Incognito: Costumes and Other Cheap Thrills

Gilda from Planet Glitz

© 2008 – 20013 by Joyce Mason

All Rights Reserved

During October, The Radical Virgo is hosting some of my favorite posts from my other blog, Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights. See announcement. 

I have always loved costumes and reported in a previous post my penchant for getting up like Auntie Mame, the Purple People Eater, and a Christmas Tree, among other alter egos.

As most of you know, my first mystery novel, coming out next month, is set at a costume affair called The Crystal Ball. It’s the silver anniversary of a longevity organization in San Francisco. The revelers are invited to come as you will be in the next 25 years. You have no idea how much fun I’m having with that! I can invent costumes without regard to the problem I have in real life—mechanical execution. For example, Micki Michaels, the protagonist and head of IOPEA, the  Immortalists on Planet Earth Association, attends the bash as a DNA molecule. That one was a lot easier to pull off in print than in person. As to the rest of the party-goers, think the bar scene in Star Wars and a lot of other highly original characters.

What is it about costume parties, costume balls, and dressing up that gives us a cheap thrill like no other? In fact, the longstanding costume shop from the hippy dippy heyday of Sacramento is called Cheap Thrills. It remains a local cultural icon.

Psychology of Costumes
 
No question in my mind will remain unanswered a click away from Google. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to know that our choice of costume says something about us. However, I found a fascinating exercise proposed for teachers of clinical psychology. In a way, that’s all of us. Life is the clinic! The exercise: (1) Write down costumes you have worn in the past, (2) Write the costumes you’d like to wear in the future—then, (3) Let others in a class setting (or a gathering of family or friends) tell you what costumes they’d choose for you. Do I want to know?

I even found suggested costumes for introverts! Again, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that introverts don’t like being the center of attention, but certain costumes are easier to hide behind than others. Or bestow a bit of of the brazen. And for those of you who want some costume interpretations without thinking too hard, click here for some expert opinions from a psychologist.

My Stab at the Costume Exercise
 
1. Costumes Past: You already know I’ve been Auntie Mame, the Purple People Eater, a cosmic cowgirl, and a Christmas tree--and (pictured) Glitta from the Planet Glitz in a Golden Galaxy, dripping gold, not 14-carat.

2. Costumes Future: I decided I had to write down my pure desires, regardless of how ridiculous I might look in these get-ups at my current age, weight, etc. Try not to laugh too hard: trapeze artist, ballerina, CSI (complete with disposable gloves and that nifty specimen collection kit), and a private eye (beige trench coat and sunglasses). I suppose these all make sense, as I try to keep my balance while navigating the mysteries of life.

3. How My Friends Would Dress Me Up. Several of them were game! I just sent them an e-mail. Here’s are some of the surprising results with my parenthetical reactions:

• I could see you in a Dorothy costume with cute little Toto in tow. (I hope it’s only my wide-eyed wonder of a child and my tendency toward glitzy accessories. I’d kill for those sparkly red shoes!) Yes, plus your persistence to get to your goal and help get others there, too, and to overcome obstacles and pick up friends along the way that are definitely not mainstream thinkers… which is a good thing! All of the Joseph Campbell mythic journey is wrapped up in the one little story... you’re living it!
• I am not sure what costume I can see you wearing, but one of my favorite all- time costumes is a clear trash bag filled with colored balloons and the person inside wearing a leotard and tights in a bright color – and they are a bag of Jelly Bellies! (You were channeling! I love Jelly Bellies!)
• Don’t laugh…I can see you in an Elvira costume. Also, Lily Tomlin as the little girl with the big lollypop. (I’m nothing if not versatile.)

 Now, don’t you just have to try this for yourself?

All-Time Favorite Costume Ideas and Incidents

I tend to be most impressed with costumes that are objects of some sort. I think it’s much easier to portray a person—I already am one—than a thing. Morphing into an animated object takes real talent. One costume that caught my eye was someone in a paper box crafted as a traffic light, complete with ovals of changing colors—Go, Caution, STOP!

Here’s my most hilarious costume incident. Our neighbor down the street, a fun guy, but never known to be on the bold side, showed up early on Halloween night as an adult trick-or-treater. He was wearing one of my coveted costumes—a trench coat—only he had a different job in mind for it. As I opened the door, he ripped opened his coat like the proverbial dirty old man played by Arte Johnson on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. His exposé revealed a large salami and two rounds of cheese hanging from his belt. (He was otherwise fully clothed.)

He got the last surprise when he stepped across the threshold and saw that he had just “exposed himself” to my sixty-something mother-in-law. A proper lady, Mom fortunately had a great sense of humor, but she still couldn’t put Paul at ease, who skulked home, embarrassed about his flashdance.

Probably the most clever costume party I ever heard of was called a Cocktail Party, and it was literal to its name. It happened in Wisconsin in the ‘70s. People came dressed as cocktails. I can only imagine the Harvey Wallbanger. I would have gone as a mint green Grasshopper. There was a Pink Lady, a Tequila Sunrise, and my favorite—six people who walked in together with a big brown box around them, bottle caps on their heads—a six-pack! Contest: Tell me how we’d adapt this to modern day. How would Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, or Charlotte from Sex & the City dress up like a Cosmo? I can’t begin to imagine where this would take one of my favorite bloggers, the Martini Diva, but I know she’ll Comment and tell your herself! (Sex on the Beach-a-tini would, no doubt, be the life of the Cocktail Party!)

