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.

[This post is from a 2024 read-along. The remainder of the post has now been placed behind the paywall.]