Power in Visualization or Vivid Imagination

I remember another moment from childhood with a crisp visvidness. It was perhaps the first time I can remember feeling astonished by being met with an expression of the metaphysical theorys my young mind was working on.

My mother and I were coming out of a hardware store in the Summer, and there was a sidewalk sale. It was the early eighties, and in the small suburban town I was in, this was almost something of a social event. There was a vendor with cotton candy. There were tables of stickers and toys and other things for very low prices. I'm sure there were hotdogs. I remember that there were games. One of them involved spinning a roulette wheel after guessing a number. If it landed on your number you won a prize. I wanted the little stuffed puppy, and badly. I guessed my favorite number, and the roulette wheel spun round and round. In my mind, I VIVIDLY IMAGINED that ball landing in the numbered spot I wanted. Just as the picture was totally clear, the spinner stopped. On my number. I got the stuffed puppy.

My imaginary friend said “ Well, now that you know how that works, life is going to get extremely interesting. “

I was about seven, and I still remember that moment very clearly. It's curious, the way such things come so naturally to children. I think there really must be something to the idea that children have not been taught to believe that magic isn't real yet, that their ideas are not steeped in the knowledge of a firm set of rules for reality, and that their experiences of fairytale stories and superhero cartoons in fact sttep them in the idea that magic really is real and the adults don't get it. That in fact is why Peter and Wendy didn't want to grow up- they didn't want to loose the land of make believe and the feeling that it has a certain kind of reality to it.

25 years later, I'm more rather than less sure that what we believe and dream are possible, and how we think on those things, has a -dramatic- effect on the courses and pathways of our lives. Whether we know it or not.

Serindipity and Connectivity

See, now I know that “The Goddess” or “The Divine” or “The connective forces of the Universe” or “Neture” or “Quantum Physics” works in really fracking Mysterious ways, Ways beyond my comprehension, but not occasionally, my delight. Of course I always knew that, but this one made me smile.

Once upon a time, in another life, when I was about 19 I worked for the Ohio Renaissance fair. I was living in my very first apartment in Detroit, managing a retail art store, and driving back and fourth to this Renaissance festival in Ohio on the weekends. Among other things on my adventures there, I got to begin to learn sword fighting, got to wear an amazingly boned and tailored Elizabethan bodice and dress, sold pewter jewelery, and made ridiculous sums of money for a nineteen year old hippy. I did one cool thing then that only 2 other people knew I was involved in- I started writing notes from “the merry little elves”, purchasing roses, and sending them one by one to random strangers that appeared to deserve in intriguing random reason to smile. The lady who lost her kids and spend hours waiting at the gate, the tired shop keep, the boy with the broken heart- all got these random single roses and notes. It was a cute little way to make people smile, and it was fun to be in cahoots with the rose seller, my liaison in the flower running business.

I made many cool friends there, and lost track of all of them in the set of moves and life changes over the following decade. While working on my blogs one day I ran across someone else's post that mentioned a dream with me in it.... err...on some random blog. Of course I had to look, and couldn't immediately figure out if it was about me or about someone with the same name, but it sure sounded like me. And then, this person starts talking about New Orleans?

Turns out it was one of the folks I was friends with way back then. He wrote me back after I commented to him, and how cool! Apparently I had a conversation with him about Paganism -that- long ago during the summer we were hanging out, and it affected his life positively enough that he still remembered me all these years later; and somehow also wound up living in New Orleans at some point in his journeys. Very interesting. It really goes to support my theory that there is some connective force in the world that moves many of us along the same pathways.