Sacred/Secular

Like Day of the Dead that follows it on November 1, Halloween is a mixture of the sacred and secular--of life and death. Overall, the holiday has become highly commercialized and more people, adults included, are into decorating and dressing up. Seasonal costume shops are cropping up on more corners. For those sensitive to it, there is no denying that All Hallow’s Eve is a night where the veil between worlds is thin.

Halloween is a celebration of the hidden mysteries of life and the mystery of our own multifaceted natures—the parts still hidden inside us. As you get ready for this annual night of tricks, sugar rush, and brushing elbows with ghosts and goblins, see what you discover about yourself in the fun, in the disguise—in the touch of the forbidden—in the magic.


~~~

Photo: Joyce as Gilda from the Planet Glitz, some Halloween in the late 1980s.


Are you on The Radical Virgo mailing list? If not, join in the upper right of the sidebar to be part of a drawing on Halloween for a signed copy of Golden Prose & Poetry, which contains Joyce's short-story, "Cruel Embroidery." It reminds some people of a modern-day Salem witch trial, just in time for All Hallow's Eve. 

Finding Love in Later Life--or Whenever Venus Is in the Neighborhood

Article © 2010-13 by Joyce Mason

All Rights Reserved

Authors Note: I promised Radical Readers some relationship material during this foray into Flashbacks and Insights in honor of Sun in Libra. While this article focuses on love on or after the Chiron Return, I think you'll find what I've learned about love, packed into this post, to be ageless wisdom synthesized from the pain and pleasure of being a Venus Girl.

This is the first article I wrote at the request of someone from the Cool Insighter community. Reader JuliaAna asked me to write: *


… a flower essence article for those of us who are older, but have never found the great love of our life and are now, as older women, looking at what is wrong with us and our energy, our projections, etc. … that has kept us from attracting that love we always wanted and still want in our lives. I have never been married, born in ’51. I’m a total romantic, but I have never found a true or great love.

This idea intrigued me. I feel eminently qualified to write it, since I did not reunite with my childhood sweetheart until I was almost 50. Turns out, he was “still the one,” as one of my favorite songs goes, and there is definitely a lot of learning I can share on how that happened for me—and for us. Tim had never married; I was single for most of my adult life, though married previously. What I learned about relationship in-between my first meeting with Tim at ages 12-14 and our reunion, 36 years later, could easily fill several books—and probably will someday. As it stands, this will be a longer than usual post, just to share the key points.

I’ll get to the flower essence question last, but first, I’d like to address some of the issues in JuliaAna’s request.



What’s Wrong with Me?

How many times I asked myself that same question as I, too, longed for the right relationship. This question needs to be balanced with reality and the clear vision of someone who has worked on him- or herself. Are your other relationships good—with friends, colleagues, bosses, and family? If yes, it’s probably “not you.” If you’ve looked deeply into your issues with intimacy, that usually means your Mom and Dad stuff, and feel you’ve done a good job healing them: there is nothing wrong with you.

One thing we often forget to examine is where relationship fits into our priorities. If you have kids from a prior relationship or a high-pressure job, you may need to make space for “romantic” love to enter. This happens on an energy level, and it can be also cured there.

Spend a lot of time envisioning how the right relationship would fit into your daily life. In advance, create the space for it. Nature abhors a vacuum and will fill it. Don’t let other activities take up your relationship space. It may take time to manifest it, but a relationship cannot enter a life with no room for it. You may actually have to allow yourself to feel lonely at times. I don’t mean you literally have to set aside two hours a day where you do nothing but wait for Mr. or Ms. Right… but have time set aside to do things that you can be easily downscale or let go when love arrives.

Being a romantic, in and of itself, can be a handicap in assessing your own role in keeping love at bay. By its very nature, being starry-eyed is not conducive to clear vision. If you work with astrology, we are the Neptune types (I’m one of them) who see the world—and love—through rose-colored glasses. That topic deserves its own section; it is such a stumbling block to finding a mature, lasting relationship.

Gauzy Vision and Other Romantic Handicaps

If you were born between 1942 - 1957, you have a particularly thorny issue with romanticism. We are the Neptune in Libra generation. When we were born, Neptune, which rules projections, dreaminess, and addiction, was in the sign of Libra —relationship, romance, and especially coo-some twosomes. We crave relationship like mother’s milk, but frankly, many of us are bad at it!

Why? That lack of visual clarity and the tendency to project what we want in a man or woman onto every passing could-be lover. More often than not, this results in harsh disappointment. We fall in love with what we think the other person is--and with what could have been between us—if s/he actually were that person. My own pain with just such a relationship took decades to get over. I just couldn’t give up who I thought he was and what we might have had … and I still occasionally catch myself wondering how our strong chemistry might have alchemized each other with more time together. I finally got over him in writing my memoir. I had to face, in black and white, that he was not good to me or for me. I had downplayed his cruelty and inflated his “loving moments”, often barely disguised manipulations, for 30-odd years. There’s a hint here.

Write about your relationships. Make a relationship history journal. Talk about hot flashbacks and cool insights! Patterns will leap off the pages. You’ll discover whatever you’re doing that’s not working with crystal clarity

