondering how I have been so far afield of so much. How can we reach an age, an age decidedly past middle, and suddenly become aware of so much that it seems we should have been pursuing and perusing all along? Why is the nature of time such that we always must make choices and know that so much will be left untouched, unexplored, undiscovered?

Leave no stone unturned is an impossibility, of course. We pick and choose.

The Rhyming of Things

Chapter 2 of Sidewalk Oracles feels academic in many ways. There is depth and breadth here and little in the way of story (compared to Chapter 1). But there is the idea again of “the rhyming of things.” I am enamored with this phrasing. I feel I can almost touch it. The senses in this haze have already become jumbled.

"Meaningful coincidence has to do with the intersection of timeless forces with the world of time, with the 'understory' beneath and behind the surface events of our lives irrupting into our field of perception. This most certainly produces synchronous experiences. But it can also generate 'rhyming' sequences played out, in dream and in waking, over days, weeks, or years." Sidewalk Oracles (17)

As we continue with the reading, we will get to a series of exercises (or “games”), but I found myself walking around this week looking for symbols, open to seeing, alert for a glint or a sparkle or the flash of a wing.

Several things did emerge, and each time I took note. A few were strong. A few were quiet, almost reassuring in the repetition of pattern and image that I know has accompanied me through the years. Some were subtle, not fully formed. Maybe I was not as open as I thought, or maybe they were simply moments at face value and not moments of sign and symbol.

These are contours of interpretation and deciphering I think we have to continue to parse and mull as we take on this journey, put our feet on the path, and begin walking.

I was looking this week.

• There was a moment with a number that has meaning to me

• There were incredibly stormy seas

• There was a pair of crows that lifted up right next to me with a “caw” that made me jump in surprise

• There were ginkgo, everywhere, and, when I stopped and looked around, a tree still full of yellow leaves

• There were foxes and squirrels

At other times, there was nothing.

Several times, I stopped and thought…. “What am I missing?” “Is there something here that I am overlooking?” “Have I been lost in thought or caught up in simply getting from step to step, finding parking, getting checked in, remembering everyone else’s details, that I missed something?” “There should be something.”

And then, puzzled, I would wonder, as I hurried on with whatever I was doing or wherever I was going, what I was looking for, what answer I am seeking, what question I had put forth. This need for clarity was on my mind this week.

Beyond simply being open, I think clarity and actively looking will be important.

It may be that the sign or answer I seek will literally fall on my head. It may take something that obvious to get my attention. But if I am more proactive in my awareness, maybe more subtle signs are within reach?

I don’t have a background in Jungian theory (or psychology). Similarly, I don’t have knowledge of Tao, I Ching, the Orenda, the Speaking Land, or any of the other cultural beliefs and collective wisdom shared in the tour of East (China), South (Australia), West (Iroquois in America), and North (Iceland) in this chapter. There is so much lore and history and spiritual grounding in these sections, and I know each could be followed much more deeply. We are given a cursory introduction to these approaches and spiritual frameworks, and I have the sense that all play into the version of Kairomancy Moss is going to outline. We will see.

“If you have something to get off your chest, you might take a walk in the woods, not like a duck… but more like a pigeon…. When you are deep enough in your own nature to hear that everything can talk and may also be willing to listen, you say your piece. You make a full confession of whatever troubles you, what you blame yourself for, and what you blame on others. You let it all out. Maybe the beaver in the pond thwacks his tail to show he has heard you. Maybe a leaf blows into your hand. Maybe the world around you is unusually still, holding its breath.” Sidewalk Oracles (38-9)

"Chapter 2, A Walk Around Jung's Tower"

Some of the points from this week:

• "Truth comes with goose bumps"

• The concept of numen (the "presence or blessing of a sacred power, a nod from on high")

• Jung's tower at Bollingen, both the construction and the time Jung spent there

• The story of the block of stone (that was not a triangle) and on which Jung carved (on one side) an eye with Telesphoros¹ (a homunculus),  and words that begin with "Time is a child — playing like a child — playing a board game — the kingdom of the child" (from Heraclitus)

• “So: ‘Synchronicity is a child at play, moving pieces on a board.’ On our side of reality, we see the pieces move, but not the hand that moves them.” (25)

• Tao ("the Way") and I Ching (a divination system with legend linking its origin to the patterns in the cracks of a turtle's shell)

• The I Ching hexagrams (each a stack of six lines, broken or unbroken) and the interplay of earthly, human, and heavenly realms

• "Play is what we must be most serious about. Play in the spirit of the child, who plays without concern for consequences, because the play is the thing." (25)

• The Speaking Land and a system of belief centered around listening to the "inner songs" of the land, the water, birds, and animals

• Orenda, "the power that is in everything and beyond everything" (shared with a story of First Woman falling to Earth and being caught on the wings of great blue herons)

• From Orenda... ask permission and say thank you²

• From Orenda… the importance of prayer and a place you hold special

• Wyrd, "a web of connection, joining everything that happens in this world to movements in other worlds"

Oh, but I was wrong.... there are stories here, including the fact that the author recounts dreams in which he has talked with Einstein.

I felt ripples of surprise as I read this passage:

"Einstein instructs me that this is how the unfolding of events in time actually takes place: not in the serial fashion that is a concession to the limited human mind, but in the release of probability bundles, packages of time + energy whose contents will be unfolded over a period." Sidewalk Oracles (45)

(Last weekend, I wrote about unfolding. Somehow running into this word here, several days later, struck me as important. Of course it is not the rarest of words, but something about the timing of reading this seems poignant. This is, again, a reminder of how individual our kairomancy will, of course, be.)

Jung’s Tower

I really enjoyed the notes on Jung and on the building of the tower(s) at Bollingen. I especially enjoyed the discussion of the cube that was supposed to have been triangular and the carvings Jung added to three of the sides. Both the cube and the house at Bollingen surprised me when I saw photos, neither being quite what I imagined from reading this chapter.

A carving, with homunculus and quote, on one side of Jung’s cube. (Philipp Roelli)

Carl Jung’s Bollingen Tower (Wikipedia)

Your Thoughts?

Thank you for sharing your comments last week. It was really good to get a sense of where everyone stands and where we are coming from as we start this book. This week, there is a great deal of deeply spiritual talk, and I expect this may be uncomfortable for some for a variety of reasons. I also fully expect that some of you may know a great deal about one or more of the systems of belief discussed this week.

• How did you respond to Chapter 2?

• Are you familiar with any of these systems of belief?

• Did you have any aha moments this week while reading?

• Do you feel yourself looking more closely (or hopefully) around as you move throughout each day?

“On our side of reality, we see the pieces move, but not the hand that moves them.” Sidewalk Oracles (25)

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1. In looking up Telesphoros (or Telesphorus), many sources mention him in the context of “healing” or convalescence.

2. I have something to share related to this section on expressing thankfulness and prayer. It is almost an afterthought that I realized something in my book is related to this chapter. I was going to try to fit it in at the last minute, but I think I will hold it for Sunday (or else next week). I just wanted to note that a “note” does belong here.