Sidewalk Oracles: Week 6

Notes on Week 6 of Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss, Winter 2024

“As you will discover once you become a long-term journal keeper, your private journals become the best encyclopedia of symbols you will ever read and much, much more.” 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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Beware of Falling Books, Week 6

In week 6 of our Sidewalk Oracles read-along, we read about Games 4-6 in Chapter 4.

This was a light week. We covered another three games from the 17 games that Moss outlines. As we move through these games, of course, we are building a repository of frameworks for looking, seeing, and gathering symbols. Week to week, you may be adding new tools to your bag. You may find that some seem more relevant or applicable to you than others.

Two of the games this week involve books and finding meaning or intuiting a message from randomly selected words on a page. The other game involves gathering words or sounds that you hear.

I was only out one time this week in between writing my last set of notes and starting my notes for today. Before I even got to the library, which is where I had headed to work (and walk) in advance of a storm, I was at a traffic light, a very long intersection, and I noticed numbers on the concrete pillar of a street light in the median. Then I noticed three numbers on a license plate in front of me and then noticed the numbers on another nearby car, the same numbers in a different order. Looking around, I saw two of those three numbers on two other cars. I was so struck by this, by the oddity of these numbers being repeated, that I jotted them down on an index card that I had in the car. The light changed, and I went on. Five sets of three numbers, all similar enough to jump out at me.

After parking, I walked around the block. I had a notebook in my pocket, and I took a number of notes. There were hawks. There were crows. Some things seemed meaningful; others did not.

When I drove home later, I looked at license plates and didn’t see any of those numbers. I looked because I was curious to see if I would spot variations of the numbers again. How random was the experience? I have no idea what those numbers mean or what significance they might have. It was a really strong recurring pattern in the span of 2 to 3 minutes.

I’m left now with this scrawled index card with five three-digit numbers and a hazy feeling of being at the stop light and seeing the same numbers everywhere I looked.

Continuing with the “Games” for Kairomancy

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 games 4-6.

Game #4: Listen for your daily Kledon: Pay attention to what you hear when you are moving through your day, whether it is a fragment of conversation or a lyric or the sound of birds or something else in the environment. Moss specifically positions this as the first noise you hear or the first noise that breaks through silence.

“Be alert, as you go about your world, for the first sounds that come out of silence or out of the shapeless noise of a city street. This may be a snatch of conversation, someone singing along with whatever’s playing through his headphones, the sound of an animal, the call of a bird.” (107)

(I think I prefer to just listen for the overheard bits and pieces or the sounds that break through my awareness… at any point. If you are carrying a question, of course, you might be intentionally listening, your timeframe being more specific. You might be listening for an answer.)

Game #5: Do it by the book: This involves opening a book and randomly pulling a phrase or a line or a message from the page. You can choose a book deliberately, or you can choose a book at random.

“When I open an old journal at random, I often find, in a dream report from years before, clues to a situation that is manifesting in my current life. I am reminded of connections with other lives and parallel worlds and with gods, spirits, and others.” (115)

Game #6: Play with the shelf elves: This one is similar to the “do it by the book” game, the shift being that we should pay attention when books suddenly come to our attention. (This mysterious finding and awareness of books has been an important part of my routine library visits in recent years. When I first read this game, it didn’t seem relevant or overly distinct to me. But then I thought about a number of experiences I’ve had at the library. I definitely know this game.)

A Library Wander

I think many of us felt that the sidewalk tarot game is something that we already do, and I think the same thing may be true about listening for and noticing Kledons. Something you “heard” or “overheard” is something we often record in our journals. It is something Lynda Barry includes in her Syllabus guidelines for quadrant journaling, too. You likely already gather bits of conversation and sound this way, but I think reading about it as a tool makes me even more aware of these sounds, not simply as something observational, something I might note and write down as part of the fabric of the moment, but as something that may have meaning.

Last week, I jotted down several fragments of conversation at the park. This week, at the library, none. Moss sets these games up as things you should expect to fulfill. I don’t know that I expect such high frequency. Sometimes I find myself looking (or listening) and nothing turns up. Within the context of this book, that would seem disappointing.

I think being practical about what counts and what doesn’t count, for me, is the right approach. It helps keep me grounded.

I did consider the books this week. No books flew off shelves or fell and hit me in the head, but at one point, feeling the week running out (before I needed to show up here with a weekly recap), I decided I should pull a book at random at home and see what happened. That is not as easily done as it sounds. It is far too easy to manipulate the process. I stood looking at the shelves, wondering what I should pull, and trying not to overthink it. (Moss does talk about using a specifically selected book or using a randomly selected book. Either way can work.) I decided to use something from the library stack. I grabbed a book and randomly opened it to a page and, honestly, I didn’t find anything that seemed relevant or meaningful.

Reading back through the game, I see that he says to open to a random page and also randomly point or put your finger down somewhere. That will be the spot to focus on. I tried opening to a random page twice that day (with the same book), and neither time yielded something meaningful. Again, I think the “find symbols at will” element may be overstating things a bit. (It probably wasn’t a good book to use. Or maybe I simply wasn’t open enough.)

One of the nice things about bibliomancy and the book games is that they can be done at any time and at home or in another book-filled space or even with a book you carry along.

I ended up at the library a second time before posting today’s notes, and I spontaneously decided to give the shelf elf game a whirl. After grabbing my books from the hold shelf and picking up a few more from the graphic novel shelf in the teen area, I walked down another aisle, turned around, and, eyes closed, reached up and touched a book: Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World's Most Misunderstood Bird.

I laughed when I saw it. Pigeons? It was right next to some books on hummingbirds and one on crows. There was even a memoir with a magpie and the well known H is for Hawk. There was a Sibley just to the side. But I had reached out and touched a book on pigeons. I didn’t carry the book to a table to look at it. I didn’t have a lot of time, and wanted to sit and write. I felt I had played the game by simply randomly picking the book. (You might think I simply knew what shelf I was in front of, but I didn’t. I couldn’t have told you where the “bird” books were. I knew I was facing the “change your life” shelves and turned away from that to the unknown. My unknown… involved birds. There is something poignant in that.)

Your Thoughts?

I hope if you are still reading along that you are still enjoying the process and the possibility that these games offer. I hope that you are enjoying the heightened awareness and the quest involved in looking and paying attention and gathering details. Even if you already do many of these things, there can still be something nudging about reading a book like this.

I think often we find that even the things we consider habitual can be freshened up and revitalized when we are reading about someone else’s enthusiasm for something or engaging with other people in talking about what they are noticing or seeing or thinking.

Are you still reading along? (I think maybe only a few of us are still reading.) I appreciate those who have been sharing week to week in the comments.

• What did you think of the games this week?

• Did you try any of them (deliberately or by accident)?

• Did you notice anything this week as a result of your heightened awareness and looking?

• Several of you have mentioned dreams (from last week’s games). Are you finding it easier to remember them?

If you are still reading (and reading these notes each week) but not feeling like engaging in the comments, I hope you’ll at least comment to let me know you are reading.

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