The Time Factor

It is crucial to uncover as early as possible whether or not a love interest is real or a projection of your own mind. Most romantics don’t like this reminder, but here it is. To know someone takes time. I think it takes a minimum of a year—often longer. I suggest you consider not moving in with someone or commingling assets until a deep trust is established and you have cycled through several of life’s seasons and challenges. Then you’ll have a track record together and know how you both fare for better or worse before you say it—and seal it in ink.

One advantage: If you’re a woman 50 or older, you’re past the ringing alarm on your biological clock. In today’s world, there are few good reasons to hasten marriage. There’s no shotgun in sight. Allow yourself to grow through all the phases of relationship till you’re both ready to take the next natural step. Don’t worry. Don’t hurry. Be happy. And if it turns out in this process you find you’re not with the love of your life, don’t hesitate to move on.

There is more romance and sex going on these days in many senior housing complexes than on many high school prom nights.  Love knows no age limits.

Think you’re running out of time? There’s never any good reason for rushing in, given how painful a wrong decision and the wrong person can make your life.

The Addictive Factor

You don’t have to be born with Neptune in Libra to be a love addict. There are many more astrological signatures and people so inclined, whatever your year of birth. If you can’t live without a relationship or your longing for one makes your life miserable, it’s time to detox. It may take therapy. If it’s a full-blown sex addiction, it may take Sex Addicts Anonymous. It is unwise, unhealthy, and untenable to live a life where you cannot be alone. When you’d rather be in situations that are personally harmful than to be by yourself, please seek help. Even if you think you’re more compulsive than truly addictive—you could really stop if you just break the knee-jerk habit—the sooner the better.

Another sign of an unhealthy relationship to relationship is “trying too hard.” Relationships are like a handful of sand on the beach of time. The more you squeeze (want a relationship desperately); the more it runs through your fingers. The more you can live without it—the cooler you are way with being either single or partnered—the clearer your energy is for the right someone to pick up on your true self. See Your Cosmic Tractor Beam for more on how this energy dynamic works.

Let’s also talk for a minute about what squeezing sand feels like from the other side. Perhaps you’ve experienced someone who is so intensely “into” you before you even have a chance to decide whether you’re that interested. It feels icky and invasive. Too much, too fast, too soon—not conducive to good long-term relationships. Desperation makes would-be lovers run in the opposite direction at break-neck speed, as well they should. You’re in love with love. You don’t even know them. You’re cheating on them emotionally already.

Astrology has helped me more than any other tool to understand my own love addiction and to overcome it. More on that next …

You First, Us Second

If you’ve ever read my post, The Converse Golden Rule, you know I am still in the process of learning to make my needs as important as serving others. I have a lot of Libra planets in my chart, and I speak from the trenches of overcoming the malady, bit by bit.

It was working with my astrological passion, the centaur planet Chiron, when I first “got” why it is so important to become a fully realized individual before stepping into relationship. In the zodiac, the first half of the signs and houses from Aries (1st) to Virgo (6th) are about personal development. In Libra (7th) and Scorpio (8th), we bond with one other. In Sagittarius (9th) through Pisces (12th), we are developing our relationships with many others. (See Wholeness and the Inner Marriage.) You cannot give your Self in relationship until you fully become yourself. Until then, you don’t have your whole self to give.

The best relationships come from two whole people who walk the path of life together. Then, when they give themselves to relationship, they create synergy. The whole is more than the some of its parts. But relationship needs both its parts—two budded individuals.

How I Manifested My Man

1. I followed inner guidance, particularly in a very literal dream that predicted a reunion with Tim.

2. I was at a point where I had accepted I might be single for the rest of my life, and I was OK with it. Tim was in the same place. Consequently, we were both broadcasting the energy of our true selves, which made our energies clear to one another.

3. I had made affirmations recently about what I wanted in a relationship. I was quite specific. I wrote them down, put them in a corner of my office where I could look at them occasionally, but for the most part, I just let go, figuring the universe would handle the details.

4. I gave up wanting to control what this relationship or person “looked like” and figured Spirit knew best. (I had a psychic reading many years ago that foretold my reunion with Tim. I thought the woman was nuts at the time! After several other happy reunions, I was now open to new relationships with people from my past.)

5. I stepped out in faith, took a chance, and contacted him. While I wasn’t sure what the dream meant about reconnecting with Tim—he could be married with five kids—I did “get” that I was to re-encounter my very first boy/girl relationship for some reason. I left the rest up to Higher Power. Quite honestly, I wasn’t sure a man/woman relationship was the reason I was supposed to reconnect with him. I was somewhat surprised when it turned out that way.

I can’t overestimate the importance of Steps 2 and 5. We were both internally in the right place of surrendering a sense of having to have a relationship, but God helps those who help themselves. Tim admits he would have never thought to reconnect with me after all those years. Yet, he was the one who kept all the pictures from our ‘tween-age romance. He was keeping some sort of psychic channel open, even though he didn’t realize it—and it worked!

