Sidewalk Oracles: Week 5
Sidewalk Oracles: Week 5
Notes on Week 5 of Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss, Winter 2024
“Oracles will speak to you where you live, through the signs and symbols of the world around you.” 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.
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.
Let the Games Begin!
I don’t know why writing that made me think of the Hunger Games. That is probably not the best lens on this foray into the symbolic? The Trickster may be at play here and there, but one of the things I enjoy about the line of thinking we are pursuing is that it is individual. We are paying attention and contemplating levels of symbol and synchronicity in our own lives. Our answers will be our own.
I have been looking forward to the games (or activities or exercises) in Sidewalk Oracles. I know some of you have already read ahead or finished the book, but I am going to maintain a really leisurely stroll here (following the established reading schedule). I don’t need to be trying 17 things at a time, and I didn’t want anyone to feel like the pace was so fast that there was no opportunity to engage with some of these games, put them in action, and record what happened.
I think the experience will be deeper and richer for the time we spend doing and thinking, letting things simmer and blossom a bit to see what settles and what rises for each of you. (Even if you’ve finished, I hope you revisit the few specific games included each week.)
Some of these games you may find you prefer to others, and some of them may be more applicable to your life (and the way you move through your world) than others. Some of them, you likely already play to some degree.
Limiting this week to just three games allowed me to really think about them.
Walking in Circles
This week, having read about Sidewalk Tarot, when I got ready to go to the pharmacy (the only time I left the house this week), I stuck a small notebook and a pen in my pocket. I was determined to engage with the game while I was out.
As I often do, I took the opportunity to walk around a short loop near the pharmacy. It sits next to a playground, wraps around a baseball field, and backs up to a canyon. There is a point at the far edge of this loop where you can look out across the gap, without realizing there is a gap, at a cluster of houses on a hill in the distance.
I walked, unsure what question I was carrying, but looking and listening. With Sidewalk Tarot in mind, I was looking and listening with a heightened sense of intentionality. I didn’t make a concrete decision about how many “cards” I wanted to pull. I wanted to simply see what I might notice. I had the “one card” perspective in my head, but without having a specific question or issue in mind, this felt more like an exercise in simply being open to the world around me.
I walked, and I jotted down a few things, including things I heard (which I know we will find in an upcoming game). I stood watching some kids swing at a Harry Potter piñata while I made quick, messy notes. When I completed another lap, I stopped again to make a note. (They still hadn’t cracked the piñata.) I wasn’t convinced that any of the small things I noticed were of real import, but it felt like I was gathering clues, and I liked that for the simple observational quality of the exercise. (Walking and making lists like this is something I often find meaningful and reflective. In those times, I record everything. On this day, I was being selective, not simply list making but symbol gathering.)
Reassured that I had a pocketful of jigsaw puzzle pieces to ponder, I walked around the loop again. As I approached the back edge where a small footpath leads to the canyon, there was no one else around, so I stopped, as I sometimes do, to take a photo of the gap. In varying lights and varying degrees of fog, the view through the trees changes. The sky is always different. The light is always different. I shifted my phone to black and white and stood still to snap a photo.
Just as I got ready to take the photo, a dog ran into the frame. This is a field used as a dog park by many, so dogs are not rare. But I am not overly trustful of dogs off leash. When there are dogs loose in the field, I often don’t walk the back edge at all, making half-circles instead. This dog had run up from the canyon. Fluffy and gray and white, it ran into my field of view and plopped down in the grass, a part of my photo. It rolled over on its back. Then it got up, walked as if to look out over the gap, just as I was doing. Then it turned and ran toward me.
With Sidewalk Tarot in my head, I couldn’t help but wonder at this dog having intruded on my thoughts (and photo) at this minute.1
Of all the things I saw or heard and recorded that day, the appearance and behavior of the dog felt most unexpected and most meaningful, but if it meant something, I still don’t know.
Chapter 4: The Book of Sidewalk Oracles
Chapter 4 contains 17 games, different ways of inviting or paying attention to oracles. These are the games Moss puts forth as tools for being better attuned to symbol and synchronicity. This week, we read about the first three games.