Once You’ve Got a Hot Prospect

Other than letting it grow into whatever it’s supposed to be—a friendship, romance, marriage, or a brother/sisterly bond—I think there’s a very important question to ask. Do you really like each other?

A good relationship, in my personal experience, is far more about friendship than any other type of love. Yes, I’m a romantic married to a romantic whose goal is to tell me every day that he loves me. Everyday living with its moments of anger, frustration, and annoyance are where you need that romanticism most to remind you why you were drawn to this person in the first place.

I can’t assume because you’re over 50 that you already know this. Physical attraction can so often be mistaken for love. I am embarrassed at how many times I did so in retrospect. There’s nothing like the early months of relationship—hot sex, romance, and your projections going wild all over one another. But basing a long-term relationship on body heat is a big mistake, especially if you don’t bother to find out how you like that person out of bed. With jobs, possibly kids, projects and just the demands of modern life, even people with the world’s biggest libidos are unlikely to spend more than 5 or 10% of their relationship in the bedroom. Why choose a partner based only on that factor?

For some of us, as we age, hormone levels decrease and take the edge off the need to compromise who we are in order to have sex. As a younger woman, I couldn’t count times I didn’t stand up for myself or smoothed over tensions so we’d still “be in the mood” on any given night in any one of my “wrong” relationships. My “loves” were almost always driven by physical attraction first, and everything else second. Hopefully, if your passions haven’t waned even a little, you’ve evolved to the point that the friendship and spiritual aspects of relationship are important to you. That’s when we’re willing to be a lot more discreet about taking that first step into the bedroom or stepping into it anytime later, when things aren’t right between you. Smothering conflict for any reason, including sex, is how you lose your own power in a relationship, bit by bit.

Big hormonal needs as a younger woman took me places I would never have gone with rational forethought. We’re designed that way for perpetuation of the species. But, remember, we’re past child-bearing age. Sometimes, I swear, the oddest combinations of people seem necessary in the short-term for karmic reasons and/or to bring children into the world with a specific genetic make-up. One of the blessings of being over 50 is that there’s no other reason to be in a relationship except for your own reasons. This is liberating!

Help from Our Flower Friends

Because they work on emotions, flower essences are powerful allies in the tricky world of relationship where both head and heart need to be balanced for happiness. Here are some suggestions to match typical issues that come up, especially for mid-life lovers and beyond.

Bleeding Heart (FES) **– Never got over a specific relationship in the past; or having difficulty with a recent relationship that didn’t work out. You haven’t completed grieving. You can’t “move on.”

Swiss Glacier Essence (Ancient Forest) – Melts any hardening that has congealed around the heart, great for people who still bear pain and scars from past relationships who want to heal and open up to love again.


Celtic Healing Springs (Ancient Forest) – Helps us awaken from illusion or preoccupation with our own story. Promotes grounding and wholeness. Good for those trying to be less dreamy about love and open to more grounded, life-affirming relationships.


Self-Heal (FES)– Another good one for past relationship hurts when it’s more a question of the cumulative hurt than one relationship in particular. Still, Self-Heal works well as a “binder” with many other essences and would enhance Bleeding Heart or any of the others in combination.

Impatiens (Bach, Healing Herbs) – Impatient about getting a relationship; trouble trusting the universe to bring it to you when the time is right

Shooting Star (FES) – A sense of alienation and not fitting in, perhaps because you’re single and have many married friends or acquaintances. Feeling you’re “too different” to find the right partner.

Sunflower (FES) – This essences is good if you’ve still got dad issues, but it’s also good for “being you,” that essential pre-requisite for becoming part of a dynamic duo. If you’re concerned about losing yourself or feel yourself slipping in a relationship, a round of Sunflower can put you back on track.

Mariposa Lily (FES) – Often called “mother love in a bottle,” this essence also handles any bottled-up, unfinished issues with your mom. When we are not at peace with our primary nurturer, assuming Mom held that job, it’s hard to nurture—or be nurtured—by others in a loving relationship.

The Monkeyflowers (FES) work on fears of intimacy. Try Pink Monkeyflower when you’re afraid to tell someone you’re true feelings or feel too vulnerable to take the risk. Sticky Monkeyflower is better when the fear of intimacy is specifically sexual, whether from fear of getting too close or past traumatic experiences involving sexuality.

Crab Apple (Bach, Healing Herbs) may stave off feelings of fading beauty or not feeling “enough” as you look for love in midlife or beyond.

Clematis (Bach, Healing Herbs) - Good choice, if you’re still too dreamy and romantic and your feet aren’t on the ground. Especially good to take at the beginning of a relationship where you think s/he might be the one.

Love: “Reality, What a Concept!” ~ Robin Williams

While my current marriage certainly has its shot of Neptune and romanticism, it is as real as it gets as far as the gifts of mature relationship. We are honest, loving, faithful, and loyal as puppy dogs to each other. (I shouldn’t have gotten so mad when we were kids and they called it puppy love. Puppies have some great qualities that make love work. And let’s face it, licking someone’s face can’t hurt!)

Our marriage isn’t as wild or heart fluttering as some of the romances of my youth; yet, it is so much more. It’s grounded, real, there for me—and something I would never trade for another one of those high adventures. We say, “I like you” almost as often as “I love you.” We are friends and family to each other.

Thanks to Hollywood, we are sold a bill of goods on what love is. To be truly happy, we have to stop making relationship “our everything” and become more realistic in our expectations. Fulfillment is your job, not your partner’s, although s/he may be part of what makes you happy. Love has many forms, and it’s probably the most important aspect of life where we shouldn’t put all our cookies in one basket. Imagine the pressure of being someone’s everything! No wonder the starry-eyed get dumped.

Sometimes we don’t even know it when real love is staring us in the face. Good example: If you caught the PBS Masterpiece Classics version of Jane Austen’s Emma. Who did Emma end up with? I’ll avoid a spoiler in case you haven’t seen it yet and still want to—but you can be sure it wasn’t the most exciting guy by Hollywood standards, but rather the one she never realized she had slowly but surely fallen in love with. It was predictable from the earliest scenes, yet fascinating to watch unfold. How many of us are missing someone right under our noses?

Speaking of noses, taking your rose-colored glasses off yours, now and then, might be the best thing you could ever do to find true love. This is especially true as you become more mature and more in touch with what makes life joyful. Take notice of people with similar values, looking in the same direction. Just be yourself and go places where you can meet people automatically, instead of in a contrived way. Awaken to those dynamic laws of attraction mentioned in Your Cosmic Tractor Beam. If you do, attracting the right person for you will be nearly inevitable. Less longing, more living. Dating services work for some people, I suspect in direct proportion to honesty and self-knowledge.

And when you know yourself that well, you’re on your cosmic beam. Love would have happened anyway, regardless of the mechanics.

~~
 
*Note: JuliaAna gave permission to share her name and e-mail excerpt.

** Links to essence manufacturers are made on first mention only.

Photo Credit: HAPPY COUPLE IN THEIR 50'S Creativest... Dreamstime.com

NEW BLOG! Joyce Mason's New Inkarnations, a blog on writing and creativity. Visit the launch post.

The Queen of Synchronicity

Article © 2010-13 by Joyce Mason

All Rights Reserved

During October, The Radical Virgo is hosting some of my favorite posts from my other blog, Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights. See announcement. 

Coincidences are spiritual puns.
--G.K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

My friends call me the Queen of Synchronicity. I write about meaningful coincidences often, because I believe they’re the cosmic feedback that our lives are aligned with the greater good and the flow of creation.

I’d like to share some of my latest syncs—they’re so dramatic!—and then talk about this phenomenon and how to tune into it.

Synchronicity

is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.

 ~ Wikipedia

The concept of synchronicity suggests, just as events can be grouped by cause, they can be grouped by their meaning.


The Power of Three

My first spiritual teacher taught me that when something happens in threes, it’s like a divine tap on the shoulder. Believe me, it’s much better to “get it” when it’s just a tap. You don’t want to be bullheaded or oblivious and need “a house to fall on your head,” like my mom used to say. (It’s better to be The Queen than to get crowned by falling real estate.)

I got that synch-in’ feeling over poetry just before I wrote this article. Synch #1: In mid-April, I stumbled across the title of a book quite by accident while cruising Amazon for something else. It caught my eye and my whole body in a visceral reaction. It made me buzz, like everything in me was yelling yes! It’s called Saved by a Poem by Kim Rosen. It’s all about using poetry for healing. My post on Write Anything! shows I was ready deep in my psyche to rediscover this excellent form of personal therapy … not to mention that I cut my teeth as a writer scribing poetry. (I bit right into the poetic teething ring.) I bought the book immediately. Saved by a Poem has an accompanying CD with poems read by a variety of well-known people I admire. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it on a recent trip out of town and was inspired by the potential of reclaiming my identity as a poet.

Synch #2: On April 20 2010, again, just before I first wrote this piece, Chiron changed signs from Aquarius to Pisces. Since Chiron is my astrological specialty, I wrote a post about what to expect during Chiron in Pisces. As I checked out other posts on the topic, I noticed that other bloggers or their readers were writing—or commenting—in poetry! It makes total sense that Chiron in Pisces would portend using the fine arts as healing modalities, as Chiron is about the wounding and healing process that leads to wholeness. Pisces is the sign famous for being artsy. I expect not only poetry but also music, art, and dance to become more prevalent as forms of therapy over the next nine years, the duration of Chiron’s stay in Pisces.

Synch #3: I attended the Northern California Publishers and Authors Conference in Sacramento. The keynote address was by Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks, the biggest “small” publisher the US—and I might add, a very progressive one. In her amazing analysis of how publishing is morphing into a multimedia adventure, Dominique mentioned a new poetry site she sponsors, Poetry Speaks. This site pays more homage to poetry and its possibilities than I’ve seen in my lifetime. I am wowed! It was another clear indicator that it was time to renew my lapsed poetic license.

Sync-o-pation

Sometimes synchronicities are so numerous in an encounter, they make me dizzy! I attended a seminar on adoption in the San Francisco Bay area given by Nancy Verrier, author of The Primal Wound and Coming Home to Self. Although geared to anyone in the adoption triad—adults adopted as children, birth or adoptive parents—the majority of those in attendance were people like me, adopted adults still dealing with the psychological implications of this early loss.