Game #1: Play Sidewalk Tarot: This game involves looking and seeing. You can go out with a question in mind, or you can go without thinking about anything specific, and you see what you notice.
“The second way is to let the world set a theme or pose a question for you. All this requires is being ready to receive, and allowing enough space in your mind and in the physical structure of your day, to notice what the world is giving you. The oracle may speak to you in the voice of a bird or a backfiring car or words overheard from a stranger. It may give you an image in the logo on a delivery truck or the pattern of clouds or the currents in water. It may appeal to your sense of smell, giving you a breath of perfume that connects you to a person at a distance, or a rank odor that tells you that something is rotten. In unsought, spontaneous ways, the oracle of the world may jab a message at you by giving you a repeated symbol or situation, coming at you again and again like a recurring dream, until you realize that you must figure out what is going on and do something about it since action as well as understanding is required.” (86)
In describing Sidewalk Tarot, Moss talks about forming your question, carrying a thought with you that you are mulling, pondering, or stewing, that for which you are seeking guidance. (This is something I’ve been thinking about a great deal as I examine my own movements.)
“Do you have a question or theme in your life on which you would like help or guidance right now? Then try to state that theme as clearly as possible…. Don’t make a whole laundry list of themes. That confuses the oracle. Select one theme that has some real energy for you. The game now is to be ready to receive the cards that the world will deal you.”
You can choose the time, the window during which you will be actively looking and will “count” what you see, a process that mirrors those visiting the hillside shrine of Inari near Osaka, Japan.
“You may decide to play with just one card from the world. This means that you are willing to receive the first striking or unexpected thing that enters your field of perception as an immediate response to your intention for guidance.”
Or, you can plan to gather three cards. Or, you can plan to gather them all (as I did on my walk).
Moss describes Sidewalk Tarot as something he uses daily, deliberately entering the mindscape for the game the first time he leaves the house. “I make it my intention… to gather three observations from my external environment. These do not need to be extraordinary in any way, just things that pop up on the street — a kid’s chalk drawing on the sidewalk, the logo on a van, a dropped coin, an abandoned shoe.” (90)
Game #2: Walk a Dream: Continue to walk and explore and ponder a dream and notice when the dream begins to play out in the real world or when fragments of the dream begin to appear.
Game #3: Keep Your Secret Book: Keep a notebook in which you log the symbols and signs you encounter and collect. (I can imagine we might fill stacks and stacks of books in this process.) Most of us are already note takers and journal keepers, so this emphasis on recording is comfortable and familiar, not revolutionary. This chapter may nudge you to pull out a separate blank book, however, specifically for the purpose of tracking signs and symbols (or your adventures with kairomancy). Moss clearly separates this kind of logging from other forms of journaling and writing, this “secret book” being an inventory and record of signs and symbols.
This is a book whose meaning becomes more clear and richer as the details are amassed and as layers of recurrence, pattern, and familiarity begin to take shape.
“Your journal is where you will record the clues and symbols the world around you and the world of dreams are giving you. It is the database where you will amass evidence of the objective reality of phenomena like precognition and telepathy. It is the chronicle where you will track the themes and symbols that recur in your life. It is the mirror that will show you where you tend to make the same moves, and perhaps the same mistakes, when your life loops around to a familiar choice or temptation, and where you manage to escape the tedious circle of repetition and rise on the spiral path of personal evolution. Your journal will become the best encyclopedia of symbols you will ever find. It will also become your very best book oracle.” (99)
As someone always jotting things down, there is obvious allure in thinking of keeping a “secret book” in which the symbols of the world, as they have presented themselves to each of us, are individually recorded, sketched, scrawled, and annotated.
Moss does note that he types his notes later, storing them digitally. (I was glad to see this practical step.)2
A Good Game
Sidewalk Tarot may be all I needed for this book, although I now feel doubly armed with the idea of the “Secret Book.” Keeping a journal wasn’t something I needed to be told to do, but I like the framing of it, the elevation of it to something that has meaning and purpose in terms of providing and fueling personal insight now and in the future.
Sidewalk Tarot is, in many ways, something I think I have dabbled in, but the game, as Moss outlines it, has a nice structure to it. These contours help give shape to the process and have given me new understanding as well as a sense of freedom. This is a game I can play. I am also reassured by the simple knowledge that this is a game others also play.