At the first break, I met a woman I’ll call Sarah. Turns out she, too, had traveled from my same Northern California metro area to attend the seminar. But that was just the beginning of the “coincidences” and commonalities. When she gave me her card, I noted she was also a writer. Sarah and I were born within a few years of one another. Both our birth moms were from the same East Coast city—but moved to a different city, the same one where we were each born. She was adopted through an agency in the suburb where I spent my pre-teen and teenage years—and her adoptive mom is from the West Coast city where my birth mom eventually moved, the place where I found Original Mom in 1986. It’s as though our birth, adoption, and mother finds were following the same map!

Sarah and I knew our meeting was “meant to be” and full of wonder about why we were drawn together! Or why we’re using the same life map.

The sync that brought tears to my eyes, though, was a young man in his 40s. He is the janitor for the facility where the adoption seminar was held. He had no idea this was the event to which he was “assigned” that Saturday. I’ll call him Matthew. Matt is in his early 40s and had just recently resumed his quest to find his birth mom back in the Midwest. He told my therapist he had learned more that day, talking to other adoptees and overhearing the seminar, than he had learned in his entire life about his psychological make-up. He kept talking about how validating it was to meet other people like himself. His girlfriend had come over—no doubt because of an animated cell phone call from him. They were beaming. Watching such breakthrough and bounty of affirmation had me headfirst in the Kleenex box. I still sniffle writing about it!

Tuning Up Your Synch-o-Meter

One of the key ways to bring synchronicity into your life is to turn up your hearing aids, so to speak. I believe synchronicities abound, but we don’t always see or hear them. If you’re particularly focused on an area of pursuit in your life or a subject that’s on your mind, watch for instances where the topic pops up. Be alert and vigilant.

An excellent example was when I was getting the divine nudge to find my birth mother. I was never interested in “finding” till the subject of adoption started cropping up wherever I went. Ultimately, I realized this was Spirit saying hello? I finally realized could not truly know myself without reconnecting with my biological family. It was one of the best hints I ever took and crucial to my personal evolution.

Then there’s also what I call lighting up in yellow highlighter. When I first found the book on poetry and healing, I wasn’t especially onto the idea that reclaiming my identity as a poet was in the wings for me. But something about that book “lit up” for me. I felt like God & Company put a big splash of yellow highlighter on the incident in the book of my life. Watch for it!


How Synchronicity Works

I believe synchronicity is simply the outcome of the law of dynamic attraction. I talk about it in Your Cosmic Tractor Beam. We draw "the right" people when we are in our true energy or resonate on our unique frequency. People on our general bandwidth or same beam are drawn to us. This is also true for things and experiences. What’s going on in our thoughts and feelings—especially feelings—draws to us everything we need to answer the question, solve the puzzle, or fulfill ourselves. We become magnets of all the physical and spiritual stuff we need to create growth and meaning in our lives. “What a piece of work is man,” Shakespeare said, “How noble in reason. How infinite his faculties.” But look at what we have to work with! Divine substance is awesome, a word so overused, I reserve it only for the magnificence of All That Is.

Bottom line: That flow of abundance is there. We just have to get on beat with it. Sharpen your senses.

And that thing I said about emotion? Adult adoptees have many residual emotions about their early abandonment. It’s no surprise that this subject matter makes synchronicities pop like microwave Orville Redenbacher’s. My own mother-find was so laced with these “coincidences,” you’d swear I was making them up.


In the Sync Hole

Once you’ve gotten a good sense of how this works by experience, you will miss them painfully if your synchronicities take a powder. When I was going through some of the most difficult trials with my husband’s health and happiness, I lost all touch with my synchronistic “flow.” It was depressing, and I felt almost abandoned by God. I can’t remember another time when I felt such a deep loss of spiritual connection.

Even this experience is a reminder why synchronicity is the stuff of spirit. There’s a reason why the adoption experience seems to draw more synchronicities than any other topic—at least in my life. Adoption is about being cut off from your original source—your biological parents. When we are “out of sync,” we are out of touch with our larger Original Source—God/ Goddess/All That Is. I’m convinced that a major reason why I was adopted in this life was to be able to help others heal that disconnection to reconnection through my writing.


The Synchronicity Symphony

Synchronicity is simply tuning into the beat of life, the flow of events, and paying close attention to divine orchestration. Trust me. It’s there. We live in so much competing noise; it’s amazing we can hear anything at all. Put on some “ear blinders,” and you’ll see that the real action has been going on in the background, behind the traffic sounds, the TV, and endless chatter.

For music lessons, you might keep a section in your journal where you notice how many things in a given day “respond” to questions on your mind or suggest paths you might take. It’s a new way of seeing, but the rewards are dramatic. Synchronicity has led me to reconnect with my lost loves and to realize that I was never disconnected from them in spirit—or the One Love in which we’re all joined.

That connection is a note replayed in every “coincidence.” It’s a grace note.

~~~

Photo Credit: RED QUEEN © Caraman  | Dreamstime.com

Dis-appointment

Article © 2010 by Joyce Mason

All Rights Reserved

During October, The Radical Virgo is hosting some of my favorite posts from my other blog, Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights. See announcement.

Disappointment leaves us sad that something we looked forward to—maybe even longed for—did not occur. It can be a relationship, a fun get-together, or a goal we didn’t achieve, like getting a promotion. We expect people to act a certain way. They don’t. Disappointment.

Yet, in the Great Calendar in the Sky (it goes along with the Great Flow Charters in the Sky ), the dis-appointment might be better for us. We just don’t know it yet. We had an “appointment” in our own minds with a set destiny. God/Goddess/All That Is had other ideas. The cosmic appointment calendar trumps our own. Sometimes we just don’t see the big picture, thinking our Day Runner, Franklin Planner, or the eCalendar in our minds knows best, like our mothers. Our own calendars are right about as often as mom is about “what’s good for us.”

I’ll share my most dramatic example. When I reunited with "Keane," a great lost love of my life (the one who took me decades to get over), he tried to get a transfer to my city, which shocked me. I was startled that after our first long weekend together in 18 years, he’d actually make an effort to be near me on an ongoing basis. What shocked me even further was a dream I had while he was still in competition for the position. I heard this clear, psychic message, “There’s no way he won’t get it.”

Assuming the best and definitely wanting him to move to Sacramento, I was stunned when someone else got the offer. That’s when I realized that my wishful thinking punctuated the dream message according to my desired outcome.(There’s no way getting it won’t happen.) What my inner wisdom was really saying in the dream: “There’s no way. (Punctuation—period.) He won’t get it.”


Disappointing Godsends

In the three decades I spent recovering from Keane, I learned something about myself. My early relationships were agony/ecstasy, enmeshed with a mixture of high highs and low lows. Pleasure and pain were so closely bound together, I truly believed I had to endure twice or more pain for any love I got. Not exactly good programming for healthy relationships.

Had I stayed with Keane from our earliest encounters (ages 18-22) or even had the opportunity to be with him again at age 40 on an ongoing basis, the basic facts of our chemistry would not change. Our pull toward one another was always bigger than the both of us, but he was terrible for me. I would have bent over backwards trying to make it work for the fun and the intense chemistry—and my actual, unabashed love for him. But we’re simply too different. He had a side, at least back-when, that was very punishing—one my sensitive soul could have never endured in the long run (and I wonder how it ever did in the short run. I guess if it took so many years to come to stasis about him, it didn’t).

I have often thanked God that there was a bigger force that kept me from going Round Two with Keane. But it took me years to “get there,” to see the divine direction, redirection, or right direction of it. With time I learned to trust the Big Appointment Calendar in the Sky … as you’ll see.


The House That Broke Our Hearts

When Tim and I first got together, my reunited childhood sweetheart hubby, we started looking for a house after we’d been living together, renting, for close to a year. We thought we’d found the house to end all houses—a block from my best friend in a small suburb that was more rural than suburban. From the back yard, it had a gorgeous view of Folsom Lake. We wanted to be near water—if not on it, at least where we could see it, which is more of what we could afford.

We signed the deal right after we saw it. It had a built-in sauna and many attractive features. However, when it came to moving the deal along, the seller hid out and would not respond to our realtor. Apparently, she wanted to back out of the contract but wouldn’t face the music. We had to hire an attorney to gain back our earnest money, and the lawyer’s fees cost us half of it. Tim was resentful and miserable for months. He had his heart set on that house.

Shortly after this debacle, our realtor’s assistant called us about a house she located just a block from her own in a nature setting near a creek. She felt this one was “it” for us. She was right! In the long-run, the house we bought was newer, closer to freeways for commuting while I still was working at my civil service job, and we suspect it is much more structurally sound than the one we lost. We love it here and can’t imagine ourselves in the other place, now that time and the divine appointment calendar has had her way with us.

This illustrates how we just can’t see the complete picture when a dis-appointment occurs. Our perfect house wasn’t ready for us yet. It wasn’t even on the market. So we had to be distracted by some other “house drama” (I was a big fan of the drama “House!”) to keep us from making the mistake of buying anything else until it became available. I chuckle over this story still, and it has been 12 years.


Expectations and Disappointment

Instead of relying too much on my personal expectations, I’ve learned to live by what my first spiritual teacher called the divine escape clause, “This or something better.” Add the name of divinity to the request as you see Him/Her/It—Lord, God, Great Spirit, etc. Disappointment makes us miserable because we continue to think we’re the ultimate authority on what’s best for us, when life and All That Is have been disproving that to us every year of our lives.

I’ve learned, now, to simply understand that when something doesn’t work out, it’s because something better for me was meant to be. I just don’t see it yet. When you can see life through this lens, everything changes. It becomes more of an adventure and there’s less of that weepy, woeful disappointment—a feeling that makes me miserable.


Relationships: The One Appointment We Should Always Keep

This is the area where dis-appointment often equals heartbreak. I have another spin on this. Not just with Keane: I have had many relationships where, in retrospect, I feel blessed to have been “removed” or my appointment calendar edited against my will at the time.

From the perspective of a mature adult, it’s easy to look back and imagine the story arc of major loves lost and how things would have turned out, had we stayed together. That’s when I appreciate that God/dess spared me. But there’s one appointment people always should keep, whenever possible. That’s your appointment with completion.