It may very well be a game.
We may very well simply interpret whatever we see to fit the narrative we are making or provide the answers we are hoping to receive. This doesn’t discount the value to me. We are always making meaning, making decisions, trying to understand current moments, and deciding which direction to turn. We can make a pro and con list and study it, and we still may end up choosing the one with the most cons. We may follow our heart, our gut, or our intuition. Adding the appearance of a bubble or a bird or a license plate or a fluffy dog to the process of understanding and making choices about our movements in the world…doesn’t seem at all out of place to me.
Whether these symbols are provided by something larger or simply moments of our attention, moments in which we suddenly focus and see a detail here, a flash of red there, the sliver of sun through the clouds on a morning before rain…is a question we can’t answer. It is one I enjoy pondering, but I am comfortable with the reality that either could be true.
Your Thoughts?
Thank you for sharing your comments last week and for engaging in discussion with me and others reading this book. My goal in reading (and in leading this read-along) is not to come up with absolutes or provide answers. I want to read and engage in ways that have meaning to me personally, and I enjoy knowing others are doing the same. Thank you to those who are openly thinking about the book and your own experience with symbol and synchronicity.
Enjoying a book doesn’t have to mean that it gave you answers or revealed the secrets of the world to you.
How did you respond to the games we read about this week from Chapter 4?
Did anything happen this week that you want to share in the context of your reading?
Have you found yourself noticing your dreams differently in recent weeks (or trying to)?
There are a number of things I am still mulling as I continue through the book, things I will talk about at other points or at the end as part of my final thoughts.3
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The photos are all dark, the dog caught in the foreground shadow because I wasn’t taking a photo of a dog.
Bibliomancy is mentioned here, but I left it out of the discussion today. I think it may come up again.
As I’ve mentioned to some of you in comments, one thing I expect to be a talking point (for me) will be related to the need to “get out” (or not). It’s something I keep swirling around, and I imagine it will probably really come into play before the games are over.
Another thing that I expect to talk more about at some point is related to the specificity of the question we carry. This comes up this week in the text, and it is something I have been thinking about (although I’m only going to skirt the issue this week).
Love this Amy! I am not a fan of off-leash dogs in public spaces either and agree that is one charming mug- love to see the photos. My dedicated “sidewalk Oracle” walk involved a furry friend as well. During our time in Alabama, chipmunk sightings have been rare and cherished. In the late fall we noticed one had made a burrow under the sidewall at the top of our street- and we’d only see him occasionally- but it was the most consistent chipmunk we’d ever spotted. Onset of winter, many hard freezes here. Everytime I cross that sidewalk I hope he’s sleeping snuggly and staying warm. So on my walk this week- consciously looking for the sidewalk oracles- on a nice sunny day- who do I spy from so far off? I think surely it’s a leaf or branch, surely it is my willful imagination. It was him! Chipper and upright and having survived the winter so far under his little roof of concrete. It had special meaning for me in the context of the question I had in my heart- namely - can we brave the expense and struggle it will be to move home to California to be near my parents. I’ll tell you the last time my parents visited us here in Alabama in the fall - we went for a walk at the lake and we saw probably three dozen chipmunks out in the woods. I had never seen so many at one time. And with that question in my heart I saw our chipmunk friend right at the top of our street in January no less. Maybe it’s a yarn but I can see the connection between my sidewalk Oracle and the thoughts that weigh my mind.
The first game, Sidewalk Oracle, is the only game. I play it every day. The Universe brings me little gifts and helps me frame photos, many of which end up on my own Substack. Illustration is harder, having to juggle pencils or crayons on my lap in the power chair. Not comfortable with that yet.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been remembering my dreams in recent years. I used to keep copious notes, but now I only vaguely recall memes and themes, breaths of memory. Instead of walking with dreams, I move in my own meditative state. Having a clear mind is easy for me, and I am receptive.
Remember that her off-leash dog was a plot point in “Look Again,” by Elizabeth Trembley, which I think you recommended, Amy. I appreciated that set of photos, thanks.