At least three times in my life, I have had a relationship interrupted for different reasons—in one case, by the man himself (Keane), not wanting go to the next growth step when I had gone as far as I could go without a commitment. In another instance, the young man’s mother made him break up with me when we were truly too young for the feelings we’d gotten ourselves into. In yet another case, another woman stepped in right as we were getting to the cusp of declaring ourselves, before either of us had gotten up the nerve to risk admitting his or her feelings. (In that case, feelings not spoken and each of us being uncertain of how the other felt became the weak link and opening for someone else to enter).

These unfinished relationships feel like emotional miscarriages. I never stop mourning them at a certain level. I have been luckier than most, because in all cases, the interruption was talked about and/or resolved in some way later, even if we didn’t live the relationship to its natural completion at the time. (Example: One of the first things Keane said in our reunion phone call was, “There were loose ends.”)

Still, these relationships leave major losses to mourn. It’s not painful that they didn’t work out; it’s painful that they didn’t get to run their course for whatever we were to learn and experience together because our opportunity was cut off before our appointment time was up. It’s like that horrendous scene we often see, or heaven forbid, may have even personally experienced, where your 50 minutes is up with your shrink in the middle of some big emotional build-up to breakthrough. You’re cut off and left hanging.

There’s a corollary of this idea that applies to divorces and break-ups of committed relationships or any relationship where there was deep bonding. You didn’t fail; the relationship didn’t necessarily fail. Your appointment was with specific learning and experiences. Your time was simply up. This particular appointment didn’t block out your calendar for the rest of your life.


The Blessing and Curse of Deep Feelings

I am a deep feeler, and my husband calls it both my blessing and curse. He’s the middle man in the previous discussion. I keep teasing him that the only time he ever listened to his mother is when she told him to break up with me. Still, we ended up together 36 years later and are happily married. Sometimes even an interfering mother can’t muck things up completely.

If you, too, are a person with deep feelings, understand that mourning the losses of these dis-appointments is normal, healthy, and something you just have to take as part of love. Move through the feelings. Understand that same level of depth is also what brings you great joy.

An old boyfriend died recently, and when I found out, I had quite a weepy day or two consisting of a rush of happy and painful memories. (As I mentioned, all my youthful relationships were a mishmash of both.) After that, I felt great. I’ve even had some nice psychic conversations with him. Any story I’ll have with him again will have to be saved for another lifetime. I can only wonder if the Great Flow Charters in the Sky will bring us together to make up for the opportunities we missed when our appointment was cut short this time.

May you learn to see the blessings in all your dis-appointments. May you lobby for completion whenever possible, and at the very least—reconnect with that person when you’re older and wiser. Express your sorrow for what you missed together … and your joy for the fact that you can see a certain divine wisdom that led you down another path.

~~~

Photo Credit: A February calendar showing the 14th prominently © Kasiap Dreamstime.com

Author's Note: This article was originally published in slightly different form in Unity Magazine.

October: The Radical Virgo Hosts Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights

Dear Radical Readers,

During most of October, the Sun is in Libra. Issues of balance and partnership are on our minds as well as beauty and ambiance—and, of course, love, peace and justice.

In my case, the next few months will be very imbalanced on the side of work as I prepare my novel, The Crystal Ball, for publication. I need a rest from new posts on The Radical Virgo since my time is so taken up with the publication and promotion of my book and my leap into fiction.

No pun intended, but I flashed on the idea that this would be the perfect time to introduce you to one of my other blogs, Hot Flashbacks/Cool Insights.  Hot/Cool is a partner to The Radical Virgo, because without the training ground it gave me as a blogger, I would not have created this astrology blog you’re reading.

I posted actively on Hot/Cool from September 2007 – January 2011. While my “spirited living” blog is on archive status now, it still holds some of my favorite articles I’ve ever written. I’d like to repost and share some of them with you here on The Radical Virgo in the coming month. I hope this sampler will be an impetus to explore a new relationship with my older blog. Although I am no longer posting there, Hot/Cool has 174 posts. Most of them, as on The Radical Virgo, are full-length articles. I suspect you’ll find a lot to enjoy.

Another balancing act: The articles on Hot/Cool are not written from the lens of astrology, though astrology sometimes  might be mentioned in them. They are, however, written with the larger vision that learning astrology inspires and helps develop. They are bigger picture articles of the same ilk as some of my Bigger Than the Sky posts here, some of which are reprints from Hot/Cool, too.

It’s important that we don’t look at the world only through astrology but realize that the biggest possible perspective is what most helps us to evolve as humans. There’s never been a time when we’ve been doing more rapid evolution, so I hope this break from Astro posts in favor of the “spirited living” perspective of Hot/Cool is a pleasant change (nice Libran words).

You’ll find a lot of the other Libran keywords in Hot/Cool, too. There will be a lot to ponder about relationships. I hope you'll also enjoy getting to know some of my other forms of writing, as I hope all my readers will come with me to some of my new genres, including fiction. Who couldn't use a little actual mystery, the very humorous kind, to balance all our work here on solving the mysteries of life?

Enjoy the hot flashbacks and cool insights!

Autumn abundance,

Joyce

~~~

Photo Credit: Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights Masthead © Graphica Studios